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Good Afternoon, Dear Reader. As I haven’t posted for a while, I thought I’d pop in to share my thoughts about some of the big news stories of the last couple of weeks.

Usually, researching this kind of post involves spending quite some time rummaging through the lesser seen regions of Google news, seeking out oddities, anomalies and the downright strange. Not this week, or last week for that matter. No. It seems the great and the good have decided to gift bloggers and columnists everywhere with the kind of material that one really couldn’t make up.

- I begin with Ricky Gervais and his one man crusade to reclaim* the word, ‘mong’. Mr Gervais has now issued an apology saying he had been “naive”, and, “(n)ever dreamed that idiots still use that word aimed at people with Down’s Syndrome”.  However, prior to his climbdown, those who objected were labeled, “humourless”, while his fans described the criticism as political correctness gone mad and an attack on free speech – which is odd because the last time I checked the laws surrounding freedom of speech didn’t include a clause advocating bullying.

- The saga of Liam Fox and his ‘friend’, the delightfully named Werritty** rumbles on. Mr Fox has now resigned but not before blaming everyone but himself for his downfall saying the criticism of his take-a-mate-to-work policy was due to “vindictiveness” and “hatred”. I suppose I can see his point. If plumbers and bricklayers can take a mate to work, why not defence ministers  who are involved in secret strategic talks with key allies? Surely unblocking a sink and discussing the defence of the realm are exactly the same thing? No? OK, I see your point – Mr Fox still needs some persuading though.

- And then there is Oliver Letwin, millionaire and MP for West Dorset, who was photographed dumping official papers into a rubbish bin in a central London park. It turns out this is also a perfectly normal thing to do because the papers weren’t top secret or anything***, just letters from his constituents. So, the good people of West Dorset now know how their elected representative treats their correspondence. So far, Mr Letwin hasn’t come up with an excuse, or found anyone else to blame, but if he wants to I suggest pinning it all on St Eric Pickles, patron saint of the garbage obsessed – if only Eric had reintroduced weekly collections sooner ….

- In (very much) related news: still available on BBC iPlayer, Holy Flying Circus is a “fantastical re-imaging” of the controversy surrounding the release of Monty Python’s, Life of Brian, which is quite apt considering the Ricky Gervais story I opened with. Life of Brian is a perfect example of comedy being used to challenge preconceived ideas. Contrary to what the anti-Brian propaganda said, the film did not attacks Christians, it challenged blind, unquestioning belief.

I suppose Ricky Gervais fans could argue that attacking preconceived ideas was their intention, but I’m not so sure. I have a feeling many/most of them unquestioningly retweeted Gervais’ mong tweets simply because of his celebrity status. They didn’t stop to think about what they were doing, they just followed along because some famous person was leading, a bit like the Brianists, really****.

- And finally: the death of Dennis Ritchie earlier this month was a little overlooked, which is very sad. Mr Ritchie was the inventor of the programming language C, and the co-inventor of the Unix operating system.  Although he was hardly a household name in the way people such as Bill Gates or the late Steve Jobs are, his influence on the technology that has become so much a  part of our everyday lives can not be overstated. It is no exaggeration to say that pretty much everything you see or do on your computer you owe to him. Yes, there were other languages, and there were other OS, but the ones he worked on were most elegant and the most practical. He truly was a pioneer!

*Not entirely sure how he intended to do this, because I thought you could only reclaim a word if it had been applied to you. For example: gay people and the word gay.

** Werritty sounds as though he could be a cousin of Raggety from Rupert the Bear.

*** I suspect he’s not trusted with the really serious stuff.

**** I blame their parents who obviously never used the traditional response, ‘And if all the other boys jumped off a bridge, would you follow?’, when their offspring tried to blame bad behaviour on the influence of others. I’m guessing they never said, ‘Stop swinging your school bag, you’ll have someone’s eye out’, or, ‘ But superheroes eat all their carrots, that’s why they have super powers!’, either.

Updated to add: Life of Brian is also on iPlayer – just watching it now, it’s still funnier than a very funny thing indeed!