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Alistair Wiseman or AliWiseman Blog MSN Page Pictures and moreAlistair Wiseman MSN page with Blog n Pics November 05 My new homepagesMy new Home Page, or rather Pages, are now up and running. The old Alistair Wiseman geocities one is now no more, but the new Alistair pages which bear a striking resemblance to the old ones, are HERE and looking quite pretty without the annoying geocities adverts. Still stuff on there about my time in Crewe, time in Wolves, info and pics of me, Esther Wiseman, Jack Rewi Angus Wairau, and a bundle of pics and links! So, go nosy, and that means you the reader.. and the googlebot, which seems to be neglecting it's duty! lol November 04 Chuckles.. You MUST learn Dutch? hmm! Here is, presented in full glory, a reply I wrote to an article which can be found HERE which shows a Dutch commercial, in Dutch, showing why you MUST learn dutch. I have probably see n the commercial. I've probably ignored it instantly as I wouldn't have understood it. Mmm effective then eh? The responses are extremely interesting. I advise people to read this looking for amusement while noticing some rather valid points. I especially would like to point out the disclaimer and the second to last paragraph starting with "For those Dutch/other people who tell people that they have not learned Dutch because they are lazy,". I think it sums up quite a lot of the difficulties faced by the ex pat here. Joe states "because learning it (Dutch) transforms you from being a guest to being an intruder in the eyes of the natives. Interesting... I moved to Leiden 2 years ago to be with my gf who is now my wife. She is Dutch. I moved here from the Uk. I'm 35. It is psychologically proven that a persons capacity to learn a new language diminishes with age. At school, many years ago, I was given the choice of learning French, or not learning at all another language. I chose not to learn one. As of up until 2 years ago, I've never required another language, and as I am in Holland, and Dutch wasn't available, I appear to have made the right decision. Having lived in the Uk in northern working-mens towns, attitudes towards foreigners not speaking English were more than a touch xenophobic. That's something I'm accustomed to. My brother teaches languages. We never really got along once he became an adult. He's 12 years older than me. Always has been in fact. He was teaching languages by the time I was given the choice as to which one I might like to supplement my English with. Oh, and I use the singular correctly! I believe I have already expounded upon the resulting outcome of that choice. My wife, being born in The Netherlands, has been learning languages since she was old enough to be programmed to do so by the education system. Her English is good enough to be thought of as a native speaker, especially now that, and I fear I have to take credit for this although it offends my natural modesty, the Americanisms which infiltrate Dutch English, have been suitably obliterated. So far, I have had no need to learn the language. I have shown a desire to, having acquired various CD roms and other web orientated learning programs. My Mother in Law teaches non Dutch people Dutch, via English. The hand of learning has not been extended. I cannot as yet make up my mind as to whether this is a good or bad thing. After all, she is my Mother in Law. I'm seeing the word "Intruder" float about my consciousness looking for something to connect with. Being familiar with the Uk program of teaching basic English as a second language for free (much like happens in the US of A), I set about trying to find something of that ilk over here. This caused much discombobulation for those whom I made inquires to, and much consternation for myself at their subsequent reactions. It appears that the concept of Free Basic Dutch is only available for those from outside the EU. I might be forgiven for thinking that perhaps, this might have something to do with economic reasons, rather than perhaps extending the hand of knowledge. But then I was always a sceptic. I have, on many occasions, and with great loquaciousness, expounded on my "I've not needed Dutch so far", to various people with whom I have conversed. I add my thoughts upon this which go something along the lines of as follows : "I always feel rude not speaking the native language. Much of the English speaking world carry with them an arrogance which says something along the lines of "You should speak my language so I don't have to speak yours".. which is perpetuated by many schools being dis-interested in teaching languages. I am not like that. I do feel rude, I feel like I am imposing upon you, the None Native English Speaker, restrictions in communications and that is not fair." It is, in my opinion, a difficult concept for people to grasp who have never experienced the psychological effects of living in a mono-linguistic, often insular and xenophobic community, that I, the willing to learn yet none Dutch speaking ex pat, says that I have not required Dutch to live here, because they have no