Curves – Red Branch Chronicles

Anniversary and A.I.

I think it is almost 7 years since I started this nonsense of trying to get along in cyber space or whatever and the whole reason I did so was two-old. First I had just (self) published a novel I had spent 8 or 9 years writing (Raiding Cooley – still available on Amazon and other sites at the bargain price of $3.95, so go on, if you haven’t already, go ahead and take a look) and I thought I needed an ‘on-line presence’ to market the book.

So I started this blog thingy, initially on Celtic Iron Age stuff, and then it morphed into new things I was learning – Curves, Travel, Music, Food and that sort of thing.

Anyway, here I am now, years later and I can honestly say that my involvement with cyber space has not taken off. I have never used – or even know what they are / do – Tik-Tok, Instagram, …. Snapchat? And, well , others like that, thank God about which I know nothing.

But all of that is now in the past because with one of these smart AI chatbots, the world is there for the picking. Just recently a bunch of pointy heads and Elon Musk wrote an open letter (to whom, I don’t know) calling for an immediate halt to AI until firmer / better regulations were in place to govern it’s burgeoning use. And recently, a major news outlet – The BBC ? – published results where an AI chatbot successfully passed the country’s Bar examinations – the entrance into the UK’s legal profession. The Economist magazine mentioned a 4% possibility of AI damaging humans by 20.. – oh, I forget the date mentioned but the future seems to be crowding in and who knows what A.I. is doing to Man’s more brutal pastimes – war, savagery, intelligent drones and so on.

Anyway, rather bravely, I though, I dipped a very tremulous toe into the murky water of AI. The website seemed keen to ‘teach me’ how to do some fairly simple procedures but after step two or so when It asked me to ‘clone a repository” I gave up and jumped to an end product which just looked – rather disappointingly, I thought – like an ordinary google query point. The website provided dozens of examples of what it could achieve if prompted and drawing upon millions of everyday interactions stored over the last several decades, it could produce a tailored, ordered examples of text with an input similar to this ‘Write a two sentence horror story with the word breakfast’ and bingo, nano seconds later it was there and … Wow, very good, I thought.

How I will eventually use something like that remains open – given my past record with FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn – but it might be fun to play around.

Anyway, for those who are interested

https://platform.openai.com/overview

will take you to a basic starting point where there are loads of incredible examples – including the two sentence horror story mentioned above and others as well as tutorials on Building applications (!), Embeddings (?), Image generation and Text Completion modules.

However, if like me, you want to skip all the bells and whistles and just want to plug a prompt into OpenChat and get an immediate response go to

https://chat.openai.com/chat

Obviously once A.I. has reached this level, there is no putting it back in its Pandoran box. Just as Atomic and Nuclear knowledge cannot be unlearned, so too A.I. has probably escaped into the wider world and will continue to learn and grow. Is the old Arnold Schwartznegger Terminator films, where an A.I. intelligence, Skynet, determines that humans are a danger to its continued existence and proceeds to exterminate them, one of those examples where fiction blends into reality? Certainly, academics and pointy heads around the world are all scratching their collective noggins as to the dangers and benefits but one thing is for sure, A.I. is not going away and is going to learn exponentially.

Back to the origins!*

I haven’t paid much attention to this blog thingy over the last few while. I’ve been scribbling away in different areas, trying to write short pithy accounts about my own life but being more and more drawn back to the mythical age of heroes, whether it be Greek, Roman, or, inevitably, Celtic.

Anyway, I wrote about the Champion’s Portion and the Elopement of Deirdre earlier on in this blog as well as the courtship of Emer, and I decided to put them all in the context of a longer picture, presenting chapters of events, as it were, through the persona of a major player be it male or female in the overall picture.

Currently, as I shuffle character and episodes, I may now designate them as, retrospectively, 7 for Deirdre, 8 for Emer and 9 for the Champion’s Portion although this may change later on. Breoga kicks off the sequence and is followed by 2 for Cathbad.

For readers who already may have read Raiding Cuailgne / Cooley back in 2016 these character headed chapters, from both before, during and after the timeframe of my novel, will reveal new insights and details, previously unknown of the prophecies inherent in the myths.

I first wrote a book about Celtic heroes and then started this Blog thingy to promote it – and myself.. That was more than six years ago now and in that time, my book has faded into the electronic blackness somewhere in a void but the blog thingy has grown and changed and transformed into multiple lives of its own, But now, here I am back writing the same stuff that gave rise to the blog thingy in there first place! Going back to where it all started. Does that make sense?

