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

Dreams being Ideals that I hold and try to live up to.
To know
To understand
To act
Not as easy as it first sounds.

Greetings again
Wejut

Very true. I've had the same dreams myself from quite a young age, which over a period of mumblety years {oh, alright, I'm 49) has produced the following consequences.
I now know quite a lot of stuff (mostly trivial).
I still don't know even more stuff (if there's anything really world shattering it's in this category)
I understand a bit more than when I started, but again it's mostly not new. There have always been people who can see the problem, but the majority are always too concerned with their immediate troubles to see that those troubles are part of a bigger pattern.
When we act we act on our immediate surroundings. Unless you've got resources (power, wealth or social solidarity) you can't get at the real problems in any significant way. And those who have the first two aren't keen on giving them up. Which is why the third is so actively discouraged/manipulated.
As an individual I try "to walk lightly upon the earth", but even that isn't easy in a society that encourages waste and conspicuous consumption. And I try to pass on that sense of repect to the next generation. When they'll listen.


There's plenty of thinkers on h2g2, it's just a question of finding them. Try surfing other researchers' personal spaces for interesting conversations and use THOSE for picking out interesting researchers.


Regards
Sage


P.S. Where does the name Wejut come fom? It sounds vaguely like some ancient Egyptian God(dess).

Your last post could very well have been my next post.

I have this HUGE urge to research - EVERYTHING - which as you can imagine - is a ridiculous goal. So I work on the rule of three.

Rule of three states.
If in a short period of time you hear or are confronted with something three times you HAVE to do something about it.

This leads to rather obcessive behaviour. I have a book filled just with facts about the number 7. There are some really odd things connected with the number 7.

Research on the number 7 lead me to write a modern opera with a composor friend of mine, that will quite probably get us labeled as heretics and burned at several stakes.

As for wejut. Well, you'll thgink I am quite crazy, but I am used to that. So here is the TRUTH! Which I don't tell many people so a feeling of well being and honor should be giving you a really warm hug just about .... .... ... NOW!

I can draw and interpret people's auras. And according to everyone I have drawn I am spookily accurate. (Wont bore you with the story of how this happened other than to say I meditate at least once a day).
As I result I am very comfortable with and am able to talk to my spirit guide who happens to he Horus (Egyptian falcon headed diety son of Isis and Osiris)
Cutting the story shorter Horus has had his eyes ripped out and restored, one is the moon and the other the sun which means he can see things others can't. which is probably why he looks after me.
(As an aside I have ALWAYS had my invisible friend from childhood and since I am 34 most people would try to say I was a wacko, but he has saved my life so often I wouldn't dare not believe in him.)
I digress (so easy to do) so the internet is full of wackos so when I first got on here Horus told me to use his name for protection. But there are billions of Horus names all over the net. So I thought, his eyes. Now there are several spellings of ouidjut (the name for one of his eyes) but they were all used as well. So I phonetically spelt it and whalah WEJUT.

I hope to talk to you again soon.
Stay safe friend.
Wejut

I am honoured by your confidence.
And a wee bit smug that my guess was so near the mark. (Well, we all have our little faults.) I am not, after all, an authority on ancient Egypt, and even though the subject exerts the same fascination on me as it does on most people who bump into it, I don't know enough to sort the probable from the improbable, or the 'what should be taken symbolically' from the 'what should be taken literally'.
You'll probably have noticed that I've just undergone a nomenmorphosis. My original name was a salute to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, sometimes referred to as the Sage of Koenigsberg, the small Prussian university town where he lived all his life, first as a student, then a professor. (It's now called Kaliningrad and is in that little bit of Russia that's sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania - end of geography lesson.) Unfortunately most people seemed to assume it was a reference to a herb that you mix with onions and stuff chickens with. My new name is a reference to a cartoon character from the early days of British TV; "Listen. I will tell you a tale. I will tell you a tale as it was told by the Norsemen of old as they sat round their great log fires..." They don't make cartoons like that any more. (Nowadays they make them with pictures that move - whatever happened to using your imagination, eh?)
Your story is fascinating, but I have to admit that it's a bit off the beaten track of my own experience. Not that my own track is particularly well beaten; mostly it's a question of hacking my way through uncharted territory (only to find a tree with 'Kilroy was here' carved on it in the densest part of the thicket).
The 'rule of three' seems to be a general heuristic for the human mind; once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times there's something going on. But it's only a rule of thumb; the human mind is a pattern chaser, and it's so good at it it sometimes chases patterns that aren't there, seeing faces in the clouds and hooded figures in darkened rooms.
You've been to my personal space, and may have noticed that I call myself a Zen Materialist. It's half joke and half serious, but I find that humour has a way of sneaking up on parts of the truth (no capital T on this one) from unexpected directions. And I suppose I use it as a reminder to challenge the set patterns of my thinking, but at the same time not to throw away the core rules that keep my feet on the ground.

