this friday, december 7th., is our 28th wedding anniversary.
her ladyship and i intend to visit our favourite restaurant, dimitri's, for a slap-up greek meal plus a considerable quantity of excellent wine.. its a time when we like to reflect on our life together, the lows as well as the highs that we have experienced over the years.
mainly, our life has been one of laughter and fun.
Englishman,
Sounds to me like each of you climbed back into the dinghy with a good catch. Maybe early on her Ladyship was impressed with the size of your rod and reel? Other bawdy puns about deep sea diving also leap to mind . . .
Happy Anniversary to you both.
Ginny
anyone know of anyone who has been disfellowshipped who has deaf and mute impairment?
how did they cope and what support network platform is there for them on leaving?.
peace.
(Just checking for Helen Keller jokes.)
Ginny
ok.....any response will do, but if you're going to post a funny one, please also type your real thoughts along with it.. as for me, i'm pretty wild, but stable.
i never mention or show my fears; especially if my wife is around.
i can't bear to make her nervous.. ashi
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I'm schizophrenic
and so am I.
the reality of impending death is our one certainty.
if we are fortunate enough to live for 70 years, we will have lived for 840 brief months.. the womb to the tomb is a rapid journey.
i once wandered through a cemetery in a town called rochester in the uk and always having a fascination for last words, i happened upon the c19th tombstone of a man who had been fatally struck while playing cricket!
These are not original, but I thought I'd share them anyway.
Ginny
Here lies an Atheist
All dressed up
And no place to go.
Here lies the body
of Jonathan Blake
Stepped on the gas
Instead of the brake.
Here lies Lester Moore
Four slugs from a .44
No Les No More.
1. we got pubs.
1000's and 1000's of pubs.. 2. liz hurley.. 3. manchester united.. 4. the harrier / concorde / a380xxx.
5. we got more overseas territories than anyone.it is still true, even now.. 6. the s.a.s.. 7. lots and lots of steam railways!.
1. Her Ladyship and those gesturing hands
2. Englishman, who gives her something about which to gesture
3. Jane Austen
4. Thomas Hardy
5. Shakespeare
6. Samuel Johnson
7. Monty Python
8. Rowan Atkinson
9. Benny Hill
10. Patsy and Edina
(oooh, a few more!)
11. Hyacinth Bucket
12. Shirley Valentine
i don't know if this has ever been brought out - i just thought of it:.
the bible tells us that it rained for forty days and forty nights.. it stopped raining and noah & co floated around for a bit.. when they landed, noah sacrificed some of the animals (weren't they in short supply?
) and god promised never to bring a deluge upon then earth again.. to back this up, there was a rainbow in the sky as a sign.. now, what causes a rainbow?
This is from The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara J. Walker under the heading "Flood":
The biblical flood story, the "deluge," was a late offshoot of a cycle of flood myths known everywhere in the ancient world. Thousands of years before the Bible was written, an ark was built by Sumerian Ziusudra. In Akkad, the flood hero's name was Atrakhasis. In Babylon he was Uta-Napishtim, the only mortal to become immortal. In Greece he was Deucalion, who repopulated the earth after the waters subsided, with the help of his wife Pyrrha and the advice of the Great Goddess of the waters, Themis. In Armenia, the hero was Xisuthros--a corruption of Sumerian Ziusudra--whose ark landed on Mount Ararat.For those who want to read more, the following books are referenced in this article:According to the original Chaldean account, the flood hero was told by his god, "Build a vessel and finish it. By a deluge I will destroy substance and life. Cause thou to go up into the vessel the substance of all that has life." Technical instructions followed: the ark was to be 600 cubits long by 60 wide, with three times 3600 measures of asphalt on its exterior and the same amount inside. Three times 3600 porters brought chests of provisions, of which 3600 chests were for the hero's immediate family, while "the mariners divided among themselves twice three thousand six hundred chests." It seems that Noah's ark was much smaller than earlier heroic proportions.
As long ago as 1872, George Smith translated the Twelve Tablets of Creation from Ashurbanipal's library, and discovered the earlier version of the flood myth. Among the details that religious orthodoxy took care to suppress was the point that the god who caused the flood was disobedient to the Great Mother, who didn't want her earthly children drowned. Mother Ishtar severely punished the disobedient god by cursing him with her "great lightnings." She set her magic rainbow in the heavens to block his access to offerings on earthly altars, "since rashly he caused the flood-storm, and handed over my people to destruction."