Chords – A New Category !

I seem to have run out of steam recently – and it is certainly not because I have been too busy! The pandemic powers on worldwide and where hope looms in a few places, disasters surge elsewhere. So, along with a slow recovery from several self-inflicted injuries (I still have no clear idea how I ruptured my Achilles tendon so badly) and quarantine restrictions I have been, for the most part, cooped up in my back yard – thank god for glorious WA weather – and I have just dried up in all creativity areas and hit a block with my scribblings, readings, cooking, celtic stuff, curiosity and, of course, travel.

So it is almost the last month of a beautiful Perth autumn and I have decided to jump start things by adding a new page,or whatever it is called, Chords in this blog thingy. It is going to be about music in the most general sense and only referenced by music I actually have accumulated over the last … Well, when did CD’s become commonplace and eliminate cassettes?

I probably acquired a CD player in Brunei Darussalam back in the mid 1980’s or so and since then my music collection swelled and sank as I moved here and there around the world. Certainly CDs – and later iTunes of course and MP3 players dominated during the early 2000’s – making music mobility much easier but when I just went through the remnants of my former CD collection, I was disappointed to find so many of the iconic cd art lost – think of the cover of Sticky Fingers (1971) or Blood on the Tracks (1975) – while their spectral remains still somewhere in the depths of a hard disk.

I lay no claim to be a music critic nor can I read, write or play any form of music whatever and my taste is mostly plebeian popular so I make no excuse for including or ignoring giants of the music age and I may occasionally ramble on about a particular piece of music or some quirk about a musician or singer or look for connections between common themes or styles. Please feel free to disagree or comment as you will.

The banner photo for this page is just a random selection of actual CDs spread out on my kitchen table and my rambles might encourage me to actually buy more CD’s despite the fact that the age of the CD is over and acquisition is a waste of world resources! Here goes anyway, my meagre effort to spread wealth!

PS. Just saw the movie The Father with Anthony Hopkins. Wow! Cuts a bit close to the bone at times. I’m just thinking of the opening scene of the movie and the basic premise of my next post, already begun and 90% finished. Is it just an old man thing or just a dream?

Crises We Have Lived Through

My Irish father and mother were born in the last century, in 1911 and in 1914 respectively so my father would have been 7 years old at the outbreak of Spanish Flu in 1918 which appears to have been the worst global pandemic since the Black Death or Bubonic Plague which ravaged Europe and killed 25 million people between 1347 and 1351at a time when the world’s population was only 450 million. Back in 1918, approximately 20,000 people died in Ireland from the Spanish Flu while 800,000 were infected out of a population of about 4 million but I have no recollection of my parents ever mentioning the effect of the pandemic on their lives or that of their parents or grandparents.

And then there was WWII and my parents, along with most of neutral Ireland, survived that too, although my mother had stories of crouching, terrified, under the stairs when Germany bombed the North Strand in Dublin in 1941, only a few hundred metres from where she lived in Whitworth Road. My father, on the other hand, mentioned that while he was in the Irish equivalent of the British Home Guard or Dad’s Army, the Local Security Force (LSF) the worst thing he had to endure was the filthy language some of the men used!

Then in 1958, when I was 5 years old, the world was rocked once again by the Asian Flu Pandemic with 2 million estimated deaths worldwide but once again, I and my family remained untouched.

In 1967 I jumped out of the second floor of an abandoned building in Sea Point, near where I lived at the time, and broke three bones in my left leg and left arm and spend the entire summer, lying on my back, swathed in plaster of paris and the Hong Kong Flu Pandemic, with another death toll of one million, passed me by once again, although I do remember the public warning advertisements on TV of ‘coughs and sneezes spread diseases’.

HIV / AIDS struck in 1981 or thereabout but I was living in semi isolation in a kampong on the north-east coast of Malaysia at that time, without newspapers or radio (I didn’t get a telegram telling me of my father’s death until a week after he had been cremated) and was totally unaware of what was happening world wide where 25 million died of AIDS while millions more are living with HIV.

