I only noticed this news report as the Long Way Up featured the superbly enigmatic Nazca Lines in Peru. Something I wanted to see since I read the daft Chariots of the Gods. Now to me this latest discovery looks a little....naive.....! Is it fake news I wonder ?
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-54593295 (thanks to Mark in posting about the Chilean riots and sending me down a rabbit hole in the BBC's South American coverage)
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>> daft Chariots of the Gods.
Erich von Daniken; one of my boyhood heroes. How are the mighty fallen!
Where are the cat's whiskers? Or are South American cats clean shaven?
And it doesn't seem all that relaxed either. I've seen a similar expression on our cat A when it comes upon cat B polishing off cat A's breakfast.
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I also read Erich at the time. Only recently I discovered he is still alive, and had an email address, so I sent him a message.
It was really spooky, because he didn't answer.
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It was a very trendy read amongst some of us (mainly male) in my peer group at the time.
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It was he who sent me off on a life journey, starting with his mad aliens, but then getting interested in related stuff, also mad, like those bonkers Victorian secret societies, then the Golden Bough, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Crowley, Mathers, Colin Wilson's stuff...it goes on. All odd but great fun if you don't take it seriously, and a bit of an historical byway for most.
It's not what they say, it's the way that society needed/wanted their stuff at particular times and why that's interesting to me.
So thanks, Erich.
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Chariots promoted a life-long love of SF and indeed opened my eyes to the geographical and cultural aspects of the Peruvian lines. In reality no reading is really wasted - the book still sticks in my mind forty something years later.
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Off thread I’m sure I learnt to read with a verse about the cat on the mat. Maybe I’m getting confused with ‘ The cat in the hat’. My CA elementary teacher friend tells me they still celebrate Dr Seuss Day in their school, and I have a tatty T shirt emblazoned with his characters which she bought me.
Boy I wish I could smoke now whatever he was on when he dreamt up those characters.
I can when I next fly there as she has a medical licence to cultivate her own stuff.
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Why does junk stuff like that spouted by Daniken appeal when real history and real science is so much more fascinating?
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von Daniken's stuff was crap even according to my 15 year old brain. Ridiculous and unrealistic garbage.
It's true though, it was quite the fashionable read in those days.
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Is it just me not to have the slightest clue what anyone is talking about?
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>> Is it just me not to have the slightest clue what anyone is talking about?
Sooty.....
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F
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>> Sooty.....
Thanks, never heard of it.
Last edited by: VxFan on Tue 20 Oct 20 at 13:15
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>> Why does junk stuff like that spouted by Daniken appeal when real history and real
>> science is so much more fascinating?
It's a mystery. People see a light in the sky for which there could be credible explanation based in our knowledge of the world, but they think it is an alien space ship.
And there are horoscopes...I don't believe for a second there's anything in that but then of course I'm a Gemini and we are notoriously sceptical.
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I'm a Gemini and we are notoriously sceptical.
Snap.
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Is it just me not to have the slightest clue what anyone is talking about?
A badly drawn cat on a hillside and some ancient Spacemen...simple !
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I absorbed this type of crap in my early teens. Suspect GOD'll be along soon to enlighten us.
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I never realised he wrote so many books. I too 'lapped up' Chariots of the Dogs and a fair few others as well.
I see Crankcase has followed a path (up the garden) similar to mine over the years, I wonder if he has read any of Max Freedom Long's books?
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>> I see Crankcase has followed a path (up the garden) similar to mine over the
>> years, I wonder if he has read any of Max Freedom Long's books?
He hasn't, and after looking at his Wikipedia entry he isn't inclined to. Sorry Dog. But I did enjoy finding that the name of his wife was Jessie Diffendaffer.
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>>Jessie Diffendaffer.
:o)
Howls about 'The Secret', Cc. I have it on 2 CD's given to me by a friend quite some time ago.
I may get round to listening to it ... one day.
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That's a secret you can keep. Or you can read the Celestine Prophecy for all eternity.
As Jim Royle might have said - prophecy my a***.
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I've 'dipped my toe' into Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Crowley, Wilson, Sai Baba, Prabhuupada, Deepak Chopra, Buddhism, Swedenborg, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi from when we were 'into' TM. Isaac Tigrett and many, many others.
All good fun of course.
I still very much believe in unidentified frying objects - especially when my wife is doing the cooking.
