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Stu Savory's Blog
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Nonday, May 30, 2005
Ceci n'est pas une 'Oui! Oui!' Thursday, May 26, 2005
The Ammonites Cross section (scaled up by factor 2 in 800*600) of the ammonite I found on saturday for my wife Cornelia. I can barely wait to see what piece(s) of jewellery she will make from it :-) Note for any X-ian fundies reading this : Ammonites are mentioned in the bible (see Genesis xix) and have nothing to do with that damned evolution theory! The Ammonites were a race very closely allied to the Hebrews. The origin of Ammon and his brother, Moab, is ascribed to Lot, the nephew of Abraham and a child abuser. We see in the very depravity of these peoples a proof of the Biblical story about their incestuous origin. In religion they practised idolatries & abominations common to the Semitic races surrounding Israel; their god was called Milcom, supposed to be another form of Moloch. With the Moabites, they were held in special loathing by the Hebrews. No man of either race, even when converted to the religion of Jehovah, was allowed to enter the Tabernacle; nor his children even after the tenth generation (Deut., xxiii). Milcom is evil, a false god, it says so in the bible; the bible condemns the military/industrial complex. So be it. Ye whore! Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Hurtigruten Day 8 : Vardo-Kirkenes-Home
[... continued from May 23rd... ] The final half day (=day 8) of our one-way trip covered the stretch Mehamn - Vardo - Kirkenes (see map) and thence (sadly, all good things come to an end) the flight home. Recap of our trip's blog so far, should you want to read it all from the beginning:
The weather in the Barents Sea proved rougher than the sail up through the sheltered straits and fjords of Norway's west coast. Since 'turning the corner' at the North Cape we went from strength 2 up to strength 6 and the ship was rolling a bit, so we'd taken some anti-seasickness pills to get some sleep. We were OK, but some others were decidedly green and were skipping breakfast ;-) After breakfast the ship headed for our final stop - Kirkenes - where we debarked. The ship makes a half-day stop there, and people doing the round trip can take a bus to the Russian border, along the European(!) main road to Murmansk The last time I saw this corner of Russia was through a cold-war periscope. After the half-day stop the ship would return to Bergen, exchanging the northbound nighttime stops for southbound daytime stops, so it's worthwhile doing the round trip as you get to see different places. Maybe when we win the lottery :-) Our final impression of Kirkenes was of the repair shipyards, full of rusting Russian hulks being fixed up for their owner's last roubles, otherwise they would have just fallen apart. Obviously Russia no longer has the capability to do their own repairs up to European quality standards :-( The 3 hour flight home was uneventful (thankyou Condor!). At Düsseldorf airport brother-in-law Klaus picked us up and drove us to their place, where we'd left our car. Düsseldorf airport had chaotic traffic, aggressive drivers picking up and setting down passengers all over the place, irate taxis blowing their horns, policemens' whistles, I'd forgotten how LOUD 'normal' city life is.
