How it Happened

Well I seem to have survived my first day back.

A lot has happened in the past few weeks.

Global Stockmarkets are in free fall and today I read that Lehman Brothers have filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Pete checks share portfolio cries, but is relieved that he is overweight in cash and moved some shares to bonds a year back,

John McCain has appointed the Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin as his running mate. Now regular readers may know that I quite like John McCain and when I first heard of his choice I thought that this was a shrewd move. My view was it may help him garner the female vote and she is an outsider, but a Creationist who appears to deny that humans have had any impact on climate change (she is back tracking on this) is hardly likely to appeal to me now is it. I ought to add that I've never seen evolution and God as mutually exclusive, I mean if you were God how would you explain creation to a bunch of scientific illiterates?

Here's one humorous take that is copyright the late Dr Isaac Asimov.


How it Happened

My brother began to dictate in his best oratorical style, the one which has the tribes hanging on his words.

"In the beginning," he said, "exactly fifteen point two billion years ago, there was a big bang and the Universe--"

But I had stopped writing. "Fifteen billion years ago?" I said incredulously.

"Absolutely," he said. "I'm inspired."

"I don't question your inspiration," I said. (I had better not. He's three years younger than I am, but I don't try questioning his inspiration. Neither does anyone else or there's hell to pay.) "But are you going to tell the story of the Creation over a period of fifteen billion years?"

"I have to," said my brother. "That's how long it took. I have it all in here," he tapped his forehead, "and it's on the very highest authority."

By now I had put down my stylus. "Do you know the price of papyrus?" I said.

"What?" (He may be inspired but I frequently noticed that the inspiration didn't include such sordid matters as the price of papyrus.)

I said, "Suppose you describe one million years of events to each roll of papyrus. That means you'll have to fill fifteen thousand rolls. You'll have to talk long enough to fill them and you know that you begin to stammer after a while. I'll have to write enough to fill them and my fingers will fall off. And even if we can afford all that papyrus and you have the voice and I have the strength, who's going to copy it? We've got to have a guarantee of a hundred copies before we can publish and without that where will we get royalties from?"

My brother thought awhile. He said, "You think I ought to cut it down?"

"Way down," I said, "if you expect to reach the public."

"How about a hundred years?" he said.

"How about six days?" I said.

He said horrified, "You can't squeeze Creation into six days."

I said, "This is all the papyrus I have. What do you think?"

"Oh, well," he said, and began to dictate again, "In the beginning-- Does it have to be six days, Aaron?"

I said, firmly, "Six days, Moses."