Greg Luck's Blog

The levels of spam I receive have been growing in the last few months. Much of it comes from this blog. Last year my approach was to require commenters to be approved. An email would come to me and I would approve them, or not, if they were spam.

Lately the spam level has gotten so high that I am missing emails. On my Mac, the bayesian filter does a good job. On my Linux laptop, I just cannot seem to get Evolution’s spam filter to work. Beats me.

Anyway this weekend I declared war on spam. I have added Blacklist to my blog, deleted all spam comments and trackbacks, and I wait to see how that goes.

This post is partly to see how my spam filters go. Update: A page full of trackbacks… Turning off that feature. Try again.

This Christmas I noticed for the first time the use of the term “Happy Holidays”. I cannot find who created this term. It is closely related to the term “Happy New Year”, so I suspect it came from that.
Ideas often take some time to make it to Australia. It seems this trend started in the US in the 1990s. So as not to offend non Roman Catholic derived faiths, the religious aspect is evacuated from all references to the holiday.

The history of the Christmas Holidays

The reason I say Roman Catholic is, that it was brought to my attention in the Sunday service at St John’s Anglican Cathedral (which welcomes all denominations and faiths) that Christmas fits into the ancient Roman festive season of Saturnalia. This festival started as a celebration of the winter solstice and then expanded to the latter part of December. Romans would give good-luck gifts and place trees with candles in their halls.

5 January Anyone?

Orthodox and Eastern-rite Christians don’t celebrate Christmas on 25 December, but rather the 5 January. Why? They still follow the Julian calendar. In their calendar our 5 January is their 25 December. The history of calendars is itself fascinating. In my blog entry The metric system: a case study in technical standard setting I discuss how hard it is to change standards once they are in. The Gregorian Calendar standard still has it’s holdouts.

Enter Multiculturalism

The western liberal democracies enshrine in their constitutions freedom of religion. Christians should be able to publicly say Merry Christmas to each other. As should others with of Ramadan, Sarvasham Eakadashi and so on. Secularists can say “Happy Hoidays”.

Secularism

A key idea behind western liberal democracies is the separation of church and state. Religion and governance should be completely separate. Where the water gets muddied is when there is a majority of one religion in a democracy. Then the flavour of that democracy follows from that religion. Contrast India with Australia, or Malaysia with USA.
Perhaps the problem is that in a secular system, there should be no holidays for religious festivals at all.

The politically correct thing

What seems to be getting played out in Australia is the systematic banning of all Christian symbols from our schools and public life. Santa Claus is banned from our local play group and school. Christmas becomes Happy Holidays and so on.
The French have come under attack for banning headscarves in schools. However they actually banned all religious symbols, whether they be Christian, Islamic, Jewish or others. They are motivated by a desire to integrate their various cultures and faiths into a peaceful country.
So, I think either all religious symbols and references should be barred from public life, or I am going to keep saying “Merry Christmas”.

The Luck family are off to the United States for a year. I am doing an exchange with my company. There is a lot more involved in going to a place for a year than in passing through as a tourist. We have relatives who have gone over on a defense exchange. They shared their horror stories and we are thus prepared. Perhaps the best advise I can offer is to talk with someone who has just done it.
An example. You cannot get car insurance unless you have a driving history. We have gone to the Queensland Department of Transport and gotten official extracts of our driving history. This is an example of a requirement difficult to predict in advance. In a nutshell, there is little distinction made between you, resident legally under a Visa, or an illegal immigrant. From the point of view of most companies you are an alien without any US domestic history. Leasing a house, obtaining insurance, and many other things that are trivial in your home country are major issues. More on this once I get there.
We are being defensive about this. In particular we are concerned about Vegemite. For those of you (the whole world outside Australia) who have not discovered the joy of Vegemite, click [here](http://www.vegemite.com.au/). We worked out our consumption was 500 grams per month; therefore we need 6 KG to last the year. Fortunately, the supersize jar of Vegemite is 1 KG, so we only need 6 jars.
We also need to consider the few weeks we are travelling. We have a special 250 gram tube of Vegemite to get us through.