Viruses, Sprinters And UFOs
Aug. 23rd, 2008 11:53 am Going to the doctor makes you ill. Stands to reason. You sit around in a waiting room with a lot of other poorly persons and you trade germs and viruses like they were baseball cards.
We were at the doctors yesterday for one of Ailz's routine appointments. Today we're both feeling bad- not anything it's easy to pin down- but a combination of stomach upset and mental sluggishness and aching joints. Carl- who didn't come to the doctor's with us, but is here this morning putting slap on window frames- seems to have the same thing, so I suppose it's "going round".
Being a carbon-based life form sucks.
I'll probably watch the fag-end of the Olympics this afternoon. For all my earlier nay-saying I've been enjoying it. Aren't those Jamaican sprinters amazing?
The other thing I've been doing- over the past 24 hours- is read interviews with Jacques Vallee- the guy who inspired the character of the French UFOlogist (payed by Francois Truffaut) in Close Encounters.![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
michaleen put me onto him. Vallee has been researching UFOs since the 50s and calls himself a "heretic among heretics". I like heretics. Even when they're wrong they perform a valuable service by making us rethink our orthodoxies. Vallee is sure UFOs are real but doubts they're extraterrestrial. Instead he thinks of them as portals between our dimension and- er- someplace else. If I'm reading him right (he's very vague and undogmatic) he reckons life on earth has been guided, tested, observed since the very beginning by critters we are inclined to think of as aliens and our ancestors saw as gods, angels and fairies.
Actually he's more of a scientist than that brief overview suggests. In the early sixties he and his colleagues were tracking satellites and found themselves observing a piece of goods that was totally anomalous and performed outside the limits of contemporary, earthbound technology. In the morning his supervisor destroyed the tape because- well- because he was a jobsworth who didn't want to have to deal with the implications. Ever since then Vallee has campaigned fiercely for scientists to take this stuff seriously.
And so they should!
We were at the doctors yesterday for one of Ailz's routine appointments. Today we're both feeling bad- not anything it's easy to pin down- but a combination of stomach upset and mental sluggishness and aching joints. Carl- who didn't come to the doctor's with us, but is here this morning putting slap on window frames- seems to have the same thing, so I suppose it's "going round".
Being a carbon-based life form sucks.
I'll probably watch the fag-end of the Olympics this afternoon. For all my earlier nay-saying I've been enjoying it. Aren't those Jamaican sprinters amazing?
The other thing I've been doing- over the past 24 hours- is read interviews with Jacques Vallee- the guy who inspired the character of the French UFOlogist (payed by Francois Truffaut) in Close Encounters.
michaleen put me onto him. Vallee has been researching UFOs since the 50s and calls himself a "heretic among heretics". I like heretics. Even when they're wrong they perform a valuable service by making us rethink our orthodoxies. Vallee is sure UFOs are real but doubts they're extraterrestrial. Instead he thinks of them as portals between our dimension and- er- someplace else. If I'm reading him right (he's very vague and undogmatic) he reckons life on earth has been guided, tested, observed since the very beginning by critters we are inclined to think of as aliens and our ancestors saw as gods, angels and fairies. Actually he's more of a scientist than that brief overview suggests. In the early sixties he and his colleagues were tracking satellites and found themselves observing a piece of goods that was totally anomalous and performed outside the limits of contemporary, earthbound technology. In the morning his supervisor destroyed the tape because- well- because he was a jobsworth who didn't want to have to deal with the implications. Ever since then Vallee has campaigned fiercely for scientists to take this stuff seriously.
And so they should!
