Geocaching

I didn't get a nice birthday portrait of my lovely lady wife on Sunday so here she is this morning in the process of discovering her second 'Geocache.' Geocaching is a kind of grown up treasure hunting thing that I got roped into on Sunday (as a result of the aforementioned special day...) that actually turned out to be quite a lot of fun - at least enough so that we took the opportunity of a shared morning-off work to go tromping out in the rain to look for some more. You basically set the g.p.s. co-ordinates in your phone and then have to poke around when you get there to find the hidden container with it's logbook to mark your presence. Needless to say, the kids think we're mental! (They were both off today as well, due to an INSET day, but had elected to use their time more usefully than us by staying in bed!)

Apparently Geocaching was originally called geostashing but changed it's name as it got more popular (seriously, check it out on the net, there are millions of loonies all over the globe doing this stuff...) due to 'negative connotations' - presumably there were loads of stoners out there trying to dig up drugs in the woods! (Actually, Katie initially thought it was 'Geo-cashing', and soon lost interest when she realised there was no actual money involved!)

From Gary Lachman's 'Turn off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius':
"Marcuse's language may seem wilfully obscure, but what he means is that in the service of what he calls 'the Great Refusal', President X or Governor Y should be called Pig X or Pig Y..., and that they should be referred to as men 'who perpetrated the unspeakable Oedipal crime.' In plain English, 'motherf**kers.' This 'reversal of values' for Marcuse is the 'elemantal act of giving a new name to man and things', itself a central magical procedure."
I read Marcuse when I was at university, but don't remember it being quite as jams-kicking as this. I'm going to try introducing a mystical element of obscenity into my own speech for a day or too and see what changes I can affect - it should make tomorrow's under 5's storytime more interesting at least!