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GAIA AND HOMOSAPIENS

***** The Richard Dimbleby Lecture by HRH Prince Charles, titled “Facing the Future”
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***** Documentary - 43.39 min | Ihe Arctic - A Changing World - The Nature of Things
CBC - December 3, 2009 - Short sponsor's ad precedes film.
target="new"> - FILM ^

Jordan Page Pendulum Music Video
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"Listen" By Jordan Page
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NoteThe symbol ^ denotes that that article can be read in full at the link. Articles with text in italics are from last issue.

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Imaging Life

Literature for the Season - A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas
BFS Media
- LINK ^

This article is complete aa presented here.
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared.

We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows - eternal, ever since Wednesday - that we never heard Mrs. Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor's polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder.
"Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.

And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.

Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and smacking at the smoke with a slipper.

"Call the fire brigade," cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong.
"There won't be there," said Mr. Prothero, "it's Christmas."
There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting.

"Do something," he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke - I think we missed Mr. Prothero - and ran out of the house to the telephone box.

"Let's call the police as well," Jim said. "And the ambulance." "And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires."

But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?"

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."

"Were there postmen then, too?"

"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells."

"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"

"I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them."

"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."

"There were church bells, too."

"Inside them?"

"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."

"Get back to the postmen"

"They were just ordinary postmen, found of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles ...."

"Ours has got a black knocker...."

"And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches and huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out."
"And then the presents?"

"And then the Presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, with a rose on his button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly glinting hill. He went in his ice-bound boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs.

"He wagged his bag like a frozen camel's hump, dizzily turned the corner on one foot, and, by God, he was gone."

"Get back to the Presents."

"There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why."

"Go on the Useless Presents."

"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run.

And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons."

"Were there Uncles like in our house?"

"There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles. And on Christmas morning, with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the swatched town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post Office or by the white deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out. Men and women wading or scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos, huddles their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow.

Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires; and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers. Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers."

Not many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, fawn-bowlered, yellow-gloved and, at this time of year, with spats of snow, would take his constitutional to the white bowling green and back, as he would take it wet or fire on Christmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes two hale young men, with big pipes blazing, no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn sea, to work up an appetite, to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the waves until nothing of them was left but the two furling smoke clouds of their inextinguishable briars. Then I would be slap-dashing home, the gravy smell of the dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince, coiling up to my nostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side lane would come a boy the spit of myself, with a pink-tipped cigarette and the violet past of a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch, leering all to himself.

I hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle to my lips and blow him off the face of Christmas when suddenly he, with a violet wink, put his whistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so high, so exquisitely loud, that gobbling faces, their cheeks bulged with goose, would press against their tinsled windows, the whole length of the white echoing street. For dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept.

Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens. Auntie Bessie, who had already been frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had some elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush. I would blow up balloons to see how big they would blow up to; and, when they burst, which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled. In the rich and heavy afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending, I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar.

Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to the seaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets, leaving huge footprints on the hidden pavements.

"I bet people will think there's been hippos."

"What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?"

"I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill and then I'd tickle him under the ear and he'd wag his tail."

"What would you do if you saw two hippos?"

Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snow toward us as we passed Mr. Daniel's house.

"Let's post Mr. Daniel a snow-ball through his letter box.

"Let's write things in the snow."

"Let's write, 'Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel' all over his lawn."

Or we walked on the white shore. "Can the fishes see it's snowing?"

The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying "Excelsior." We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay. And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs and the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house.

"What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?"

"No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas. I'll count three." One, two three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door. Good King Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen ... And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.
"Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said.

"Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading.

"Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did that.

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

A lot of this page I owe to my parents, for it was they who eased my life financially, and made it possible to do not only this project, but a gaggle of others. For that I will always be grateful.

It was also they who had the courage and wisdom to emigrate from Wales to Canada in 1963 to provide for me and my brother, a better life. I can't say if my life would have turned out any better had we stayed in the land of song. But, I can say that regardless of where my brother and I were brought up, we were the benefactors of two people who were always there for us, who sacrificed so that we could enjoy, who showed through example the difference between right and wrong, and the joy of helping others. If I could comfort my own children half as well, I would know that at least one little piece of the world will be a better place.

Mum and Dad let me offer you now, this statement of love and thanks, publicly for all you have done, and I dedicate the "Child's Christmas" page to you.

***** An Editorial for the Times

The holiday gauntlet
Toledo Free Press - By Eric McGlade - December 23, 2009
- LINK ^

This article is complete aa presented here.
Forgive me for playing Scrooge here, but I am always amused, and sometimes put off, by what stokes the passions of people around the holidays. Of course, there is the whole “Black Friday” thing. When I was a younger man, I used to get up early and go to these bizarre store openings, not to shop, but to get preaching material … and the free doughnuts that various businesses would provide. I would get enough, (preaching material, not doughnuts), to last me into Lent.

Then there is all the righteous indignation out there generated by those who think the PC (politically correct) crowd has gone too far. You know the stuff, the so-called “war on Christmas” guys you hear on talk radio and Fox News who are always up in arms over some alleged slight of the baby Jesus. I understand now the latest of these manufactured dramas is that of the rumored renaming by our obviously “Marxist and anti-Christian” president of the White House Christmas tree to a politically correct “holiday tree.” Of course, none of this has happened. I am certain that the Obamas love the baby Jesus as much as any other first family that has occupied the White House … perhaps even more than some.

The fact that some people believe that Christianity, by far the largest religious group in America, is being oppressed by the concern that we respect people of other faiths in our public conversation boggles my mind. Growing up, my mother taught me that what is being defined today as PC is nothing more than having good manners. Our Jewish friends have a great tradition in Hanukkah. Kwanzaa, though in relationship to the ancients is the new kid on the block, seems like an ennobling tradition. Our Muslim friends have a legitimate claim as well on the calendar. How is honoring that diversity disrespectful to the Christian faith?

