What is it when it’s a story and a drawing too… a drorie of course! Some very creative graphic designers I know have created a blog combining stories and drawings. http://drories.blogspot.com/
My favourites are Steve and Geraldine.
Geraldine is one cool cat.
Today we have been cleaning our house. Not just getting rid of dirt and dust but really cleaning. As in clearing away the toxins and chemical buildup. It was easy, all that wes needed was a few new products, none of which came from the cleaning isle in the supermarket either…
vinegar, tea tree oil, eucalyptus oil, bi-carb soda, lemons… and a bit of elbow grease.
And it didn’t take much longer either. The only extra time I had to spend on the bathrooms involved spraying vinegar on the tiles in the shower recess and leaving it for 15 minutes.
What’s even better is that there’s no streaky residue that the chemical cleaners leave behind. All tile, metal and glass surfaces are gleaming, my bathrooms smell divine, and my body rejoices that it has a few less chemicals in this world to contend with.
We are even painting the bathrooms with environmentally friendly paint.
Imagine a world beyond our world.
The most amazing, inspiring thing I have seen this week is the image of Atlantis and the Hubble space telescope in front of the sun. It’s humbling. And the entire mission, for me, puts life in perspective.
At fourteen years of age I wondered for the first time what life was about. Not just my life, but the purpose of life. It was the first time I was aware of wanting to know the greater meaning of existence for humankind. Even if I couldn’t verbalise it at the time, it’s what I wanted to know. Back then though I thought there was an answer.
Then throughout the years I was drawn to television that imagined other future existences and as I watch I want to be part of that future. I want to know a world where we not just explore but know, even to some small extent, what is beyond our planet. And it’s hard to imagine the magnitude of our planet, let alone the space beyond it.
But watching Atlantis take off gives me goosebumps. Looking at the technology they are going to upgrade and install on Hubble is absolutely incredible, and seeing those astronauts working on Hubble is awe-inspiring.
Imagine being in that shuttle. Imagine being in space. Imagine looking back at our planet from the silence of space. And imagine what the technology is going to give us for years to come.
There is no one answer to the meaning of life or of our existence. But this takes us closer to being able to imagine another piece of the puzzle that is our place in it.
The NBC show Life has been cancelled. This is a tragedy in a television landscape that is populated with reality tv or gratuitous cop drama (and we all know which franchises they are). Don’t get me wrong. I love reality television. But there is more than enough of it. What there is also more than enough of is cop shows that need to shock the audience with gratuitous scenes of internal body parts, maggot infested corpses and violence against women. We can’t celebrate nudity on tv, but we can be subjected to these sorts of things. But that’s a whole different topic for when I feel like a rant.
Life is a refreshing drama about Detective Charlie Crews, sentenced to life for a crime he didn’t commit. He’s been acquitted and the continuing story arc throughout the show is his search for the people that framed him. Detective Dani Reese is his long-suffering partner who puts up with his fruit fetish and zen philosophies. It is these quirks that make the storyline so entertaining and his zen sayings each week are highly amusing.
I desperately want one of the US networks to pick up Life. Shows are arbitratily axed these days without giving them time to settle in. Of course the networks don’t give them time to settle in as they constantly change the time and day they air a show so that viewers don’t know when to watch.
There is a Twitter campaign to save Life that encourages USA Network to pick it up. Right behind the fiasco that saw Firefly pulled is this if it doens’t get renewed somewhere, somehow.
I’m adding the widget to show the Popular Penguins range of books. Now I just need to figure out how to add it to my sidebar.
I love old photos. My mum has a big box that has hundreds of photos from when my grandmother was a child through to the present. Most of the more recent ones though are neatly kept in their envelopes but the older ones are a big jumble. But I know what they all are.
When mum moved recently she and I spent all day packing up her house one Saturday then spent the night going through the photo box. It was sad and sweet at the same time because we hadn’t long lost dad. But I had the same sense of wonder and excitement looking at the photos that I always have.
It’s like that box is a treasure chest offering up treasure after treasure of black and white gems that tell the story of my parents lives.
This photo was taken by my dad on Lord Howe Island on their honeymoon 50 years ago. I have no idea of the context, or of what mum was running from, or to. But the evocativeness of it sets my imagination alight.
Last week Coldplay lit up Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne. And I was there for it. It’s been a while between concerts for me so I had forgotten how long you have to wait for the main act. And not just one support band, but two. Decoder Ring may just have gotten a new fan but I’m afraid the next band left me not just cold but stone motherless cold.
But I wasn’t there for the support bands anyway and Cold Play didn’t disappoint. It was incredible and amazing and fantastic! And so worth the wait.
Of course they played a lot of songs from Viva la vida, after all, that’s the tour. But we got some of their older hits too… Yellow, Clocks, Politik, Fix You, The Scientist. There were many highlights – the yellow balloons, the woman screaming behind me when they started singing The Scientist “I was scared they weren’t going to sing it, it’s my favourite!”, them running into the second tier and singing in the crowd, the songs… EVERY song. But the best part of all was falling in love with Lovers in Japan again and the thousands upon thousands of coloured butterflies that showered down on the crowd. It was magnificent!