point of reference to work on. It is also difficult to grasp that, after the initial show of willingness, a person will eventually think "Sod it!". A person arrives with, more often than not, no experience of any Dutch whatsoever, and with their barriers already up (see above), and these barriers are reinforced by bureaucratic non sequiturs, a people which can actually communicate with a certain degree of proficiency in English anyway, and the fact that to actually learn Dutch academically will cost an inordinate, ney, extortionate amount! I believe I may have mentioned my wife is Dutch. Asides from her family, her social scene since I have arrived here has consisted of.... me and my new friends over here. Her Dutch friends, and I use that word really really wanting to substitute it for acquaintances, call on the phone maybe once every 6 months. She, reciprocates. Every 6 months. I have no concept of this. It is bizarre beyond belief to me. Her family live a few kilometers away. (25-35ish?). They have visited as many times as my sister has in 2 years. My sister lives in Sweden. Both used the same mode of transport, the car to get to us. It's just that my sis traveled 1600k more. So when we go out, we go to the local British bar. There are many Dutch people within, and they speak Dutch between themselves and English to us, often not recognising that my wife is Dutch. She socialises with my (and now her) English / various other nationality friends (there are Danish, American, South African and French people as well), and now actually gets to interact with people rather than just having work and me as her whole life. That has to be healthier than, and I can only judge from what I have experienced, what she seemed to think was the normal way to be. And so no. Learning Dutch is not a must. It is not a prerequisite, and I have happily survived without it. For everyone who says "You need to learn Dutch to fully experience the culture", i say "poppycock!" (which apparently according to Stephen Fry derives from Dutch). For those Dutch/other people who tell people that they have not learned Dutch because they are lazy, I say this : You probably have no concept of quite the size of the task being asked, because, to many, learning a new language is not just about learning new words and new pronunciations, it's far more than that. It is about self expression. About who you are. It is about taking away from someone all that they are, block by block, and then attempting to reassemble it, but with a mirror! (and possibly upside down!) My passion for self expression is legendary in my world! Take that away from me and I cease to be me. Tell me I have to use a concise version, I cease to be me. Some people, are simply not willing to risk sacrificing themselves in this way. To be honest, I don't blame them. Alistair disclaimer : I am aware that my wifes social life/family may not be indicative of all dutch society. Please don't reply with bla bla not the norm... it IS the norm for where I am living, because I live with her and can only relate to how I find it here. I came here to be with her, not for the culture, the language, the inlaws, the work, the income tax rates, the stupidly high prices for housing, so again, please, don't give me any of this "You moved here so you should..."etc etc. I've made more than enough "sacrifices" coming here to have new ones "Imposed" upon me. Ye gods I miss Real Ale from a Hand Pump in a tapped and vented barrel!! And.. as an add on... Learning a language in your own country (like the majority of Dutch people will have done with English), is a very different beast to learning the language of the country you are now living in. October 27 Ponderings about the human race. Well. This should be fun. I was sat in bed last night, reading through a David Icke book, mostly about vibrations, how everything vibrates at certain frequencies and how people with similar vibrations are drawn to each other. Interesting, but not what Mr Icke is most known for (which is actually quite a shame). What he IS known for however, is his theory about how certain bloodlines run the world, and these bloodlines are linked into a reptillian alien race, in order basically to keep us living in fear, because the afore mentioned aliens feed on the emotional responses given out by people who are scared/afraid (perhaps in the same way as some dogs recognise we are scared of them?). Some of the people involved, Icke states, actually shapeshift, manifesting at one time as human, one time as reptillion. As these aliens occupy a different dimensional field to us, they can "possess" a body, whilst not appearing in sight of ordinary human senses. If this sounds far fetched, look up and read about Dark Matter and Dark Energy, making up about 95% of the universes mass, but it only exists in our dimension when you don't observe it... or rather it does exist, but not somewhere we are as yet capable of seeing it! However re aliens, given the right circumstances, the right flux in atmospherics, or indeed "emotional" state of the alien, people occasionally are able to see this other