Fantasy has always been about the struggle of good over evil. Great stories of all cultures are about justice fighting injustice, religions are about the right path versus the wrong path for living. This dichotomy reflects the division in the experience of people that there are decisions to be made in our existence and that…
Month: February 2011
Marius
In Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables there is an uprising of the young, forming barricades to protest at the state and Marius the young naive stands with his young political friends who all die. These uprising apparently were frequent following the revolution and even today the French are quite happy to march and burn things in…
The Oldest Revolution In The World
There is a website ( http://www.endoftheinternet.com/ ) which states that it is the end of the Internet. It is a kind of in-joke for all those people on the Net and who understand how the Net works. It is also just a joke to share with everyone, rather than being a joke site, it is…
Pilgrim’s Progress
I remember reading Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress and finding it quite interesting despite, or maybe because of, the obvious Christian theme. For much the same reason I was glued to watching the Mahabharata which was so different because it was staged for a different culture. And again another great saga Monkey, showing how the Chinese thought…
Kiribati
For those who don’t know Kiribati is an island in a series of islands the capital of which is Tuvalu in the pacific. There are many islands in the pacific that will disappear as sea levels rise but I first came across Kiribati in much happier days in the early nineteen nineties when researching for…
What Is It To Know?
I have on my shelf here two large compendia of flowers, giving all the information about names, growing conditions, forms and propagation. I don’t have similar works on the cellular structure, chemical make up and evolutionary history 0f individual plants, but there are lots of detailed books on the subject. Every time we find out…
Goodbye Egypt
Mubarak, whom I suspected might have been complicit in Sadat’s murder, is going, leaving an Egypt longing for democratic policies that don’t include secret police and the de facto rule of the army. I sometimes wonder if people really understand themselves. A long time ago I heard a Buddhist monk say that anyone who converted…
Digital Evolution
One of the more interesting things about scientific advance is to suppose that evolution on Earth is an expression on how the universe works. If evolution is something that can be charted across all the galaxies, within the galaxies themselves, then when we find something that works, some way in which matter acts and reacts,…
Eye Of Needle
It Christian communities it has long been debated what Jesus meant when he said a camel could pass through an eye of a needle more easily than a rich person can get into heaven. I accept that all ‘holy’ writ has come down from the minds of people but it interests me to wonder what…
Elephant Castles
Zoos bug me. I have been told there is no other way for children and some adults to experience the exotic animals of the world and that zoos do immensely important work saving species through breeding programmes. The problem I have with these arguments is that they overlook the entirely synthetic nature of zoos. You…