Australia Day

Australia Day is January 26th, so this year it fell on the Thursday. My sister Julie and I were invited to that great Australian tradition, an Australia Day barbecue, at the home of Madeleine's parents.



There were about 14 people there, which would be a crowd for some suburban backyards, but not for their place. Madeleine's parents live in a home which is right on the borderline between a large house and a small mansion; built about 1840 the grounds originally ran all the way down to the bay. It's not that big today, but there was still plenty of room for us all on the old croquet lawn.



Madeleine's brother Ashley (who's the Consul for one of the Scandinavian countries) arranged the chops, sausages and prawns with a deft hand and smoke and sizzle were soon filling the garden. Refrigeration for beer and wine was provided by the simple expedient of filling a wheelbarrow with ice and leaving it in the shade of a handy magnolia tree.



Mad's husband Joe regaled us with stories about his trip to Moscow and the intricacies of arranging rail travel in Russia. The merits or otherwise of the Orient Express were debated and stories about life in Antarctic bases were recounted.

It was perhaps typical of the city of Hobart and of the calibre of our hosts that we noted later that all the women had been to Collegiate, while most of the men were Hutchins old boys. If I'd thought about it, I would have worn my old school tie!

The food and wine flowed freely as everyone chatted freely, moving occasionally to keep their chairs out of the fierce January sun. As time went on, a few couples drifted off - either homeward or to take the guided tour of the house - and I took advantage of a vacant sunlounger to stretch out and close my eyes for a moment or two. It was all very relaxing - the hum of voices, dappled shade from the leafy tree above, the gentle breeze blowing across the grounds and the buzz of a passing bumblebee.

Madeleine and Joe leave this week to return to Canberra. It was good that they were able to be here for Australia Day; I think this is the longest time that Madeleine has spent in Hobart for a few years. We shall miss them.

At the end of the afternoon we returned home almost stupefied by our dose of high living. Fortunately we had a while to collect ourselves before switching on the television for the Governor General's Australia Day speech. Not as essential as the Queen's Christmas Message, but interesting to listen to.

lamb for A-Day?

WE'VE been underestimating the power of lamb, news reports suggest.

Sydney's racial violence, the loss of the Ashes and model Michelle Leslie's drug hassles in Bali apparently all could have been solved by a healthy dose of one of Australia's favourite red meats.

In another politically incorrect battle cry to get more chops on the nation's barbecues, former football star Sam Kekovich has delivered another 90 seconds of TV satire in the Australia Day lamb promotion.

"Australian models holidaying in Asia would get into a lot less trouble if they carried a couple of lamb chops in their handbags," Kekovich says in the ad which went to air a few days before Australia Day.

"Lamb could have prevented the boofheads perpetrating violence on our beaches - it's bloody hard to bash someone with a cutlet.

"And we might not have lost the Ashes if our cricketers picked up lamb chops instead of mobile phones. Why on earth did they dispatch lurid text messages to English trollops when plenty of Aussie sheilas would gladly target their middle stump?"

The former North Melbourne player has been enlisted for a second year of red meat ranting in Meat and Livestock Australia's (MLA) annual push to drive up lamb sales for the national day.

His 2005 debut came close to derailing the marketing campaign when he said failure to eat lamb warranted capital punishment.

The Advertising Standards Bureau investigated but, after an unprecedented equal amount of criticism and praise, later dismissed the complaints and allowed the commercial to air.

It also was the first time the regulator received complaints that an ad had vilified vegetarians after Kekovich pilloried "long-haired dole bludging types" for rejecting lamb in favour of "all manner of exotic, foreign, often vegetarian cuisine".

This year, Kekovich insists that lamb and barbecues are at the core of our national identity.

"To be as Australian as I am, don your apron - mine says 'Chop Gun' - whack some nice juicy lamb chops on the barbie, invite everyone over - if you can't pronounce their name, just call them mate - and celebrate living in the best bloody country on earth."
MLA hopes this year's promotion would be taken in good humour and not result in more complaints to the advertising watchdog.

"There'll always be a couple of people out there that take grief at listening to Sam Kekovich, but it wouldn't be Sam without that. We'll wait and see," marketing chief David Thomason said.

MLA is hoping for another big rise in lamb consumption, with Kekovich's 2005 invective pushing up the number of lamb serves sold nationally by more than one million.

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The car is booked to go in to the garage on Monday. That seems a while to wait, but with the holiday on Thursday it's a short week this week.

So it's my sister's turn to do the motoring in the family this week. What was that old bus slogan - "Leave the driving to us"?

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Dropped in to the Chickenfeed discount store on Wednesday to look over their new stock of DVDs and movies. I was particularly interested in the Jacques Cousteau set; I found #1,2,4 and 5 without any trouble but #3 necessitated a bit of rummaging around. There's nothing more irritating than looking for that one missing episode.

Also picked up a boxed set of Sherlock Holmes movies from the 1930 and '40s, plus a double feature of two favourites from the 1960s Mr Ed and Petticoat Junction (the latter was a surprise - it features a beatnik poet played by guest star Dennis Hopper!).

It's a constant series of surprises just what turns up on DVD nowadays.

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The soft-voiced bell of the Temple clock was telling out the hour of seven in muffled accents (as though it apologised for breaking the studious silence) as I emerged from the archway of Mitre Court and turned into King's Bench Walk.

And who should we find at Number 6A? None other than Doctor John Thorndyke, one of the most famous medical sleuths of detective fiction.

In The Red Thumb Mark [1907], R. Austin Freeman introduces us to his no-nonsense medico-legal consultant. Appearing for the defence at the Old Bailey, he demonstrates that finding a man's fingerprint at the scene of the crime is not an infallible indication of guilt.

There are some very effective descriptions of the grimy courtrooms and unprepossessing prison cells which have the ring of authenticity. (Freeman once worked at Holloway Prison).

Many of Freeman's novels can be downloaded for free from websites like Blackmask Online. If you have a taste for classic whodunits, they're still quite readable.

the real, the dream and the future

Tuesday was a difficult day, though not for the reasons I had expected. I knew from the start that I had to make sure my sister made her lunch appointment in North Hobart, that I had to take Kay to the supermarket and that I had to do two days work in one this week because of the Australia Day holiday on Thursday.

I got through the morning and the afternoon without too much trouble - sometimes I was pretty busy, but we completed everything at the office on time. The car was a worry though: that noise every time I stepped on the brakes could only foreshadow some urgent and expensive repair work.

This kept me so distracted that we were almost finished in the supermarket before I realised something else was going on. I had just made a sharp left into the frozen food section and was waiting while Kay debated the merits of various ice creams when I thought to myself "I don't feel so good..."

Leaning against the deep freeze, I turned my attention inwards instead of outwards and decided I did not feel myself at all. There was nothing that stood out among the symptoms, but there was a general malaise that made me suspect my Blood Glucose Level had dropped while I wasn't paying attention.

I bought the smallest chocolate bar I could find and consumed it as soon as we got through the check-out. I stood there munching away without much enthusiasm, then wheeled the trolley out to the car.

After I loaded the groceries, Kay said "You know, diabetes is one of those complaints where it's not so much the disease itself that worries me, but the side-effects...."

My patience was at a low point and I snapped "Exactly where are we going with this?"

Kay rolled her eyes. All too often, her mouth and her brain are running at different speeds - she'll tell you that herself. "Actually I'd like to change the subject, but I wasn't sure how to do it once I'd started on this topic!"

"Let's change the subject then," I said. "That suits me fine."

I was rather downcast for a while. This is the sort of thing that I had hoped to avoid ever since I was diagnosed with diabetes.

It all made me a bit uneasy about the future.

And then....


A couple of days later I woke up early; went back to sleep and I had this incredibly vivid and unsettling dream.

In the dream I left my home and went out to do some routine errands. Everything was normal until I met up with my friend Graeme. He had just bought some interesting old books and we went into this market. There were a lot of old books that I recognized but I couldn't seem to touch them. Graeme had wandered away, and somehow I found myself going in the wrong direction and ended up going up a lot of steps into this enormous shopping centre.

