….groan. Got loads of stuff to get on with. This morning, I’ve been working on the redesign of the Oakleaf Circle site, copying over hundreds of URLs.
And checking them, as well. I’ve got a useful little freeware program that checks links, but it can only tell me if a link is dead or not. It can’t tell me, for instance, when a domain name has changed hands and the site turned into a link farm; nor can it tell me if an online business has shut up shop and kept the site going with a “Closed” notice on the front page. So every link has to be checked manually.
Which I wish more people would do! Checking my site stats, I notice that a regular 5%-10% of visitors come from the redirect at the old Geocities Oakleaf Circle site. That one was abandoned nearly four years ago, when I bought the Oakleaf Circle domain name and got a properly hosted site. So somebody, somewhere still has that URL listed on their directory pages.
I could do a linksearch, find them and tell them about the change. But if they can’t be arsed to spend a couple of hours a year checking and updating their links, why should I bother?

…..we don’t need to examine the Universe as a supernatural creation. It is enough — more than enough — to examine it naturally. The sense of awe, beauty, wonder, and joy we feel when we view a Hubble image of a distant galaxy is a natural product of our sense of discovery. It is more amazing, and ultimately more wonderful, to think about how all these incredible things came about due to the relatively simple laws of physics, rather than try to ascribe supernatural powers behind their creation.

— Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer

I’ve finally sorted out the software problem that was stopping me from uploading pictures from my camera – turned out I needed an update for my motherboard, in addition to the card-reader driver.
So – here’s a recent picture, taken a couple of days ago. It’s the field below my house, and the loch is flooding! The water this morning was higher than that when I went out to the village this morning. But I’d forgotten my camera; the rain started again when I was out, I got soaked, and by the time I got back, I was too cold, wet, and weary to go out again.

In cas you hadn’t heard of the lady, Sylvia Browne is a famous American pyschic greedy heartless fraud. She appears on a weekly TV show, sells books, and does phone readings for a mere 700 bucks a pop (if you can’t quite run to that sort of money, her son does phone readings for only $400 a time).
Anyway, there’s a lady named Elizabeth who blogs about her health problems. In October 2004, she wrote in this post about having a phone consultation with SB:

I had seen the psychic Sylvia Brown on shows like Montel Williams and Larry King telling people what their health problems were. So I arranged a phone consultation. Guess what? She told me my problem was yeast! I said I had thought of that before and had a test that didn’t show anything and I never had yeast infections. She said it just hides itself in your system and you have to get rid of it. I tried a yeast diet for awhile but then was diagnosed with panic disorder so I kind of forgot about it. Wasn’t thinking that the panic could be caused by the yeast problems.

That was all she wrote about her. The next February, this comment appeared:

hii,
just want to know if this things are read by sylvia brown herself, if n e 1 can tell me, i need real help from a physcic. thnkx.

Elizabeth replied promptly, telling the person to try Browne’s website. But, about 3 weeks later, another comment:

dear syliva
I see you on montel all th time
i have two questions for you?
first one is I se my dad once in a ahile? my dad has past on in the year 2000
i have been married for 4 yrs hes now my husband but nmy dad has never seen my aparment up here in flagstaff?
he has woken me up whi;e i was sleeping on my couch and i thought it was my husband?
how i see my dad i seee him in white it hapened the first time when i was sick with the fu
and then i hear strang knocks at my door and there is no one there? could this be my dad is watching over me?
and the second question is do you now if i will find work sooon!
love\lori

And more followed.
And more.
And still more. Somehow, word had got round that Sylvia Browne was writing this blog – or at least reading it – and would answer peoples’ questions if they posted there.
Elizabeth did post some more in the comments, telling people that she’s not Sylvia Browne and to please stop posting their questions there; others also posted comments saying likewise.
But still the desperate questions kept coming in.
“Do you ever see me getting together with the guy i like? ”
“I am reading Mother God and I was wondering if Azna came down to Earth as the Virgin Mary?”
“I need help”
“Hello,I am so glad to finally be able to reach you som how,my father suppossably died in aug 2000,I just learned of this last year,and I hurt so badly now I miss him so very much,and I just want to know how it happened,did he suffer,”
“Sylvia I would like to know if a boy named Oscar Torres will ever like me even if I stay big”
Some of them are heart-rending:If there is a fee for this question please let me know so i can find the money to pay you? but my Husband has been missing since Sunday night June 19th,2005 very unlike him. All the money is missing from the supermarket (manhattan NY)that he’s manger of, he closes at night alone the door was left unlocked cell phone and keys were found in the store. I want to know if he’s in pain or is he alive or maybe were we can find him, I would take any one of those answers.if possiable. please his wife, miss him and worried about him. Thank You! Jean

