A few months ago, I was deleted by someone on Facebook for making a joke about Christianity that they found in bad taste. It turns out that this had also been fuelled by the fact that I had earlier poured withering scorn on their belief that we should forgive unrepentant rapists and because I had called them sexist and homophobic (which I still believe is true for various reasons, the latest being that they referred to LGBT in their last blogpost as “politically correct lingo”). My subsequent attempts to reconcile with them privately failed miserably, as they sent me increasingly bizarre messages that included mocking me for having a mental breakdown last summer and a lengthy explanation about how they had only started sending me abusive messages only when they considered that our relationship was doomed and that’s why it was justified. I’ve never found “Thou may abuse ex-friends and strangers” in the Bible, at any rate.
I found the hypocrisy of someone sending me messages telling me that I am unconscionably rude and arrogant and then signing them, “Your better” breath-taking. I still find it reasonably incredible that someone can call for a Christian attitude towards men who commit violence against women and then apparently fail to demonstrate it themselves to people who offended them. To this end, I wrote a blogpost on the matter entitled, “A Joke to Delete For? Religious Humour and Hypocrisy on Facebook”. I took it down after a lot of criticism for apparently attacking religious people and because the person involved claimed I was back-biting.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the comments that I received. They ranged from suggesting that I should never have posted the joke at all in order to offending someone’s sensibilities, to the fact that my post was largely intended to publicly proclaim someone to be a hypocrite. (more…)
I have a piece of coursework due on the 17th, and many blog ideas. But coursework being more important, I am not posting for another couple of weeks. :)
Seems like just yesterday I went, “Ooh, look, I have a website!” It’s been a year now and I now have 70 or so webpages and 70 blogposts. Calloo callay! I will be celebrating by doing something silly in Chelmsford in the afternoon. Give me a bell if you want to join in. :)
To recognise the auspices of this most exciting day, I have jazzed up some parts of my website. My activism page has been newly updated with new stuff in the world you should care about, and my media page has been rewritten to look nicer, with new content added from before uni. I will be trying to keep on it from now on. Not that you care, but hey, it looks nice. :D
Stats!
* 261,300 people have visited SarahMcCulloch.com since it went live.
* 18,709 people visited in one day, on June 1, 2010 (I was linked to by one of those Facebook pages that made you join to see something interesting).
* 180 countries have sent visitors my way, including Palestine (5), Cuba (3), and Zimbabwe (2).
* The United States sent the most visitors (85,664), followed by Poland (37,703), and then the UK (30,907).
* The top search term is “Sarah McCulloch“.
SarahMcCulloch.com went live on January 5th, 2010 and since then I’ve been pumping out blogposts at a rate of a little over one a week and have published nearly seventy pages on the main website. As the year draws to a close, let’s look back at the most popular pages (excluding landing pages):
Easily the most popular page on my website, the full chemical name of the largest known protein, commonly known as Titin, is over 189,000 letters long. I originally uploaded it when I discovered that the only place on the Internet that hosted it has put the entire word on a single line. Although several websites have nicked it and published it since, SarahMcCulloch.com remains the number one world destination for all your excessive chemo-linguistic curiosity needs.
You can hear part of the longest word in the English Language read out by a sexy Englishwobot here:
Following the publication of my website on a Polish equivalent of Demotivator.com, 26,000 Polish geeks descended on my website in April and crashed it under the weight of their Slavic enthusiasm. In an attempt to capitalise on this, I wrote up the story as a blog entry and asked people for money to pay for hosting, which we had to double to deal with the traffic numbers. The article has since paid for the original costs involved and continues to make Poland the fourth most popular country for my website after the the US, UK and Canada.
What does mephedrone do? How do you take it? Is it the same as MDMA? Why can’t I maintain an erection on mephedrone? Questions about mephedrone are one of my most popular search term clusters, and so I wrote this article to answer some of the more common and unusual ones.
A cluster of pages on how to maintain a sleeping pattern based on short naps around the clock rather than one deep sleep throughout the night. A perennial favourite for geeks and students alike, my polyphasic writing had to come to an end after a bout of depression meant I had to go back to sleeping “normally” (because who can stay miserable for 22 hours a day?). Stay posted for June, folks, when my job ends and I need to revise for my exams…
A three part interview with a lovely guy I met on the Internet (so many stories begin in this way…), numerous gay Baha’i groups and blogs have linked here, so evidently it touched a nerve. My work on the treatment of homosexuality in the Baha’i faith is certainly not especially cutting-edge, but it is certainly popular.
Incidentally, for anyone reading this who is LGBT and Baha’i, I would really like to write more on the topic. Contact me here.
The gay Sikh community can’t be any smaller than the gay Baha’i community, but it appears to be much less vocal. Written by one of the founders of Sarbat, the LGBT Sikh organisation, this article gives a brief overview of SIkism’s understanding of homosexuality and how gay Sikhs should be received in their communities. It was win.
Again, for anyone reading this who is LGBT and Sikh, I only really scratched the surface with this article and would really like to write more on the topic. Contact me here.
With the publishing of the Comprehensive Spending Review, the Liberal Democrat Party began to face an exodus of members. Unfortunately some of the more purist party animals decided people weren’t doing so from political principle, but a variety of other reasons that weren’t because the Liberal Democrat Party are a bunch of self-serving hypocrites who’ve sold their voters out for power. One jibe at the outgoing Chair of DELGA from another member of the Executive prompted me to write a spontaneous resignation letter and produced the most read article on my blog that month.
Liberal Democrat polling is at its worst since 1990.
Written just after I had my house searched by police and I had to deal with it alone, I have since removed the names of my flatmates from the article itself. In light of the fact that they nonetheless ignored five texts and seven phone-calls (and later told me the reason had been because they simply hadn’t checked their phones in two days – *raises eyebrow*), however, I think the title can stay.
I’d like to write up a follow up article one day that contains actual legal references. If anyone knows where I can actually find that kind of information, let me know.
I admit, when I wrote this report, I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so popular. I think the fact that this Vodafone protest was held in November and remains one of the most popular articles on my website for this year says something about the strength of feeling in this country. We are not all in this together.
Again, an essay I knocked out for a Howard League for Penal Reform competition that only really contains an overview of why prisons are a pretty rubbish solution to crime has been a surprising hit. Having now gotten into prison reform after my research for this essay, I expect to publish further articles later on next year.
There’s a hell of a lot of writing on gay people and Judaism, less so on trans issues. An essay I wrote for my degree (and which I got a first for. :D) I’m glad that so many people have taken the time to looks up Jewish attitudes to trans people. Knowledge leads to understanding, understanding leads to acceptance, acceptance leads to observance…
It’s been a while in the making, but SarahMcCulloch.com is very nearly finished. A few more tweaks and fixes and we’ll be done. If you notice any broken links or misspellings when wandering though, do let me know…
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