On Second Thoughts.....

A knot is a method of fastening or securing linear material such as rope by tying or interweaving. It may consist of a length of one or several segments of rope, string, webbing, twine, strap, or even chain interwoven such that the line can bind to itself or to some other object—the "load". Knots have been the subject of interest for their ancient origins, their common uses, and the area of mathematics known as knot theory.

The above is what you can read on Wikipedia which goes on to offer this;

While some people can look at diagrams or photos and tie the illustrated knots, others learn best by watching how a knot is tied. Knot tying skills are often transmitted by sailors, scouts, climbers, cavers, arborists, rescue professionals, fishermen, linemen and surgeons. 

The boffins that write for Wikipedia left out knitters and embroiderers, who are skilled in creating decorative knots and even more skilled in untangling threads that get knotted up.  I was fortunate to have a mother who taught me how to knit and embroider when I was six years years. I was fortunate to have a father who was a fisherman and rescue professional.  I was less fortunate to "tie the knot" with a man who flunked knots when he was a boy scout.



In the year 2000, I trained and gained professional qualifications as a massage therapist, a modality in which the term "knot" is a useful euphemism for 'sections within the various muscles of the body that have constricted and create pain that is consistent'.  Techically: myofascial trigger points.



It is a rare person who has experienced the pain of a knotted muscle, yet many people are unaware of how much tension they hold within the muscular structures of their physical body.  As a person who has long been conversant in energy medicine and subtle bodies, I have eschewed the esoteric approach for the pragmatism of a hands-on strategy.  I teach the average person the basics about their anatomy and physiology.  I teach simple human biology.  The facts not the foo-foo; the foundational knowledge that wannabe healers need to possess about themselves before they will be able to access their subtle body matrices without throwing a spanner in their works.



Over the decades I have heard many people, read many stories about folks following their 'gut instincts', believing those urges, those pumps, those propulsions are indications of a Higher Self, an innate wisdom at work. 



In his book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, defines "gut reactions" as a judgment that is fast and comes quickly into a person's consciousness. The person doesn't know why they have this feeling yet it's strong enough to make them act on it. "What a gut instinct is not is a calculation. You do not fully know where it comes from." According to Gigerenzer a gut reaction can be so accurate because gut reactions make great use of the amazing capacities of the brain that nature has spent eons evolving in order to help us survive.



"Gut feelings are based on simple rules of thumb," says Gigerenzer, "what we psychologists term "heuristics." These take advantage of certain capacities of the brain that have come down to us through time, experience and evolution. Gut instincts often rely on simple cues in the environment. In most situations, when people use their instincts, they are heeding these cues and ignoring other unnecessary information."

Baby, do you understand me now?

Sometimes I feel a little mad.

But don't you know that no one alive can always be an angel?

When things go wrong, I seem to be bad.

But I'm just a soul whose intentions are good:

Oh Lord! Please don't let me be misunderstood . [2].

He reminds us not to simply make decisions " like a bookkeeper -- list all the pros and cons and then make the decision, after weighing everything. That is the classical rational approach." This approach to decision making can cause us to ignore our intuition and our gut instincts and it can be too slow to get us to where we need to be. "In some situations, that demands too much information. Plus, it's slow. When a person relies on their gut feelings and uses the instinctual rule of thumb "go with your first best feeling and ignore everything else," it can permit them to outperform the most complex calculations." [1]


I am not in full agreement with Gigerenzer because he cites professionally trained people as proofs for his theory and your average person is not trained at all to recognise the difference between a short-sighted survival instinct and a refined intuitive hit.  Your average person-on-the-street knows zip about how their physical body actually works.  They are all gut and no mindfulness.

By the way: do we really need a book explaining how "gut instincts" work?  Gigerenzer, no doubt, is writing for a target audience: the American psyche.  The dumbing down of Americans continues.  The Max Planck Institute for Human Development eh?  Here's one for ya - The Two Thick Planks Will Fix What's Wrong Widdya Society for the Conservation of Sardonic Writers. 

Bloody Nora!!



Gut instincts are the form through which fear-based responses function.  They are tricksters and teachers.  They are Loki whose function within the rich tapestry of human mythology has been misunderstood and devalued because we are human, because we are dense, because we are enchanted with romantic notions of "no guts, no glory".


Technically: feces starts to be formed in the gut.  It follows that 'gut instincts' are derived from your inner waste treatment plant.  That first-thought-best-thought mantra is way tricksy, because the first thought is a crude emission.  Our Elders have always counselled patience and it is preferable to wait a beat for that second instinct to bubble up than to agree to something, to react in a habituated fashion only to think to yourself later on.....wait a minute! On second thought....


That first "gut instinct" will dupe you and beliefs such as first-thought-best-thought are the sprinkles on that cupcake.  First thought-best thought only pans out when you know what you are about in the first instance - few people do.  Gut instinct is NOT a refined nor disciplined intuitive knowing: it is simply a burst of energy.  A fart.


Gut instincts are the Gunslingers - they shoot first and ask questions later. 

Loki: Cumbria's Man in Chains


The Lokasenna

When the sea god Ægir held a banquet, his servants Fimafeng and Eldir offered praise to those in attendance. Disgusted by what he perceives as sycophantry, Loki killed Fimafeng; as a consequence, the gods drove him away. But Loki was not so easily removed. He returned and demanded a seat at the table, citing a blood-oath that Odin had sworn with him.


Once seated, Loki proceeded to insult everyone at the table. He mocked Bragi, god of poetry, as a "bench ornament" and "backward in battle." He castigated Odin for injustice and allowing "faint-hearted" warriors to win. And of Frigg, Odin's wife, Loki said, "You are Fjörgyn's daughter and have ever played the whore." Loki spared no god his sharp tongue.


Finally, Thor came in and responded to Loki's taunts with a threat to knock off his "shoulder-stone" (head).


Faced with an angry thunder god, Loki decided discretion is the better part of valor and made himself scarce. But the gods found him hiding in salmon's form and dragged him to his doom.


With the entrails of his son Narvi they bound him to the rocks.[3]

Gigerenzer talks about how becoming fear based in our behavior rather than intuitive can even lead to fatality. "After 9/11, many Americans stopped traveling in airplanes and drove on highways instead. I looked at the data, and it turned out that in the year after the attacks, highway fatalities increased by an estimated 1,500 people. They had listened to their fear, and so more died on the road. These kinds of fatalities are easily avoided. But psychology is not taken very seriously by governments. Most of the research about how to combat terrorism is about technology and bureaucracy -- homeland security. In this case, educating the public about their own gut reactions could have saved lives." [1]

This will take your head off:  how many of those 1,500 people were organ donors?  How many people waiting on transplant lists received a gift of life because some Americans were too scared to fly...and perhaps reckless drivers?  Some ledger keeper may have the statistics on that, for where Death walks, Regeneration is never far behind. 

