Protected

Protected,
originally uploaded by Andrew M Butler.

Dear Mr HMV

How am I meant to discover which DVDs a boxset contains if you plaster the security tag across it?

Discuss....

"Childhood is the need to be sheltered from adult secrets."

I have no attribution - seems to be Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Delacorte Press, 1982).

More on Pratchett and His God

From the Femail section of the Daily Hate Mail:


So what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat-show sofa?

More accurately, it was a memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was OK and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from?

Me, actually - the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis's Spem In Alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.

It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.

I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.