It was one of these gigantic neon-lit places that went for miles and was filled with all sorts of shops. Every shop was packed with people and I had difficulty getting through. While I was trying to find my way out, I ran into my sister who told me that I had been away all day and that everything at home was in chaos because I'd been gone so long.

She told me that my mother had gone into hospital again and that I would have to go and see her when I got out of this place. I was disturbed by that, because it seemed to me I had only been away an hour or so — perhaps I had fallen asleep and not noticed that so much time had passed.

Since we were so late, for some reason we decided to have a meal before trying to find our way out. The restaurant was very crowded and we had trouble finding a seat. We had to share a table with a family whose small child scattered food in our direction.

The food seemed to hard to eat; not only did I feel awkward and crowded, but the pieces of food seemed to evade my grasp as I tried to eat them.

While we were trying to eat, I muttered to myself "I'll bet this is another one of those dreams. I seem to spend an awful lot of time in Japanese-style shopping centres in my dreams recently."

It was difficult to get about in the crowd because I was carrying some bread rolls in a bag. When we left the restaurant, we tried to get down a very steep and very wide staircase, but it was blocked by tables of people eating. In all the confusion someone picked up my bag of bread rolls and I picked up his bag of different bread.

Somebody directed us to another exit. This was a smaller staircase, but it was only one flight above the little side street that led out of the shopping centre. A lot of people were trying to get out through it at the same time, and nothing seemed to be happening.
At last we got on to the stairs and tried to get down them. I lost my packet of bread, which didn't concern me a lot since it wasn't mine. But the way ahead was almost impassable because the stairs were steep and narrow; every step was cluttered with piles of books and the long line of people had slowed almost to a stop while they tried to work out where to put their feet.

I could see down the stairs to the little side street. It was quiet and almost empty and I knew that if we could just get down the staircase we would be all right.

Looking at the precariously balanced piles of books and papers (the titles of many of which were familiar to me), I realised that nobody else was going to be able to make a decision and I called out for everybody to stand still.

I began picking up the books and (as gently as I could) dropping them into the street below. After a while there was enough room for everyone to get past and the stairs were empty in a very short time. My sister and I were free to go home now.

I walked off the stairs, into the street and that's when I woke up.

For a couple of minutes I lay there stunned. The dream seemed so powerful and charged with personal meaning that I felt I'd received a direct message from a higher power. I was disoriented, trying to adjust to the real world, which seemed a pale imitation of the universe I'd just left behind. A fly landed on my forearm and I flinched, thinking this was the start of some new manga-style fantasy. The images were so fresh in my mind that I immediately went to the keyboard and typed this out.

The other day I was leafing through an old issue of Reader's Digest and skimmed through an article about a doctor who had started a group for the study of dreams. In her opinion, all the people we met in dreams were symbols or messages for our waking minds.

That didn't impress me, because I knew that a lot of my dreams were either incomprehensible jumbles or straightforward blends of real memories in a new form.

But after this dream I began to believe that she might have something. Maybe reading the article had primed me to be receptive to this brainstorm of a dream. Not to mention the large number of people in the various books of the Bible who received messages in dreams.

But unlike Pharaoh in the Old Testament, I didn't need to call in consultants to interpret my dream. My life was the shopping centre, full of noise and motion but with little real significance. The only exit was the narrow way, but it was cluttered with things that I had let build up there. I was the only one who could help myself – I just had to make the decision to do it.

hot chicken

Lots of people have trained falcons to sit on a glove. How many people do you know can do this with a chicken?

Two of Julie's chickens are living outside my backdoor and she often has to move them about. The rooster has turned out to be unusually tractable and with very little effort she has trained him to stand on her wrist while she walks from one part of the yard to another.

She is planning next to train him to perch on her shoulder so she can have both hands free. I must get a video of that when he learns his new trick.

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You will remember that I was apprehensive about the barbecue on Sunday. The weather forecast was worrying. We took all the precautions we could at home, even making a special detour to move the chickens from the back door into a shady nook in the backyard, before setting off across the river.

Drove across the Tasman Bridge, through Lindisfarne and turned towards Rokeby, then up a side road through the gum trees. It was fine and sunny but not unbearably oppressive yet. We found our way to the right address, notable for the number of cars parked in the bushland around the house. In the shade of some of the taller trees, the members of our congregation were lolling about consuming sausages, salads and punch.

The afternoon unwound pleasantly enough. The lady of the house and Julie trekked across to the hen house to inspect the new additions to the chicken population resulting from last week's trip to the poultry farm. I trailed after them, though I don't know a Polish from a Rhode Island Red. Then it seemed to be growing warmer and we moved inside into the living room, where we divided our time between jostling for position in front of the electric fan and casting about for a lost contact lens.

When we finally set off for home, the air seemed to be charged with heat. As soon as we stepped outside I could feel the perspiration start from my pores. Down the side road and back on to the highway, with the windows down for maximum ventilation. ("Is the bonnet supposed to wobble like that when we hit 100kph?")

The heat got worse every mile. As we came through Bellerive, we saw the traffic banking up in the road leading to the Tasman Bridge. "I'm not sitting in a traffic jam in this heat," said my sister decisively as she swung the steering wheel. "We'll circle round to the Bowen Bridge.":

It took a few minutes extra, but we were thankful to avoid the trail-back of cars. We felt washed-out by the time we reached my house, and no wonder - while we were on the road, the mercury had hit 39° on the Celsius scale (a blistering 102°F in the old measurements!).

We checked the animals were all right (the cat went outside then came back and stretched out on the coolness of the linoleum floor in the kitchen) then I lay down for an hour to recover my strength.

Surprisingly, the temperature dropped steadily after that and it started to rain lightly about 9 p.m. It must have dropped twenty degrees by the time I went to bed that night. I was afraid that might mean a storm but apart from a single bolt of lightning around midnight things seemed fairly normal.

I don't think I've seen a day as hot as this one for about twenty years; I ended the evening sleeping naked under a sheet, exhausted from the extreme temperatures.

There were about twenty bushfires around the state, but they were all under control by Monday except for the one near Zeehan on the west coast. It was warm in the afternoon but nothing like it was on Sunday.

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Is it just me or is the Australian Open tennis dragging on even longer than usual? I know nothing about tennis championships, but this one seems to be going on forever.

I'm not bothered by it normally, but they tend to give it priority on the ABC radio, disrupting a lot of my favourite programmes. Curiously, it seems not all radio stations are taking the tennis broadcast, so many of the shows are still going out as normal over the Internet. I was able to hear The Idlers and The Coodabeen Champions normally on the web.

The numbers of people listening would be well down though. The midnight quiz segment The Challenge on the late show started the other night with only three contestants; normally people from all over the country are fighting to get through to the switchboard.

The host (Lisa Forrest filling in for Tony Delroy) could only advise people to assume the show was on even if they couldn't hear it, and to try dialling in at the normal time. I guess this is a definition of faith: you can't hear it or see it, you just believe that it's there and act accordingly.

hot times

The summer weather continues to be ... interesting.

7:45 on Friday morning I woke up to a thunderstorm in full swing. It was the first time I/'ve ever heard the often-mentioned "rolling thunder"; it started out with a dull rumble then built up to a roar. I saw my sister Pauline the next day and she'd been on the Bowen Bridge during the storm. Yikes! I can think of places I'd rather be during an electrical storm.

About a dozen fires were started around the state by trees that had been hit by lightning.

When we stopped in at Café 73 in Moonah later in the day they said the power had been out twice during the afternoon. Thank the Lord neither problem had affected our part of town.

The storm at least meant that the morning wasn't as hot and sultry as it has been some days this month. However the temperature climbed up and up after lunch till it hit 33ºC [91º F in the old measurements] — quite hot enough for us thank you very much!

Saturday wasn't much better. After we'd been to Julie's house to feed her menagerie, I had perspiration running into my eyes and I spent half my time pivoting to face into any breeze that sprang up. What worries us is that we've been invited to a barbecue by one of our ministers on Sunday afternoon and the forecast temperature is a worrying 36°, followed by rain.