Gratuitous Plug

There are over 114,500 Americans waiting for a life-saving transplant. Registering takes only a few minutes.


Our small monkey-minds are too knot-clustered to truly encompass the forces which have guided the evolution of all life in the cosmos.  I suspect if we were to understand, a mere inkling of knowing would scare the bejebus out of us.  Wannabee wiccans want to lift the veil.  Wannabe wiccans are food for what lies on the other side. Now there's a gut instinct for ya!  Try not to run.

Our gut instincts are conditioned reponses as Tom Kenyon illustrates in his real-life experience: Wrong Instincts.  Of course it's a mere coincidence that Tom received his FGO* whilst in Australia.


My ol' teacher said that people make all sorts of promises on a full stomach, which they then break when hungry.  Do not allow your gut to call all of the shots, all of the time..

Referenced Links

[1]  How We're Wired for Gut Reactions - Dr Tian Dayton, Huffington Post, 26 April 2009


[2]  Lyrics to "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" written by Bennie Benjamin, Gloria Caldwell and Sol Marcus for the singer/pianist Nina Simone, who first recorded it in 1964.


[3] Loki: Evil....or Just Misunderstood - Kevin Filan at Widdershins

Image: Loki stone, Kirkby, Cumbria. Found at Esmeralda's Cumbrian History & Folklore

*FGO - fucking growth opportunity

Green-Sickness

Image Credit: Photographer Klaus Enrique Gerdes created a series of portraits made of fruits, flowers, and vegetables called “arcimboldo”. The name comes from “Giuseppe Arcimboldo” the 16th Century painter famous for painting portraits – over 400 years ago – entirely made up of fruits, vegetables, plants and other inanimate objects that still captures the imagination of art enthusiasts the world over

Until the nineteenth century, unspecified chronic anaemia was known as chlorosis, or the “green sickness,” referring to the extreme pallor that characterized severe cases. For centuries, “chlorosis, or green sick-Dutch painters portrayed the pale olive complexion of chlorosis in portraits of young women” (Farley and Foland 1990: 89). Although such extreme cases are not common in Western societies today, less severe acquired anaemia is quite common. In fact, acquired anaemia is one of the most prevalent health conditions in modern populations.

Technically, anaemia is defined as a subnormal number of red blood cells per cubic millimeter (cu mm), subnormal amount of hemoglobin in 100 milliliter (ml) of blood, or subnormal volume of packed red blood cells per 100 ml of blood, although other indices are usually also used. Rather than imputing anaemia to unrequited love, modern medicine generally imputes it to poor diets that fail to replenish iron loss resulting from rapid growth during childhood, from menstruation, from pregnancy, from injury, or from hemolysis. One of today's solutions to the frequency of acquired anaemia is to increase dietary intake of iron. This is accomplished by indiscriminate and massive iron fortification of many cereal products, as well as the use of prescription and nonprescription iron supplements, often incorporated in vitamin pills. However, a nutritional etiology of anaemia as dietary has, in the past, been assumed more often than proven. Determining such an etiology is complicated by the fact that the hematological presentation of dietary-induced iron deficiency anaemia resembles the anaemia of chronic disease.

Kent, Susan. "Iron Deficiency and Anemia of Chronic Disease." The Cambridge World History of Food. Eds. Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas. Cambridge University Press, 2000.Cambridge Histories Online. Cambridge University Press. 28 June 2012 DOI:10.1017/CHOL9780521402149.104   

Trivia; Green sickness was 17th century British slang for sexual urges, especially in women.

Further Resources

Viriditas: secret histories of women - the blog of author Mary Sharratt

Hoydens & Firebrands: roaring ladies who write about the seventeenth century

It's Your Move: Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron has shuffled off into the dark night, leaving us her rich legacy of essays, screenplays, movies and books. 


Me and Nora had something in common: an addiction to online Scrabble.  There was a dark dungeon time in my life when playing online Scrabble was the one thing that made sense.  Yet addictions are addictions, no matter how benign they seem on the outside. When I should have been sleeping, I was playing Scrabble and insidiously a sleeping-disorder crept up on me which completely messed up my body-clock, biorhythms and ability to function while working four-to-midnite as a medical audio typist for a histopathology laboratory.  They don't call those hours the 'graveyard shift' for nothing!




I used to play at Internet Scrabble Club. , the creation of Florin Gheorghe AKA Carol. I read somewhere that it was a project he developed whilst at school.  I might have read that in the side-splittingly hilarious expose of Scrabble by Stefan Fatsis, Wordfreak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players.


I laughed until I cried reading Fatsis' memoir because I recognised myself : the obsession with wanting to play a certain word; the heartbreak when my opponent blocked the board; the attachment to a four-number rating as though it was the sum-total of my worth.  The ecstasy and WTF! of playing DRUIDISM only to be accused of cheating.  The petulance of bad-sportsmanship, the skidmark of the incompetent and unskilled.  Scrabble gives you the full spectrum of competitive angst: without the sweat-stains.

I was never a player in the majors yet I could see that league from the level I did play at. I could give a major league scrabble player a run for their tiles simply through playing badly.  Which means: closing down the board.

I grew up an only child so the opportunity to play games - any games - online 24/7 filled a need that went malnourished in my childhood.  I was hungry for all games and learned how to play cards online, learned how to play backgammon online, learned how to play mahjong online. You see, online, there is always somebody who is happy to play with you whereas in real-life, most people are busy. Most people think sitting indoors playing games is no life: being a geek.  I think those people are just allergic to good clean fun and are lousy at games which involve strategy, so they avoid playing those games and thus, their weakness is never exposed.


Scrabble is a wordsport that is mandatory for writers, ambrosia for lovers of words, and it increases your vocabulary.  Addicts can rationalise anything. Science even validates it.

Word recognition behavior can be fine-tuned by experience and practice, according to a new study by Ian Hargreaves and colleagues from the University of Calgary in Canada. Their work shows, for the first time, that it is possible to develop visual word recognition ability in adulthood, beyond what researchers thought was achievable. Competitive Scrabble players provide the proof. [read full article at Science Daily]

Some years ago, maybe 2007,  I went cold turkey with Scrabble and I do miss the challenge. I miss the warm fuzzy feeling I would get as I slipped into 'the zone of focus' and there was nothing else. Just me, the words, the board and my cat Thomas who used to sit on my knee trying to mesmerize me with feline charm:
purr...gotobed..purr...getsomesleep...purr...gotobed...purr...getsomesleep...purr...feedme..purr...

My dear little orange cat with the white blaze who went ahead to the Spirit in the Sky in 2009.


Nora Ephron; a name which always put me in mind of norephedrine (not a valid word in Scrabble).

