Over at the Secret Sun I've been reading Christopher Loring Knowles' Everything In Its Right Place and this was my response.

Christopher around the mid Seventies this British TV arts program called The South Bank Show put out an edition concerned with a Welsh artist called Euan Uglow. The basic idea was they'd hired him to paint one of the nudes he was known for and were go'n'o film his progress to give the viewers some idea of the artistic process.

Unfortunately though hardly'd Uglow started than he stopped unable to explain why he couldn't carry on or even whether he'd ever be able to finish it and the host Melvin Bragg looked so visibly mad with him you couldn't help but feel Uglow'd ripped them off somehow.

At the time in my mid teens I didn't have the words to explain to myself what I was witnessing but years later I came to the conclusion based on personal experience what Uglow's problem'd been was he wasn't prepared to mechanically knock out a painting just for the cameras.

For him for it to be authentic art he had to know his 'finger' was plugged straight in the socket of THE SOURCE and the current of truth was flowing directly through him out onto the canvas.

Ditto Van Gogh. I once heard an art college lecturer pronounce Van Gogh glorified chocolate box art and the proof was his enormous popularity.

I however envisage a time when technology will be able to show presently unseen but not unfelt electromagnetic dimensions to Van Gogh's art which'll clearly show their 'wholeliness' ie that they're records of the few times in the man's life when he felt he was his real self because THE SOURCE was pouring through him bringing those paintings into existence.

What I'm getting at is what you yourself've clearly and extremely cogently pointed out all these 'skeptics' seek to 'sort out' the 'paranormal' in the same way some unwitting paedofiles become child psychologists or join child protection agencies precisely to keep near as possible to THE SOURCE of a type of energy which so powerfully stimulates them they can't bring themselves to admit they're attracted.

There's a teaching story covers the same idea. A famous poet goes to see a Sufi doctor with all these appalling symptoms. "Haven't you just supposedly finished a new work?" says the Sufi "Could you do me the honour of reciting it for me...and now recite it again...and again...and again..." and he keeps on in this vein until the poet suddenly cries out "Doctor you're a wonder I'm cured!"

The point being where Van Gogh only ever knew true sanity and happiness when he was acting as a CONDUIT for the power from THE SOURCE and Uglow couldn't function as a true artist because he couldn't access that power from THE SOURCE the poet in the story is actually connected to THE SOURCE but because he can't complete the circuit and facilitate its flow through and out of him by reciting the poem a sufficient number of times it's actual making him ill.

This's why I tease you about your oracular tendencies by way of encouraging others to express their equivalents of such capacities because ultimately it doesn't matter whether anyone else gets what each of us's onto though I agree with you a working consensus helps.

In other words this's a public spiritual health issue and we're supposed to give expression to this sort of stuff in the same way we're supposed to regularly move our bowels.

Or as the Gospel of Thomas put it "If you bring forth what's within you what you bring forth'll save you. But if you don't bring forth what's within you what you don't bring forth'll destroy you."

There was a consolation though because while I was go’n’o have to pay for a sandwich I didn’t want I’d now get to take a better look round the joint whilst avoiding the possibility of embarrassing meself by asking 'stupid' fucking questions.

But after waiting what LITERALLY seemed like hours I now became convinced I was losing it again because not only did I keep suddenly finding myself somehow right back down the queue everytime I could’ve sworn I was on the verge of reaching the till but the longer things kept dragging on the more convinced I became customers I’d seen make their purchases and leave were somehow sneaking back in the queue ahead of me without any one but me seemingly noticing a thing which’s probably one of the reasons why when the infernally loud harsh brassy k-TCHING! sounded for the umpteenth bastarding time and yet another icy tornado calamitously once more robbed the shop of any last vestige of heat it’d begun to accumulate all the willpower which’d been mounting in me to finally work up the nerve to break out from the queue and make for the open door seemed to just suddenly fizzle right out leaving me feeling defeated and crushed and like I’d never know what it felt like to be warm or dry ever again.

But now I knew this Sandwich Shop business wasn’t going to be over until I finally managed to reach the till and stay there without somehow magically slipping back the other way it was inevitable I’d start try’n’o distract myself from the tyranny of the endlessly repeating harsh brassy k-TCHING! rattling the teeth in my skull by dreaming up yet more new ways to torture myself.

For instance how very remiss of me to’ve neglected going over all those possible forthcoming harrowing scenarios which’d be bound to unfold the moment I finally got to order the bastarding sandwich I didn’t want. I mean would I for instance have enough on me to actually be able to pay for it?

Well of course that’d depend on how much I actually had on me and as I bleedin’ full well knew since I'd actually come out with a tenner and hadn't done anything with it therefore logically RATIONALLY I must still have a tenner on me but unable to resist making certain I hadn’t somehow blacked out on the way and managed to spend it without actually noticing or more straightforwardly simply somehow lost it I now began surreptitiously patting the contents of each pocket only for my blood to run cold the moment I realised I couldn't find it.

Resisting the urge to start tearing my hair out in a fit of pique and terror at the thought I really might be about to make a fool of myself over it I was suddenly struck by how both sides of the queue seemed to subtly incline away from me whenever I started gushing sweat out of every pore orifice or nook and cranny in my body making me obsess for a moment if I had a body odour problem but before I had a chance to enthusiastically snatch up that particular baton and run with it I managed to sufficiently compose myself to veer my attention back towards starting on a second much more thorough survey of my pockets finding the task made all the more difficult by the fact not only did every groaning individual bone and muscle in my body feel encrusted and riddled through with needles of ice but me hands were so frozen I could barely sufficiently unclench them to begin surreptitiously insinuating my fingers slowly between the rough rippled unyielding layers of the rain and sleet thickened denim of my jeans’ paradoxically shrunken pockets hence it came as no surprise everytime I did finally manage to tease something sufficiently to the surface to be able to catch a furtive glimpse of what it might be out the lower corner of my eye it always seemed to have the soggy amorphous appearance of bundles of grey pulp.

Eventually though I managed to clandestinely extract from the brass stud decorated corner of one particularly freezing water filled pocket something I was finally able to visually confirm was indeed the tenner hence I began relaxing because YES the tenner was there and YES it was still a tenner and YES it hadn’t somehow transformed itself into a sodding sodden fiver or a crushed gold foiled wrapped chocolate coin or the mutilated remains of an old bus ticket or a piece of notepaper or what used to be an old piece of snotty tissue or simply dissolve out of existence.

But of course the moment I finally shoved it back in my pocket I immediately began worrying I might’ve accidentally shoved it to the floor instead.

