Stressed? Me too....

I haven't posted in a while, life has gotten away with me, but this is something that was introduced to me recently and I think its worth watching. 

One of my favourite poems is said to have been written on an anonymous tombstone.

When picture look alive with movements free,
When ships like fishes swim beneath the sea,
When men, outstripping birds, can scour the sky,
Then half the world deep drenched in blood shall be.

Interestingly, when I googled it as someone had erroneously (I think) said it was Nostradamas, I found it tagged onto the bottom of a mother shipton prophecy.... now I have no idea where it is from. This is the prophecy one website claims;

http://www.merkurpublishing.com/prophecies_shipton.htm:
A house of glass shall come to pass
In merry England, but alas!
War will follow with the work
In the land of the bloody Turk,
And State and State in fierce strife,
Shall struggle for each other’s life.
Carriages without horses shall go
And accidents fill the world with woe.
And the center of a bishop’s see,
In London, Primrose Hill, shall be.
Around the world thought shall fly
In the twinkle of an eye.
Through the hills men shall ride
And neither horse nor ass bestride!
Under water men shall walk,
Iron in the water shall float
As easily as a wooden boat.
Gold shall be found and shown
In a land that’s now unknown.
Fire and water shall wonder do
And England shall admit a Jew.
Three times three shall lovely France
Be led to dance a bloody dance
Before the people shall be free;
Three tyrant rulers shall she see
Each spring from a different dynasty.
And when the last great fight is won
England and France shall be as one.
And now a word in uncouth rhyme
Of what shall be in later time.
In those wonderful far-off days
Women shall get a strange new craze
To dress like men and breeches wear
And cut off their beautiful locks of hair,
And ride astride with brazen brow,
As witches do on broomsticks now.
Then love shall die and marriage cease
And babies and sucklings so decrease
That wives shall fondle cats and dogs
And men live much the same as hogs.
In eighteen hundred and ninety-six
Build your house of rotten sticks
For then shall mighty wars be planned
And fire and sword sweep over the land,
And those who live the century through
In fear and trembling this will do.
Fly to the mountains and the glens,
To bogs and forests and wild dens,
For tempests will rage and oceans will roar,
And Gabriel stand on sea and shore
And as he toots his wondrous horn
Old worlds will die and new be born.
In the air men shall be seen,
In white, in black and also green,
Now strange, but yet they shall be true
The world upside down shall be,
And gold shall be found at the roots of a tree.
When picture look alive and movements free,
When ships like fishes swim below the sea,
When men, outstripping bird, can scour the sky,
Then half the world deep drenched in blood shall die.


However.... there is controversy of the Shipton prophecies and their truth, as one author of a book of her prophecies admitted to making up a doomsday claim often seen in this poem, the last two lines:
Published in 1448, republished in 1641. -I took this one from ye-olde-wikipedia :)

Carriages without horses shall go,
And accidents fill the world with woe.
Around the world thoughts shall fly
In the twinkling of an eye.
The world upside down shall be
And gold be found at the root of a tree.
Through hills man shall ride,
And no horse be at his side.
Under water men shall walk,
Shall ride, shall sleep, shall talk.
In the air men shall be seen,
In white, in black, in green;
Iron in the water shall float,
As easily as a wooden boat.
Gold shall be found and shown
In a land that's now not known.
Fire and water shall wonders do,
England shall at last admit a foe.
The world to an end shall come,
In eighteen hundred and eighty one."

So who to believe? Who knows... but they are awesome if they were prophecies... makes you wonder...

"Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the Earth is our mother. What befalls the Earth, befalls all the sons of the Earth?

This we know; the Earth does not belong to any man; man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. All things are connected.

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."

Not sure where this comes from, but i wrote it down in my yr 12 diary, after finding it in the front of a biology textbook. I like it. :)

Compltely unscientific...

Found this on someones facebook.

I think this just about sums it up for Love.

awesomeness

I was going to write a blog today but then spent from 11am to post 12 pm (still going actually) playing an awesome game of CIVILISATION IV with Henry. As the Celts and China, we've kicked the arse of many nations in a Pangea. I have destroyed Korea's Wang Kon and nearly took down De Gaulle until he started a sneaky vassalage to Elizabeth in England.... so... i better get back and continue to build my nation. I need to get access to oil so i can destroy my enemies.
Yay.
Civ IV
So awesome.

Michelle out.

Nessie or Nelly?

I begin my blog with a song.

"Nelly the elephant packed her trunk, and said goodbye to the circus, Then off she went with a trumpety trump, Trump, trump trump."

Well not really... I was reading up on the Loch Ness monster. Fascinating and it would be awesome were if some of the stuff were true. most of my research was done on one site- http://www.nessie.co.uk/. Great but a bit biased as its geared towards proving the Loch Ness Monster is real. Its a good site none-the-less.

From what I read, the legend of a Loch Ness monster or Kelpie has been around for hundreds of years. Sightings start in the late 1800's. In the 1930's a sighting and photograph take the world media by storm and ever since then its been popular. There has been faked evidence (my favourite is the big game hunter, Marmeduke Wetherall- what a name-, who used a stuffed hippo foot to make fake footprints!). The descriptions seems to mainly be of a creature/disturbance in the water which resembles an upturned boat, and/or long sinuous heads. Many sighting have been by locals who know the loch well and wouldn't mis it up with birdlife or otters.

There are very large eels living in the Loch which would account for some claims, which can apparantly leave the water too- so may account for some of the lan sighting that have occured from afar. Otherwise the belief by fanatics and Cryptozoologists is tha the Loch Ness holds a Plesiosaur:

Who knows- people have to make their own mind up. Regardles of what Nessie may or may not be, sightings have declined recently and fans of Nessie deny claims that its possible if it were real, that it has died.

I recently read something that piqued my fancy though and gives an explaination fo what Nessie is and why the sightings may be declining (other than less Media Hype!) Looking at the Nessie pics- the older ones seems to have long necks giving the classic Nessie shots, grainy balck and white shots. Here a a few of the classics.taken from google image and nessie.co.uk:

So what was also popular in the 1930's other than Nessie sightings- apparantly according to the National Geographic article i have linked to, travelling circuses. Could it be that elephants having a bath in the Loch mean that Nessie is actually Nelly?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0309_0603009_loch_ness.html

So who knows- but here's a pic posted on nessie.co.uk- asking people to ask themselves if its real or fake- i say it's real- but maybe we need to nose-about the issue a bit more.

Atheism anyone?

Well, this guy is hilirious. Seriously in his own world and giving evidence as to why religious people are a bit illogical.


Let me give my own evidence on the logic of God:


"The Babel fish is small yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the unconscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED." "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly disappears in a puff of logic. "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is whte and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that did not stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best selling book 'Well That About Wraps It Up For God'. Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different race and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. "

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979, Chapter 6

I really like Douglas Adams arguments against religions. In response to people who would claim that we are so perfectly designed to work in our world and that our world meeting all our needs, that a God must have played some role in creation (or intelligent design), he would put forward this analogy:
A puddle, were it sentient and using the same argument, would claim it was so perfectly fitted to the hole it occupies that the hole MUST have been designed just for it. However, ofcourse the puddle is the shape it is purely because of the shape of the hole it occupies. Just as humans and all plant and animal life has evolved (Yes, EVOLVED) to fit and work with the environment we are in.

Evolution, gotta love it.

Its Super-Cool.