Eideard

ITV children’s TV presenters Anna Williamson and Jamie Rickers have revealed that they were once questioned by police under anti-terrorism powers – for carrying glittery hairdryers.

The pair, who front ITV1′s weekend kids show Toonattik, were filming a skit for the programme on London’s South Bank wearing combat gear and armed with children’s walkie-talkies and hairdryers…

“We were filming a strand called Dork Hunters, which is to do with one of the animations we have on the show. We were out and about doing ‘dork hunting’ ourselves on the streets of London,” Williamson said today.

“Jamie and I were kitted out in fake utility belts, we had the whole bulletproof flak jacket thing, we’ve got hairdryers in our belt, a kids’ £1.99 walkie-talkie, hairbrushes and all that kind of stuff, and we were being followed by a camera crew and a boom mike and we get literally pulled over by four policemen and we were issued with a warning ‘under the act of terrorism’.”

Rickers added: “We were stopped, not arrested, but they had to say ‘we are holding you under the Anti-Terrorism Act because you’re running around in flak jackets and a utility belt’, and I said ‘and please put spangly blue hairdryer’ and he was, like, ‘all right’.”

I know a few coppers who would feel dumber than dumb – if forced to act out one of these paranoid scenarios required by nutball politicians.

Up until last summer, Jennifer Gray of Columbus, Ohio, considered herself “a weak Christian” whose baptism at age 11 in a Kentucky church came to mean less and less to her as she gradually lost faith in God.

Then the 32-year-old medical transcriptionist took a decisive step, one that previously hadn’t been available. She got “de-baptized.”

In a type of mock ceremony that’s now been performed in at least four states, a robed “priest” used a hairdryer marked “reason” in an apparent bid to blow away the waters of baptism once and for all. Several dozen participants then fed on a “de-sacrament” (crackers with peanut butter) and received certificates assuring they had “freely renounced a previous mistake, and accepted Reason over Superstition….”

Within the past year, “de-baptism” ceremonies have attracted as many as 250 participants at atheist conventions in Ohio, Texas, Florida and Georgia. More have taken place on college campuses in recent years, according to Hemant Mehta, chair of the board of directors for the Secular Student Alliance, a group that promotes atheism among high school and college students….

In Christian theology, baptism can’t be undone. If a Southern Baptist renounces his or her baptism, then that person is usually presumed to have never received an authentic baptism in the first place, according to Nathan Finn, assistant professor of Baptist studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.

Personally I like the Southern Baptist aesopian response best: Your first baptism was sour anyway. Har!