Over at the BBC I'm reading Living Outside the Hearing World by Lucy Wallis in which she tells us the issue of 'curing' deafness with cochlear implants has become something of a touchy subject among the 19,600 deaf teenagers in the UK.

One clue to why such teenagers might be 'attached' to their deafness is given by 19 year old Meghan Durno who describes how after undergoing the implant procedure she spent the intervening period of four weeks studying for a veterinary nursing degree at Edinburgh Napier University relying purely on lip reading. "When I went into the lecture theatre, I just switched off because the lady that was standing there started pacing up and down and talking and I couldn't understand what was being said, so I just looked at the notes".

In other words in order to read each others lips deaf people tend to require and give a much more intimate if not intense level of attention while people who hear tend to get by on far more minimal if not downright superficial levels of reciprocal attention.

Another clue is SenCity a multi-sensory Club Night which provides Aroma Jockeys who mix scents in the same way they mix the music and a vibrating dance floor.

In other words the young deaf people DO 'hear' the music - but with their bodies not their ears.

Meghan's brain took time adjusting to experiencing hitherto unknown sensations like babies crying or birds singing. "With the implant, I'm able to hear little things I never knew existed....Like when you rub your hands together, I never knew that made a sound."

"I was lying down one time and I heard a noise and I was like what's that and I realised it was my own breathing… I've amazed myself with what I can hear, and amazed a piece of machinery can help you hear."

My point being imagine a planet where hearing hadn't evolved. There be no koans like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" or "If a tree falls in the forest will it make a sound if no one's there to hear it?"

But if a few kids started reporting they could 'hear sounds' when they rubbed their hands together the scientists of that world'd refer to such a development as The Hearing Delusion because for them it'd a scientific fact there was no such thing as 'sound'.

And if anyone dared point out there might be something in the fact these kids had 'ears' those same scientists'd point out the scientific ridiculousness of the idea a few teensy tiny bones wrapped up in a minute amount of muscular nerve mush could be responsible for making those kids jump out their seats everytime a scientist got angry with them and slammed a door.

In fact those scientists'd probably point out since those ears seem to feed directly into the brain they're probably the reason the kids think they're 'hearing' things in the first place.

But let's push the envelope a little further and imagine a world where the denizens've evolved few if any of the senses we have.

Let's imagine a few of their kids've succumbed to what that world's scientists refer to as Schrodinger's Tree Delusion because those kids're reporting observing something they call a 'tree' falling in a 'forest'.

The kids even take the scientists to the 'forest' to see the 'tree' and by luck to hear another one fall.

But as the kindly scientists point out if the kids weren't so unwell they'd be able to perceive with their own gas sensitive organs what they call a 'tree' is actually a cloud-like gaseous life form the vertical growth of which necesitates it gradually condensing its impurities into the solidified multi armed structure they call a 'tree' until the structure's sheer solidified pointlessness finally causes it to topple over releasing the gaseous life form to start the cycle all over again.

I'm reading Robin McKie's Piltdown Man: British Archaeology's Greatest Hoax on the Observer site.

The thing is over thirty people're suspected of the hoax but no one ever seems to suspect another possibility: the real hoaxsters might've been geologist Kenneth Oakley, anatomist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and anthropologist Joseph Weiner.

You see in 1953 when the hoax was finally exposed everyone breathed a sigh of relief because Piltdown'd been placing a question mark over the emerging paradigm which didn't allow for million year old 'men' existing in Britain.

Which's probably why '53's pronouncement was merely a rehashing of Weidenreich's in '23 which had it Piltdown was merely a modern human cranium 'married' to the jaw of an orangutan with filed-down teeth.

[That rather remarkable thirty year gap before Weidenreich was confirmed alone should tell you all you need to know about just how fallibly mortal scientists can be].

But when Weidenreich first made his claim a different paradigm was emerging.

Since the turn of the Millennium however traces of 700,000 year old people've been turning up in West Sussex which by a rather curious coincidence's right next to East Sussex where Piltdown was found and it turns out all of a sudden Piltdown would've fitted right in with the latest paradigm - if he hadn't been a hoax.

