It is what it is

I found Keri Smith's blog recently and made it one I'll check up on regularly. I love her list of 100 ideas for living a creative life. Why not try one today?

Today's entry has the slogan I've quoted in the title of this post. I want it on a T-shirt!

Easter reading

Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the new repulsion, always different, always new. The long neuter spell of Lent, when the blood is low, and the delight of the Easter kiss, the sexual revel of spring, the passion of midsummer, the slow recoil, revolt, and grief of autumn, greyness again, then the sharp stimulus of winter, of the long nights. Sex goes through the rhythm of the year, in man and woman, ceaselessly changing: the rhythm of the sun in his relation to the earth.

DH Lawrence, A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover

Earth Hour 2008

I'm getting excited about Earth Hour, on March 29th. If the weather's nice, I plan to go out to Sydney Park the night before and take some photographs of the city lights. Then, during Earth Hour, I'll go to the same spot and take some more photographs to see what the place looks like with the lights out. I'm hoping to get a good view of some stars too.
In my philosophy class last night we discussed the postmodernist view that large-scale change cannot be effected by individual agency. I'm not suggesting that turning the lights off for an hour will have any major impact on climate change, but to see the way that this phenomenon has spread across the planet (as shown on the map above) from its conception as a local event last year surely shows that small steps can lead to bigger things. There is hope for the future!
So don't succumb to postmodernist despair: sign up, and make a difference to the world.

More sad graffiti

This bemused old gentleman has appeared on the hoardings outside the former Nando's chicken shop that was firebombed a couple of weeks ago. I am not sure if he is the grandfather of the sad children or whether he is simply weeping for the loss of his favourite Portuguese chicken shop.
The Dude is getting worried. In the past 12 months, there have been three large fires in the vicinity of his school: first St Barnabas Broadway, then Nando's, then the Broadway shopping centre (His Dagginess' brother, Tiger, was the first officer on the scene at that fire). The Dude and various of his mates think their school might be next. If they're lucky.

Oh my god!

Since I'm joining the teapot cult, I thought I'd put up an image of my latest idol, bought in Taipei in January. It's not two storeys tall, but only a petite three inches. Yes, the cups do fit together to make a perfect egg.
I think I'll appropriate an ancient heathen festival to celebrate my new beliefs: how fortunate that there's an equinox in a week or two. Now, what would go nicely with a steaming sacred beverage? I know, soft fruit buns! Hmm, perhaps I could decorate them with a cross to represent the chicken's perch...

I got religion!

This morning's broadsheet had a story about a woman who worships a teapot. Forget the Flying Spaghetti Monster, where do I sign up?

On a serious note, I am not unaware of the irony of the situation: I can make jokes about the beliefs of all sorts of religions but the woman in this story once went to jail simply for saying she is not a muslim. A quick google brought up several recent news stories about similar cases. It made me give some thought to what I can do to help these people.

So here's what I did... it's not much, but I signed up for Anwar Ibrahim's newsletter in the hope that somewhere along the way I can learn enough about Malaysian politics to do something, even if it's just to write to the PM or my local member to encourage them to put political pressure on the Malaysian government.

In the meantime, I'm off for a steaming cup of ambrosia from my divine vessel. In-cha-lah.

Recycling CDs and DVDs

After my epic struggle to find an environmentally friendly way to dispose of my obsolete printer last year, I viewed the growing stack of used CDs and DVDs on my desk with some alarm. These bits of plastic and metal are a necessary evil for transporting data and images in my industry, but once I've finished with them the information is immediately out of date and the discs can't be reused.
The local council just dumps them in landfill; they can't be recycled with the tin cans and plastic bottles because they contain both metal and plastic. A Google search led me to this fun site -- I might have to make one of those hovercrafts -- but I've got other creative projects to keep me busy.
Finally, I found Ecodisc, so I'll be packing my stack off to them soon. If you're in Sydney, Auckland or South Africa you too can recycle your discs.
P.S. If you're in Sydney and have an old computer, printer or other hardware to get rid of, I've got the address for that too. You've got to take it to the depot at Homebush Bay yourself, but at least you know it's not going into landfill.

Here be dragons

After reading a post by the Bad Astronomer on the science of fairy tales, I surfed over to LiveScience.com and found this great article about the possible real creatures that may have helped give rise to myths about dragons.
Aren't they all so CUTE!

Rubbish!

