Compare and contrast these two different approaches to prophesy:
King James Bible: Revelation 13 v1—4
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.
And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.
And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?
BBC: Eclipse set to be 'best in years'
Skywatchers eagerly awaiting Saturday's total lunar eclipse say that the spectacle could be the "best in years".
The eclipse begins at 2018 GMT, with the Moon totally immersed in the shadow of the Earth between 2244 and 2358 GMT.
During "totality", only light that has been filtered through the Earth's atmosphere reaches the Moon's surface, making it appear a reddish colour.
The eclipse will be visible from the whole of Europe, Africa, South America, and eastern parts of the US and Canada.
Spot the difference? That's right: one is total bollocks, is impossible to understand, and, because no precise time is specified, impossible to test, even if we could understand it; the other is a precise, testable prediction.
That's the key difference between science and mumbo-jumbo.
There will definitely be a lunar eclipe tomorrow night. Scientists can confidently predict this because one of their predecessors, a chap named Isaac Newton, came up with some surprisingly simple and beautiful equations that describe how things like moons move about. So confident can we be that this prediction will come true that I will personally bare my peach-like arse outside Greenwich Observatory if it doesn't.
On the other hand, if a seven-headed, ten-horned, becrowed, pardine, bear-footed, lion-mouthed beast ever turns up, I will personally eat my hat.
Then I'll shit my pants.
Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but, when I were a lad, there used to be something called etiquette (look it up): a general set of rules explaining what constituted socially acceptable behaviour (and, more importantly, what didn't).
Foremost of these rules (for us chaps at least) was the commandment, Thou shalt not engage another gentleman in conversation whilst either of you is having a slash. It just wasn't the done thing—not even for the sort of chaps who make a habit of chatting to other chaps in gentlemen's washrooms.
Yesterday, I was spending a penny in the gents at the Tebay Service Station on the M6, when the chap two urinals along from me suddenly remarked, "Ah! There you are! I've been trying to speak with you for ages!"
I glanced over at him nervously.
"I think you and I need to get together with Phil to thrash out the details," he said. "Have you got his number?"
It was clearly a case of mistaken identity: I had never seen this man before, and I didn't know anyone called Phil who I was likely to want to thrash out details with. "I think you've got the wrong per…" I started to say.
Then I realised the chap was on the phone. That's right, he was making a business call whilst having a burst! Is nothing sacred?
It lends a whole new meaning to the phrase, I'll give you a tinkle.
As predicted, this evening's lunar eclipse began bang on time. It continues as I type.
Chalk another one up for science. This means my peach-like derrière remains covered.
Sorry, ladies.
Times: Pope is warned of a green Antichrist
An arch-conservative cardinal chosen by the Pope to deliver this year's Lenten meditations to the Vatican hierarchy has caused consternation by giving warning of an Antichrist who is "a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist".
Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, 78, who retired as Archbishop of Bologna three years ago, quoted Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), the Russian philosopher and mystic, as predicting that the Antichrist "will convoke an ecumenical council and seek the consensus of all the Christian confessions".
What a hoot! I honestly had no idea people were still going on about the Antichrist in this day and age. I thought He must have gone the way of limbo by now. What a total, total hoot!
But hang on a second. The Antichrist is supposed to be the exact opposite of the Christ, right? It's just like anti-matter and matter: when the two meet, all hell is supposed to break loose. So, if the Antichrist is a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist, does this mean that the Christ is a warmongering, environmentally unsound religious bigot?
WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL US, CARDINAL?
OK, now I'm really scared.
Honestly, it's (almost) enough to restore your faith in politicians:
BBC: Gormley's statues stay out to sea
The 100 cast iron men statues fixed into the sand on a Merseyside beach are to stay.
The figures on Crosby beach, collectively called Another Place, are cast from a mould of artist Antony Gormley's body… Mr Gormley said he was "absolutely delighted" with the decision, made at a council meeting on Wednesday night.
The council heard objections from HM Coastguard, conservation agency Natural England, and certain residents who claimed to be offended by statues with flaccid knobs, then decided Bollocks to that! Those things are totally cool and are staying put.
Fantastic.
Seriously, if you get a chance, go to see them before some idiot politician changes their mind.
This is how it began with the smokers (remember sweet cigarettes?):
BBC: Shows 'encourage teen drinking'
Teenagers may be encouraged to drink more because television soap operas are "awash with alcohol", according to a survey published in The Food Magazine.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, mark my words: it starts with think of the children, and will end with the banning of alcohol from pubs.
Welcome to the healthy, new, smoke-free, carbon-neutral, low-fat, tea-total, meat-is-murder, asterisk-the-swear-words, Puritan age.
Hebden Bridge Times: We've more footpaths than anyone
A hillside near Hebden Bridge has more footpaths than anywhere else in England or Wales, say the Ramblers' Association.
According to the group's magazine Walk, a 1km by 1km square including Old Town has the greatest density of rights-of-way compared to any other square in Ordnance Survey maps.
The association calculated more than ten kilometres of rights of way in the square, which stretches from Lane Ends and the Hare and Hounds pub in the south, to Bog Eggs farmhouse on the moors to the north.