Which's why I'm a tweaky bit suspicious when Robin McKie tells us the reason for the new tests to be done on Piltdown's "to solve a mystery that has baffled researchers for 100 years: the identities of the perpetrators of the world's greatest scientific fraud."

I can't conceive how they might find that out (unless the researchers're forensic scientists a la CSI) but I can conceive how the filing on the teeth might turn out to be ordinary dietary wear and tear, how now Piltdown's face fits again some if not all of his parts might turn out to be real.

You can watch the Ur Skeptic Michael Schermer look fairly sheepish and subdued during this series of Paranormal Challenge which is an offshoot of the series Ghost Adventures. This episode investigates the infamously haunted and now abandoned Loma Linda Hospital in a gang dominated part of LA. Schermer was the skeptic invited along to watch and set up some of the situations.
There are some choice moments when Schermer is having to entertain the possibility that what he just saw and heard might very well be paranormal. Particularly funny are his slightly dyspeptic looks when listening to some Electronic Voice Phenomena. This was the Ghost Adventures crew's second visit to Loma Linda. The first visit was quite hairy. This second visit did not provide as much paranormal fodder as was hoped and it was probably picked because it was so rich in paranormal events the first visit, but it still delivered enough to keep Schermer up a night. LOL!
Recommended viewing for all skeptic watchers.

Here is the original Ghost Adventures visit to Loma Linda. Quite a bit of "action" actually happened on the preliminary "walk through.'

"The event took place on a cold winter's night near Woodstock, NY in 1965. According to Curtis, if it hadn't been for the occupants of this metallic stranger, Jimi and his fellow musicians might have frozen to death."
***********************

JIMI HENDRIX: THE SPACE WIZARD

The author, Beckley, says, "I can't say in all honesty that I really knew Jimi Hendrix, but I did see him give a number of really good performances. It was at one of those post- Woodstock concerts where I managed to wind my way backstage. Jimi Hendrix was leaning up against a wall of amps and speakers. As I walked past him, we both just kind of nodded as if we recognized each other, and to this day I can swear I heard him ask me, 'and what planet are you from pal?'"

Jimi expressed a great interest in matters of an extraterrestrial nature, had admitted seeing UFOs, and once told a reporter from The New York Times that he was really from Mars. And he wasn't kidding either. David Henderson, in his book The Life of Jimi Hendrix (Bantam), quotes Jimi's feelings about life on other planets: "There are other people in the solar system, you know, and they have the same feelings too, not necessarily bad feelings, but see, it upsets their way of living for instance - and they are a whole lot heavier than we are."

"And it's no war games, because they all keep the same place. But like the solar system is going through a change soon and it's going to affect the Earth in about 30 years."

On several occasions during his career, UFOs just happened to show up while Jimi was giving a concert. During the last days of his life, he performed on the rim of an extinct volcano in Maui. Jimi played three 45-minute sets, says Henderson in his best-seller.

After each set, he retired to a special sacred Hopi Indian tent. Later, witnesses in Maui testified that they heard musical tones emanating from rocks and stones. UFOs were also sighted over the volcano by people who called in to a local radio show. A cameraman on the set said that he fell from his perch after seeing a UFO through his lens.

In the film Rainbow Bridge, Hendrix rattles on for several minutes about astral projection and the philosophy of the Space Brothers. He also tried to master the art of psychic healing, through color and sound. Fellow musician and songwriter, Curtis Knight, knew all about the episode involving the UFO in Maui. It was an odd-looking craft that glittered in the bright sunlight. Jimi felt certain the UFO had come down to put its spiritual stamp of approval on the show. He told me that he'd been emotionally and physically recharged by the experience.

During the course of our conversation, Curtis also revealed the fascinating details of the time a UFO landed in front of them and actually saved their lives.

The event took place on a cold winter's night near Woodstock, NY in 1965. According to Curtis, if it hadn't been for the occupants of this metallic stranger, Jimi and his fellow musicians might have frozen to death.

