TimeSplash Twitter Tour Starts Now!

The TimeSplash Non-Stop 24-hour Round-the-World Twitter Tour starts soon. The process is complicated but all you need to know is that I'll be in your timezone between 7pm and 8pm during the next 24 hours. To shout out to me as I go by, send me a tweet on Twitter.

This is my Twitter ID: @graywave ( http://twitter.com/graywave )

I'll be using the hashtag #timesplash if you'd like to follow the whole thing (and have lots of stamina and a very high tolerance for me saying "Hello New York", "Hola Argentina" "Gruetzi Switzerland" and such for the next 24 hours.)

Don't forget to shout. And if you know people in odd places, tell them to shout out too. I've a feeling some parts of this are going to be very lonely :-}

Beachcombing With Kurt

I was talking to Wifie the other day and I pointed out that the length that hair grows to on different parts of your body is a function of the speed at which it grows and how long (on average) each hair lasts before it falls out. She looked at me in surprise and asked, 'How do you know that?' I just shrugged, and said, 'I dunno. How do I know most things I know?' Meaning, I just pick these things up, mostly from things I have read.

I am, in fact, a vast repository of arcane knowledge. For example, I know that the centre of our galaxy is in the direction of the constellation Saggitarius, that the wavelength of green light is about 500 to 550 nanometres, that the average length of a marriage in the West these days is under ten years, that Groucho Marx once said, 'I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.', that Karl Marx is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, and so on and so on. I have no idea where most of it came from. I read a lot of stuff.

However, I noticed myself learning a piece of trivia today. I'm reading A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut and he mentioned in passing that Marco Polo brought back pasta (to Italy) from the Chinese. This struck me as such a singular fact that I know I will remember it. And this must be how I have learnt so much of what I know – by picking up interesting tidbits from novels, histories, biographies, science books, magazines, even TV shows and films. For example, I'm also reading Master and Man, a collection of short stories by Leo Tolstoy (and, yes, I often have two or three books on the go at once) and I'm discovering all kinds of interesting background about 19th Century Russian society, the care of horses, cobbling, how to navigate a horse-drawn sled in a snow-storm at night, and so on. Some will stick. Some will not. It's hard to tell, at this point, whether I will have retained anything from the experience in a year's time.

But the pasta-from-China thing will stay with me. I'm sure of that. As will the terrible sense of sadness that A Man Without A Country communicates. It's awful to think that Vonnegut was so disillusioned at the end of his life and so ashamed of what his country had become. It makes me want to have been able to comfort him – with something like, 'Don't worry about it. Nothing we become will even remember what America was in a million years' time,' or 'So what? We were just monkeys, playing a bit too roughly maybe. None of it really mattered.' You never know, it might have helped.

Anyway, I plan to keep A Man Without A Country handy and hope that, as I re-read it over the years, something more substantial than facts about pasta will stick to my neurons.

Religious Bigot Bans Gay Pride March In Moscow

If you read my previous blog posting and thought I was perhaps overreacting to the dangers of allowing people who are not quite sane – because they believe in magical beings - to run the world, then you might like to consider yesterday's Gay Pride march in Moscow. The march was banned by the city authorities but marchers went ahead anyway, trying to deliver a letter to the city's mayor, Yuriy Luzhkov. They didn't make it.

The march was attacked by right wing-protesters and the marchers were beaten and abused while the police looked on. Eventually, about 70 of the marchers were arrested when the police finally intervened. (Some put the number arrested as high as 100.) Later still, the police also arrested some of the right-wing attackers.

I mention this not because I think gays should have fair treatment in Russia (although I think that everyone should have fair treatment everywhere) but because of the reason the mayor of Moscow is reported to have given for his opposition to the march. He is on record as saying that Gay Pride marches are “the work of Satan”.

So here is a man who believes in magical beings, he feels that these magical beings are influencing the world in which we live, he clearly gets his information from a five-thousand-year-old document produced by someone else who was crazy enough to believe in magical beings, and he probably talks to these invisible beings at least once a week. Yet he is in charge of a whole city! On the orders of this delusional man, gay rights marchers are locked up and refused a voice. And I'm pretty sure he's not receiving any medical treatment for his mental problems.

Homosexuality, whatever you think about it, is at least real. It exists. It is manifested in many, many species, including our own. It is a fact of life. It doesn't hurt anyone or deprive them of their civil liberties. The magical beings that Yuriy Luzhkov believes in are not real. They exist only in stories and in his mind. Yet they get peaceful protesters beaten up and they deny them their right to speak.

Now tell me religion isn't a bad thing.