Floating world - a compromise between warring states

Floating world by an artificial lake

Australia’s national capital is a strange floating world by a mountain lake. Reflecting the dream-like nature of the city, the lake is not a real one and the city is a compromise between warring states.

Happily ever after - the bethrothal of royalty and popular culture

Republicans can gnash their teeth but the reality is that royalty has managed to do the swift manoeuvering required to move it from antique and declining relic to funky pop culture icon. The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee confirms this.

At the tail end of royalty we can finally pretend they were harmless and charming all along, not founded on the basis of beheadings and torture chambers, murders and arranged marriages, at the end almost a benign presence – like a pandemic that has run its course.

It’s true that fear of the guillotine certainly played an important role in inducing self reform – that’s not something to forget, survival is a strong instinct. But royalty has gone further than just tidying up a not so pleasant side of itself and reluctantly accepting the people as rulers. It has embraced them, even if a bit uncomfortably at times, and in doing so it has become part of the everyday.

Happily ever after

Last year I saw the Grace Kelly exhibition in Bendigo, which was a good example of how royalty adopted the movies to lift itself out of modern irrelevance and to make itself part of mass culture by becoming popular entertainment.

Wormholes in space

There has been a lot of speculation about the possible existence of ‘wormholes’ in space. Wormholes are kinks in space and time that can connect two distant parts of the galaxy almost instantly.

I’m convinced that they exist and that there is one connecting Waverton on the Lower North Shore in Sydney and Burrawang in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales.

Rear Burrawang Hotel in mist

Meeting someone

In earlier centuries, it was not unusual for women to marry someone’s sword, portrait or block of land—probably far better than marrying their football club.

Modern dating might at times seems extreme and unusual (if not cruel as well). But is it really?
In earlier centuries, it was not unusual for women to marry someone’s sword or for someone to receive a photograph or a painting to assess the merits of a potential partner. Shiploads travelled from Britain to fill a gap in marriageable young women. Advertising was not uncommon.

The fact that potential partners ever met was a miracle comparable to the first plane flight or refrigeration.

Half empty, half full

Asked whether the cup was half full or half empty, I’d have to ask why it wasn’t completely full.

I am beginning to think that the world is made up of two kinds of people. There are those who spend all their time stopping bad things from happening and there are those who are much more focused on making good things happen.

Half empty, half full, too full.

These strike me as the same people for whom the cup is either half full or half empty, but that might be cruel.
For myself, if asked whether the cup was half full or half empty, I’d have to ask: why wasn’t it completely full?

Too close to the television

When I was growing up, we were constantly warned not to sit too close to the television. Now, as an adult, I spend my whole life sitting too close to a television.

When I was growing up, we were constantly warned not to sit too close to the television screen. Now everyone I know spends their whole life sitting too close to a television screen.

Electronic screens have become our second set of windows looking out on the world around us—and even more so on the world distant from us.

Sitting too close

Most homes now have at least one such screen, many have a great deal more. They might be called televisions or computers, mobile phones or PDAs or perhaps home cinemas, but they are all forms of the old television screen that used to show black and white programs from an Australia most of us can barely remember—that’s if we were there at all.

Senseless - cures for the common cold

When I have a cold and, suddenly, I lose my sense of smell, my sense of taste vanishes as well. With a head cold, it’s like eating in black and white.

With the range of modern, life-threatening viruses around, there are plenty of diseases to be worried about in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. With swine and avian flu, AIDS, hepatitis B, C and D, Ross River fever, yuppie flu, new strains of TB and whatever else, there's an awful lot to worry about.

Taste vanishes in a black and white haze

Despite all these extremely serious diseases, what worries me is something far more simple. What really worries me is the common cold. I want to know why it is common. If it was less common maybe I wouldn't catch one so often. What about ‘the uncommon cold’ – why can’t I catch that, maybe every ten years or so?