Nor + ephedrine - a  crystalline compound C₆H₅CHOHCH(CH₃)NH₂ known in three optically isomeric forms of which the levoratatory form occurs naturally with ephedrine; 1-phenyl-2-amino-1-propanol —called also phenylpropanolamine.


The previous word in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary is nor'easter a variant of northeaster - a strong northeast wind.  A nor'easter is a storm with northeast winds.

In Freemasonry the compass point of the northeast is highly symbolic, for in the northern hemisphere, the north has been traditionally seen as the place of darkness. The east is known as the source of the light. Therefore the northeast corner stands midway between darkness and light.

From one Scrabble Master/Addict and Word Worshipper to another: fair winds, calm seas and blue skies, Nora Ephron.  May you look back on your perceived failures and know them to have been mere tempests in a B-cup. May you never hear the phrase "I'll have what she's having" on the Other Side.



Thank you for sharing your secret to life: marry an Italian. 


May the Q be with U!


Nora's 1996 Commencement Address to Wellesley Collegiates

Of Constellations and Crikey!

Bookshelves, Royal Society


This evening as I appreciated the stars and the half-moon shining in our southern skies, my gaze was drawn to the constellation of Scorpius and it's bright red star Antares - one of the four Persian royal stars - and I wondered 'Why Scorpius?'  You see, to my eyes, the elegant curve of this constellation looks more like a fern frond unfurling a gesture.  I suppose the desert astronomers of old were more acquainted with scorpions than they were with gesturing ferns, which led me to ponder on the ethnobias of the names for the 88 classical constellations.


Then I considered the constellations we call the Southern Cross and the Pointers and having formed the question, I followed this question to the blog of the Aboriginal Astronomy Project, whose latest post tells a story about the Southern Cross and the Pointers.  In a nutshell, puzzled reader, you will need to click this link to read the Aboriginal telling because the copy-and-paste function is not allowed. It's not a long story: the good ones never never are.


I love this synergy we call Serendipity.  Ever notice that the symbol ? is similar to the glyph for the asteroid Ceres?  Is similar to the curve of the constellation named Scorpius and it's bright red star Antares......  Do questions compete with each other to be completed first?  Duelling questions, rebelling answers....


I had a thought last night.  If I did not know the name tree, what would I call this being.  I would call it "WOW THAT'S BIG!"  which is one of many secret names for trees in case you didn't know...

Cyathea frond



Did you read the legend at the Aboriginal Astronomy Project?  If not then what I write next will not make sense...


I can get down with the Southern Cross as a shovelnose ray and the Pointers as two boys in a canoe. I can see that story in the sky.  I enjoy the correspondence with the Maori creation story of The Land of the Long White Cloud - that we call New Zealand.  A country I have visited twice and where Tane Mahuta hooked me good and proper all the way back in 1980, when I was nineteen.  I had a passion, a strong propulsion to travel to New Zealand and it may take me the rest of my life to unfurl the forces that scurried me down that path.


New Zealand is one country, one culture which does not disappoint.  It lives up to its mythology.  From the plane you DO see a long white cloud and it is breathtaking.  It is a country steep and steeped in primeval forces.  It is a country that knows who you are long before you start to recover from the anosognosia of everyday life. 


The blackfella story puts me in remembrance of  Australian Wildlife Conservationist Steve Irwin who paid a steep price for having quick reflexes on 4 September 2006,  after being pierced in the chest by a stingray barb while filming an underwater documentary film titled Ocean's Deadliest.  He pulled the barb out.  Irwin's death a demonstration in what not to do when skewered by a marine animal.  Irwin's whole life was about teaching people.  His message lives on: little stingrays are scared of big people in the water with them.



A ship, a turtle and a snail are named after Steve Irwin. An asteroid discovered in 2001 was named 57567 Crikey in honour of Irwin and his "signature phrase."  Crikey is an Australian minced oath - a kenning.  A profanity which shapeshifts into a word with a cork placed over it's poisonous sting.

Tane Mahuta - Lord of the Forest

Further Reading:

The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life - Robert Trivers

Shark and Ray Handfeeding - Cuddle a 300kg stingray

Eagle  Dreaming: Southern Cross as foot of a Wedge-Tail Eagle and other stories - Aboriginal Astronomy Project.

Tane Mahuta - New Zealand's famous giant


The Seven Worst Things About Being Male - Psychology Today

When Elders Goof

"Life on Earth was thus an almost utterly improbable event with almost infinite opportunities of happening. So it did." ~ James Lovelock circa 1979

James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS, Ph.D, aged 92, is a chemist and creator of the Gaia Hypothesis. He is called the 'Godfather of Global Warming'. [How James Lovelock Introduced Gaia to an Unsuspecting World by Tim Radford, Guardian from August 2010]


What he was, to most people, was an alarmist more on the order of President Obama's Science Czar John Holdren, a doomsday zealot. And I don't mean 'alarmist' in the American political sense, i.e., anyone who accepts the science of climate change - I mean a real End Of The World Is Nigh prophet. So silly even the hysterical poster child of Think Progress, Joe Romm, believed Lovelock was over the top.


Now Lovelock believes he was over the top also.


In April 2012 he told MSNBC's Ian Johnston that he had been "alarmist" about climate change and  that amateur environmental commentators like Al Gore were too. This is an extract from the interview with Johnston:


James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.

Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared.  He previously painted some of the direst visions of the effects of climate change. 


In 2006, in an article in the UK's Independent newspaper, he wrote that "before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."


However, the professor admitted in a telephone interview with msnbc.com that he now thinks he had been “extrapolating too far."


The new book, due to be published next year, will be the third in a trilogy, following his earlier works, “Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity,” and “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: Enjoy It While You Can.”


The new book will discuss how humanity can change the way it acts in order to help regulate the Earth’s natural systems, performing a role similar to the harmonious one played by plants when they absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.


Climate's 'usual tricks'


It will also reflect his new opinion that global warming has not occurred as he had expected.


“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.


“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.


“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.


He pointed to Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” as other examples of “alarmist” forecasts of the future.


In 2007, Time magazine named Lovelock as one of 13 leaders and visionaries in an article on "Heroes of the Environment," which also included Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev and Robert Redford.

“Jim Lovelock has no university, no research institute, no students. His almost unparalleled influence in environmental science is based instead on a particular way of seeing things,” Oliver Morton, of the journal Nature wrote in Time. “Humble, stubborn, charming, visionary, proud and generous, his ideas about Gaia have started a change in the conception of biology that may serve as a vital complement to the revolution that brought us the structures of DNA and proteins and the genetic code.”

Lovelock also won the U.K.’s Geological Society’s Wollaston Medal in 2006. In a posting on its website, the society said it was “rare to be able to say that the recipient has opened up a whole new field of Earth science study” – referring to the Gaia theory of the planet as single complex system.


