An English Atheist bids you
Hello and Welcome
Sitting here drinking too much coffee, eating too much chocolate and smoking too many cigarettes whilst running up a massive 'phone bill, I thought it was time to stop surfing and start building. This is the result...
Mission Statement
Haven't really got one - I'm not trying to sell anything or convert you to my way of thinking. Few people have anything really useful or interesting to say, but everybody wants to say it anyway and we are all competing for your attention.
This site is basically an eclectic collection of random junk; things that I find amusing or of interest to me.
I freely admit that you'll find a lot of useless junk here too. It's seems to be some sort of byproduct of cyber space. What you won't find, though, is "and here's some pictures of my little doggie dog, isn't she just the most adorable creature you've ever seen? "
I also flatly refuse to display a "My Awards" page. Even though I've received 427 awards most are given merely to provide a link to the giver's site, and take ages to load.
You may not agree with everything that's written here. You might not 'get' a lot of my humour. In fact, I hope to generate at least a little controversy, if for no other reason than to make the dialogue interesting and you can always post a response in my guestbook or forum.
My name is John. I live in the United Kingdom, I'm 52 years old ~ married to Heather, a beautiful Scottish lassie with red hair, and a temper to match. If you're into astrology, I'm a Scorpio. Personally, I think it's a load of bunk, but that's a typical Scorpio for you.
Heather, unfortunatly, is disabled with severe osteo-arthritis and fibro-myaglia syndrome, and I am her fulltime carer.
For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.
And we, that now make merry in the Room
They left, and Summer dresses in new bloom
Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth
Descend--ourselves to make a Couch--for whom?
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and--sans End!
Alike for those who for To-day prepare,
And those that after some To-morrow stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
"Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There."
Omar Khayyám, From His Rubáiyát
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed
with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for
the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance
of reading a document written on another computer, another word
processor, or another network."-Tim Berners-Lee in
Technology Review, July 1996
The above quote is from a page written by Cari D. Burstein to express the sentiment behind the "Viewable With Any Browser" campaign and I've added the button and link because I share his sentiments about those annoying sites that are designed with a specific browser in mind.
All the pages on this site should be
viewable with any browser - although some older browser won't
read CSS and some HTML tags, all the text and images should still
display properly.
Unless, of course, you are still using Internet Explorer.
Even IE8 is still turgid, buggy and bloated, the only really useful features being Porno mode, a.k.a. Private Browsing Mode, which prevents IE from caching any pages or form data, and automatic search for highlighted text. Whoopie.
From exo.blog:
Over the course of several days, we evaluated IE 8 under both Windows XP (SP3) and Vista x86 (SP1) to determine how this major update behaves and what, if any, new burdens it might place on today’s over-taxed (in the case of Vista) Windows PCs.What we found was another example of unchecked Microsoft code “bloat,” complete with “shirt-bursting, waistline-stretching” memory consumption and the kind of CPU-hogging thread growth normally reserved for massively parallel server farms.
No matter how you slice the data, IE 8 represents a massive expansion of the baseline runtime requirements for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. Meanwhile, the Firefox folks continue to embarrass Microsoft by “doing it better” (including delivering superior performance and overall standards compliance) while consuming fewer hardware resources. How these efficiencies will play in the aforementioned multi-core future remains to be seen.
Do yourself a big favour and download Firefox. Your computer, web page designers and future generations will thank you for it.
PATCHOULI DREAMS
Memories submerged and hidden Emerge
unbidden woken by the waft of patchouli scent
Faces I’d thought forgotten teenage paths trodden, words and images from before you went.
Dark unbound hair, your menthol cigarette, how can I forget the years spent dancing to ‘Stairway to Heaven’?
Your singing laugh, your wax-pale face, your sweet lips’ taste. The saddle-wax and scent upon black leather. We spent those years in a perfumed haze in patchouli days sharing cigarettes and promises uncaring of the cost.
Does your fringed leather grow dusty in cupboards musty, does Chanel replace patchouli, do you still burn fragrant ‘Joss’?
So many years now you’ve been gone, what went so wrong? Dreams grown stale as an incense haze. Have you hung your flowing skirts away For tamer days with patchouli scented memories of wilder, carefree ways?
A dark-haired girl drifts in my mind, left far behind when we grew away from Rainbow and Pink Floyd, Hippy juice and leather wax bring memories back, spiralling downwards into an echoing void. Copyright 1990, S Hartwell