Old Testament writers copied other details of the ancient flood myth but could not allow their god to be punished by the Great Whore of Babylon, as if he were a naughty child sent to bed without supper by an angry mother. Thus, they transformed Ishtar's rainbow barrier into a "sign of the covenant" voluntarily set in the heavens by God himself (Genesis 9:13).
The Tigris-Euphrates valley was subject to disastrous floods. One especially was long remembered; geologists have linked it with the volcanic cataclysm that blew apart the island of Thera (Santorin) and destroyed Cretan civilization. When Sir Leonard Woolley was excavating the site of Ur, he found the track of a mighty flood--a layer of clay without artifacts, eight feet thick. Such a flood may have been identified with the watery Chaos that all Indo-European peoples believed would swallow up the world at the end of its cycle, and out of which a new world would be reborn in the womb of the Formless Mother. The ark and its freight represented seeds of life passing through the period of Chaos from the destruction of one universe to the birth of the next. Even in the Bible, the "birth" was heralded by the Goddess's yonic dove (Genesis 8:12).
Gnostic literature preserved the older view of the flood-causing God as an evil destroyer of humanity, and the Goddess as its preserver. Because people refused to worship him alone, jealous Jehovah sent the flood to wipe out all life. Fortunately the Goddess opposed him, "and Noah and his family were saved in the ark by means of the sprinkling of light that proceeded from her, and through it the world was again filled with humankind."
The Greek Myths, Robert Graves
Middle Eastern Mythology, S.H. Hooke
Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, W.R. Lethaby
Gods, Graves, and Scholars, C.W. Ceram
Assyrian and Babylonian Literature, Selected Translations
Epic of Gilgamesh
Shakti and Shakta, Arthur Avalon
The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels
Ginny
i was talking on the phone about a week ago with a poster from this forum, and when he found out i was from south bend, indiana, he asked me if i had gotten together with the group of indiana posters that were having a small gathering (around bloomington i think?).
the truth is, i havent had one-on-one contact with too many from this board up till now, save some frequent chat room visitors, so i didnt realize we had an indiana following.
after my name appeared on the whos who page, i did get emails from a couple people familiar with the area, but i would like to get in contact with the rest of the indiana posters.
Hi, Dubla!
I'm from Bloomington, Indiana, and recently had a small Apost-O-Fest here in southern Indiana. I know of at least two other posters on the board who are also from Indiana, and I will mention your thread to them and see if they wish to respond and reveal their locations.
For these gatherings, I've usually had to import apostates in from Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and elsewhere. It's great to know that the homegrown variety are available, too. I love to travel, so that's helped in meeting lots of apostate folks.
You're welcome to e-mail me if you'd like to talk about getting together. I can also watch for you in chat.
Ginny
what i'm debating is this.... and creationist probably wont be able to help.
reproduction is the driving forve of evolution, so why does evolution not simply favour the genes of those that reproduce the most...i.e.
not the most fit, intelligent, etc.. and if this is the case, why does the world not fill up with rampant nyphomaniacs?
Ballistic,
why does the world not fill up with rampant nyphomaniacs?Who says it hasn't? Haven't you been in jw.com chat lately?
I know little about the fine points of evolution and usually prefer to observe such discussions without comment.
Having offerred that caveat, I would question the basic premise. Is reproduction the driving force of evolution? How is "reproduction" defined? If you think of reproduction in an immediate sense, producing large quantities of children would make sense. Taking a longer view, quantity could actually inhibit survival and reproduction.
On the recommendation of Dogpatch, I have been reading Global Brain by Howard Bloom. If what Bloom says is true, there are two main schools of evolutionary thought--individual selectionists and group selectionists. He explains it this way:
The individual selectionists who dominate today's neo-Darwinism believe that humans and animals are driven by the voracity of genes. A gene sufficiently greedy to guarantee that many copies of itself make it into the next generation will rapidly expand its family tree. Genes which program for self-denial and give up what they have to help out strangers may fail to breed entirely. Their number will shrink decade after decade until the unselfish utterly fade away. Those who survive will be cynics preprogrammed by natural selection to commit an act of generosity only if their donations pay off in hordes of progeny.All other issues aside, I am amazed at Howard Bloom's ability to write about science in highly readable and eloquent prose:Meanwhile, another school of evolutionary thought has been driven underground. It is known as group selection. Those few willing to admit to their belief in group selection argue that individuals will sacrifice their genetic legacy in the interests of a larger collectivity. Such a need to cooperate would have been necessary long ago to make a global brain and a planetary nervous system possible. On the other hand, if the individual selectionists prove correct, humans and earlier life-forms would have been unwilling to share knowledge which might have given others a competitive edge. If selfishness is the force that drives us, there are future consequences, too. The cyber-ocean of the World Wide Web and its coming technological successors would be a barracuda pit rather than a meta-intellect.
