Inglish as She is Goodly Spoken

You may laugh at the title, but today's heading is actually the name of a real book. We often laugh at foreign languages, like the French swear-phrase "Sacre blu", which literally means... as you might guess... 'sacred blue'. Why 'sacred blue' should be their equivalent of English's 'f^%@!' is anyone's guess. And what about foreigners trying their best to write signs in English using only a Local-Language to English dictionary, and some of the hilarious signs which result? See engrish.com for heaps of examples. But when its all said and done, you can't really blame them for having trouble. These are just some of the reasons why English is so hard to learn:

The bandage was wound around the wound.
The farm was used to produce produce.
The dump was so full it had to refuse more refuse.
There is no time like the present, so he thought he would present the present.
When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
He did not object to the object.
The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
The oarsmen had a row about how to row.
He was too close to the door to close it.
A stag does strange things when the does are present.
After a number of injections my jaw became number.
The artist saw a tear in his painting and shed a tear.
She had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
An army chef decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

And of course, there are no eggs in an eggplant, and no apple or pine in pineapple. Quicksand works slowly, boxing rings are square, Guinea pigs are neither from Guinea nor are they pigs. Writers write but fingers don't fing. A slim chance and a fat chance are the same thing, so are quite a lot and quite a few. But overlook and oversee are very different. You fill in a form to fill it out, an alarm goes off by going on, when the stars are out you see their light but when the lights are out you see nothing. And why do you wind up a watch to start it, but wind up a story to finish it? Why is a parcel that goes by car called shipment, and one by ship called cargo? And why do you drive on the parkway, but park in the driveway?

One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

A man came up to me in the street today and pointed a key at me. I said "Don't start anything, mate". "What's it to you?", he demanded. "It's a two-letter word to me", I said, looking daggers at him. He dodged the daggers and snarled "You wanna make something of it!?" "Can't make much out of it", I said, "except maybe ti, and that doesn't make sense anyway." "No", he replied, "besides there aren't enough letters in that to make sense". "This is stupid", I said. "No", he replied, "THIS is stupid", holding up a piece of paper with the word stupid on it, "but I see your point." "Sorry", I exclaimed, and did my loose fly back up. "Right then", he said, "I'm off", so he went off to the right, while I left to the left. Unfortunately his right was my left and we ended up back where we started from. Some days you just can't win.

The post-title comes from that old poem: One fine day in the middle of the night, two dead men got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot each other. A paralyzed donkey passing by kicked a blind man in his good eye, cracked his head on a rubber wall, fell into a dry ditch and drowned them all.

And let's not forget that creepy ghost-story: The other day upon the stair, I saw a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today! Oh how I wish he'd go away!

And Now, Good News!

No news is good news, they say. And certainly a look at world news today indicates that it must have been a very good day indeed. The authorities have called off the search for the crew of a catamaran near Queensland. Or to put it another way, they're not looking for some people who weren't on a boat that wasn't where it should be. Kevin Rudd, Opposition Leader, is not releasing any information about IR. And there's a possibility that the bodies of two young women, found close to where two young women went missing last week, could be them. Mufti is still defiant, just like he was yesterday. Victoria's health chief has said the source of a salmonella outbreak at a Melbourne nursing home may never be found. Islamic prison gangs may be cracked down upon, because it is feared they might be forming gangs behind bars. There could be no irrigation water for farmers in the Murray-Darling basin if rain doesn't fall. Queensland's borders will remain open, says Deputy Premier Anna Bligh. And the first blind pilot to fly half way around the world hasn't arrived yet in Darwin.

Does anyone else notice a trend here, to report News that isn't actually based on anything happening, but on things that didn't happen, might happen, or won't happen? These weren't stories specifically chosen from a larger list to illustrate my point - the above are genuinely the first 9 stories in Google News (Australia) today. When did the media decide that there wasn't enough actually happening in the world, and start to report on anything they liked, whether it happened or not? From a young age I was taught that the essence of writing a report was to know Who, What, Why, Where, When and How. Nowadays, it must be Nevermind, Perhaps, Anyway, Maybe and Whatever.

