Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed that he is grown so great?

Here's a funny wee tale. A friend of mine graduated from the University of Canterbury with a degree in Geology. He went off to South Africa to settle accounts with his native country and picked up a job prospecting for diamond mines near Kimberley.When we caught up I asked what he did.

"I walked around the veldt with my team. I pointed to a bit of ground and said 'dig here.'"

"That's cool," I said, "How do you know where to dig?"

"I don't. One bit of ground looks much the same as another out there."

"So what's the difference between you and me going out prospecting?"

"I've got a degree in Geology."

Today I took the dogs for a walk at Gollans Point near Sumner. Do have a wee look at the link because you can see the area in its pre-quake state quite nicely. On this fine sunny nor'westerly day there were half a dozen men abseiling down the cliff face you can see opposite the car park. They were pulling clumps of rock by hand off the face of the cliff, all six of them busily using ice axes and what-have-you. Traffic was held up for a good 1000m each way while they were doing this. When I had finally got to Sumner I walked back towards Gollans Point where I could observe this at close quarters. I understood what was going on. They were stabilising the cliff face, by pulling it to bits. I know that's not immediately obvious, but I live in Heathcote Valley where cliff stabilising was proceeding along very nicely aided by dynamite until a boulder very carelessly arrived in the middle of a man's lounge via the eastern (hillside) wall and took up rather too much space. Even that wasn't enough space for the boulder, because, get this, there was a stick of dynamite still embedded in the boulder complete with charge. The lounge owner didn't bother getting into a dispute with the boulder of course; he was far too sensible for that. He took it up with the boulder's supervisor who, according to The Press, said it was perfectly safe. Although that was not by any means the only boulder to have been exploded after the quake, the whole blowing things up to make the hillside more stable seems to have fallen from favour. And fair enough too.

But pulling them down by hand? They may know better than me but frankly I think the only difference is they have a degree in geology.

The Earthquake Blues

Some of the strangest things get me bent out of shape about the quake. Things like a familiar building in ruins, obvious things like that. Or being in a crowded restaurant amid the buzz of conviviality only to hear someone say a Christchurch word, like 'munted' or 'red-stickered' and I'm back in the midst of it.

Sometimes a day will go by without an aftershock and being lulled into the delusion of security is easily possible. Then a series of shakes will take me back to the fear that struck in September and in February. In February there was darkness and no power or phone, but there was water, sewerage, the comfort of the radio and my own knowledge of geology. I could offer comfort based on what I knew and we could pick things up and carry on. Even leaving the house when it was yellow stickered wasn't too bad; we were with friends and the infrastructure was still in place. What remained with many people after September was the noise and the terror of things shaking, falling and cracking in the darkness. Our daughter trapped in her room by fallen furniture. My friend flung across the room and slammed against the wall by the force, breaking bones and putting him in hospital. Despite the mayor and the prime monster assuring everyone that no one died in September, they didn't say that they had decided what was an earthquake death and what wasn't, so that the most seriously injured survivor could be touted as a hero, even though he himself had done little other than rest up and heal in hospital. The scores of people who had died from stress-induced cardiac arrests are not listed on any role of honour and their friends and family grieve privately.

My son and I went to Wellington to celebrate his brilliant academic year. While in Te Papa we went into the earthquake simulator. After exiting in fits of laughter at how mild it was compared to what we'd been through we both recalled the noise, accurately, if a little quietly reproduced in the exhibit. It made us both recall our experiences and sobered us somewhat.

Then came February. I watched agog at the car-sized boulders bouncing erratically down the sides of the valley I live in. Fearfully I wondered how one could avoid one of those stone behemoths and resolved to get out as quickly as possible. It was the stuff of food-poisoned dreams. A stunned road worker was waving people away from the Ferrymead Bridge. I slowed down and grasped his hand. It was shaking. Crowds of people wrapped in blankets sitting on camp chairs outside their wrecked houses, dozens of them. I finally had to double back and pass by outcrops of columnar basalt, cracked and cracking. The container park, with its stacks of shipping containers six high were tipping drunkenly off their centres, looking like a giant's game of Jenga. My arrival at school was celebrated like a return from danger. I guess it was. There I heard the tales of parents running from the central city, some with blood running down their faces, terrified their children were suffering the fate of many they saw.