Koyaanisqatsi had us again :-(
Monday, May 23, 2005
Hurtigruten Day 7 : Hammerfest - North Cape
[... continued from May 21st... ] The penultimate day (=day 7) of our one-way trip covered the stretch Hammerfest & strait(sic!) on to Honningsvag - then a bus trip to the North Cape - then sailing on to Mehamn, where we entered the Barents sea. On this section of the map true north is about 20° left of the vertical. We arrived at Hammerfest at about 5 in the morning, but in this land of the midnight sun our sleeping rhythm was much disturbed, so, since we were awake anyway, we decided to explore Hammerfest on foot during the one hour stopover, as it's a tiny town. First thing we saw was the symbolic memorial to those lost on Arctic expeditions, which is directly on the harbourside. Then we tried to join the Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society , a night club which was however already closed at 5 a.m, and which doubles as the Tourist Information office during office hours. Just another 100 yards along the street we found the prettily painted bandstand, now 216 years old, behind which (uphill, to the right) was an ugly block of apartments made of converted containers just bolted together (what a contrast!). A stiff climb to the hilltop gives a great view. The Main Street bakery specialized in return of the Midnight Sun celebratory cakes, but was still closed too, at 5 a.m. Hammerfest's inhabitants were still hibernating, maybe? :-( Our ship then continued on to Honningsvag where a longer stop was planned. Local busses took us on the 25 mile trip to the North Cape for the obligatory photo taken to document the fact that we had been there :-) The North Cape is a convenient high cliff, but actually the northernmost point of Europe's mainland is Knivskjellodden , an insignificant promontory about a mile west ;-) The lack of a serious snow cover is due not to the fact that summer was starting (it was about +2° C ), but to the fact that the Gulf Stream runs up the west coast of Norway, warming it to about 20° C to 40° C warmer than (say) Barrow as Alaska's northernmost town or Chatanga in northern Siberia. Surprisingly to some, Iceland is actually south of the Arctic Circle even! Europe has a more northerly island - Spitzbergen - which is further north than Russia's Novaya Zemlja! Local trolls in the North Cape tourists' exhibition centre even beat ME in a beauty competition ;-) On the way back to our ship we got a chance to meet some
Lapps and their reindeer, and
Cornelia was able to do some
shopping in the
Lapps' souvenir hut. I hid my credit card ;-)
. . . [to be continued] . . .
Saturday, May 21, 2005
Hurtigruten Day 6 : Harstad,Tromso,Skjervoy
[... continued from May 19th... ]
The great thing about these Hurtigruten cruises is the peacefullness - and all the time, time, time you win. No blaring TV, no screaming/wailing children on board, no radio, no telephone, no surfing the web (no blogging even, although I did take notes and photos for this delayed blog), no going out to buy vittles, no preparing meals, no washing up, no neighbours stopping by in the morning to borrow a cup of sugar or in the afternoon to borrow a bag of fertiliser for the garden (hmmm, are they making a bomb?), no postman ringing the bell, and - above all - no animation or shows on the boat (it's not a cruise ship it's a working ferry, albeit long-distance), just peace & quiet. Possibly we gained an extra eight hours daily of sorely-missed silence :-) Most of the passengers were well-educated senior citizens, many sat like us up on deck seven in the panorama lounge, quietly reading a book and watching the coastline drift by, and/or any other traffic, like the coastguard looking for foreign fishing-boats illegally in Norwegian waters etc. Most were reading light romances and/or detective stories they'd brought with them ('cos the ship's library is 90% in norwegian), so Cornelia and I soon had the reputation of being heavy intellectuals, because we were reading 'difficult' books ;-) Actually Cornelia was reading Brian Greene's 'The Elegant Universe' which is a layman's guide to string theory; and I was re-reading E.T.Bell's famous 1937 book 'Men of Mathematics' which comprises biographical material about the lives and achievements of the great mathematicians from Zeno to Cantor. Both good books, but I think Betsy & her Nobel prize-winning physicist husband Frank would have put us to shame. After an early lunch of really fresh crab, we went ashore at Tromso during the 4-hour stopover. The main attraction was the 'Polar experience' exhibition, which is mostly an aquarium (not as good as the one in Bergen), but also has displays of various polar expeditions, not all of which were two-way trips. Interestingly, the lighting was heavily subdued so that we could (barely) see what a 6-month polar night looked like. Today's bare (sp?) blog-header photo was taken there. Whilst in Tromso we also visited the Arctic-Sea Cathedral. This is built like a capital letter A, along the architectural lines of the racks used to dry fish in these climes. The cathedral has a huge A-shaped modern stained glass window, well worth seeing. It being a sunday, the local bishop was due to hold a service there, so we left. Personally, I think the alleged bishop was an imposter; I never once saw him move diagonally ;-) Tromso's third (secret!) attraction, well hidden away, is a prudish sex-shop which not only sells multi-coloured sealskin bikinis and wolf-fish-textured condoms but also sells curtains, so people can't look in your windows to see what you're up to in those 6-month long arctic nights ;-)
. . . [to be continued] . . .
