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I love that powerful line from the Book of Job, where God describes the futility of trying to tame one of his wild creatures called Leviathan. “Can you make a pet of him like a bird or put him on a leash for your girls?” “Any hope of subduing him is false; the mere sight…

Those clever boys from Geeks2U worked their magic on the church computer last week. It took the technician all of ten seconds to diagnose the problem. Someone had inadvertently loaded three antivirus programs onto the poor machine. The programs were trying to kill each other and were paralysing the system. As soon as the technician…

I was watching a man unloading beer kegs at the pub on the corner near the church. The kegs were of the fifty litre kind, which, when full, weigh in around seventy-five kilograms. And he unloaded all twenty by himself!  It was his method that intrigued me. He would carefully roll the keg off the…

I had reason last week to pay tribute to my hard-working lymphocytes, who engaged in numerous deadly skirmishes with some dangerous intruders of the flu kind. Not sure how many of them died in battle, nor how many received citations for extraordinary acts of bravery. It would be interesting to read their war records and…

There is an old view of God that thinks of him as a watchmaker, that runs like this: God made the world, wound it up, and left it to tick away without having to hang around to check on either the time or the occupants. The view is called Deism, and is one of those…

My son sent me a meme the other day. We do communicate in more meaningful ways, but he is kind to pass on things that he thinks will enrich my life. The little brain-emission was titled ‘The Four Stages of Life’, and displayed four pictures in linear progression:  a baby bottle, a bottle of coke,…

In my life, I have seen more people killed by visiting a hotel on Vine Street, than by landing on any other piece of real estate. It’s not rocket science. It’s typically the first landing point for those who have spent some time in jail; and a bit cruel really. To step out of jail,…

I’m nearly done with Giulia Enders’ book ‘Gut’, a fascinating all-stops journey from the lips to the large intestine. Perhaps I should write and thank her in the words of the great Pavarotti, who once expressed his appreciation to an audience saying, “I thank you from the heart of my bottom.” In her book she…

In 1799, a discovery was made by some of Napoleon’s troops in Rosetta, a camel’s spit from Alexandria in Egypt. A stone bearing, in three languages, the decree of an old Egyptian king. The decree, actually, is underwhelming – basically the announcement of a tax-break to some rather impertinent priests. But the trilingual broadcasting of…

How utterly infuriating! In a technologically-advanced world such as ours, how hard can it be to retrieve a file accidently deleted from a flash drive, without spending a squillion dollars at the local computer shop? Yes. Yes. I thought it might have gone into the Recycle Bin, which would have been an easy retrieve. But…