Entity. It's a great theory, and actually much fun to explore, as if you do the research, there are so many parallel stories in mythology that, Ickes theory certainly holds more water than most of the God delusions still doing the rounds. Almost every religion carries a story of Gods interbreeding with "The daughters of Man", thus creating a bloodline link. Not that long ago the guy who (in my opinion) ripped off Holy Blood Holy Grail (still an excellent book) to create a story about Jesus having kids and continuing a bloodline. Continuing the Davidic lineage. Kings and Queens are made through bloodlines which give them power. However... this is just a stimuli to me. As it happened, I had earlier been listening to Re : Evolution , by Terrence McKenna, accompanied by The Shamen, from the old and dusty Boss Drum album. Again this was talking about the effect of vibrations altering neurological processes so that people can come together as a one almost, in a positive way instead of the negative of mass hysteria. Interesting... And then, oddly enough, my mind wandered back to what I was doing (not who.. i was innocent back then) all those years ago when listening to that for the first time, and I was likely to have just picked up a new Spiderman comic. So, my mind follows the path to Venom. For those who don't know, Venom is a bad guy. A combination of an alien Entity seeking symbiosis (look it up lol), brought back from space, and a human, both of whom share a hatred for the webbed wonder. The human (Eddy) because his career had been ruined by Spidy's alter ego, the alien because Spidey had rejected it after discovering that it was actually a sentient alien being wanting to bond with him. Upon the alien finding Eddy, they bond, the alien augmenting everything of Eddy's, inc strength and his hatred, while actually giving him the same powers as Spidey due to the earlier time the alien spent with him waiting for the right time to bond with him instead. Quite a mish mash I think you'll agree. So... where is all this leading? To be fair, I'm typing this now attempting to complete this writing in some form of coherent structure, so bear with me. We are animals. Always have been, always will be. This whole society thing is pretty much piffle. It's a control mechanism set up specifically to do that. Built upon a pyramid structure we are told in a Top Down way what we can and can't do, what is, and what isn't acceptable. The more socially "refined" we become, the less we are allowed to do. The more we group ourselves into categories, the more dogma we have set out for us to OBEY. which is all well and good up until you begin to get delusions of grandeur and start to believe you have left the animal behind. You haven't! Our animal instincts are the ones which make us greedy, make us irrational at times, overtly emotional at others. Fall in love with one person for a while, sleep with someone else as well. Evolution gave us these animal instincts, not even learned behaviour but congenital. The statistic : 1 child in every family with 4 kids doesn't belong to the husband... doesn't lie. So, what we say separates us from the other animals though, is our intellect. But, where did this come from? Throughout early history, man made some incredible advancements. Language has to be a major thing to have happened to man. Not just verbal, but written too. I read an excellent theory that tribes thousands of years ago stumbled upon flora and fungi which instigated a temporary Synesthesia , which meant that upon hearing a sound, that was interpreted as a vision, or more probably, upon "seeing" something, the person under the influence actually heard a sound, and from then on associated that sound as the name of the creature / object. Meerkats have developed a "language" which does the same thing in that, dependent upon the noise, the type of threat can be determined as ground or air based! It is known early man made drawings etc but the leaps made to progress to where we are now are still not fully explainable, in the same way as how pyramids were created. It is my hypothesis that, I can tie all of these ideas together. The presence of no other "intelligent"/"advanced" entities besides us in the universe is statistically impossible. Only human arrogance is capable of convincing ourselves that like Tiger, we're the only one! but then only human arrogance can label us either intelligent or advanced anyway so I guess one intrinsically links to the other.. lol. Now behind all the piffle and dogma of all the religions you have to believe that because of the hugely similar accounts of the early days of man, there has to be something in that. A base or foundation. As I've said before, one of the common themes prevalent throughout many histories is the idea that other entities came and bred with the humans around, forging a bloodline. What if, instead of meaning physically having sex with, this actually pertains to a joining. A symbiotic relationship, whereby both entities share the same space in a reciprocal synergy. The human Host, becomes augmented, because the alien Entity provides