Editor’s Entries: Martinis and a Villa in Capri • Samson and Delilah • The Lion of Judah: King Saul • Last of the Hebrews: Jeremiah • I shall not be forgotten: Sappho of Lesbos • The Cosmopolitan: Euripides (by Theodor Mommsen) • The Characters (by Theophrastus) • The Making of Judaism • Not to all People but onto Chosen Witnesses • Only the Naughty Bits: Petronius • Tell them the Great Pan is Dead: Plutarch • Hoax or History? The Annals of Tacitus • The Wizard’s Niece • Dispensation of the One: Plotinus • Homoousion, Homoiousion, or Houyhnhnms? Arius and Nicene • Keeping the Faith: Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and his Time • Indian Summer: the 5th Century • The Worm in Eve's Apple: Sex and Christianity • The Innovation of Childhood • The Ape that Talks • Memory is like Writing on Water • Bondage of Common Sense: Martin Luther • The Magnificent People: the Inca Empire • Let there be Light: Michel de Montaigne • Was he for real? Descartes • My Great-Great-Great Grandmother’s Letter • A hot Chestnut in the open Fly: Laurence Sterne • All in the Mind: Immanuel Kant • The Manufacture of Ideas as we speak (by Heinrich von Kleist) • From the Memoirs of Mr. Schnabelewopski, Esq. (by Heinrich Heine) • My Kind of Saint: Antonin Chekhov • A Catholic Upbringing: James Joyce • The Shame: Franz Kafka • A Sellout with Conviction: Gottfried Benn • The Unknown Russian: Vladimir Sirin • At the Pictures • The Terminus • About Me • Books I enjoy • Brief Notes on English and American Style (by Raymond Chandler) • How to stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet (by Douglas Adams) • Elements of Style (by William Strunk) • If E.T. is out there, why doesn’t he visit us? • Where does the Lake go, when the Geese fly to Canada? • A Case of Game Theory: the Origin of Morals • The Simple Art of Murder (by Raymond Chandler) • A Directory to Afterlife

Coming soon: An Untidy Schedule • The Book Adrian • Farewell to Venus

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Mark Twain

To Dawn

Our Allotment is a place where people meet, enjoy the company and help each other out. 

For better or worse we are all denizens of the ever-growing Invisible City of the Worldwide Web. Last time I checked, 1.4 billion people connected to the net every day, and the numbers keep growing. The new metropolis is still a construction site with all the customary dust, debris and rubbish; I am not saying it is an unmixed blessing. Yet would you rather stay in some parochial backwater where the sheep vie with the shepherd for the price of naiveté? (No offence to the Amish.) After all, never before in all history had there been such a variety of information, opportunities and stimuli, such easy access to culture and art, to the sciences, to goods and services and to the red-light districts. The choices seem endless; it is short of debilitating.

To constantly agonize over our choices, only to be suckered in again into even more research, and so waste time and energy and never stop worrying whether we may have been missing something better  has become symptomatic for the overall information overload of which the full impact is still gathering; we have seen nothing yet. This is not how most of us would like to pass their lives. In the end the incessant chatter just passes us by, and we are thrown back to the screeching of chimps swinging in the treetops oblivious to the world.

So, how can we sensibly pick and choose and find or do what we really need?

I don’t mean to suggest a better search engine – Google is pretty good at what they do – I think more in terms of deciding with confidence, after the choices have been presented to us, and of feeling happy and assured that we made good choices (which is not always quite the same as going for the cheapest deal).

In other words, here is the place where we resort to what mankind always does and has done since Eve asked Adam whether he liked her new lipstick – we ask a friend or neighbor, trusted people, who know stuff and lend a helping hand and pay you the respect you deserve for your own contributions of expertise. Each and everyone can make a difference and should have a voice. When it comes down to the bare essentials it is all about community and being at home with people we like and who like us.

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If you want to become a member you go to the registration page and click into one of the images of houses and shops, or into the “Lounge” if you wish to subscribe and run your own forum – depends what you want to do. If you look just for a private page where you can share messages and photographs, or keep a blog, click into one of the urban houses; if it is business you have in mind, click into the shops along the Plaza. You will be referred to a link with instructions what to do next. If you agree to the conditions, you receive access to your own page(s) on this site, of which the content, except for the overall format (same header, same footer), you can compose and design as you please; templates are available.

Businesses, representing their interests on this site, may put up their own ads, private posters, if they so desire, can place on their pages affiliated advertisements. Each member is added to the alphabetical “Members’ Directory” (the general index and universal sitemap).

Only members have a franchise; matters of concern for the community will be put to an instant vote. Over time these polls may create a body of rules and regulations, but let’s keep it simple folks. It’s your site; it’s your home. Members receive a discount on all goods and services offered by other members doing business on this site. This is a condition for every business that participates. Every member can publish in the community’s journal – although as the chief editor I reserve my editorial prerogative, but other than that, I am not Big Brother, this is a community, and it is up to you to make it working and get the most out of it.

Our site is a registered and trademark protected product; additional franchises require our permission under the rules and regulations laid out on this site. The design for this site may not strike you as particularly fancy, but it does read well on handheld media like iPhones and the iPad. Should you forget our URL, or lose your bookmarks, just google my name – michael sympson (with a “y”) – and it should be the entry right at the top.

As for now the editor is still tinkering with the registration code, I am not nerdy enough for this sort of thing. (You are most welcome to rewrite the whole page in Java script and create a style sheet, would make it so much easier to maintain.) By the end of August, early September we should be up and running.

Live well and be happy!
    michael sympson

The difference between us and a computer is that, the computer is blindingly stupid, but it is capable of being stupid many, many million times a second.

Douglas Adams

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