greetings Governor

If I'd known I'd end up shaking hands with the Governor, I would have put on a better shirt. I wasn't expecting that when I joined the semi-annual Open Day crowds at Government House in Hobart.



The place was built in 1857 and is one of the nicest vice-regal residences in the Commonwealth. Designed by William P. Kay, it is described in the brochures as "a fine example of an early Victorian country house in neo-Gothic style and is one of the largest of its type in Australia" (73 rooms!).

This is where the Queen stays when she's in town.

The standard of decoration and ornamentation is high, and you spend as much time looking at the ceiling as you do at the furniture, portraits and fine art. Here I am looking about....



The tour funnelled us through the drawing room, the ballroom and the conservatory. Our mouths were open and our eyebrows raised for much of the progress through the house. It was simply amazing.



Finally we came to the rear and exited through the conservatory into the grounds, where a military band was entertaining the crowd and community organisations provided light refreshments.

I have been in the grounds of Government House before, but this was the first time I'd had the opportunity to see the interior.



It was there in the final room that the Governor, the Honourable William Cox, and his wife Jocelyn, were shaking hands with the visitors. I think the woman in front of me actually curtsied.

As usual whenever I meet important people, my mind went a complete blank. "So, what do you think of our house?" asked His Excellency jovially.

Desperate to say something - anything! - I gabbled something about "Wonderful! It's really...er... wonderful." The governor didn't seem surprised; he probably gets that reaction all the time.

My sister, however, had a real moment of angst. Her camera's batteries had died seconds before the governor and his lady hove into view! A unique photo opportunity lost, alas.

At least we know we were there.

** ** ** **

We didn't do too badly in our first month of Broadband. Between me and my sister Julie we managed to download 6200 MB during peak hours and 1400 MB during off-peak time.

Not bad for a couple of old fogeys, I thought.

I remember the salesman looked a bit surprised when we opted for the 20GB-per-month option on our ADSL, but the next option down was absurdly low. We'd prefer to have too much rather than too little.

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pain, floods and monarchs

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Yes, I have been slow to update this month. The two things that have had me preoccupied have been my bad back and my sister's struggle with hydrology.

Moving that big market umbrella around the back garden so we could find a spot to sit out on the lawn last Saturday was a mistake. The degenerated disc in my back hasn't bothered me for a long time, but it certainly did this week.

What makes it difficult is that I'm at my stiffest when I get out of bed in the morning, but 75% of all my bending takes place in the first hour after I get up. Feeding cats, put out birdseed, getting dressed... you should see me trying to put on my socks.

A mixture of ibuprofen and paracetemol at various times of the day helped me get through things, but it wasn't much fun. You remember that Bill Cosby routine about hearing himself make the same sound that his father used to make when he got out of bed? That's what I was like.

And what, you ask, of Julie's problems?

Well, if you've seen any pictures of her house you'll have noticed that it's below the level of the road. Recently the front yard has become more and more wet. The dampness slowly spread across the yard and down the side, finally becoming a visible trickle of water.

Muddy patches become puddles. Puddles became pools of water. After a few days I couldn't get from one side of the yard to the other — I had already fallen over once attempting it.

After a few days, Julie phoned the Town Hall and asked if some of this water could be coming from the water pipes in the street. A crew arrived, looked around and dug down to the stopcock for the water supply to Julie's house. They turned this off so they could judge if the water was coming from her pipes or theirs.

Then they left.

And never came back.

Julie waited for a few days. There was no water inside the house, but there was plenty outside. Fortunately she was staying with me so it wasn't a personal difficulty, but she still had to carry water to her animals.

Do you know how much bottled water a horse gets through in a day?

(No, just kidding – there was enough water in the creek for Julie to be able to fill the horse trough with a bucket.)

Finally she phoned the city council again. Nobody seemed to know who it was that had been there the first time. Finally they referred her to what they called "the plumbing inspector".

He duly arrived (it turned out he rejoices in the title of Hydrology Investigation Officer) with an assortment of metal-detectors and other instruments. He went all over the footpath, making cryptic marks on the sidewalk with bright blue paint.

A couple of days later another crew arrived and dug a hole six feet deep in the footpath on Saturday morning. I bet the neighbours were pleased when they cut their way through four inches of cement.

While we were looking down at the water in the bottom of the hole, one of the workmen said conversationally "We've found some more water after that first lot."

I looked at him. "Is this good news or bad news?" I asked.

It must have been a good sign though. Within 36 hours they completed their excavations and filled in the hole. Almost instantly the pools of water around the house began to dry up – they're now just muddy patches and we hope that in another couple of days they'll have dried out.

We live in hope anyway.

I don't know if it was 40 days and 40 nights but it felt like it.

==========

Called in for lunch at a new outlet of Pasta Resistance in Collins Street, just near the entrance to the Chickenfeed discount store. A small restaurant but nicely turned out.

I had the pasta salad with bacon and broccoli and thousand island dressing. Quite acceptable.

==========

I don't pay a lot of attention to sports at the best of times, but I did tune in for the telecast of the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.

The climax was the presentation to the Queen of the ceremonial baton. She accepted it and spoke to the assembled athletes.



"One year and one day ago - on Commonwealth Day 2005 - I placed this message in this hi-tech baton. It has since been carried round the Commonwealth on every continent and across every ocean by many thousands of voluntary Queen's Baton Relay runners.

I hope that everyone who saw the Baton during its journey recognised it as a symbol of the unity and diversity of our Commonwealth of Nations. The Commonwealth Games are both a product of our unique organisation as well as a tangible example of the value of this partnership of peoples.

