I guess the recent controversy over building a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center in NYC has got me thinking about religion again & this image somehow floated to the surface. It made me think of one of my favorite films - "The Gods Must Be Crazy". For those of you who haven't seen it, it's about a Kalahari bushman named Xi who finds an empty Coke bottle that has been tossed from a plane. At first he thinks it's a wondrous thing, but soon finds that it causes nothing but trouble & decides that the gods must be crazy & that it must be disposed of. The film's narrator first describes the bushmen in their innocent state: "The one characteristic which really makes the Bushmen different from all the other races on earth is that they have no sense of ownership at all. Where they live, there's really nothing you CAN own: only trees and grass and animals. In fact, these Bushmen have never seen a stone or a rock in their lives. The hardest things they know are wood and bone. They live in a gentle world, where nothing is as hard as rock, steel or concrete." And then, after being exposed to the Coke bottle: "At first, Xi tried the thing out to cure thongs; it had the right shape and just the right weight. It was also beautifully smooth and ideal for curing snakeskin. And Pabo discovered you could make music on it... And every day they discovered a new use for the thing. It was harder and heavier and smoother than anything they'd ever known. It was the most useful thing the gods had ever given them, a real labour-saving device. But the gods had been careless. They had sent only one. And now, for the first time in their lives, here was a thing that could not be shared because there was only one of it. Suddenly, everybody needed it most of the time. A thing they had never needed before became a necessity. And unfamiliar emotions began to stir: a feeling of wanting to own, of not wanting to share. Other new things came: anger, jealousy, hate and violence." Created with Bryce 7 using mostly metaballs, a few of my own models, & some purchased models...