Yes, I got a t-shirt (of course!). And no, I can’t stop listening to the album over and over.
The concert playlist:
Life In Technicolor – Violet Hill – Clocks – In My Place – Yellow – Cemeteries of London – Chinese Sleep Chant – 42 – Fix You – Strawberry Swing – God Put A Smile Upon Your Face – Talk – The Hardest Part – Postcards From Far Away – Viva La Vida – Lost! – Speed of Sound – Green Eyes – Death Will Never Conquer – Viva La Vida
Politik – Lovers In Japan – Death and All His Friends
The Scientist – Life in Technicolor – The Escapist
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Today I am angry. I awakened to a world full of smoke and a hazy blood red sun that has filled the house with an eerie orange glow. The people of Victoria are trying to get on with their lives. Thousands are displaced with nowhere to go, nothing but the clothes they are wearing, although hopefully they have been able to get some help from the many donations that have come in. The fires are still burning, the temperatures are set to rise again next week which can’t be good, and they have charged a man with arson over the Churchill fire. So, what would the state as a whole like to do to him? Yeah, I feel the same way.
What angers me is in all of this destruction and horror is that there are people in the world so ignorant they feel the need to comment in a less than positive way.
The Mail on Sunday in the UK captioned this photo with the comment ‘Er Bruce, the fire’s the other way!‘ To those who wrote and approved this copyline… are you morons? I know you are a newspaper so it might sound like a silly question but have you been watching the news or do facts not get in the way of a ‘good’ story. I mean, we’re rolling on the ground here laughing at your oh-so-funny quip. Over 181 people are dead, thousands homeless, entire towns burnt and melted into the charred remains of earth, millions of wildlife dead and those that are injured are left without habitat. I got up this morning having tossed and turned all night, dreaming bad things as the smoke seeped into my house. Hope you guys had a good old night’s sleep though.
Maybe, just maybe, these firefighters, many of them VOLUNTEERS by the way, had the good sense to remove themselves from an inferno bearing down on them (see my previous post for the stats on the fires).
As for one of our nations cutest icons, TMZ showed their poor taste too with: Koala to Firefighter: I Won’t Tap That! ‘After battling some of the worst wildfires ever to hit Australia, a firefighter shared his bottled water with a pampered koala on Monday. Afterwards the new friends went to Pilates and dined on sushi.‘ Yep, that’s just what the firefighters are doing in the face of the worst devastation in living memory in Victoria. Pilates! You have apologised, but again, how did that copy get approval to go live? You are a bunch of idiots. Enough said.
And lastly, it’s last because I can’t bear to read any more negative things today, here is a link to a very scary piece of footage: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-211954 To the poster on the iReport site that made disparaging comments about Jim, the guy who took this footage, why don’t you actually inform yourself about this tragedy instead of making ill-informed comments. Perhaps you think he could have ‘run’ as you put it. These fires are like liquid vapour travelling at speeds that are unfathomable. It is being dubbed ‘the perfect storm’ because of the conditions that caused it to grow into the monster it has become. Fleeing, for many, either on foot or in a vehicle, was just impossible. Amaranth, I did not even finish reading your post. You are an ignoramus!
I am going to leave on a good note because after all, who can resist a good news story and a koala!
Tonight the Dandenong Ranges are no longer visible from our house. The smoke is thick in the air and it is hard to breath. It has even managed to work its way into the house. They warned us that the eastern areas of Melbourne would be affected by smoke. We feel too far away but we’re not. I feel like life has stopped still inside a blazing furnace that is hell… that is Victoria. Even those who aren’t affected by the fires themselves are affected by the horror of what has happened in the last week.
Last Saturday we were shocked by the smoke that billowed across the sky from the fires in Kinglake. A week later we are still stunned by the devestation of our state. How can the state rebuilt, how can those people affected by the fires move on? When the fires are still blazing.
What started with me reading the paper for news of what is happening at the beginning of the week is now me crying at the heart-breaking stories of people losing homes, pets and loved ones. But it is also about the heroes. Even if they don’t know they’re heroes. The guy who saved the family of five from an approaching firewall, the young man who lay on top of his 94 year old great uncle as the firefront passed and burnt down their house, even the firefighter who saved Sam the koala… especially the firefighters, many of them volunteers battling and inferno so hot the stats give you goosebumps.
Average bushfire:
Short distance spotting 50-100m (spotting = where embers, burning leaves and branches are thrown in front of the fire)
Long distance spotting 1-2km
Energy expelled 10,000kW/m of fire
Flame Height 10-20m
Proximity to flames up to 80m
Black Saturday:
Short distance spotting 1-2km
Long distance spotting 15km
Energy expelled 60-80,000kW/m of fire (equivalent to 500 Hiroshima atomic bombs released at once)
Flame Height 50m
Proximity to flames up to 200m (making it difficult for the firefighters to get close)
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