The perfectly logical RATIONAL solution of course was to simply gaze down round my feet for any sign of it but it now occurred to me if I did that I’d immediately alert everyone in the queue I thought I’d dropped something of value though of course I knew full bleedin’ well most of the guys round me looked such authentic fugitives from a police lineup for bag-snatchers if I really HAD dropped the tenner they’d’ve plucked it out the air long before it had a chance of ever even beginning to fall at which point my growing nonchalance immediately disappeared the moment it suddenly occurred to me how completely fucking awful it’d be if when the time finally came to pay for the bastarding sandwich I didn’t wanted my assumption these thoughts were just me neurotically entertaining myself were replaced by a shocked awareness I actually HAD dropped the bastarding tenner.

Hence it was I now became trapped in an endlessly repeating neurotic loop of checking me pocket the note was still there shoving the damned thing straight back down then immediately worrying THIS time I might’ve REALLY pushed it to the floor and of course every desperate effort I now made to pull myself together and snap out such a ludicrous state of mind only seemed to exacerbate my ever more neurotic need to be certain.

Hence in spite of it being the middle of winter I now began sweating like a pig resulting in the tenner gradually becoming more and more sodden more and more mangled so much so I started worrying its ink might run until I pointed out to myself how it was a stone cold scientific fact paper money was specifically designed to preclude precisely this possibility until it then occurred to me this wouldn’t apply if the tenner was actually a forgery perfect in every way save for one tell-tale detail that when exposed to perspiration from the body of any poor bastarding twat called Alan Borky its ink’d run as freely as the Niagara Falls of cold glutinous sweat which now started cascading down my back into the crack between my pert and glistening arse cheeks hence I now found myself not only interminably checking the tenner was still there and still a tenner but also nerve rackingly alert for any signs of smudging. Assuming that is I’d actually be able to see them through the torrential curtain of battery acid now gushing out my brow and simultaneously burning and drowning my eyes.

But as if all that wasn't enough to be getting on with it now occurred to me even if the tenner was still there still a tenner and NOT a forgery it’d be just like me at exactly the moment when the public executioner like eyes of everyone in the joint were all fixed on me with laser beam intensity to order the one fucking sandwich in the entire world which cost more than a tenner.

Oh god what would everyone think of me? I was a cheapskate? I was poor? I was try’n’o avoid paying? I was deliberately causing a nuisance? I was deliberately holding up in the queue? I was a bunko artist? I was try’n’o pass off a homemade tenner me or one of the other mental patients at the home’d made from brown daubed toilet paper freshly plucked from the bog?

The only thing worse’d be if the girls at the till now suddenly cottoned on I was also that very same semi-precious stone robbing pervert who’d been ogling them outside while suggestively rubbing his hands and hips up and down the ever more slimy window pane before then having the nerve to actually come inside the shop and keep returning to the back of the queue to give himself more perving time pumping his hand in and out his pocket while furtively eyeing up and down the female staff at which point my sweating now abandoned its hitherto comparatively gentle flow and like the contents of a bullet riddled barrel suddenly started bursting forth in huge great torrents pshhh! from my brow pshhh! from my face pshhh! from my neck pshhh! from my spine pshhh! from my armpits and pshhh-shhh-shhh-shhh! from my bollocks arse crotch and legs bringing my already perilously weighed down soggy undercrackers to the brink of actually dissolving on my body while at the same time my heart was beating so erratically in between various explosive attempts to jackhammer its way out me ribs it genuinely felt on the verge of exploding like an overripe tomato a prospect somehow poetically counterbalanced by my correspondingly intense awareness my dry papery bagged lungs were now pumping in and out so hard in their desperation to suck in air which no longer seemed to be there they genuinely felt on the verge of collapsing or even imploding.

And yet what does soft bollocks do to alleviate his distress in the midst of all this mental and physical chaos? Why of course I suddenly chose that moment to become embarrassed at noticing how the sweat continuously gushing down onto my legs and out over my shoes’d formed two huge ever expanding lakes round my feet a deeply ironic development given how my feet were practically the only part of my body that never seemed to sweat!

Yet what really finished me off wasn’t all the gallons of slimy icy sweat I feared might be me melting away or the thought how embarrassing all the violent spastic jerks twitches and facial/body convulsions must be making me appear nor even my ever growing anxiety my inability to stop my tenner-checking hand incessantly pumping in and out my pocket might eventually result in someone calling the police station round the corner. It was the plain old-fashioned hybrid claustrophobia/agoraphobia panic attack which now resulted in the walls and ceiling of the shop seemingly starting to buckle and bend and zoom off into infinity whilst simultaneously claustrophobically closing in on me like an airless second skin somehow.

Hence desperate at no longer being able to breathe I now found myself making a break from the queue at precisely the moment time seemed to slow down almost to a dead stop making the very fabric of space itself seem to thicken and assume the consistency of very dense elastic glue forcing me into what almost felt like a life and death struggle with some unseen living thing determined I was never go’n’o reach that shop door even as the door itself now seemed to shrink down to the size of a postage stamp and pull away from me off into the infinite distance making me feel like I was no longer running on the spot but actually getting pushed backwards even as the black and white tessellated surface of the shop floor now appeared to fold in on itself in a series of three dimensional intertwining psychedelic swirls and whorls and my stomach experienced a catastrophic plunging sensation as the ground itself seemed to physically buckle and seethe and plummet beneath my feet as if the concrete below the tiles’d somehow turned to jelly or the tiles themselves were now the surface of a huge very badly made trampoline.

Yet in spite of reality seeming to turn itself and me inside out or perhaps because of it not to mention a seemingly indomitable cussedness not to be railroaded into something against my will I somehow managed to haphazardly stagger my way across the spiralling black and white maelstrom of the floor like a wildly tottering drunk and get near enough to the door to be able to briefly cleave to its old-fashioned gleaming brass-handle for sanctuary only for the moment I now began trying to tug it open to become electrified by the mind-blowing realisation not only were the door and the handle in some inexplicable way both alive with their own form of intelligence but the evil little bastards were gleefully resisting my every desperate attempt to prise the damned thing open and escape until gambling everything on either exerting enough physical force to actually rip the door from its hinges or give meself an apoplexy they finally yielded. Yet even then the ‘cackling’ little bastards couldn't resist playing one last final dirty trick on me by ‘exhorting’ the old fashioned brass bell at the top to let out one final extra loud and harsh Big Ben sized K-TCHING!!! just to make certain no one failed to notice the sodden semi-precious stone thieving self-abusing pervert was finally leaving their midst.

