A Change Of Mood

I used to write sermons for a living and I'm liable, if I don't keep a check on myself, to slide into pulpit rhetoric.

Which is one good reason for not writing too much about the tsunami. I don't trust myself not to be cheap.

But there's just this one thing I want to say: the public mood has changed. For the past couple of years it's been Them and Us and War against Terror and ugly, ugly, ugly, and now, suddenly, it's Brotherhood of Man. Westerner and Easterner, rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, believer and secularist- we're all in this together.

And wonderful things have happened. Pakistan sent aid to its old enemy India, national leaders have discovered that there are votes in being kind and the warplanes and warships are being used to carry food and medicine and water.

A Tree Full Of Penises

I had to share this.

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=7010695

amritarosa put me onto it.

This medieval mural in the Italian city of Massa Marittima shows a bunch of women standing under a tree full of penises. According to a British academic, it illustrates a passage from the Malleus Maleficarum and is the earliest representation of witches in European art.

The Reuters article gives a full explanation.