"one day you'll wake up, in the present day a million generations removed from expectations of a being you really want to be..."(Thin Ice, Jethro Tull ( Read more... )

For those of you interested in writing (and reading) I'd take it kindly if you popped in and made a comment on A writers website I participate in

Humans are strange, complex creatures. Writers moreso. Some are human too. I haven't evolved that far, for which I am very grateful. Humans do things which are noble and wonderful and altruistic. They can construct art that moves the soul. They can give their own lives to try and save strangers. They're capable of acts of great inventiveness, ( Read more... )

I walked over to fetch milk this morning. Down the middle of the road, of course (no sidewalks and not much traffic). The sky was blue between thin filoplume clouds. The Drakensberg mountains look like a juvenile baker's appretice dusted them enthusiastically but inaccurately with icing sugar. A Jackie-hangman was eating a dead berg-adder in the ( Read more... )

In the inverse of Australia, we're coming up to fire season. Brakes are being readied. People are nervously burning off trash. We cleared and burned off one of our problem areas yesterday. Hot, smoky, lung-burning, eye-watering hard work. We had a visitor today who said to me how lovely the unworried lazy life in the country was. I look back in ( Read more... )

I see Michael Martin - the UK speaker of the house, is eminently suited for a job in the ANC government. When we had scandal about baby deaths in the E Cape a while back, the Panjandrums promised decisive action in following the matter up. They did. They fired the whistle-blower! Martin - calling in police to follow up on the leak of commons ( Read more... )

My comrades ghosts walk behind me ( Read more... )

Democracy beats the trousers off most of the other things on offer out there. That said South Africa is a good place to see that it still has some way to go before being the ideal method of getting the best people into running public service. Most of the electorate is pretty ill-informed, poorly educated, and strongly inclined to vote on tribal and ( Read more... )

Storm this afternoon, and so I was reading my great fat australian cookbook. Great recipes, and I feel I ought to learn. I was irritated by the lack of pics... when it occured to me that I never take take pictures of my own food. So I had a go. I think we eat quite well for a permanently broke writer, thanks to the garden and nature providing ( Read more... )

Raising a society - it would seem to me - is not unlike raising children. Society tends, if left to itself to be immature, often unpleasant, inclined to do things because somebody thought it would be fun - which it usually isn't for the victims. As you might have guessed I am not one of those who holds to the concept of innocent savage or noble ( Read more... )