h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

*Watches the strange folks BBQ-ing outside in the cold from the safety of the window seat*

*Gets bored*

*Retrieves marker, and begins doodling people fighting the mini-dragons with large butterfly nets*

*Ponders the idea of adding some helicopters; nixes that idea since helicopters are hard to draw*

*Wanders back to the window, looks outside, and shrugs*





*Makes lots of for when anyone comes back inside*

all is not lost yet, paulh. i will try to make it to london no matter how bleak my chances look now. there is still hope

Glad to hear it!

Pavlova anybody?

Myself, I prefer duck in the form of a stew, with carrots, onions and potatoes, same things one puts in a roast, prepared with more water and long, slow simmer.

...or shu mai, a kind of chinese ravioli, with the duck wrapped in a won-ton noodle.

Chinese dumplings are delicious!
I'm not very good at making them, sad to say.

i remember danny kaye singing "there once was an ugly dumpling..."

was he by any chance inspired by your cooking, paulh?

He never tasted my cooking. That may account for his long life.

Is there a badge for the Useless Bloody Loonies yet? Something a 'UBL' design suitable for blazoning like an 'SPQR' in the capital of a Roman standard?

Re: post 90, please bear with me. I'm going into a manic phase. More typos than usual to be expected for the moment.

I'm so useless that I don't know how to design a badge.

Ah ITIWBS

SPQR...

Means??


GT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPQR

A popular icon of the ancient Romans displayed at the forum and the capitals of standards, same principle as the icon of the nursing wolf bitch that was supposed to have suckled Romulus and Remus displayed in the chambers of the Roman senate.

Senatus Populusque Romanus

The Senate and people of Rome.

I got a shiver of excitement a few summers back when I was in Rome, and saw the Colosseum and other surviving artifacts from the Roman period. It's a magnificent place, even in the presence of its ruins. The one significent thing that Rome lacked was sensitivity. Christianity eventually provided this, but the resulting Romanization of Christianity weakened the Empire enough to hasten its dissolution, and Rome's effect on Christianity made it more susceptible to corruption and callousness.

But that's just my opinion. I am always interested in new research that reveals more about Christianity's first 100 years, when it was not yet an "official" religion. I sincerely believe that it had something precious that was lost in centuries 2 through 5. Can that something be found again? What about the many prominent women who are named in the New testament for their inestimable work in getting Christianity started. The patriarchal Roman culture diminished the role of women generations later.

SPQR, famously changed to SPURS by Morcambe and Wise

Did they use SPURS on the Western frontier of the empire?

The badge concept in a spirit of mockery of course.

Currently reading from "The Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius, one of the 'five good emperors'.

On early Christian history one of the controversies has to do with a putative fifth gospel by an author refered to as 'Q', from which material in the others gospels is supposed to be derived, thought by some to have been a woman.

Also the gospel according Mary Magdalene is still accepted by at least some of the Gnostics, if by none of the Catholics.

The first official canon of the bible was commissioned by Constantine on the prompting of the Coptic Patriarch, but does not survive.

Various modern authors have tried to reconstruct the Book of Q, which is said to have been a collection of things that Jesus said. I read one such reconstruction, but I don't remember who the author was. It might have been Burton mack or (more likely) Marcus Borg and Thomas Moore. Harold Bloom might have done a preface, though I'm not sure of this. I've seen parts of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which no one knew the existence of until 1945, when a treasure trove of buried scrolls was turned up in Nag Hammadi, Egypt.