Simply Divine

I dreamed I was the son of a goddess.

Specifically, I dreamed that my mother recieved a copperplate handwritten letter from a venerable firm of solicitors, informing her that her brother - leader of a small religious cult - had declared her divine co-ruler (subject to his vetting), and she therefore had special legal privilages.

I wondered if that gave me any special tax or education rights - whether I could blag a place at a decent university under the government's faith based schools initiative. While wondering vaguely which of my nonbelieving uncles was the holyman, and when he'd become a megalomaniacal charismatic nutcase.

Then I was woken up by a cheery text message inviting me to spend an afternoon pushing election leaflets through letterboxes. Which is a form of religions devotion, I suppose.

I couldn't go because I'd managed to injure my foot in a really girly way. For the same reason, I didn't get to go to the climate change awareness thing.

I would have been free to do the leafletting because the civil service lost some of my forms again. Last week I was supposed to start a pointless course for the unemployed, but couldn't because my "SL2" form had disappeared - together with the forms for several others.

They apologised and arranged an interview this thursday to fill out all the forms again.

Two more banks want to give me millions, and I've won five more lotteries. Including the "Microsoft MS-Word Online Lottery". Four times in one day.


Interesting forum on Sunday on "What would socialism be like?". Short version: with an economy designed to serve the needs of all instead of the greed of a few, work will be less of a drudge because it serves the worker's purposes instead of the boss's, and all the dumb hatreds which divide people with so much to unify them will no longer have a basis.

There were the usual objections about human nature being capitalist (silly), Russia being Communist (silly), Socialists being utopian (silly) and sufficient working class unity being unachievable (maybe not so silly).

Then most of us bundled into the pub for a more in-depth analysis. I had one very useful discussion with a student called Nick about religion and the burden of proof. He'd been frequently stumped by the demands of believers to justify his atheism by disproving their religion.

It's odd how people who understand perfectly well how it's up to climate scientists to prove climate change, politicians to justify their policies and students to prove their abilities, still don't grasp that it's up the faithful to prove their superstitions.

But then, giving lessons in elementary logic to people whose self-worth depends on being selectively illogical has never had much effect.

Speaking of logic, there's a presentation tomorrow from a local academic on fuzzy logic. I expect we in the audiance will be told why it makes washing machines more energy efficient, but not why it still retains most of the inadeqacies of binary logic.

And speaking of fuzzyness, I then spent several hours getting drunk in the home of a sailor (also called Nick), with his friends, doing the kind of outrageous flirting only possible with men completely confident in their heterosexuality.

I like Nick - he's got the kind of casually perceptive warmth of someone who spent his youth seeing most of the planet, through the bottom of a beer glass.

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