I am very familiar with the 1km square in question: it was within spitting distance of Jen's old house, and I have spent many, many hours trudging the footpaths around there—often ending up at the Hare and Hounds pub (known locally as The Lane Ends), which is still our local.
Ever since we moved here five years ago, I have complained that it isn't as well situated for footpaths as Jen's old place. Now I know why: nowhere is.
Letter to New Scientist:
Last night, I took Fred Pearce's advice ('Look, No Footprint', 10-Mar-2007) and installed 111 energy-efficient light-bulbs to offset the 11.1 tonnes of carbon emissions that I will be responsible for this year. All went well, until a passenger airliner en route for Manchester tried to land in my drive.
There must be easier ways to be green.
It's over a year since Jen and I got our Aga, but it only occurred to us last week that we hadn't made Scotch pancakes on it yet.
Horrendous oversight now remedied.
Thank you, Scotland!
Agas are particularly well suited for making Scotch pancakes, as you simply rub a bit of lard directly onto the hotplate and drop your batter straight on to it. No frying pans to wash, and the hotplate soon burns itself clean.
If you're looking for an excuse to buy an Aga, that's it.
New Scientist: Curves were best for Stone Age women
Stone Age men would not have been impressed by size zero women. Female figurines dating back 15,000 years reveal that the preferred body shape for women was curvy with prominent buttocks.
You reckon?
… All of the figurines were headless and had hugely exaggerated buttocks. Perhaps strangely, given their allure today, few of the figures had breasts.
So, presumably, Stone Age men also preferred their women without heads and breasts.
… However, the figurines may have expressed more than just men's desires. "It is hard to say if this body shape was a social preference or if it represented a spiritual image," says Nanneke Redclift, a social anthropologist at University College London.
In other words, they haven't a baldy clue why these figurines were shaped in the way that they were. But congratulations to these social anthropologists for getting some press coverage by writing about buttocks.
Me? I suspect Stone Age man just wasn't very good at sculpture.
There's a cold snap on the way, apparently, so I'm heading south to sunnier climes for what remains of the winter. Back around 28th March. In the meantime, please feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
…From Liv'pool to Florence via Rome,
It's oh, so nice to go trav'lin'
But it's so much nicer, yes, it's so much nicer to come home.
The tea's a lot better for a start. Well, better in the sense that tea actually exists in Blighty. They don't seem to have heard of it over there. And the cups of coffee are really tiny. God alone knows how they managed to knock an empire together.
Anyway, Jen and I are back from Italy, and the stuff we've been up to, you won't believe me: swearing at dead popes; encountering famous thesps; narrowly escaping assassination by nuns; gorping gawping at Galileo's finger; playing the Sistine Chapel game; coming to the inevitable conclusion that our Saviour was ginger. So much stuff. I am now officially a Renaissance man.
I'll fill you in on some of the details over the next few days, but I promise not to make you wade through through any of the 600+ 900+ photos I took.
Well, maybe just one or two.
But first, time for another cup of tea. I have some serious catching up to do.
Oh, and thanks for all the kind words while I was off, by the way. Serves me right, I suppose.
OK, I don't do this very often, so listen up: I'm about to say something nice about the Vatican…
The Vatican has a rather good set of museums, and, unlike most museums I have been in, they are happy to let you take photographs of their exhibits. Good on them!
Apart from in the Sistine Chapel, that is.
I don't know why they won't let you take photos in the Sistine Chapel—the copyright on Michelangelo's famous ceiling must have lapsed by now, and it's not as if you're going to do any harm taking a few snaps, provided you don't use your flash.
Ordinarily, apart from when I'm at rugby matches, I reluctantly abide by photography bans. But, when I found myself in the Sistine Chapel last week, and I saw the hundreds of other tourists gawping (sic) up at the ceiling, while frantic museum guards ran amongst them shouting, "No photo! NO PHOTO!", I suddenly had a flash of inspiration, and invented the Sistine Chapel Game:
The Sistine Chapel Game is very easy to play: you simply have to take a photograph of yourself in the Sistine Chapel (with the ceiling in shot), without being caught by any of the guards.
So I eased my camera out of its bag and fired off a few shots.
"No photo! NOOOOOO PHOTO!" shouted a guard up at the front, who then started barging through my fellow tourists towards me. I quickly turned my back and pushed my camera back into the bag.
The guard practically swam through the crowd straight at me, then, at the very last second, veered to the left and started giving a right bollocking to the fat, bearded and very confused American tourist standing next to me.
Of course, you realise I'll probably be excommunicated for this.
…but I wouldn't want to decorate it.
Hitchin has just emailed me to say that he and the missus are flying to Rome tomorrow, and are visiting the Sistine Chapel on Monday. Of course, I immediately challenged him to play the Sistine Chapel Game.
The Romans seem to have a thing about fountains. They have them coming out of their ears. I speak metaphorically.
The most famous fountain in Rome is the Trevi Fontain. It's where Anita Ekberg famously went for a paddle in La Dolce Vita. Me neither.