The Beamer Breathes - Just

Not a lot of chance to blog anything today because Kierran has been hogging the computer all day playing Runescape, but it did give me the opportunity (or perhaps 'push') to get outside into natural light for a change, and I opened up the BMW for the first time in 3 years. She's been sitting under a tree, was covered an inch thick in leaves, twigs, etc, and I wasn't sure whether to be more worried about the 1 foot huntsman spider dropping down the back of my neck, or the snake living underneath. Luckily neither showed. She was dead as a doornail, of course, but when I jumped it from the ute the motor turned over and the status panel shows green on all systems. Things didn't go quite so well when I took the battery out, though, and put the ute's in - I had sparks everywhere as I attached the neg lead, and smoke started curling up from below. A lot of twigs and debris had made their way into the engine bay, so it may have just been them catching fire, or it might be a serious short somewhere from corrosion of the electrical system. Either way, I high-pressure hosed out the entire engine bay and put the original battery on charge; with so much moisture in there it will be a week before I can give her another try anyway. But it says a lot about Germans engineering, I guess, that I had no doubt in my mind at all that if I had a charged battery, she'd start straight away, even after 3 years of being left to the elements.

The East Side of Town

Pardoe Downs, Ravenswood, Bridgewater - every city in the world has an Eastside. The part of town where the lower classes live, the dole bludgers, unemployed, single mothers, druggies, slums and no-hopers. In almost every city in the world, these people live on the east side of the town, for one simple reason - in general, thats the way the wind blows, so all the smog and pollution drifts that way. These are the areas where everyone is on the lawn bitching at their neighbours, all the lawns are 2 feet high, and the marijuana, beer and cigarettes are bought before the rent is paid. Two kids have an argument in the playground and it comes to "my dad can whoop your dad"; at 3 pm at the appointed place and time only one man turns up, to find he's supposed to be fighting himself. Its the sort of area where a man can have 2 six year old daughters who aren't twins. On Father's Day the men have more houses to visit than if they were trick'n'treating on Halloween, and a kid can live in the wrong house for a week before anyone notices. The dramas that are played out daily are the source of every soap opera ever made; a wise TV producer would forget ideas like Big Brother and just install cameras in every house in the suburb, but the problem then would be how to edit it all down. A week's life in the Eastside would make a year's TV. Not that I want to get stuck into them or paint everyone with the same brush, I've been an Eastsider myself. You might think some of the above is funny, if you've never been an Eastsider. But satirical or not, its 90% true. It's not necessarily a bad thing, either. However disfunctional, this is where real family life is happening in modern society, with single or defacto mums popping out well above the average 2.6 children, and the kids leaving home in their mid teens. For all the dramas and personality shaping, THIS is where the majority of our next generation are coming from, for better or worse.

Around the World

Andy Warhol said that everyone in the future would have 15 minutes of fame. He was almost right, but he didn't stop to consider that with world population going up and up and the amount of hours in the day staying the same, that time would have to be divided amongst more and more people and so each would get a little less fame time. Currently I think it averages about 2 days if you're a politician, 1 week if you hire a shonky tradesman and get it shown on Today Tonight, and 2 months if you carry drugs into a foreign country in a surfboard bag.

Having a look at the ClustrMap of visitors to my blog always gets me thinking. Sure, there are blogs out there which get gazillions of visitors, and which quite frankly are far more interesting than mine. But this one man, with his ordinary thoughts, has had someone nestled into a cold bay in northern Canada reading his words. Over in Alaska, on some cold winter's night, someone sat up late over a cup of coffee reading. Down in South America, someone read the words of a man who will never see what they are privileged to have outside their window, the magnificent Andes. In the deepest jungles of Africa, in the poor nation of Ethiopia, in the rich affluent society of Dubhai, and in the overcrowded cities of India, people looked at my page. Across Europe from one end to the other, people who speak a variety of languages read what I wrote. In Russia, once a police state, people have read my words. And even in Alice Springs, the desert centre of Australia, someone visited me.

It's all rather humbling. Thank you, and may the Great Bird of the Galaxy roost on all your planets.