However Lovelock, who works alone at his home in Devon, England, has fallen out with the green movement in the past, particularly after saying countries should build nuclear power stations to help reduce the greenhouse gas emissions caused by coal and oil.


'Perfect recipe' for wildfires as season starts early


Asked if he was now a climate skeptic, Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I’m not a denier.”


He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, but added that the effect of the oceans was not well enough understood and could have a key role.


“It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age,” he said.


He said he still thought that climate change was happening, but that its effects would be felt farther in the future than he previously thought.


“We will have global warming, but it’s been deferred a bit,” Lovelock said.


'I made a mistake'


As “an independent and a loner,” he said he did not mind saying “All right, I made a mistake.” He claimed a university or government scientist might fear an admission of a mistake would lead to the loss of funding.


Lovelock -- who has previously worked with NASA and discovered the presence of harmful chemicals (CFCs) in the atmosphere but not their effect on the ozone layer -- stressed that humanity should still “do our best to cut back on fossil fuel burning” and try to adapt to the coming changes.


Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the U.K.’s respected Met Office Hadley Centre, agreed Lovelock had been too alarmist with claims about people having to live in the Arctic by 2100.


And he also agreed with Lovelock that the rate of warming in recent years had been less than expected by the climate models.


However, Stott said this was a short-term trend that could be within the natural range of variation and it would need to continue for another 10 years or so before it could be considered evidence that something was missing from climate models.


In the interview, Lovelock said he would not take back a word of his seminal work “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth,” published in 1979.


But of “Revenge of Gaia,” published in 2006, he said he had gone too far in describing what the warming Earth would see over the next century.


“I would be a little more cautious -- but then that would have spoilt the book,” he quipped.

Further Reading

The longlist of twelve books for this year’s Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books – the world’s most prestigious award for popular science writing – has been announced at the Cheltenham Science Festival today, by one of the judges, author Jasper Fforde. For list of books selected by the Royal Society, clickum here.

Long Distance Information

Image carried over from anticap

The Memphis Sanitation Strike began on 11 February 1968. Citing years of poor treatment, discrimination, dangerous working conditions, and the work-related deaths of Echol Cole and Robert Walker, some 1300 black sanitation workers walked off the job in protest. They sought to join the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1733.

On March 29, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr went to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the black sanitary public works employees. On April 3, King addressed a rally and delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address at Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. King's flight to Memphis had been delayed by a bomb threat against his plane.  King was booked in room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, owned by Walter Bailey, in Memphis. 

At 6:01 p.m., April 4, 1968, a shot rang out as King stood on the motel's second floor balcony. The bullet entered through his right cheek, smashing his jaw, then traveled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder. After emergency chest surgery, King was pronounced dead at St Joseph's Hospital  at 7:05 p.m. According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's autopsy revealed that though only 39 years old, he had the heart of a 60-year-old man, perhaps a result of the stress of 13 years in the civil rights movement.

The Memphis Sanitation Strike  ended on 12 April 1968, with a settlement that included union recognition and wage increases, although additional strikes had to be threatened to force the City of Memphis to honor its agreements.

"Nothing in this world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance, conscientious stupidity .......and riding in the back of a garbage truck".

Further Resources

Hellhound on His Trail : An urgent invitation, a tragic outcome
Side Trip: Jacqueline Smith's personal and private crusade

The Tattooed Gardener

Extract from How Is Personality Formed? interview with Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born to Rebel.
Sourced from The Edge

SULLOWAY: There is an important dimension of personality called "agreeableness/antagonism"—one of the Big Five—that exhibits significant differences by birth order. This birth-order difference reflects difference in the niches that firstborns and younger children typically occupy.


Firstborns tend to occupy the niche of a surrogate parent. Acting as a surrogate parent- that is, assisting with child-rearing duties- is a great way to curry favor with parents. For this reason, firstborns tend to identify more closely with their parents, and they also tend to identify with whatever their parents value. Parents value a child's doing well in school, so firstborns are conscientious, do their homework, generally do better at school, and tend to be over-represented as academics and in Who's Who.


The niche of the responsible achiever is particularly likely to be open for an eldest child. Once this niche is taken, it is difficult for a younger sibling to compete effectively for the same niche, although they often try.


The typical strategy of younger siblings is to see whether they can compete successfully in a niche already occupied by an elder sibling. If they cannot, then the best strategy is for the younger sibling to branch out—to become more open to experience—and to try to find some alternative niche where they will not be directly compared with their elder siblings.

If an elder brother is a great spear-thrower and a younger cannot top that, they might as well take up the bow and arrow. And if there is another older sibling already specializing in the bow and arrow, then it pays to invent the crossbow. The general rule, then, is do something different that adds value to the family unit as a whole.

Like Darwin's famous finches, younger siblings are busy diversifying: They are trying to radiate adaptively away from whatever specialized abilities are already represented by siblings who are older than themselves.


These "contrast effects" between siblings explain the relationship between birth order and certain kinds of creativity. Younger siblings are much more likely to accept radical innovations in science and in social thought. Within their own families, they are at the bottom of the pecking order, so they tend to identify more with the underdog and to champion egalitarian causes.


Younger siblings were the earliest backers of the Protestant Reformation, and after it the Enlightenment. Most lost causes in history have been supported by younger siblings and opposed by firstborns. This historical difference goes directly back to the kind of psychological differences in strategic niches that siblings occupy within the family constellation.


JB: You have stated that younger siblings have more in common with their peers than their siblings.


SULLOWAY: On average, firstborns are more similar in personality to firstborns in other families than they are to their own younger siblings. Similarly, a youngest child in one family is often more similar to a youngest child in another family than to his or her own elder siblings. Still, all laterborns are more similar to one another, on average, than they are to firstborns.


JB: How did you test this hypothesis?


SULLOWAY: There are several ways of testing it. In my book Born to Rebel, I engaged in two major empirical assaults on this problem.


The first method of attack involved historical evidence. I gathered data on more than 6,500 participants in major revolutions in science, politics, and social thought. In addition, I arranged for each individual's position in each controversy to be validated by half a dozen or more expert historians. Overall, I asked 110 historical experts to examine my lists of participants in revolutions, and to assess whether these lists were representative of participants as a whole. My experts were also asked to nominate missing individuals, and they rated every participant on a scale of acceptance and rejection. Obtaining these expert ratings involved a tremendous amount of work, in part because I did it in person. I flew a quarter of a million miles around the world as I gathered these expert ratings from scholars in England, France, Germany, Italy, and America.


My second line of research involved a reassessment of the birth-order literature as a whole. There are more than 2,000 publications on this subject, and what was needed was a meta-analysis to determine whether there are more significant findings than would be expected by chance.


In my meta-analysis I tested specific hypotheses about sibling strategies, using the Big Five personality dimensions as my guide.


