From 7pm on Friday night we opened the first ever 24 hour Global Skeptics in the Pub, an online event in the run-up to the SkeptiCal conference, hosted online by skeptics in Northern California. The event coincided with our usual four-weekly Skeptics in Cyberspace meeting, so it lined up nicely.
I popped into the High Court last week to sit in on a court case where the Jehovah's Witnesses are attempting to argue that they should be exempt from the current Royal Commission enquiry in Abuse in Care. Sara Passmore and I (we're both NZ Skeptics committee members) visited for an hour, and we seem to have accidentally sat on the “wrong” side of the courtroom. Having sat down, we looked around and realised that our side of the room was mostly men in suits (including, I think, Alfred Ngaro - more on him in the article below), whereas the other side of the room was mainly women, including one with bright pink hair.
As I write this on Sunday morning, we've now switched over to New Zealand Daylight Time, putting our clocks forward by one hour until early April next year. The touted benefits are that we can enjoy more time in the evenings outside when it's still light, and the sun isn't rising so early in the morning.
In an occasional feature we look back at issues from the early days of NZ Skeptic.
Did you catch TV3's Inside New Zealand documentary programme a few weeks ago on "Satanic Ritual Abuse"? If so, you won't have forgotten it, try as you might to "repress" the memory. It was one of the most sublimely awful hours of television ever to be broadcast in Godzone -- silly, irresponsible and sleazy. A middle-aged woman led a camera crew around the North Island to the sites where as a child she claims to have been sexually abused in the late 1940s and 1950s by her mum and dad, the parish priest, town dignitaries, and no doubt the local dog catcher and all the dogs.