Litigium

As the New Year approaches… If you think ‘it will be better’ in the New Year, you’re wrong. There’s absolutely no rational reason to expect the pace or pattern of cosmic change to alter simply because it’s subsequent to a man-made Gregorian moment that does not mark any particular interstellar event; is remarkable only in its insignificance, and fleetingness in the greater macrogalactic scheme of things. It’s not going to take a New Year to stop smoking; it’ll take tough self-discipline. It’s not going to take a New Year to get a better job; it’ll take guts and persistence. It’s not going to take a New Year to heal the world. Shit is gonna happen the way shit has always happened: In a high-density extrusion steam! As humankind celebrates, they gather in groups, and become silly. And many then consume alcohol (etc.) and become even more silly. Then, when they realise ‘everybody is doing it’, they become Übersilly. But as the day dawns on the first day of the n...

What I write is but an echo of what I have heard; What I write is but a reflection of what I have seen; What I write is but an inkling of what I have felt felt; What I write is but a suggestion of where I have been; What I write is but a dream of where I wish to go; What I write is but an anthology of what I have read; When I can bring echo, reflection, inkling, suggestion, dream and anthology together, Then I will not have written in vain. Until then, I write. AMB

Now who gets this lucky TWICE in one day? Watching a group of para-gliders prepare to launch from near the summit of Papaner Rothorn (2,899m) in Lenzerheide, Graubünden, Switzerland... As the first guy took off, he was looking good until a cross-wind turned him around and slammed him unceremoniously into the mountainside, twice! You'll see how he narrowly missed rocky outcrops and landed, both times, in relatively soft snow. After a thorough check-over by his buddies, he could walk away. Fair to assume he'll be feeling a little 'blue' for a few days... (Video best viewed in 1080p HD).

Though in the heat of battle, my foe was as determined and duty bound to kill me as I was to kill him, I will be magnanimous in my victory, for that is what I went into battle for. So as my vanquished ‘enemy’ and I share a cigarette, a rat pack or creased and faded pictures of our sweethearts, it’s really just two soldiers talking in a copse within a wood, a bend in a trench, or a tent in the desert, their uniforms caked with the same mud and dust, their wounds oozing the same blood, their brows stained with the same sweat, their cheeks streaked with the same tears. The measure of honour is not in our victory: It is in how we treat the defeated. A remnant of Der Atlantikwall , a seaward-facing command bunker in the dunes at IJmuiden, the Netherlands. Inspired by the sentiments of Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, defender of Moscow (1941), reliever of St. Petersburg (Leningrad) (1944), liberator of Berlin (1945) etc. - AMB * Latin: All ...

  For the last few months (at least), the ‘rest of the world’ has been subjected, ad bloody nauseam, to both US and local press coverage of the elephant and donkey circus the USA calls an ‘election’.   It has all the makings of a soap opera. Apart from a short intermezzo provided by Mother Nature (who doesn’t give a New York Subway rat’s arse who wins) in the form of Hurricane Sandy – which temporarily called Obama away from campaigning to do the job he’s paid an obscene amount to do as President – it’s been non-stop. No-doubt the Greens among us will chalk-up a victory as there is no conceivable way the aftermath of Sandy cannot impact heavily on the outcome of this ‘election’. But is it really an ‘election’ at all?   So what if it’s happening to/in the country that (if the scientists are to be believed), via pollution and overconsumption, contributes the lion’s share to global warming and climate change? It’s undeniably ironic but while it’s all well an...

Over the last few days, a drama has unfolded in the UK and European media surrounding a 15-year-old schoolgirl who eloped to France with her 30-year-old lover, who was also her maths tutor. Probably to counterbalance the “official” Facebook page that inevitably sprang-up for the occasion, someone started a page entitled Megan Stammers & Jeremy Forrest - Good Luck To You Both . An interesting, stimulating and sometimes heated debate ensued about the rights, wrongs, ups and downs of the case. From the cacophony that erupted emerged a (very eloquent) word of moderation. After some persuasion, the modest wordsmith allowed me to reproduce it here, unedited and its original form, on condition of anonymity. – AMB By courtesy of an anonymous author: My heart truly goes out to ALL those involved, both families, friends, the school, its students, meg and jeremy. There are only two people who know the truth and the facts, everyone else can only speculate. I deliberately avoided pos...

My uncle lived to 96 – almost. His body just shut-down but right until the end, his mind was crystal clear and razor sharp. In the last decade of his life, he’d often say (of people not older than 75) “take these senile old folks away! I want to talk to young people.” And young people always came away from such a chat with something they could keep. But he was an exception that proves the rule. The slowing-down of the brain (in the absence of an actual degenerative disease) after you’re 40 is not a disorder: it’s physiological. Considering you will have learned about 75 percent of everything you will ever learn by the time you are eight, after 30-odd years of making neurological connections, if you have the odd “senior moment” at 45, you needn’t panic and suspect early onset Alzheimer’s. Accepted opinion today is that your brain will have been “slowing down” since your 30s but experience might have compensated for it until now.    Nieuwjaarsduik, Wijk-aan-Zee, 01 Jan 201...