“Bible-bashers” are those who feel the need to spread their views to others. It’s a term that comes from the religious pamphlets of the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, describing aggressively religious people.

To find out which you are, take this handy quiz:

1. Do you believe you have an Invisible Friend In The Sky? (Yes=1 point, No= 0)
2. After spending a few days creating the billions of stars in the billions of galaxies that fill the awe-inspiring majesty of the universe, does your Invisible Friend In The Sky now spend its time closely monitoring your daily actions and reading your thoughts? (Yes=2 point, No= 0)
3. Does your Invisible Friend In The Sky care which adults you have consensual sexual intercourse with? (Yes=5 points, No= 0)
4. Is your Invisible Friend In The Sky eternal, beyond the laws of causality and entropy and undetectable by science? (Yes=1 point, No= 0)
5. Does your Invisible Friend In The Sky regularly intercede in the material world on your behalf (good grades, safe journeys, speedy recoveries) because you ask it to? (Yes=1 point, No= 0)
6. Does your Invisible Friend In The Sky routinely neglect to help blameless people caught up in calamities like genocide, war, famine, earthquakes or tsunamis because it “works in mysterious ways” (or other manifestations of inscrutability)? (Yes=5 points, No= 0)
7. Does your Invisible Friend In The Sky require subordinate behaviour from women such as covering their hair, wearing shapeless garments, not being allowed to teach in places of worship or hacking off each others’ external genitalia at puberty? (Yes=10 points, No= 0)
8. Does your Invisible Friend In The Sky require you to tell people with a different Invisible Friend In The Sky (or no Invisible Friend In The Sky) that they are wrong? (Yes=10 points, No= 0)
9. Does your Invisible Friend In The Sky think it legitimate or laudable to kill people with a different Invisible Friend In The Sky? (Yes=20 points, No=0)
10. Are you angered/ offended by this quiz? (Yes=5 points, No=0)

If you scored zero, you are not a God-Botherer.

Between one and five, you might be but don’t know it; you probably tell people that you’re “a spiritual person”.

Between five and ten, you’re a God-Botherer.

More than 10 makes you a Bible-Basher. 20 or more and you’re a fundie.

Here’s my list of schadenfreude blogs.

• spEak You’re bRanes – a collection of real letters to the meeja by right-wingers and godbotherers.
• Here’s a comprehensive gallery of men who look like old lesbians.
• sorry i missed your party is a collection of pictures of other people’s (dull) parties from Flickr
• People of Walmart is full of clandestine photos of Yank chavs. In Walmart. (Thanks, Pat “Herb” Lauke.)
• mug shot du jour is a special double-dose of schadenfreude, as it is full of weird or ugly people immediately after they’ve been arrested.
• Don’t judge my hair judges other people’s hair.
• Look At This Fucking Hipster—”photos of fucking hipsters doing what hipsters do best… Being a Fuckin Hipster!”
• Texts from last night (“Remember that text you shouldn’t have sent last night? We do”) occasionally has some gems.
• Tweeting too hard is where self-important tweets get the recognition they deserve.
• Teen angst poetry collects reader-submitted sixth-form poetry. Brilliant.
• The Intubator distills YouTube down to its core: an endless stream of randomly selected, unedited personal videos…Videos that no-one bothered to tag, title, or describe

Got any favourite schadenfreude sites?

1. I’ve had carnal knowledge of women from all the world’s major religions except Judaism. Before you shout “anti-semite”, I tried very hard to rectify this deficiency with Ayelet from Tel Aviv but her room-mate came home too early.

   When I got married I decided that abandoning this particular spiritual quest would be prudent to preserve nuptial harmony. My wife agrees.

2. I have difficulty playing the basic F major chord on guitar.

3. I’m actually quite shy, but conceal this with an loud egocentric persona. People think I’m quite easy-going, but I have a vile temper.

4. I once got a girlfriend pregnant and we agreed she should have an abortion. Our never-was daughter would be 17 years old now. That thought haunts me.

5. I’m not racist, sexist or homophobic. But I dislike spending time with stupid people.

6. About a year after we were married, my wife woke up and told me that she’d had a dream of a small girl swimming towards her in the ocean. Later that day she used a pregnancy testing kit and it was positive. That’s why our daughter is named Marina (after the T.S. Eliot poem).

7. I can transform myself into a duck in my guise as The Great Duckano.

To continue this meme (which is geekspeak for “chain letter”) I have to tag seven more people to tell us seven things we might not know about them. So start confessing, Yeni Setiawan, Simon Mackie, Putri, Citizensheep, Todd Libby, Jake Smith and Joanna Geary.

Lust List™

As you know, I’m a happily married chap, but in response to the literally zero mails I receive asking what kind of woman I find pretty, here’s my current Lust List™:

• Meera Jasmine

  A South Indian film actress, Jasmine “is a simple and down to earth person. Her choices are also undemanding. Her favorite attire is Half Saree and she loves to look homely“. Phwooooar!