That is, I expected firstborns—relative to laterborns—to be more:
(1) conscientious;
(2) aggressive;
(3) conventional;
(4) extraverted in the sense of being dominant (laterborns are more extraverted in the sense of being sociable), and;
(5) emotionally volatile, in the sense of being quicker to anger.


All five of these hypotheses were confirmed by my meta-analysis, which involved a statistical survey of 196 birth-order studies controlled for social class and sibship size.


JB: What about the only child?


SULLOWAY: Only children pose another interesting question. I view only children as the ideal controlled experiment. They are what it is like to have no birth-order effects at all: Only children have no siblings, hence they have no sibling rivalry. Two predictions follow from these circumstances. One is that only children ought to be intermediate on many personality traits. This follows because they are not being pushed by a younger sibling into being particularly conscientious or aggressive; and they are not being pushed by an elder sibling into being particularly daring or unconventional. Hence only children ought to be somewhere in the behavioral middle. And this is where they turn out to be.


Secondly, only children are free to occupy any niche they wish to in childhood—for example, they do not have to worry about who is going to move in to occupy a niche that they vacate. For this reason, they are free to roam around. As a result, they ought to be more variable than average in their personality traits and interests, and they are. Only children are the most unpredictable group. Their behavior is difficult to predict precisely because their childhood options are greater than for people who grow up with siblings.

Here's the argument in a nutshell.

SULLOWAY: Based on Darwinian theory, I argue that offspring are predisposed (genetically) to compete for parental investment. The role of the environment inevitably comes in because individuals—based on the contingencies of birth order, gender, and age spacing—tend to occupy different family niches. This part of the argument is not at all based on genetic determinism. There are no genes for being firstborn or genes for being laterborn. Siblings become very different in large part because different family environments—or niches, if you will—lead them to adopt differing strategies in their efforts to get out of childhood alive.


Because firstborns are bigger than their younger siblings, it is easier for them to employ aggressive and tough-minded tactics, which then become part of their personality. This part of the theory is very much an environmental and interactionist argument. My reasoning in Born to Rebel is like Pinker's argument inThe Language Instinct. There's undoubtedly a hard-wired capacity for humans to engage in verbal communication, a capacity that other apes do not possess. But the country we grow up in determines which language we learn to speak.


In the same way, we are hard-wired in a Darwinian sense to compete with our siblings for parental investment, but the particular aspects of each person's personality are the product of characteristics of the family environment in which one grows up, just as speaking German in one country, and French in another country, are appropriate linguistic differences produced by the same language instinct.


 In short, my argument is not just about nature; nor is it just about nurture-it is a combined nature/nurture argument, in which much of the psychological details are clearly on the environmental side.

Image wandered from Vagabond Journey

Voltaire's Fathers' Gardener

SULLOWAY: A story proves nothing; it just demonstrates that people have been clever enough to find evidence to fit their hypotheses. The approach I took in Born to Rebel involved testing my hypotheses using large statistical samples, and then illustrating the various relationships I had documented by telling one or more stories that brought these relationships to life. For example, laterborns are more likely to challenge the status quo, and they are more likely to cause their parents aggravation by doing all sorts of outrageous things.


A person who exemplifies this tendency is Voltaire—he got his start as a poet when his family, to amuse themselves, had Voltaire and his elder brother Armand engage in poetry contests. The family soon discovered that Voltaire was a terror at satirical poetry—and he was probably aiming many of his scathing ditties at his elder brother, whom he didn't particularly like. The family put an end to these poetry contests. The father subsequently became concerned that his younger son would end up wasting his life in such an unfruitful profession as literature. "You will starve to death," he warned his son. But a poet had been born, and Voltaire became the richest literary figure in all of eighteenth-century Europe through the sales of his ribald poems, plays, and books. His brother Armand, by the way, became a religious fanatic. What is Voltaire most famous for? His scathing critiques of the Catholic church!


Here is another story about Voltaire that I cannot resist telling. Voltaire once witnessed his father having a vehement argument with his gardener. Voltaire's father was a stubborn man. He finally dismissed the gardener, saying to him, "I hope you find an employer who is as gracious and kind as I am." Voltaire thought this remark was ridiculous-that his father, one of the most irascible people he knew, would tell the employee he had just fired that he would be lucky to find another employer as even-tempered as himself.


Soon after, Voltaire went to see a play. It turned out that there was a scene in the play just like the Voltaire had witnessed between his father and the gardener. After the play was over, Voltaire went to see the playwright and asked him if he would substitute, in the next performance of the play, a few words that were closer to his father's own remarks. Voltaire then went home and invited his father to attend the play. His father accepted, and as the father sat through the play, there finally came the scene with the gardener.


Voltaire wrote of this episode that "My good father was rather mortified."


This story reflects the use of the satirical knife blade, and the turning it in his victim, that Voltaire did to his enemies throughout his career. Some noblemen became so outraged by Voltaire's satirical broadsides that they had him beaten, or arranged for him to have a nice long stay in the Bastille. In any event, these are the kinds of biographical stories that bring a figure like Voltaire alive; and they also illustrates the kinds of unconventional and irreverent qualities that younger siblings have displayed throughout history.

Have You Been HADD Lately?

Religion provides the tribal life style we evolved for (local communities/churches), numbing of nagging questions (about essential absurdity, fundamental uncertainty about what the world is ontologically, and so on), safety in a hierarchy (you know your place, have people you can kick with impunity), and definitively an enemy (the bad) is always provided. ~ Sascha Vongehr 10:10

BREAKING THE SPELL
How Nature deals with the problem of other minds
Daniel C. Dennett, 2006


The first thing we have to understand about human minds as suitable homes for religion is how our minds understand other minds! Everything that moves needs something like a mind, to keep it out of harm's way and help it find the good things; even a lowly clam, which tends to stay in one place, has one of the key features of a mind - a harm-avoiding retreat of its feeding "foot" into its shell when something alarming is detected.  Any vibration or bump is apt to set it off, and probably most of these are harmless, but better safe than sorry is the clam's motto (the free-floating rationale of the clam's alarm system).

"Jason" - the original killer clam rake


More mobile animals have evolved more discriminating methods; in particular, they tend to have the ability to divide detected motion into the banal (the rustling of the leaves, the swaying of the seaweed) and the potentially vital: the "animate motion" (or "biological motion") of another agent, another animal with a mind, who might be a predator, or a prey, or a mate, or a rival conspecific.


This makes economic sense, of course. If you startle at every motion you detect, you'll never find supper, and if you don't startle at the dangerous motions, you'll soon be somebody else's supper. This is another Good Trick, an evolutionary innovation - like eyesight itself, or flight - that is so useful to so many different ways of life that it evolves over and over again in many different species.


Sometimes this Good Trick can be too much of a good thing; then we have what Justin Barrett (2000) calls a hyperactive agent detection device, or HADD.  This overshooting is not restricted to human beings. When your dog leaps up and growls when some snow falls off the eaves with a thud that rouses him from his nap, he is manifesting a "false positive" orienting response triggered by his HADD.