A bushfire crisis is being predicted for Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia.

If this is the last entry for a while, you'll know it's because we're recuperating from sunstroke and/or escaping from fires and floods.

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This month the BBC7 website are running a series of H.G. Wells short stories on Saturday afternoons. Last week they started off with the chiller "The Sea Raiders"; next week we'll hear the whimsical "The New Accelerator".

I've been an admirer of Wells' short fiction all my life. Their potential for radio was something I'd always been aware of, and if it wasn't for the collapse of radio drama in this country I might have tried my hand at a script.

I think the first book I ever bought by mail order (back in 1967) was a massive volume of The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells, printed on that thin grey paper they used in Britain during World War II.

Back in 1996 I started a one-man campaign to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Wells' death and contacted every major media outlet in the country. Philip Adams and Robyn Williams wrote me nice letters, the Sydney Morning Herald turned my press release into a column, I was interviewed on ABC radio and the State Library of Tasmania staged a display of my H.G. Wells collection.

Something that not many people think about is that nearly all the main themes of popular fiction were foreshadowed by Wells:

• atomic bombs
• alien invaders
• germ warfare
• time travel
• mutants
• genetic engineering
• moon landings etc etc.

There's more to Herbert George Wells than just The War of the Worlds.

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Julie and a friend went off to see an acquaintance who breeds chickens in a big way. She came home with six fancy-looking chooks. Photographs to follow.




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liner

Ocean liners seem to be getting bigger and bigger. The summer months in Tasmania mean a series of cruise liners calling at various ports, and some of them are mind-boggling in their dimensions.

Driving past the waterfront on Thursday, the centre of all eyes had to be the Diamond Princess, the largest liner ever to dock at Hobart. Three times the size of the Titanic, it checks in at 116,000 tonnes, it would be taller than a 60-storey building if you stood it up right.

As we drove past it, we were impressed not only by its sheer bulk but by the strange design features like the turbine-like objects on the roof which made it look like something out of Thunderbirds or Transformers - if it had suddenly taken off, we wouldn't have been completely surprised.

The 2700 passengers had only one day in Hobart; the ship sailed at 6 o'clock that night, but will be back for eight visits during 2006. We may have to get used to seeing it here.

Things have changed a bit since I saw the Oriana on my first visit to Sydney and thought it was a pretty big ship - she only carried 1500 passengers I think, and it wasn't nearly as luxurious as the modern superliners.. This is, of course, not the same liner that sails under that name today. (I think the one I saw was built in 1959).

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ABC Radio's Nightlife programme has completed its survey of listeners to pick their top songs for summer.

1. Sounds of then - GANGgajang
2. Summertime - various versions of the Gershwin song
3. Boys of Summer - Don Henley
4. Under the boardwalk - The Drifters/Bette Midler
5. Good Vibrations - The Beachboys
6. Capricorn Dancer - Richard Clapton
7. Friday on my Mind - Easybeats
8. Long Hot Summer - The Style Council
9. Come Said the Boy - Mondo Rock
10.Island in the Sun - Harry Belafonte


I know all those except for #3, which was a bit of a surprise since I haven't paid much attention to popular music for the last 25 years. Haven't they written any songs about summer during the 1980s and 1990s?

Listen live in:

Windows Media

Real Media

[10pm - 2am Mon-Fri Australian Eastern Time]




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I visited Essentially Mobile about my new laptop and they say that this model doesn't come with a DVD drive, but for $200 they can get me an external drive that will not only play DVDs but burn them as well. That doesn't sound too bad (I can remember the days when a CD burner was an expensive luxury add-on!).

The price includes the enclosure. The what? It's not in the Oxford Dictionary of Computing 1994 edition but apparently it's a fancy name for the box the drive sits in while you connect it to the laptop's USB port.

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Reading an old Doc Savage thriller The Exploding Lake originally published in Doc Savage Magazine September 1946: "This months Doc Savage novel takes you to the mystery land of Patagonia, where nature plays curious tricks and the schemes of evil men conspire to make it a country of dread."

A mushroom shaped cloud spotted in Argentina - could it be related to Nazi war-criminals who escaped from Europe at the end of the war? That would be enough of a plot for most thrillers, but with master pulpmeister Lester Dent at the helm, you can be sure there'll be more than that involved by the end of the story.

In fact the whole business turns out to be a carefully-laid trap for Savage.

These post-war Doc Savage stories are shorter and slightly less extravagant than the heyday of the 1930s, but still remarkable for their pace and inventiveness.

You can read them for free on the Blackmask website.

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Monday morning I was so tired after the weekend I didn't get up very early. Unfortunately this meant that when I stepped out the back door for the first time that day it was already a hot and sultry 27º [about 85ºF in the old scale]. It was like being hit in the face with a hot towel.

It was so hot outside the back of the house that before we went out that day we had to move the two chickens that live in the box near the back door. We put a cage out under the trees in the backyard and they sat out in the shade and the fresh air.

The white rooster has become quite tame; my sister Julie can pick him up and he'll sit on her arm like a falcon perching on his master's glove. I must try and get a photograph of this one afternoon when she's moving him.

The clear hot day gave way to a clear night with the full moon lighting up the suburbs like a cosmic floodlight. Julie noticed that the frogs and crickets up by her place were unusually quiet that night – perhaps they find it prudent to keep a low profile when it's so easy for predators to zero in on their position in the moonlight.

ABC radio presenter Barbara Pongratz was muttering about having to struggle out of bed and reach for the hose to save her tomatoes from shrivelling up. (Saw her in the supermarket last week — Hi Barb!)

By Tuesday morning things had clouded over a little and the climate felt much milder. It was less intimidating outside and we didn't feel so overwhelmed. I put on a short sleeve top to help Julie feed her animals before she went to a luncheon at the museum, then changed into a business shirt when I arrived at the office.

Things were fairly busy at the office, with a couple of jobs including typing a long handwritten report for one of the church groups. It was all about a project that had come spectacularly unstuck and words like "oversight" and "responsibility" came up with some regularity. Oh dear.

I gave Kay a lift to the shops while I was out. She hasn't bought any blank videotapes for a couple of weeks but she made up for it today, tottering home under the weight of 30 three-hour tapes. That should last her at least a week. (I suppose I can't cast the first stone; I bought two jars of Vegemite in a sale, making eight jars we have in reserve on the pantry shelf now.)

Drove home and served up tonight's dinner: Scotch Eggs on a bed of spinach with home-grown tomatoes and a slice of Molenberg swiss bread, washed down with a Barossa Valley Semillon.

Wednesday morning I felt better than I have most mornings this month. The last couple of weeks I've been so tired that it's been an effort to get anything done. For example, some people complain there's nothing on breakfast television worth watching: first thing in the morning I am so out of it that I run on automatic pilot for the first hour. (I always eat the same things for breakfast in the same order – it's like a mild form of sleepwalking.) It never crosses my mind to turn on the television; it's all I can do to listen to the wireless.


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I have nearly finished personalising my new laptop. I not only had to transfer the data from my old increasingly-unreliable machine, but I had a whole list of software I needed to install.

I covered a sheet of paper with 22 programmes I would like to use on it. In the end I installed most of them, I didn't bother with Foxit Reader because the machine came with Adobe Acrobat 6 already installed. Ad-Aware and Spybot are less necessary since I started using Spyware Blaster – prevention is better than cure. And I prefer the slimmer Real Alternative to the various Real Player versions.

All these are freeware of course, as are the rest of the software: AVG anti-virus, Audacity sound recorder, Wordweb, Fresh Download, Microsoft Reader, YBook, and a neat little collection of Oxford Dictionary reference works I got off a disc many years ago. And I've previously mentioned Rough Draft 3 which I use for word processing.

Just about got it exactly right....

Old Timer's Disease?

I have been slowly getting my new laptop personalised, adding the software and adjusting the settings till it’s just the way I’m accustomed to. I had a page almost filled with a scrawled list of freeware that I wanted to load, from Audacity to YBook Reader.

bIt was four or five days before I twigged to the reason why this machine was a couple of hundred dollars cheaper than I had expected.

