Best Of

Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.

Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.

A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.

You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.

Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.

I stopped actively using Facebook years ago and never embraced Twitter. Facebook pissed me off when it went to overwhelmingly showing people/groups I never followed rather than my 'Friends'. Defeated the entire point of it as far as I was concerned.

Only thing I still use it for is Messenger with my friends and family.

Like most changes from big tech companies thesedays they seem designed for the company's benefit, not the customer.

Which is a shame, as so many things are much more convenient now thanks to companies, but the attitude seems to have shifted.

Aren't Twitter and Facebook free? AIUI, if you don't pay for it, you aren’t the customer.

Mass clearout of England leadership not in ECB plans after Ashes failure

McCullum’s position likely to come under scrutiny

ECB believes mass sackings would be a mistake

The England and Wales Cricket Board is eager to avoid a mass ­clearout of England’s senior leadership in the wake of another humiliating away Ashes series defeat.

England’s hopes of winning the urn were expunged inside 11 days for just the fourth time in the contest’s 143-year history with Sunday’s 82-run defeat in Adelaide, and a fourth Ashes whitewash is on the cards in Melbourne and Sydney, unless the tourists can arrest a dismal 18-match run without a win in Australia that stretches back to 2011.

A full review of the tour’s planning and execution will take place following the final Test next month when jobs could be on the line, with Brendon McCullum’s position as head coach expected to come under the most scrutiny.

The Guardian has been told that the ECB do not want to repeat the mass cull that followed their 4-0 defeat in Australia four years ago, however, when coach Chris Silverwood and director of cricket Ashley Giles were sacked the following month, with Joe Root resigning as captain following another series defeat in the West Indies two months later.

While changes could still be made depending on the outcome of the rest of the tour, the ECB believes that mass sackings would be a mistake and leave England less well-placed to learn the lessons of the tour.

Rather than appointing a ­completely new leadership team, there is a desire at Lord’s to retain what one source described as some “institutional muscle memory” of an Ashes tour, which, given England’s dismal record of one series win since 1987, is in ­danger of appearing an insurmountable challenge.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/dec/21/ecb-clearout-england-leadership-ashes-defeat-australia-cricket

I'm sure they'll blame county cricket and cricket fans for all the failures and demand that we immediately hand over all power to the ECB and stop playing first class cricket at all.

Because that's what they always do.

Instead of mass sackings, how about mass executions?

If we really wanted to win the Ashes, we would have a tour of young players who show promise in the first class game to Australia every single year, and get them playing top-level grade cricket in the Aussie leagues. Separate from the Lions tour or the U19 tour.

That would very soon teach them how to succeed in Aus. And then they could go on to be Test players. And if they don't, they could at least pass on what they've learned to their team mates by batting and bowling in the nets with them.

And it will never happen, because it might cost the equivalent of 1 ECB boss' bonus.

The only issue there is.
How many young players of top level grade cricket standard do we have?

A fair number, and they would get better form constant playing in different conditions.

The most frustrating thing about this tour is that with the exceptions of Starc, Cummins, Smith and possibly Lyon I don't think this is a particularly special Australian side, and the ones coming through often struggle when they come for spells in county cricket. Handscomb, for example, had years of underachievement for Gloucestershire and Middlesex before he finally came good in Leicester last year.

Imagine if the likes of Hull, Goodman, Rehan Ahmed, Bashir, Rew, Organ, Potts, Bethel were not just playing in the summer for their counties (or in a few cases, carrying drinks for England) but spending winters playing competitive cricket (again, not training camps) to really learn how to play in those conditions, at a level where they would be highly competitive.

Throw in a couple of wise old stagers to lead - say Madsen, Roland-Jones, Gregory or Northeast - and it could work.

It was tried with an A-tour to the West Indies domestic tournament in 2000-2001 and it did help develop several future Test cricketers, although none that were important in 2004. What it did do however was ram home to the management how bloody difficult touring conditions were in the Windies, which meant the planning of the itinerary for Vaughan's side was far better.

There's this to be said for it: how many boys get to play Mary, and how many girls get to play Joseph?

• Suggesting that the distribution is skewed by sex as a confounder, with men earning more than women, Good point.
  
• It may also be a case of if you subdivide any group into subcategories, measure a thing, then sort by size of that thing then you will end up with a staircase regardless of actual underlying pattern,
  
• What MiC should have done is a stacked bar graph or a histogram, so we could identify if outliers are skewing it
  

I’d also assume that there might be an economic correlation - schools in better off areas put on relatively more nativity shows and/or kids from socially excluded backgrounds don’t participate in these shows & also struggle in later life

Yes, and this also correlates with the donkeys and sheep voting Reform yesterday.

Of course, there are no animals mentioned in the biblical accounts. There are definitely no donkeys, sheep or any other kind of domesticated beast, so it is all traditional nonsense invented long after the gospels.

I think I'm with the Wee Frees on this.

[Pope] Benedict puts the record straight in his third book on the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, which was released on Tuesday and looks destined for the bestseller lists with an initial print run of one million.

Having dealt with Christ's adult life and death in his first two books, the pope tackles the birth of the son of God and puts paid to some myths surrounding the newly born Jesus's spell in a stable with Mary and Joseph.

"In the gospels there is no mention of animals," the pope states. He says references to the ox and the donkey in other parts of the Bible may have inspired Christians to include them in their nativity scenes.

The Vatican itself has included animals in the nativity scenes it sets up each year in St Peter's Square, and Benedict concedes that the tradition is here to stay. "No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey," he says.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/pope-nativity-animals

Doesn't seem very conclusive, I presume the gospels don't mention the first poop from the divine baby, but we can safely assume it happened without it being an invention.

There's no reference to an innkeeper either.

Though there is reference to the inn. Which presumably had a keeper. There is no reference to the stable. The stable is inferred, unreliably, from the manger. The shepherds are told to look for the manger, not the stable, as the sign they have the right baby.

The whole splendid thing is a post hoc legitimation myth. The ancient world abounds in them. It is none the worse for that.

There's no reference to an inn either, the word used meant 'guest room', which traditionally would be in a private home and not a commercial inn.

The only bit actually mentioned is the manger.

The same way that the “Publicans” in the Bible are not innkeepers at all.

I’m not sure that inns (as we, or even medieval people) would understand them, would have been a thing, in that time and place.

The gap between rich and poor was staggering. A middle class scarcely existed, The elite would stay at one of their residences, or the residence of a fellow elite, while travelling. The elite-adjacent might find a residence owned by a patron, or one of the friends of a patron. The masses would look for a doss house, a room for hire, a stable, or else camp out.

All the way to modern times, admittedly now only in more traditional societies, it was common for travellers to travel very light and expect to be fed and put up by strangers, in exchange for either casual chores or simply news of the wider world. This is how the poor travelled, and it only really stopped with the age of mass transport and communication.

It’s something that would seem outlandish to us - the idea of asking a stranger if you could stay the night. But, it features in old novels, and earlier, monasteries were expected to accommodate travellers.

But yes, there were thousands of ways that peasants looked out for each other, in the expectation that this would be reciprocated.

Where we are so different to the past is how individualistic we are, and the way that for a lot of people, the goal is to maximise profit. Whereas, in the past, the goal was to avoid catastrophe.