But who gave a shit because all that mattered was I finally getting’ out o’ that place yet there I was hanging in mid-air doing my very best impression of Shaggy and Scooby Doo at the moment they’re no longer running on the spot but actually about to accelerate away from Ol’ Man Masterson disguised as the Swamp Mummy from Mars exhilarated by my awareness sheer momentum was about to carry me chest first over the threshold my senses dazzled by the contrast of the Sandwich Shop’s harshly brilliant acid yellow tinged electric lighting and the now somehow unspeakably beautiful dank gloom outside ravished by the gorgeous cocktail created by the chilled street air rushing to meet and intermingle with the hot swirling savoury scented shop air enveloping me as I breathed in a huge delicious soul-expanding sigh of relief in anticipation of that last final momentous Neil Armstrong-sized step which’d complete my return to planet Earth only to hear instead of the heart-rending squeak of my new left shoe’s sole finally making contact with the wet and slippery muddy marbled surface of the Sandwich Shop’s quaintly old-fashioned black and white mosaic front step an oddly familiar voice shrilly half croak half quack "These books in the window are they for sale?" before realising to my complete and utter horror the voice was mine.

Over at the BBC I'm reading Paul Rincon's Conflict and 'boom-bust' explain humans' rapid evolution.

According to human origins researcher Prof Ian Tattersall "However you slice it, evolution within [the human family] has been very rapid indeed".

He points out how two million years ago our ancestors' brain size started doubling in size then a million years later started pretty much doubling in size again.

And he may even be right.

I personally am squeamish about the assumption increase in brain size equals increase in intelligence though.

And for a number of reasons.

First of all there's the anomaly Boskop Man and the Neanderthal had larger brains than us.

Then there's the memory and intelligence feats of apes like Ayumu which most humans'd do well to match.

Then there's the remarkable intelligence exhibited by creatures with even smaller brains such as crows which employ complex techniques to manufacture sophisticated tools.

Then there's the even tinier brained bee's utilization of complex mathematics.

But even more astounding's the case of people like Patient R who exhibits not only self awareness but a sense of humour in spite of missing key parts of the brain thought indispensible for precisely these capacities.

Or what about at least 120 people out there holding down jobs as tax inspectors or college lecturers while effectively having no brain at all?

Yet what really makes me question the idea increase in brain size equals increase in intelligence is the history of computing where an increase in capacity invariably results from an increase in miniaturization.

The whole idea bigger means better I suggest's basically a hang over from the Industrial Revolution and it's precisely this particular mental habit I further suggest which's stopped us from realising for a long time just how very clever our fellow creatures on the planet actually are.

It may even be the case the reason the likes of the Neanderthal went extinct's precisely BECAUSE they had a larger clunkier brain.

I've been over at the Neurocritic and the Neuroskeptic's blogs reading their takes on Naomi Wolf's "Vagina" and this's my response.

Taking one of Naomi Wolf's supposed howlers "dopamine is the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain" and Neurocritic's response "Dopamine is not a feminist neurotransmitter, unless snails and insects have been secretly reading Betty Friedan and listening to Bikini Kill."

Apart from pointing out this's like saying because some kid coloured in the pages of a copy of Darwin's Descent it proves its contents're meaningless gibberish I personally don't "feel sorry for Ms. Wolf" as Neurocritic puts it because this's as bad an example of "shooting fish in a barrel" as when I once read someone deploring the absurdity of the phrase 'the pen is mightier than the sword'.

As I responded to that person a) taking the phrase literally's either willfully or stupidly misunderstanding it and b) if you'd ever done martial arts you'd also know the pen actually IS literally mightier than the sword because they're easier to conceal and you can kill people with one in far more ways and in a far shorter time than it takes to even begin raising a sword.

But here's another Neurocritic bon mot in response to Wolf's "Those of us who are not scientists often forget that brain chemicals are vehicles for very profound human truths" "I thought brain chemicals were vehicles that bind to receptors and trigger signal transduction molecules. Even the most reductionistic neuroscientists among us realize we are worlds away from understanding how oxytocin might explain morality".

In that case why's Neurocritic even writing blogs dissing others? Because apparently according to him until we cease being worlds away from understanding how things like oxytocin might explain things like morality we must just sit there and say nothing and let brain chemicals be vehicles which bind to receptors and trigger signal transduction molecules because to do otherwise is meaningless and pointless.

Another Neurocriticism "feminist biology apparently tells us that the vagina is the delivery system for profound female truths...So women who aren't having orgasms cannot be confident liberated feminists??"

Here he sounds like the leader of the 'Eyeless People' who tells the artist visiting them as far as they're concerned there's no such thing as sight and what the artist calls eyes're actually cysts which're automatically removed whenever their children're born.

Apparently you haven't noticed this Neurocritic but there's a complete difference between the parts of a woman and the collective sum total effect of those parts and the only persons who ever even have a remote clue to what those differences are are women.

The same applies with men. Female neuroscientists can infer all they like about us but only men have a clue what it's really like to be a man.

So all you male critics of Naomi Wolf leave her Vagina alone and stop being such complete cunts!

Several times I managed to pause just long enough to consciously make the seemingly highly sensible decision to give up and go back for the bus but it didn’t matter because I’d immediately find myself being involuntarily swept along as if my body’d developed a mind and a will all its own enabling it to simply disobey me. But what really alarmed me I was going off me rocker were those moments when just for a brief instant I could’ve sworn something really WAS half pushing half dragging me along almost frogmarching me against MY will to London Road deploying the icy charged gluey slipperiness of the pavements or roads whenever I literally tried to dig in my heels or battering my concentration into splinters with the Frost Giant brutality of the freezing wind and rain everytime I seemed to catch a brief glimpse through the mental roar of the million different voices and images raging in my head of what was REALLY going on.

And I mean really seriously what the fuck was I dreaming of? Back breakingly borne down by freezing wringing rags now many times their original weight every inch of me literally sodden through to the skin each extra moment I stayed out exponentially increasing my risk of catching pneumonia all for some stupid fucking book which went out of print aeons ago which I was never go’n’o find in a shop that never existed.

But that’s when the general atmosphere of sheer escalating lunacy ratcheted up another notch because as I finally turned into London Road I immediately started try’n’o convince meself my way was being blocked by the most fantastically surreal looking skyscraper I’d ever seen in my life. In fact as a way of delaying admitting what I was really seeing I even managed to briefly summon up a pretty fair impression of indignation at the Council for planting something so huge there without warning anyone in advance as well as half convince myself I really did feel a certain qualified but grudging twinge of admiration for how quickly they’d managed to put the bleedin’ thing up while at the same time almost genuinely believing I really did feel utterly pissed off at the thought I was now go’n’o have to go all the way round the world again.