Placing a disc in the CD drive, I went to read a classic Doc Savage thriller off a disc from the Blackmask website. Nothing happened. After a moment the truth dawned — there was no DVD drive on the machine.

“Ah,” I thought.

At first I was taken aback at how stupid I’d been. I’d asked what I thought were the necessary questions in the shop, but it had never occured to me that in 2006 a new computer could come without a DVD drive. A quick Google search threw up some contradictory results: a couple of references suggested the Thinkpad R50e did come with a DVD, but most described it as CD only.

Ah me, I don’t seem to be off to a good start this year.

Monday night we were out at the monthly pub quiz at the New Sydney hotel, where our team The Amnesiacs won the gold medal for the second time in three months in spite of an inexplicable mistake made by yours truly.

When the category Science & Nature came round, my colleagues just handed me the sheet and more or less sat on their hands. The last question “What does the acronym Laser stand for?” was simple of course. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emmission of Radiation.

But when the answers were marked, we got that one wrong. I insisted to my team mates that I had written down the correct words, but when I looked at the sheet I saw in my own hand-writing that I had put down as the final word “Radio” instead of “Radiation”.

I sat there for a moment bewildered; I clearly remembered writing down the correct word, but here was irrefutable proof that I hadn’t. Somewhere between my brain and my fingers, something had gone off the rails.

Nevertheless, victory is victory and we were quite pleased as we drove home afterwards. I put the car keys down and went into my room to change. Five minutes later I returned and began a futile search for the keys. I even got down on my hands and knees and searched the carpet in case I’d knocked them off the table without noticing.

An hour later I discovered them still in the pocket of my trousers from earlier in the evening. Apparently I had put them down then absent-mindedly picked them up again and replaced them in my pocket.

I felt discombobulated and retired for the night with mixed emotions. I sat up for a while in bed flicking through a magazine without actually concentrating. 55, I thought, is a bit young to enter the doddering-old-man stage of life.

But facts are facts and obviously I am a small but perceptible step closer to going gaga.

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"In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story." — Ben Bova, American science-fiction writer.

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I have tried out a couple of free word-processors over the years. OpenOffice grew larger and larger with every new version and I eventually gave it up for the 602Suite word processor. That worked well for about a year, but I began trouble with some of the settings.

The release of a third version of Rough Draft seemed an opportune time to try it again and I’ve been quite pleased with it. It’s made available freely by its creator Richard Salsbury.

You can download it at no charge whatsoever from his website. “RoughDraft is a freeware word processor. Although suitable for general use, it has features specifically designed for creative writing: novels, short stories, articles, plays and screenplays. It's designed to be as practical as possible, offering all the features you need, but without being complicated or awkward to use.”

It has spell-checking and automatically saves your writing every ten minutes. Few authors will ask for more. That reassuring little signal in the lower left corner of the screen that says your file has been saved gives you a warm feeling all over.

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My back has been troubling me since the week before Christmas but it seems to be slowly improving. Julie has a whole pharmacopoeia of pain-killers available in her medicine cabinet, but I’ve found that what seems to work for me is to take paracetemol before retiring at night and ibuprofen around lunch-time.

Otherwise it takes too long to have any effect if I take pills with breakfast and wait for them to work.

And there are other factors that make starting the day difficult. The other night I must have slept lightly, because I woke with memories of a series of vivid dreams, as though I’d spent the night in the front row of a movie-house screening a double feature. This happens now and again, and it take a while for one’s mind to settle down afterwards.

At least my Blood Glucose Level readings have been satisfactory this month. This last fortnight they have been around 6.5 in the mornings and sometimes as low as 5.4 in the evening. If I could just lose some more weight, my endocrinologist would be a happy chappie.

==========

SBS doesn’t produce much original drama but they kicked off 2006 with a typically offbeat offering RAN: Remote Area Nurse. Susie Porter stars as nurse Helen Tremain who returns to her post in the Torres Strait islands after caring for her dying mother. She expects to be able to pick up where she left off, but life is never that simple.

Porter - who starred in the Australian movies Better than sex and Little Fish - returned from London where she’d been in a West End play to spend four months in the islands. She praised producer Penny Chapman and the local participants: “Penny’s a producer who brings heaps of integrity to a project and the scripts were so well-written. The islanders who star in the series are all untrained (actors) and they were so good. At times I’d look at them work and think ‘God, they’re better than us’ because they acted on nothing but instinct.”

The first episode was interesting and the photography in the Torres Strait is jaw-droppingly beautiful. This may be one of the few series worth watching during the Silly Season month this summer.




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Crash

Sometimes you get a surprise from life, just when you have everything planned out for the day ahead.




After a few weeks you becomes inured to the constant warnings from the Weather Bureau about strong winds, gales and storms. But now and again you realise that it does affect you.

Tuesday morning I discussed what I was going to do today with my sister, who was going to go down to the final day of the Taste Of Tasmania while I was at work. I walked out to the car and got behind the wheel.

I adjusted the rear view mirror. Must be out of alignment, I thought, I can’t see anything but the trees next to the driveway. Moved the mirror. Still nothing but trees.

Got out of the car and looked down the driveway. The tree at the mouth of the driveway had keeled over in the high winds and completely blocked any exit to the street.

I walked back inside and said to Julie: "Change of plans. Neither of us is going anywhere."




So, while Julie took a cab to her house, I walked down to the nearest bus stop and arrived at the office only 30 minutes late.

Using my mobile phone, I managed to co-ordinate with the Trees R Us company to go out with chainsaws and chop up the tree. They were so busy that they couldn’t cart it away straightaway, but they could clear the driveway.

Quite a sight greeted me when I returned home. The entire left half of the front lawn was covered in foliage. Somehow the tree took up more room horizontally than it ever did vertically.


But that wasn’t the only thing that crashed.


The last few days I’d been having a lot of trouble with my laptop. The machine had been crashing more and more frequently, to the point where I suspected that the problem was with the hardware, not the software. Julie, who’s of a more practical bent than I am, tried adjusting the casing of the machine, attempting to tighten up any loose panels.


Wednesday morning I packed up the machine and drove into the city to visit the Essentially Mobile shop in Collins Street. I had spoken to the guy behind the counter about possibly upgrading the memory of my laptop, so he was aware that it was an older machine, an IBM Thinkpad. But when I mentioned my suspicion that the casing itself was actually broken, he shook his head.

Not worth repairing, was his verdict. What he could do was sell me the equivalent machine, a Thinkpad R50E, for $799.

I thought that over for 24 hours, then went back and said I’d take one. My previous machine was over five years old, which is fairly ancient for anything electronic. I had inherited it from my sister, who had bought it second-hand herself. So I guess it didn’t owe us anything.

(If you want a comparison with previous generations, we have a very old laptop in the household which used to belong to the schoolgirl daughter of one of Julie’s friends. It runs Windows 95 so you can guess its vintage. It’s very clunky and slow, but it still runs. The hard drive has a total capacity of 680 MB. It cost $5,000 new. Just think about that the next time you complain about what it costs to upgrade your computer!)

I had to go to work that day, so I took the laptop with me. Things were too busy for me to do anything with it, but several people in the office were curious about it. "What sort is it? Where did you buy it? How much was it? How much?" I should be on a commission for Essentially Mobile - I may have drummed up quite a bit of business for them.


Thursday evening I was very tired after a busy day. It seemed almost as though this was an omen - perhaps this new year was going to be full of crashes - trees falling and laptops self-destructing. What was going to be next week? My health and finances were a little wobbly and I’d made the occasional mistake at work. Was I on some sort of downward spiral?


Or was I just being unduly pessimistic? I’m nearly always tired in recent months, and after a while it makes me rather glum and moody. I guess that’s only natural.

---

Lisa Forrest is filling in for Tony Delroy over summer. Tony's back 30th January 2005.