On Monday this week, Lucky Mark, the Dude and I started walking in the mornings before work and school. The first day we were out, I noticed that the single most common type of rubbish on the footpaths was empty cigarette packets. The second day, we counted 47 cigarette packets on our three-quarters of an hour walk. Today, armed with rubber gloves and a plastic bag (and joined by the Messa), we collected 64 cigarette packets.
Most of these were found around the side doors of small businesses, which begs the question: why cannot a cigarette smoker, who carries a packet outside with a cigarette in it, carry the empty packet back inside to put it in a garbage bin?
The obvious conclusion is that smokers, who care so little for the state of their lungs, care even less about the lungs of the planet.
Tomorrow, I am going to count the second most prevalent form of rubbish: breath mint packets. Could the same culprits be responsible?

Singapore swings

Just to prove that we've been there, done that. I drank a Singapore Sling in the Long Bar at the Raffles, so now I can come home.

I also astounded the people in the Raffles shop by buying ten packets of Raffles Iced Tea -- well, you never know when the Master will be back to get some more. We've eaten chilli crab (and various other delicacies), shopped at the markets in Chinatown and caught the MRT everywhere. Went shopping on Orchard Road (waste of time -- the markets were much better) but did get a jar of my favourite face cream from Marks & Spencer. Also discovered that you can't buy bath salts in Singapore.

Yesterday we ate [roast chicken and rice] in a food court off Orchard Road. It was so crowded, people were grabbing the corner of a table wherever they could. At our table, the two girls opposite got up to leave and a fellow who wanted to sit down immediately signalled for the trays to be cleared. A grumpy little old lady was in charge, and she came and sullenly cleared the trays while complaining bitterly to me in Chinese and gesturing towards one of the food stalls with sharp, angry hands. Then she wiped down the table top with a damp cloth, made somewhat damper by the fact that she ladelled some of the leftover chicken broth from the bowls on the tray onto the rag -- so much for hygeine! I never did work out what she was so cross about.

Today we make the Aussie pilgrimage to Changi Memorial, then perhaps drop in at Little India on the way to the Night Zoo at Sentosa Island.

First Pavarotti, now Teresa Brewer

As children, my cousins and sisters and I would beg our grandmother for a chance to play the old 78s in the cabinet of the stereogram in the living room. One of my uncles had been a big Teresa Brewer fan in his (and her) heyday, so "Ricochet Romance" was on high rotation (along with its flipside, "Too Young to Tango").

Sing along:

I knew the day I met you, you had a rovin' eye
I thought that I could hold you, what a fool I was to try
You buzzed around the other girls, just like a busy bee
And when you'd finished buzzin', cousin, you buzzed right back to me.
But baby...
I don't want a ricochet romance, I don't want a ricochet love
If you're careless with your kisses, find another turtle dove
I can't live on ricochet romance, no, no, not me
So if you're gonna ricochet baby, I'm gonna set you free.

Oh, Teresa, how you spoke to my prepubescent heart! RIP.

Just what I have been saying for years...

Sydney Morning Herald, October 24, 2007

Hail the Master

Lucky Mark graduated today with his MBT. Best guess at what that stands for gets a prize (or at least a big sloppy kiss next time I see you).

Iron-y

I was complaining of feeling tired despite having a reasonably early night and a reasonably good sleep, and Lucky Mark asked me if I had been taking my iron supplement.

"No," I replied, "because I haven't had the strength to get the child-proof cap off the bottle."

Walk to work Friday

Ten steps down the hallway, up the attic ladder and I've walked to work. I was out (driving, unfortunately, because the distance was a good 10 kilometres) taking the Dude to his friend the Dealer's place to spend the day, when I noticed the streets were buzzing with 20- and 30-something pedestrians, lugging their laptop satchels and streaming steadily city-ward.

An article in yesterday's newspaper pointed out the trend for members of this younger generation to live an inner city lifestyle, rather than subscribing to the suburban tradition of large house and yard that seems to have been the ideal for the previous two generations (Baby Boomers and Generation X). Of course, there are those of us Gen-Xers who live in poky little inner city terraces despite the trend...

But I liked seeing Generation Y out en masse, walking to work and thinking about the effects on the environment and their own health of our city's great reliance on fossil-fuel-fed transport. The only shame is that the demographic was so narrow: where were all the older people on Walk to Work Friday?

Verbing nouns

Lucky Mark was reading me an email he was writing so that I could act as his portable thesaurus. The email was full of such phrases as 'in order to progress this application' and 'we will action the document'.

"Why don't you use plain English?" I complained. "'Progress' and 'action' are nouns, not verbs."

"Everybody else does it," he pouted.

"That doesn't make it right," I echoed my mother's favourite admonishment. "What's wrong with saying, 'in order to take the application to the next stage'?"

