I’d heard before of stigmata, but only in the metaphorical sense. Things are a stigma against a person’s character, for example. I hadn’t even considered the etymology of the word, or the fact that its real meaning comes from a religious sense. As Wikipedia explains,

Stigmata (singular stigma) are bodily marks, sores, or sensations of pain in locations corresponding to the crucifixionwounds of Jesus, such as the hands and feet. In some cases, rope marks on the wrists have accompanied the wounds on the hands.

The term originates from the line at the end of Saint Paul‘s Letter to the Galatians where he says, “I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.” Stigmata is the plural of the Greek word στίγμα stigma, meaning a mark or brand such as might have been used for identification of an animal or slave. An individual bearing stigmata is referred to as a stigmatic or a stigmatist.

That, by itself, is interesting enough. I’m always happy to learn new things, and I learnt where a term that I use occasionally when I dip into my repository of words in my mind comes from. From now on, whenever I talk about stigmata, I’ll undoubtedly think of the notion that a huge number of Catholics in the past have perhaps intentionally damaged their health to show their piety.

It’s something that people are aware of: there are the comedy lashings that are seen in Monty Python’s Life of Brian which never fail to draw a laugh. But it always seemed quite removed, both historically and geographically. That was until reading the Smithsonian article. Weirdly, there’s been a gender redress in the number of people who claim (or have self-inflicted, depending on your belief) to have suffered wounds which are parallel to those of Christ on the cross.

Until the twentieth century, reports of stigmata were confined to Catholic Europe, but the most recent count of contemporary cases, made about a decade ago, included about 25 cases scattered around the world, including one in Korea and one in Japan. This in itself is a remarkable development, but there has also been a dramatic change in the ratio of male to female stigmatics. Overall, the vast majority have always been women: 353, compared to just 54 men, a ratio of almost seven to one. But according to Harrison’s analysis, that ratio has changed dramatically in the last half-century. Among the 44 cases reported since 1946, it is 2.4:1, and among living stigmatics it is a mere 1.5:1.

That’s a very strange trend. As, weirdly, is the fact that the location of the wounds and sores has changed as medical science has got better. Medical experts today reckon that the standard depiction of nails through the palms would not have kept a body attached to a cross: more likely were puncture wounds above the wrist in the forearm to keep people sturdy.

Sure enough, as people began to realise this through scientific knowledge, the wounds of stigmatists began to migrate up the arm and away from the hand. God moves in mysterious ways.

The rational (well, rational in the sense of how best to explain what is happening, not to justify it) explanation is that this is simply people self inflicting wounds to demonstrate their faith. A surprising number of people have seemingly done so: more than 400 since St. Francis of Assisi in 1224 first reported Christ-like injuries.

I find it strange how western culture often pokes fun at the devotion of eastern religions, yet does something like this. There’s something to be said about people in glass houses not throwing stones.

But then there’s the evidence which disputes that it’s all fakery and falsehoods.

In at least some of these cases, investigators such as Harrison have argued, substantial evidence indicates the original wounds can recur spontaneously and apparently psychosomatically, generally on significant dates. During the 1990s, for example, an Italian woman named Domenica Lo Bianco exhibited the stigmata on Good Friday. Her fame spread, and Harrison notes that an Italian psychotherapist, Dr Marco Margnelli, has reported videoing Lo Bianco in a laboratory as she relived one incident of stigmata in a “trance state.” According to Margnelli, marks appeared spontaneously on his subject’s arm as she was taped and outright fraud could be ruled out as an explanation.

How do you explain that? Anyway, regardless of what people think about the legitimacy of stigmatism, the blogpost is an interesting read and people should take a look.

The boundary line between England and Scotland, for instance, has been majorly helped out by the whacking great big Roman wall which Hadrian built. It was a ready-made line of demarcation between the countries.

But what happens everywhere else in the world? And more importantly, what happens when one nation disagrees with another over who has soverign rights over a plot of land?

It’s something we’re seeing more and more these days. South Sudan is the world’s newest country – as I’ve previously written about here – but the long road to its independence from Sudan was punctuated with protracted negotiations over where, exactly, the borders of the new nation would lie. It’s not without reason. On a personal level, you’re playing with people’s lives: if someone is on the wrong side of the border, then they suddenly lose rights and citizenship.

