Author: Daniel D. Watkins

First published, 15th February 2015 I still get the flashbacks, wake up in the middle of the night … Did I cry out in my sleep? Pierce Brosnan singing SOS in Mama Mia scarred me for life. Back then, when I stomped around trying to work out whether it was Mel Brooks or Goebbels who first discovered that the…

First published 5th April 2015 Ursula K. Le Guin (a.k.a. Morgan Le Fey) has recently laid a curse on Kazuo Ishiguro (a.k.a. Don Quixote). Now, maybe an unread obscure indie dilettante novelist like myself (a.k.a. Bilbo Baggins) can get away with breaking all the genre rules, you know: write literary fiction beneath the invisibility cloak…

First published, 9th May 2015 Democracy is like all systems for power distribution in social groups in that it is a means that seeks to justify or, more importantly, legitimise the status of dominance in social hierarchy. Given that we are a social animal biologically hard-wired to behave always and ever like chickens, whenever two…

First published, 22nd February 2018 It’s a common fact of human nature that what people decide is right depends almost entirely on whether they understand it. What is difficult, complex and detailed is, for the average person, wrong. Truth is simple; simplicity itself. However, the way in which people decide what is true and what…

First published, 1st October 2018 Hemingway’s swan song, The Old Man and the Sea, was more perfectly written than it has been read. I mean, it seems to me that those who have buzzed about it, like flies around some Faberjé egg, may have given the fable less thought than it deserves. The work is true…

First published, 7th October 2018 Here’s a blond/e joke: before the pleas are taken from the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials at the end of the Second World War, the president of the Tribunal, Lord Justice Colonel Sir Geoffrey Lawrence addresses the twenty four Nazis in the dock: “Before we begin, gentlemen, which one of…

First published, 15th October 2018 What is potentially interesting about the Dunning-Kruger effect is not so much that there is a cognitive bias in those tested but between those at opposite ends of the intelligence spectrum, when perceiving each other. Intelligent individuals may well have a tendency to assume all are as intelligent as themselves.…

First published, 21st November 2018 There is something seriously wrong with the processes of domestication be it of wolves, wild cats or human beings. Domestication is, itself, a form of violence. Domestication is the abuse of the natural state that leaves some battered and bruised and almost all (dogs, cats and people), ultimately, agoraphobic xenophobes.…

First published, 7th December 2018 The world is the mind in which we live. Ours is a tropical universe. Those who believe that reality is really real are those most at ease with their own fantasies, some might say, delusions. Monotheism, perhaps, has given us some of the most theatrical ‘realities’ and yet Judaism and…

First published, 20th November 2019 Is life a cycle or a path? Well, it’s kind of neither either/or both. Is a trajection. Let me explain… In common parlance, our life is referred to as being connected to the idea of cyclicity. Of course, though the ‘life cycle’ is a fairly common way to express the…