Pathetic Portables

There are a lot of good reasons why you'd buy a portable DVD player. My kids enjoy being able to tuck themselves in a corner with their favourite movie and a pair of headphones, and I tend to watch a movie or an episode of Star Trek at bedtime every second day. They're particularly useful for people with contact lenses - you can take your lenses out before going to bed and still watch a bit, because you sit so close to them.

But... and its a big but... don't expect value for money or long-term use, or you'll be disappointed. Mine is a Shinco SDP-1750A, cost $185, and 9 months after I bought it, the screen died completely. I took it back to Harvey Norman and 3 weeks later, instead of repair, it was replaced with an entirely new unit. That one lasted 3 more months, and died 3 days after the original 12-month warranty ran out. Harvey Norman wouldn't come at replacing it because the warranty had expired, and the replacement one hadn't come with its own 12 month warranty - that applies from the date of original purchase, not the date you got this particular unit. So on average, for your $180, you get 6 months use, or in other words, one of the cheapest portables costs you $1 a day.

I bought both kids a Dick Smith branded portable. These were a little more expensive, and given the experience with Shinco, I took the option to extend the warranty to 3 years, which added considerably more to the cost. In the 4 months they've had them, no problems so far with the units, other than the extremely poor design and function. All the basic things the kids want, like cursor keys to select a particular episode, aren't on the unit, only on the remote, and the remote often isn't anywhere to be found. I have often found that I put a movie into one of theirs, and can't play what I want. Picture zoom, screen ratio changing, even chapter skipping are all unintuitive or not on the actual unit at all. To top things off, the screen is mounted high on the flip-up panel with a large blank space between it and the hinge, so that lying on the floor watching it, the kids are bound to get a sore neck from craning forward too much. Overall, the Dick Smith ones are poorly designed for their intended function. If the designers had actually bothered to put a disc into the player and watch it, these faults would have been evident. As for the long-term reliability, I'll post an update if and when one of them develops a fault.

The lesson here is evident - if you want a well designed, reliable portable DVD player, pay the extra money and go with a good brand name like Sony.

Weather Wars

Curse these Western Australians, they've invented time travel and won't let the rest of us have it. Not only that, but are they using it to solve the great mysteries of history, to seek the advice of the legendary Solomon, or take a photo of a dinosaur that doesn't look like it was made by a kinder kid with a clay kit? No, they're wasting it on clouds.

How do I know? Because I got a phone call earlier today from a friend in Western Australia. WA is 3 hours behind us here in Tassie, so it was 2 pm there and 5 pm here. It was raining in WA, according to my friend, and in 2 hours that raincloud would be here in Tassie, since weather almost always travels west to east. That means that the rain would leave WA at 2 pm, and arrive here at 4 pm. And I can tell you, an hour ago it wasn't raining here! But now, thanks to the WA'ians and their secret time machines, it apparently IS going to rain here an hour ago now.

I tried to explain this to a mate from the USA on MSN, but didn't have much success, which is hardly surprising because he is 18 hours behind me. So not only was he taking 18 hours to answer my questions (duuuh), but I was answering his 18 hours before he even asked them.

Whoever came up with the Greenwich Mean Time and time zones ought to be shot. Once, everywhere in the world you went the time was 'Now'. But now, its then there and now here, and its only now there when its then here. Perhaps someone should nuke Greenwich completely off the map, but then would anything exist any more anywhere at all, or would that be the End Of Time?

Sign My Petition

These bloggers, what can you do to shut them up? I know you really don't want to be here, and you're being forced to read this against your will. So what better way to get me back, than to add your name to the petition I've started on gopetition.com. Add your voice now and get these useless blogs off the internet and back into the secret diary hidden under the pillow, where they belong!

Petition to take bloggers off the internet, at gopetition.com

Back to the Blog

Alright Sue, stop complaining. After a break of a few months to have a really crap time, I've decided to add an entry. If you're really, reaaaally nice I might add more than one this year. A few ups and downs lately... some disappointments over getting my daughter for Easter, which didn't happen until a few days after Easter and got me all depressed. Secondly, things in the organisation I'm a Board Member of have gone from bad last year to much worse now. It's being sorted.