It was four o'clock in the morning, and we were trying to make it back to Manhattan - a drive of more than 100 miles - through the worst blizzard I can recall. The wind was whipping the snow around our van so fiercely that we missed the turn-off leading to the state highway that would put us in the direction of home. The next thing I remember is getting stuck in a drift that reached the hood of our vehicle. Soon it got so cold. The windows were rolled up tight, and we had the heater on full blast to protect us from the rawness of the elements. I had my doubts about seeing the light of day. We could have turned to human icicles very easily. That's how bitter it was!

Curtis says the road in front of them suddenly lit up, as a bright phosphorescent object cone-shaped, like a space capsule landed in the snow about 100 feet up ahead. It stood on tripod landing gear, and for all purposes gave the appearance of being something right out of science fiction' At first we thought it was an apparition caused by the cold and our confused state of mind. I mean, we just couldn't believe our eyes.

Prodding Jimi with his elbow, Curtis asked if his imagination was playing tricks on him or whether the rock star saw it too. Jimi didn't answer, but sort of smiled. He seemed to be staring out into the night, his eyes riveted on this thing resting within a stone's throw.

Curtis was overcome with fright. Before he could make a move of any kind, a door opened on the side of the craft and an entity came forth. He stood eight foot tall, his skin was yellowish, and instead of eyes, the creature had slits. His forehead came to a point, and his head ran straight into his chest, leaving the impression that he had no neck.

The being proceeded to float to the ground and glided toward the trapped occupants of the van' It was then that Curtis noticed the snow was melting in the wake of the creature. His body generated tremendous heat, so much so that as it came across a small rise, the snow disappeared around in all directions. In a matter of what seemed like seconds, the being came over to the right- hand side of the van where Jimi was seated and looked right through the window. Jimi seemed to be communicating telepathically with it. Curtis relates that immediately the interior of their vehicle began to heat up. Suddenly, I was roasting! One moment it had been bitter cold, and the next moment we might as well have been in Haiti. The heat coming from the being evaporated the snow enough to free their imprisoned van' As it glided behind our van, I saw the drift had completely vanished. Turning on the ignition key, I gunned the motor and got out of there. As I looked back through the rear view window, I could see the road filling in with snow again' The object - the strange craft - was at the same instant lifting off like a rocket from a launching pad.

Jimi never did talk much about what happened. He sort of let me know that the cool thing to do was not to bring up the subject. It was to be our little secret. However, from what he did say, I sort of suspect that the object arrived to save our necks chiefly because Jimi had been practicing trying to communicate by ESP with the beings on board. I know this may be hard to believe, but I'm putting it straight, just like it happened, you hear!

The boys from the group who were with us remember nothing. They were out cold in the back. As we got into the main road, they revived. It's as if they had been placed under a spell - you know - hypnotized. A capsule review of Jimi's songs shows that he incorporated some of his interplanetary ties in with his music. The lyrics of many of his songs contain veiled references to UFOs. His album, Axis-Bold as Love, opens with an announcer talking about flying saucers, with a cut following being a catchy tune called, 'Up From the Stars'.

My little account about my interaction with what may’ve been the ghost of George Harrison while I was sitting on the bog set off another bog related memory – this one involving Nick Redfern as it happens though not as a LITERAL ghost and only indirectly.

Basically just over a year ago we moved into the place we’re in now and not long afterwards there was what seemed to be a minor earthquake (the effect of which may’ve been exaggerated by the fact the house has brand new foundations) but powerful enough for me to sense it arriving at about 5.20 in the morning and wake up in time to witness the whole house seeming to momentarily lift in the air.

[All sorts of weird sh*t subsequently unfolded in the following weeks and months involving me and another party seeing ghostly Chinese-looking people floating round the place – coming directly up out the ground in the case of this weird old menacing granny type straight out of Ringu (though if she was meant to scare me it might as well’ve been Pingu) – which made me wonder if any of the early 19th Century railway cottages and workshops were ever rented out to Chinese families before they knocked ‘em down in the first half of the last century but then again might’ve had something to do with this overbearing (to the point of intentionally menacing) Tibetan ‘god’ figure that seemed to turn up the same time whinging about how unfairly the Dalai Lama was treating him to which I could only reply (after consulting my Tibetan Buddhist brother and finding out ‘Geordie Sugden’ might be Dorje Shugden) “It’s not me you need to be talkin’ to about this mate – it’s the Dalai Lama. As I understand it you’ve been having some sort of running beef with the guy for lifetimes so if you’re really sincere about being the good guy you want me to see you as then you’ll prove it by getting your arse round to his place to sort it out with him. Other than giving you this advice what else d'you expect me to do?”].

