Since money is a system human beings created, and since we are all inculcated, one may even say brainwashed, into the reasoning that flows from that system, I have often wondered what a world without money may look like. Since the world of money is all pervasive and there is actually nowhere on earth one…
What Are We Frightened Of?
There is almost no story I can think of which is the founding saga of a nation (from King Arthur to the Mahabharata taking in all the myths of the ancient world and those in bibles) that does not envisage some wickedness, some malevolence against which the hero or group has to fight. And not…
Face Masks
There are hundreds of cultures across the world and down the millennia which have designed and used face masks for various reasons. Mostly ritualistic which appeals to facial features that are fixed, but sometimes, and these are my favourite, for costume and partying. The Venetian face mask balls have something of a sinister reputation mostly…
As I Sit Here
in front on my screen typing away surrounded by pretty graphics and an intelligence that wants to know why I am spelling everything the Un-American Way, I realise the computer age is well and truly off the ground and that one day we will be talking to them and they will be talking back. This…
Rupert Murdoch
There is a great deal of comment and not a little anger in the UK about the News of the World’s phone hacking. Though there has never been a shortage of politicians eager for Rupert Murdoch’s friendship in the past, and even now, because of his ability to write positive or negative things about them…
Alien Life
This is of course the stiff of fiction but fiction has a habit of intruding into real life at some point and we are searching. The first things we will find are microbes and whether we find them in this solar system or rushing around on a comet we don’t know, but the whole idea…
The Chaos Of Ideas
When I was young I asked myself the question, ‘why do people think differently?’ I realise this is not a question of great moment but it fascinated me because I saw people discuss passionately different sides of the same problems and I wondered how people drew different conclusions when faced with the same facts. Later…
Active Minds
This week some Breton musicians came to the village to entertain and a lot of work was done in the school with the children to make sure they had a fun evening. It made me think about the attraction of cities where culture dazzles and is on tap, as against villages like this where everything…
Those We Have Tortured
I have always liked Michael Palin, probably because he acts like one’s favourite uncle but also because of his hilarious take in the Python series about the Spanish Inquisition. And one has to laugh at the hideous and long lasting (nearly four hundred years) Catholic slaughter which burned people for not being good Christians and…
Help!
I have never had much time for modern popular music. I enjoy a little traditional Jazz, I think some of the twenties songs hilarious even when they are not supposed to be and I can see the allure of fifties rock and roll and the political strengths of the sixties but the comments and music…