Then in 2000, I moved to Hong Kong to live and work when Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was first reported in 2003, infecting over 8,000 people in a matter of weeks and taking approximately 750+ people’s lives. I remember being ‘inconvenienced’ in several ways then – my favourite Australian bar in Kowloon closed down, I had to wear a face mask when teaching and my new wife refused to accompany me back to HK in April 2003 after we got married in Perth, Australia but once again, the angel of death seemed to have passed me – and all of mine – by once again.

Although SARS did not claim a large number of lives, it changed the way the world responds to global spread of infectious diseases. Like today’s COVID-19, SARS was caused by the coronavirus, and was spread much like the common cold, through close person-to-person contact and respiratory coughs and sneezes.

In November of 2019, I managed to tear the Achilles Tendon in my (again) left leg and while that was getting better, I somehow ruptured the tendon in my other leg in late February 2020 and have been wearing an orthopaedic ‘moon’ boot ever since. So this recent COVID-19 pandemic, of which I took a fairly unalarmed view initially until my nursing daughter compared it to the Black Death, has once again passed me by as I am house-bound, barely able to hobble around the house and garden. Nevertheless, the extraordinary lock-downs and social isolations the world is experiencing, the incredible impact the pandemic is having on people’s lives and livelihood, the mounting loss of life worldwide and the ever increasing restrictions on daily life imposed by governments in an attempt to stem this tide of disease, death and destitution is impacting upon us all.

Home isolation is easy for me now, crippled temporarily as I am, as are the other restrictions but I wonder how well I will cope once I am mobile again.

Throughout history, there have been tumultuous waves of change (The Flood?) – from the wave of agriculture that transformed the world from that of hunters and gatherers to that of the industrial and later technological and communicative waves that revolutionised the way we live. Other waves too, of mass emigration for example, which so recently threatened to overwhelm Europes’s borders, have threatened to swamp us, ever since the first people left the Rift Valley in Africa and set out to people the world, and the barbarians broke through the natural frontier of the Rhine to bring about the demise of the Roman Empire in the fifth century but, like all waves, pandemics too typically slow and come to an end on their own, though the process may be accelerated through effective preventive strategies, such as the measures world governments are putting in place right now.

So, in the words of, I think, Winston Churchill, ‘if you are going through Hell, don’t stop, keep going’ and, above all, stay safe and well.

Happy New Year / Decade?

23:22 on Tuesday Dec 31 2019 as I write this.

Happy New Year – being in Australia, I suppose we are among the first to celebrate the New Year of 2020.

But here is a thought – certainly, it is a new year – who can disagree with that? – but is it also a new decade? Is tomorrow the start of ‘The Twenties’ or do we have to wait until this time next year before the decade kicks in?

There was no year 0 A.D. when Pope Gregory XIII instituted his new calendar in 1582 to replace the increasingly erratic Julian calendar. So, the first decade would have been from year 1A.D. to year 10 A.D. The next decade would have begun in year 11 A.D. and so on. Does that make sense? So, ‘following’ that line of thought, the decade called ‘the Twenties’ should not begin until 01 January 2021.

And yet tomorrow / today is 01 January 2020 and if it sounds like Twenty, looks like a Twenty and appears like a Twenty, surely it is ‘The Twenties’? Am I being a pedant here?

Who cares. Happy 2020 everyone.

Kefir

All along the Black Sea route from Istanbul to Baku in Azerbaijan, every local restaurant a ‘lokanta’ in Turkey and beyond seemed to serve some type of frothy yoghurt-like drink. Intrigued, and not always wanting to drink alcohol before lunch, kefir was delicious, cool and tangy and yet different from place to place.

Originating in the Caucasus region, milk kefir, like most cultured or fermented foods, for example, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, kombucha, cheese and beer to name but a few, has a long and rich history rooted in simple agrarian cultures of preserving food. Fermented foods preserved in this way claim a range of health benefits from better digestion to a strengthened immunity system through the growth of good bacteria known as probiotics. Unlike prebiotics found in fibre-rich foods which go through the small intestine before being fermented in the large colon of gut, probiotics are live beneficial bacteria naturally created in fermented foods.

Probiotic kefir is, basically, a gelatinous mass of fermented milk, harbouring a generous variety of bacteria and yeast containing dozens of microorganisms, some of which haven’t even been identified, and which is used to make continual batches of milk kefir.