On a grander scale, you’re also talking about seriously large amounts of money. For South Sudan and Sudan, it was oil. It just so happened that the majority of Sudanese oil was taken away from them in the secession. They fought tooth and nail to keep some of it, because they are predominately an oil economy.

The same thing happened under the Arctic. Russia planted a flag 14,000ft under the sea in order to stake a claim to an area which could have proved to have significant hydrocarbon resources. Then Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay wasn’t necessarily overly happy about that. “This isn’t the 15th Century,” he said. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming this territory.’”

It’s happening again. That picture up there is the current makeup of the offshore sections of Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. However, the Ivory Coast’s national oil company has released another map which redraws the boundaries so that the majority of the lucrative spoils of oil are in their ownership. Their justification is that the boundaries are really arbitrary.

I’ve written previously about the problems of putting arbitrary borders on areas of land which don’t conform to straight lines:

The Berlin Conference held in 1884 was a grand meeting of old imperial hands. Chargés d’affaires from Europe’s leading colonial powers gathered in long drawing rooms to sit around impossibly large tables, a phalanx of wallflower advisors backing them, in order that they might better organise their individual stakes to parts of Africa. A great map of Africa was hung from one of the rooms’ high ceilings, matching the huge heavy curtains for weight and splendour. This was the great theoretical carve-up of Africa into neat geometric lines and right angles: “you can try your luck at taming the savages in this bit as long as you leave us this and this”, they would discuss between breaks.

Called by King Leopold II at his luxurious Berlin villa, the conference brought together representatives from the United Kingdom, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Sweden-Norway, Spain, Denmark, France, Belgium, Italy, Russia and Portugal to work out an African policy when it came to geographical claims. All turned up. The United States were offered a seat at the table, but chose not to attend. They talked over several months and came up with the General Act of the Berlin Conference, a diktat which outlined in international (colonial) law each individual nation’s claims to parts of Africa and the all-important shipping routes which would allow their interests in the continent to flourish. When the representations took their seats in the panelled walled rooms of Leopold’s villa, 80% of Africa still remained under tribal control. 18 years later, in 1902, 90% of it was officially European-owned.

The Berlin Conference codified country’s rights to claim land which was not really theirs: it established arbitrary territories in which they could contest ownership, which in turn led to the arbitrary borders that each power established for the colonies they created. Had either level of cartography been more compassionate and less focused on straight lines and 90 degree angles, some of the current complications that seem endemic in African nations might today be avoided.

It’s not only limited to Africa, though. It just so happens that they’re the nations that are most willing to fight for it. Think about the United States of America. There are so many straight lines on that map. There are no perfectly square land masses on our planet (though if you can find one and point it out to me, I’m more than willing to eat my words).

Cartography is an amazing thing, but it’s also fraught with difficulties. When you carve up a piece of land into sections, you’re essentially trying to give order to something which simply isn’t designed for it. There’s no wonder that ten, twenty – or, in the case of Ghana and the Ivory Coast, 27 – years later, it comes back to haunt people.

It’s an incredible city of contrasts, where you find monied and poor cheek by jowl next to each other. It does, like most major world cities, have its own unique ecosystem which you have to fully buy into to survive (though I’ll admit that only New York, to my mind, had a more powerful demand that you submit to its way of life than Moscow). Two articles demonstrate the essence of the city really well.

The first is The New Moscow by Gary Shteyngart, which tells of the post-Soviet Union difference between rich and poor. As part of my recent client work, I’ve actually been writing about Russia and its young people, and pretty much came to the same conclusion. There are those who are about my age (22) who have pretty much always lived under a radically vibrant and youthful democratic Russia (or at least the pretence of it). Their childhood was filled with the Wild West outlaw landgrabbing which has made people like Roman Abramovich incredibly rich, and so they feel they can go out and do anything. Then there are those who had their formative years under Communism but really came of age after glasnost (they’d be about 30 now). They know the grey world of pre-modern Russia, and so have much the same attitude: go out there and do what the hell you want because you’re free.