All that's pretty serious, so here's the "feelgood" blog post. Like most sensible people, I have a Miglia TVmax attached to the computer so that I can record live TV directly. It's a great product and the compression ratios for video are amazing, I can fit just over 3 months of 24 Hr/Day TV on my hard drive. Given that there's only about 2 hours of TV a week actually worth watching, that means you can record things forever. One of the really nice things about it is that it uses an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) called IceTV, which allows you to set programs to record with a single click, or indeed record every episode of a show if you like. Its nice, easy to use, and very powerful. There is just one catch - the price.

IceTV costs $13 a month, and that's just way too much to pay in a place like Tasmania where there are only four channels. Luckily, they have a free month's trial option, and even after it expires you can use it for a while, so for now at least, I don't have to pay.

One of the nice things about IceTV is that they write their own program description, and its probably best to describe these as "hidden extras". Many of them give me a laugh, because the guys or gals who write them don't serve up the usual drivel, they tell it like it is. Take, for example, these:

Police Files Unlocked
Footage from police cameras is cobbled together to make a cheap program about the general public's lack of respect for road rules and law & order in general.

Media Watch
Everyone loves it until they're on it. Media Watch turns a critical eye on the Australian media in general, and journalism in particular.

Today
The giggles are the same and you could argue they they're better groomed at Today. However, it's six of one half a dozen of the other really. A magazine style format with a smattering of news, current affairs, celebrity goss and the scandal of the day to get the early morning juices flowing.

Gotta love it. Keep up the good work, guys.

New Year's Eve

New Year's Eve, another year come and gone and they seem to go faster and faster the older you get. Since lots of you will be downing a few bottles of Liquid Courage this evening and then hitting the Karaoke stages, I thought I'd better provide you with the full lyrics to Auld Lang Syne:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp ! And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
We twa hae run about the braes, and pou’d the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit, sin’ auld lang syne.
We twa hae paidl’d in the burn, frae morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d sin’ auld lang syne.
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere! And gies a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie-waught, for auld lang syne.

And if you can't understand any of that, don't worry, no-one else can understand you either when you start singing up on the Karaoke Stage, so just sing anything that comes out. Well, words that come out, anyway! No crying weakly for Ralph or Hewey, please!

Links:
What the hell does the song actually mean? (Wikipedia)
Auld Lang Syne in WAV format

Microsoft Never Fails… to Fail

Just 4 weeks after it's release, security flaws have been discovered in Windows Vista. The Big M spent 5+ years developing it, and released it 2 years(!) late. In fact, according to an article in The Australian newspaper, it's the first major upgrade since Windows 95, 11 whole years ago! And what do they have to say about the problem? "Well, sure it's there, but there aren't any nasty programs taking advantage of it… yet… Oh, and Explorer has a few security holes in it as well, sorry about that". Still, Mike Reavey, operations manager at Microsoft's Security Response Centre, isn't worried… "Windows Vista is our most secure platform to date." Well, since Windows has some 114,000 viruses so far, versus the Mac platform's… er… has anyone found any yet?… I wouldn't be too proud of that, Mike.

I use both platforms, so let me say it straight from a real-world side-by-side user: Get a life and get a Mac. Once you've gone Mac you'll never go back. Well, hardly ever anyway.

In the Year 2525…

In the year 3535, ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies.
Everything you think, do and say is in the pill you took today.
In the year 4545, ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes.
You won't find a thing to chew, nobody's gonna look at you.
In the year 5555, your arms hanging limp at your sides.
Your legs got nothing to do, some machine doing that for you.
In the year 6565, ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife.
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too, from the bottom of a long glass tube.
In the year 7510, if God's a-comin, he oughta make it by then.
Maybe he'll look around himself and say, "Guess it's time for the judgment day".
In the year 8510, God is gonna shake his mighty head.
He'll either say, "I'm pleased where man has been", or tear it down and start again.
In the year 9595, I'm kinda wonderin if man is gonna be alive.
He's taken everything this old Earth can give, and he ain't put back nothing.

Now it's been ten thousand years, man has cried a billion tears.
For what he never knew, now man's reign is through.
But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight.
So very far away, maybe it's only yesterday.