Kefir grains, so-called because small and numerous colonies of yeast and bacteria feed off the fat, or lactose, in full-cream milk, breaking it down during fermentation into simpler sugars, becoming bulky and lumpy like clotted cream or the surface of a cauliflower in appearance. These ‘grains’ are, in fact, the starter culture that will ferment fresh milk to continually produce the kefir drink itself. Over approximately 24 hours, the microorganisms in the kefir grains multiply and ferment the milk, turning it into the kefir dairy drink. Then the grains are sieved from the liquid and can be used again by adding fresh milk and the whole process can start over again.

Back in West Australia, after returning from the Caucasus, few supermarkets seemed to stock kefir but packets of freeze-dried cultures can be bought from health food stores where each packet can make up to 5 litres but by the third or fourth litre, the resulting kefir becomes progressively weaker and grains never form. This powdered starter, with far fewer bacteria and yeasts, could not compete with the microorganism content of milk kefir made from live grains which I later managed to locate on the Internet locally.

In a small zip lock bag was a live culture of some white, curdish looking goo which I poured into a glass measuring jug and added a cup of fresh, full-cream milk before covering the jug lightly and leaving it out on the kitchen counter for the bacteria and yeast to do their magic. A day later, I topped up the litre jug, gave it a stir and left it for another 24 hours.

Using a nylon sieve and a nylon spatula I drained the liquid into a glass bottle, poking and pushing at the goo in the sieve until I could see the grains. Back into the jug and another cup of milk to feed the microorganisms and to start the process off again.

Health benefits for probiotics in fermented products are widespread because their live microorganisms may help restore the natural balance of gut bacteria and may even help protect the heart by reducing “bad” LDL cholesterol levels and modestly lowering blood pressure. Claims that kefir boosts the immune system, aids in digestive problems, improves bone health and may even combat cancer are all made in support of kefir, but for me, it is a pleasant drink, certainly preferable to the ordinary yoghurt or milk I used to have before and presumably the fermentation has done nothing to alter the protein and calcium already present in the milk I used to make my daily kefir.

I suppose vague claims that probiotics such as kefir “supports good digestive health” are meaningless and the other touted health benefits are debatable but I look forward to the sour, tangy tart taste with that hint of effervescence, a ‘frizzante” tingle on the tongue in the mornings.

Clean Money

Cleanliness might be the last thing that comes to mind when thinking about money. While a trillion microbial bacteria live all over us and, no doubt, on our money too, most of us probably never give its purity a thought.

At the same time, unconsciously, we associate money with dirt – filthy lucre, money requiring laundering, filthy rich (as opposed to dirt poor), and so on, all spring to (my) mind automatically – but only recently I became aware of the concept of clean money, not the freshly laundered staff, and how it earns that epithet through the use to which it is put. Simply put, clean money is money that doesn’t harm people or the planet but is used for the benefit of all.

Recently a Royal Banking Commission here in Australia has slammed all four of the major banks for greedy and unscrupulous behaviour towards their customers. Fees charged to the accounts of deceased people, or charged for advice never given were some of the proven charges while more than sixty million dollars were loaned to dirty fossil fuel projects in the last ten years.

While many of us (or at least some) try to lead meaningful lives – donating to charities, sorting our domestic garbage, eating organic, even going vegan – increasingly people want to know whether their money is used beneficially, morally and for the sake of the planet and future generations and how the products made with our money may be damaging people and the planet.

Clean money thinks through where materials came from, who assembled them and whether the process was fair or unfair, empowering or disabling. Does it matter? Do we understand where our money goes, for what and for whom?

Along with clean food and clean energy, clean money is emerging, blended by both the massive ‘green’ movement worldwide and the colossal transfer of wealth from the well-heeled Boomers on to Gen X and the Millenials*.

We all (mostly) place our money into banks nowadays but I certainly have never questioned – much less thought – about what the bank does with my, and other people’s, money. The simple question prompted by Joel Solomon* in his recent book, The Clean Money Revolution – Do you really know what your money is doing? – struck me like a hammer blow. What if, God forbid, my bank is investing my money in chemical or biological weapons programs or in strip mining the ocean floor or cutting down the Amazon jungle or…? You get the picture.

So, where do our banks invest our money and how do we find out and what is my personal bottom line? Perhaps because of the scandals unearthed by the banking commission here, there have been a lot of attention paid to responsible banking with smaller banks and credit unions that proclaim their aversion to investing in such things as fossil fuels, intensive animal farming, gambling, arms and the tobacco industries to name but a few while still returning a prosperous return.