"That takes too many words," he whinged. "'Progress' is faster to type and say."

"You can't use that excuse for 'action'," I countered. "'Act on' has one less letter!"

"But it has a space, so it's still the same number of keystrokes."

I give up.

There's no other word for it

Yes, she is.

Shimmer

I went with my friend the Neuroscientist to an exhibition of artworks based on microscopic slides created by researchers at the Queensland Brain Institute. The Neuroscientist makes beautiful images of rat neurons and I have talked to him in the past about my desire of making some of them into embroideries, so we were both interested to see how another artist had tackled the job.
I was glad I persuaded the Neuroscientist to come because he was able to recognise and explain what the artworks represented. We had a great conversation with the gallery manager about her son's schizophrenia and the brain's role in addiction in general, then we admired the artworks: three dimensional representations of cells and cellular structures created using beads, sequins, fabric and paint (even bubble wrap).
The structure on the right of the catalogue cover above, a blue and green spiral, was described by the gallery manager as perhaps being representative of DNA. After she had left us, I indicated my scepticism to the Neuroscientist, saying that it didn't look like a double helix at all. He, of course, immediately recognised it as an opiate receptor -- which, apparently, comes out of the cell wall, makes exactly seven turns (he called them something else, like "involutions" or something similar - I'm afraid I've forgotten the term he used) then reenters the cell through the cell wall.
The talk of DNA served to remind me of this website and its pattern for knitted DNA. One of these days...

Pavarotti vale

"One of the very nicest things about life is that we must regularly stop what we are doing and devote our attention to eating." Luciano Pavarotti

I once embroidered this motto on a tablecloth, which I was coincidentally using the day I heard of the big Pav's death.

Other sayings on the same tablecloth are:

"He was a very valiant man who first adventured on eating of oysters." James I
"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." Virginia Woolf
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." Carl Sagan
"There's no sauce in the world like hunger." Don Quixote
"A cucumber should be well sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing." Samuel Johnson (a man after my own heart.)
"A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety." Aesop
"Since Eve ate the apple, much depends on dinner." Lord Byron
"Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es." Anthelme Brillat-Savarin ("Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." Cheese, mostly, I think.)
"Talk of joy: there may be things better than beef stew and baked potatoes and home made bread -- there may be." David Grayson
"A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness." Elsa Schiaparelli
"I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion." Don Quixote

The APEC effect

I ventured into the city this morning to go to the art gallery. Lucky Mark drove me in in the Big Red Car, and we were pleased to see that the threatened traffic chaos caused by road closures and the fencing off of a large swathe of public land did not really affect our route.
After a leisurely browse of the beautiful Translucent World exhibition of Chinese jade, I strolled back through the Domain and across Hyde Park to catch a bus home. In the Domain, I spotted a patrol of police officers (is that the correct collective noun?) comprised of six on foot and two leaning on the bonnet of a paddywagon. Seated dejectedly in the gutter was an immaculately dressed transvestite in a gorgeous pink miniskirt and matching jacket, with coordinating pink four-inch stilettos and handbag, her long, spray-tanned legs folded elegantly beneath her. It seemed rather a case of overkill -- the fresh-faced probationary constables who thought they would be protecting visiting dignitaries from feral protesters seemed rather bemused by their perfectly coiffed and not-at-all protesting quarry.
I saw another two patrols of police as I continued my walk through the park, as well as a fire engine with an Australian Federal Police car escort driving around the precinct in a sedate manner, and one of the converted bus/holding cells turning out of Macquarie Street. In all, about half of the vehicles I saw were related to law enforcement and security.
On the bus, the usual suspects hopped on and off. A young woman carried on an inane mobile phone conversation with a friend while fishing through her handbag with the other hand looking for correct change to pay the bus driver. I think I must be getting old, because I just wanted to say to her, "Look, I'm sure your friend will understand if you stop chatting about what you're going to wear tomorrow long enough to organise your bus fare, so we can all get home sooner." A man carrying a baby got on and paid the fare for himself and his female companion, who struggled to wrangle an empty pram onto the bus without folding it up. A woman with a comb-over sat in front of me: I am not sure what misfortune or illness had resulted in her hair loss, but somehow the hair around the back and sides of her head was still long and she had pulled it up into a knot on top of her head to cover the fluffy, thin growth that I could see through the sparse strands. I thought it was very clever of her to come up with that solution, although I think if it were me I would just shave it off and wear a scarf or hat. She was talking on her mobile phone about a job interview she was going to and what she was planning to say to convince them that she was the right candidate for the job. I hope she gets it.