Blog T

This weekend; Friday 5th to Sunday 7th October, welcome to the twilight zone. It is a funny thing how several institutions can be rattled to their foundations at the same time; what association you have to synchronicity/serendipity/happenstance is almost irrelevant, but, just out of whimsy, what sort of weekend was it for the supernatural/crop circles/weird weather afficionados? I saw the looming typhoon over the Shanghai race track, and expected the worst. The remarkable rookie, Lewis Hamilton got the dark forces in his tyres and failed miserably; a little further east, the tennis in Tokyo was being turned on its head; Stuttgart saw a nineteen year old brightly coloured youngster shake tennis's number two in the WTA, and she is, as I type, shaking the world's number one. Rugby saw the dullest team of the World Cup take an easy game off the Australians, and the famous All Blacks, more suitably now called 'the All Greys', went down in a match with the French controlled by a partially blind referee; I hold no prejudice against handicapped people; they have risen to great heights in my world; it's the ones who only see one side of the competition I loathe, and dark forces indeed put these people in the wrong place at the right time. However, in the face of dark forces, it pays to have a good loud laugh; they can't stand that; so ho ho ho to all you winners who lost; it was real amusing, especially the bloke who wagered $5,000,000 the NZers would win the Rugby World Cup; perhaps the dark forces came from the bookies? I have a scientist friend who is the greatest disbeliever in such nonsense; however, he was strolling in the Oxfordshire countryside early one morning and came upon a crop circle; he was the first on the scene, and was able to inspect its form and doubtless authenticity/inexplicability, which bemuses him enormously to this day.... whether he's changed how he approaches his science is dubious, however, but he is my source of the information regarding the dark forces at work in the agricultural world.... I just have to frame my questions in terms a scientist understands and can easily respond to.... Yeah right; have you ever noticed (I might have asked this before) how all the scientists in your class at school were the most dysfunctional members of the school; never good at sport, not good mixers, probably shy/ugly/geeky/obsessed? I don't know where they are now, mostly, but those I do know of did some strange research which includes mashing the brains of lab frogs, (cannulating, I think it is called) and observing the results. So I've always been a little dubious of most science; the stuff MIT publishes is pretty good, consumer orientated of focussed at the drug companies; say yes/no to drugs; dark forces indeed, and I have no need of side effects personally, as those are dark forces I can control by avoidance..... a bit like TV.... surprised myself to get emotionally involved in an eccentric episode of an always weird medical drama last night; it's fiction, after all, and is just some director playing with my attention span; so I surfed the channels and got a replay of the All Grey's defeat by France, and they showed NZ's Prime Minister lurking in the shadows of the grandstand; I'd hate for those dark forces to be at my big game. Nuff said.