Shteyngart is a great writer, and it’s well worth reading this. Take this section for example:

As I fly into Moscow from Rome, the New World order is clear: middle-class Italians gesticulating up a storm in economy, slick Muscovites up front, chatting in hip, sullen tones over their iPads, their luggage bearing tags from Rome’s Hotel Hassler. I’ve never seen a man in his thirties pout so effectively with his designer lips when told of the absence of his favorite wine. [...] The center of the Snob universe is Moscow’s former Red October (Krasniy Oktyabr) chocolate factory on the Bersenevskaya Embankment of the Moscow River. A red-brick fixture of central Moscow for over a century, this enormous complex, crisscrossed by walkways that bring to mind the industrial glamour of New York’s Meatpacking District, once perfumed this gritty city with its sweet chocolaty smells. Today it is at the heart of Moscow’s media elite, home not just to Snob but to the influential Kommersant daily, not to mention oligarch-funded Internet ventures such as Digital October, and an endless array of clubs and restaurants with names like Progressive Daddy and Belka: The First Non-Smoking Bar.

Next is Miriam Elder’s story for The Guardian about Moscow’s annual battle with the snow, which shows the other side of Russia. Crippled with bureaucracy and leftovers from the Communist era, nothing gets done. For example, to get a driving license in Russia, all you need to do is bribe your instructor with a few roubles. How did I learn this? Russia Today, the country’s English language news channel. A sample:

The new mayor, a longtime ally of Vladimir Putin, remains a nonentity after one year in office. Despite his origins – born and raised in Khanty- Mansiysk, in the darkest depths of Siberia – he also appears to lack much- needed knowledge on the science of snow removal. Sobyanin’s one tangible move as mayor has been to dig up many of the tarmac-like pavements that line Moscow’s main roads and replace them with cobblestones. They make for lovely summer strolling. And will likely turn the city into even more of an icetrap once the snow settles into their cracks for good. Navigating Moscow’s traffic-crazed streets is a stressful experience at the best of times – in winter, it’s downright exhausting.

It’s an interesting country, if nothing else.

The book is available at Smashwords, who do a magnificent job of converting it to pretty much every format under the sun (yes, you can read it on the Kindle. Yes, you will be able to get it via Apple’s bookstore once it’s been accepted there. Yes, if you’re still a technological mongoloid like me you can just download the PDF or view it online). And it’s less than the price of a Twix at the corner shop down the road from me. So please take a gander at it.

It might be useful to you; it might not. But I think that it’s fairly true to the problems that freelancers face – especially the dilemmas they often have. For example, invariably people go into freelancing because they want to wrest back control of their career and write only what interests them. The problem with that is that what interests you often doesn’t pay. That’s one of the central tenets of the book, and it’s front and centre as the first confession: I don’t always like the work I’m doing. A sample:

You have to become realistic at some point. Pragmatism is perhaps the best skill that a freelancer can have – way beyond writing skill, personal personality or the ability to sell themselves like no-one’s business. The freelancers that work in cloud cuckoo land…well, actually, they don’twork at all.

So take shoddy jobs that you don’t like, because every job is experience to add to your list. Plus you never know – you might hate writing your first erotic story, but end up liking the second and third, and know how to push a reader’s buttons by the fiftieth. If you’d been snooty about the jobs you took, you’d never have found your real calling.

I haven’t found that niche yet, but that’s not a problem. I’m learning lots of stuff about the world that I ordinarily wouldn’t have bothered to figure out or find on my own initiative. Some day I might. If I don’t, what’s the problem? I can just keep doing anything and everything, and still present myself as unique. I’ll be adaptable, rather than a self-confessed expert at something.

I also touch upon other hotly-debated topics, like devaluing yourself by lowering the amount you charge for different clients (it’s a contentious issue, I know), selling yourself (people who follow this blog regularly will know that I ascribe to a peculiarly Geordie phrase, shy bairns get nowt) and some jobs that didn’t go so well.

I think it’s good. Even if you don’t, well, it’s 63 pence and 12,500 words of your time. Got to be worth a gamble, hasn’t it?

Sometimes, as a freelancer, you have to do this sort of work. It’s not necessarily grunt work – as I explained in an earlier post, one of the new bits of work that I have is writing blog posts for a “humor” (sic – it’s American) website under a psuedonym. You churn out good but fairly soulless copy, and it’s perversely fun.

You can’t be picky about what you do as a freelancer – not unless you’re at the very top of the profession (which, if you’re reading this, you almost certainly aren’t). Sometimes you have to go after the menial blogging/press release jobs advertised on Craigslist which pay you significantly less than your normal hourly rate. It’s money coming in. It’s not good money, but it’s money coming in nonetheless.