The instant of creation marked the dawn of sociality. A neutron is a particle filled with need. It is unable to sustain itself for longer than ten minutes. To survive, it must find at least one mate, then form a family. The initial three minutes of existence were spent in cosmological courting, as protons paired off with neutrons, then rapidly attracted another couple to wed within their embrace, forming the two-proton, two-neutron quartet of a helium nucleus. Those neutrons which managed this match gained relative immortality. Those which stayed single simply ceased to be. The rule at the heart of a learning machine was already being obeyed: "To he who hath it shall be given. From he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away."What a love story, eh? Perhaps the world, in its most elemental sense, is filled up with rampant nymphomaniacs.Protons, on the other hand, seemed able to survive alone. But even they were endowed with inanimate longing. Flitting electrons were overwhelmed by an electrical charge they needed to share. Protons found these elemental sprites irrestistable, and more marriages were made. From the mutual needs of electrons and protons came atoms. Atoms with unfinished outer shells bounced around in need of consorts, and found them in equally bereft counterparts whose extra electrons fit their empty slots.
And so it continued. A physical analogue of unrequited desire was stirred by allures ranging from the strong nuclear force to gravity. These drew molecules into dust, dust into celestial shards, and knitted together asteroids, stars, solar systems, galaxies, and even the megatraceries of multigalactic matrices. Through the connective compulsion "a terrible beauty was born."
Ginny
i posted something similar on beliefnet following the availability of the awake article on human rights posted by kent on the watchtower observer board.. jehovah's witnesses and the wt society, in particular, are in favor of promoting human rights when it suits them.
when the wts was associated with the un they listed human rights as one of their interests.
it should be noted that the wts wrote a very favorable article about the un and the issue of human rights in late 1998.
Human rights may be of interest to the Watchtower Society but they ought to learn what human rights are and live by the ideals of the declaration of Human Rights in their own house first.
Bravo, Thirdson!
Ginny
i've narrowed it down to three choices:.
bonnie raitt singing..... "that summer night in texas, baby.
too hot and wet to sleep.
My vote is for something by Leonard Cohen.
There's I'm Your Man, from which I find it difficult to choose just one line . . .
If you want a loverOr Take This Waltz:
I'll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I'll wear a mask for you
If you want a partner
Take my hand
Or if you want to strike me down in anger
Here I stand
I'm your man
If you want a boxer
I will step into the ring for you
And if you want a doctor
I'll examine every inch of you
If you want a driver
Climb inside
Or if you want to take me for a ride
You know you can
I'm your manAh, the moon's too bright
The chain's too tight
The beast won't go to sleep
I've been running through these promises to you
That I made and I could not keep
Ah but a man never got a woman back
Not by begging on his knees
Or I'd crawl to you baby
And I'd fall at your feet
And I'd howl at your beauty
Like a dog in heat
And I'd claw at your heart
And I'd tear at your sheet
I'd say please, please
I'm your manAnd if you've got to sleep
A moment on the road
I will steer for you
And if you want to work the street alone
I'll disappear for you
If you want a father for your child
Or only want to walk with me a while
Across the sand
I'm your man
Oh I want you, I want you, I want youor Ain't No Cure for Love:
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lily
In some hallways where love's never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take its broken waist in your hand . . .And I'll dance with you in Vienna
I'll be wearing a river's disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder,
My mouth on the dew of your thighs
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
With the photographs there, and the moss
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
To the pools that you lift on your wrist
Oh my love, Oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz
It's yours now. It's all that there is . . .
I'm aching for you babyGinny
I can't pretend I'm not
I need to see you naked
In your body and your thought
I've got you like a habit
And I'll never get enough
There ain't no cure,
There ain't no cure,
There ain't no cure for love