There are all sorts of conflicting legends about how many coins you are supposed to throw into the Trevi Fountain, and what will happen if you do so. Jen's guidebook said, if you throw a single coin into the fountain, you will meet the man of your dreams. I was rather put out when she decided to put the legend to the test. It worked: she threw her coin into the fountain, turned to her right, and there I was!
Then she suggested that I throw a coin into the fountain.
Just for the record, there is not now, nor has there ever been, a man of my dreams. Each to his own and all that. Don't knock it till you've tried it, etc. But what the hell: when in Rome and all that malarkey. So I threw my coin into the fountain, turned to my right and…
Apart from the Sistine Chapel, the other place the Vatican wouldn't let me photograph last week was the crypt containing the tombs of a fair number of popes. Fair enough, I suppose, but I went to have a look anyway: I wanted to make sure that John Paul II really is dead.
I'll make no bones about it (no pun intended), there was no love lost between me and Pope John Paul II. Well, there was certainly no love lost on my behalf; I don't know how the late pontiff felt about me. I don't have much time for religious leaders as a whole, but, in JPII's case, it was the man himself, not just the office, that I disliked. I disliked him immensely—primarily for his stance on contraception, which placed religious dogma before the physical well-being of his flock, the nasty, dangerous little man.
Since JPII's death, they've been trying to make out that he was some kind of saint—literally, in this case. As I reported two years ago, the Roman Catholic Church is looking for evidence "in favour or against" the late Pope John Paul II's suitability to be a saint. They're not talking about scientific evidence, you understand. What they're looking for is anecdotal evidence that JPII should have the letters S-T added to the front of his name. Being religious types, the sort of anecdotal evidence they have in mind is of the non-testable, miraculous kind: pray to JPII, witness a miracle, and Bob's your uncle (and John Paul's your saint). Easy-peasy!
All of which explains (I think) why, as I filed past JPII's tomb (muttering the words you evil, little bastard under my breath—I couldn't help myself), there were about a dozen or so of the faithful in a little roped off area, on their knees, praying at the slab of marble like there was no tomorrow. I felt sorry for them, I really did. These poor people seemed to be nice, ordinary members of the public, who genuinely believed that praying at a piece of rock might actually achieve something. You could see it in their eyes: they were genuinely touched—in both senses of the word. How did it get to this?
Interestingly, a few tombs along, the faithful praying at the tomb of St Peter (est. 1950)—that's Peter the rock (geddit? Nice one Jesus!) upon which the Roman Catholic Church was literally built, the patron saint of cobblers (no, really: the last shall be first, and all that), and, if the Bible is to be believed, one of Jesus's actual apostles—were conspicuous by their absence. Mind you, I suppose he's already got his sainthood.
Shaking my head in literal disbelief, I crept out of the crypt and returned to St Peter's Basilica to take some more photographs.
And then something really strange happened: I pushed the little button on the side of my camera which makes the flash pop up, took a photo of a statue of some woman carrying a book, and pushed the flash back down again. "What's so strange about that?" I hear you ask. Well, for about a month now, the flash on my camera has had a fault: it has been popping up OK, and the flash still works, but there has been something wrong with the mechanism which has been preventing it from popping down again unless I jiggle about with the catch. Only this time I didn't need to do the jiggle—and my camera has been working just fine ever since.
Spooky!
Could a John-Paul-II-hating atheist have been the first to witness one of his miracles? Could the paparazzi's favourite pope end up becoming the patron saint of flash photography? I'll leave the Roman Catholic Church to decide.
But, if they want to try to repeat this minor miracle, the prayer that seemed to work for me is you evil, little bastard.
Talking of popes being turned into saints, compare and contrast former pope and current saint Dionysius (???—268) and Charles Robert Darwin (1809—1882):
We have a right to know.
Whenever Jen and I are in Italy, we like to play the Nun Game. Well, to be honest, it's just me who likes to play the Nun Game; Jen thinks it's silly and usually refuses to play to begin with, until her naturally competitive nature kicks in:
"Look a nun! Ten points! Yes!"
"I'm not playing."
"… Oh look, another nun! Ten more points!"
"…"
"… And there's a nun reading a newspaper. 20 points!"
"No way is a nun reading a newspaper worth 20 points!"
"You're just jealous because I'm on 40 points. That's 40 points to nil. You're rubbish at this game!"
"I'm not falling for it. I'm not playing your silly nun game."
"…"
"NUN ON A BIKE!! Forty-all! Yes!"
Last week, Jen and I were crossing a zebra crossing on our way to the Vatican. In Italy, zebra crossings don't indicate any right-of-way for pedestrians; they are merely there to inform drivers that they should swerve to avoid any pedestrians on them, rather than beeping their horns at them for being in the middle of the road.
Jen was a couple of paces in front of me on the zebra crossing, when a Fiat Panda came screeching round the corner and headed straight at her. Jen had to run to avoid being hit.
"Did you see that?!!" said Jen, after I'd caught up with her.
"Yes. What an idiot!"
"It was a nun! That's got to be worth a couple of hundred points: having a nun try to assassinate you with a Fiat Panda!"
I stopped playing at that point.
There's no way on earth this place was built in a day:
It should be quite impressive once it's finished.
