Sacred Tree Keeper in Uganda

The BBC has a brief, eight-frame photo-story about a woman who cares for a Sacred Tree that people have worshipped for as long as anyone can remember.

There are holes at the bottom of the tree that legend assigns to various supernatural powers. If you want to catch a lot of fish you pray to one hole, if you want to get pregnant you pray to another. The keeper has two assistants who help her listen to the problems of people who come there to pray. All three keepers are women. I noticed that in one of the photographs, the tree looks very "lady-like" as Ray Romano would say.

What with the holy holes and the female keepers, it makes me think of it as a form of Goddess worship - but the text doesn't say.

In other unusual news, a landslide in California started some sort of geochemical reaction in the soil that set the woods on fire. A thermometer placed in the ground read more than 200 degrees centigrade. No one knows what caused the heat, but they'd bloody well better get on it. Sounds like cheap energy to me!