But the truth was London Road now somehow appeared to be soaring almost vertically straight up in the sky which was utterly impossible of course hence a horde of my supposedly more rational microselves now started berating me from every direction I was seeing no such thing and it was all just London Road’s pretty steep at the best of times and the unrelentingly freezing wind and rain gusting in my face was causing moisture to well up in my eyes blurring my vision and making the low levels of illumination provided by December daylight all the worse thanks to all those huge black rain and snow clouds smothering the winter sun plus I was already dead tired from all the slippery plodding I’d been putting in so the daunting prospect of having to drag my weary leaden limbs up the admittedly steep hill’d finally sapped any last vestige of mental stamina I had left causing me to hysterically overstate the case the hill did indeed seem SLIGHTLY steeper than normal.

But every word of that was so fucking obviously completely untrue another horde of loathing filled microselves were simultaneously banging on as running commentary during the similarly scary but dazzling kaleidoscopic video montage of all the other weird impossible things I’d ever seen how this new Leaning Tower of London Road Effect was the final conclusive ‘proof’ I’d always been insane even as baby in me pram.

But in spite of all these and a whole host of other swarms of endless mental subcommittees dedicated to tearing me and each other apart by way of setting me straight some tiny isolated part of me struggled to keep my attention focused on the more logical rational thought no book on Earth was worth any of this outrageous preposterousness so how much more ridiculous now to put myself through the equivalent of climbing the North face of the Eiger for a purpose as pointless as fetching yesterday's fish and chip wrappers long after they’ve blown away specially since Sarah’s voice tea and painkillers now lay within immediate touching distance courtesy of the Empire Theatre side Lime Street Station taxi rank just round the corner.

The weird thing was though I’d already long ago decided all I really wanted to do was simply plunge face down smack straight into the pavement to pass away into ice cold gluey oblivion and if I hadn’t been subjected to the vertiginously insane spectacle of London Road inexplicably shooting straight up in the sky I almost certainly would’ve . But the fact the whole fucking universe was willing to start warping and spasming the very fabric of itself just to stop me going up London Road in search of some tatty old piece of barely held together bookworm riddled crap that I’d never find in some imaginary shop that’d never actually existed suddenly filled me with such a seething sense of cosmic indignation I now knew no matter what NO’IN’d be stopping me going up there. Not even the thought of the complete twat I was about to make of myself by try’n’o ‘climb’ the soaring vertical face of London Road.
But you know what? I’d had a stomach load and didn’t give a shit I was about to look as absurd as those campy Sixties TV shows where the ‘special effects’ amounted to tilting the camera so Batman and Robin appeared to be walking straight up apartment blocks when they were really just shuffling long the studio floor.

In fact I was even prepared to wiggle my way up there on me bleedin’ belly if that’s what it took even if it did mean someone might call the cops some dangerous escaped mental patient seemed to think he was a worm.

And fuck me even though it took a hell of a long time and a great deal of energy draining stress and countless ‘vertigo’ and panic attacks try’n’o reach ‘up’ and grab at things like shop fixtures and protective grilles as a way of gradually hoisting my way further and further ‘up’ London Road I actually somehow made a fair fucking amount of progress. Oh I was both mentally and physically exhausted of course and I kept periodically having failures of nerve which left me desperately clinging to things like pillars or pavement kerbs or shop corners out of fear I might actually somehow ‘plunge straight back down’ even though I knew it all had to be just an illusion and I must really be lying prostrate on the ground drowning in pools of icy rain water mixed with the gallons of the cold glutinous sweat gushing out every pore of me body something only confirmed by the visually disconcerting sight of concerned looking passers-by tottering towards me like bizarre flies making their way across highly reflective hazardously slippery ‘bathroom tiles’ hence the enthusiasm with which I immediately set about thoroughly ‘shooing’ them back away. And at some stage London Road even started slowly tilting back towards its normal accustomed slant necessitating my gradually switching to a new sort of run-jump-leap tactic in order to get past the normally narrow roads running the length of the little side streets finding though now it took just as many attempts to get ‘up’ those ‘formerly’ short stretches of tarmacadam as it would try’n’o run an assault course of extremely high and steep embankments.

So by the time I'd got to the top everything’d more or less tilted back quite close to normal though looking downhill everything still seemed somehow distinctly much steeper than on previous occasions yet in the process I’d also finally established there weren’t any butchers or charity shops on London Road.

Yet what does soft shite do instead of heading straight for home Sarah's voice and painkillers? I somehow manage to get the idea in my head there was a possibility I might’ve momentarily blacked out somewhere on the way up making me miss some key detail hence rather insanely I now started grudgingly trudging all the way back down.

But round the middle of my descent I finally realized what I'd taken for a butchers-cum-charity shop was really a sandwich shop and there in a narrow side window adjacent to the main window display of sliced meats sandwiches and various cooked foods were the books recorded on the video carefully arranged around a peculiar display of pendant length crystals raw mineral samples and various semi-precious stones laying on a bed of dirty crumpled lace.

The only thing was the books now looked so much older far more sun-bleached and very much more curlier paged than in the video not to mention covered in heavy layers of greasy dust plus none of them were the Bennett thing which’d dragged me out in the cold and the wind and the rain in the first place but the moment I spotted their authors’ names Gurdjief Ouspensky Collin all thoughts of Sex went straight out my mind because according to Bennett he’d been involved with all three of these blokes particularly Gurdjieff and Ouspensky both of whom he styled his teachers in what he called Esoteric Psychology The Work or The Fourth Way.

And suddenly what’d at first seemed a complete waste of time now seemed positively inspired making me experience a delicious giddy almost drunken euphoria welling up inside my chest only for it to be instantly snuffed out the moment I realized I didn't so much as have the first clue why those books were there because not only were they unpriced but nothing about them even hinted they were for sale or for that matter just what their purpose was.

Worse their general yellowy discoloured condition and the enormous amount of dust they’d gradually become buried under implied they'd been put in the window long ago and maybe even completely forgotten about. Yet never mind the books why were all those semi-precious stones and crystals there? And given how the sole visible entrance only opened into the Sandwich Shop then if this really was the display for some say rarely visited second hand bookshop then where the hell was it?

Well there was always the possibility it could just be on one or both of the two floors immediately above the Sandwich Shop or then again maybe the Sandwich Shop originally started pushing the books in the hope of increasing the base for their potential profit margins because after all I'd bought books in health food shops at least once and maybe when no one showed sufficient interest in buying them the Sandwich Shop’s interest in selling them gradually tapered off hence their apparently neglected condition.

