|
||
 |
Back tomorrow |
|
|
Here's a picture of Queenstown:  |
|
|
|
|
||
| |
Te Waka |
|
|
SMH journalist Bruce Elder has been travelling around my part of Te Waka. The bits about winetasting notwithstanding, some of the pictures are nice, if small.
|
|
|
|
|
||
| |
GTF |
|
|
SCWR has has three words for the
sneering, fluting-toned gargoyles ... who, far from commending the Weegie guy who got tore in on the side of the police to restrain the would-be mass murderers while knowing from reports of the London car-bombs that the 4x4 was very likely to contain propane cylinders and nails and could go up any minute taking them all with it, decided to indulge in an exercise in nitpicking with regard to his grammar, for fuck's sake. Anyway, 'seen' is perfectly acceptable Scots. John Smeaton has become something of an overnight internet sensation, a website having been set up with the expressed aim of raising enough money to buy him a thousand pints - and have enough left over for a fish supper. |
|
|
|
|
||
| |
Proximity |
|
|
Some Google news proximity fun:  |
|
|
|
|
||
| |
Three things |
|
|
Jim has a question. It's pointless asking it though - la la la la la, they can't hear you. There's coverage of the attempted attack on Glasgow airport over at the Trots. Domestic cats have been around longer than previously thought:
Domestic cats around the world can trace their origins back to the Middle East's Fertile Crescent, according to a genetic study in Science journal. They may have been domesticated by early farming communities, experts say. But the study suggests the progenitors of today's cats split from their wild counterparts more than 100,000 years ago - much earlier than once thought. At least five female ancestors from the region gave rise to all the domestic cats alive today, scientists believe. The earliest archaeological evidence of cat domestication dates back 9,500 years, when cats were thought to have lived alongside humans in settlement sites in Cyprus. However, the new results show the house cat lineage is far older. Ancestors of domestic cats are now thought to have broken away from their wild relatives and started living with humans as early as 130,000 years ago.  |
|
|
|
|
||
| |
The Riding |
|
|
It was the opening of the third session of the Scottish Parliament today. The ceremony includes a march called the Riding - which, according to the Scottish Parliament website, is 'based on the traditional procession ... which signified that the Parliament was sitting and occurred at each meeting of Parliament up until the Treaty of Union in 1707'. Where else would you see lasses with swords ordering everybody about, pipers (Green Hills of Tyrol/Scottish Soldier), hippies, vikings (my favourite) and a lion? 
|
|
|
|
|
||
| |
Paddington fails the citizenship test |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
| |
Hitchens on cats |
|
|
[M]uch lower animals, such as cats and bats, have much more fascinating and lovely and more potent ears [than humans]
..... My own favorite tale goes the other way: the Prophet is said to have cut off the long sleeve of his garment rather than disturb a cat that was slumbering on it. Cats in Muslim lands have been generally spared the awful treatment visited on them by Christians, who have often regarded them as satanic familiars of witches. |
|
|
|
|
||
| |
The childhood of our species |
|
|
It is disappointing that Christopher Hitchens' new book has been published here with the title God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion, rather than with its original title, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Here's a wee excerpt:
One of the very many connections between religious belief and the sinister, spoiled, selfish childhood of our species is the repressed desire to see everything smashed up and ruined and brought to naught. This tantrum-need is coupled with two other sorts of "guilty joy," or, as the Germans say, schadenfreude. First, one's own death is cancelled - or perhaps repaid or compensated - by the obliteration of others. Second, it can always be egotistically hoped that one will be personally spared, gathered contentedly to the bosom of the mass exterminator, and from a safe place observe the suffering of those less fortunate. Tertullian, one of the many church fathers who found it difficult to give a persuasive account of paradise, was perhaps clever in going for the lowest common denominator and promising that one of the most intense pleasures of the afterlife would be the endless contemplation of the tortures of the damned. He spoke more truly than he knew in evoking the man-made character of faith. |
|
|
|
|
||
| |
Donkeys |
|
|
I have spent the day being alternately amused and shocked by purportedly educated people's ignorance of the constitution and government of the UK. One dodo even asserted in my hearing that Britain has no constitution. Anyway, I have a new book to read, so I'll be off now.
Ooh look! A donkey that looks like Boris Johnson.  |
|
|
|
|
||
| |
Apostate |
|
|
A letter to you Davey - from former Tory MP Quentin Davies:
In an unusually personal attack he accused Mr Cameron of "superficiality, unreliability and an apparent lack of any clear convictions." He said that these qualities ought to "exclude you from the position of national leadership to which you aspire and which it is the presumed purpose of the Conservative Party to achieve." ..... By contrast, Mr Davies said he "greatly admired" Gordon Brown "who I believe is entirely straightforward, and who has a towering record, and a clear vision for the future of our country which I fully share." "Under your leadership the Conservative Party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything. "It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands. A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda.'' ..... "The Conservatives are either wrong - on the NHS, on nuclear power, on Europe, on many things - or they simply do not know what they want or what they believe." Snicker. I do find the notion of a Tory ultra-left amusing. |
|
|
