Dived over to
The Range again on the way back from the school this morning: picked up a few more bits and pieces, including the purple/aqua voile inner curtains for Kai's room. I have to admit it was nice being able to take my time looking around without Kai, good as he is when it comes to shopping. I've pretty much decided how I'm doing our room - just need to sketch it, have Ken tell me what a bad idea he thinks it is, then go ahead and do it anyway... [grin]
Anyone who's visited our house may have noticed that plants like me, and tend to grow somewhat big in my home (wherever that might be). Normally this isn't too much of a problem (just remember to bring your machete) - with one exception. I 'inherited' an asparagus fern ('fern'?
hah! Should be called an asparagus
thorn the number, sharpness and length of the spines. My poor hands...) from Ken's grandmother after her death. It's a handsome plant - but in common with my others, it's grown rather
large, the leaf strands five to six foot long. Finding the right place for it, heat and light-wise, has proved difficult: hooked along the top of the lounge window it's in full sun in the summer, and where it's been for the last year or so - on a shelf above the radiator in the hall - it's both in the way and too hot. So today I moved it to the landing window, where it's doing duty as a living curtain. It's a little leggy at the moment, but should now improve, with the correct light conditions.
This month's review went off this morning - eight days before the deadline! It was an... interesting book,
Thraxas at War by Martin Scott. Odd. Reads almost like an AU comic parody crossover of
LotR,
Sherlock Holmes and
Xanth with a little
Jeeves and Wooster thrown in - but luckily
without the Marty Sue elements... I didn't like it very much, or so I thought initially - but now I simply
have to read the others in the series, so it obviously had some kind of very strange effect. Most intriguing.
The latest Arianna Huffington newsletter arrived in my inbox this morning. I signed up for this some time ago, and it's often very interesting, though of course I take everything I read with a large handful of salt these days ('I'm a professional cynic but my heart's not in it...') It talks about 'The Rapture', and to my surprise, when I mentioned it to Ken, he'd never heard of it. So I had him read the article - find it
here. Then Kai wanted to know what we were talking about, so we spent the walk to school discussing the whole notion of people so selfish and irresponsible they'd let the world suffer in order to speed their own way into some mythical 'heaven'.
Kai wasn't impressed. He wanted to know what could be done to make them see sense - or at least someone else's point of view. I didn't have an answer for him. In my experience bigoted, self-righteous, deluded cultists like this (they aren't Christian in any sense of the word. If Christ returned tomorrow He'd be appalled by them) simply refuse to listen to anyone who doesn't agree with them. Arguing is pointless, and even if they could be presented with physical proof they'd refuse to acknowledge it. (This is the primary reason I find patriarchal monotheism intellectually offensive and morally repugnant. Just my opinion, of course, you worship who or what or how you want - as long as you don't hurt anyone in any way. Or the planet.)
It did, however, make me consider statistics (no, I let Ken do the maths, so if the numbers are wrong, blame him!) According to this
site (go take a look, it's frightening to watch the numbers change) the world population is approaching 6.5 billion. Of which getting on for 300 million are American. That's
less than 5% of the world population. (And yet they produce 25% of the world's pollution. Reprehensible,
ne?) Of those 300 million, around 50 million are rapture cultists (for want of a better term). That's 16% of the population. And 0.77% of the world's population.
Why are we letting less than one percent of the global population hold the world to ransom?
If they were dogs they'd be put down.
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Joules *Dances with Haddock* Taylor
pontificated this at 5:02 pm
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