Anyway at the time the earthquakey thing set off a memory from around 1989 of being on the eighth floor of a building near the Liverpool Pier Head with 60-80 other people but with only me an’ one other guy noticing there’d just been an earthquake hence the debate which now followed where I was emphatically told Liverpool doesn’t have earthquakes forcing me to reel off various memories of other earthquakes I’d experienced proving that was wrong.

This in turn set off the memory of the earthquake I’d experienced while living on the Saint Nathaniel’s estate at the heart of the Toxteth Riots where I’d been sitting on the bog when I suddenly became aware there was a train somewhere off in the distance hurtling towards me from directly behind.

Now I knew Edge Hill station was just up the road from where we lived and since you could often hear and feel the vibrations and echoes of trains roaring through the night I dismissed the growing wobbling sensation as a mere buttockular illusion.

Yet the more I sat there the more aware I became this thing was definitely hurtling straight at me and with such growing force it definitely felt as if it was about to slam straight into me – but I was sitting on the bog on the second floor of a council house where it was physically impossible for any train to reach me!

I now tried to dismiss the whole thing as just another of my weird and often silly special effects (like ‘invisible dogs’ – or ‘leprechauns’ - seemingly coming up to me in class or work and peeing down my leg) some of which can take the form of very physical ‘panic attacks’ where it feel as if something’s been ‘launched’ at me from a very great distance which when they finally arrive slam into me with such force it feel as if it’s all I can do to stop my atoms literally ripping themselves apart and flying off in all directions.

However as the ‘train’ finally started to arrive instead of slamming into me it made the cistern, the porcelain toilet seat and the water it contained – and of course me and various parts of my anatomy - violently jiggle around on the spot until to my relief I felt it pass directly under the crack of my cheeks, past my nuts and out through the middle of my legs.

Which’s where Nick Redfern enters the picture so to speak because as I recalled all this I was convinced it had to be one of the earthquakes which occurred round the beginning of the Eighties (either just before or not long after the Toxteth riots) but I realised the details didn’t quite match.

Then as I kept replaying the mental video tape of me sitting on the bog I was struck by how young and slender my legs looked, how petite and dainty my feet seemed and – the dead giveaway – I realised I had Y-fronts round my ankles which meant whatever I experienced had to’ve occurred in the first half of the Seventies in my early teens.

So I got on the internet to check if there was anything to this memory and I find out on January 23 1974 at around 8.38 pm that Wednesday night there was supposedly an earthquake in Bala Wales accompanied by an unusual meteorite display.

Well that fit the bill perfectly because I always dreaded Monday and Wednesday nights as a kid because Coronation Street always came on at 7.30 pm and because I absolutely hated that dreary depressing whiney theme tune (almost as much as I hated A Family At War’s one at 8 pm) I’d trained myself to find some way of distracting myself just before it came on hence my hurrying upstairs to look across Parliament Street from the titchy bedroom I shared with Our Kid just in time to see a green fireball come down at an angle of about 20-25 degrees (so low in fact I thought it was go’n’o hit the estate across the way) only to then watch it ‘bounce’ seemingly on the very air itself back into space.

The thing was though I was so spellbound by what I’d already seen I kept watching for more until around an hour later just as I was about to give up I saw this green glowing ‘disc’ (an egg shape elongated almost to a sliver strictly speaking) start emerging from behind a large old tree and immediately started screaming my brother to hurry up the stairs if he wanted to see a real live flying saucer only for him to burst in the room just as it zoomed off.

Now it was that ‘disc’ which set me thinking maybe what I saw couldn’t've been the same thing or I’d somehow gotten my memories mixed up.

Then I started stumbling across all this internet stuff debating whether that same night a UFO supposedly crashed in the Berwyn Mountains also in Wales some of it critical of a book called In A Covert Agenda by Nick Redfern.