The last time I looked (today), the comments were up to 348*. Yesterday, Ingrida posted: “i have a problem, i would like to get in contact with you. please when you see this message get in touch.”, just below yet another desperate plea from the blog’s author that she has nothing at all to do with Sylvia Browne.

These are the kind of sad, desperate people that creatures like Sylvia Browne are exploiting and using and f**king over and getting extremely wealthy from. This is one of the times when I wish there was really a Hell, so that these type of parasitic b******s will eventually end up there.

*Today, 12th Dec: 357 and rising……

Another day of illness – sometime in the early hours, I woke up with another tachycardia attack. I’ve had these attacks on and off for about thirty years, but they seem to be getting worse. They’re certainly lasting longer – just a couple of years ago, I could expect the attack to be over in 20 minutes or so. The one before this lasted for four hours, panicking me so much that I called an ambulance and got an early-morning ride to hospital (the good thing about that, from my POV, was that I finally had an actual ECG record – showing a steady and virtually unvarying 183 BPM for over an hour – of an attack taking place; previously, I’d always felt that my GPs were all rather dismissive of my accounts).
This attack lasted for at least six hours. But, this time I didn’t panic, having been reassured by the heart specialist last time that I wasn’t going to have a heart attack and that my heart was really in pretty good shape. This morning, while it was going on, I even managed to lightly doze for a while, resulting in a peculiar dream in which a woman named Pat rang me on the telephone and tried to tell me that she had the answer to my problem (“Which problem?” I asked her, “I’ve got lots” – she then put me onto some man who proceeded to wuffle on about doing things with coins; that was of no interest to me so I put the phone down on him.)
But I don’t want to repeat the experience – I got dizzy every time I tried standing up and spent the rest of the day on the sofa feeling weary and aching – so I’ve decided to start taking the beta-blockers that the hospital gave me. I tried them once before, a year or two ago, and stopped because they made me feel woozy and fluff-brained all day and gave me bad dreams at night.
But I have enough experience and knowledge of tachycardia to know that with me, it’s often triggered by anxiety. And at the moment, I’ve got a fair bit of that, what with having to rush through getting the 2008 Elfin Diary before Yule, plus having to deal with a wonky broadband connection that has seen me cut off from the interwebs for days at a time (it looks like a new wireless router is in order).

So i’m back on the beta-blockers and not at all looking forward to having a fluffy brain……

I’m well behind with reading the regular SF-news newsletters from Dave Langford of Ansible (and if you have no idea what an ansible is, you ain’t an SF fan and wouldn’t be interested in the newsletter!).
Anyway, this little list of writing howlers from SF novels, collected by Dave and his indefatigable assistants caught my eye:

Breathing Exercises Dept: `Faraday, eighteen-year-old daughter of Earl Isend of Skarabost, sat soaking up the atmosphere with her intelligent green eyes.’ (Sarah Douglass, _The Wayfarer Redemption_, 1997)
Dept of Facial Contortion: `Pym returned him a fixed smile over eyes blazing with fury.’ (Lois McMaster Bujold, _A Civil Campaign_, 1999)
Light of Other Days Dept: `She saw through its “eyes”, which were packets of specialized nerves designed to collect information from a spectrum far exceeding human comprehension, from light waves now unseen but which were common when the planet was young and newly cooled.’ (William R. Trotter, _Warrener’s Beastie_, 2006)
Dept of Teleporting Sweat, Crossed Eyes and X-Ray Vision: `Sweat rolled down the woman’s face as she spoke, and beaded on the narrow face of the other man present.’ `His eyes popped open, and for a moment they stared at each other almost nose to nose.’ `Perhaps it was the hangdog way they sat, shoulders slumped, eyes on the ground under their boots.’ (all Robert Jordan, _The Fires of Heaven_, 1993)
Serious Mainstream Dept, or My Vegetable Love Should Grow …: `He felt his cashew become a banana, and then a rippled yam, bursting with weight.’ (John Updike, _Brazil_, 1994)