Responsible banking means using the customers’ deposits to loan to people, to community organisations and to businesses in order to have a positive economic, social, environmental and cultural impact on the world.

Responsible banks are owned by their customers, not the shareholders, with profits returned to customers through better rates and fees while investing in such areas as community housing suited to people with special care needs, lending responsibly to individual customers an amount they can afford to repay, sustainable, affordable and community-focused land developments and renewable energy projects and not for profit community organisations, all aimed to create positive social and environmental change.

Perhaps antecedent to this ‘new’ banking morality was the earlier focus on Fair Trade products as society moved from the Baby Boomer generation in the middle of last century to that of the (possibly more) socially aware Generation X and the Millenials who followed them, born towards the last quarter of the previous century.

Right now, the Millenials are on the edge of the largest transfer of inter-generational money ever experienced in human history. Baby Boomers here in Australia probably make up less than a quarter of the population while hanging onto to more than half the wealth of the country. During the next twenty years, at least three trillion dollars are expected to change hands from one generation to another, the Millenials. Worldwide the figure must be huge.

Unfortunately, much of this money the Millenials will inherit is, by its very nature, dirty money, earned from non-ethical investments in such things as arms, fossil fuels and tobacco to name but a few. No blame, of course, can be attributed to generations who, in their turn, profited from such things as slavery and the opium trade for example. No doubt, just like us, people trusted the banks to do the right thing with their money. However, unlike the present generation which has grown up with the Internet and widespread knowledge, our parents were probably unaware of where the banks were investing their money.

This generation does not have that luxury of ignorance. Now there is no excuse, we can join the growing number of clean banks that support such things as divesting from fossil fuels into renewable energy, organic foods or other ethical possibilities, like cleaner manufacturing or preventive health or waste reduction.

No matter how much or how little we have in some bank or other, there is one thing we can all do and that is check if our banks make their money in a way that aligns with our personal values, If not …?

Personally, I am looking forward to closing down my account with the subsidiary of one of the four major (dirty) banks here in Australia and opening up with a clean one.

By aligning money with values everybody can benefit from what their money is doing right at this moment somewhere in this shared world without sacrificing our planet.

That will certainly be easier for me than going vegan!

A rough definition of some of the terms used here –

Baby-Boomers refers to the generation born in the two decades, more or less, after the WWII, so from 1946 – 1964

Gen(eration) X covers the following period 1965 – 1979, and

Gen(eration) Y – also known as Millenials – takes in 1980 – 1994, while

Gen(eration) Z deals with those born between 1995 – 2015

Gen Who Knows? – 2016 – 2038?

Solomon, Joel. The Clean Money Revolution . New Society Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Basque and Georgian

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to find non-existent links and connections with a mythical past just as it is easy to believe something because you want to believe it? This seems most evident to me when I am travelling.

In most places in Western Europe and elsewhere, links between a Celtic heritage and other cultures can be easily found. After all, Celtic tribes pretty much covered most of Europe and Asia Minor before the rise of the Romans.

Consequently, I could always find some connection to my Irish / Celtic past both real and imagined, no matter how tenuous. wherever I found myself, in a museum, a bar or faced with some artistic design.

However, recently in Georgia, I came across a common understanding in a shared belief that seemed to have no logical basis whatsoever.

Everyone I spoke with insisted that their Kartvelian language, spoken primarily in Georgia, and part of a language family indigenous to the Caucasus, is related to the Basque language spoken by a minority in the western Pyrenees, straddling the border between France and Spain on the coast of the Bay of Biscay.

People I chatted with in bars or with some inquisitive soul on a street or a park, one and all repeated the same thing.

Rome used to call their part of the world East Iberia as opposed to West Iberia, modern day Portugal and Spain and the Georgian language they speak today is also known as Iberian.

One excellent craft beer in a small bar in Batumi led to another and there were three or four young men, all speaking better English than my flimsy grasp of a smattering of European languages, all insisting on the similarities between their language and Basque.

When they discovered that I used to be a language teacher, they embarked on a list of grammatical and lexical similarities between the two languages, based on common names for landscape features such as river mouths and hilltops.

They had me there of course, because I didn’t know anything about Georgian or the Basque language except that ‘pinchos’ were the same as tapas! What I did know was that Basque is one of the living languages which did not descend from a proto-Indo-European group of families and that the Basque linguistic family tree is called an isolate, meaning it has no relation to any other known language.