Those smaller jobs also can end up in unexpected places. As an example, I wrote a couple of articles for free about my travels a few years ago for an online magazine run by a personable editor. That guy then joined a massive PR recruitment agency in London, and decided to take a chance on me writing copy for them. It worked (until he left), but I’d built up other relationships in the company so when they have work I have the chance to try for it.

By taking the less glamorous jobs, you sometimes open doors to better ones. That’s why I ghostwrote a book with a tiny advance on the basis that I’d recoup my money by taking part of the sales revenue. The book is tanking – thanks to a lack of promotion, above anything else (I hope). It’s disappointing (50,000+ words work basically down the drain is a disheartening experience for anyone) but I can now say that I can ghostwrite as well as write under my own name, and if anyone in that industry wants a ghostwriter I can also say I have hands-on experience.

Don’t be too precious. You can’t afford to be – especially not in these times. Take the unglamorous work. Someone has to do the freelance equivalent of emptying the bins. And from the most menial jobs come the best opportunities, becuase people recognise you’re willing to get your hands dirty.

I know that the Scots have a word for how the festival’s been so far – dreich – but from Saturday morning (bar a bad shower at about 2.30pm) it’s been warm and if not sunny, then acceptably clear. In fact, the temperature’s so warm that even if you end up being caught out in a downpour and can’t find your way into an indoor venue, you’re likely to dry out within half an hour anyway.

This was my first Fringe. I was expecting a train full of luvvies congratulating each other, so was disappointed by the journey up being populated with Glasgwegian families with a DS for each child but not enough money for train fares. Still, once you hit Edinburgh itself – and Waverley station – you realise just how all-encompassing the festival is to the city for the month or so it takes over.

A sad off-duty unicyclist in a Sgt. Pepper’s-era jacket sitting on the pavement (tired or just trying to take a break from being in performance mode) was a pretty good way to start the festival experience. The Royal Mile has a collection of rotating street acts which are all very entertaining but – as a personal plea, and on behalf of the street team staffers I’ve met over the weekend – please keep clearly posted gangways clear. It just pisses people off otherwise.

The first show on Friday night that I managed to see was a smorgasbord of stand-up in the staff building (which annoyingly means that I can’t really say “go there!” because if you turn up at venue 2 without a staff pass, or someone with one, then you’re not going to see it). However, the show was headlined with a short set by wunderkid Daniel Sloss, who proved through his polish and timely jokes about the state of our Facebook lives why he’s had a pretty meteoric rise to the top – via BBC3. If you can, go and see his show at Assembly George Square (that’s venue 3) – if you manage to find the massive yurt village that is the BBC’s Fringe set-up, then you’re within spitting distance.

Other recommendations at Assembly from people who spent far more time than my 40 hours at the Fringe include Hot Tub With Kurt and Kristen (she of Flight of the Conchords fame) and Dave Gorman’s Powerpoint Presentation. All three of these are on at Assembly at basically the same time (7.35-7.40pm) so either pick wisely or try and spread your trip out over many days.

Saturday morning would’ve been spent at Shakespeare for Breakfast (C Venue, 10am – venue 34) but for an inopportune night out on the Friday and the need to sleep in. Reviews are very good though, and you get free food and drink for your £7.50 so you should go anyway.

Carl Sagan is my God, Oh and Richard Feynman Too (12.10pm, Canons’ Gait, venue 78) was my next stop but annoyingly Robin Ince is too popular to be able to turn up half an hour early and still be able to get in to the limited-seating space for free, so turn up very early and get yourself a queueing token behind the bar or be disappointed (as I was). Ince walked past me as I sulked in the square behind the venue, wondering what to do next.

Luckily there’s plenty to do because it’s Edinburgh and it’s Fringe time. A trip back to the flat I was staying at – avoiding the increasing crowds – meant a reconnoitre and a £14 ticket for The Phill Jupitus Quartet in Made up (Gilded Balloon Teviot Debating Hall, 3.30pm, venue 13). Obviously, the show’s different every day because it’s improv, but Jupitus’ roster of friends to come play comedy with him is deep and strong. It was definitely the best hour of the 40 I had at the Fringe.

