Equinox notes
Spring Equinox passes with a nicely coincidental solar eclipse. A quantum polarscope made from fixing the lenses from those freebie specs you get given at 3D movies to either end of a cardboard tube provided an excellent view of the solar crescent without retinal burns. It also shows amazing things if you put certain crystals or crumpled cellophane inside it.
The local birds fell oddly silent and stopped flying as the eclipse went to maximal occlusion and it became a bit gloomy, even the normally raucus rookery in the great old yew tree opposite fell reverentially silent.
Then to the huge stone circles at Avebury, just got to the pub before the cloak and runestaff brigade arrived, nice to have shamanic drumming with lunch.
Then to Grove where the most dour and saturnine Capricorn present naturally became the King of Winter and had a ritual bardic duel with the King of Summer, (portrayed by someone of a rather sunnier disposition), of course I had to lose because of the season, but,……………. I’ll be back,………. Mwahahahaha.
Nevertheless the turning of the season seems welcome; Frogmass and Toadmass begin as guests arrive in the lake at Chateaux Chaos and the Mandrakes (autumnalis variety) screech out for their annual re-potting.
Yet not all seems well in Bristol, to celebrate its new status as Green Capital of Europe, Bristol City Council has started filling in the disused pedestrian underpasses at Old Market Roundabout with SIX AND A HALF THOUSAND TONS OF CONCRETE. When I asked the workmen why they weren’t simply sealing it up they said ‘Dunno mate, crazy innit.’
Numerous tributes appeared on Arcanorium College to Sir Terry Pratchett, we shall miss him sorely. His fantasy fiction lays peppered with his deep humanism and has much of contemporary social relevance in it. Some have compared him to Geoffry Chaucer. He wrote with an insiders knowledge of contemporary magical ideas, (unlike the humorless elitist view that JK Rowlings presents), magic and gods and demons exist in direct proportion to our belief in them he opined....alledgedly there was once a coven to which he belonged in Milton Keynes back in the day....
So a fond farewell to a magnificent British eccentric and a really delightful bloke.
Post-Expansionist Cosmology attracts increasing attention, despite the consultancy role played by Yog-Sothoth of the Elder Gods in this, requests come in now for clarifications and reviews of overlapping alternative cosmology papers from various academics around the globe. The Chinese seem particularly avid downloaders of the Hypersphere Cosmology paper.
Post-Neoplatonist Magical Theory continues to supplant the antique metaphysics of the previous aeon, get a copy of The Epoch whilst the first edition remains in print.
Post-Unitary Temporal Theory remains a work in progress, maybe this summer down in quiet Wales…..
The Large Hadron Collider should fire up again this year. So far six billion euros of investment have produced a graph with a miniscule bump in it, which after some rather questionable statistical interpretation supposedly proves the existence of the Higgs mechanism which contradicts the otherwise apparently perfectly sound theory of general relativity. Maybe they will get some more little bumps but I predict they won't get any supersymmetry 'sparticles'.
Anyway, here’s hoping for sun and surf at the Gower for Eostre,….and no more winter for a while.