But that’s why Nick’s such a hero of mine: he’s never been afraid of sticking out like a sore thumb or taking a position contrary to popular opinion – hence he’s also the only other official native of Norfokkerunia with me (though of course there're others - but they’ve still to officially earn their passports).

Over at The Telegraph I'm reading Brendan O'Neill's The Hounding of 'Psychic Sally' is Becoming a Modern-Day Witch-Hunt.

The title says it all and O'Neill concludes: "I don’t believe anyone can talk to the dead. I wouldn’t see a psychic if you paid me. But people like Sally Morgan have existed for centuries and they do not cause great harm to society or warp morality. We should be far more worried about the current fashion for trying to hound out of existence any eccentric way of thinking or believing that decent folk don’t like."

One of his commenters dimitricavalli observes 'I'm waiting for the same types you write about to conduct a campaign against "Groundhog Day"'.

Be assured Dimitri the day these people think they've burnt the last witch's the day they'll turn their attention to ferreting out Groundhog Day because they spend so much time obsessing the rest of us're too dumb to stop being influenced by people who believe in flying saucers, ghosts, God etc it's difficult not to see them as mentally ill.

They remind me of a story I read last week about a man who was so frightened of dogs he jumped in a park lake and drowned.

Except in their case they won't know any peace until they're convinced all the 'dog' and 'dog owners' in the world've been eliminated.

The explanation they usually give for their zealousness is the old one of the unusually powerful meme befuddling the minds of the weakwilled and the gullible ie the only reason people think they see flying saucers and ghosts is because they're told there're such things.

Well all my life I've been seeing unusual things which I don't believe in - but I still see them.

The one I usually give's how I've long believed the afterlife (if there is one) must be some inconceivable way of existing far beyond human imagining and certainly nothing like Spiritualists seem to believe ie a world not dissimilar to this one where you can apparently learn to play the guitar or buy chips and not have to avoid stepping in dog poo on pavements.

In spite of which I've been seeing Roman soldiers wandering through Liverpool (even though they supposedly weren't here) Elizabethan figures haunting the streets of London and more recently me Dad who at times looks about fifty years younger than he should (and other people who've seen him've said the same) - and he didn't even believe in God never mind life after death!

But there's still the possibility that some sort of mental cuing might've prepared my mind to see those things.

So explain what cuing prepared this particular episode for me from about two months back in December.

I'd just sat on the bog when all of a sudden I heard this somehow familiar voice saying something and I immediately thought ooer! Our kid must be taking a shower and not locked the bathroom door.

Except it wasn't his voice and I realised whoever it was must've been addressing me because they went on "...so've you got some sort of problem with me eh then Borky?"

I now looked out the corner o' me eye and was shocked to see a somehow familiar figure sitting on the far corner of the bottom end of the bath.

I put out my mind there should be a load of items there making sitting there impossible - or extremely uncomfortable - and realised I was looking at someone who was the spitting image of George Harrison in the late Sixties but with looser autumnal coloured casual clothing of a style he might've worn during the Eighties.

Now just like whenever I've seen me dead Dad all I can tell you it is seemed remarkably like George.

[Me Dad once even did this walking through me thing at his cremation which somehow convinced me at the time it really was him but I can't tell you for sure it was].

And all I could think was why's he so pissed off with me? What could I've done to so upset him? And who am I anyway that he's remotely arsed what I think about him?

He then started saying something else which I couldn't quite make out (other than to note it was quite aggressive in tone) because by this time the absurdity of my situation hit me: here I was sitting on the bog with me kecks round me ankles and an old boy from my old school the Liverpool Insitute 'George Harrison' out The Beatles was having at go at me! And at that point the incredible shyness I'd felt in his presence was joined by sheer embarassment and an indignant sense it didn't matter who he was I had every right to defend myself!

"Look 'George'" I said "I don't know what I've said to offend y'mate but is this really the time and the place for this sort of thing? I mean can't y'see I'm try'n'o 'ave a shit here!"

And with that he was gone - and he hasn't been back.

If it was George the nearest thing I can think of saying which might've offended him was during the BBC Martin Scorsese thing when I observed how curiously money concerned he seemed to be for someone so spiritual though I was also highly impressed by how much greater his understanding of such things was compared to John's.

