Strangely Perfect

Introduction Two items on today’s news demonstrated the vast contrasts in our humanity. Stardust probe finds ‘subdued’ comet crater & Japan halts whale hunt after chase by protesters. Our Absolute Ingenuity and Progress The absolute ingenuity of us humans and how far we have come since our cave-dwelling days is supremely demonstrated by the return [...]

Metropolitan Police Wear Examined The appearance of “our” police is becoming more and more like some hellish dystopian vision of oppression from all the best science fiction of the last century. Compare and contrast the two shots below; one from the finale of the BBC series Blakes Seven, the other from the Whitehall kettle during [...]

One Small Step for Man, one Giant Leap For Mankind When Armstrong said those words (except I missed out the ‘a’), it looked like men & women would be walking tall on all sorts of astronomical bodies in a continuation of the Apollo programme.  As we no know, things didn’t quite work out like that [...]

No fuss. My old friend Jeff recently died. The track now playing was one of the last pieces we did together.  It’s Jeff’s creation  and is one of my favourite Crawling Chaos tracks.  This is a pre-Waqqaz version from a cassette that has travelled round France, been in various glove compartments and cupboard floors. I’ve [...]

Students die in India as bus plunges into river The above headline is awful enough for the people involved, but in reality, it’s subject, a road crash, is common enough in my own country, the UK. What is really bad is how the BBC is reporting this.  They should know better but essentially, they’ve reported [...]

How Summer Camps Could Change Britain by Christopher M. Green (Convenor of the Summer Camps Forum and Founding Director of The ATE Trust) Download Links to Original Chris Green Articles: Letter to MPs February 2010 Suggested letter format to lobby your local MP on behalf of Chris Green’s summer camps’ initiative. How Summer Camps …inline [...]

Continuing on From…  What Killed Flight AF 447 Since the search for the ‘black boxes’ of Flight 447 was abandoned a few days ago (20th Aug 2009 – see news item),  only 3 days later, Nature’s On-line version has published reports of the jet things I was going on about in my first article about [...]

Northumberland Northumberland is a lovely place – cold, sunny, windy, dry, overcast, damp, clear, clean and historic.  But mainly brrr  and wow!  Especially on the coast. It’s quite popular with tourists.  Here’s why I go there… …why do the fuckwits? The historic island of Lindisfarne (Holy Island) is connected to the mainland via a tarmac [...]

Introduction You may not have noticed the co-incidence yesterday, but an Iranian aircraft crashed and the US Space Shuttle took off.  the co-incidence was in  the strange reporting that envelops such events. Iranian Crash This, as air crashes go, was pretty ordinary – something went wrong, it crashed, everyone died.  You’d expect some reasoned discussion, [...]

I can’t vouch for the information as I don’t live in Turkey, but I’ve just found out that Turkey has blocked Google.com Google Groups from internet access for it’s citizens.  See: Turkey & My Foreign Perspectives with Bea Vanni: Goodbye Google Alert: Hello More Bans for Turkey While my Turkey blog is less frequent these [...]

New Jaguar XJ In common with most cars like this, it’s a lovely looking machine – a style marvel; sleek and vapid, mercurial. It’s also a waste of space and a waste of effort. It’s two tonnes of mass for a 400kg payload is pants.  An ecological disaster zone. Money for Old Rope Not only [...]

Sex and Death, Death Sex, Death and Sex, AND the Death of Democracy. I’m yet again struck by the rampant hypocrisy from America.  It’s citizens seem to think that everyone in the world has to follow their peculiar mores and morals to the letter, conveniently forgetting that they won’t abide by their own rules written [...]

Pricewert Whinges Over the past week, behind the scenes, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been progressively locking down an ISP, until finally on the 6th of June, it got the plug pulled.  See news item here: US cuts off ‘criminal’ net firm Pricewert, the umbrella for firms such as 3FN.net & APS Telecom [...]

I’ve just had a hit from someone looking for Colony Holidays…  Sooo I’d better write this down fast!  I’ve been meaning to do it for a while. Colony Holiday Etc A few years back I fished around on the web to find out what had happened to the CCHS, Council of Colony Holidays for Schoolchildren.  [...]