• Pui Fan Lee

  I’m a bit embarrassed by this, given Pui is a Children’s BBC presenter, and played Po in the Teletubbies. But she is a fox. And she once played a lesbian in a crap TV show, but (I have to confess) didn’t look her best.

• Björk

  Björk has loads of talent, is inimitable and oddly sexy – except in this shot where she looks distressingly like Michael Jackson.

• Sheila Chandra

  Sheila Chandra has an astounding voice, and is gorgeous too.

• Alison Smith

  A willowy West Indian girl from high school. I never had the balls to ask her out, as miscegenation was too shocking a concept for a Worcestershire high school in 1982.

Top 10 searches that found this website

Turns out that a lot of people, when bored at work, type “bum” into Google…

1. bum
2. personal site
3. computers internet blog
4. bruce
5. bruce lawson
6. friday jokes
7. vasectomy
8. accessibility
9. thailand
10. stiff little fingers

The most-read posts in 2007

Good mix of professional and personal. And the bum and willy pictures (NSFW).

1. Future-proof your CSS with Conditional Comments
2. HTML 5, microformats and testing accessibility
3. CSS Zen Garden submission: “Geocities 1996″
4. Jan’s bum
5. Spam letters
6. Forms: inputting country names
7. Stupid government websites
8. Photo gallery
9. Odd Jobs: Bollywood movie extra (in which lots of people who can’t be bothered to read ask me to help them get jobs in Bollywood)
10. My big Friday night (NSFW)

• Shakespeare

  Fittingly, his birthday is the same day as St George’s day, as he contributed so much to the richness of the English language – as well as doing his propaganda bit for unity under the Tudors by blackening the name of the last Plantagenet monarch and promoting feelings of English patriotism.

• London

  Ah, London. Galleries. Theatres. Ethnic enclaves. Parliament and Big Ben, tourist traps, and carnivals; the Tube; Black taxis and red buses; medieval streets and hideous 1960s brutalist developments. Finest city in the World (if you don’t have to live there!)

• the English countryside

  The English countryside is gorgeous. Across the Vale of Evesham in the spring, the beauty of the Yorkshire Moors, the Lake District, the Cornish coast, the Severn Valley in autumn, we don’t have towering mountains, glaciers, or rift valleys. The English countryside is varied, but moderate and dependable. Just like English people are.

  Even the animals that populate our countryside are the same. You don’t get malaria from our bugs. We have no poisonous spiders, and no large animals which can eat you. Our single venomous snake – the Adder – is only as nasty as a wasp sting (and I’ve never seen one, ever).

• The Beatles, Stones, Sex Pistols and The Clash

  For a small country, we’ve produced a lot of world-changing music. We rock. Nothing more to say.

• Broadway, Henley

  They’re chocolate box-perfect English towns. They’re a bugger to live in, as you can’t put a nail in the wall without someone from the local Council making sure you’re not damaging the character of the area, but they’re damn gorgeous. There are houses in Henley that are older than many countries.

• Pubs and proper beer

  Pubs – not bars. They don’t need to be all thatched roof or horsebrasses. They don’t need to be picturesque, but do need to be authentic rather than brewery-mandated “English Pub Experience”. They need a sense of community, a character behind the bar, some grumpy regular drinkers, proper beer and probably a resident dog.

• Food

  People think English food is just fish and chips or curry – and there’s nothing wrong with either of those. But real English food can’t be beaten, and is rarely encountered by visitors. Take great cuts of meat, fresh vegetables like parsnips, sprouts, roast them all and lightly season, serve with a rich gravy and a pint of proper beer and you’ve got the best Sunday family meal in the world.

• World War 2

  We English bang on about the war a bit, it’s true – but it’s because it’s deeply embedded in our psyche. OK, it was sixty years ago, but the reason it stays there is because, for a couple of years until the yanks could be arsed to help out, England and our Gaelic cousins Scotland, Ireland, Wales stood alone: we mobilised our entire workforce, turned civilian factories to making armaments, ploughed up parks to grow food on, and tore down metal railings as raw material to make guns.

  We evacuated our children, split up our families and sacrificed our men, while the rest of the world sat on their hands or laid down their arms, because fascism so repelled us. And why shouldn’t we be proud of that?

  Jan 2 2007: It’s been pointed out to me that I may not know my history, and the UK may not have stood alone in quite the way I wrote. So don’t listen to what I say…

• The National Health Service

  I’m always astonished when I read that in other, allegedly civilised countries, health care is based on ability to pay. God knows, our NHS isn’t perfect, but get this: if you fall sick in the UK you will get treatment of the highest possible quality that the NHS can provide, free at the point of delivery, regardless of whether you’re a millionaire or a vagrant. Now that’s a civilised idea.

• Jane Austen and George Orwell

  Both used the English language perfectly to celebrate and satirise the England that they loved. Orwell, in particular, is a hero of mine with his fierce promotion of clarity of language, his love of fairness and his defence of the weak. I reckon he should be the eponymous St George today.

• English people

  I’ve a mix of Scottish and English extraction with a dash of Italian too. My wife is a naturalised Brit, from Thailand, so my kids are utter mongrels, which is itself quintessentially English. Everybody is mixed race here.