The Golden Geek

Image of Goldman from Minerals of Scotland


A Selection of Comments Panned from Science 2.0


Most people are fearful of ideas, especially those that suggest that they aren't in control. The idea that the brain is doing something "without their express knowledge or permission", is something most find disturbing. So, they cling to "free will", or "morals", or even "rationality" as something that they can use to justify their belief that humans are better than that.

As a result, we find more fascination with fringe topics to suggest that humans have a huge reserve of untapped power. Psychic abilities, notions that we only use a tiny percentage of our brain's capabilities. Even things like the "power of positive thinking" are all geared towards helping people try to capitalize on some hidden power to elevate themselves beyond simply being "human".

That's the whole point of the singularity. If we can't achieve super-human status biologically, then our technology becomes our salvation. God doesn't do the job, so we'll invent some super-computer to do it for us. Techno-religions are the wave of the future, because they represent an updated version of the same superstitions, but they sound so much more legitimate because they are all sciency and mathematical.

Personally I suspect that part of the problem is that we've evolved a brain that is capable of doing more than is necessary for survival. We've already "won" that round, so now our brains are attempting to explain our success as something intrinsic in us as humans, rather than the lucky coincidences that gave rise to humans. In the end, it's one of the primary reasons why most people reject evolution, because they can't envision that humans could exist without some special act of creation in which the universe itself acknowledges our uniqueness and greatness.

above bespoken by Gerhard Adam, 11 May 2012


Cognitive Tribalism

If it is new to people it is often threatening. Call it cognitive tribalism, fact is it happens. Time and again I have been met with stares of amazement when I say something that is perfectly obvious to me but new to them. Your idea about science as an emergent activity is worthy of serious consideration but it undercuts the still deeply embedded faith in what some call free will.


Whenever you attack free will be prepared to face barrages of people who think you are half balmy. People en masse seem to need to believe that someone is steering the ship, that we\they are in control of all this. It may well take another hundred years before people are ready to seriously consider that we're all on one crazy and fascinating ride.


Great line in the movie "The Big Chill", something like this: you can go for a week without sex but can you go for a week without a rationalisation?


I am not qualified to critique the work of Frank Sulloway regarding creative thinking types but having read the book I think he is onto something. Sulloway's central idea is that the creative mind set arises from the individuals in their developmental years being exposed to significant authority figures with whom they are in very strong conflict. Don't have to psycho analyse this, it could simply be about habits of thoughts arising from constantly engaging those figures in arguments about this or that. 


I meet people who take astrology seriously, 10 miles to the west of me there are health farms selling bulldust to rich gullible people, I read today that apparently 1 in 6 USA citizens still think Obama is a Muslim, on the internet there is a cure for every disease and a solution to every problem. I'm amazed at the stuff out there. So it seems to me that perhaps our Western Culture is not nearly as unified as we would wish. There is certainly a much greater multiplicity of views now and the conservatives, if the history of monotheism is any guide, are onto something when they suggest if you move things too fast all hell can break loose.


One of the appeals of Star Trek is that if not in phenotype at least there is hope of moral improvement(that closet socialist Roddenberry!). A faint hope ... . A while ago I read The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright. An atheist-agnostic he does seriously put forward the idea that humanity has demonstrated a moral evolution. Could be true and might even serve as a useful foundation stone for a future religion. As Carl Jung wrote: You can take away a man's gods but only to give him others in return. Or Albert Camus, The rebel, who at first denies god, finally aspires to replace him. And on it goes in the laments of history.


We can do better, we need a new dream. In these days I'm worried about the chemical soup we are slowly but surely spreading across the planet. We may not have time to do better. Not my problem, I'll be long dead.


above bespoken by John Hasenkam, 11 May 2012

Further Resources

How Is Personality Formed? - Interview with Frank J. Sulloway at The Edge

Let the Mud Fly!: a scientist's guide to insulting other scientists - Paul Knoepfler

Rock. Stream. Wood. Dream.

Forest of  Bowland in flood, June 2012
Image courtesy of Martin's Bowland Blog


Recently I have received enquiries from folks researching their family history, the threads of which have led to them to The Tree I have planted on the internet.  A Tree which shelters more stories than is immediately obvious to the casual glance....or to one tunnel-visoned with tracking down  a particular person from precooked and masticated details and data.


Yesterday, I spent hours immersed in playing hide-and-seek with a particular ancestor, said to be a 'weak link in the chain', on the only basis that no evidence has been found which proves beyond doubt, that he is a descendant of those that came before him; or that he is the ancestor of those of us who have been spoonfed to believe that we are descended from him.


Thomas of Mockerkin or Moccassin as I fondly call him in a nod to his skill as a shoemaker; is purported have been born in 1603.  The same year that Elizabeth I died.


While some of the antipodean descendants squizzle over the veracity of Thomas' place in The Tree, we also have to take it on faith, that the dozens of family historians before us, checked and double-checked the connections because, bottom-line, we're connected to aristocracy. Us... and hundreds and thousands of other folks .  Certain descendants have dined-out for decades on a very famous story which links us to the Kings and Queens of Scotland and England. Would be a shame to lose the telling rights to such a rich post-prandial anecdote.


The stories in The Tree link my tribe to 'The Luck of Workington' - the agate cup given to Sir Henry Curwen by the unhappy Mary, Queen of Scots.  To Pendle Hill and young Jennet Device and old George Fox; to an enclave of Quakers nested within devout Catholic Cumbria; to the Pilgrimage of Grace and bow-bearers, shepherds, shoemakers and soulkeepers; to things that only rock, wood and stream can know. To great-grandfathers' grandmother, Mary Storey, who in the Census of 1851 was stated to be a pauper farmer's widow. 

Storey. Story. Storie. Storri. Stori. 

Names that are acrobats, shape-shifters and tricksters.


A little-known author, R. Storry Deans wrote The Trials of Five Queens in 1910 which can be read online for free.  A gift of knowledge from The Tree.

There is an abundance of lucks sheltered within the leaves on The Tree.  This talismanic tradition of lucks has been researched by James Beswick Whitehead and curiously it weaves its way back to having originated with Mary, Queen of Scots' gift to Sir Henry Curwen.  The story goes:

Mid-May 1568

After spending a night or two as prisoner-guest with the Curwens, Mary, the hapless Queen of Scots, was then conveyed to the mansion-house of my ancestor, Henry Fletcher, of Cockermouth Hall, who after playing host to Mary and her retinue, then conveyed her to Carlisle Castle.  Upon taking his leave of the doomed Queen, Henry Fletcher gifted Mary with 13 ells of crimson velvet, with which to make a robe befitting her station. 