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The Taste of Tasmania

The end of the year brings with it the Hobart Summer Festival and the jewel in the crown of the festival is the annual Taste Of Tasmania. Food lovers and gourmands from all over the southern states head for the Hobart waterfront. Over 70 different stalls selling food and wine of every description.

Hard to believe that it all started 17 years ago as a stop-gap to amuse the public between the beginning and finish of the Sydney-Hobart yacht race. Now the yachties are still part of the festival, but no longer the main part.



My sister Julie is a great enthusiast for the taste, as was her mother before her. She had me down there last week, but my enthusiasm was muted because of my bad back. I was more interested in finding a comfortable position to stand in than in perusing the banners over each stall.



So we went down to the docks again Monday after Julie returned from her trip to Launceston where she attended the races (and was snapped by the press for a colour photo in the local paper -- fortunately the picture doesn’t show the cowboy boots she was wearing because of the bad weather!)

Things were more comfortable now that a cool change had come over. It was pretty crowded - it was after all the last day of the long weekend and a lot of people were having a final fling before going back to work tomorrow. But I enjoyed it a lot more than last time.

I dined on some delicious foods, washed it down with a refreshing glass of wine and finished off with some locally grown fresh fruits. Julie, as she traditionally does, finished the visit with an oyster shooter. (I’m surprised the stall that sells them doesn’t give her a gold card or something as their most regular customer.)

---

One of the extra attractions at the waterfront on Sunday night was a broadcast by those stalwarts of ABC weekend radio, the Coodabeen Champions. Greg Champion played the guitar and sang, while his three colleagues mingled with the crowd, interviewed celebrities and recounted the story of their cruise up the Derwent River on Saturday.

The 2½ hour programme even included what may be the world’s first live broadcast from the back of a merry-go-round horse when one of the Coodabeens rode into history with his microphone.

It was a long time between drinks — the last time they were here was in the early days of the Taste, back in the 1980s — one of their most enjoyable broadcasts, I thought.

Speaking of radio, Anne Fitzgerald and Lisa Forrest are standing in for Tony Delroy while he’s on his annual leave. It’s always interesting to see how the summertime stand-ins handle the most demanding part of the show, the midnight quiz. Listeners are always quick to point out any errors in handling this long-running segment.

---

While my sister was away for the weekend, I was responsible for feeding her livestock. It’s not the first time I’ve done it, but the weather this summer has been very favourable for plant growth and I could hardly get down her driveway without bending double.

The day before she left, I got out the gardening equipment and cut a path down the side of the house so I could get to and from the hen house and the creek. Getting down there after dark the last thing you want is a branch or a blackberry cane across the face.

Each visit begins with being greeted by the cats, then comes feeding the ducks and geese who are free to range over the property but are always there for dinner. The majority of the roosters are shut in overnight, to avoid aggravating the neighbours. Some of the chickens have their own quarters too because Julie wants to breed from them and preserve their bloodlines.

Then it’s time to ford the creek and up to the shed, where the horse is invariably waiting for his food. If you’re too slow, he gives an impatient whinny that carries from one side of the duckpen to the other.

The final sequence is feeding the dogs, who are always very excited at the thought of dinner. They can hardly keep still long enough for you to put the dishes down. (One of these days they’ll knock me down and grab the food from my supine body.) After they finish licking out their dishes, I throw them a carrot and sneak out while they’re munching on them — cheaper than dog biscuits and just as popular.

Then (after saying goodnight to the cats) I can go home.



For Christmas, Julie gave me a 100GB external hard drive for my laptop computer so I could back up all my stuff without ending up with a pile of CDs.

This is a very useful gift and I was quick to start using it, but this weekend I thought for a while that I had received it just in time. My laptop became increasingly unreliable, finally becoming almost unusable -- it crashed about every two minutes at that stage.

It sounded, a friend pointed out, like the effects of the Blaster worm. But my anti-virus defences were up to date, and it felt more like a hardware problem. I googled the problem and the suggestions broke down into three possibilities: the Blaster worm, power problems or overheating.

I sought Julie’s advice when she returned from up north and she listened attentively, especially to my comments that I thought there was something loose because the lid no longer closed properly. She went over it and pushed everything back into place that seemed loose or out of place.

So far it seems to be running all right, though I’m being very careful of the plastic casing. I am typing this on it now and everything seems OK. We shall see...

---

Unhappy to discover that last week’s episode of Theatre of the Mind on community radio was the final show. I knew that there was talk the series was coming to an end, but I hadn’t realised that last week was it.

It’s a shame, because a lot of the old radio shows they covered are available nowhere else. With the American radio programmes you can easily buy MP3 discs or even download them for free from sites like Otrcat or Otrfan. But the comedies and serials from the great old days of Australian radio are heard infrequently if at all.

Television star Dawn Lake died this week and the obituaries discussed her career highlights, mentioning in passing that she once worked with radio superstar Jack Davey. I suspect that a lot of Australians under 50 would have said “Who?”

Christmas

One of the odd things about the sunny weather is that Julie's cat loves sitting in her car in the afternoon. I think she enjoys the warmth that radiates from the vinyl seats after they've been sitting in the sunshine.

======================

Christmas went off all right for a change. The first two Decembers after my mother died we simply didn't do anything for the festive season. We didn't deliberately ignore the season, we just put it in the "too hard" basket.

On Christmas Day we attended church then went on to my niece's home. Her partner was cooking the turkey on his elaborate barbecue - something I hadn't heard of before but which turned out to be quite successful.

What was startling was my great-nephew Nathan, who has grown two feet since I last saw him and now looks to be 14-going-on-22. A bittersweet reminder of how fast the years are flying by.

On Boxing Day we drove up to Ridgeway in the mountains for an afternoon at Jan's house. Many of Julie's old school friends were present. The conversation took some odd twists and turns -- one participant, who reads this blog, threatened me with bodily harm if I repeated her comments about shoes and sports bras. So I won't.

======================

The standard of Yuletide television programmes seems to get worse every year. On the other hand, there was a lot of ABC radio programming that was worth listening to.

Christmas Eve on the ABC there was a Christmas episode of The Idlers, a Christmas special with Rod Quinn and a Christmas episode of Saturday Night Country. The following evening there was a Christmas episode of The Coodabeen Champions. Lots of good stuff.

It is a little baffling that they're now podcasting The Idlers but not The Coodabeen Champions. The only reason I can see is the amount of music in the latter show.



Boxing Day also begins the annual Summer Festival in Hobart. Julie went off to the Taste of Tasmania on its first day on Wednesday.

I am growing fatigued after the last few weeks. I always seem to be tired, never getting enough sleep and always facing a long "To Do" list that I never seem to reach the end of.

Of course it could be something to do with the fact that I haven't had a holiday for about 18 years.

As we approach the New Year I muse on making some resolutions -- take more exercise, lose weight, read a short story every day, all the usual stuff. We shall see.

Christmas Eve

One of our ministers wrote the following for the church bulletin this week:

"Every year something makes us mad about what is happening to Christmas. We fight some things, but like it or not, we live in a fallen world. Here's a story about one Christmas 'hijack'.

A church in Sydney decided to get out in the community in the weeks leading up to Christmas and ran a stall at the local markets each Saturday morning (good idea!). They gave away free coffee, bibles and literature that explained Christmas. Some of the other stall-holders - especially the ones selling coffee and running book stalls - complained to the chamber of commerce, who ran the markets.

The following week the church got a letter from the chamber of commerce saying that they had withdrawn permission to run a stall at the markets. And, wait for it, in their view: 'Christmas was a most inappropriate time to be giving things away.'

Now there's a twist on Christmas that you may not have heard of!

Our response? We could get mad and write to the paper, get even and attack the 'enemy', or get real. Get real about the blindness that Satan has inflicted on the eyes of the unbelievers, who are like sheep without a shepherd. Society is much like a child who doesn't know any better.

Jesus' response? He did attack the self-righteous religious hierarchy; but for the lost souls of the masses, he had compassion upon them (Matt 9:36). The same sort of compassion that led his Father to send his Son into a world that desperately needed a Saviour. A salvation that was free - a free gift for us, though so costly for him.