Similarly on a wine ‘search and consume’ mission in Sighnaghi – one of the premium wine growing areas in Georgia, – an elderly women working in a veg plot in front of a ramshackle house beckoned me over and began to explain – in fluent but accented English – the history of the town walls around which I had been strolling.

Proud of her fluency, she confided in me that she had been a lecturer in languages at the University in Tbilisi.

Aha, thinks I, I’ll check what the boys in the bar had told me and no sooner had I mentioned the possibility of a Basque Georgian link, than she pounced.

Absolutely and not only that, she insisted, when she found out where I was from, the Irish had their origin in the area of the Basque refuge during the last Ice Age, at least 18,500 years ago and so must also be related to Georgians because Georgians and the Basque language of Euskera have a common origin! Just look at the etymology of words, she insisted. Then, as further proof, she cited Biblical evidence, reminding me (!) that Noah’s Ark had landed nearby and Tubal, the grandson of Noah and the fifth son of Japheth, commonly believed to be the father of Europeans, left the southern slopes of Mt. Caucasus to settle between the Pyrenees and the river Ebro, and that the Basque people are his direct descendants.

Barking mad, I thought and after handing over a few Georgian lari as a requested ‘donation’ for the town wall, I rushed off for the solace of a glass of wine.

I had no doubt that there was an ancient kingdom of Iberia – next door to the kingdom of Colchis (see my post on Medea) and I suppose there could be some typological similarities between the two languages but to suggest that Basque and Georgian were related seemed an impossibility.

The Basques are a pre-Indo-European remnant population of Europe that trace their ancestry to Mesolithic hunter-gatherer groups at the end of the last ice age about 11,000 years ago, OR they date back to later Neolithic groups who introduced agriculture, later mixing with local hunters before becoming genetically and linguistically isolated from the progress of the Indo-European languages in the rest of Europe.

More than likely there would have been a multiplicity of language families in pre-Ice Age Europe, from one of which Basque, or Euskera, originated. Whatever their origins, it is the only Pre-Indo-European language that is extant in Western Europe.

The only thing that’s clear is that it existed in that area before the arrival of the Romans with their Latin that would eventually develop into the French and Spanish Romance languages.

While not a language isolate like Basque, there are only four Kartvelian languages, Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan, all spoken within Georgia, and all unrelated to any other language in the world.

Georgian, along with other Kartvelian languages, appeared in what was known as the Kingdom of Iberia sometime around 1000 BC. The Roman grammarian Marcus Cornelius Fronto in the 2nd century mentioned the emperor Marcus Aurelius trying to understand their “incomprehensible tongue”, unlikely if there were a connection between Georgian and a language spoken in the Roman Pyrenees territory.

Georgian evolved into a written language with an original and distinctive alphabet, when the royal class converted to Christianity in the mid-4th century adopting the status of Aramaic, the literary language of the new national religion and the oldest surviving literary text dates from the 5th century AD.

However, the hypothesis of a relationship, linking the Caucasian languages with other non-Indo-European of ancient times, is generally considered to lack conclusive evidence.

Musing over a very pleasing bottle of wine on the terrace of my hotel, I could sympathise with the Georgians and their determination to connect with Basque. After all, I had wandered through the museums in Tbilisi and Yerevan finding ‘proof’ of a Celtic past in shards of broken pottery and vague spiral like designs because that is what I wanted to find. And there I laid it to rest until I noticed label on the bottle of wine I was drinking.

Solstice & Christmas

I love astronomical words like ‘gibbous’ referring to one of the moon’s phases, even though I don’t fully understand what it means in the same way that I haven’t really come to grips with solstices (longest & shortest days?) and equinoxes (equal nights and days?) but I do know that one of them – the summer solstice – is just around the corner.

Falling usually on December 21 or, in this case, on Saturday, 22 December 2018, the summer solstice is the longest day of sunlight we can expect for the next year.

Solstices are specific times on opposite sides (north and south) of the equator, which is the imaginary belt running snugly around the Earth’s belly and thus occur twice a year.

The winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere (Europe etc.) is around December 21, the darkest day of the year, while around June 21, is the summer solstice.