Friday, May 20, 2005
Rape Photo Thought that headline would get your attention! Sex sells, or is at least intended to do so. Whilst we were away for those ten days' creative break we got 3947 Emails! I'll say it again, 3947! However our trusty spam-filter identified about 99% as spam, leaving ~40 real ones. 99% spam, and most of it of a sexual nature :-( Promises of giant size penises (yes, plural!), freshly divorced, randy women and webcam offers for all those single-handed Casanovas on american campuses. American? Yes, indeedy : most of the offers were sent to me (in Germany) in a poorly spelled improper subset of Her Majesty's language. Viagra and a US high-school education have a lot to answer for. But not from me, I won't be answering any spam. So if your email got misclassified, please resend it, 'cos I just chucked everything away that the spam-filter had classified as maybe junk. Perchance you asked about Hurtigruten seamen but omitted 'A' letter? Hard cheese! Now I suppose the blog-reading spambots will read today's blog-header and inundate me with even more spam for the testosterone-controlled teenies. But maybe I can discourage them by letting the search engines find correctly titled photos, but with an innocent content. So let's just mislead them a little more with a photo of me playing a moving part in a porn-movie. Sorry about the typographical errors there, that should have read pawn-move :-) Brisbane bloggeress A. Pashen (homonymic spelling correct!) wrote telling me about a hard-case (sic!) of rape in Australia: There's been a series on TV here (OZ) about some of our odder evolutionary orphans (there's nothing us Aussie's are more proud of than our unusual native wildlife, except perhaps our swimmers). I really hope it makes it overseas as they did a very interesting show on the Echidna and where (they theorise) it evolved from and lots of fun info on it's rather unique poison. Apparently no pain killer known to man actually blocks the pain caused by the venom in the male echidna's spur. Oddly the male uses said spur when mating with female echidna. Whether to calm her or as an aphrodesiac I am unsure. Human's copping a decent dose of the poison, quite often die. I guess it's another case of one person's fun being another's torture. Just seen a trailer for the new Star Whores movie. Noticed that the star troopers' body armour shows that they have one central testicle. Sith happens! Glad to see that a US Senate sub-commitee got raped by British MP George Galloway when they tried to make a scapegoat of him. Here are a couple of (my) excerpts from the very entertaining cross-examination of Galloway on TV this past week: Mr Galloway went on the offensive from the start of his testimony, saying the committee had "traduced" his name around the world without asking him a single question. He told committee chairman Senator Norm Coleman: "I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice." Asked how often he had met Saddam, Mr Galloway said he had met Saddam Hussein on two occasions - the same number of times as US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and maps - the better to target those guns. I met him to try to bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war," he said. Way to go, George Galloway! Tell 'em like it is! But to return to the rape spam. The sheer effrontery of the scams one gets sometimes just takes my breath away. The way they try to rape the unwitting(sic!) user! Just look at this screenshot: 
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Hurtigruten Day 5 : Arctic Circle - Trollfjord
[... continued from May 18th... ] At 7:16 in the morning we passed the Arctic circle, marked by this globe statue on a rock in the straits. See today's header photo, with Hestmannoy (568 meter) mountain in the background. That evening the ship's crew held a sadistic ceremony wherein all of us first-time-crossers had ice-cubes and cold water poured down the back of our necks! Brrrrhh!!! Barely an hour later, just after breakfast, we passed a sister-ship headed southbound, the Midnatsol (Midnight Sun). Snowy mountain scenes preceeded our arrival at Bodo for our next adventure. This was a trip in a high-power (225hp) 35 knot boat (for which we were dressed up in warm flotation suits in case we fell overboard), to see the famous fast whirlpools (which can be 10 metres across and up to 4 meters deep!). We also saw unique rock formations and even a sea-eagle like this one. After Bodo, our ship headed across to the Lofoten islands , visible from 100 kms away in the glass-clear air. Our first short stop was at Stamsund, with it's pretty little harbour marker, before proceeding to Svolvaer for a slightly longer stop. Svolvaer is great. It has the world's only 100% ice bar. The lounge bar itself is made of ice, as are the glasses you drink from, as are all the statues and carvings in the bar. The ice bar you MUST visit, even if their cocktail is very weak! We set sail again at 10 p.m. with the midnight sun bathing the mountains in a beautiful pink glow. Since the weather was totally calm , the captain demonstrated his macho seamanship(sp?) by inserting his huge penile boat into the tight, wet, Trollfjord at midnight. The entrance is so narrow there is only 10 feet of room left and right to squeeze his massive er...boat into the Trollfjord! Turning around at the end needed great precision too, at one point the prow was a bare 2 feet from the fjord wall! An amazing demonstration of his skill and a very unique midnight.