Have a merry and a giving Christmas."

May all the peace and joy of Christmas be with you, now and always.





The Last Quarter Moon is Saturday December 24. Venus dominates the western twilight sky. Venus is spectacularly large for a planet, larger even than Jupiter at its closest, and should be readily visible as a crescent in good binoculars (but look in the early twilight before Venus is too bright).

Venus is close to the horizon at twilight. Mars is in the northern evening sky in the company of the beautiful Hyades and Pleiades clusters. Saturn is now visible near midnight in the northeastern sky, near the Beehive cluster. Jupiter can be seen in the dawn sky, above the eastern horizon.

On December 27 Saturn is just below the crescent Moon. Mercury is just below Jupiter, but you will need a level horizon to see it, so that rules out most of Tasmania.

radio activity

Over the summer you will hear a few unfamiliar voices on 936 when local
radio goes national and programs are broadcast from different parts of
Australia.

From 28 December to January 6, Nick Rheinberger will present the National
Summer Mornings program from Hobart on ABC Local Radio. Nick will showcase
the best that Hobart has to offer. He will feature local talent, soak up
the buzz of Summer Festival and the excitement of the Sydney to Hobart
Yacht Race.

As an accomplished ukulele player, Nick is looking forward to
meeting the Ukes of Hazard (three ukulele playing females) who will
headline at the Gaiety Grande during the Summer Festival. Nick is planning
to bring both his ukulele and his charango (a Bolivian string instrument a
cross between a ukulele and a mandolin, usually heard in the jungles of
South America). Nick will also preview the Cygnet Folk Festival, with a
live performance by the Spondooli Brothers.

The Mornings program will move out of the studio for two days on December
29 Nick will broadcast from the steps of the Marine Board building and on
January 3 he will be at Parliament House Lawns from 9am-12md. The program
will be webstreamed via http://abc.net.au/backyard/summer

The irreverent and witty Coodabeen Champions are also heading this way and
will broadcast nationally from the Hobart studio on Saturday, 31st
December.

On Sunday 1st, they will venture out of the studio and head
down to the waterfront, out the front of the Marine Board building, whey
they will broadcast their program from 6.309pm. The guys want to savour
all the atmosphere around the docks and invite everyone to come down and
say hello.


The Regular Team:

BREAKFAST
Ric is heading off for a well-deserved break after a gruelling schedule
with on air commitments and the ABC Giving Tree. But he will be back next
year to wake you up in the morning. Ric passes on his heartfelt thanks to
everyone who was involved with or donated to the Giving Tree making it our
most successful year ever. He thinks he is very lucky spending Christmas
with his wife, children and grandchildren and wishes everyone a very Merry
Christmas and all the best for 2006.

MORNINGS
Coxy is taking a two-week break, resurfacing on 936 Breakfast for a couple
of weeks (09-20 January), and returning to Mornings on 23 January.
We'll be he reckons drawing close to the Premier announcing an election
by then, so let's hope he has his wits about him from the off.
In the meantime, from all at Mornings, have a great Christmas and a
wonderful 2006. And let's leave the alarm off for a couple of weeks, hey?

AFTERNOONS
Sarah Gillman has been filling in since Trevor Jackson departed for sunny
Queensland, so we will wait expectantly to find out who will be sitting in
the chair for 2006.

DRIVE
This has been a busy year for Louise on Drive, especially with most of the
first half of it being spent on the Morning Program, but she is looking
forward to being back on the radio at 10 past Four on Monday, January 23rd.
They've got a few surprises for you next year with the show too. Louise and
Lynn hope everyone has a Merry Xmas and a Happy 2006.

NIGHTS
Night owls Annie and Carol are about to abandon their nocturnal habits for
a long stretch and become morning people once again. What with nationally
networked summer programming and the Australian Open Tennis, your
'nighties' will be soaking up the sunshine right till the end of
January. Annie and Carol wish you all a very jolly Xmas, and a New Year
that brings all your hearts' desire. They hope you enjoy the tennis 'n the
cricket 'n all that wholesome outdoorsy stuff, and look forward to luring
back to the night lounge come next February.


dig on the radio
If you haven't caught up with it yet, dig on the radio has returned to the
Local Radio airwaves in a regular Saturday night program, starting at 6:30pm.
Hosted by Brian Wise and Michael Mackenzie, the show covers a wide-range of
musical styles and is an entertaining look at familiar as well as newly
released music. There's interviews, album reviews and a live performance in
the studio every week. Already the boys have had Mia Dyson, Stephen
Cummings, Mick Harvey and Sarah Blasko play live on the show.
For more information on dig on the radio check out the website at:
http://abc.net.au/dig


Visit the 936 ABC Hobart website www.abc.net.au/hobart
Or Email cruickshank.robyn@abc.net.au if you have any queries or feedback.

crash!

Spent some of yesterday afternoon helping my sister do some repairs at her house. What happened, you may ask.

Her neighbour from across the street was reversing and found herself going backwards down Julie's (quite steep) driveway. She burst open the closed gates, sent a small chicken shed flying and came to rest at the end of the driveway. The car had to be towed out of there.

But all things considered it was a fairly mild result. The gate suffered only a displaced hinge (though we still haven't found the lock!) and the only hen in the chicken shed escaped without injury. The 130-year-old sandstone steps at the back of the house are slightly out of place.

I just thank God that this didn't happen when Julie was out in the yard feeding her livestock. That hardly bears thinking about.

---

Received in the mail this week, the latest edition of the Rupert the Bear annual published by London's Daily Express. I agree with the Rupert website that said "What is true of all Rupert Annuals is that they are miniature masterpieces of childrens' literature - full of magic, mystery, fun, memorable characters and truly beautiful illustrations...All Rupert Annuals are beautiful books, with a consistency of look, quality and style that is astonishing."

Rupert has been an institution in Britain since 1920 but it's only in the last few years I've seen the annuals turning up on Australian bookstalls. The strip runs in the local reprint of the Daily Express but in very small black-and-white form -- nothing like the beautiful artworks in the annuals.

I remember the days of my childhood when even if you'd lost your calendar you knew Christmas was approaching if you walked past your local bookshop and saw the piles of children's annuals stacked high. There was something for every interest, from little girls to teenage boys. A world completely vanished nowadays (except for a Doctor Who annual that came out this year though it wasn't called a Doctor Who annual on the cover!)

---

We don't have national radio stars as such in Australia. The "shock jock" phenomenon is a ghetto with only a couple of practitioners. We certainly don't have anybody like Howard Stern.

Thousands of people rallied on Friday, said the news, to applaud Howard Stern, who after years of raging against government regulations on obscenity, broadcast his last show on public airwaves before heading to unregulated Sirius satellite radio station.

"We broke every rule known to radio and mankind and I'm proud of that," Stern bellowed to supporters from an outdoor stage erected in a closed-off midtown Manhattan street.

Syracuse University Professor of Television and Popular Culture Robert Thompson said Stern's enormous popularity could be what takes satellite radio into the mainstream.

"Every medium has needed one great show to kind of push it over the edge. Milton Berle was called 'Mr. Television' because he got people to go out and spend money and move the radio out of the place of honor in the living room," Thompson said.

"There is a pretty big audience who would not only follow him to satellite, they'd following him to Neptune. I think that's what Sirius is counting on," he said.

Interesting, though academic since we don't have satellite radio in Australia either.

summertime

Beach no-go zones were announced in Sydney as celebrities rallied for peace at Coogee beach.

Actors Cate Blanchett, Claudia Karvan and Bryan Brown joined singer Jimmy Barnes to call for tolerance.

"It is actually very clear and simple," Blanchett said. "Violence and racism are bad. Whenever they occur they are to to be condemned and we should not turn a blind eye."

"It's about respect for others, respect for the rights of others and respect of the rights of everyone to go about their lives in a peaceful way."

Amen! People guilty of violence should be prosecuted, whether it happens on the beach or anywhere else, regardless of their race or religion. That's not hard to understand, is it?

