Star Billing

For those of you who share these inclinations, here's a rundown of southern celestial events of note for the rest of 2005. See you on Mt Nebo for the Occultation of the Pleiades by the Moon. Bring the thermos.

I've been back in Australia a month today.

Crap.

I'm still hovering between the feeling that I've just arrived home, and the draining, sucking drudge that I felt before I left -- that caused me to leave in the first place. How long does one allow one's head to get it together (as they say in the classics)? Does everyone return from a great journey completely incapable of fitting into their former lives?

I absolutely don't belong here anymore, if I ever did. Situations and people I managed to smile thinly at and tolerate before now bring outright hostility and frantic agitation. I suspect I'm either going to do something new and gobsmackingly brilliant or end up a news headline.

Getting Down

Sometimes pleasure comes from the most unexpected quarters.

I called via Coles in the Myer Centre after work today. It wasn't an entirely deliberate act, but one in a series of almost random choices I'd made since ambling despondently out of the office mid-afternoon. Frustration and a vague, unfocused depression had daubed my day grey, so shouldering my way into that ants' nest of irritable grocery-seekers was a decision tinged with more than a little masochism, the kind of willfully perverse punishment I flay myself with when I'm in this dark frame of mind.

But life is not remotely predictable, and sometimes gives a laugh and a tickle just when a slap in the chops is expected.

Thud-unk, thwak! Thud-unk, thwak! Thud-unk, thwak! Thud-unk, thwak! All around me shoppers, who seconds before had been gnashing their teeth over which boutique brand of organic haloumi to buy, or screeching instructions into their phones relaxed, closed their eyes and began grooving and wiggling their bums to Stevie Wonder's Superstition which now seeped its soothing salve across the store. I kid you not: the shoulders of everyone within my sight dropped and their faces smoothed out of the knotty tension of before. B'DOW-dow-DOW-doooow! was all it took to slide the mood dial around from gratin' to groovin', from bitchy to bitchin'; smiles replaced snarls, and all thanks to some anonymous employee's choice of tunes. And then, to my utter, utter delight someone said, "Holy guacamole!" Alright!

Indeed...the most unexpected quarters.

Nerd Werds

Will we ever have robot lovers? Why do we sleep? Can we live forever? Will men ever give birth? What's it like to walk on the Moon? Does changing perfumes really discourage infidelity? When will cars drive themselves? Can we holiday in space - and what will that be like?
I'm not sure that I can answer these conundrums with any measure of confidence, but apparently reading a couple of issues of Cosmos may change that state of affairs. Yes, Cosmos. Have you not heard of it? It's Australia's new popular science magazine -- in fact, Australia's only popular science magazine. Is it good? I can't answer that either, as it hasn't actually hit the newsstands yet, but that it's edited by former Quantum presenter and 21C editor Wilson da Silva is surely in its favour.

Cosmos will be a glossy title with high production values and a focus on top-quality writing, photography and illustrations - a feast for the brain and the eyes.

"Every issue of Cosmos will explore who we are and what we might become, our place in the world and our future on the planet," da Silva said.

"It's time consumers had a quality Australian science magazine that appeals to a broad range of people."

- Press Release, March 17

Science journalism is strong and vibrant in this country on television, radio and online; to get a slice of the glossy paper variety join me in the newsagent bright and early on 22 June. Colour me 12 shades of excited!

Temporary Partial Blindness ROCKS!

Cool, huh? It's useful for scaring the kiddies, too.

I'm referring to the eye, incidentally.

Monday Morning Mobile Messages

Me:
"Oh my gawd! Greece
wins Eurovision!
What's going on?"

He:
"Oh ma gaawwd! I
can't believe it.
They've finally
admited that us
Greeks are the best
in the world at
everything mate.
This is the proof for
what we have been
telling yous for 5000
years and yous all
just laughed. Now
who is laughing? Mate
we are the bestest
and now yous have
to accept that. So
suffer!"

Slide Night -- Part 2 -- Melbourne

St Kilda Beach was littered with many things, some rather stomach-turning, others quite charming. What were all these live starfish doing on the sand, anyway?




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Caribbean Gardens. A shot any wider would show this place for the bewitching smorgasboard of Seventies tat that it truly is. Next door is a "Rollerama". Need I say more?




Caribbean Gardens again. The yellow post is part of the chair lift, a rare death-defying find in this age of crippling insurance and enthusiastic litigation. Against my better judgement we took a spin on this contraption. How do I express the joy felt when halfway across, suspended over a dam (sorry, "lake") a section of the cable running in the opposite direction was... well, frayed seems too tame a word for it. *sniff* It took me back to my childhood. Which is when the chairlift last saw a maintenance man, at a guess.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~




His name's Newton, and he's a bloody genius if this is anything to go by.