Kevin Leitch has been digging up evidence of a growing alliance between the Unification Church (AKA“The Moonies”) and Scientology.
What Kevin has uncovered so far sounds a lot like the working alliances that sometimes spring up between certain types of anti-porn feminists and fundamentalist religious groups. In this case, it’s not fear and loathing of porn that unites the Moonies and the Hubbardistas; both are both firmly agin most modern Western medicine in general and vaccination in particular. (In this case, they are pushing the “mercury militia” agenda – that claim that mercury in vaccines causes autism. Explaining why this claim is so wrong would take another post; read through Kevin’s blog – he’s the father of an autistic child and an advocate of autism rights – to find out more.)
The aforementioned anti-porn alliances have never lasted much longer than a single campaign – both groups have entirely different aims otherwise. However we should not be so complacent about these two religious groupings getting together. Both are very rich, very powerful organisations with capital sunk into their respective “alternative” medical treatments and a thirst for yet more power and political influence. Seeing them getting together is not a nice prospect.

Funny thing is the human mind. Or at least, mine is.
I remember, four or five years ago, I was walking home one day. It was just an ordinary day; I’d finished work, had stopped off at the supermarket and was walking home with a couple of bags of shopping. An ordinary middle-aged mum walking through an ordinary Lancashire town.
And I started thinking about souls. Don’t know why. (Stop at the pedestrian crossing outside the library) What is a soul? (Cross over the junction by the fire station) Do all creatures have one? (Start walking down my road) What about rats? (Turn in at my gate) Do rats have souls? (Go through my door)
I don’t remember if I came to any conclusions. But for around ten minutes, I was walking along on autopilot, totally engrossed in working through this particular train of thought. A friend, passing in a car, bipped and waved at me and I never registered her. Just too busy thinking about the possibility that rats might contain the same quintessence of being that humans do.

Something similar came upon me last night. I was reading When Life Nearly Died, an examination of mass extinctions throughout Earth’s history.
Reading it is putting the current global warming crisis into context, for me at least; life on Earth has gone through several global catastrophes before, and has always recovered – eventually. Anyway, I was reading about how the tectonic plates are moving at about the same rate that human hair grows (5cm a year, if you’re interested) and that the Himalayas are being pushed upward at nearly the same rate.
And I started thinking. Here’s the train of thought:
“Maybe I’ll be reincarnated a couple of million years in the future and see Mount Everest sticking above the stratosphere.”
“There’s no such thing as reincarnation. And anyway, humans won’t be around that long.”
“But who’s to say there won’t be some kind of sentient being around then?”
“What is sentience?”
“Isn’t it self-awareness, that feeling of Me-ness?”
“So what is this feeling of Me-ness, what does it consist of?”
“Umm….”
“It’s not memories, memories are a construct, a layer upon the essential Self. Same with feelings, thoughts, emotions. All are constructed.”
“It’s just… ME. That’s all it is.”
“And everybody has it.”
“Yet it’s unique to everyone.”
“Maybe that’s what get’s reincarnated. Not memories, thoughts or anything. Just this feeling of Me-ness.” It gets reincarnated with every birth of every sentient being. ‘Cos every sentient being possesses it. And without memories or any of that other baggage, it’s exactly the same Me-ness every time.”
“So, if there’s anything sentient around on Earth and looking at Mount Everest two million years in the future – it will have this exact same sense of Me-ness that you now possess. And you, along with everybody else, WILL be reincarnated to look upon the future Mount Everest!”
“‘Course, I, as I exist now, won’t know anything about it. But it will be the exact same Me. ‘Cos Me-ness is always exactly the same.”

And there it ended (B had switched on the TV – Spooks was coming on.)
Reincarnation? I’ve got it sorted!