On this European night out on the brink, the cafés and the bars still stink.

[reddragdiva]

I still feel like a hamster running late on his wheel. Friday I handed the on-call phone and 3G card to my boss with great pleasure. In the evening I went to the Penderels Oak for the Wikipedia meet. It was OBVIOUSLY INSANE of us to attempt meeting in a pub in the city on a Friday straight after work, but somehow we managed a productive evening.

No talks, just chatting in a pub and sorting out important Cabal business. I have to arrange a serious meeting over a few hours with various people over Wikipedia 1.0, which appears to be a project that will eat our arses if we don't work out damn soon how to get a good stable version to emerge from the wiki process. hairyears wandered by and appears to have signed himself up to make Windows Installer files (MSIs) for MediaWiki and its dependencies (Apache, MySQL, PHP) — so that approval for a wiki is easier to get past the pointyhairs ("Look, it runs on Windows! Four button clicks!") and the box can later be converted to Linux for a notable speed increase ...

Saturday we went to annoy the Scientologists for Lisa McPherson Day. (Lisa McPherson tried to leave Scientology, so they tied her to a bed where she died of dehydration.) We have had some problem with the Church of Scientology and David Blunkett's gibberingly insane fine new law for protecting the public dignity of religions; in their rôle as the pathological behaviour tester of the legal system, the Church decided us demonstrating against them offended their religion. We got some advice from Liberty and worked out the most conservative and boring way to demonstrate. So for five demonstrators and four or five Scientologists, we had six police present observing the proceedings. I was on the boom box, repeating the same thirty seconds of soundbites for about two hours (with arkady taking over for a while). We gave away lots of leaflets. By far the most popular was $cientology Costs A Mint, which sets out the price list as a running total.

In the evening, we made another trip to Fucking Lakeside to argue with Ikea. They came yesterday and delivered everything except the couch and the bed frame. Today we got the couch and sofa and arranged their delivery and a refund of the first delivery. This is only a moral victory, as we spent the money on a taxi back, but returning the pain is just fine by me.

Sunday we get a couch and a bed. Apart from assembling the latter (and boy do Ikea beds suck to assemble ... I took down and rebuilt redcountess's Melbourne one twice, though it seems like more), it should be that thing I haven't had much of lately: a day of relative leisure.

Today's quote apropos of nothing: "I have never worn coloured condoms and never plan to. I'd feel like my dick had joined TISM."

Comments

[lproven.livejournal.com]

I really wish I had been well enough to be at both those gatherings. Ah, well...

[zotz]

Black condoms.

Very slimming.

[vatine]

Slight wonder... Can religions own "intelectual property" in the UK? Can religions have "trade secrets"? Once taht is determined, ideally as "no", will 5cient0logy want to *be* a religion or a business? Ideally, here, religious-organisation-owned businesses are counted as religious organisations for the purpose of teh two things I mentioned.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Ribbed condoms - for extra grip in the wet.

Glow-in-the-dark condoms - a problem for epileptics.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

I believe the Church of England owns some patents.
The monks of Buckfast Abbey produce and sell a trade-secret medicinal liqueur.

[vatine]

Does the medicinal liqueur have actual legal trade-secret protection? Anyway, that seems like a dead end. :/

[reddragdiva]

I understand "religion" has carefully not been defined. There are many organisations that are legal charities (the CoS isn't); such organisations can certainly have trade secrets (e.g. mailing lists). I'm not sure of the status of "trade secret" in the UK, other than employee violation of normal business confidentiality.

(Note of interest: The Process Church of the Final Judgement, a particularly nasty bunch of Satanists from the late 1960s, got charitable status in fairly short order at the time. They actually split from the CoS in the 1960s. So the Process got charity status and the CoS still hasn't.)

[poggs.livejournal.com]

I have just realised. I may have met you or arkady before I met you... I remember picking up a "$cientology Costs A Mint" leaflet one weekend from people outside the uncharacteristically rich-looking place in TCR.

[death4breakfast.livejournal.com]

And Goth. Being black and shiny makes them very goth.

Anyway, I hate the way the plain ones look. Icky.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Registered charities can and frequently do own trading or manufacturing companies, and I believe that these qualify for the full range of tax and VAT exemptions applicable to charities if their profits pass entirely to the parent body. Such companies would of course have the full protection of the law for commercially-sensitive information, copyrights and patents.

As almost all religions in the UK have charitable status, or are at least the beneficiaries of charitable trusts, a 'religion' could indeed own intellectual property.

A possible worry is the concept, in the law applicable to charities, of 'enrichment'. Charitable status is explicitly withheld from any enterprise that acts to 'enrich' an individual - you can educate, support, settle trusts for lifelong medical care and so on, but not 'enrich' the beneficiaries. Nor, in a company that is part of a registered charity, can the employees or directors be 'enriched' by their compensation packages... although many national charities pay their directors commercially-competitive salaries.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

However the C0$ has been consistently denied charitable status by the UK ever since it first applied for it back in the 60s.