for now

Not once did I think of stuffing you up a chicken. I could if you really wanted me too, but I'd rather not. Unhappy chickens are a dangerous lot.
We were talking about imagination today. (I am a teacher. Or did I mention that already.) It was amazing to some of the other stauncher teachers that some children don't need to prove to them that they know the answer to what they are asking. In fact that had no idea that some children are so smart they find the asking of some questions quite insulting. They then label those children as dumb.
I used to be one of those children, and now I wonder why I didn't ax murder most of my teachers as I wanted to do today. Some people are so totally lacking in imagination that it scares me. And we leave our children in the care of these people.
Sorry for the rant. Had to share it with someone, and you mentioned it.
Hope you are well.
Haven't mastered smiley's yet.
Wejut

Yes, I never really flourished at school myself. Always wanted to do my own thing. To be fair, I suppose a class of 30 kids ALL doing their own thing would be as unproductive as over regimentation; the problem is getting the balance right when the right balance is different for different people (students and teachers both). Speaking as a seasoned pontificator with absolutely no specialist knowhow whatever, I wonder whether people can be TAUGHT to think for themselves, or whether it's mainly a case of appropriate encouragement.
Speaking personally I do most of my best thinking in a fairly switched off state, so I often have little idea how I actually arrive at solutions to problems; the reconstructions I use to convince myself and others are made up backwards, so to speak. This is quite important too; if the reconstruction fails to convince it's back to the drawing board!
Work aside, what's it like out in NSW. Most of us Brits have stereotype visions of a land full of people called Bruce and Sheila, hats with corks, and sheep of course. And 'Neighbours'. Probably not a word of truth in any of it, of course.
And we only have one coal mine left in old South Wales, and I can't sing to save my life, which puts paid to most of our national stereotype, too.
Last, but not least, smileys., which I have only just got to grips with myself. So I'm practising on you.
Just click on any smiley and it will take you to h2g2's smiley page where you can learn all there is to know about them.


Stay

Facts and fiction about the land down under:
1. Don't know anyone named Sheila and only know one Bruce.
2. Have had a friend who used to raise orphaned kangaroos, but that's not very common. Out west, which is sort of where I live there is further west, but that's for another time, there are lots of kangaroos but they ar mainly dead on the side of the road and off eating crops.
3. Koalas are firece little bastards who have hair like steel wool and they wee on you alot.
4. I do not walk upside down, neither do any of my friends. But would like to learn how.
5. Neighbours isn't exactly true. I don't know anyone in my street and I've lived here for months.
6. The beaches are very sandy and beautiful, though far from where I am (6-7 hour drive at 110km/h) the sharks are nasty and are known to eat people who aren't careful.
7. Our Prime Minister does have very ugly eyebrows.
Can't think of much right now. Ask anything and I'll let you know.

Stay safe
Wejut

Well, if you're not walking upside down it must be us! Can't tell you how to do it, though. Must be like riding a bike, but with worse consequences if you fall off!
Our Prime Minister is pretty scary, too. I haven't seen a fixed grin like that on anybody sane in many a long year. I only voted for him because the alternative was the leader of the opposition.
I don't know how the school terms run in Oz, but up here the kids have started their summer hols and we've actually had a few days of nice weather to celebrate, which makes a change, British weather being one of those stereotypes which is pretty much true.
Other Welsh stereotypes:-
1) Everybody is called Dai Jones (except me, but I'm really English); this is almost true, except for the women, who are called Gwendoline.
2) Male voice choirs; there are still lots, but not as many as there used to be. (This may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your point of view).
3) Rugby. Still the sporting pursuit of choice for most; bit like Oz really.
4} Cricket. A game invented by people who thought golf was too exciting. An English plot.
5) Sheep. Lots of those.
6) Coal mines. True thirty years ago. Now there's just one; you can see two disused pits from my house.

The Welsh are, of course, the original British. The English were originally Germans, and the Scots came from Ireland.
Speak to you again soon.