. . . [to be continued] . . .
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Hurtigruten Day 4 : Trondheim - Rorvik...
[... continued from May 17th... ] Recap of the trip so far :-
Then we were driven up the hill to see the music museum, with a guided tour by a pretty, young, and multilingual lady, who could play all the old instruments too, with appropriate period pieces on several of them. They even had a welsh crwth (a useful Scrabble word, as it contains no vowels ;-) Stupidly, the museum doesn't allow you to take your own photos inside, and I didn't have enough Norwegian Kroner cash on me to buy one of the beautifully illustrated scores. Note to self: next land-trip, remember to take your wallet along too! 4 hours flew by, time to reboard. MS Kong Harald sailed west out of the fjord then resumed our northward coastal journey, passing an island monastery, mountain-bound shoreline plains, and lighthouse ruins. Near Rorvik we squeezed through the narrowest strait of the inside passage (see photo at top of today's blogposting), and while the boat sailed through the bright evening sun towards Bronnoysund, we explored the ship's bars. The ship has its own debit card, charging your credit card when you finally debark. Alcohol is expensive in Scandinavia though, and a beer (0.4 liter) at the ship's bar cost 7 € . Ouch! All drinks are extra, even table-water at mealtimes cost us 150 NOK (= 20 €) for the week, a rip-off. With our various shore-trips and diverse drinkies on board, we spent €300 (each!) over and above our package-deal costs, blowing our planned budget :-( The further north we got, the longer the evenings lasted and the sun in the west illuminated until quite late the hilly shore to the east beautifully.
. . . [to be continued] . . .
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Hurtigruten Day 3 : Bergen-Geiranger-Molde
[... continued from May 16th... ] FYI: The Hurtigruten are the coastal boats up the coast of Norway from Bergen to Kirkenes. MS Kong Harald had left Bergen the previous evening und proceeded up the coast by night, passing through the strait at Ytre Sula whilst we slept soundly in our tiny cabin. It turns out all the cabins are the same size, just 3 meters wide and 4 long, en-suite bathroom included. The bathroom is so small that males have to declare their intentions before entering (backwards or forwards :-) Our cabin was down on deck two, just above the waterline, hence we had small bullseyes rather than big windows. The advantage of a lower deck is that you are nearer the centre of roll, and so get less motion when the seas (and the passengers) are heaving :-) Breakfast and lunch were magnificent buffets, whereas the evening meals were 3-course, waitress-served dinners, all of high quality and quantity (I put on 8 lbs in 10 days :-) . Seating was pre-assigned. Having booked an outside cabin, we got a window seat during meals :-) Probably we were under the average passenger age, which I estimated to be around 66 then. It was a rainy day, with low cloud over the mountains and over small offshore islands. We continued up the coast (see map) that morning via Floro (a tiny working harbour) and Maloy to Alesund. After a short stop, our ship headed off for an afternoon in-and-back trip through Geiranger Fjord (see today's header photo). Geiranger Fjord is a beautiful landscape with many waterfalls, ( 1, 2, 3) in particular the famous Seven Sisters waterfalls. Some fellow tourists got off at Geiranger and took the bus across the mountains to meet our boat again at Alesund. We saved our trip money, guessing (correctly) that much of their trip would be in the clouds ;-) Our boat proceeded back to Alesund, where the weather had improved a teensy little bit. While we had our evening meal the boat continued northwards to Molde.
. . . [to be continued] . . .