Let's hope that next year those disturbances in Sydney, a blemish on the face of Australia, will be just an unpleasant memory.





I read in the local paper that 2005 was one of the warmest years on record in Tasmania. We could believe that quite easily.

Thursday night it was so warm and stuffy that I didn't find it easy to sleep. The house still seemed hot and uncomfortable on Friday morning.

We went over to Julie's house and she released two of the chickens she'd been hand-rearing into the newly constructed addition to the hen house. At least it's shaded and protected for them out on the other side of the barnyard.

After watching the chickens for a while, I decided they were all right and went back to the house to walk the dogs. The sun was high and I warmed up quickly. Even the dogs felt the heat and lapped up some water as soon as we got back inside.

It was still sunny when I returned home, but there was enough shadow over by the banksia rose in the driveway, and we took some chairs out and sat in the shade with a glass of wine.

We finished off the 2003 Gordo semi-dry made by Akrasi Wines in Victoria. It's a light fruity wine with a touch of musket, very pleasant.

After about half an hour out there, eating sandwiches and reading magazines, we actually cooled off a bit. Julie moved her chair over into the sun - "I'm getting gooseflesh over there, and reading that theological journal is putting me to sleep". "I recommend another cup of coffee," I said, "and switching to The Lady for a while."

Finally about 7 o'clock it clouded over and two or three hours later it rained for a while.

I served up some salmon for dinner, on a bed of rocket and spinach with a dressing of balsamic vinegar and capsicum. Julie added extra mayonnaise to hers. Washed it down with some green tea and finished off with a slice of pannecota.

Meanwhile, the cage left vacant by the two chickens outside the back door didn't stay empty for long. Julie moved in two of the other chickens from the box outside her bedroom door. This only leaves two chicks inside (one of those is the one with the bad leg - I don't know what we're going to do with him).

At least we're going in the right direction: less poultry rather than more.

---

Tony Delroy for some reason started his annual holidays on Friday 16th December, so the Friday night radio show went to air across Australia with Anne Fitzgerald, who hails from Launceston in northern Tasmania.

It's always interesting to see how the summer replacements handle the late show. Tony makes it all sound so easy and conversational that you only realise how good he is when somebody else tries to do the same thing and fails.

The midnight quiz segment "The Challenge" is often a litmus test. The regular callers are affronted if the compere doesn't take it seriously and they're always quick to point out if the rules aren't being followed.

I can think of one fill-in emcee who was so obviously out of her depth that we had to grit our teeth and wait out the month for the return of the regular presenter. Her first couple of nights hosting the quiz were trying listening.

The Idlers on Saturday night was pushed back to 9:05 p.m. by the cricket broadcast, which was supposed to finish at 8:30. Will we ever get a radio executive with the gumption to cut off a sports broadcast if it over-runs? I suspect not.

We await the summer with a mixture of trepdiation and anticipation. Sometimes you can get something really good. Sometimes you don't.

---

I suspect in a few weeks we'll be tired of the word "Narnia" as the movie advertising bandwagon hits high gear.

Douglas Gresham, C.S. Lewis' step-son [who once lived in Tasmania], says that he tried to interest Hollywood in a Narnia movie for years but it wasn't until the success of The Lord of the Rings that there was a nibble.

If it gets people interested in the original novels that can only be a good thing. My local supermarket already has a special rack displaying paperbacks of the whole series.

I wonder if some television station in a couple of years will make a double-feature out of Shadowlands and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

---

Pamela Anderson's new sitcom Stacked is now running on the late show on Friday night. It's mildly amusing – certainly better than a lot of the half-hour comedies that American television churn out by the yard.

I saw an interview where Pammy was asked about the title. She replied drily "I think it's a double-entendre." (The show is about a bookstore.)

Let's hope that it runs longer than her last venture V.I.P. did on local television. That would have to be the most misunderstood programme on the air – nobody seemed to understand that it was a spoof. It wasn't supposed to be a serious crime drama.

race riot?

The sermon this Sunday morning began with what I thought was a striking illustration.

Imagine, we were asked, a small boy who'd never been to the circus. Hearing that the circus was coming to town, he became very excited and talked of little else.

Finally the big day came and the performers and the animals marched down the main street. Elephants, clowns, acrobats, you name it.

After the parade, the little boy ran up to the ringmaster and said "Thank you for bringing the circus to town."

Then he went home.

That's the way the world behaves with Christmas. They love the superficial trappings and the noise and colour. But that idea of Christmas is as wrong-headed as mistaking a parade for the actual performance.

The real meaning of Christmas is confronting -- telling people about it makes them uncomfortable. But is there anything that's more important in our lives?

---

An idiosyncratic construction of wire, wood and plastic is rising out of the muddy ground at my sister's house. It lacks a water supply so far, but otherwise is close to completion.

Julie has been making a concerted effort to finish some extensions to the chicken shed on her property. This may be something to do with Cedric the rooster's recent habit of crowing at 6 o'clock every morning outside my backdoor.

I suspect the neighbours might be pleased as well.

Meanwhile the geese at Julie's house have finally hatched some of their eggs after a long long nesting time. I was over there on Sunday and I counted ten geese and six goslings. There may even be more by this time.

---

The disturbances in the Sydney beachside areas are regrettable, but the media attention makes it sound worse than it might be.

One can imagine a conversation along those lines:

"Hello, Australian consulate."

"Hi, this is Hank Harn from G-WHIZ news. Could you give me some information about the race riots in Sydney?"

"If I can."

"Great. So, how many people have been killed?"

"I don't think anybody's been killed. A few people have been injured."

"OK. Got that. Has the National Guard been called out?"

"We don't have one in Australia, but I understand what you mean. No, there are no troops but I believe some extra police are on the streets."

"Tear gas? Rubber bullets? Water cannon?"

"I don't think so."

"Much property damage? How many city blocks burnt down?"

"I understand a lot of windows were broken and some cars damaged."

"This was a race riot? Or what passes for one in your country..."

"Would you like me to phone you if I get any more information?"

"Look, let me be frank. Don't call me, I'll call you."

---

I thought I was onto something to solve my Internet radio problems when I saw a reference on the BBC message boards to a programme called Streambox which allowed you to download the Real Player files instead of recording them as they played.

After spending all Monday morning experimenting, I found that (surprise!) it wasn't as simple as I had hoped. After looking up the software, downloading and installing it, I tried downloading a half-hour show from the BBC.

This wasn't quite as good as I'd expected. For a start, with my dial-up connection it took longer than half an hour to download the file. I was surprised to discover when I played it back that it still had the pauses in it that have been such an irritant recently.

I guess there are few short cuts, on the internet or in life.

Which reminds me of the latest drama with the office computer: I mentioned that we'd had to go over to Outlook Express after the Outlook e-mail system failed.

Well, guess what? This week Outlook Express failed for no apparent reason. I've had to resort to accessing our mail on the ISP's website, which is a very slow process.

Maybe we should just uninstall everything and reinstall it from scratch.

---

The amount of information that you can pack into a small space in the digital age never fails to amaze me.

I stopped in at one of the Chickenfeed discount stores this week and they had a display of DVD sets – 50 movies for $29.95 which would have seemed unbelievable once.

Sure, most of the movies on each set were ones that I didn't particularly want to see, but I bought a set of the western movies because it included several Roy Rogers and Gene Autry flicks.

You certainly can't beat the price.

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The end of the year draws on. The radio announcers are beginning to go off for their annual holidays, and the television programmes wind up for the year. In their place we get shows that they aren't game to screen during the ratings period, or "Summer Editions" of local shows.

A good time of year to catch up on your reading and listen to some good music.





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life as choc?

Browsing in the local pharmacy while waiting for a prescription, I picked up a chocolate bar that demonstrated the modern tendency to want to have it both ways.

It was a "Tangerine" bar made by the Sweet William brand. It boasted "real chocolate" on the front, but also promised to be dairy free, cholesterol free, gluten free, lactose free, halal and suitable for vegetarians.

With all this, you'd imagine that it was not just harmless but positively good for you! Alas, turning it over and looking at the ingredients list, I found that the main ingredients were cane sugar and cocoa butter.

