Fuddland
Someone threw two rocks at me yesterday.
Well, I say “threw” — more like, they viciously and with intent, pushed them through my letterbox. Had I been squatting underneath the letterbox at the time, they would have hit me squarely in the head. Or possibly the coccyx. [It depends how I was orientated. I’ve not thought it through quite yet.]
It wasn’t even a random stranger who dumped them through my letterbox: it was the postman. The gall of the man, just striding up to the house, knowing full well I’d recognise him, and chucking the rocks right at me, not caring for the consequences. It’s quite frankly a blessing I wasn’t even at home when he passed by.
And, okay, if I had been in, and for some reason squatting beneath the letterbox, the rocks admittedly wouldn’t have caused me much damaged, since they were packaged in a Jiffy bag, and each one was itself bubble-wrapped in bubble-wrap.
So, essentially, when I say “threw two rocks at me”, I really mean: someone has sent me two mystical “healing stones” — I was just trying to make it sound tough.
She’s fallen in with the wrong crowd lately — a few weekends ago she participated in a feng shui rearrangement of her friend’s front room, and recently they went to a “complementary therapy” taster day, during which — amongst other things — she had her earwax extracted via candles. I’ve not yet worked up the courage to get any details as to how this is performed.
Complementary therapy is not therapy that consists of people telling you how flattering that jacket is on you and asking if you’ve lost weight recently because You! Look! Great!, although now that I think about it, I’m fairly certain I could get a significant number of fee-paying people of low self-esteem to attend such an event, and may well think about organising one if money gets tight. I could invite all my contacts from The U.K. Mailers Club for a start — even giving them a discount if they return my mint-flavoured stamps.
No, complementary therapy is the liberal halfway-point between conventional medicine [that is, the stuff that actually makes you better] and alternative medicine [“Ibuprofen? No thanks, I’m just going to rub this bark all over my naked torso.”], in that it’s supposed to help you in parallel with the conventional treatments. I buy into some of it — the healing power of a good cup of tea is irrefutable in my opinion [can I say “in my opinion” straight after “irrefutable”? Probably not] — but one thing I have a hard time believing are the various supposed healing properties of types of stone or gem.
The two I received were carnelian and green aventurine, and very nice to look at they are too. Carnelian is apparently “excellent for restoring vitality and motivation, and for restoring creativity”, whereas green aventurine is a “general harmoniser … it settles nausea … bringing in well-being and emotional calm”. It’s just that, even if there was some kind of force being transferred from the stone to me — and after all, I “believe” in radiation, and lots of things give off some form of radiation [including you and me], so it’s not an entirely far-fetched notion — then shouldn’t it either be detectable somehow or, at the very least, shouldn’t it be finite? There should be a half-life we can determine, and these stones could quite possibly “run out” of effective levels of their respective properties at some point; if so, how can I tell if mine are on the wane?
Still, not being one to belittle something until I’ve given it some thought and a fair go, I decided to see if they do exactly what they say on the tin. They were a little bit crunchy but I managed to chew them up eventually and washed them down with a big glass of freshly-Britta’d water. I wonder how long it takes for their effects to begin to show? Now do excuse me, my stomach ache has passed and I’ve got a strange urge to complete some etchings…
Comments
mrtn | 2004 / 09 / 30 – 12:02
it’s a conventional argument i know, but it goes something like this:
you “believe” in radiation;
the stones’ power should be “detectable” somehow;for what percentage of human history have humans been able to detect radiation?
David | 2004 / 09 / 30 – 12:15
Re #1: Right, but you also need to take into account the [extremely] exponential growth in human knowledge that the last couple of hundred years have seen. Just because it took us 40,000 years to get to a point where we can detect certain forms of radiation with Geiger-counters etc. [and ignoring the fact that, for example, we’ve been “detecting” the radiation we call heat for our entire existence], that doesn’t mean it should take us anywhere near that long to reach the next stage.
mrtn | 2004 / 09 / 30 – 12:25
re #2: well, i was going to comment on various “types” of radiation but thought i’d keep it simple ;)
let’s postulate that all kinds of radiation are on a continuum: from really easy to detect, like visible light, up through harder to detect, like IR light, Gamma rays and so on, and on through the really really very difficult indeed to detect - things which we don’t even know about yet, because we can’t detect them.
given that, the exponential growth in knowledge you speak of doesn’t discount there being an explanation which we haven’t worked out yet does it? i didn’t say, after all, it was going to take another 40 millennia to discover the secret of the healing stones (or whatever) - maybe someone’s getting their paper ready for publication right now?
or are we approaching the “everything which can be invented has been invented” stage in physics?
David | 2004 / 09 / 30 – 12:42
Re #3: You’re right, just because it hasn’t been discovered doesn’t mean it won’t be, tomorrow or in ten years or whenever. And there are other ways to detect something, or at least provide stronger evidence for its existence, besides it registering on some device or other: double-blind experiments testing the specific supposed effects of a particular stone on a group of people, for example. [Actually, those have no doubt been carried out a number of times over the years.]
I guess the main point was wondering whether what we’re calling the radiation, if it does exist — and this is distinct from whether we can prove it does exist or not — has a “half life” or not. The general rule of the universe seems to be that things degrade and entropy rules supreme. Some things last thousands of millenia, some only a matter of nanoseconds. If we assume it does exist, can we ever determine how long a stone’s power has left?
Brown | 2004 / 10 / 01 – 08:50
I do like your funky chess set. What do the other pieces looks like?
David | 2004 / 10 / 01 – 10:02
Re #5: They all look like those two — it’s actually a New Age draughts set. They make it impossible to stack the pieces to form kings, because, like, we should all be equal man. ;)
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