I found this essay really interesting. Especially the Illusion of matter, and the illusion of colour!

Any thoughts?

Here is an excerpt from the BBC website reporting on an incident where a young woman and a man were raped in Saudi Arabia. It needs to be read a couple of times really, to actually grasp whats happening.

The 19-year-old, who has not been named, was travelling in a car with a male friend last year, when the car was attacked by a gang of seven men who raped both of them.

She has become known as the "Qatif girl", a reference to the largely Shia town which she comes from.

Four of the men were convicted of kidnapping - but the court also sentenced the woman and her friend to receive 90 lashes each for the crime of "illegal mingling".

Last week the court increased the woman's sentence to 200 lashes and six months in prison.

It also banned her lawyer from the courtroom and took away his licence.

The justice ministry said in a statement that the sentence was justified because the woman was in a car with an unrelated man.

Maybe it's me, but I see something a touch wrong with this?

It's that time of year again. The time kids look forward to it, cos of the presents, the single adult males cos of the lasses in Santa suits and stockings, and the banks because they know parents everywhere will buy things they can't afford so their kids don't feel like crap when they go back to school and have to say they got an atari 2600 instead of a playstation 3! Oh yes, a time of joy indeed. But... lets look at it again, from a different perspective.

I remember last year, there was a teacher in the uk, fired from her job, for telling the kids there that Santa wasn't real. Fired! Dismissed. Livelihood gone. And what for? Telling the truth! These were not 5 year olds either. They were 9! So... in teaching the kids about the real world, rather than going along with the lies and deception peddled by these children's parents, this person was punished. The parents of the kids involved were obviously outraged that this teacher could have said such a thing to their vulnerable babies. And why shouldn't they be? They'd rather that their children discovered for themselves the silliness of the idea and then chastise themselves on their own gullibility, rather than have it pointed out to them that their parents have lied to them all their lives about what they perceive as the happiest time of their lives each year, while quietly laughing at them with other adults, cloaked in superiority. What happens when you find the only people you thought you could trust unequivocally... turn into tricksters and deceivers?

Interestingly.... it would appear what happens is, kids hit the bottle and hard drugs, and then start ravishing each other! Starrman's dazzling topic entitled "Having children", cites that, "As many as one in 20 children aged 10 and 11 admitted taking part in a heavy drinking session in the past four weeks", presumably some neglected to reveal their own involvement, so that makes for quite a startling statistic. Kids are far from stupid, and having just found out that the presents don't actually magically appear, they then have to think about where they DO come from. The thought process may well go something like this.. "1 : Dad / mum doesn't make enough money to be able to afford this cos they're always arguing about money. 2: Yet i do have this. 3 : they bought me something they can't afford, and are arguing still about money. 4 : Its my fault they are arguing." Kids look for reasons,  and being kids, often don't understand certain realities, so therefore attribute blame for things to themselves, and then carry the guilt. This effects self esteem, which in turn leads to alcohol and so on.

But wait, lets move back to the Santa mythos. I remember as a kid, my parents (who were, and one still is, religious nut jobs, and i do mean complete fruit bats!) lynched me for using the expression Xmas. They claimed that people who did that were "Taking The Christ out of Christmas", and that was after all what Christmas was intrinsically all about. What with all the symbolism i asked what i thought was a pertinent question. "Don't you think it's odd that Santa is an anagram of Satan?" I got in trouble for that! However, the Santa tradition had been maintained, right down to the leaving out of a couple of mince pies and a glass of sherry next to the chimney for Santa to enjoy after his delivery, for all the years i remember as a child. In fact if i close my eyes I can still see the old fireplace!

Curiously, it is illegal to eat mincepies in the uk as a certain Mr Cromwell banned them many moons ago. So, Santa, besides breaking and entering, is also committing an offence, (which in fairness is pretty much thrust upon him by the house owner), by eating the pies left for him in every house. Not just this, however, there is far worse to come. Consider the sherry. With a world population of 66,762,290,000 which, if we divide that by 4 to get the average number of households... = 16,690,572,500 glasses of sherry in one night, split over 24 hour and 39 time zones. Thats impressive amounts of drinking, even for a guy who grew up in a working mans town like Crewe! No wonder Santa is portrayed as fat! Yet this person, obese, binge drinking, law breaking, drunk driving as he is, is idolised by kids across the globe. An impressive role model indeed and one capable of creating quite an impression! Right up until a teacher, who should really be the role model, tells the kids he's just fictitious, and gets fired for it. Which sets up another good example of how the world works!

Of course, Santa's lack of abstemiousness will be dismissed as silliness, but i can't help but wonder if some of this does indeed permeate into the psyche of the next generation. The Christmas mythos itself has Jesus turning water into wine in copious amounts at a wedding. And i do mean copious! After all of the wine that was ready and prepared was drunk, which we have to assume will have been roughly estimated as enough to cover the guests, Jesus produces another 180 gallons! That might not mean much to some people, so i'll convert it into real money : 1440 pints, or 818 litres! On top of what was already drunk, which ostensibly has to be 2, 3, or more times more in quantity than the final top up the big J C lavishes on his guests. Again, another shining example for our children, and this one more often than not, is not cancelled out by a teacher doing their job, but in fact is propagated by them!