But that didn’t automatically mean they were no longer for sale even though again it was also true they weren’t priced but they had to belong to someone and had to be there for a reason so maybe if I just hung around outside long enough someone might eventually emerge with a book in their hand and if I worked up sufficient courage to breach the subject what the hell was going on I might actually find out. There was even the possibility someone might actually quench my burning curiosity why that peculiar tatty faded A-4 sized poster I’d just noticed of the Sufi Enneagram diagram mentioned by Idries Shah was there.

Yet the longer I stood there on my hideously pain-wracked new-shoed feet exhausted and drenched and buffeted by freezing ice-charged blustery rain moment by moment minutely scanning each and every tiny detail of anyone who even so much as dared to think about scurrying past me into the shop it became all too increasingly obvious not so much as a single bastarding customer was ever go’n’o come out with anything other than plain white/faintly pastel grease-marked medium-sized paper bags stuffed with sandwiches or microwave heated pasties or sausage rolls and/or semi-opaque plastic-capped plain white polystyrene cartons of boiling soup or tea trailing huge clouds of snowy white steam behind them.

The other thing seriously starting to get on my tits was the way each time the door exploded open it was to the accompaniment of this hideous infernal old-fashioned brass-toned monotonously recurring skull bone penetrating brain jarring jingly K-TCHING! And for all the times the damned thing’d set my nerves’d jangling all I ever managed to catch was an all too brief glimpse inside the shop of trays of food and a seemingly endless row of drenched bedraggled people waiting for that food but of books or book buyers saw I none. Nor was there any sort indication of a way up to the hypothetical upper storey bookshop I’d grown less and less confident of the existence of and right smack where such a way up’d have to be there was a bloody great industrial sized alternately gleaming and glistening stainless steel urn operated by a pretty young pony-tailed female sales assistant who’d periodically all but vanish under huge great mountain sized cotton-woolly clouds of snow white steam every time she dispensed boiling water from its tap for what I initially assumed to be tea or coffee until my quivering nostrils started detecting on the air a peculiar sequence of cheap smelling but also somehow deeply nourishingly pleasant chemically tinged warm air wafts which I eventually reinterpreted as the delicious smell of various economy brand packet soups. And yet normally I wouldn’t be able to so much as stand the smell of such soup especially minestrone.

Meanwhile as I continued pondering the mystery of the missing bookshop it gradually dawned on me various girls I’d been observing serving’d also been observing me seemingly becoming increasingly agitated by my incessant use of my hands to vainly hold up or push aside the continuously renewed curtains of rain blurring my main window view of the shop’s interior. And of course the moment I tried to stop myself doing this I only found myself doing it all the more compulsively resulting in the girls' generally agitated state now ratcheting up to a positive frenzy which in turn only served to increase my own already exponentially growing anxiety they might actually believe it was them I was staring at though I managed to momentarily calm myself down by pointing out they might just think I was a robber casing the joint for all those semi-precious stones in the other window. Until it suddenly hit me they might think I was a robber AND a pervert!

At which point a somehow extra loud and harsh K-TCHING! announced an enormous great bearded police constable was now hurtling out the Sandwich Shop door in my direction setting my entire body quivering like a giant gong as I went into a state of complete catastrophic shock from which I only even began thinking of recovering long long after he’d strode past me on his way back to the police station just round the corner his hands filled with cartons of snowy white steam surrounded boiling hot minestrone plus a variety of grease stained bags of scalding microwave heated food but NO books.

And now you’re probably thinking this was me not going to Widnes to see Sarah all over again because the obvious answer all along’d been to simply go inside and ask how to get upstairs to the hypothetical bookshop or maybe even more straight-forwardly simply ask what the hell the books and crystals were there for in the first place?

And I quite agree that would've been the logical rational SANE thing to do but alas since my earliest teens I've often been prone to outbursts of hysteria verging on utter insanity becoming at such times tortured by the idea what other people might be thinking of me hence I now decided before I actually went in the shop it’d be best to avoid any possibility of making a fool of myself by say accidentally confirming any notions the girls might have about me being a jewel-thieving pervert by neurotically rehearsing over and over in my head every conceivable slip up I could make.

For instance wouldn’t I look incredibly stupid if I asked how to get upstairs when the way up was right there in front of me yet somehow I’d failed to see it? And how much more of a twat I’d look if the way up was then clearly pointed out to me in the form of some huge glowing neon diagram right there on the wall but somehow I still couldn't see it? Or what if there wasn't a way up at all? That is there wasn’t a public one because what if upstairs wasn't open to the public because it was actually the shopkeeper's living quarters? Or what if the reason why there was no obvious way up was because somehow I was only imagining there were upstairs floors? What if what I took to be upper floors were really some sort of internationally famous Victorian decorative architectural façade landmark like the Liver Birds which everyone on the planet knew about except me? Or what if there wasn't really a façade at all and it was just a stress induced trick of my highly strained imagination?

Of course the easiest way to avoid any or all those potential faux pas was to simply concentrate on asking about the books in the window yet what if it thanks to searching so long for the Bennett book I'd actually started hallucinating the bastards and everyone’d be staring at me thinking what fucking books? O god that’d be just the worse thing possible. I mean I'd never be able to show my face in London Road again.

Oh well I now concluded with a rather heavy-hearted sigh perhaps it’d be best if I just forgot the whole thing and went home because after all I could always come back tomorrow.

But since tomorrow was Sunday and I couldn’t come back tomorrow surely that was the final confirmation I either needed to fall face down on the floor and die or book meself a long spell in a padded cell in the hope I might at least slow the clear degeneration of my mental faculties. But lights cameras action! That final self-loathing self-defeating observation turned out to be the cue for another part of me to kick in.

You see this tendency I had to allow myself to be manipulated by what I imagined other people might be thinking about me’d been such a longstanding source of intense resentment with me sooner or later I'd always eventually react by making a particularly ferocious effort to do the very thing I thought I was deterring myself from. Hence re-energized I now boldly bounced into the shop determined to ask about the books only to realize the moment the now seemingly Big Ben-sized K-TCHING! bone-judderingly rang out not only were the suddenly pinhole-sized pupils of everyone in the place seemingly hostilely fixed on me but my larger-than-life alter ego’d shrivelled back out of existence taking my vocal chords with him enabling my considerable capacity for sheer naked gutlessness to instantly reassert itself leaving me now at the wrong end of an extremely long line of weary looking drenched people queuing for a sandwich I didn't actually want.

