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Published without fanfare some thirty years ago in England, Roy Lewis’ The Evolution Man, or How I Ate My Father has been rescued from the bowels of obscurity by Italian publisher Roberto Calasso. And this comic tale of Pleistocene civilization is quite a find, blending the primal power and oddity of Kafka’s and Calvino’s parables with a heavy seasoning of Monty Python humor.

The Evolution Man follows the struggle of a small tribe of cavemen in northern Africa as they try to keep one step ahead of Mother Nature. This nameless band of pre-humans has many of the same conceits and concerns that we have today: finding the perfect cave for the whole family (hopefully bear-free), keeping a successful marriage without resorting to a swing of the club, and figuring out how to make ends meet in a dwindling economy when Dad’s accidentally burned down the nearby forest.

While Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man is filled with Cro-Magnon humor, the book has much more simmering in its prehistoric pot than gags about stone tablet typewriters. Beneath its mammoth-skin covering, the book wrestles with the very idea of technology and how far humanity should take it, from the point of view of a culture where turning back to all fours was a tangible possibility.

Lewis’s cavemen and women are well aware that they’re living at the end of the Pleistocene era, and they discuss their plight in mock-sophisticated English drawing room language. The narrator’s father Edward, in fact, is preoccupied to the point of distraction by the tribe’s backwardness, insisting that there’s a better way to live than chewing on raw buffalo and running up the side of volcanos for fire. He not only wants a controllable source of combustion, but domestic pets, high-tech weaponry, and capital-A Art for future generations to admire.

Soon, however, Father’s tinkering with the Way Things Are begins to upset the rest of the tribe. Uncle Vanya takes the role of the neanderthal Rush Limbaugh, insisting that Edward is too preoccupied with his highfalutin’ ideas to keep humanity shuffling along on the orderly trail of Nature. The narrator starts to wonder if Father’s fudging around with the Natural Order should be stopped

Tickle: IQ and Personality Tests – Tickle’s Original Inkblot Test – Your Results

Sumit, your subconscious mind is driven most by Reserve

You approach the world with your guard intact because unconsciously, and perhaps consciously, you want to maintain an element of control in your relationships with people. You tend to hold your private experiences just out of reach of others. You’re not one to immediately show all your cards, to let people into who you really are until you’re ready.

Unfortunately, that sometimes means you also hide things from yourself. You may find that your desire to remain guarded backfires, affecting your self-awareness. Why are you like this? It’s possible that you act in this manner because of a deeply-rooted fear of being exposed, or of truly expressing yourself. To protect yourself from this fear, you act in the opposite manner — you are guarded.

There is a certain respect that comes with resistance, an unconscious understanding that the human psyche is very vulnerable. We all feel we have a lot to hide, and you are not one to be intrusive or thoughtless about how you approach sensitive topics with others. Therefore you inspire a sense of safety in others when they are around you. Your psyche is very deep, very rich, and the more you can let yourself know (both the good and the bad), the more you will be able to appreciate who you really are.

Though your unconscious mind is driven most strongly by Reserve, there is much more to who you are at your core.

Times Online – Arts

THIS MAY is Museums and Galleries Month, and nothing better exemplifies the crusading passion behind so many fine British museums than the life-sized model of the moa. It can be seen at the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in Tring, Herts, a treasure house of the thousands of species that Rothschild collected, catalogued and stuffed.

[...]

Rothschild

All aboard the ghost train

Refugee Week
Leave To Remain
19 Princelet Street

Mammals Trust UK

Working Roman baths

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Trailer is up for this year’s must see horror smash

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Obituary: Iannis Xenakis

It must have seemed as if architecture had claimed him. But all through the late 40s and 50s Xenakis was nursing an ambition to combine his mathematical passions with his musical one. Not until the mid-50s did he discover convincing ways of doing this. One was to dispose sounds in

Quark Expeditions, Antarctic Cruises, Arctic cruises

Quark Expeditions has been one of the leading innovators and operators of expedition cruises, especially in polar regions, since 1991. The company has pioneered and developed a concept of fantastically adventurous journeys in first class comfort on powerful, polar icebreakers. This concept is unique and many

Cross Stitch Design Software

Beginners Scuba Resources

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/2004/mar03/weirdfields.html

http://evangelion.mit.edu/weirdfields/winners.htm

Air Niugini – Discovering Rabaul

Dilated Peoples – Neighborhood Watch – April 6th!

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts | Art’s glass toilet tests courage

[Bonvinci's transparent toilet] installation will open for two hours from 1800 GMT each week day, from 1400 to 1800 GMT on Saturdays and 1000 to 1800 GMT on Sundays.

Guardian story and more toilet art in Kingston

And yet more, this time of a guerilla nature, coming to a cubicle near you.

Times Online – Activities

BILL VIOLA | FIVE ANGELS FOR THE MILLENNIUM

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Airstream Trailers imported from USA – for sale in UK