What truly amazes me is what many of us religious types don’t get upset about. So many of us will go to the mat over the alleged renaming of a tree, but ignore the fact that America will spend $450 billion on Christmas this year. AdventConspiracy.org reports that if we were to siphon off just $10 billion of that to address water-borne illnesses, the lives of 1.8 million people would be saved every year. Where is the outrage about this addiction we have to consumerism? We will fuss and complain about having to share our holiday with other traditions, but ignore the fact that 16 percent of us cannot get health care because of pre-existing conditions.

When that number reached 5 percent in Switzerland, people literally demanded an end to the market based practices that caused this. (“The Healing of America” by T.R. Reid). Where is the outrage on this lack of concern for what Jesus called “the least of these?” While many will dispense with quaint homilies about Jesus being the reason for the season, we are expanding this war in Afghanistan, and expecting less than ten percent of our population to shoulder the burden of this sacrifice, while transferring the costs to future generations. Where is our outrage over the injustice found in this?

It seems that so many of our religious impulses today have been shaped by marketers and cheerleaders. The grand traditions of the ancients that shared substantial visions of swords being beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks … of justice rolling down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream … of the wolf lying down with the lamb … have faded so much from our consciousness that we are left to the conventions of our own petty appetite for consumables and silly debates on the nonsense of what to call the community tree.

The world is a seriously broken and wounded place and deserves better from those of us who claim to live life in faith. The ultimate object of our faith and affection deserves better. A little less manufactured outrage and a little more reasoned concern would go a long way to getting us from sword to plowshare and spear to pruning hook. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Have a great Kwanzaa or whatever faith tradition excites your passions and brings you meaning.

Eric McGlade is a United Methodist minister who lives and works in Bowling Green.

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Topical News

Arts and Culture

Many familiar songs with unfamiliar sources
News from Mortons Gap
Pennyrileplus.com, Madisonville, Kentucky - By Jennifer Nelson - Wednesday, December 23, 2009
- LINK ^

This article is complete aa presented here.
Well, folks, it’s that time of year again. This is the annual “story behind the song for Christmas” column. I’d like to start off with one of my personal favorites, “I Wonder as I Wander.” John Jacob Niles said he based this song on a line or two of haunting music that he heard sung by a young girl in North Carolina. He asked her to sing the notes over and over, paying her a few pennies each time until he had written it all down.

“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is one of the most mysterious of all Christmas songs. There are several sources of its origins and meanings, some of which I found no solid evidence to support. In the Middle Ages, religious holidays, especially those of the Christian faith, were practically the only holidays, so rich and poor alike tried to extend such happy times as long as possible. Christmas became 12 days of celebration, beginning at Christmas Day and extending to Jan. 6, which is called Epiphany (when the Magi were thought to have arrived with gifts for the Christ child). In the 16th century, counting songs were very much in fashion, which is why this song is thought to have been so popular and remains so to this day.

Religion and Philosophies

Merry Christmas, to one and all
Lompoc Record - By Steve Petty - Friday, December 11, 2009
- LINK ^

This article is complete aa presented here.
Ten more days until the solar cycle renews and the sun starts its return to the northern hemisphere; winter solstice is the darkest day for us up here north of the equator. We hardly think of it in today’s world of eternal electric light, but ancient people held this day in holy reverence. Monuments large and small abound around the globe where people without a written language, as we know it, marked the passage of days and the travels of the earth and sun.

From Stonehenge to Chaco Canyon we can imagine these astrologers waiting in the hours of pre-light for the sun to send its rays of light through a passage to a distant wall marked just for the occasion. The festivities that followed reminded the people that God had not abandoned them, light and warmth would soon return, followed by green buds, colorful flowers and hopefully abundant crops by the end of summer, so the parties were splendid.

For weeks leading up to the solstice, people prepared for the party; special clothes, foods, decorations, games, dances, festivities of all kinds were waiting for the ancient shaman to proclaim the day.

Knowing the day well ahead, the wise man wraps himself in the ceremonial blankets or robes and assembles his elders and messengers. Sunrise and the light dances down to the marker stabbing it like a saber. “Aha! Now! Let the celebration begin/

Christmas Decoded? What New Discoveries in Nazareth Tell Us About Jesus
Huffington Post - By Bruce Feller - December 22, 2009
- LINK ^

Just in time for holiday deadlines, Israeli archaeologists announced Monday they had uncovered remains of the first dwelling in the city of Nazareth that can be dated back to the time of Jesus. Digging not far from Basilica of the Annunciation, where tradition says the angel Gabriel visited Mary, archaeologists found remains of a wall, a hideout, and a water system that appeared to collect water from the roof. Researcher Yardena Alexandre also found clay and chalk vessels used by Galilean Jews of the time -- an indication the home belonged to a simple Jewish family.

The findings suggest Nazareth was probably a small hamlet with about 50 houses populated by poor Jews.

Christmas Around The World
My Stateline - Tuesday, December 22, 2009
- LINK ^

Have you ever wondered how other countries and cultures observe this time of the year? Here's a look at how others are spending the holiday:

Belgium -- On Christmas Eve, a special meal is common.

It starts with a drink and some nibbles, followed by a starter course such as seafood, and then stuffed turkey. Father Christmas is called Saint Nicholas, and he brings presents to children on December 6th, "St. Nicholas Day," a long time before Christmas. Small family presents are given at Christmas too, under the tree, or in stockings near the fireplace, to be found in the morning. Christmas breakfast is a special sweet bread called 'cougnou' or 'cougnolle' - the shape is supposed to be like baby Jesus. Some families will have another big meal on Christmas day.

Click link above for customs in other countries.

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