GrandmasterP

..... I had a great uncle Wilf. Wilfred Moorhouse Dyson. He was a champion runner in his day.

I agree entirely. Both Adam and Eve were equal opportunity parents. Cucumbers though, good vegetable for discussion of lineage as a metaphor for dispersion of knowledge. Cucumbers were known to be cultivated around 3,000 BCE in Egypt Didn't reach France til the 9th Century First recorded under cultivation in England in the 14th century and it took another 200 years for them to reach north America. You can eat cucumbers, they have a market value; but arcane knowledge has less culinary or financial use and is consequently so much the less popular. Just imagine then how hermeticism did or did not travel, how; and over what time scale. No way can there be any unbroken hermetic lineage-knowledge outside of someone's imagination.

Blonde Chinese here. Careful where you tread with this one though though lest you step into a big steaming pile of eugenics. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/11/no-romans-needed-to-explain-chinese-blondes/#.UM7rznwgGSM One of our chaps an archaeologist and part time spy, Sir Auriel Stein (possibly the model for Indiana Jones) discovered the blonde mummies back in 1910 and the Nazis went to town making what they could of his discoveries some quarter of a century later. Which was ironic in a way as Stein was born a Hungarian of Jewish ancestry.

Knees up Mother Earth Robert Rankin's sequel to The Witches of Chiswick Hermeticism at its most surreal.

Of course America has also exported Gods. There was Elvis.

Origami could well be the mystic link here. Chinese had paper, Egyptians papyrus...... Wizards Hat is a popular Origami fold.... http://www.ask.com/Q/how-to-fold-origami-wizards-hat Makes sense if you think about it.

Old is a state of mind. I try to act my shoe-size and as a leap year baby, I have only had 15 real birthdays so far.

Hideous tragedy. Lots on the MA forum on this... http://www.martialtalk.com/forum/showthread.php/106751-WTF-Is-Wrong-With-People

Sounds good. You can't beat home grown veggies for flavour and sheer satisfaction. We had our first first early spuds today, grown under glass and lit. Delicious, always manage a few round Xmas.

Now our wireless had accumulator batteries that I had to carry to the bicycle shop and exchange for charged up ones when they went flat as we did not have the electricity until 1958. When it did come to our village my grandad said... "Well it's alright but it'll not catch on round here". He was wrong, we got our first TV in 1959. End of an era that was.

70% effort maximum is a popular figure. Expend any more and you are maybe overdoing it.

Ta ;-)

Isn't Dave Wood mathematics at Warwick?

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/comfortability Too late. ;-)

We do pretty well for public parks in England for such a small country. Central Park layout was copied from Birkenhead Park across from Liverpool. Urban homesteading is a great idea you really don't need too much space to grow lots of veggies given a bit of careful planning.

...... Spot on, excellent book, that idea that immigrants sort of import their gods along with themselves.

Thor for example. You must don't hear about him that much these days. Those Caesars who reckoned they were Gods.. All gone. Lug's another. Loads of dead Gods there must be.

You are not old K. I remember the old Home Service musical broadcasts on the wireless. My how those long dark winter evenings just sped past to the foot tappin' rhythms of Joe Loss and his Orchestra and the Swingle Singers with their 'Sing Something Simple' close harmony stylings each and every Sunday evening.

Keep it in your trousers, they told us on overseas familiarisation in the army. No cause, no cure needed. On track though, Fred wasn't always ill and he wrote some good sense. That whole God is dead schtick is about right though I reckon. Below a certain minimum number of believers maybe Gods sorta perish. Metaphorically.

Canada is about as tooled up as the USA is but has far fewer gun crimes per capita. Singapore is wall to wall people and almost crime free. I don't reckon the OP theory has legs.

Yep, that and no antibiotics back then. I nursed one of the very last tertiary syphilitics in England back in the late 70s. GPI it was called. Gross Paralysis of the Insane, poor chap had to have everything done for him.

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Alice in Wonderland.

We have a State Church here the Church of England and our dear Queen, who many will know is a woman; is the head of it. In their wisdom they have just voted against permitting women to become Bishops. Go figure!

You'd need to read the paper Recep, it's to do with sacred dance.

Terry Pratchett has a nice take on Gods in his book Small Gods. He reckons Gods ebb and flow in power and influence according to the numbers of their believers. Lots of believers = Powerful God. Tiny sect = Tiny God