John J

I am visiting friends in Australia soon, and we've been invited to the 'baptism' of their grandchild (about six months old). I've attended christenings in the UK, but never a baptism. What should I expect at this Australian baptism?

One regularly hears of people who have had the Last Rites read to them, but who actually pull through and live. So what, I wondered, are the effects of hearing the priest reading the last rites to you? Do people tend to think, 'Aw shoot! This is worse than I thought', and then keel over and die?

Or do they think, 'Stuff this for a game of soldiers. I'm not ready to die yet', and then pull through?

This is a totally serious question. To me, it's always seemed terribly presumptuous of the priest to administer these rites when the shock of hearing them being read could conceivably be the final thing that pushes a seriously ill person over the edge. Sod the priest, get me a friggin' doctor please! And if I really genuinely am beyond the point of no return, I sure as heck don't want any darned priest hovering over me and rubbing it in.

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in 2000 years, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needs it most?".

I've paraphrased Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) with that question. So Christians, I'll never understand why you believe what you believe, but I'd be interested in hearing your answers to Mark Twain's question please.

And I'm not looking to mock you or to belittle you. I'm just interested in your thoughts. Thanks

I am making the plans for a family funeral, but don't really know how long they last. It'll be in a village church in the UK,and is not Roman Catholic (I am told they take rather longer than others).

The deceased was a very popular and well-known man locally if that makes any difference. So how long should I allow for the service, assuming there are no follow-on services needing to use the same church?

30 minutes? 45 minutes? Anyone have any ideas please?

Our dear leader (UK) has called for a return to christian values, and claims the UK is a christian country.

We are NOT a christian country - we are a secular country; most people profess no faith, and there is a large percentage of other faiths such as hindu, islam, buddhist, etc etc. Is this call for a return to christian values a good thing or, as I feel, a potentially catastrophic retrograde step? Taken to its logical conclusion, we could end up like America with the religious right dictating areas of government policy such as schooling (teaching of creationism for example), foreign policy, etc etc.

I wish I'd voted for him last time round so I could write and tell him he'd lost my vote. I can't do that, but it'll be many, many years before I consider the Tories worthy even of consideration for my vote.

British Y!A-ers - what do you feel? Is Cameron's plan good or bad for Britain? For the world?

I am just interested. I've seen it happen so often but have no idea what this swaying is supposed to achieve.

I will soon be visiting the Flanders/Somme regions of France/Belgium with plans to see as much of the World War 1 battlefields/trenches/museums as we can.

There is one particular museum that we want to visit: it is a museum that I was told about about several years ago, but my friend cannot remember the name of the museum or even the name of the city/town where it is located.

He describes the museum (or possibly just one room in the museum) as being a very long and narrow room. Multiple loudspeakers placed around the room allow the museum to replicate the sounds of World War 1 shellfire in three dimensions. My friend describes it as sounding exactly like guns are being fired at one end of the room, then the shells and bullets can be heard passing overhead and then exploding at the far end of the room.

I know this is not much of a description to give you but it is the best I can do. Does anyone have any idea what this museum is called or where this museum is located so that I can visit it?

Thanks to everyone who answers

Just been tidying out the attic and came across my old Vivitar Series One 100-500mm zoom lens that I used to use with my old Olympus OM1/2/10 series SLRs (non-digital).It was a quality lens in its day (before everything went digital) so it seems a shame to just chuck it in the bin.

Would any modern Digital SLR camera be able to use it, or is it just fit for the bin?

On a recent plane journey, the passenger next to me proudly stated that his son was away doing missinary work. I tried and failed to think of a rational but unoffensive response that would adequately express my views.

My own view on these wretched missionaries is that they have no right whatsoever to to go spreading their religious poison anywhere, and particularly not in less developed countries. That these callow youths have the arrogance to believe they can improve the lives of other people by poking their noses into their lives and trying to convert them to their particular brand of religious idiocy just defies belief. It's cultural vandalism of the worst possible kind.

SO, WHAT WOULD BE A GOOD RESPONSE NEXT TIME I FIND MYSELF IN THS SITUATION?

Ideally I would like to be able to say something that makes my hatred and contempt for these arrogant cretins apparent, but at the same time I would not want to cause unnecessary offense to the parent. Any suggestions please?

My daughter's Dell laptop stopped working so we took the machine back ti its factory settings and wiped all of her data. Now it is telling her she can only start Windows/MS Word etc five more times before she is locked out. It tells her the product validation code she typed in is incorrect, but it can't be - it's written on a sticker on the base of the machine which was put there by Dell themselves.

I told her to contact either Dell or Microsoft, but she says they want a large amount of money (she mentioned £40 minimum) to help her and to fix the problem She can't afford that and I am reluctant to spend that sort of money when the darned thing should work fine - as I said, we took the machine back to it's factory settings (using Dells' own software tools) and the codeword put on the PC by Dell is not being accepted.

Does anyone have any ideas what we can do? Incidentally, she's in Edinburgh, UK

Kett's (or ket's) Rebellion of 1549 was an uprising by the dispossessed peasants of Norfolk rebelling against the enclosure of common land by the wealthy/aristocrats. Yet this rebellion of the desperately poor was led by Robert Kett (or Ket) who was a very wealthy man (he owned Wymondham Manor).

In Suffolk, the county to the south,a similar uprising of the dispossessed was led by John Harbottle, another wealthy man.

Can anyone enlighten me as to why Robert Kett (a wealthy land-owning tanner) and John Harbottle (a wealthy wool and cloth merchant) should both side with the rebels. It must have been more than a simple feeling of compassion for their fellow men - both actually led the rebellions in their own counties, and risked their lives in so doing. Although John Harbottle escaped punishment, Robert Kett was imprisoned in the Tower of London before being hung in chains, still alive, from the battlements of Norwich Castle. There his painful death was drawn out over several days as a lesson to the local inhabitants.