Monday, May 16, 2005
Hurtigruten - Day 2 : Bergen City Foot Tour
[... continued from May 14th... ] The Hurtigruten are the coastal boats all the way up the coast of Norway. We had arrived at their southern turning point - Bergen - a day early, so that we could spend this second day sightseeing Norway's 2nd largest city (on foot, the weather forecast being mostly fine). A ¾-mile walk from hotel Admiral out to the end of the promontory brought us to the aquarium, small but good. Not as fantastic as the one at Monterey (California) which is the best I've ever seen, but good nonetheless. We had underwater views of penguins 'flying' through the water, they and the seals being curious about these humans peering up into their huge tank. Other fish preferred to stay well hidden. Protective anenomes and swift rays completed the picture. We then walked a mile back through the old town, along alleys with pretty wooden houses and up and down steep hill-streets, past the statue of violinist Ole Bull, into the town centre. While my arts-interested wife Cornelia went through the handicrafts museum there, I rested my feet in one of the little city parks, next to the wrought-iron bandstand, with a view beyond the ugly grey town-hall tower block up to the hill-top cable-railway station, which was to be our next goal. We took the cable-railway up the hill over the town. Half way up I took the view across the fjord posted at the top of today's blog entry. The ship departing the fjord is a Hurtigruten boat. Magnificent views across Bergen city were our reward. BTW, 'Bergen' is German for 'Mountains'. Next we took the downhill train and visited the old market hall. What a beautiful old-style market, with a fine selection of stands! Norway is famous for the quality of its fish, and the fish stand did not disappoint, offering salmon, halibut, mackerel and crab, smoked and/or fresh. Across the hall, the green-grocer had a good choice of fresh vegetables too. But I must admit that we turned weak at the chocolate confisier's stall, even if it is smaller than Doris' Alaskan shop ;-) Just a few hundred yards along the quayside, we came to the world-heritage shop front, all old traditional Hansa stores. Behind the frontage they straggle back, a hundred yards of UNESCO-preserved, historical, tiny wooden stores, with narrow wooden alleys between them. Typical storefront decorations include an elk's head and - on the Angel Apothecary (=drug store/chemist) - a carved wooden angel, which also marks an upstairs 'night-club' of unknown reputation ;-) Heading back towards the centre of town, we saw the old Hansa tradesmen's building, originally built in 1480 but rebuilt after the fire of 1712 and again in 1912, still an impressive building. Finally, we went inside the old stock-exchange - now the tourist-information office - to see there the really beautiful murals and ceiling paintings, before going on to board our ship.
. . . [to be continued] . . .
Sunday, May 15, 2005
C.M.O.T Dibbler lives!
Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. In Terry Pratchett's
excellent Discworld series of books, there is an unhygienic market dealer called
CMOT (Cut My Own Throat) Dibbler, who specialises in selling dubious fast-food,
such as e.g. "Grilled Rat inna Bun".
Now go read about this brand-new accidental biodiversity discovery in New Scientist! I have taken the liberty of informing Stephen Briggs and pTerry ;-) Saturday, May 14, 2005
Hurtigruten - the Blog of our Trip north
Back on March 21st, fellow blogger Melanie Mattson asked us to name 5 of our lifetime ambitions : "Listing them from 1 to a maximum of 5, what are the things you want to do before you die?"To which I replied inter alia :- 3. Take the Hurtigruten, the post-boat, up the coast of Norway through the fjords, up over the North Cape, averaging 2 stops daily. Achievable for us, and planned :-)Well we did it, we took the coastal ship all the way up the coast of Norway, from the 2nd largest city of Bergen (coordinates 8/9 A on the map) to Kirkenes (coordinates 2 J on the map). The ship we took was the Kong Harald shown above. The tiny white-coated figure on the quay in front of the bows of boat is my wife Cornelia. Now I'm no photoblogger, just a taker of snapshots, but I'll be showing you some of my photos over the coming days as I blog the trip. To keep the bandwidth down on this blog, I'll be writing links in my text which are links to photos which will pop up in a separate window, as I already did here with the map of Norway. That way, you can choose which ones you want to see. You can also read their page: Hurtigruten, the Norwegian Coastal Voyage. Day One : We'd got a special (i.e. cheap) package deal, which included a direct charter flight to get us from Düsseldorf (in Germany) to Bergen (in Norway). Once there, we were bussed to the red-painted Admiral Hotel, which is of a good standard, except that the often wet and slippery external fire escape ladders terminate about ten feet up, leaving you with no choice but to drop into the ice-cold harbour, unless there's a boat tied up conveniently for you to fall onto! We got a great 5th floor front room with the package deal, giving us a magnificent view across the harbour to the old Hansa shops, now under UNESCO world-heritage protection (more about these later). The view from the other window was just as great, we could see a magnificent three-master tied up at the castle. I wished THAT had been our cruise ship, but it was not to be. We had arranged to come to Bergen a day early, so that we could sightsee Bergen on day two, before boarding our coastal ship in the evening. I'll show you Bergen in the next blog-entry (I'm still sorting the photos :-). I'll be blogging each day of the trip separately.