We didn't stick around. We left for Greenpark and a week later Auckland. That trip through the North Island was emotional to say the least. Every small town we passed through had signs in windows supporting Christchurch, red and black streamers and balloons abounded. In the middle of nowhere a huge sign reading 'Kia Kaha Christchurch' was carved into the hillside. We all shed grateful tears. Everywhere we went in Auckland people were raising funds, having sausage sizzles, busking. We got massive discounts on clothes we had to buy, places we went to visit. Furniture appeared from the most obscure connections as we set up residence in my wife's sister's garage.

Even all the hospitality from all the wonderful Northerners who gave us so much couldn't forestall the inevitable return to responsibility and uncertainty. It was a heavy homecoming. After the insulation of Northland bach holidays and friendly Aucklanders the shock was deep. Streets are frozen wave forms of the earth moving. Conical features, left over from bubbling liquefaction put CV joints and suspension at risk. The character of the February aftershocks is different to September's. Our house, so close to the epicentre is still rocked and shaken and the big ones, above 3, start us all wondering 'is this going to build? Is there worse to come?' People everywhere looked tense and drawn. Sleep deprived. A conversation at, say the garage, becoming an emotional sharing of stories of loss. and everywhere, the rubble, the broken streets, the listing houses, on sunny days the dust, on wet days the sludge. A trip across town becoming a mission amongst the demo sites and army cordons, routes changed, landmarks missed. All the time knowing that where there aren't chemical toilets and port-a-loos, there are broken sewer pipes and raw sewage flowing into our rivers and estuary.

Battered. I feel battered. And better off than many. So lucky.

God Almighty!

Atheists give me the bloody pip! They really do. It's... oh don't get me started.. no, wait this is my blog and I can say what I like: it's their arrogance, their total conviction that they are right, that they have all the answers. Well, everyone's entitled to their opinion, right? My opinion is that they are not entitled to their opinion. And the gloating! It's always Copernicus this, Galileo that, Spanish Inquisition the other thing. And Darwin? Oh boy have they got Darwin! Just putting aside the fact that the Beagle's voyage consisting of travelling to strange new latitudes, encountering strange new phyla and killing them! Yes, while the Victorians' thirst for museum-going grew and museums fell over themselves trying to acquire newer and weirder exhibits, there were hosts of scientists eager to oblige and plenty of shot for the shooters to bring down as much as they possibly could.

And science, science is always the first and last resort of these scoundrels. Science is Rational! (this is a good thing) Science is High Minded! (scroll down for some of the pettiest quarrels science has got in its back catalogue) Science is Rigorously Peer-Reviewed! (the idea is that if a hypothesis stands up to every man and his animal-quadruped-canine having a go at it, they upgrade it to theory and commence teaching it in schools).

All righty let's look at what they taught in schools, shall we?

The fifty-five crystal spheres. This is going back a ways, but the stars have been around for a lot longer and people have been looking at them for about as long as people have cared to. At around the time of Plato, who was born around 429B... er, C, OK? The Common Era? Bloody hell, it's Christ, all right? Christ. Good. Anyway, Plato had a school and one of his bright sparks was a chap named Eudoxus. Eudoxus placed all the fixed stars on a huge sphere, the earth itself a much smaller sphere fixed at the centre.  The huge sphere rotated about the earth once every twenty-four hours.  So far, this is the standard “starry vault” picture.  Then Eudoxus assumed the sun to be attached to another sphere, concentric with the fixed stars’ sphere, that is, it was also centred on the earth.  This new sphere, lying entirely inside the sphere carrying the fixed stars, had to be transparent, since the fixed stars are very visible.  The new sphere was attached to the fixed stars’ sphere so that it, too, went around every twenty-four hours, but in addition it rotated slowly about the two axis points where it was attached to the big sphere, and this extra rotation was once a year.  This meant that the sun, viewed against the backdrop of the fixed stars, traced out a big circular path which it covered in a year.

It wasn't a bad start, but the model didn't quite match what observers were actually seeing, so a few more spheres with a few more circular motions had to be introduced, until they wound up with fifty-five of them altogether. And that was the cosmos. Quite beautiful, and quite poetic really, though poetry isn't exactly scientific. It's a bit too spiritual for one thing, and that's just not rational and can't be proved in an empirical way. Aristotle, reckoned to be the bee's knees amongst thinkers, swore by the fifty-five, and good on him say I. If you have a loony notion, stick to it.

