Atheism in a Christmas Stocking

Quite excellently and without a hint of irony I got a copy of The God Delusion by the famous atheist Richard Dawkins for Christmas. It was the top seller on amazon.co.uk in the run up to the festive season and is even running as the number ten Christmas bestseller in the USA. Also up there in the US top sellers, currently sitting comfortably at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, is Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama's recipie for a new America, The Audacity of Hope. It would be too easy to read too much into these lists, so I will a bit. At the very least, there has got be to some hope when people are finding books like these at the bottom of their Christmas stockings.

In other news, I'm back in Cardiff for the holidays and am stuck on my parent's 56K dial-up internet connection. Sometimes I disconnect and reconnect just to hear the dial-up. I'm making the most of this because stories about dial-up are our generation's equivalent of the "In my day computers took up entire rooms and birds sometimes nested in them" type stories or the "Man was sent to the moon on less processing power than your mobile phone" genre of tales that my parents tell me. Duing some future Christmas, I intend to bore my grand children with anecdotes about how I used to be able to make a cup of tea whilst a webpage loaded. If I get bored of being the token old guy in the corner, I might even scare them with tales about how some websites even used to use frames.