  We live next door to Naz, a British-born muslim of Pakistani background, and our other neighbours are the Murphys, of Irish descent. Across the road are the Singhs and the Cohens and the Smiths. It’s a crappy grubby urban English proper street, full of proper English people.

Hurray for England. Have a good St George’s day.

Managers don’t decide, they just administrate

There can be two reasons for this. The first is relatively benign, as long as it’s a temporary phase in the transition from small start-up to smallish established company. I encountered this with Wrox, which was begun by a charismatic entrepreneur. It takes a long time for such people to take a more hands-off role to concentrate on high-level strategy and let the managers take the day-to-day decisions instead of just implementing the entrepreneur’s wishes.

But in a mature organisation, inert management is a killer. I’ve worked in places where the colour of a button on a Web form was decided by the Big Chief because everyone was afraid of taking the decision in case they got it wrong or were called on it in the future.

This is ultimately fatal to a company. Some decisions are relatively trivial (do we use this photo of our new Widget on the cover of the Annual Report, or that one?) but if managers won’t decide, it goes up and up the chain, until the person with the bollocks actually to take the decision is so far from the debates that they can’t hope to get it right. Meanwhile, lower ranks feel disenfranchised and nobody wins.

Empires of nothingness grow and grow

Inert managers need to justify their existence and keep their budgets up, as the best way to self-esteem and the Chief’s ear is to hold a large budget.

So a department for the polishing of paperclips is established. That’s fine; every organisation needs shiny paperclips. An extra person is recruited, and suddenly, the manager has to hire an underling to be Manager of Paperclip Polishing. Policies and procedures are needed, debated in endless meetings, posted on the Intranet to an oblivious workforce.

Sally from Events needs urgently to source some paperclips at short notice for the Shareholder’s meeting. An anguished email from Bob, the Head of Paperclips, lands on her computer: she can’t possibly source them from anywhere without requisitioning them Bob, using form 78/c in triplicate (counter-signed by The Big Chief) and it takes three days.

Bob can’t possibly acknowledge that it doesn’t fucking matter, because that would be admitting his job is null. Sally is irate because the shareholder’s meeting notes aren’t nicely clipped together. Bob’s team are annoyed because Sally is trying to circumvent Paperclip Policy.

Meanwhile, Bob’s manager is delighted; she decides to hire a Paperclip Evangelist to sell Paperclip Procedures to the rest of the company, so her budget and thus her sense of self-worth increases.

“Human Resources” expands

HR departments are a classic example of the tail wagging the dog. My personal opinion of most HR directors is that I wouldn’t piss down their throats if their hearts were on fire (except for my mates Bruce and Steph, and I knew them before they went to the Dark Side).

However, I acknowledge that organisations sometimes need a Personnel Officer. (Enough with the self-aggrandising “HR” bullshit). Organisations get difficult staff, tricky situations, and you need Personnel Officers to sort them out. They’re a bit like adult diapers – if you need something to catch a little bit of mess, they should be hidden: nobody should ever know you’ve got them.

But in sick organisations, Personnel Officers are as rampant as threadworms in a stray dog’s guts. They write policies, go to meetings, even sometimes sit on the Board.

If Personnel are expanding while core businesses are in a recruitment freeze, then your organisation isn’t just sick – it’s got cancer. Excise it before it spreads.

Consultants spread faster than Athlete’s Foot

Bad managers know that the easiest way to look decisive while doing fuck all is to get a Consultant in. These modern-day witch doctors come in with shiny suits and shiny teeth, charge the ailing organisation £1000 a day to write some report that says what everyone knew anyway. (Another sign of a sick organisation is that management never trust their own staff to have a brain, so always need to obvious spelled out by a consultant).

The report is then endlessly debated, given to Personnel to implement, they fuck it up and the departed consultant is blamed.

Too much uncertainty and not enough truthful communication

At some point in a sick organisation there will be a cull, a.k.a. “redundancies”. If there’s “downsizing” to be done, bosses get hard-ons/ wide-ons as it’s a chance for them to be decisive, show leadership, etc etc. But the troops hate it.

While Personnel expands and senior managers bang on about “challenges” and “change”, the best quality staff get demoralised and demotivated. They figure that, if their less able colleagues are going to be fired, they will have to do more work, and there’s no guarantee that the company will get better.

And so the talent starts looking for other jobs, and generally finds them, leaving the dead wood sitting pretty as firing them will leave nobody at all to polish Personnel’s paperclips. Thus, nobody wins.

If there’s going to be redundancies, do them swiftly, humanely, don’t require redundant staff to work their notice and thereby make everyone feel embarrassed and lethargic. And tell the fucking truth: “We, your managers, have ballsed-up. Obviously, we’re not going to fall on our own swords, but will instead fire some of you”, not “The year ahead will present many challenges. It will be a time of change which we will embrace blah blah fucking blah”.

Anyone else ever worked for a sick organisation and can point out some more signs?