peripathetic

Showers, but some brightness later
Richard Dawkins, in an article printed by today's Guardian Review, advocates a naturalistic worldview, along with some illuminating, even bright, asides along the way:

I once read a science-fiction story in which astronauts voyaging to a distant star were waxing homesick: "Just to think that it's springtime back on Earth!" You may not immediately see what's wrong with that, so ingrained is our unconscious northern hemisphere chauvinism. "Unconscious" is exactly right. That is where consciousness-raising comes in.

So, as with the word 'gay' which was hijacked decades ago by homosexuals, Dawkins reports on a couple of people who set up a website to enable you to self-identify as a bright. Not as bright, but as a bright. Do you have a naturalistic worldview? Go there, if you're not too embarrassed with the gimmickry of it all...

The ills of contemporary poetry are also given some attention, and in the Independent's magazine, there's an interesting, if scary, article about The Big One - the catastrophic earthquake which wil strike San Francisco sometime in the next 40 years. Sadly, The Independent is shit at putting such articles online. So it's not there.