:o}
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I can honestly say I’d no idea what star sign I was. Apparently it’s Cancer. Sign of the crab. I’ve no idea what that means. And something to do with water, which makes sense as I’ve spent every late afternoon swimming in the sea for the past week.
Which is a total coincidence with my travel plans and Llareggub to do with star signs
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>> I’ve spent every late afternoon swimming in the sea for the past week.
Oh pee off (how do I type this in green?).
>>Llareggub. I know what Dylan was saying.
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The one that really annoys me is the UFO sightings.
For goodness sakes, a Hollywood star gets her kit off at night, alone in darkest Africa and there's a gazillion cell phone pictures on the internet within moments.
A f. great space ship lands in the middle of Arizona, beams people up, travels through time and then returns them to the same spot and no b****** sees a damn thing, never mind photographs it.
Last edited by: No FM2R on Mon 19 Oct 20 at 19:15
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Shaceships are invisible. Surely everyone knows that. You have to set your camera to infra red to capture their heat signature.
www.livescience.com/21672-invisible-ufos-fill-skies.html
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>> Shaceships are invisible. Surely everyone knows that. You have to set your camera to infra
>> red to capture their heat signature.
Shoe Menders, Everyone knows they have cloaking devices, as developed by the Romulans, and employed in upgraded Klingon D7 class battlecruisers.
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We lived in Wiltshire some years back. Crop circles were all the rage at the time. There seemed to a rag tag bunch of grubby, long haired people who performed various mystical rites at Stonehenge, Avebury ring, Silbury hill, Kennet long barrow etc and drove around in clapped out old vans. Crop circles were just another excuse to infer some form of metaphysical influence. The only unifying thing that I could see was that they all turned in Trowbridge to pick up their benefits on the appropriate day and buy lager.
Some years later a neighbour in the village we lived in together with his pal had taken drink. Later that night they disappeared into a nearby field with the brilliant idea of impressing a design into the ripening wheat crop. It was a big yohoho until the farmer caught up with them and presented them with a bill of £150 each for the damage caused. After a bit of argeybargey in which the name of the local constabulary was invoked they coughed up, much to the amusement of villagers. So crop circles aren’t caused by little green men, druids, space visitors but rather by destructive morons. Who would have thought?
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Besides, the Vogons wouldn't have given permission for such frivolous rubbish.
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Yesterday a NASA Spacecraft landed on an asteroid 300 million kilometres away, performed an amazing manoeuvre to take a sample of the rock and is standing by until the scientists have communicated with the craft and calculated the weight of the sample. The sample will then be returned to Earth after a two year journey and hopefully will throw light on the origins of the solar system
This merited but a few lines in most newspapers as the public aren’t interested in real science
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The asteroid is the size of the Empire State Building. Pretty impressive to hit a target that small from 300 million miles.
The physics of the tragectory must be very complicated.
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I lov e some of the stuff they are doing in space. That one that landed on the asteroid, they were expecting to grab 60g of substance but may have got up to a kilo. It's be travelling close to teh asteroid for a while, and the surface wasn't a smooth landscape as they expected, it was really rough. So they had to pre-programme the manding to an area the size of a tennis court, as messages took 18 minutes to reach the craft so they couldn't do it live.
Once it took off from the asteroid they were going to photo the grab to see if it had anything at all, and then extend an arm and do a manoeuvre of the whole craft which would allow them to calculate how much they had. If they were happy then they'd set it off towards home otherwise they were going to set it up for another try.
I think the results are expected in 2 years. So this has been travelling all that time primarily for this one operation. I suppose on a daily basis there isn't much to do, just wait and watch, but the excitement in the related labs and control room must be immense. So much planning must have gone into it. What an achievement!
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>> What an
>> achievement!
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And yet, and yet.
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Probably staged to coincide wiv Trump's and sleepy Joe's 'upcoming' erection.
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>> This merited but a few lines in most newspapers as the public aren’t interested in
>> real science
There is a UK Sitcom called "This Country". It's kind of a fascination of the horrible thing, not unlike "The Office". However, the reality in "This Country", though amusing in places, is fundamentally depressing in its accuracy.
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Bit of a shame if they find, after a journey of millions of miles from asteroid to earth, that all they had was an ice cube which thoughtlessly melted on the way down!
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Cats on mats - hawkeye