[For Jeffrey Simmons who knew my treasure when it was hidden even from me]

Just outside the centre of a certain Northern English city stands an innocuous-looking sandwich shop. On the morning of the first Saturday of December 1989 I stepped into that shop and into another world…

Two months short of my thirtieth birthday I was temping as an invoice clerk at a large bus company and due to the most important relationship of my life I was experiencing…difficulties. Yet the joke was I hadn't even wanted a bleedin’ sandwich. I’d wanted Sex a book by John Godolphin Bennett which prior to Sandwich Shop Saturday'd been just another item on an extremely long continuously growing self-compiled things-I-ought-to-read list though that morning jolted awake by the first of many what I can only call violent electric shocks I found myself (pardon the pun) bolt upright in bed my brain positively ablaze with the all-consuming idea I must as though my very life depended on it obtain a copy of the infernal thing - a compulsion so sudden irrational and verging on the disturbing I tried explaining it away with some vaguely defined notion about Jungian-style higher selves maybe alerting me Sex held clues in my longstanding quest to attain a cure for the lingering (though periodically more unbearably intense) ache in the ‘hole’ in one o’the 'back teeth' of my soul - said ‘hole’ a result of my complete inability to stop chewing over the mystery of what I was and why I was the way I was a concern I’d lately been pondering just that bit more intensely in the hope of ‘inadvertently’ stumbling on a ‘cure’ for the even greater ache in the ‘hole’ of one of the ‘back teeth’ of my ‘heart’ - this ‘hole’ resulting from my complete inability to stop chewing over the mystery of my relationship with the fair and beauteous Sarah an awesomely-intelligent eighteen year old who only a year earlier’d been working as a hotel chambermaid in London until a catastrophic glandular condition forced her back to her parents’ in Widnes and ultimate attendance on the same computer programming training course our paths eventually crossed at.

Our difficulties while seemingly beyond all description in their true intense complexity went something like this: although accepting my love for her was real Sarah insisted it was unrealistic because while admitting she reluctantly admitted loving me too it was only as a brother - something she ceaselessly and vehemently maintained and something I ceaselessly and vehemently refused to accept.

O I didn't dispute her belief was genuine it was just I knew in my bones she was utterly wrong even during those inexplicable unheralded moments when she’d suddenly become sufficiently arsed to abandon the pretence of ice cool laissez-faire indifference to me and the rest of the world she liked to maintain to unleash her formidable intellect on my psyche in a tour de force of forensic examinational mastery (ruthlessly and gleefully conducted sans ‘anaesthetic’) utilizing flawless machine-precise logic allied to sheer mechanical relentlessness to inexorably bulldoze me Humpty-Dumpty style over the side of the bottomless abyss of the impossible ‘possibility’ I might actually be wrong.

Yet every time her mental guerrilla warfare like tactics’d grind me down to a gibbering babbling bewildered hyperventilating helium addicted speaker-in-tongues (the failsafe of all males of my line cornered like rats) convincing us both I was finally about to admit she was right I’d suddenly somehow manage to infuriate her and give us both a shock by snapping out my deranged staccato hysteria to instantly become the very avatar of composure and equanimity - a whole other me who’d serenely and suavely announce in the most mellow and controlled of tones how on further reflection I’d now be adopting the new and far more coolheaded perspective while yes it was indeed perfectly possible she was totally correct about EVERYTHING I wasn’t any longer so totally convinced of the IRREFUTABLE conclusiveness of her arguments and henceforth’d only be agreeing to disagree.

…because you see I had this special mental library or 'video collection' as I liked to call it among which were countless 'video tapes' relating to Sarah the most particularly prized of which featured every gesture and phrase of hers it’d ever been my privilege to witness - gestures and phrases which even considered on an individual basis “proved” irrecontrefutably her love for me wasn’t merely sisterly and from time to time I couldn't quite resist the temptation to both astonish and annoy her by 'playing' some of these tapes back to her in spite of knowing she’d always invariably both astonish and irritate me by giving MY utterly “INFALLIBLE” memories alternative and blatantly bogus interpretations causing me to jeer "You're fooling yourself" only the moment we hung up to immediately set those same videos back in action running them over and over for the umpteenth billionth time scrutinising them even more minutely for such apparently trivial details as the tiny but highly revealing vocal nuance or the tell-tale eye-brow twitch wondering all the time whether it really was me who was fooling myself because you see despite my age I was a virgin something about which I wasn't to say the least happy especially as I wasn't sure whether this was by highly reluctant choice or some as yet unidentified neurosis...even if only plain, old-fashioned latent-homosexuality.

O of course from my teenage years onwards I'd masturbated while imagining myself making love to whichever member of the opposite sex I was currently madly in love with but on the other hand (pardon the pun) I'd also turned down girls who'd blatantly propositioned me continuing long afterwards to wonder whether such knock-backs on my part were really due to an inability to separate Sex from Love as I explained it to myself or because I had say some hidden fear of sexual intimacy and yet in all my years of exploring the seams of my psychic fabric I hadn't detected so much as the slightest hint of erotophobic lint so could it really all be just down to some peculiar fear of committing myself (no matter how briefly or shallowly) to other people and could this also be the reason why I kept falling for girls who were either impossible to attain or who claimed to see me as a "brother"? In which case was Sarah then merely the latest "love of my life" and as such just another ploy in this hypothetical life-long life-postponing strategy of mine?

Whenever I’d mercilessly challenge myself to unflinchingly reveal from the most secret and darkest recesses of the heart of my heart what really truly seemed to me the case the answer always unhesitatingly came back I was waiting for the right person adding however this wasn't some romantic notion concerned with saving myself for 'Miss' or 'Ms Right' but rather a peculiar sense (always just out of reach of being brought into focus) sex with someone 'unsuitable'’d have dire and catastrophic consequences…and not just for me.

Anyway it seemed I’d suddenly somehow managed to 'convince' myself the answer somehow lay with the Bennett book and yet that day not a single copy was to be found even in the second-hand bookshops (nor’d repeated flitting back and forth between shops in the hope some member of staff might’ve somehow mysteriously stumbled on a copy and put it out on the shelves in the last ten minutes helped) which of course wasn’t any kind of major revelation because I’d already failed to find even a hint of Sex browsing through the innumerable mental videos I’d acquired over more than a decade’s worth of bookshop visits including the most recent one of only a few days earlier.

Anyway it was absolutely pissing hardcore razors of liquid ice down and because of a preference for travelling by foot my feet were absolutely murdering me because I’d somewhat foolishly made the appalling mistake of putting on a brand new pair of shoes supposedly out of a fear my older - comfortable! - pair might start leaking and so tired downhearted and frustrated all I wanted to do was go home have a cup of tea swallow a couple of painkillers and phone Sarah and o at that moment the one thing I wanted - no needed! - more than anything else on Earth was to hear the gentle refrain of her music-filled voice…because if she was in a good mood then nothing could be more wonderful than listening to her beautiful enchanting tones scintillatingly holding forth on some subject or other but even if she was in a foul mood and God knows she often was! _ well it was still her.

