David Binelli

The Book of David Long, long ago, long before Conscious Artificial intelligence and even before Mechanized Response Units, and Reactive Droids, there lived a mean and ruthless King who ruled this land that used to be called the United States of America. He was so worried of being attacked by foreign countries that he spent all the people’s money that he collected from taxes, on science, technology and the military in a bid to making the perfect army. Every penny was used in making larger, faster drones, lighter, deadlier weapons, more of everything the best army would ever need. There were companies all over this land designing more and more sophisticated and intelligent robots specifically for the battlefield. It was always said, it was better to lose a thousand robots than one human life, but over the years that began to change as the highly sophisticated equipment became more and more expensive. Money out-ruled human life. People were cheap. One day a young man calle...

Utopia No-one knew exactly when it must have started. Like any cultural change, it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. People had behaved as they had always done since the beginning of humans. Breathing, eating, sleeping, loving, dying, surviving, learning. That’s the big one…learning. Without learning how can the human race progress? If you don’t learn from your mistakes, how can you stop from making those same mistakes over and over again, because there will come a time when evolution takes a leap and you’re left behind to become extinct? At least that what Darwin said… It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. And how do we adapt to change? Through learning. Man, and woman for that matter, are programmed with an in-built need to learn. How did the first caveman make a fire for himself on those cold pre-historic nights? Whether he stumbled across a way of strikin...

Seeing is believing  What a lovely day. It’s about 5pm on a beautiful Sunday evening and I’ve been sat on a wooden bench in the middle of York for the last hour or so enjoying just being out and about. I’ve lived in the city centre for about 3 years now and I love it. Everything is on my door step, shops, café’s, bars and restaurants. What more could a middle aged single guy want. The sun is shining and it’s about 27 degrees. A perfect evening for just sitting here in my cargo shorts displaying my lily-white legs, my eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses bought in the market for a fiver and doing some people watching. Tourists. Loads of them.  Whenever I’m sat alone watching the world go by I play a little game with myself called Guess where they’re from. I try to guess what nationality people are from by the way they’re dressed, or how many cameras they have suspended round their necks. Sometimes it’s easy because I can hear them chatting to each as they saunter by, other ti...

The Witches Wood Surrounded by red-brick, semi-detached houses in a small suburb of York, there nestles an ancient wood with a bubbling stream of crystal clear water known as Tang Hall Beck trickling slowly along amongst the trees and bushes. This elderly glade of trees and bushes is known as Heworth Holme and its entrance is so small that if you blinked while walking along the road, you would miss it, and, on a good day, takes no more than about five minutes to walk from one end the other.  Recently, within the last 30 years or so, it has almost been forgotten by all but a few local people who still use it to stretch their legs or walk their dog, but, and it's a big but, they only ever venture among the knurled and twisted trees during daylight hours.  Local families have been taught over eons never to venture into the wood during the hours of darkness because stories have been read to them by passing generations that it’s not safe. Not from muggers or thieves, but from somet...