Lola lived 5,700 years ago in what is now Denmark. Her image, created with the help of DNA taken from a lump of chewed birch pitch, suggests that fair-haired Scandinavians are a modern phenomenon

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ancient-human-lola-given-face-thanks-to-stone-age-chewing-gum-3qhqxflsg

Can’t believe it’s four years since this front cover

And 88 years since the first SANTA COCA COLA … Haddon Sundbolm started working on the iconic character in 1931 …

MY SON AND GRANDSONS LIVE IN SYDNEY … TODAY, ONLY 2 MINUTES ALLOWED IN THE SHOWER!

The two main Australian parties— centrist Labor and the rightwing Liberals—are BOTH RESPONSIBLE for Australia’s water crisis.

A report from the Australia Institute has revealed that dozens of large dams have in fact been constructed in recent years, but not for the public good.

Martin Scott writes: “The recently constructed dams in the Murray-Darling Basin do not help drought-stricken towns, struggling small irrigators or the wider public. They are built with taxpayer money on private land mainly for the benefit of large corporate agribusiness like Webster Limited”.”

I never imagined that back in the 1980s, the discovery, and subsequent theft of, half-a-millennia old Northern European ‘stag carvings,’ would become a core event in my personal story over many decades.

‘My’ fugitive stag took me on a quest that led to Goddess, or what Goethe calls the ‘Eternal Feminine.’ Together, ‘she’ and I toured European culture, past and present, exploring social, cultural, theological and philosophical ideas within my spiritual heritage.

Much of what I saw was a ‘Waste Land’. I even thought at one point that I would be stuck in “rats’ alley.”

Poetry helped save me. Beauty became my redemptrix.

And much to my surprise, the record of my adventure ended up not as a prose poem but a screenplay. A film flirting with the world of arthouse and high concept films!

But only flirting.

The ‘Fugitive Stag’ is an exciting adventure story with broad audience appeal.

And a tagline supplied by one of the greatest writers of all time, the Russian Dostoevsky – “Beauty will save the world.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gut-instinct-leads-enterobiotix-scientists-to-a-microbiome-wonder-drug-8fw8k0t3d

Faecal transplants are one of the great hopes of medicine. The microbiome, the diverse populations of microbes living in our guts, has been linked to a range of diseases. 

A front man for the age-old God of Violence and War

He had nothing to do with the real Jesus, who was his antithesis.

This ‘god’ goes back at least 3,300 years ago to Zoroaster and his mythical world of ‘goodies-and-baddies.’ The ‘god’of superheroes, be they Jewish, pagan, Muslim or Christian. The god popularized in the third century A.D. by Mani.

Mani, the patron saint of today’s media and its world of the epic battles between good and evil, or as Jesus would have it, baddies-and-baddies.

745 years after his death. Mani rules the Media. O.K.!

One of my favourite actors …

Cyrano de Bergerac, Playhouse Theatre, review: James McAvoy left me speechless https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/cyrano-de-bergerac-playhouse-theatre-review-james-mcavoy-left/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_tw via @TeleTheatre

A great tagline for a movie – half of it 150 years old! Thank you Dostoevsky (from his book ‘The Idiot.’)

The really real ‘Father Christmas’ – fact not fiction.