Now if you’re wondering why the hell I didn't just go and see her in Widnes well that was something of a touchy subject between us because although she’d never actually said so in actual words I somehow knew I was absolutely forbidden to as a result of which I hadn't so much as laid eyes on her for at least seven months but in spite of the unusualness of our situation we used to speak a minimum of once a day a number usually multiplied exponentially on the flimsiest of excuses and every ten days or so have at least one three hour call during which marathon sessions my right ear in spite of periodic switches to my left - would end up feeling like raw steak but because she’d call me even more often than I’d call her I was often as confused as I was delighted by the two completely different people she seemed to be: one who loved me and wanted my love and one who hated me but needed my love.

Anyway by this stage it wasn’t just I wanted to quit on Sex it was also I really couldn’t see any other option - but just as I was about to start for home everything suddenly seemed to go pitch dark and for a moment I was utterly convinced a hitherto unsuspected brain tumour’d made me go blind…until much to my relief the 'darkness' became an extremely close range view of a patch of intense dark blue which immediately convinced me I was looking at the facade of a butchers for some reason. But the moment I was struck by the oddness of this association the mental 'camcorder' displaying the image abruptly yanked itself backwards and as if it’d originally started 'shooting' while lying on its left side simultaneously rotated itself ninety degrees rightward to the ‘vertical’ before rapidly flashing through a complex series of what I supposed to be the mind's eye's equivalent of refocusing its ‘lens’.

Anyway not knowing whether to laugh or cry but by way of reassuring myself and working out what the hell was going on I hurriedly cobbled together the quasi ‘explanation’ one of my videos‘d somehow taken on a life of its own and started running itself resulting in the terrific flurry of images I now identified as various views of trays of sliced cooked meats on display in a shop window - the only thing wrong with this explanation being since it was a shop I'd never seen before it couldn't’ve been shot by me and therefore couldn't’ve been one of my videos.

But as if this realization wasn't unnervingly confusing enough I now found myself becoming alarmed by the fact no matter how hard I tried I no longer had any control over which bits of the video I was able to view and was being in effect forced to direct my attention solely at less sharply defined peripheral details on the tape's leftmost edge (ie the part only visible to the left corner of my left eye at the time of ‘shooting’) where rather startlingly I thought I could just make out in a much narrower side window (on what I supposed to be the other side of the shop’s entrance) a number of books and yet surely that was wrong because who'd ever heard of or for that matter seen books in the window of a butchers?

Anyway fully recovered from my brain tumour fright and no longer worrying whether my underpants’d remained sufficiently clean to risk calling out to passers-by to call me an ambulance I began devising another more consciously tentative hypothesis.

Somehow for the first time ever TWO videos must’ve become overlain and mixed up with each other one of ’em clearly a butchers located in London Road (even though there weren’t any butchers in London Road!) and the other of a bookshop also supposedly in London Road yet the only thing even close to a bookshop there was this place I sometimes bought imported American comics from. But then again it wasn’t impossible I’d once blithely strode past some place down London Road which normally sold stuff which wouldn’t normally interest me but on just this one occasion some background part of my consciousness concerned with peripheral viewing’d been so startled to see books in this place’s window it’d made a record of the event in the hope it’d eventually come to my attention. Yet the only place which’d even remotely fit this profile’d be some kind of charity or thrift shop. But as far as I was concerned there’d never been anything remotely like that in London Road and I might add it was a route I frequently took on my way into the city. But then again it wasn't beyond the realms of possibility some place’d recently opened there which I’d somehow failed to notice.

Of course the only way to be certain was to walk through to London Road. But why even bother? Someone’d surely already bought it by now but even if they hadn’t a book like Bennett’s had to be fairly rare and thus fairly valuable and surely charities screened for such items in which case no way’d it be found on sale in a charity shop marked '10p'. Yet even if such a copy had somehow slipped such a safety net, there was no way it would've ended up in of all places that shop. But even if it had that only brought us straight back to someone surely having bought it by now. But even chucking all those considerations aside the simple truth was London Road was the other side of town. The temperature was getting icier. The rain heavier. My feet more and more bloodied and blistered. My sorely bamboozled and be-battered brain was screaming for painkillers. My aching heart and frostbitten ears throbbed for the sound of Sarah and my poor little mouth was all too effectively communicating its desperate need of a cup of tea via a highly convincing impression of the Sirocco sweeping through the Sahara Desert at noon.

And yet despite these and countless other perfectly good and rational reasons I kept giving myself I found myself trudging in the direction of the mythical butchers-cum-bookshop convinced of the complete absurdity of my behaviour all the time on the verge of a seething temper tantrum everytime I ‘accidentally’ drifted near a bus stop but instead of waiting for one immediately succumbed to this insane lemming-like compulsion to get to London Road.

Over at UFOMystic I'm reading Scott Corrales' translation of Sigrid Grothe's Chile: A Flying Humanoid Over Santiago and this was my response.

Sigrid Scott.

From my early childhood onwards at the beginning of the 60s I've been prone to episodes where there seems to be at least two versions of me and on occasions as many as eight.

I've both seen and been these others mes while being witnessed being them by others.

When I was about 12 an old lady who lived across the street from ours forbade any of the kids to play near her place until one day she and a friend of my brother's witnessed me appear as both myself and this very much taller off-white ivory tinged 'ghost' version of me.

After that she told the other kids they could play by hers all they liked so long as they kept me "the witchraft boy" away.

From very early on though these other mes've done a fair bit of getting about which at first took the form of flying about exploring the city of Liverpool effortlessly passing through walls etc then other parts of the world.

Round about the turn of the 90s though things seemed to enter a turbo charged phase and I'd be in the middle of conversations with friends when I'd suddenly start giving them a live running commentary of the antics of some of these others mes flying over say the Amazon River and being waved at by the natives in canoes or encountering the psychedelic denizens of cartoon like realms almost beyond description.

One episode which always sticks in my mind was finding myself flying over what seemed to be a sports stadium in California some time round the early afternoon and touching down on some sort of stage where this huge hirsute blond ǵrey streaked haired biker-roadie type seemed in the process of checking out equipment for a rock concert that going by his urgency seemed scheduled for that night.

As I watched him he suddenly seemed to notice me giving me a hostile look and moving towards me in a way leaving me in no doubt he viewed me as some sort of interloper so I waved him bye-bye and lifted off.