Noggin the Nog

Probably because we're mostly sad convict stock... Not so due to imigration in actual fact but we all still like to believe so, especially those of us who have traced our ancestory (not me personally but my sick and twisted Aunt) back to the second fleet (Oh well, can't all be perfect) and some guy who stole a loaf of bread or something stupid like that, we have a lot n common as countries.

We actually have two types of Rugby.
Rugby league and Rugby Union. League being the one with meat heads in baggier shorts tackling and stopping and starting and scrums where one man tries to push two men up three mens bums while the other side does the same. And Union with the tighter shorts, they guys that pile on one the top of each other and they have throw ins and what not. I'm not a big sports fan. Actually, I hate it with a passion. Except before I completely destroyed my knee I used to play indoor (not ice) hockey. When I was 14 I was playing in the biggest mens comp in Sydney in first grade. I was pretty good and fearless. Then I grew a few brains and the doctors stopped x-raying my feet cause they couldn't tell old breaks from new ones and still I played until my knee was buggered forever. Sport sucks.

Cricket - my god, do you have to be in a coma to play it as well? Israel and Pakistan are bombing the (insert favourite bad word here)out of each other. But the cricket scores and not being able to play on some field in some other country is the lead story on the news. What the....!!!

Sheep, lots of them. We rode to prosperity on the sheeps back or so the legend goes. Finest Merions in the whole of the universe. That sort of stuff. My view on sheep. They are so adorable as babies. I love raising orphaned lambs - but then they grow up and get dumb and ugly, but they taste good with mint sauce. And I loe wool jumpers.

Mines. I'm not happy about selling Uranium and plutonium and all the other nasties we dig out of the ground. We have lots of mines. If fact I don't know what we don't mine, but it's a big country and the mines are spread out. Only a few cities have the situation you have there.

Did I sound cynical? I didn't mean to.

Will try to learn how to walk upside down so you don't have to...
Until then, stay safe.
Wejut

Hi, it's me again. Meant to post you sooner, but I never seem to find the time for all the things I HAVE to do, never mind the things I WANT to do.
Why is it that just at the time in my life that I want to ease off and just contemplate things a bit I seem to have less and less time for it?
A touch of the Monday s about that last remark I suspect. I quite enjoy my work, actually (I'm a shopkeeper, by the way, which probably sounds a strange job for a philosophical type, but there you go), but getting up in the morning is definitely NOT my strong point.
I think that the bit between waking up and getting up is the best part of the day, and it's usually much too short.
Don't know much about my ancestry, most of my ancestors popped their clogs before I could ask them. (Ancestors, eh? Who needs them?)
My mum claims to be descended from royalty, which given the way royalty puts it about could just be true, but I THINK it's just snobbery. Perhaps I could try nuking Buck House and waiting to see if anyone turns up to offer me the throne?
Rumour has it that the recent contretemps between India and Pakistan was, in fact, cricket related, and that Kashmir was just an excuse. It makes about as much objective sense as a religious war, anyway. Fundamentalism is one of the few things that really gets my goat, I have to admit, whether it be religious, nationalistic, political or whatever. It's all 'me first' dressed up in whatever stock phrases come to hand. Sorry, I'm ranting again, but fundamentalism REALLY is one of the few things etc. etc. Personally I'd lock them all up in a little room and not let them out until they managed to agree on something.
Sorry to hear that your knee is crook, by the way. Do you still get about OK for ordinary purposes?
Speak to you again soon.


Stay

Howdy again, good to hear from you.

I believe that whenever you want time to think the whole of the universe gangs up on you and causes ten million distractions. Because if you weren't distracted then you may figure out the real (Sorry DNA) answer to Life the Universe and Everything. Then you wouldn't need the Universe and so it would dissappear in the same puff of logic that God did.

I suffer from Monday blues but it lasts for four more days. I actually go to school half an hour before school starts so I can spend half an hour getting over the anger at being there. If I'm not there half an hour early I spend the rest of the day angry at being there.

I also set my alarm at 6:30 am knowing that I wont get out of bed until 7am so I can have half an hour of that NOT-QUITE-AWAKE feeling. I have three alarm clocks so I can time it right.

Also can't bare fanatics. I think your little room is a good idea, but I bet they'll all die before they reach agreement, still that's a good outcome.

Knee is OK except cold weather or if I kneel on it. I don't have any cartlige on the back of my knee cap so as long as the ridges stay put, it doesn't hurt to much, but if I move them I swear and I've had muscle removed from the side of my leg to help it glide better. but you get that.

Hope you are happy and well
Wejut