The Week that was/The Weeks that were – Lisbon and the aftermath. 15.07. & 22.07.2018
The Week that Was – 08.07.2018
Gone Fishing Lisbon.
The week that was was full of preparations for my trip to Lisbon which started today and will be going on until the 16th. I’m sitting here now in my AirBnB room in the north of Lisbon, listening to planes go by overhead and looking forward to an interesting week in this town which I’m visiting for the first time. Coming Friday I will see Iron Maiden live here. For the very first time. I promise I will scream for Bruce! In light of all this there wasn’t really much to write about last week. Hence all I’m doing right here right now is saying that there’s nothing I’ll be writing about in a longwinded way to make it, at least a little, look like I’m writing about something…. I hope your bygone week was awesome and exciting
The week that will have been might not make it into blog post form until after the 16th, but at least there should be a good deal of things to write about. And photos!
Talking of photos… here’s one of a cat in Lisbon.
The Week that Was – 07.01.2018
The Week that Was – 24.06.2018
The week that was was rather unremarkable.
Sure, things have happened in the world. Good ones, bad ones, the world keeps turning. I’ve spent enough text ranting on politics in last week’s post, this week I’ll keep it short. After all a lot of things have been discussed at length elsewhere. Just to say that I, too, am of the opinion that anyone who separates children from their parents and then puts them into detention centres with the sole purpose of fighting migrants – you are not fighting migration, you are fighting migrants you worthless excuse for human beings – is a/are fascist(s). We can discuss politics of controlling/preventing migration, but treating migrants as second class humans is beyond discussion. Whether this is in America or Europe. (Btw. The Guardian released a list this week of the know casualties of the European Migrant crisis. Here.)
OK then, that off my chest, let’s, once again, look at the wonderful world of not politics. There was a story making its rounds that we may be the only advanced civilisation in the observable universe. Personally I would, even in that case, put “advanced” in quotation marks. But that may be just me. Anyways, this raises a bunch of questions: Are we really alone? Are we, as Arthur C. Clarke pondered a while ago, maybe the first such civilisation with others to follow? Do we not know how to look properly? And if the latter, why? Is it that we are simply not capable to find a civilisation like ours with our means? Or could it be that an alien civilisation is so fundamentally different from ours, that we wouldn’t know if we saw one? This speculation makes me think of examples thought up by Stanislaw Lem – Fiasco or even Solaris come to mind – or Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud. Either way, we mustn’t forget the Fermi Paradox & Drake equaton. And we mustn’t forget that a story such as the one that we’re likely to be alone, coming from some scientific study, is a great treat for any sensationalist media.