[And so far John doesn't seem to've taken offence at my saying that]!

I found out today that I am going blind do to the the medications I have been taking for my heart and my life exposed to my work in the mountains and deserts along with being exposed to high energy lasers without protection. So now I have some working baseline for my observations. Many things that have happened in dream states have pointed to a major problem but it's easy to discount this things to other mental aberrations or activities so does the body in it's subconscious awareness. So here's the experiment can what I understand what this underlying aspects of the mind be teased apart and decoded. A what can I say about this process, how will I adapt to these changing conditions. Well time to ponder and form a way to present what is going on and what can I say thats useful.

I'm reading The Devil's Trumpet by Ben Shattuck on The Morning News site.

It's a wonderfully well written meditation on the role of historians which came to be written as a result of his investigation of Suzy Witten's (author of the Salem novel The Afflicted Girls) claim it was jimsonweed not - as Ben supposed - ergot which brought about the Salem Witch Trials.

For me though the one bum note in it's when he quotes Cornell University History Professor Mary Beth Norton an expert on Colonial American:

“Let me remind you that the 17th century was a pre-modern society. This is a society before the scientific revolution. Nobody knew that hurricanes were coming because there were no satellites; nobody understood animal illnesses. When strange things happened—and many things in the 17th century were strange because nobody understood the germ theory—the default explanation became witchcraft. That is, if you didn’t have way of explaining something, you would say to yourself, ‘I bet this person or this animal was bewitched.’”

Let's side aside points such as maybe the reason people used to believe in things like weather witches was precisely because some people DID seem to know when things like hurricanes were coming.

Or that much of modern vetinary pharmacological science's based on traditional treatments discovered and utilised by traditional people for thousands of years.

Let's just take that one point "When strange things happened—and many things in the 17th century were strange because nobody understood the germ theory—the default explanation became witchcraft."

Is it really true nobody understood the germ theory?

I mean what really is the difference between believing in 'germs' (tiny unseen life forms capable of causing illness) and 'fairies', 'elves' or 'spirits' (tiny unseen life forms capable of causing illness)? Especially when many treatments for the former're based on traditional treatments for the latter?

We've even had reports for nearly a decade now of 'germs' (using the term generally to cover such microscopic illness causers as bacteria) demonstrating collective intelligence (if not downright conscious awareness) sufficient to successfully evaluate and choose between a range of strategies capable of dealing with possibilities lying in their future).

And then there's those pictures of that bacteriophage I was looking at a while back.

One of the ways witchy style tiny unseen life forms're supposed to effect their disease causing's by firing teensy-weensy arrows into their victims.

And there's that bacteriophage effecting its own reproduction cycle by firing a ruddy great 'harpoon' into its victim.

We've got all those polished crystal lenses going back almost three thousand years in museums all over the world: maybe some Ancient Assyrians, Chinese or Greeks saw some of those bacteriophages firing what looked more like 'arrows' to them under those lenses making the supposedly primtive belief in elves and elfbolts of our ancestors merely the technical terminology of the day.

Even the ancient practise of warding off illness with magic words still seems to work today.

In fact if you use the magic word placebo the efficacy's recently gone up from 33% to over 50% - and that's even when the person KNOWS they're getting a placebo.

In fact the word's so powerful maybe the efficaciousness of all those drugs approved by the various world drug approving authorities was a result of the placebo effect!

Over at PhysOrg I'm reading Scientists Replicate Key Evolutionary Step In Life On Earth: "More than 500 million years ago, single-celled organisms on Earth's surface began forming multi-cellular clusters that ultimately became plants and animals."

It's that 500 million years that intrigues me.

Round about the middle of the last decade I spent months sitting in my favourite armchair rocking backwards and forwards Bill Gates style (or so I've lately learned) dwelling on how single cell life made the switch to multicellular life and getting 'answers' to everything but.

Then one day I suddenly found myself seemingly coming apart at the molecular seams and supposedly travelling backwards in time (undergoing in the process a sort of reverse history of Evolution which left me in no doubt there was indeed such a process only something far more sophisticated and ordered than the present random process we're supposed to believe in).