amplification of skills already possessed and adds it's own capacities to the Host (much like the Venom character). In return the Entity feeds from the energy and/or vibrations given out by the human. Human DNA gives out photons ... a type of laser light in fact. Not a strong laser, but a laser nevertheless.. Interestingly we don't know what about 93-95% of our DNA is actually there for, (remarkably similar numbers to the afore mentioned Dark Matter etc), so if it emits a power source like that, who knows what else as yet not found is emanating from us. Asides from that though, emotions could easily be a source from which the Entity could draw power. Indeed, this is exactly what David Icke purports is happening, and that the world is manipulated as are we specifically to generate negative energy/emotions, as these provide more than positive ones. This Entity, nowadays, having coexisted with us for centuries, is now referred to as our consciousness. Our Soul if you will. That part of us which exists outside of the corporeal. So, how does this work? Well, lets look at the idea of an afterlife and a soul. Again, almost all religions have these concepts, and I have discussed quite why I believe they exist in this blog entry from May 6th last year in response to the Zeitgeist film, and how they came about. Now however, I shall throw a new reason into the mix. The Human is a vessel here for the Other Entity. That Entity existed before the human, and will continue to exist afterwards. A consequence of that is residual leakage. The Entity moves from one Host to another, and sometimes leaks information of its past Host into its new one. Hence you have people who appear to have recollections of other lives. They fully admit their flesh is different, so what else could it be but the "Soul" which has passed on with this regularly highly accurate information. The fact that this Entity could be sentient to a point (although perhaps it is instinct driven and i'm anthropomorphizing) means it knows once the vessel it currently occupies dies, it will then have to move on to another. Ergo, the consciousness is aware on some level that it will move on, but we as Human Beings have become so arrogant that we believe it is the individual which will move on just without the body. We forget that personality is tied in with the physical brain and chemicals running through it, and has nothing really to do with consciousness. In fact, it is entirely possible that the Entity might have no concept of "I" at all. Also our personalities are amplified so much that we ignore our instincts both animal and the possible residual information available to us from the Entity. So what we have is, the animal species Human, coexisting in synergy with an Entity called/thought of as our Soul (as over thousands of years the memory of never not having such a thing is gone in the same way as we forget when we were not Self Aware), Humans benefiting from augmented intelligence superficially, with our societies and technology giving us precedence over the other animals on earth, as we've lept through various stages of "Progress", but creating a hierarchical society still based on animal instincts, (how could it not be), such as greed, power, territory, etc still with all of the actions and interactions of the other species parallel to us, but so far escalated that we now live perpetually in fear and subservient to a way of life which no one asked for, and the "Soul" feeding from every emotion that Humans can experience, having learned that, as Humans intellect expands, so the capacity for emotions increases almost exponentially, ergo providing it with more "fuel". A self perpetuating circle.. until something self destructs maybe, or maybe until we become so intellectually advanced that we spot what's happening. I suspect I know which would come first. What's interesting here is that, for myself I would like to think that the Entity involved is ambivalent to Humans, neither liking or disliking (as i suspect these are purely human animalistic creations and not applicable here to it). Anyway.. lol.. this isn't finished... and it is just an expansion on an idea.... not what i am saying IS... but what might be... but i'm out of time... more soon.. lol October 18 Alistair Wiseman HomepageJust a little note to say that, due to the demise of geocities, I have moved my website to HERE although I have not transferred all of the pages, as it was really too much trouble considering the limited amount of views the website receives compared to here. Hopefully if I need to retrieve that which I have not moved over, the internet archive site will have saved it for me. October 13 Global Shwaming, Gods creation of all demoted, and Obama peace prize farceAh, it was an entertaining time in the news for sure last week. 1st you have the obvious one. Obama getting the Peace prize when we all know he'd been in office under 2 weeks when the nominations finished. Classic... but that's really a tad mainstream for me. The name of the puppet changes but the strings stay the same.
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