surely not the end in sight!

One moment dear Christopher Hitchens was on the screen promoting another doubtless fine book, “Hitch-22.” The next minute he's been handed the black spot. Now the god-botherers are hoping he'll recant and embrace god. I can't see it.

Reading random blogs I found someone taking great macro photos in their garden. Soon after, the photographer was in hospital having life-saving major surgery. Just shows once again, you never know when you'll go. Nobody ever dies wishing they'd worked harder, but I believe everyone wishes they'd managed to love more. I'd rather spend my last hour blogging than working or in deifheid company. Imagine if you found out that you'd just wasted your last day listening to the drone of deifheids!

I took the other photos after sharpening my pencils instead of working.

there is no one either good or bad ....

There is no one either good or bad, but circumstances make them so.

There was a discussion of the Cumbria shootings in The Independent by Julian Baggini, of interest to freelance taoists everywhere. For your convenience, here are a few key paragraphs:

As soon as the identity of the Cumbria killer became known, people immediately started to ask what kind of man Derrick Bird was. And there were always going to be only two possible answers. Almost every perpetrator of an atrocity is assigned the role of either a monster who was bound to do great evil eventually, or an ordinary person who inexplicably flipped.

We need to understand that situation, rather than character, usually matters more in how people behave, not so we can just let everyone off, but so that we can better understand why people do wrong and do more to prevent it. Most people are neither bad apples nor good eggs, but soft fruit that can easily turn from ripe to rotten.

Left and right have traditionally made opposite mistakes in this regard. Conservatives have placed far too little stress on the role of social circumstances in criminality, imagining that poverty and social exclusion are mere excuses for criminality, not causal factors in it. The left, on the other hand, has tended to overplay the social, imagining that people have no control over how they respond to circumstances, that all criminality is the inevitable result of iron laws of economic determinism.

What we are now understanding is that it is not either/or.

I rest my case. Everything is a balance of one thing and the other.

entertainment and exercise

After working all day and evening, I relaxed by watching an episode of Embarrassing Bodies. Amazing TV of real people and their asymmetrical breasts, incontinent streaming, blown-out vaginas etc. No bottoms this week though.

It's not just sensational camerawork, it's educational too. One informative sequence revealed the mantra "socks before jocks." Apparently people who want to avoid spreading their athlete's foot into athlete's crotch should put their socks on before their pants. You learn something every day.

Meanwhile, the ipod seems to have lost the only ebook I ever read, The Real Alma Mater. Somewhere there's a backup copy that I can reload.

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I'm not sure I'll ever swim again, at least not in the winter - I can't face the split fingers. Mind you, since I developed plantar fasciitis for the first time ever, walking is out so I'll be forced to resume swimming. Have you ever had that? In my case it's just a soreness right under the heel. Probably from walking on hard flat insoles. It's amazing how many new kinds of decrepitude one discovers on getting older.

Because the walking's been curtailed, I was nearly persuaded to buy a Wii system, for fitness. You can use it to play virtual tennis, box, and do yoga and tai chi. But I stopped myself just in time. I already know how to do tai chi and yoga. I just need to bloody well get on with it. And I could probably teach myself shadow boxing for oldies, without causing any new injuries.