Man-Trap!

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Ever seen a real man-trap?

My neighbour was given this with a load of other bits and bobs. She thought it was a toy, but closer examination made me disagree. For a start, it was quite clearly a gun of some order, but it didn’t have any kind of handle. There wasn’t a conventional trigger either.

It might have been a toy cannon, but it didn’t have a carriage. Yet opening it up revealed that it was chambered to take a real twelve-bore shotgun cartridge. Plus it’s made of very heavy cast iron. It’s just not like a child’s toy at all.

Live, Love and Stop Making a Fuss.

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On the end of an affair

Well, there it is; for the last fourteen months I was very much involved with someone, and now I’m not. It’s interesting to examine the feelings one has at times like this. Of course I grieve for the loss of love—and it was love, mutually—but at the same time I am aware that I am once again a free agent, faced, again, with the same choices. So how will I choose?

Buddha taught that all suffering is caused by attachment, and that is of course true; it is axiomatic.

Merry Xmas!

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Merry Xmas, Christmas, Yule, Saturnalia, Holidays…it doesn’t really matter what it’s called, because the meaning is the same: this is the time of renewal, when we slough off the old year and the wearisome encrustations that have built up and look forward to the new. It is the time when our sun, Sol, which has been slipping lower and lower in the sky, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere, stops, and begins to rise again, bringing with it the promise of warmth.

Time is Running Out!

Time Is Running Out! (To get your free e-book!)

French Onion Soup! my hilarious new book about life in France, is still available for free e-book download from this site, but time is running out. The offer is due to close on the 25th and thereafter the e-book will be available exclusively through the Amazon Kindle Store.

The downloads for the e-books are below; click and the files should begin to download automatically, depending on your browser.

(This offer is now closed.)

The print book is available worldwide through Amazon. The ISBN is 978-0-9565-007-3-1.

HERE on Amazon.co.uk

or

HERE on Amazon.com

And to all my friends and readers, Merry Christmas Yule, Solstice, Holidays, Saturnalia and anything else I have forgotten.

Jesus? I have a better story than that...

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Today marks the first day in one of our greatest annual cultural events: the winter solstice. From now until the 25th, the sun will appear to hesitate before it once again begins to climb into the sky. That of course, is the reason so many solar deities have their birthday on the 25th—Mithras, Dionysus and Christ being but three.

But what you may not know is that while these three ‘dying and rising’ gods, every one of them an agricultural deity, are clearly men, the very first was not; she was a woman.

The earliest version I have found is in the Sumerian tale of the goddess Sul or Sud. This is not a Sumerian name and it's unclear where she came from, but that doesn’t matter. As befits a goddess, Sul was staggeringly beautiful and at the peak of her fertility; she knew it was time for her to choose a partner.

Women Got Us Here.

The fact is, women got us here.

Earlier this year, it was finally confirmed that humanity’s exodus from Africa occurred only around 50,000 years ago.

This settled a dispute, though there was actually very little, concerning a massive super-volcanic explosion at Toba, in what is now Indonesia. This cataclysm erupted around 3,000 cubic kilometres of ash. No other volcanic eruption during the life of humanity has even come close to this. Toba caused a six-year volcanic winter and an ice age that lasted for a millennium. Fantastically huge pyroclastic flows, made up of superheated ash and gas, would have incinerated everything in their paths,

Christians is Bitchin’

[caption id="attachment_1162" align="alignleft" width="224"] Giant Xmas Tree at SM MegaMall, Manila. Pic: Rod Fleming[/caption]

Christians is bitchin’—again.

Well they do this every solstice, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Personally I find the excessive emphasis on consumption, and the unstated presumption that one will go into debt to buy presents one doesn’t want or need to make other people conned into the same bollocks feel a bit better, a pile of crap. For want of a better word.

So I won’t be doing it. Sorry.

But I’m still up for a bit of Yuletide cheer;

Singing the World into Being

[caption id="attachment_1158" align="alignleft" width="271"] Aboriginal Rock Art, Ubirr Art Site, Kakadu National Park.[/caption]

I first read about the Songlines in the late Bruce Chatwyn’s eponymous book, and even then the concept fascinated me. The Songlines are massively complex, but essentially devolve to the creation mythology of the Aboriginal Australians. In this, every animal had an anthropomorphic first ancestor—so there was Kangaroo-Man, Koala-Man, Lizard-Man and so on. Each human tribe is also derived from one of those ancestors. In the dawn of time, these ancestors walked through the world, literally singing it into existence.

The words they sang are the Songlines, handed down through the millennia of human life on the continent.

Richard Dawkins is WRONG!

Richard Dawkins is WRONG. He’s just plain wrong and even though his wrongness is perhaps understandable, that doesn’t change a damn thing.

Oh it’s okay, he’s not wrong about god or gods, Evolution, Genetics, Biology, the age of the Earth, and a whole heap of other stuff. He’s smack on the money on all that.

But he is dead wrong about religion—specifically, the one he himself was nominally raised in, the Church of England,

French Onion Soup! for free-UPDATE

I’ve received quite a lot of interest in my new book, French Onion Soup! This will remain available here as a free download till Christmas.

However some people have expressed that they’re having difficulties with the original download, so I have added a few alternatives. They’re below.

Something Greater

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I’m sometimes asked if I don’t feel that I am missing out, by not believing in ‘something greater’. It’s a valid question and actually one that I think all atheists should ask themselves. But the answer, at least for me, might also be of interest to others.

Yes I am part of something greater, in a very real and immediate sense. It’s not so much a question of believing but of accepting the evidence in front of me. I am part of the Earth. The Earth is not just a core of molten iron covered in a crust of rock and water, with an outer gaseous atmosphere, though it is these things. It is a living system, an entity. And I am—we are all—part of that entity.

Consider what you are: you are composed of billions of individual living things called cells.

French Onion Soup! (At Last!)

French Onion Soup! is here at last!!!! My hilarious, quirky, must-read book about a crazy Scotsman living the French Dream with his family, is at last available as both a print and e-book. Yaaay! You can buy it HERE on Amazon.co.uk

or

HERE on Amazon.com

It has been a huge amount of work, but I have already begun the sequel, which will be just as funny.

Since it’s Christmas, Hanukah, Saturnalia, Yule or Solstice (depending on your own particular penchant) soon, I’m going to give you all a present. You can download the French Onion Soup! e-book This offer is now closed, but you can buy a copy here.

The Storytelling Ape

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It’s a striking thought that civilisation evolved here on Earth only 7,000 years ago. Since then, humans have achieved many really incredible things. But even in terms of our own—mostly unwritten—history, 7,000 years is almost insignificant; it’s less than 4 % of the time Homo sapiens, the storytelling ape, has existed.