. . . [to be continued] . . .
Friday, May 13, 2005
Superstitions
Morbid paraskevidekatriaphobia is rampant today; it is
the irrational fear of friday the 13th, just another superstition.
But whence superstitions?
Mankind is susceptible to superstition. Many believe there is a big grey-bearded old man in the sky, who metes out punishment to those who believe otherwise. There are many variations of this myth, each sect claiming to be The One True Church©, and labelling anything else 'superstition'. One man's religion is another's superstition. (Atheist me got kicked out of a bookshop once, for moving all the bibles into the fiction section ;-) Pre-dating the late, great, Douglas Adams by several millenia, the Jews believed JahWeh had a name of 42 letters, no vowels in it, it being in Hebrew, and thus being only pronouncible by the high priest. The Xians like the taste of symbolic cannibalism, and often bite off more than they can chew, rather like a wierdo mohel. Some people won't tread on the cracks in the pavement. Some knock in wood, or cross their fingers, others throw salt over their shoulders, or cross-their-fingers-and-hope-to-die. But today's particular superstition is paraskevidekatriaphobia, the irrational fear of friday the 13th. There are a whole bunch of fears about thirteen. If 13 people sit down to dinner together (like at the Last Supper) , a superstition claims that all will die within the next 13 moons (a year). There are 13 witches in a coven. Many towns do not have a 13th Street, many streets have no house numbered 13 (maybe 12A instead?). Our own dear Meg is at risk though, because Sacramento bucks this superstition. Many buildings don't have a 13th floor. If you have 13 letters in your name, you will have the devil's luck (Jack the Ripper and Charles Manson both had 13 letters in their names). An early pope claimed that the crucifixion took place on a Friday 13th, and as we know the popes are infallible ;-) But the Chinese regarded the number 13 as lucky, as did the Egyptians in the time of the pharaohs. It's not just 13 that has it's own superstitions; Fridays do too. Never change your bed on Friday; it will bring bad dreams. Don't start a trip on Friday or you will have misfortune. If you cut your nails on Friday, you cut them for sorrow. Ships that set sail on a Friday will be lost at sea. So today being both the 13th and it being a Friday makes it doubly suspect! Your horrorscope for today: Today you will meet 13 new people, head on. So drive carefully :-) Then if you are still afraid to go out on Friday 13th, I recommend you visit this oriental town :-) Sabbath, May 1, 2005
Walpurgisnacht
Many of my dear readers profess to be X-ians, a religion split into mutally-intolerant sects, whose common unifying ritual is symbolic cannibalism, often claiming they are really the good ones, and all others are evil. Bush Sr. is a case in point. So, as part of Stu Savory's Satiric Satanic Info-Service, I'll tell you about Saturday's Pagan party, known here as Walpurgisnacht. The central Pagan celebrations here in Germany are held up in the Harz mountains, on the highest, which is called the Brocken. Brocken means Big Lump, we have pretty unimaginative names for our mountains here, other countries use more imaginative mountain names. When the first mountaineers of the British Empire reached Nepal looking for the biggest hill, the natives warned them that they "would often run out of breath in the thin air and have to lay down to recuperate a lot". In their pidgin English this was summarised as "Ever Rest", whence the name ;-) In another famous example, a "local father went off over the hills to play cricket in the neighbouring valley, accompanied by his mother as his supporting audience". The Brit mountaineers pointed the way they had gone, and the locals explained about the couple, which the Brits took to be the name of the mountain they were pointing at "Nan go, Pa bat" ;-) But