Sadly, Monsters: A History of Villainy (Fingers Piano Bar, 5.30pm, venue 221) wasn’t. Alternatively named ‘A History of Villainly’ on their own promo material, this reminded me of a time in year 8 where a group of my friends and I got cocky because we’d put on a pretty passable comedy revue the previous year and decided to do it again, without preparation. Slapdash, amateurish and worst of all, not funny, I lasted 15 minutes of the hour-long show before I quietly snuck out the back.

It was free, though, and there are an awful lot of good shows as part of the free Fringe, so check them out.

One show which most of the people I was around for the weekend wanted to see but ended up always being too late for was Debbie Does My Dad (Bedlam Theatre, 11pm, venue 49) which is supposedly a humorous lecture from the son of a famous porn star. Annoyingly, given it was recommended at precisely hour 2 of my 40 hours in Edinburgh and I had the following 27 hours to plan to see it, I never got round to it (instead, a staff night out took us to the altogether too cramped teats of Udderbelly).

The Fringe, though, is a tremendous thing to take in, and with the sheer number of shows you’re bound to miss things. Next year I’d probably be more aware of buying tickets ahead of time for the popular shows (Robin Ince being someone who has a significantly larger following than I’d envisaged). Plus I’d probably spend more than just 40 hours trying to tear round the city.

The problem is I don’t have any idea what to see. The one act I was determined to see – Bo Burnham – isn’t actually doing the festival this year; I was 12 months too late. It’ll be a fun experience as I go for the happenstance approach to seeing acts at the Fringe. I suppose if anyone has any suggestions for acts to see, they can suggest it in the comments below, and I’ll try and go.

Hopefully I’ll be regularly (ish – maybe once a day) posting about the atmosphere, the acts and the people you come across at the Fringe. Until tonight at 7.06pm, when I roll into Waverley, then!

I don’t get why people are rioting in Liverpool and Birmingham and Bristol. As far as I’m aware, no-one shot someone there. That’s just opportunistic troublemaking.

Congratulations, you’ve managed to turn everyone against the concept of peaceful protest.

Perhaps everyone’s rioting because they took a look at the CAC40 and the DAX dropping 5% a piece, or the FTSE losing $46 billion in a day yesterday. Somehow, though, I doubt that they keep up with the markets. I think people just wanted a telly and a yen to make good on their long-held dream to set stuff on fire.

Worryingly (and I say this as someone who is politically unbiased and doesn’t ascribe to a single political party), people seem more willing to pass over blaming those who went out on the streets and place the blame for all this at the feet of the Tory Government.

They’ve done an awful lot wrong, true, but I don’t really think they can be blamed for this. After all, it’s not Boris Johnson caving in the window of a Curry’s Digital with a bin, or George Osborne setting fire to people’s houses (though there’s a valid argument that metaphorically he is). You’re not seeing Eric Pickles legging it with a 42′ widescreen TV down Clapham High Street.

And of course, the costs of sending policemen in riot gear and paying them overtime is definitely helping the economy (if that’s the reason that’s currently being claimed as the driver of the mindless violence). Paying for all the water to tamp down the smouldering buildings, too. I guess you could make an argument that paying builders is injecting money into the economy, but the loss of high-value TVs and electrical equipment counteracts that. Plus there are the hospital bills and insurance claims for those injured and those whose lives have been ruined.

It just doesn’t add up. So stop. I would try and be more eloquent, but really, this woman in Hackney has it all said:

We’ve seen in the past few months a series of events which have managed to break down, brick by brick, the wall of silence which often ringfences China when it comes to the world press. A lot of the new openness is coming from state-sponsored ripoffs of western social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

The collision of two bullet trains in the Zhejiang province a little over two weeks ago should ordinarily have been kept within the Chinese walls, but this was an anomaly. Because of the new open internet society, rumours of the accident spread through the social networks based in China and leaked out. The wall, it turns out, is more porous than would be expected. The pictures were terrifying, and took their places in the western news bulletins and newspapers.

Ordinarily these pictures and reports wouldn’t have escaped from the domestic media, but this time they did. Earlier in July, so did first reports of what has turned out to be an enormous oil slick at a Chinese offshore drilling platform. That event had been managed to kept under wraps slightly better than the bullet train crash – it was nearly a month before the first reports eked out – but nonetheless, once the information escaped, western media made sure to follow it up. China has been forced into a humiliating admission of the gravity of the situation which weakened the normally self-congratulating public face of the regime.

