Hotelvis

A song has come back to my mind.

Something for the Ron Paul fans.

Have I mentioned Derren Brown getting a group to guess how many jelly babies in a jar and knowing in advance that it would be a woman who was closest? Female intuition. The weak consciousness, allows the subconscious ot have more influence.

'Germany's simplicity is that of the neurotic, not the primitive. It is megalomania and egotism and the pride of the man in the Bible that waxed fat and kicked. But the results are the same. She wants to destroy and simplify; but it isn't the simplicity of the ascetic, which is of the spirit, but the simplicity of the madman that grinds down all the contrivances of civilization to a featureless monotony. The prophet wants to save the souls of his people; Germany wants to rule the inanimate corpse of the world. But you can get the same language to cover both. And so you have the partnership of St Francis and Messalina. Dick, did you ever hear of a thing called the Superman?'

'There was a time when the papers were full of nothing else,' I answered. 'I gather it was invented by a sportsman called Nietzsche.'

'Maybe,' said Sandy. 'Old Nietzsche has been blamed for a great deal of rubbish he would have died rather than acknowledge. But it's a craze of the new, fatted Germany. It's a fancy type which could never really exist, any more than the Economic Man of the politicians. Mankind has a sense of humour which stops short of the final absurdity. There never has been, and there never could be a real Superman ... But there might be a Superwoman.'

'You'll get into trouble, my lad, if you talk like that,' I said.

'It's true all the same. Women have got a perilous logic which we never have, and some of the best of them don't see the joke of life like the ordinary man. They can be far greater than men, for they can go straight to the heart of things. There never was a man so near the divine as Joan of Arc. But I think, too, they can be more entirely damnable than anything that ever was breeched, for they don't stop still now and then and laugh at themselves ... There is no Superman. The poor old donkeys that fancy themselves in the part are either crackbrained professors who couldn't rule a Sunday-school class, or bristling soldiers with pint-pot heads who imagine that the shooting of a Duc d'Enghien made a Napoleon. But there is a Superwoman, and her name's Hilda von Einem.'

That from "Greenmantle" by John Buchan.

Tomorrow I'll post the first part of my brief history of feminism, originally meant for the RI board. Today I'm going to criticise Ben Fairhall.

I'll have to be quick.

The green man was not a pagan symbol, but a symbol of woodland outlaws and resistance fighters. Elvis' name was of Welsh origin, Elfys Presselli. Odin didn't die on the tree, he merely suffered which caused him to become wise. That and the business with the well that cost him his eye.