Zager and Evans In The Year 2525

Saltwater

We are a rock revolving around a golden sun
We are a billion children rolled into one
So when I hear about the hole in the sky
Saltwater wells in my eyes

We climb the highest mountain, we'll make the desert bloom
Were so ingenious we can walk on the moon
But when I hear of how the forests have died
Saltwater wells in my eyes

We light the deepest ocean, send photographs of Mars
Were so enchanted by how clever we are
Why should one baby feel so hungry she cries
Saltwater wells in my eyes

We are a rock revolving around a golden sun
We are a billion children rolled into one
What will I think of me the day that I die
Saltwater wells in my eyes

Julian Lennon
Saltwater

Evil Santa's Site

Admit it - like me, you always thought the "Nice Old Do-Good Man in a Red Suit" cover-story was a bit suspect, and Santa was actually up to no good at all! Check out the website at Letters from Bad Santa for form letters, unusual gifts, etc. And on a more serious note, don't over-eat, don't over-argue and don't whatever you do drink and drive. See you again after the X-bomb fallout settles!

Or for something a bit more family-friendly, take the kids to NORAD Tracks Santa so they can see how amazingly technologically advanced the good-ol' US of A is, and how even though they're pretending to track good old Santa, those same technologies are what makes them God's Own Nation! Yes, combining myth, religious dogma, and killing machines in a form kids can relate to and learn to love - now that's the real Christmas spirit.

And for all us poor bloggers, stuck "out there" in cyberspace, what would Christmas be without a reply from Santa to the letter we sent him a few weeks ago?

A Million Years in One Afternoon

With the hype-up to Christmas in full swing, I've posted a few religious-oriented entries in the last week or two, so I'll leave the subject alone for a bit now with this parting shot. Anyone who still believes that the world is billions of years old (or perhaps its trillions or millions now, the figures in popular science journals change every 3 or 4 years), I would suggest a visit to creationwiki.org. Now I know what you're thinking, but the fact is that if you truly believe in science, then that includes the belief that any rational theorum which explains things more accurately than your current model, is a more scientific approach. For me, Creation explains what I see in the world a lot more accurately than Evolution. Consider this example, from creationwiki:

Perhaps the most remarkable catastrophic events to have occurred at Mt St Helens was the rapid erosion that was accomplished by mudflows, landslides, and waves of water. On March 19, 1982 a small eruption melted the snow that had accumulated in the crater over the winter, and a resulting hot mud flow carved a system of canyons up to 140 feet deep and 17 miles long in a single day. The deepest of the canyons has affectionately been called the little Grand Canyon of the Toutle River, and is 1/40th the size of its namesake. The small creek that now flows through the bottom would appear to have carved this canyon over a great length of time, but this unique event has demonstrated that rapid catastrophic processes were instead responsible. The Grand Canyon in Arizona has also been claimed for some time to have been carved gradually by the Colorado River, but it is now becoming clear this American icon is as well the result of catastrophic erosion.

Depressed Yet?

In case you missed this story in the News, a US Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recommended Wednesday that warnings on anti-depressants be changed. It seems that anti-depressants cause an increased risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors in children and adolescents, and the debate is whether that extends to young adults or older patients as well, and whether the warning labels should be changed to reflect the fact. Now forgive me for exclaiming "WTF!?", but surely anti-depressants are to stop this kind of thought/behaviour pattern? I can just picture a man walking into the Doctor and saying "I'm so depressed, Doc, I think I want to kill myself", and the Doctor says, "Here, take these pills, then you'll be sure!"

It shouldn't come as any surprise, though. Scan through old newspapers sometime and find any article that says something is good for you, then scan ahead a year of two and find the corresponding "No it isn't" article. We've been told to eat more chocolate, don't eat chocolate, drink more tea and coffee, drink less tea and coffee, no red meat, lots of red meat, minimal dairy, as much dairy as you can, more sugar, less sugar, no sugar, more sugar, take an aspirin every day for your heart's sake, don't take aspirin ever. What a world.

The only thing you can discern for sure out of the whole thing is that anybody claiming to be an expert is best not listened to, and the best way to live life is to use your own common sense. As my Dad used to say, "The whole world is mad except me and thee, and I'm not so sure about thee."