It is not the only event which the authorities failed to cover up. In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, tainted milk scandals and the deaths and displacement of families came to light in a manner which shocked the Chinese, usually used to dealing – and suppressing – internally with things like this.

There have been further revelations about the train crash, too. A Chinese railway official was quoted in a domestic economic newspaper as “the same thing is always done [ie. there are always cover-ups], but this time there was just more media attention.”

That media attention, of course, came from the new media. It’s a situation that many old leaders are finding difficult to come to terms with – especially established vestiges of the past like China’s Communist Party (for a similar way in which new media has outpaced other previously-comfortable dictators, see The Revolution Will Be Tweeted?). The internet, for all intents and purposes, is still a new-fangled, dangerous thing to these leaders – and China is recognising that now.

There’s a reason why writers bring up the sausage factory analogy when discussing poorly-paid blogging jobs for companies like AOL-Huffington Post, which just opened a UK version within the past month or so (I sent them an email offering my services as a blogger – gratis, as everyone who contributes to the blogging section does – but haven’t heard back). When AOL laid off significant numbers of staff last year before joining forces with Arianna Huffington, there were a cavalcade of angry bloggers who spilled the depressing, highly-stresses atmosphere that requires 5 or 10 (or more) blogposts a day of decent quality. Almost all of them used the sausage factory analogy.

My favourite post is by Oliver Miller, who wrote for AOL’s Television section. He wrote a third of a million words in under a year for AOL – paid, relatively handsomely (for a blogger at least) at a rate of 10 cents a word.

Some people struggle to write for their whole lives, and only dream of ever getting paid for it. And here was I was, Mr. Big-Shot-Razor-Blade-Man, getting paid a real salary. I could sit at home and write in my pajamas while eating take-out food; and that’s what I did. I was so grateful.

But this was part of the problem. We — by which I mean me and my fellow employees — were all so grateful. Which allowed us to ignore — or willfully overlook — certain problems. Such as the fact that AOL editors forced us to work relentless hours. Or the fact that we were paid to lie, actually instructed to lie by our bosses.

He wrote 8 to 10 blogposts per day, and rapidly lost his enthusiasm. What started out as carefully crafted, proud copy became boilerplate. He was spending too long writing his posts, and eventually got it down to 25 minutes per post. It doesn’t sound appealing.

Except I’ve just done that, for less money than that, and writing more. And actually, I didn’t mind it. I still don’t. I’m still doing it.

There was an ad for an American humour website; a group trying to be the next Cracked (in fact, in their advice to writers they specifically direct you towards the site for an example of how they would like things written). I started doing work on Friday night, and I’ve since written 60 300+ word posts which are by degrees informative, entertaining and hopefully comedic. That’s between 15-20 posts, or 5-6,000 words a day.

I absolutely love it. Admittedly, there’s no pressure – I’m not being given 10 topics a day to write about or else – and I could, if I wanted to, only write a single post (or none at all). It’s also not for such a high-profile site as AOL, so any grammatical mistakes or factual errors (not that I think there have been any in my posts so far) wouldn’t be so harshly judged. I get to pick the topics, and if something interests me enough to be able to muster up a few hundred words, then that’s great. It’s largely mindless, vapid prose, but it’s fun.

I’ve managed to create a balshy alter-ego (you didn’t think I’d use my own name, did you?) who has a one-sided conversation with the reader. It comes easily to me, and I hope that I can continue doing it for a long time yet.

Weirdly, I’m not even concerned about the quantity of writing that would be involved. If I continued at current rates, I’d be writing significantly more than a million words in a year (perhaps nearer two). That’s okay. I can handle that, I think. I’ve got about a week’s worth of potential posts (including ‘Lady Gaga’s Biggest Hoo-Hahs’ and ‘Who Would Win? Pirates or Ninjas?’) planned and ready to write and upload. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s about 75-80 posts. They’re all written down on a pad of paper; whenever I have a stupid idea, it gets written down.

That list is supplemented by anything my mind conjured up while I’m surfing on the internet. If I read something interesting, I’ll give my own take on it and share. It’s fantastic.

I’ve been inside the sausage factory, and somehow I’ve come out smelling of roses. There were no pig carcasses, no spatters of blood and definitely no brains dripping down the walls. So far, so sane.