They must both have had very strong reasons for leading the rebellions. Does anyone know what they might have been?

I'm thinking of visiting nepal at the start of March for about three weeks of mainly trekking. I've been twice before - once in November/December when the air had the clarity of diamond, and once in April when the air was much hazier and, frankly, a disappointment. Does anyone know how clear the air is likely to be in early to mid-March?

I'm thinking of the Pokhara region, simply because it's what I know, but does anyone have any better suggestions (but not Everest base camp - far too busy from what I hear).

The lasty time I was there was 1984, so I know things will have changed a lot. Any further suggestions or tips would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

So Noah built this boat to carry two (or was it five?) of every animal to save them from the flood that engulfed the whole world.

Now, it seems to me that if the whole world was flooded, most plant species would have been killed off. Someone else must have done a similar thing to Noah to save all the different plant and tree species. Does the bible make any mention of this other guy, 'cos I don't recall ever hearing about him/her. Does anyone have any ideas?

I run a small consultancy business (limited company) with very simple accounts

- 1 employee (me!) (although that could change soon)

- 1 or 2 customers invoiced monthly

- a handful of expenses monthly

- VAT payable quarterly

- accounts for legal requirements yearly

I am currently using Sage Instants which I find the most hideously unusable piece of software that I have used in my 30+ years in the software industry. Virtually every single design decision they made when they wrote the software was the wrong one from a usability perspective (incidentally, part of my business is usability consultancy, so I do know what I am talking about here)

What alternatives are there to Sage's stinking pile of dog-poo? I don't really care what it costs - I just want never to use Sage software ever again

PS Yes, I could create a few spreadsheets to do it, but I am hoping for something a little more robust than a spreadsheet

I am a complete novice at gardening, but recently harvested our first successful crops of peas and runner beans. I understand that these legumes aid soil fertility by adding nitrogen, so how much longer should I keep the plants in place to get maximum benefit? They have both finished cropping, so should I remove them immediately, or wait until they start to die off in the autumn?

Incidentally, if it makes any difference, the pea and bean plants will by composted once they are dug up.

So, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi (the Libyan bomber of Pan Am flight 103) has been released from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds as he's dying of prostate cancer and has only a few weeks left to live.

I've been listening to interviews on radio and TV ever since the release was announced. Three British parents of the bomber's victims (including Jim Swire) were all happy for him to be released on compassionate grounds. And a vox-pop in Lockerbie (where the bombed plane came down, and killed eleven more people) by the BBC suggested the feelings were much the same. And British people aren't, on the whole, particularly religious or churchy.

Yet in the US, where religious feelings are so strong that the country often appears to outsiders to be a virtual theocracy, there appears to be nothing but anger, revulsion, and a feeling of a lost opportunity for revenge.

I just wondered - is it the 'churchyness' of the US that causes this lack of compassion? And the secularism of the Brits that causes the compassion.

What do you think? Has religion caused the lack of compassion in the US, or is it something else?

Oh, fwiw, my opinion: I'm British, utterly non-religious, and I feel he should be released, although I also feel he is probably an innocent man

OK, first let me say that I am not religious at all and have no intention of ever becoming so.

However, a recent YA answer referred to Numbers 13 which I looked up (something about a battle, and the distribution of the spoils of war, and how that delightful chap Moses told his people to kill all the women except for virgins, whom they could casually rape), and it piqued my interest. I'd never heard of this story before.

I am not interested in the biblical or religious aspect of any of this, but out of nothing more than idle curiosity, I'd like to know more about the stories in the bible. I am looking for an objective synopsis of the bible stories

Is there such a thing as a small book (say, a paperback of about 100 to 250 pages) that describes in modern and objective English what the bible has to say from start to finish?

Finally, let me be absolutely clear here: I am not looking to convert or to become religious, and I am not looking for bible passages annotated by a religious person. I simply want to get a rough idea of what the bible says, without having to wade through all the turgid and poorly written details contained in the real thing.

By the way, I'd be equally interested in a similar synopsis of the Quran.

I live just outside Edinburgh, UK. Around 11:30 PM on Wednesday evening, I went out to watch for meteors. The sky was clear of clouds, but slightly hazy, so conditions were far from perfect.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw a couple of very faint meteors which were hardly worth the trouble of going outside. Then, from the direction of Perseus (roughly NW) a large orange object appeared. It came from the same radiant point as the previous meteors, crossing the shole sky (as much as I could view - I have trees to the north and the south) in about 8 - 10 seconds. Sirius was visible in the SE; this object was less startlingly bright or white as Sirius, but was much, much larger, much larger even than the ISS which I see occasionally.

It surely can only have been a meteor, although it lacked the tail I'd normally associate with meteors. Did anyone else see this?

I have a set of manuals (installation guide, user guide, reference guide, operator guide, etc) for a piece of software. All of these manuals are indexed. No problem doing that.

However, each index only refers to the book it is in. What I would really like to do is to have each index referring to every one of the books. To give an example, I'd like the index entry 'software installation' to appear in every one of the books, referencing 'Pages 1-5' when it appears in the Installation Guide, and referencing 'Installation Guide, pages 1-5' when it appears in every other book.

Is there a way of doing this? Any hints or tips greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Incidentally, my version of Word is 2007, but I also have access to previous versions.

I've just been wondering to myself - what is the oldest, verifiable date in history?

I hope my wording is clear, but just in case, what I am asking is what is the oldest event in history that we can be certain happened on a specific date?

Does anyone know? And if so, how can we be so sure of the date?