FDA Panels Urges Changes to Antidepressant Labeling

What Did Jesus Really Look Like?

Which of the images above is the real Jesus? Well, most people would say number 4, or perhaps 1 or 5. And they'd be wrong. In fact, number 6 is probably the most accurate picture of Jesus, although even that's just guesswork. The simple fact is that we've all been conditioned by Hollywood and Sunday School to accept an image of Jesus as tall, lean, with flowing blonde hair, fair skin and light-coloured eyes, but that doesn't fit with any of the evidence.

We only have two hints from the Bible about his looks, and both are fairly uncomplimentary. Isaiah says that he has "no comeliness" and that "there is no beauty that we should desire him". And that His face was "marred more than any other man". And in the 3rd century, Tertullian said that Jesus' body "did not reach even to human beauty, to say nothing of heavenly glory".

Apart from these direct references to his appearance, a lot can be assumed from other evidence. First, Jesus looked ordinary - when a mob was out to get Him, He hid from them simply by melting into the crowd. And at His betrayal, Judas had to point Him out to the soldiers, even though there were only 12 people in the garden, with a pre-arranged signal. These incidents show us that Jesus looked like any other Jew of His day. Archeological evidence shows the average semetic male of the era was around 5'1" and 110 pounds. Since Jesus worked outdoors as a carpenter until He was about 30 years old, it's reasonable to assume He was more muscular and physically fit than our portraits suggest, although He did a lot of walking when He began His ministry, so it's fair to assume He would have become leaner.

How did Jesus wear His hair? Well, the apostle Paul saw Jesus and knew exactly what He looked like. In the time of Christ most men wore short hair, and in 1 Corinthians Paul wrote, "Doesn't even nature itself teach you, that if a man have long hair, it is shameful?" Would Paul have made such a statement if Jesus had long hair?

The simple fact is, although there were no pictures of the real Jesus, or accurate descriptions, that hasn't stopped people through the ages inventing them. From the static yet profound icons of Eastern Orthodoxy to the punishing bruiser of Michelangelo's "Last Judgment", Jesus served the needs of the day. Slave-era blacks painted an African Jesus, Jesus took on almond eyes in Asia and blonde hair in Scandinavia. The consistent trend has been to make him more human, to make a Jesus that His followers could easily identify with. Caravaggio did it for Italians in the 17th century with a suffering, peasant Jesus, and the filmmaker Kevin Smith reflected the modern "Jesus is my best friend" mentality by introducing a smiling "Buddy Christ" in his movie "Dogma."

Ultimately, then, the answer to the question, "What did Jesus really look like?" is: Whatever you want Him to.

Further Reading

A Safe & Healthy Workplace

These days every organisation seems to have a Political-Correctness-Police approved mission statement, most of which are simply copied and pasted from someone else's, all the way back to the original model statement which originated in some disabled vegan lesbian aboriginal's poetry book. Take, for example, this excerpt from the Tasmania Fire Service website, and let's stop for a moment to think on what it really means, and if the principles stated really would provide for a better workplace.

The TFS works hard to have a safe work place where people are able to fulfil their potential and contribute to the achievement of our goals. We want a workforce where diversity in all areas is valued, particularly in the areas of gender and ethnicity. It is our view that the way we deliver our services will be improved if we have people from a wide range of backgrounds and social groups working in our organisation.

Fighting fires isn't a safe activity, by its very nature, so that part is just drivel. It's nice to give humans the opportunity to reach their potential, find Nirvana, and be one with the universe, but in most cases, fulfilling your potential means stopping someone else from reaching theirs. It's on this very point that most Political Correctness falls down - the simple fact that giving a Right to one person automatically implies you are taking it away from everyone else. And the chances that what I need to do, to fulfill my own personal potential, will coincide with the goals of the Tasmania Fire Service are very remote indeed. Having a job is all about giving up personal freedom in exchange for the pay cheque, no matter what the PC Police say.