This held sway for a goodly while, some 900-odd years. During which time it became so fixed in people's heads that it was completely outrageous that anyone should thing different. The come the early heroes of the Age of Reason: Copernicus,Tycho Brahe, Keppler, Galileo, et al. Ask your average atheist who was responsible for the suppression and the obligato response is the Church. The church had an awful lot of power in them days.

Supposing you had ideas that didn't meet with the Pope's idea of a good thing. You could be excommunicated. Put outside the circle of those who commune with God through the Church. Heavy shit, because you couldn't do business - business transactions had to be sworn, usually on a Bible. You couldn't baptise any children - necessary if you wanted those children to be taught in school, in the hands of the Church; or to inherit anything of yours - administered by Guess Who, and incidentally bastards couldn't inherit anyway, or be employed by anyone. Hey! Who said anything about bastardy? Well excommunication took care of that, too, because marriage vows don't count when a couple get the cold shoulder from the Church... so all in all, excommunication is a Big Thing. A bit like membership of the Communist Party in socialist states, or carrying a Union card in places where they don't let you work unless you have one, or try and conduct your business outside the reach of the State generally, but I digress.

You see, science doesn't have any difficulty with peer reviews. Who pays the piper calls the tune and lest we forget, there were an awful lot of industry funded studies that told us we couldn't get cancer from cigarettes; that leaded petrol was perfectly safe; that Agent Orange had nothing to do with infertility or deformity amongst veterans' children; that nuclear power was so safe and cheap you would be hard pressed to even charge for it. And fights and scandals? Yes, even High-Minded Science has one or two of them in the back pocket. Alfred Nobel, he of the dynamite fame, discovered his wife was having an affair with a mathematician. That's why the maths johnnies had to come up with their own prize.

The man who helped Captain Cook navigate so successfully, a watchmaker named John Harrison, came up with an ingenious chronometer capable of keeping accurate time at sea. This enabled mariners to know where they were in relation to their port of origin - a useful thing to know if you didn't want to wreck yourself on unexpected rocks. With a prize offered by the British Parliament of £20 000 Harrison wanted a successful trial to claim it, and Cook's log was full of praise for Harrison's wonderful Watch. All good so far, except there was a competing method for reckoning longitude involving observation of the stars and the moon and calculation of those observations against almanac tables. If it sounds a touch on the complicated, it is, and rather weather dependent too - bad luck if a typhoon happened to be blowing. You think a reliable chronometer would have it all over the moon and stars, but for the slight wrinkle that the Astronomer Royal favoured the lunar-star method and he also sat on the Board of Longitude. Nevil Maskelyne kept poor Mr Harrison on a string until the poor bugger was nearly dead before George III took up his case and ensured he got his just desserts.


This is not an isolated case. Scores of tales of back-biting, feuding, slander, sabotage and murder abound in the history of science. Far from extending the glad hand of acknowledgement one is more likely to encounter brutal suppression in the scientific lark. That is unless your backers happen to have enough money or political clout to arrange that you present the right result. Whole industries of chemicals, power generation, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, space exploration and extermination of both human and animal populations are based on this neat little premise. God save us. Science probably has a vested interest in us not being saved. Empirically this is more likely than not.

Which brings me to my other bug-bear. Atheists are fond of saying there is no empirical evidence for God's existence and that the burden of proof lies on the faithful to prove His presence. Bollocks say I. I don't have to prove anything to anyone. What's the point? What possible measurement would satisfy them? How much compassion can you fit into a petrie dish? What is the correct formula for Byron's She Walks in Beauty? What colour is love?

These are stupid question. However they are in essence the questions the Atheists ask when they require proof of the Divine. "What's jazz, lady?" asked Fats Waller, "If you don't know I can't tell you." When faced with questions like "Is there a God?" the Buddha would reply "It does not further."  In other words, an inquiry like that has no relevance to the pursuit of achieving Nirvana, so why are you wasting your time over it? There can never be any point to such a question. It is a hindrance on the path to self realisation.

I think the most pathetic objection to God is "How can a being of infinite love allow such things as famines, tsunamis and volcanoes to happen?" Give me a break! I never realised Atheists had such tender spirits. That's right, they have no spirits. Tender feelings then. Shame we can't quantify those. A favourite of the Godless camp once said That which does not kill me will only make me stronger. Conflict, struggle and terror are actually the stuff of life, that is if you happened to be attached to such ephemeral phenomena. One thing Christianity offers (if you're prepared to do the work) is life eternal. All the Atheists offer is death. Yer pays yer money and yer takes yer choice.