Revelation

Gordon Brown, getting a grilling on TV off the press about the global economic crisis, IS Tony Hancock on Face to Face!

Hallelujah

I woke in the middle of the night and I found Jesus. It's true. And I wasn't even aware I was looking for him. Sleep went right out of the window but it doesn't seem to matter. It feels good. I've always wanted to believe but have never really been able to. The sticking point for me has always been the multiplicity of faiths. How can one faith claim to hold the one and only path to salvation? What about all the good people of other faiths, or none, or those who lived back in "pagan" times, who have cared for their children and tried to lead good lives? Then it dawned on me in this long moment of epiphany that this is not the question to ask. The scientists at CERN are asking questions for which they can never hope to get an answer. So they find the Higgs Boson? Lovely, at least now we have a face for the name. It still doesn't explain why everything in the universe that is "real" accounts for only 5% of what is out there. We ask questions using the only reference framework we have available. One of the images that came to me as I lay in the dark was of two ants, rubbing antennae, asking each other: "What if this is all there is?"
Despite my agnosticism I have always felt that my path has been lit in dark times, at crucial points in my life.
There are words that we can use to hint at what underlies these kinds of phenomena: like serendipity, or coincidence, or "blimey, am I imagining things"?
So I figured as I lay there, or rather it struck me, that you have to follow the path that is right for you. For who you are, where you come from, what has moulded you. It's only right for those ants to keep running round, doing what they're programmed to do, until someone pours boiling water over their nest.
And then I thought. And then I thought - should I share this? And then I thought, well perhaps I should, if only because I had the idea to, and I should perhaps see where this leads.
And as I logged on to the Internet, and opened "Blogger", I wondered what I should put in the title bar. And I thought I'd put "Hallelujah" but I wanted to make sure I fully understood the meaning of the word, and so I opened Wikipedia, and my attention was drawn to today's featured article, which read as follows:

"Anekantavada is one of the most important and basic doctrines of Jainism. It refers to the principles of pluralism and multiplicity of viewpoints, the notion that truth and reality are perceived differently from diverse points of view, and that no single point of view is the complete truth. Jains contrast all attempts to proclaim absolute truth with adhgajanyāyah, which can be illustrated through the maxim of the "Blind Men and an Elephant". In this story, one blind man felt the trunk of an elephant, another the tusks, another the ears, another the tail. All the men claimed to explain the true appearance of the elephant, but could only partly succeed, due to their limited perspectives. According to the Jains, only the Kevalins—the omniscient beings—can comprehend objects in all aspects and manifestations; others are only capable of partial knowledge. Consequently, no single, specific, human view can claim to represent absolute truth."

Coincidence, or what?

As the great Dave Allen used to say, "May your God go with you".

Alternative to BBC I-Player

I sometimes wish they'd just leave well alone. They had a corking little Listen Again facility on the web for BBC Radio which worked like a dream, and then they had to go and embed it in the I-Player alongside the TV programs, which are no darned use to me anyway, since no-one abroad can access them anyway. To make things worse, it's a pound to a penny that the ruddy thing won't work in any case, throwing up a "program temporarily unavailable" message when you want to listen to the latest episode of The Archers.

Well, I've just discovered a natty wee get-around to get back to the old style re-broadcast using Real Player. You simple enter the following in the address bar of your web browser:

rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/xxxx_ddd.ra

whereby you replace "xxxx" with the time and "ddd" with the day of the week. So, for example, if you want Thursday's episode of a tale of country folk, you'd put "1900_thu". As long as you already have the real player application on your PC, this will generate it and set it running just before the start of the program and shut it off two minutes after it is over. So you get to hear if that night's Front Row is worth listening into. Which is nice.

Capello - what's that about??

I've just been watching that overpaid stooge Capello struggling to get through his press conference in English. We'll get beaten by Andorra tomorrow. Ten-nil.