And suddenly I was seemingly this sort of dimensionless scintilla of sentience gliding over a relatively flat plain populated by low and high 'walls', upright and toppled 'pillars', boulders of all sizes and shapes and endless amounts of broken or cracked scree, my way periodically 'barred' by endless curtains of dust which seemed to spontaneously rise up out of the ground directly in front of me or rushing at me from a distance and twitching like peculiar lifeforms challenging me before then darting away again.

The first thing that now shocked me was the apparent sterility of everything. I realised I'd actually been expecting to find a glue-like single-celled slime coating everything for some reason.

The next thing which shocked me was SOMETHING seeming to convey to me in some indescribable way I was looking at Liverpool hundreds of millions of years ago (though it was unclear whether I was supposed to understand this as meaning whichever landmass at the time happened to've drifted over the point on the Earth where Liverpool is now OR the very same chunk of rock we now call Liverpool located wherever it happened to've continentally drifted at the time).

But most shocking of all to me was the information SOMETHING now conveyed to me that 'Liverpool' was supposedly the point on the Earth where multicellular life first emerged.

Because one of the things you have to get used to with this sort of stuff is all the pandering to your ego - not to mention bullying - which seems to go on.

It's a bit like say some powerful person unexpectedly making you rich or famous and as a consequence suddenly finding queues forming (usually right alongside other queues telling you you're a worthless piece of crap) full of all kinds of people who'll tell you anything they think you want to hear just so long as they get to hang out with you (at least until you're back to being a nobody again).

And of course there's far more malignly intentioned individuals out there who'll immediately set out to gain advantages from such a development by seeking to influence or even gain control over you for all sorts of dark and nefarious reasons.

And exactly the same applies with all this weird sh*t I go on about (in fact learning to discern which is which seems to be part of the training).

[Viz Muhammed and the verses he received which seemed to confirm it was okay for the Meccans to worship Allat, Aluzza and Manat only for it to turn out they'd come from Satan].

So when I got told Liverpool was supposedly the POOL out of which multicellular LIFE arose I immediately became deeply suspicious but also quite intrigued.

Anyway SOMETHING now seemed to 'say' Look! There! Right in front of you!

And as always seems to be the way with these things work where I'm concerned I kept insisting all I could see was endless empty desolation until suddenly I realised I was hurtling towards this sort of oyster shaped rock until I was so close to it I could't tell whether it was immensely big or infinitely tiny then suddenly I was somehow inside it and to my surprise it was not only hollow but illuminated by this sort of low intensity apparently radioactive green hued light being emitted by a milky coloured pool.

And as I looked down at this pool I could see countless little dimly glowing flattened spheres appearing at its surface and sort of going pop before splitting into two much smaller flattened spheres then dispersing away from the pool's centre and plunging out of sight only to reappear back at the surface and repeat the process without cease.

I found watching the whole thing so hypnotically fascinating in fact I felt I could watch it for forever but then suddenly one of the flattened spheres went pop but instead of splitting in two it now seemed to've contracted while retaining a smaller copy of itself inside itself before then plunging out of sight only to eventually reappear and split into two new cells containing smaller versions of themselves inside themselves until eventually there was as many double flattened spheres as single ones at which point SOMETHING seemed to inundate me with such data as the outer sphere was supposedly the direct ancestor of things like the mouth, the anus, the skin and the skeleton, the inner cell of things like the stomach, the bowels, the internal organs, the eyes and the brain.

Over the years I've tended to be dubious about the information conveyed to me during this particular experience not only because of the clear attempt to appeal to my vanity with the admittedly intriguing idea Liverpool really IS the Pool of Life but also because I personally've tended to believe multicellular life must've emerged far earlier than 500 million years ago and if I remember me Earth Science modules from university Liverpool's built on 600 million year old sandstone.

But saying that you could also argue it comes under Grant Morrison's idea of actually setting the deus or dei ex machina tasks just to find out what's possible because for months I kept rebuffing other stuff I was being bombarded with and insisting I wanted to know about the origins of multicellular life.

It brings a whole new meaning to Banging the Gong!