It is the exact opposite here, of course, in the Southern Hemisphere (Down Under). During the December solstice, which is summer here, the Sun is directly over the Tropic of Capricorn (another imaginary band around the Earth’s knees, as it were) and has reached its southern-most position on the globe, when the North Pole is tilted furthest away from the Sun.

The Solstice is actually at a specific moment – when the Sun is exactly over the Tropic of Capricorn, (latitude 23° 30′ South), and occurs at 06:23 in Perth, West Australia, this year.

The summer and winter solstices were crucial points of reference for ancient civilizations, including the Celts. Only the druids who had angled their sacred sites so that they either faced, or stood, in a geometrical relationship to the rising sun of the solstice, could reveal the paths of heavenly bodies, showing the workings of the universe and the designs of the gods as the solstice is one of the two times of the year when the sun rises and sets in almost exactly the same place, several days in a row

The term solstice comes from the Latin word solstitium, meaning ‘the Sun stands still’, because on this day, the Sun reaches its southern-most position as seen from the Earth. The Sun seems to stand still at the Tropic of Capricorn and then reverses its direction. Some cultures referred to this period as the day the Sun turns around.

Ancient people are thought to have seen the sun rising and setting ever further to the north or south and to have assumed that, without a good deal of prayer, procession and bloody sacrifice, it would either get stuck in the same place – with disastrous consequences for agriculture – or, worse, continue in the same direction until it disappeared for ever. Absolute nonsense of course, given that these self same Neolithic peoples built enormous, astronomically aligned stone temples so that their priests, and spiritual leaders could guide their peoples through the obligatory festivals and celebrations of the astronomical events of the year.

Both Greece and Rome revered the sun with Hercules seen as a sun god. His twelve labours were equated with the twelve constellations of the zodiac through which the sun passes in the course of a year while Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, was the official sun god of the later Empire of Rome.

Emperor Aurelian reintroduced the sun god and cult in 274 A.D. The Emperor Constantine the Great, with the Edict of Toleration, proclaimed at Milan, made Christianity legal throughout the Roman Empire in 313 A.D., but continued to have his coins inscribed with the words, “Sol Invicto Comiti”, which means Committed to the Invincible Sun. Accordingly, Constantine’s adoption of Christianity in the Roman Empire was more likely a matter of political strategy than religious conviction.

St. Patrick (the patron saint of Ireland) blended pre-Christian, pagan beliefs onto his brand of Roman Christianity introduced to Ireland c. 432A.D. by taking druidic beliefs in the sun god, Lugh and fashioning them into orthodox Christianity. The addition of a circle (the wheel – like the pocket-sized votive wheels still found in Celtic sanctuaries – was a symbol of the sun. The eight spokes are thought to represent the cardinal points and the rising and setting of the sun at the summer and winter solstices) onto the Christian cross became the commonly recognised Celtic Cross, bringing together elements of paganism and Christianity.

So too were dates chosen to offset pagan celebrations of Saturnalia and Natalis Invicti. In ancient Rome, the winter solstice festival Saturnalia began on December 17 and lasted for seven days. The festival was held to honour Saturn, the father of the gods and was characterized by the suspension of discipline and reversal of the usual order. The date of Christmas itself celebrating the birth of the “true light of the world” was aligned with the December solstice because from that point onwards the days began to have more daylight in the Northern Hemisphere. Mind you, what that has to do with anything is anyone’s guess.

Happy Solstice (winter or summer, wherever you are) and a very happy Christmas to all.

A(nother) New Direction (Again!)

One of the original ideas for this blog thingy was for me to encounter new curves in media and technology and … ok, ok, I am the first to admit I have been a bit of a slow learner in those areas. But at least when I posted something on Red Branch Chronicles it also appeared, as if by magic, on my FaceBook thing which I never actually look at. No idea how that happens – it is something that automatically occurs when I post on my WordPress account. Now, for some reason, FaceBook no longer accepts direct input from WordPress unless I convert my FaceBook ‘Profile’ – didn’t even know I had one – to a Facebook ‘Page’.

Im not 100% sure what the difference is, but perhaps a page is more business-like than a (more?) informal profile? Who knows? Not sure I care actually, but I feel as if technology – and FaceBook in particular – have thrown up another obstacle in my snail like approach to media literacy.

Anyway, having followed explicit on-screen instructions (from FaceBook) on how to convert my Profile to a Page, this post should now magically spring up on Facebook to the shock and awe of … myself, anyway.

Here’s hoping