As WH Davies lamented…
What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?
- An urban legend which has found many takers over the years is that Jesus survived crucifixion, travelled to Kashmir, eventually died there, and is buried in Srinagar. Now, a New York woman, who says her family originated in France, where Jesus and his wife Mary Magdalene lived for 30 years after the crucifixion and had two sons and one daughter, is claiming to be Christ’s ‘59th descendant’, and is seeking DNA testing of the shrine’s remains.
- Found: The oldest pressurized water system in the New World, an aqueduct-tunnel system in the Mayan city of Palenque, which was built hundreds of years before the concept was believed to have been introduced by the Spanish.
- Scientists zero in on ancient Land of Punt.
- The mayor of a Devon town claims that people originating from his town settled in America three decades before the Pilgrim Fathers.
- Simon Bolivar, the 19th Century political leader, probably died of arsenic poisoning rather than tuberculosis – and may even have been murdered, according to new research.
- A 17-year-old girl who is trapped in the body and mind of a toddler could help scientists unlock the key to ageing.
- Woman unable to recognise voices gives new insights into the human brain.
- Six-month-old babies ‘can tell right from wrong’. I wonder, at what age do they lose that ability?
- Genetic switch could restore memory.
- Ancient pieces of continental crust that are falling to the bottom of the Earth’s mantle could explain mysterious dents in our planet’s gravitational field.
- New bionic hand approches Star Wars’ technology. It even looks better than Luke’s artificial replacement.
- Losing weight quickly at the beginning of a diet may be the key to stopping the pounds from coming back, according to new research.
- Three spacecraft flying three million miles apart are to fire laser beams at each other across the emptiness of space in a bid to finally prove whether a theory proposed by Albert Einstein is correct.
- Hundreds of thousands of embarrassed Britons are suffering in silence every year after injuring themselves during sex.
- Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909.
- A senior Russian politician claims to have met aliens on the balcony of his Moscow apartment.
- Russian Governor tells of his alien abduction. President asked to investigate.
- Aliens caught off guard.
- Pope’s visit to Portugal may shed light on the Third Secret of Fatima, parts of which are rumored to concern the Satanic infiltration of the Catholic Church and the rise of an anti-Pope.
- Burglary victim catches thief by using a clue described in a Sherlock Holmes story.
- Virulent airborne fungi linked to missing scientist, Joseph Moshe, who last year was the subject of a spectacular chase and arrest by the LA police department and SWAT team, assisted by the FBI, Secret Service, CIA, US Army and several other unidentified federal officials.
- In an unusually strong attack on politically powerful deniers of global warming, 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences have charged that opponents are using ‘McCarthy-like tactics’ against legitimate climate scientists.
- A third of all plants and animals face extinction. Animal and plant species are being killed off faster than ever before as human populations surge and people consume more.
Quote of the Day:
Inventions and the scientific method of research have so transformed human life that the long inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed. It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope but there is no such society as the gods once supported. Ideals of the social unit are not those of the hieratic pantomime, making visible on earth the forms of heaven, but of the secular state, in hard and unremitting competition for material supremacy and resources. And within the progressive societies themselves, every last vestige of the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality, and art is in full decay.
One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the century of Galileo. Where there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there is now darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring light again to the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.
The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot – indeed must not – wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, and rationalized avarice and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live’, Nietzsche says, ‘as though the day was here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal – carries the cross of the redeemer – not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories but in the silences of his personal despair.
Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
