Blogger letters - a joy deferred

So I finally received my letter from Azra, this being the third iteration of the letter from her side due to some misunderstandings and confusion about postal addresses ... and it rocked!

To start with, it had a seal .. plus Azra's slightly untidy scrawl (I kid, the address was neatly written, the letter itself not). Plus all the pent-up excitement, that had been building for weeks. I remember sending my letter almost 2 months ago; and in the interim Azra and I have sent innumerable messages trying to get the post through, which by the way is why normal people don't write letters anymore; even fast mail takes a good few days.

And then there was the letter itself, a solid 4 pages long and with my initials embossed onto the first page. Folded up, inside the envelope it possessed an unusual, heft; which I later discovered was a good luck coin glued to the final page.

Much of the content of the letter is private; suffice to say that it included a few heartfelt confessions plus some rather risque pics.

The joy is in the reading, the dwelling upon ideas, imagination free to wonder, without having to confine yourself to 140 characters. Simply letting the words, scatter themselves across the page; meandering without the pressing urgency to make a point that so much of the written word is now reduced to."Be top-down, be punchier" is the constant refrain; thus the joy of a delightful wordy meander is magnified.

The story of how life happens, without waiting for your plans to bear fruition, to just live in the moment; to quote John Lennon "Life is what happens, while you are busy making other plans"; was the theme of the letter. Sauntering on with exquisite verbosity, Azra spoke of peregrination, wandering from one place to another, every new destination a place for an exciting sojourn.

Without a doubt, her letter, is for me an excuse to rub the dust from my eyes, and get on with living!

Why hippies make me want to vomit (... and why GM crops will save the world)

So having been labelled a hippy before, I know this is a massive generalisation ... but to be frank most hippies and in particular 1 hippy make me want to vomit.

It's terrible I know, we should respect and understanding for people's positions, thoughts and way of thinking about things, but really .. this level of idiocy and stupidity is more than even my iron cast stomach can handle.

When you consistently talk about GM crops with an authoritative tone of voice, but actually know close to nothing, it's actually kind of revolting. Comments like "GM crops only have 10% of the nutritional value of organics" are not only wrong but so clearly wrong it boggles the mind that they could be even considered plausible.

Sure, I get the whole "we should go back to nature vibe" (said in your best stoner drawl) but to be honest, organic food can not feed the planet. Actually it could, if we got rid of all our livestock, but the plausibility of that scenario is even more far-fetched. So sure, let's get back on our moral high horses and talk about how Gaia knows best and continue to let millions of Africans starve and die because we refuse to utilise drought resistant high-yield crops.

By the by, GM crops, would alleviate the need for herbicides and pesticides by allowing for disease resistant crops. And yes, Monsanto is an evil corporation, but their crops and their innovations will help mankind. And yes, terminator genes (so that you need to buy new seed every year) is not ideal, but is the only way to allow people to invest the necessary resources to allow for innovation. It's the same like saying that big pharma shouldn't be allowed to make money; all it betrays is a lack of understanding and gross naivety.

Honestly I think it's the idioticy that irritates me the most. The lack of understanding that conceptually there's very little difference between GM crops and selective breeding, which is something mankind has been doing with both livestock and crops for over 2 millenia (not 1oo years as our hippy friend would have you believe)

So i'm really sorry that my first blog in months is little more than a rant about stupid people, but that's the way it is. I'm sorry, people that dumb are little more than a waste of Oxygen