Boxing day

Here in Spain, today is just the day after Christmas and my birthday, too. However, in the UK it is a very important day known as Boxing Day. It is a public holiday in the UK and several former British colonies. It is mainly dedicated to shopping and there is a lot of sport events during the day.
Today, I decided to celebrate my birthday doing some sport, despite I was a bit tired after being running yesterday in the morning. Besides, I am still suffering the flu but I am almost completely recovered now. And I am glad to say that I am in a good shape and I feel every day younger.
Today and yesterday we could enjoy a wonderful weather to practice sports outdoors. However, today was a bit cold to ride a bike without wearing gloves. I know it first hand and you can trust me, it is not a pleasant experience. Anyway, it was a morning of fun and for sure much better than staying at home in a warmer environment.
Fortunately, this year this day is on Sunday and we can enjoy it the same way as English people. Therefore, I celebrated Boxing Day in my way and it was mainly devoted to sport and friends because I do not like a lot going shopping.

Connecting ideas

I do not tend to watch King's Christmas message or, at least, do not tend to pay attention to them. This year I did not watch it and I did not read anything about it. Instead of that, I decided to do something different, something strange. This afternoon, I was watching Queen's Christmas message. What Queen? could you ask. United Kingdom's Queen, that is, Elizabeth II. Why would I do that? Well, I have no answer for that but I have an excuse, I was checking if royal family members speak in a way that I could understand them, just in case I have the chance to talk to one of them, you never know. And my conclusion is that the Queen speaks English correctly (not really a surprise for me but I needed to be sure).
I must also say that Queen's messages is as boring as King's. In fact, I have no intention to repeat this experience. I guess that seen one, seen all of them. In my opinion, it would be more entertaining to watch an episode of the Simpsons, a Comedy Club program, even a documentary on La2 channel. As a matter of fact, it would probably be more interesting any kind of program except Big Brother or any other reality show or gossip programs.
Maybe this lack of interest on my part is because I am not a big fan of monarchies or social classes. I consider that they should be buried in the past and I am not proud of living in a country that supports a monarchy. Somewhat, we could be compared with bees, that show a very social behavior differenciating between queens and workers. Should we be conform with this comparison or aspire to organize our society in a more correct way where social classes, discrimination, unfair wealth distribution, selfishness and other human defects do not exist.
We are all equals and should respect to each others. We should play as a team if we want to survive, and the basis in teams is respect among teammates. In my humble opinion, mankind is doomed to extinction if we keep our current behaviour, but I am aware that this is in our genes and it is not very likely that the change needed really happens.
I am sure that there is a lot of people that disagree with this opinion and I would like to listen to their refutation if it does not include ideas like hope, optimism, prayer or miracle.
For now, we can bet on what kind of apocalypse is waiting for us. If you need some help to collect ideas you can watch a lot of movies that will show you lots of different ways to lead mankind to extinction.

P.S.: I am certainly impressed of how I started writing about Christmas messages and I finished with human extinction. It is hard to explain how my mind links ideas, mainly because I have not a clue how it does.

All the truth? (Making of)

This is a bit strange post. I am going to explain all the steps that I took to create last post on the blog.
Three days ago, I was washing dishes after having lunch at home and on TV there was news about Julian Assange's trial in the UK. Then my mind started doing some work, I guess, and I started thinking about the idea to write something related to that on my blog. When I finished washing dishes, and after several ideas that I did not like much, the good one came up into my mind.
After a while, I started writing and in less than one hour I had finished and I had reviewed it, looking for mistakes. After that, I was going to publish it but I had a big problem. I made a mistake and log out my account without saving what I had written and I lost all that work. I was not in the mood to do it again, so I wrote down the main points and decided to do it next day.
Unfortunately, yesterday I spent all the day in bed because of the flu and I could not write anything that could make any sense.
However, today I feel much better and I finished the post, published it without problems and I had the idea of writing this "bonus".

All the truth?

Newspapers and TV news programs have shown latest weeks a lot of information about Wikileaks, its founder Julian Assange and all the reactions to the massive leak of confidential data. Besides, Julian Assange has been charged for sexual assault to two women who attended to his conferences. This case seems really complex because of the huge amount of information generated, all the people and goverments involved and the possible consecuences of publishing it.
This is a good issue to talk about, but I am not going to do that. Thinking about that something came up to my mind. What if all the above was fake, I mean, if it was carefully prepared, like in a movie. Governments and powerful people who rule the world have all the elements needed to produce a movie of that kind, that is, they are plenty of money. We are helpless against them if they decide to manipulate us and the only thing that we can do is trying to make that work harder. Our problem is that if the movie script, the director, the actors and the other elements needed are good enough we will have to clap our hands at the end and to believe the full story.
I am not saying that the Wikileaks case is fake. I am just pointing the fact that it can happen and it is possibly happening right now somewhere. Communication media are very powerful and make it easier to interfere and modify the normal human behaviour. You only have to see that all the dictatorial regimes in the world try to control as much communication media as possible. In fact, when you watch the news from outside that countries, you can see perfectly what is happening because you have much more information than people living there have.
I read an article several years ago where was questioned the fact that Apollo XI landed on the Moon. In summary, the article explained that it was just a very good film used to intimidate the Soviet Union and make US citizens be proud of their country. It mentioned several images that apparently were against laws of physics. I cannot say if that event in history was real or not and like me, most people in the world. Beyond that, we can believe in communication media, but that is like believing in some god, it is faith not reality.
Another example, in this case completely fake, is the Orson Wells' radio drama based on the War of the Worlds that make listeners believe that an alien invasion was in progress.
Somebody can tell that I am going crazy but I always thought that reality overcomes fiction and I have not much faith, so I have to be a skeptic.
I am also a bit pessimistic, so I think that we are doomed to follow the leader. I mean, we will do what people who really rule the world want, without realizing it. I could compare us with lambs and I think you can find out who the sheperds are.
And to finish this post I would like to recommend you to watch the movie "Wag the dog" where you can see some of the previous ideas in practice.

Just thoughts

I was reading a magazine yesterday early in the morning and I read an article that reviewed the evolution of different religions centering in the fact that now most important religions are monotheist and in ancient Rome and ancient Greece, people believed in several gods. That made me think about the fact that maybe that change in people's beliefs led to the origin of the actual trend in labour market. In last years, can be seen that companies all around the world try to reduce their workforce as much as possible. The main goal is use machines to do work previously performed by human workers. Nowadays, most of human workers are technical professionals that are in charge of preparing, handling and repairing machines that do hard most of the work. So, if we extrapolate what happened to religions over the last centuries, it is possible that in future only machines will do work, and only one man will rule all them (like in the "Lord of the Rings"). And these thoughts make me wonder about the destiny of humankind. Is it maybe extinction in a way similar to that showed in Terminator movies? or maybe i have seen too many episodes of Sarah Connor Chronicles? I do not have an answer yet, but I am completely sure that the answer to this question is waiting for us...

in the future, whether it is going to be sooner or later.