In food as in life, you always have to read the small print.

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The start of December saw an unfortunate confluence – I was still tired from the NaNoWriMo novel-writing month, and I had to step in to cover some extra hours while someone was away at the office. Between this and Julie's night-owl habits it made for a taxing couple of days. I have to start getting to bed earlier.

The NaNoWriMo website, by the way, had a record number of participants this year (59,000), and an impressive number of winners (9,700 including yours truly).

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The new series of Garrison Keillor's radio show started on BBC7 finally in November. The show has been on every week, but they've been repeats for quite a while. The GKRS incarnation is an edited version of the weekly Praire Home Companion that airs on National Public Radio in the United States. The BBC version drops a few of the songs and (of course) all the advertising except the spoof commercials for bodies like the Ketchup Advisory Board and the American Duct Tape Council.

Meanwhile in Australia ABC Radio National celebrates a remarkable milestone: in 1966, classical music enthusiast John Cargher entered the ABC studios to present the very first Singers of Renown, a programme which has now reached its 2000th edition. This week John reveals the experiences that turned a hobby into a full-time profession, and plays performances from Domingo, Pavarotti and many others.

Radio National has confirmed its revamped programme schedule for 2006, which begins on Monday 23 January. (You can download the program schedule as a pdf file from their website.)

There will be a greater focus on books and the arts. From Monday to Friday at 10am The Book Show, presented by RN stalwart Ramona Koval, is the major addition to the weekday morning line-up: a 40-minute program that explores all forms of publishing.

The weekday Deep End programme airs at 3pm with a new brief to cover the arts in even greater depth, and the new Sunday Deep End is broadcast at 10am with Julie Copeland’s Exhibit A following at 11am.

ABC Radio National has responded to listeners' requests and reintroduces the daytime edition of the music programme The Daily Planet. Lucky Oceans presents Monday to Friday at 2.20pm, while Doug Spencer delves further into the world of music each weekend night from 10pm with a brand new Weekend Planet.

Music Deli, presented by Paul Petran, merges with Live on Stage. Broadcast at 8pm Friday and me4pm Sunday, the emphasis is on live concerts from the kinds of artists featured in both these programmes.

ABC Radio National also introduces a new music feature program, Into The Music. Presented by Robyn Johnston, the program looks behind the events and trends in music; it airs at 5pm each Saturday.

After Saturday AM at 7am, Geraldine Doogue hosts Saturday Extra at 7.30am with analysis of current events. Then a new design and lifestyle program, By Design, airs at 9am with Alan Saunders. In the afternoon, All in the Mind comes forward to 1pm, and Alan Saunders returns at 1.30pm with The Philosopher’s Zone, which becomes a half-hour show.

"The 2006 schedule," says the ABC "owes much to an extensive review of the station’s programming, undertaken this year, and close attention to audience feedback. ABC Radio National goes into 2006 newly committed to specialist broadcasting, within reach of all Australians."

I can believe that – the return of Alan Saunders with his own design programme is a clear reaction to the almost vitriolic comments posted by ABC listeners after The Comfort Zone was absorbed into the new Saturday Breakfast show. The Geraldine Doogue fan club were swamped by irate Comfort Zone supporters annoyed by the changes.

It doesn't pay to tinker with people's favourite radio shows, something that the various ABC networks don't always take on board.

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The problems with listening to Internet radio that I mentioned previously haven't gone away but I've learned to live with them. Real Alternative plays Real Player content, but no matter how much I tweak the settings there's still a second of silence about every minute. This means that if I'm recording a half-hour show I have to go through and delete 20 or 30 pauses before I save it to an MP3 using Audacity software.

This is tolerable, but the thought of having to do this to a 90-minute play or a two-hour concert makes me cringe. Roll on the Podcasting revolution when we'll be able to routinely download all these programmes.

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RECOGNISING A STROKE – a public service announcement.

A neurologist is reported as saying that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognised and diagnosed within 3 hours.

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer brain damage when people nearby fail to recognise the symptoms of a stroke.

Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:
1. *Ask the individual to SMILE.
2. *Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.
3. *Ask the person to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently) (i.e...It is sunny out today)

If he or she has trouble with any of these tasks, call paramedics immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

After discovering that a group of non-medical volunteers could identify facial weakness, arm weakness and speech problems, researchers urged the general public to learn the three questions. They presented their conclusions at the American Stroke Association's annual meeting last February. Widespread use of this test could result in prompt diagnosis and treatment of the stroke and prevent brain damage.

I don't usually pass on things that are sent around on the Internet, but I guess it can't do any harm to mention the above advice. After all, a lot of young people only know how to administer CPR because they've seen it performed on television dramas.




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personality?

I did one of those quizzes you see frequently that promise to diagnose your personality type just by asking a few questions.

I know I'm a bit of an introvert but I wasn't expecting this result:

You Have a Melancholic Temperament

Introspective and reflective, you think about everything and anything. You are a soft-hearted daydreamer. You long for your ideal life. You love silence and solitude. Everyday life is usually too chaotic for you. Given enough time alone, it's easy for you to find inner peace. You tend to be spiritual, having found your own meaning of life. Wise and patient, you can help people through difficult times. At your worst, you brood and sulk. Your negative thoughts can trap you. You are reserved and withdrawn. This makes it hard to connect to others. You tend to over think small things, making decisions difficult.

What Temperment Are You?

I guess stolid, unhurried, quiet, but "melancholic"? I wouldn't have thought so, but then I'm looking out from the inside, so what do I know.

a novel result

Monday night was the end of November.

Well, it was for me.

That was the night I got to see this on my laptop screen:

Dear Novelist,

You did it.

Despite everything else going on in your busy life, you managed to pull off the creative coup of writing a 50,000-word novel in just one month.

When the going got tough, you got typing, and in four weeks, you built vast worlds and set them in motion. You created characters; quirky, interesting, passionate souls with lives and loves and ambitions as great as yours. You stuck it out through the notoriously difficult middle stretch, and pressed onward as 80% of your fellow writers dropped out around you.

And now look at you: A NaNoWriMo winner. And the owner of a brand-new, potential-filled manuscript. It's an amazing accomplishment, and we're proud to have had you writing with us this year.

It was a near thing though. I hadn't been aware that word-counting programmes can vary in their results, and I uploaded what I thought was my finished manuscript on Sunday. I was 1500 words short!

Thank heavens that I hadn't left it until the last day. This gave me another 48 hours to write some new scenes and fine-tune the chapters I'd already written.
Scorched by Darkness was completed and approved. Whew!

I didn't know if I could do it. I'd never written 50,000 words about anything. Until this month I'd never written 5,000 words in a day about anything. To
do creative writing at that speed was a big ask.

But at least I've answered the question "Could I do it? Could I write 150 pages in a month?"



The man came round to mow the lawns this morning. Zelda the goose was disturbed by all this noise in the back yard and waddled across the patio to the back door. I thought she'd stay there where she felt more secure but she didn't stop there.
Hopping up onto the back step, she walked straight into the house. I called out to my sister, who was propped up in bed reading. She looked up just as the goose walked through the door of her bedroom. "Eeeek! Don't you dare poop on the carpet, Zelda."
I shooed her out and closed the door. I think perhaps she was motivated by memories of the box she lived in when she was a gosling. Maybe she thought it might be nice to curl up under the warmth of the reading lamp again.

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Sunday was Julie's birthday. We met up with some friends at the newly refurbished Maypole Hotel in the northern suburbs. It was a very pleasant meal. Most of those present were past or present members of the Amnesiac team from the quiz nights at the New Sydney.

Joining us were American science fiction writer Steve Lazarowitz and his partner Dana. They were regular members of the Amnesiacs last year but back problems make it difficult for Steve to join us.

It was nice to see them again. After Julie's birthday present (a book on extraordinary chickens) had been passed around the table, he was inspired to reminisce about walking down Flatlands Avenue in Brooklyn with a chicken on his shoulder. (It's a long story.)





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