The point of this story's while I know for a fact there're left and right hand path groups out there who seem to undergo often lucrative time/space travels as well as seemingly experiencing shapeshifting as part of their white/black mystical training I'm convinced this sort of out-of-body thing's much more common among ordinary people than's normally supposed and somewhere out there there may still be a roadie who remembers witnessing some sort of apparition which may or may not've resembled me touching down in the Californian sports stadium giving him the fright of his life.

Over at the BBC I've been reading Jonathan Amos' Why Top Sport Stars Might Have 'More Time' On the Ball which covers the Hagura et al paper Ready Steady Slow: Action Preparation Slows the Subjective Passage of Time published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Accordng to Amos the research seems to verify the claims of sports stars like George Best and John McEnroe time seems to slow down while they're playing.

Dr Hagura's quoted as saying "Our guess is that during the motor preparation, visual information processing in the brain is enhanced. So, maybe, the amount of information coming in is increased. That makes time be perceived longer and slower."

This's always been one of my own working explanations for when I experience time slowing down.

And there is of course the truly terrifying reverse Benny Hill Effect where everything seems to speed up because you're aware if your brain's slowing down the rate at which you access visual data if it stays that way you'll be locked out from the rest of life forever viz the film Awakenings.

But while the increase in the neural engagement with visual data may explain the temporal dilation experience it begins to break down with the Eternity Effect where time seems to stand still.

There're others possible dimensions to this research Dr Hagura might wish to pursue.

As a kid I was always one of the ones who were last to be picked during things like games of footy.

However from time to time when I experienced my time slowing down shtick observers'd tell me I'd briefly turn into a grey streak or blur moving so fast in fact I was practivally invisible and if only I could promise to do that every time I'd always be picked first.

The thing is over the years I've noticed during footy matches on the TV in particular players like Tony Adams going up for a ball at the same time as everyone else but while everyone else'd start falling back to earth they'd seem to hang in the air that tiny bit longer which'd allow them to score.

The same with basketball which I don't go out of my way to watch but some of those guys really do seem to defy gravity when they're scoring.

My point being if this's a real effect I've always assumed it was a psychokinetic based but now I find myself wond'ring whether it's actually a kind of temporal defiance based one.

In the past I've harped on about the importance of Greg's research into paranormal sounds but when I've been asked why and how it's important I haven't been able to find just the right words to explain myself.

Now I think I can.

Some time round the beginning of the Millennium I saw this huge black dragon hovering over Liverpool but it was such an improbable aerodynamically inane thing with muscular coils all over the place with 'holly leaves' for wings I refused to believe my eyes and tried to convince myself it was a binbag or a kite or a seagull you name it but in the end when it wouldn't change into something else I had to admit the evidence of my eyes.

[At the time it didn't make a lick of sense until I was subsequently bumped onto a site called Parallel Perception where I encountered the reality rearranging work of an Aussie guy I personally consider Human Lightning Bolt Conductor #1 Lujan Matus because it turned out not only did he have a guardian spirit in the form of just such a dragon but he also had a sort of black leather armoured mystical counterpart and as a kid I'd been stabbed in the arse by just such a leather clad character who emerged from the toilet wall shortly after a mysterious possibly Australian teenage kid appeared in the middle of my infants school yard just long enough to warn me "Hey kid if you go in there somethin''ll g't y'u!"].

The point of the dragon story being even though visuality's our primary sense we're able to argue and debate both there and then and afterwards whether we saw what we think we saw.

A good example of that's the recent 'lion' sighting in Essex. Maybe what they saw really was only an outsized ginger tom in a field but even if what they saw really was a lion they'll never really know for sure.

If however the 'lion' roared it wouldn't've mattered what the fuck it was they'd've been too busy shitting their pants.

And this's me point. Sound has an effect whether you know what the sound is or not. All you have to do is see film of an earthquake and watch solid roads and bridges made of concrete or metal ripple like they're made of jelly to know that's true. In fact the thing with sound is you not only don't need to notice you're hearing it for it to have an effect but it can be outside the human auditory range and still be deeply affecting you viz ultrasound which many resort to as a go to 'explanation' for inexplicable sightings.

I'll give you a more subtle example of the possible power of sound over vision.

A while back I read this Jewish Israeli jazz musician guy called Gilad Atzmon who used to be in Ian Dury's band saying he was about to publish this book called The Wandering Who? which was supposedly go'n'o cause this atomic bomb sized shit storm over the whole Israel/Palestine Jewish identity/influence.

I thought bollocks! Even if he really does have something 'significant' to say all they'll do is ignore him.

But to my amazement the likes of Alan Dershowitz made such a huge fuss denouncing the book it sent its sales through the roof making me jokingly wonder whether Dershowitz was secretly taking a cut of the profits behind the scenes.

My point being there was absolutely no evidence the book'd even be noticed never mind sell but Atzmon was so convinced of what'd happen before it actually did.

But then it struck me as a jazzer who likes to wax poetic about the primacy of the ear it was almost like Atzmon'd picked up this subterranean groove heading towards the surface before anyone else and like a truly good musician he knew just when to hit his mark for maximum effect.

My point being if you look back at the history of the human race there're few if any examples of artists as being prophets or messengers of the gods but there're plenty of musicians not the least the teacher figures Orpheus Pythagoras and Rumi.

Hence my claim Greg Taylor's paranormal sounds research's very important.

I've been over at Life's Little Mysteries reading Natalie Wolchover's 'Mysterious' Baltic Sea Object Is a Glacial Deposit and this was my response.

Natalie be honest.

If someone announced they were making a documentary exposé of Ocean X Team but they didn't want to give too much away would you use words like 'titillating' or 'titillation'? Because if you did you'd leave them and many others with the impression you were seething with loathing and contempt for them.

Since we don't know what it is or how long it's been there or indeed how it got there it is indeed 'strange' and 'mysterious' so why the quotation marks?

As for Lindbergh surely he's as free to speculate "if it is constructed" "If it is Atlantis" as you and others are free to speculate it isn't. It's all just speculation in the end.

Besides which we've been finding round the deeper coastal waters of Britain for a few years now traces of what seems to be a pre-Ice Age civilization and if such a civilization'd built it's own equivalent of Göbekli Tepe it's highly likely it'd've been swept to the bottom of the sea by glaciers.

Who's to say something similar hasn't happened here?

Indeed who's to say stories like Atlantis and the Biblical Flood aren't merely memories of such a widespread calamity?

All Lindbergh's doing's the same as you trying to make his way in life doing something he loves all the time knowing unless he gets a lucky break it's always going to be a bit of a financial struggle.