Many decades ago I inherited 13 yards of black French velvet that belonged to my Fletcher grandmother, a seamstress.  Beautiful selkie-glossy fabric from which  my mother cut off a precious  piece so I could make a queenly robe for the Elizabeth I doll I had fashioned from an empty plastic dishwashing liquid bottle.  I was seven years old.  It was 1968.

"Picture Agate",  Scotch Pebble from Ayrshire, Scotland
Image smuggled from Minerals of Scotland


I grew up, not only reading Cinderella and  Snow White, but also the real-life historical stories of  Tudor women, such as those of the six wives of Henry VIII and the lives of his daughters and germs of ideas that I was too young to be aware of were seeded and carefully sheltered by an inner verderer.
Researchers and medical historians now suspect that Henry VIII was not so much cursed as he was poxed - syphilic.  A plausible reason for his bizarre behaviour, not to be confused with an excuse for the malignancies of narcissism.

Sew... I was never going to make good wife material.  Before Germaine Greer and the 1970s feminist movement trundled along, I had already been innoculated by the sense and sensibilities of Tudor Queens and other important females from herstory's pages. 

Cumbria was a traditional battleground in which the Scots and English squabbled.  After a few hundred years I reckon that sort of nonsense would get up the nose of the peasant farmers, and the most pragmatic message my ancestors have gifted to  me is: that the notion that humans have free will and choice is bollocks, when you consider the pre-existence of a broad range of variables called limiting factors.


Paranoia is still endemic to our human species. 

The discovery, by Dr. Glyn Davies, that the Musgrave will of 1677 explicitly refers to The Luck of Edenhall pushes back the date of the talismanic tradition to a period long before the Northern antiquities boom post-Culloden. The fact that roving antiquary Thomas Machell drew the glass in 1666 attests to an interest in it outside the immediate family. Research into family papers might uncover still earlier references to the tradition of Lucks. 

The objects themselves are very varied: glasses, drinking horns, metal bowls and even a trumpet! Sometimes they are engraved with couplets reminiscent of the fairy's warning at Edenhall and such objects are clearly tributes. Yet the new research opens the possibility that the Musgrave glass was not necessarily the first object to be called a Luck.

Is it possible that the tradition originated in 1568, when Mary, Queen of Scots thanked Sir Henry Curwen for his hospitality by giving him an agate cup or quaich with the blessing, "Luck to Workington"?

From Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser, 1969:

According to one tradition, during the four-hour journey the queen had a sudden premonition of the fate which awaited her in England, and ordered theboatman to take her after all to France; but the winds and tide were against her, and the boat went remorselessly on towards England. Nau mentions no such vacillation: when Queen Mary arrived at the small Cumberland port of Workington at weven in the evening, she seemed as elated as everby the heady wine of optimism. Queen Mary stumbled as she first set foot on English soil: this omen which might have been interpreted in a sinister light, was on the contrary taken by her followers as a sign that their queen was coming to take possession of the country.

Image: Nova Scotia Clams



At Workington, the queen rested and was given supper, while Lord Herries sent a message to Sir Henry Curwen of Workington Hall, whom he knew of old, to say that he had with him a young heiress whom he had carried off from Scotland with the hope of marrying her to Sir Henry's son (liar liar pants on fire).


The answer to this inviting proposition came back that Sir Henry was in London but that his house and servants were at Lord Herries' disposal. Already Mary's surprising and sudden arrival at the small port, combined with her mared height and dramatically beautiful appearance, were leading the inhabitants to guess only too easily that they had the famous Scottish queen in their midst. One of the Curwen servants, who was French, did not even have to guess: he recognized Queen Mary immediately and told Lord Fleming that he had seen her majesty before 'in better days'.



[Lady Fraser says nothing of the gift of a cup and there appears to be no early document to authenticate it. By 1900, a Curwen descendant was calling it The Luck of Workington and justifying the name by putting in Mary's mouth the hearty old English sentiment of "Luck to Workington". It may well be that Mary was grateful to the absent Sir Henry for the hospitality she was shown in his house. It is not impossible she did leave a cup in thanks; the fact she had little to give at this juncture makes the gesture touching. It may even be that a phrase such as "Luck to Workington" might be attempted as a courtesy to her host by the Francophone queen, though it rather misses the mark if the host is absent.

The agate cup maintains a dignified silence on these matters, aware that beauty has a limited use for truth. Like the Luck of Edenhall, it seems set to outlive the great house it was said to protect.]

I suppose the 13 ells of velvet story from my ancestor is also an embellishment of fancy.  However I did make an Elizabeth I doll from an empty plastic dishwashing liquid bottle:

Palmolive ~ you're soaking in it!

Desire and Abject Pity: robbing the cradle to feed the grave

In early 2000 a Bourke Street retailer from either Darrell Lea’s chocolate shop or Minotaur’s

popular culture bookshop decided to work the city into a body when they renamed the
corner of Bourke and Russell streets the Golden Elbow. The city entered into full body status,
corporeal and transformed into a racist target. Residues of Burma and Thailand could be
sensed in the track marks that trailed around the traffic lights and into the amusement arcades.
What an exemplar of a city-becoming-body. The Golden Elbow is a sign of fear, it is both an
imaginary space and a real space.

The city cradles the bodies of its dead and we often can encounter the dead in ruptures of ordered space-time. In the isolated alcoves in the centre of Melbourne’s CBD are collections of scribbled obituaries to those who have died from heroin overdose (Obituary wall).

These alcoves are the shrines and memorials to those loved ones that die in the midst of the city’s pleasures. Their bodies are gone, however the dead bodies become inscribed in walls and make sense in the dirty little nooks.

The dead bring the surfaces of the city to life.

One obituary, scribbled on a sheet of cardboard was left at an overdose site in the loading bay for a Chinese restaurant. Splattered with mud, the cursive blue biro message said:


‘Wish I could have been there when you died. Your baby son misses you.
He’s too young to know, I'll make sure he never forgets you. Love ... '

This message puts us in touch with the absent lover. An encounter. An alcove measuring 4m × 2m × 3m, filled with used syringes, spoons, used swabs and stinking urine and shit is no place to die and certainly no place to remember the dead. Now it is a place not just to remember the dead, it is a place where the dead become very much alive. The body of the dearly departed has become a part of the city, well, for as long as the obituary remains.

A knot can form in your stomach when you see these images. Knots, boiling points, moments such as these are moments when events inhere in surfaces to produce sense.

This rupture in the surfaces between wall, body and time is an encounter. It tells us not just that someone died here. It also tells us that for someone who loved the departed, this place lives one. Somehow when we experience this we also become part of a body of the city. We connect with a dead body and dead's loved ones through a scrawl on a wall.


This space is memorable as it moves us, it connects us with the dead.