Do I have a solution? No! I merely wish to out this... this... perhaps unintentional, but nevertheless, Hideous subliminal we thrust upon the younger generation at this time of year.  What you do with this news is your own business. My work here is done!

Ho ho humbug!

Yawns n stretches

You know what never fails to get me down... what brings me to the ground and weighs heavy on my shoulders

Gravity!

Personally, and im not looking for agreement, i suspect that gravity is the root of all evil! That... and blue belly button fluff!

I have a theory on that... and it ties in with why there is only ever one of a pair of socks findable! Our feet are absorbing our socks....(the right foot more than the left i suspect) and then much like we do with food... excreting what it cant digest via the belly button! Somewhere within us is a Symbiont life form who's diet is sock! We are their host! And, as our normal excretions become the colours they do, so with the fluff of the belly variety, irrespective of the sock colour we wear!

"Wait!" I hear you cry, "What of the clothing you wear? What of the jeans, and the tops?" "Poppycock!", i reply to these deniers of the truth! I wore nothing but black, white, green, red and yellow for a week, and yet in that time period the manifestation of blue malevolence that i speak of happened not once, but twice, which obviously shows the purplesque pigmented protrudance is unrelated to my attire at the time of formation.

I offer you this information as the new year approaches so as to make you, the reader, aware. Playing with knowledge of the pack improves your chance of winning! It also helps if you have a full deck so i'm told, but i reply "It didn't help the Titanic passengers did it", which quells any more of that sort of talk. So... be warned, it ain't rainy days and Sundays.... its Symbiont's n gravity that always get you down. Cast them aside and you'll find the new year heralds joys the like of which i cannot begin to speak of here.

Until next time!

After all the serious talk of deconstruting belief systems, a little light refreshment!

I stumbled back across, on my old wandering about the ether, this site, which shows the differences between English and American English.

I've linked to the letter "S", simply because of this definition..

scotch n. Scotch is a contraction of the word "Scottish" but is now only used in the context of foodstuffs (and even then really just scotch eggs), and whisky - we refer to anything else as being "Scottish". So we aren't Scotch people; we are Scottish people. If we were Scotch people, we would be made primarily from whisky. Oh, wait…

There are doubtless others which will amuse, but this one struck a cord with me!

An end of an era! Seems that Tv-Links, the site that brought you, the viewer, all the programs you wanted to see, old and new, has been eaten by FACT, the Uk's version of the copyright police.

What this site did, in essence, is to provide links to programs which other people had uploaded, so that you could search the site, find the desired link, and then go to it. A directory, if you will, not dissimilar to any other directory, in that all it provided was directions (in this case in the form of a clickable hyperlink) to programs and films uploaded by others.

What bothers me is, that as far as I'm aware, the site itself did not hold any copyright material, nor did it upload any. What's happened, is tantamount to shooting the messenger, or to use a more interesting example, if a person intent on crashing his car to kill himself asks directions to the nearest motorway, the person who then gives the directions is subsequently arrested for aiding and abetting! (Thinking about it the car manufacturer would be hauled in too as an accessory!)

In my humble opinion, it should be the people who have uploaded the films and videos and breached the copyright laws who should be caught and punished (preferably after the viewer has seen the last episode of "House" mind you.. lol), not the guy who provided a site for links to be placed upon.

If the copyright plods really wanted to make a difference, they could've used a site like that to track people who DO upload illegal stuff (and poor quality illegal stuff especially!!).

As a curiosity, if you google Tv links.. there are thousands of hits provided, complete with links, all of which i would imagine used to work! So, as Google links to the site which links to the sites which hosts these programs..... somehow i don't see all the search engines MD's being hauled into Scotland Yard. However, the president it will set, if the person who owed the site does indeed wind up in jail or fined, could prove very interesting indeed. Most of us have pictures or writings up on the net, and most of us have used hyperlinks to stories and pages which include pictures etc, and I wouldn't mind betting none of us have checked the copyright of all of the content of all  of the pages we've visited, linked to, or indeed, told others to have a look at. This in turn means we could all be liable of something.

I read somewhere the idea that our governments are creating laws so that in the end we are all guilty of committing some kind of crime, and accordingly when they feel the time suits, they are ready to haul us in. I am wary of repeating this idea though, in case they copyrighted it, and I've not attributed a credit! lol

Having only recently moved to Holland, it seems that the cable company here do things differently. We have a Humax decoder box thingy, which upon instalation required these numbers to be input :

Frequency 372000
Symbol rate 6875
Network id 5555

However... this leaves us which a few hundred channels free, so, I'm into thinking, if the correspondnig frequencies for neighbouring countries are available, maybe I can receive thoe too, assuming that our areial is good enough.

So, anyone in France, Germany, or indeed the Uk, or anywhere else which might be in range, if you have the equivalent info, please feel free to drop me a comment.

Written years ago, this ties in with the topics "I Love You v I Want You", and the poem, "Love". Enjoy!