As for a workplace where diversity is valued, nothing could be further from desirable for any organisation, which needs all its staff to work toward it's goal with one mind, one purpose, and one set of actions - the complete opposite of diversity, in fact. And although there are certainly businesses where it might be an advantage to have a German, for example, on staff, they are a small percentage. In most businesses it doesn't make one iota of difference if your staff are of varied ethnic backgrounds, or a mix of male and female, yet the TFS, like so many other PC-correct groups, says it wants this, even needs it, so that it's "delivery of services" will be improved by the most diversity it can squeeze in.

The sad thing about all this, is that everyone knows statements like the above are just so much legally-required garbage, from the people who draft them to the people in the government who tick off the box that says the organisation's mission statement is acceptable. And day-to-day, despite the stated desires for ethnic variety, culturally sensitivity, male and female interaction and spiritual closeness, people are still being employed based solely on their ability to do the job they were hired for. Shame, shame, shame.

The True Origin of Christmas

There are a lot of Christians running around these days chanting "Put Christ back into Christmas". Well, I am a Christian, but I've got some bad news for you guys. Christ was never a part of Christmas in the first place!

The Shepherds and the Wise Men
Jesus wasn't born on December 25th or anywhere near it. Shepherds don't sleep out in the fields watching their flocks by night in the middle of the Middle East winter, so the best guess for Christ's birth is somewhere in September, but the date isn't recorded. A lot of people get confused because they've heard the Wise Men may have taken years to get there, but the shepherds were on the scene pretty much straight away. The Wise Men were almost certainly Astronomers from China or Persia. They came from the East, and took up to 3 years to get there, because Herod ordered all children under 3 killed. There weren't 3 of them, either, this is a common assumption based on the fact that 3 different types of gift were given. Considering the length of the journey and their importance, there may have been a caravan of hundreds of people in their retinue.

December 25th
December 25th was the Roman Festival of Saturnalia, where lawlessness, intoxication, debauchery, rape and human sacrifice reigned, all without punishment. Human-shaped biscuits were eaten, and singing naked in the streets was common (the precursor to modern carol singing). In the 4th century, the Catholic Church, hoping to convert the heathen, adopted the Festival by promising they could continue to celebrate it after conversion, and in 1466 Pope Paul II revived many of the old customs to persecute Jews.

Christmas Trees and Mistletoe
Worshippers of the pagan Asheira cult worshipped trees in the forest and brought them into their homes to decorate. Their practices also were adopted by the Church, giving us the modern Christmas tree. In Norse mythology, Hoder killed Balder while fighting for the female Nanna, using a mistletoe-poisoned arrow. Druid rituals used mistletoe to poison their human sacrifices. The custom of kissing under the mistletoe is a mixing of the sexual nature of the Saturnalia Festival and Druidic sacrifice.

Presents
In pre-Christian Rome, the Emperors forced citizens to bring them offerings and gifts during Saturnalia. The Catholic Church simply invented Saint Nicholas and adopted the gift-giving practice.

Saint Nicholas and Santa Claus
Nicholas was Bishop of Myra around 300, and was named a saint in the 19th century. In 1087 a cult worshipping him developed, and in Turkey he supplanted a female deity called The Grandmother in the role of giving gifts to children. The Nicholas cult spread north and was adopted by German and Celtic pagans. These groups worshipped many gods but their leader was Woden, father of Thor, who had a long white beard and rode a horse through the sky every August. The legends of Saint Nicholas and Woden merged, and his schedule was changed to December 6th, Nick's birthday. In an attempt to convert pagans in Northern Europe, the Catholic Church adopted the Nicholas cult and moved the date to December 25th. In 1809 novelist Washington Irving wrote a satire of Dutch culture which referred to Saint Nicholas using his Dutch name, Santa Claus.

Santa Becomes Famous
In 1822, Professor Dr Clement Moore published a poem, "The Night Before Christmas", based on the character of Saint Nicholas after reading Irving's book. The modern image of Santa is largely the work of illustrator Thomas Nast, who from 1862 to 1886 drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of Santa for Harper's Weekly. Nast also invented the North Pole address, the workshop filled with elves, and the list of good and bad children. The only thing missing was Santa's red outfit, and for that we can thank the Coca Cola company, who contracted Haddon Sundblom to create an advertisement featuring Santa drinking Coke - and insisted that his suit be Coca-Cola red.