On the corner of Bourke and Russell streets, opposite the Golden Elbow and adjacent to the lolly shop is a landmark. It is a bus stop where hundreds of my steps have accumulated over the years. As a fourteen year old, I used to wait, guitar in hand, at this bus stop after wandering about the city for an hour or so following my six o’clock music lesson. At around eight o’clock each Friday night, while waiting for the bus to carry me back to the suburbs I used to check the rising pulse of the city, and then sadly take the forty-five minute bus ride home to mum’s salmon casserole.

Extracted from City Becoming Other co-authored by JOHN FITZGERALD, a Vichealth Senior Fellow in the Centre for Health and Society, University of Melbourne. He is currently completing a book/DVD on Australian needle and syringe policymaking and;

TERRY THREADGOLD, former Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies, and Head Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies and now Pro Vice-Chancellor for Staff and Diveristy, Cardiff University. 

Her book Feminist Poetics: Poeisis, Performance, Histories (Routledge, 1997), a study of race, nation and identity in Australia, remains a key text in the field of feminist cultural studies and critical discourse analysis. Her most recent book, with Justin Lewis, Nick Mosdell and Rod Brookes is Shoot First and Ask Questions Later: Media Coverage of the 2003 Iraq War (Peter Lang, 2006).

Terry Threadgold on Creating a Positive Working Environment

Atropos: No Looking with the Hands!

Identity:  The Inevitable. The third Moerae or Fate
Description: White-robed, grey-haired goddess who holds the shears that sever the thread of life.
Symbols: Shears, scissors, or cutting implement.

The Greek Myth

Homer saw the three Fates as representing mankind's individual and inescapable destiny. It was only Hesiod who treated them as minor divinities. And yet the principles they represent are as valid in today's world as they were in ancient Greece.

Daughters of Night, the Moerae or Fates were three in number and were named Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. Clotho, the spinner, personified the Thread of Life; Lachesis, the Apportioner, often called 'Chance', that kindly element of good luck that we all hope will make its presence felt at some propitious time in our life, while Atropos stood for those fatalistic conditions that are generally described by schools of Eastern belief as 'karmic'.

The Moerae shadow the whole of a person's life. They arrive with Ilythia at the moment of birth and are present at the point of death, when it is their duty to sever the cord of life. In ancient Greece they were also iinvoked at the time of marriage to ensure a happy and lasting union. They dwelt on Olympus and submitted to the authority of Zeus, who commanded them to see that the natural order of things was respected. Their gift of prophecy manifested mainly at the time of birth, at which point they were able to view the entire life of the newborn child.

Comment by Murry Hope

Life has a habit of occasionally placing us in situations from which there are no easy ways out. As the old Chinese proverb says, 'Destined enemies always meet in narrow passages.'  Although we may frequently dodge adversity by skilfully negotiating our way around it, or being sufficiently materially endowed to pay someone else to extricate us from it, a predicament will inevitably arise that we and we alone must handle.

"When the world runs out of fabric, Job Warehouse will still have fabric".

Image One: Exterior, Job Warehouse, 56-58 Bourke St, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Image Two: Breastplate of Aaron.

Like Chooks in a Thunderstorm

As I sat down to eat dinner on Tuesday evening, I had no sooner polished off one Honey BBQ chicken drumstick, when the earth shook.

I knew the image on the front of the Continental Cook-in-Bag Honey BBQ Chicken looked pretty scrumptious and the experience exceeded all expectations.

What has also exceeded all expectations, or is challenging my compassion for fellow Aussies, is their reaction to the largest earth-shaking Victoria has had in 109 years.  But then, the epicentre of the quake was a mere 14km from Moe.  Bogan Central.

These are not people who are aware of real earthquake devastation like Christchurch experienced last year, or China, Italy, Columbia and a thousand other places...these are people who are upset because they sloshed beer over themselves with fright and their patio furniture was knocked over.

Mind you, there were a couple of big jolts and Gaia rumbled for 10-20 seconds.  As I sucked the Honey BBQ sauce off the chicken drumstick, I heard things rattling upstairs - before I felt the movement below. It was pretty impressive. 

I went outside. My neighbour three units down came outside. Then his neighbours three units down came outside and we all whooped and hollered and laughed....because, quite frankly, earthquakes of this scale don't happen all that often in our part of the world.  Nobody got killed.  The damage is minimal although I did notice a dead tree in the front-yard of an abandoned house a few doors up from where I live, is now only being held upright by two power-lines.

I called the State Emergency Services about that and tested the theory of 'no good deed goes unpunished'. It still holds water. There's no such thing as ringing in an initial report of a fallen tree on powerlines and going on your way.  No when you leave your name and a contact phone number, which then becomes a beacon for 2-3 people to call, wanting to know more details.  It's amazing how people don't listen.  I told them the property was abandoned yet they still asked questions that only the owner of the property could answer.  There's only one tactic for that: keep repeating the same information as many times as it takes until it gets punched in.

Memo to self:  give false name and contact phone number next time.

Prior to Tuesday evenings rattle, I had been fussing over creating a mandala-altar, which had several crystals balanced on rocks and, surprisingly, none of them had been displaced by the shake.

Thursday 21 June 2012 was our Winter Solstice here down under and it rained all day, not hard rain, a soft steady patter and I had placed outside, among the flowering violets that carpet my backyard, all my crystals, rocks, pinecones, shells and other things, for a good cleansing.  Particularly my elephant ornaments, of which I have four, and some brass and copper vases that have been around since my grandmother's day.  Over 100 years old.

I went outside at three o'clock something Friday morning and looked at my bower of sparkly shiny, awfully clean objects, in the dark of night and listened to the soft pit-pat-pity-pat of raindrops falling from branches and my mind wandered to alpine fields and the terrible circumstances of the Thredbo Landslide in July 1997. 

The cause of that landslide was not an earthquake.  The investigation found the cause to be a leaking mains water pipe and the Alpine Road built on a vulnerable slope of debris.  3500 tonnes of debris came crashing down a slope about midnight on July 31 1997, killing 18 people.

A leaking water pipe.

A whole lot of rain has fallen in Melbourne - about 25mm.  I've been collecting rainwater and drinking it - sure is sweet.  The cold and wet snap hitting the state has brought welcome snow falls to the Victorian alps.  Falls Creek, Mount Buller and Mount Hotham have all had falls of between 10cm and 15cm. A further 50cm is expected by Friday night, 22 June.

Meanwhile, there have been solid rainfalls across Victoria including 30mm at the Grampians.

The Bureau is forecasting steady rain through most of the day on Friday.

Good weather to get down with Norse mythology and Sif through some cupboards and doors.

Hearthside Surfing;

Natalie Goldberg On 'Thunder and Lightning' Inspiration: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft

Blast from the Past: Goddess of the Week from October 12 2009 : Sif
Faultlines Weaving their Way across Southern Australia : Click to read full article.