So... Love? Love! Love. Even just the change of the punctuation allows the word to take on different persona's. In the hands of individuals, how much more so will its interpretation change? All the different diversities of humanity let loose on a four letter word which, when it comes down to it, no two people will have the same definition for.          
       
Where do we start? In essence just the fact that we have established that although it has initial common ground, (i.e. the SPELLING!!!), when we try to define it with stable parameters, we start to have an irrevocable break down. It is not stable. In mathematical terms it would be somewhat like the non-linear equation used to develop certain chaotic shapes, which, although they can be seen to emulate each other, never actually follow the same pathway twice. So, although the basis is similar, no two are the same, and therefore as it is ongoing, it is impossible to predict the next course, although it IS possible to use intuition to estimate it, which as the mathematicians amongst you know, is the signature of a non-liner equation, and the romantics will see is also the signature of love.        
       
We need to examine what it is that means we label something Love. For the purpose of this work we will assume talk of love is a set of feelings towards someone. These are strong positive feelings, such as affection, warmth, liking, companionship, and often sexually linked. People state that its indescribable, which either means they lack the vocabulary needed, or perhaps just because its a new thing to them to experience they are perhaps scared to attribute words to this thing. Logistically though, for something which does not have parameters, all encompassing descriptions are going to be impossible!        
       
Our society dictates that, because love follows the love = marriage= monogamy mandate, it is impossible to love 2 people the same, at the same time. When you point out however that the above definition, states the love for one person HAS to be different to the love for another, due to its non linear nature, and therefore your are NOT feeling the same about both people, it demonstrates that it IS possible to love more than one person, and in-fact this could extend on into infinity! Its not that long ago that it was perfectly acceptable to be married to more than one person, and in many cultures this still exists!        
       
As a curiosity to the Love only one rule, this is only applied when the person doing the loving is doing so in a sexual nature. It is perfectly acceptable for families to love each other, and to suggest you can only love one of your brothers would be ludicrous indeed. But, its still love. The same word. Interestingly again, society dictates that, whether we like or dislike family members we must love them irrespectively! This then removes the linkage of actually liking someone, with loving them, as many people will testify to hating their siblings. It seems from an early age we are vulnerable and susceptible to the dictation of who we can love, and why.
       
So, when you love someone, you are supposed to like them and value them above anyone else you know (unless this equates to family members, who are of course, exempt as they're all equal!). If they were your friend though, you'd just call them your best friend, and tell them you love them like that, and that's acceptable. You can love all your friends, its again only when it becomes sexual that this giving of love becomes frowned upon.        
       
Why is this version of love and sex linked in such a way? Again its society which dictates this, mostly through the medium of religion. The church dictates that people should be chaste before marriage, and as marriage is Till death us do part, and divorce is frowned on, this means life is a One sexual partner only affair. Although many of us are not practising Christians we still have ingrained in our society these constraints, which are instilled in us from birth. Fortunately as we become more liberated in our attitudes we are breaking down the stigmas. Marriage is now an outdated concept with more than 1 in 3 ending in divorce, but living together has become the norm, as we no longer have to justify it to the church. Sex is no longer just for procreation, but is a form of recreation too, and as we recognise this, so its ties with love become loosened. The morals of society are removed and instead the values of the individual orchestrate what is and isn't the done thing. Rather than us becoming detached, we are in fact, detaching a set of ideals, removing something that generations before us hammered into place. Never has the word "liberated" been so literally correct        
       
Love then, seems to be, for all its randomness, relatively easy to break down. Rather than try to work out where its going, which we've established is unknowable, we can work in reverse, to find a starting point, and the parts to the resulting equation. Some people say when they love someone, they "need" them. This is simply untrue. It is possible to become emotionally dependant on someone, rather like an addiction, (hence the expression Love sick), and like any addiction, if you remove access to the cause (e.g. you break up with your partner) you will have withdrawal symptoms. You dont need the person though, you want them, albeit, badly        
       
This is where things start to come together. Having established that you want a person, rather than need, it becomes obvious that you have chosen to want to be with this person, for what-ever combination of reasons. Not acknowledging this means people can use expressions like I couldn't help myself when things go wrong. This means they don't have to accept responsibility for their actions, for example in an affair, when both parties are asked why they did it. To want things is only human, but in life we chose which of the things we want to actually have! It is a choice, cognitive, and because of this it means we chose who we love. To understand this gives us control over our lives in the emotional department, because, as hate is just an inverse of love it therefore abides by the same rules. With regards the addiction syndrome, as this is psychosomatic it can be dealt with the same way as gambling addictions, with will power! Once a person realises they are responsible for their feelings, and only they themselves are capable of changing them, it gives them the sense of control that allows them to take charge of their life        
       
So to conclude, we have found that, once started, there is no way of knowing where love will take us, but it is us initially who choose to embark on this course of action, and it is us who choose when we will leave. To acknowledge control, rather than claim to be helplessly in love, must surely elevate the status of love, in that we choose to love a person, rather than have it decided for us! To know we are consciously chosen, knowing that on taking this course the future is uncertain, only serves to make the word more powerful, more meaningful, and the person speaking it, more sincere and special.