Weird dream

I was wandering at night in an unfamiliar city when I saw two larger boys accost a smaller boy named Gosnout and take him away in a car with what seemed to me ill intent. It took me the rest of the dream, which was packed with interesting characters whom I have now forgotten and probably lasted about three seconds real time. to find a police station and inform them of what I had seen. They were much nicer about this than they would have been in real life, but I still left with the feeling that I had failed to impress upon them the urgency of the situation.

But I knew what I had to do next, which is the same as I have to do now; go and buy some fresh veggies for the Countess before she wakes up. The blood sugar has not been as in control as it should have been, and that is my fault. Onward.

Lulu promotion

http://www.nyrond.co.uk/stuff.html has nothing new yet (next Mershane book in February) but this weekend you can get twenty per cent off any Lulu order with code TREASUREUK. That's any of the books (mine or the Countess's) or my CD.

A fable

There once was a school
Where the teachers were cruel
And made everybody drink tea.

So the students escaped
A fine vessel they shaped
And they sailed away over the sea.

They found a new land
Where the scenery was grand
And a shiny new school came to be

Where the rules were all fair
And they promised that there
All students would always be free.

But the new land was full of dangers, and there soon came to be a division among the students. Some were gentle and scholarly, and stayed within the borders of the new school, studying hard and practising to be lawyers and thinkers, while others sought adventure in the uncharted lands to the south and west, and they became brave and boisterous and impatient with the regulations and routines of the school. Neither kind was bad, and both were needed if the whole land was to become the school grounds, which, in due time, it did. But the two kinds chafed each other, as very different people sometimes do, and in the new, broad lands their differences came to be writ larger than they ever could have been in the cramped confines of the old school.

And one day the Adventurers ran out of adventures. There were no more new lands to be conquered, no more new peoples to be mastered, nowhere for a man to stand and look out over undiscovered country and say "one day this land shall be mine." And the Thinkers, following the Adventurers into the new land, tried to impose the new school's rules, which even though they were fairer than the old school's still bothered the Adventurers, who had got used to bending them or even breaking them whenever they wanted. But they couldn't make anywhere else to go, so they settled, reluctantly at first, to live under the rules and to dream of adventure and glory elsewhere. And they polished their weapons, which had been so necessary for everyone's safety in the first days, and cherished the rule that said they could keep them.

And for their part, the Thinkers found that they had almost (but not quite) run out of new thoughts to think. The rules were about as good as they could be, especially when the Adventurers resisted to the bitter end any suggestion of adding new ones, and even fought some of them with the weapons that nobody could take away from them. A bitter resentment grew between the two tribes, made worse by the fact that, according to one of the first and most powerful of the rules, both Adventurers and Thinkers had to be represented in the government, and as is the way in such cases, both formed powerful parties to impose their thinking on the lawmakers. The Adventurers' time had passed, but they refused to accept it; and the Thinkers were weaker, because they saw both sides, whereas the Adventurers only saw their own.

And the Adventurers were still brave, and boisterous, and impatient with rules as an Adventurer must be, and very few of them were bad; and the Thinkers were still gentle, and scholarly, and concerned with fairness and decency, and very few of them were bad. But there were enough bad people on both sides to trouble the school's history from that day to this, and since now the school was very big and powerful and had many weapons, even the old school, and all the other schools in the world, now looked, and felt, very small and weak, and some in those schools were scared of the new school and what it might do if the bad people became powerful enough.

What happened next? Who knows?

(EDIT: none of this is, of course, to say that Adventurers can't think, or that Thinkers can't be brave. It's a fable. The real world isn't that tidy.)

True Blood--a fairly non-spoilery thought on one scene in this episode

So, they are just flat out writing television for the slash fans these days, then.

(To which the Countess responded: "There are more of us than there are of you.")

Astrology

Apparently something has happened (I don't know precisely what, but it may have to do with Ophiuchus and the precession of the equinoxes, which is old news to serious astrologers but who cares), and [EDIT: insulting phrase redacted] various sceptics have been popping up to point and laugh at the stupid people who believe inanimate balls of gas and rock know what you're going to have for breakfast next Tuesday, or something. [Paraphrase is a composite of various general comments on astrology from Terry Pratchett, David Langford and others, and does not refer to any specific comment on this issue.]

So I thought it would be a good time to re-run my speculative theory about the origin of astrology, which I arrived at using my special variant of Occam's Razor, in which you go with the simplest explanation that fits all the available facts and doesn't depend on everyone except you being a moron. Here goes, then:

1. The personality traits came first. Gazing into the sky and propitiating the gods is all very well, but I think it's been fairly well established that your successful king, general or merchant tended to be a pragmatist and was more likely to pay good money for something which would tell him useful information about his subjects, customers or enemies. The traits were not made up, they were observed.

2. Once they had been observed and codified, some form of classification would have been needed, and animals have always been linked in folklore to particular qualities of humans, so that would be a useful way to go. Some people are like bulls, some are like fish and so on. (I seem to remember being told that we went through various systems before arriving at the current zodiac, but I'm not sure what they were.)

3. This is where the stars come in. Looking for some way to explain the progression of animal-like traits they'd discovered, the ancient astronomers found that if they grouped the stars along the sun's path in a certain way and really used their imaginations, they could find the relevant animal shape in the position where the sun was at the moment of the person's birth. To be honest, I'm quite surprised they thought of this at all, since barring an eclipse it's kind of hard to see the stars immediately behind the sun. It doesn't seem intuitive, if you see what I mean. Nevertheless, think of it they did.

4. And this is where the gods come in. "Why is there a bull in the sky?" people would ask, after the relevant constellation had been pointed out to them ("No, there...well, try squinting a bit..."). And the ancient sages eventually came up with a story, which by the time the Greeks came along had been fully incorporated into the corpus of myth surrounding the tenants of Olympus. This explains the bittiness of the stories and the unlikely selection of bods who got asterised.

The beauty of this theory is that it's not in any way a defence of astrology itself. I personally believe there might be something in it, but it's just as likely that the original observations were flawed, that witnesses were inadvertently led, that cold reading techniques were employed. Humans are a diverse lot and don't fit easily into any number of boxes, so all that could ever have been observed and codified were broad tendencies which could have been illusory.

What it is, I think, is a right way round view of events which are commonly viewed in reverse; that the ancients, looking for ways in which the gods might have shaped the souls of humanity, decided the stars were full of creatures and then arbitrarily imposed their characteristics on people. Nothing within the history of science (as far as I know) has been decided that way, and it's not a very sensible way of going on whether you believe in gods or not. My way of looking at it has as much chance of being true as any other version, and it's a good deal kinder to our ancestors, to whom we owe a fair bit.

And it opens up the possibility that the progression of personality traits documented by ancient astrologers, if it exists, has absolutely nothing at all to do with the stars or the planets as such, but has some other cause which nobody has bothered to look for, because opinion is polarised between "it's true, and it's the stars" and "it isn't true at all because the stars explanation doesn't make sense." If that's so, it explains why the precession of the equinoxes hasn't affected the casting of birth charts in any significant way (till now, and if it does I think it will just mess things up for honest astrologers).

That said, if you want to pour scorn, go ahead. I have no proof to offer, nor any particular emotional investment in this issue, so be as sceptical as you like. And if you know something which knocks my theory into a cocked hat, do please share.