let's get back on-thread. People dress up in fancy-dress costumes, the girls usually as witches in groups of three, whose major concern appears to be arranging the time and place of their next meeting : "When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?" Actually, we three (and twenty others), met again at a party on Saturday night (April 30th, May Eve), which was of course Walpurgis night. Originally, the celebrations were to worship the Lightbringer, shown above. But nowadays, the fancy-dress costumes are chosen to represent embodiments of pure evil. Often such pagan parties will turn into orgies, usually because some of the participants - like yours truly - have some really filthy habits ;-) Why 23 party-goers? you may ask. X-ians often suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia, the Xian fear of 13 being associated with 13 Jews scoffing at the Last Supper, then gay-kissing. But if you see someone wearing a T-shirt with the number 23, or people meeting in groups of 23, this is because they are "Illuminati", a group of wise ones. They are usually more discreet though, neither rolling up one trouser leg (due to a fear of oily bicycle chains maybe?), nor baring their breasts like transvestite drag queens, nor doing both (like freemasons). Oh, I've just realised that we have a Friday the 13th this month, so I need to blog about superstitions on that day :-) We didn't drive all the way to the Brocken this year (about 100 miles away) but
just had a local party with some friends. Yes, there were 23 of us :-) Of course
we traipsed through the pitch black night, bearing our flaming pitch torches,
to meet at a lonely, deserted forest crossroads at midnight to declaim the Rite of Ashkent,
but we heard no dark reply "GOOD EVENING" :-( So there we were in our embodiments-of-evil costumes, gathered around in a 23-a-gon, on a crossroads at midnight, with the traditional Frankensteinian peasants' flaming pitch torches, and unruly savage beasts (bulldogs, actually) straining at the leash, performing the Rite of Ashkent to summon Him, when the local forester drove around the corner, to see what was going on, lest his forest be on fire! Needless to say, he didn't stop for a bloody drink :-( For those of you of an enquiring mathematical bent, maybe I should explain why the Illuminati need 23 people for the Rite of Ashkent (not 8, as pTerry seems to think). Having drawn your Pentagram to summon Him, making damned sure that there are no gaps in the lines, you will notice that there are 5 points to the pentagram and 5 intersections of the lines. Makes 10. The Rite requires a copulating couple at each of these points. So that's 20. The other three are the witches still trying to set up a date and place for their next meeting. Hence twentythree ;-) |
Dr. Stuart Savory, who is an overeducated, grumpy multilingual ex-pat Scot,
blatently opinionated, old (1944-vintage), amateur cryptologist,
computer consultant, flying instructor, bulldog-lover, Beetle-driver,
textbook-writer, long-distance biker, blogger and webmaster living
in the foothills south of the northern German plains. Not too shy to
reveal his true name or even whereabouts, he blogs his opinions, and
humour and rants irregularly. Stubbornly he clings to his beliefs,
e.g. that he's not really evil, or even anti-american, in spite of
Dubya's efforts to convince him that he should be.
He sorely misses his late dog :-(
Political compass Economic L/R: -1.62 Liberty/Authority: -2.56 Blogs that I read Betsy Devine Blogging in Paris Doug Alder Easy Bake Coven Elaine Kalilily English Cut Frank Paynter Haggiswurst Jeneane Sessum Joel Sax Jonny B's secret diary Just My Opinion La Vache Qui Lit Make: Blog Making Light Mandarin Design Mercurial Noded Not Enough Who In The What? Old fash. patriot Shelley Powers Tessa Steer TFS Reluctant The (UK) Policeman Yule Heibel Now Reading 
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