From a speech given by the late Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy fame) at a conference nearly 10 years ago:
“….The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let's talk about the four ages of sand.
From sand we make glass, from glass we make lenses and from lenses we make telescopes. When the great early astronomers, Copernicus, Galileo and others turned their telescopes on the heavens and discovered that the Universe was an astonishingly different place than we expected and that, far from the world being most of the Universe, with just a few little bright lights going around it, it turned out - and this took a long, long, long time to sink in - that it is just one tiny little speck going round a little nuclear fireball, which is one of millions and millions and millions that make up this particular galaxy and our galaxy is one of millions or billions that make up the Universe and that then we are also faced with the possibility that there may be billions of universes, that applied a little bit of a corrective to the perspective that the Universe was ours.
Britney Spears crotch pictures have been flying all over the net... Publicity stunt or not, on purpose or by accident, was she drunk or sober, who knows and in any case here is fourteen pictures that we found:
This is not made up... and it happened in the USA.... in the beging of the 21st century:
From NBC station in Chattanooga, TN : Police in Albertville, Alabama say 19-year-old Gary Helms, Junior is charged with raping his 45-year-old mother. Police say he did it to seek revenge against his brother after the two argued over a girlfriend. The police report says Helms' mother was passed out drunk on the couch when the rape started. She came to and recognized her son during the attack. The police report says his mother tried to get away but Helms held her down until he was finished. Albertville police Sergeant James Smth says Helms confessed to the attack and was ordered held in the Marshall County Jail on a $100,000 bond. "From what we understand the rape stemmed from an argument between him and his brother. And apparently they were arguing over a girlfriend. And the rape was some sort of retaliation towards his brother ... it's just pretty much a shock to the conscious of the general public."
Number 9 - Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
Number 8 - Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny. If you see him without an erection, make him a sandwich.
Number 7 - Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks.
Number 6 - Some people are like a Slinky...not really good for anything, but you still can't help but smile when you see one tumble down the stairs.
Number 5 - Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
Number 4 - All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.
Number 3 - Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut saves you thirty cents?
Number 2 - In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.
AND THE NUMBER 1 THOUGHT FOR 2006:
We know exactly where one cow with mad-cow disease is located among the millions and millions of cows in America, but we haven't got a clue as to where thousands of terrorists are located. Maybe we should put the Department of Agriculture in charge of Homeland Security.