Tonight we celebrate the value of sport as a means of bringing together people from seventy-one nations and territories, and from a wide range of cultures, traditions and beliefs.

As we look forward to the next eleven days, I would like to remind you of the very successful Games at Sydney in 1938, in Perth in 1962, and in Brisbane in 1982. Together they underline the impressive contribution that Australia has made to the successful development of the Commonwealth, and to the encouragement of good sportsmanship and friendliness throughout the Commonwealth.

I am glad to have this opportunity to offer my best wishes to every athlete and official taking part in these 'friendly' Games. I congratulate everyone who has worked tirelessly to organise this great sporting celebration, which I hope will entertain hundreds of millions of people round the world."


==========

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

Radio was seen as eminently practical on the farm, providing the latest
weather forecasts, agricultural market reports, and other information that made
the business of farming more productive. But perhaps more importantly, radio
brought formerly isolated homes into close daily contact with the rest of the
nation. This led many of radio’s developers to believe that the new medium’s
greatest promise would be realized in serving rural listeners. In a 1924 speech at
the University of Missouri, RCA's David Sarnoff argued,

Radio's greatest contribution to civilization lies not so much in what it
does for the city dweller but upon the signal influence it can bring upon
the life and action of our farm population. . . . the message that radio
brings to the farmer is the message of human contact, human sympathy,
and culture

Read more here


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Sunday morning

Faith withers and dies when the Bible is regarded merely as a collection of men’s thoughts or as a subjective record of God’s actions, mused Charles Colson in an introduction to a book about the Bible.

Timothy 3:14-17 assumes that Timothy would have had a sound knowledge of the Old Testament

2 Peter tells us that the writers of the Bible were guided by the Holy Spirit. This is what we mean when we say they were “inspired”, not in the everyday sense of being inspired to write to Aunt Ethel – the truths they reveal were those communicated by God to Man.

While most people will admit that Jesus existed, there is no way to prove that he was the Son of God. That is where faith comes into play. All our preachers take it as given that the words in the Bible come from God – that it is the final authority for Christians and there is nothing that overrides or supersedes it.

You’ll find the world is full of people who know better than those old-fashioned opinions expressed in the Bible.

We shouldn’t fall into the trap of reading books about the Bible to the exclusion of reading it for ourselves – one of the catchcries of the Reformation translates as “Scripture alone!”

They also used “Scripture interprets Scripture” – difficult passages in the Bible should be interpreted in light of other biblical passages rather than the opinions of pundits and commentators.

In the book of Genesis, Satan begins by attacking our exact understanding of God’s words and all too often that is the attitude of the world: that the Bible needs to be interpreted by experts before we can understand it.

calvin’s preaching of the word of God in 16th century Geneva reversed the downward spiral of that city into spiritual and social decay. The less the church depends on the Bible, the more irrelevant it becomes, then as now.


Lord Your Word shall guide us
and with truth provide us:
teach us to receive it
and with joy believe it.

When our foes are near us,
then Your Word shall cheer us.
Word of consolation,
message of salvation.

When the storms distress us
and dark clouds oppress us,
then Your Word protects us
and its light directs us.

Who can tell the pleasure,
who recount the treasure
by Your Word imparted
to the simple-hearted?

Word of mercy, giving
courage to the living;
Word of life, supplying
comfort to the dying.

O that we discerning
its most holy learning,
Lord, may love and fear You,
evermore be near You






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Archmides goes visiting

We did eventually get to see Steve Lazarowitz on a more temperate day, taking with us Julie's tamest rooster (who now seems to have been dubbed Captain Archmides).





I showed him how tractable the rooster was....





and he tried it out for himself:





In return he showed us some of his pets.

Who weren't quite as cuddly as the Captain in my opinion:




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weeds and weather

The beginning of March marks the official beginning of Autumn - or Fall as our American cousins like to call it - and indeed the first day was refreshingly cooler after those recent oppressively hot days.

It didn't last of course. Friday we had an appointment to see the man who was cutting back the undergrowth at my sister's house, then we were going to go visiting with one of her roosters. (Yes, she was taking with her the chicken that's so tame he stands on her wrist while she walks around.)

But the weather wasn't going to co-operate. We saw the guy at Julie's house (and he's done a wonderful job on clearing the front of all the greenery that was choking it - see above) but the temperature just kept climbing.

Julie looked overwhelmed by it and when it hit 36º [about 97º in the old Fahrenheit scale] we gave up and phoned to cancel. The humidity was just too much for us to handle.

I was surprised the next morning to find that the temperature had dropped 20º without the usual drama of a thunderstorm or a torrential downpour of rain.

Incredibly, the maximum and minimum temperatures for Hobart on Saturday were both just 16º.

Weird!

==========

Monday saw the switching on of the ABC's new FM transmitter in Launceston, transferring ABC Northern Tasmania [the old 7NT] from AM to FM. ABC Hobart remains on AM, but you have to wonder how many more years that will last.

Since FM broadcasting started in Australia back in 1980, the commercial stations have led the exodus from the AM band. Here in southern Tasmania, the AM band is now the province of the ABC and a handful of low-powered community stations.

An entire generation of young people have grown up who probably don't even know there is an AM band on their radio sets.

Still, not to worry. By the time ABC Hobart gets around to going FM, we'll probably be listening to it on radio sets that have streaming internet audio built in.

The first radio set I ever owned had big glowing valves that you could see warming up through the back of the case. That seems a long time ago (and indeed it was - that would have been around 1958).

==========

An example of how we're isolated from the harsher aspects of the modern world.

On Sunday morning the preacher asked for prayer for a friend of one of our congregation (they both sing in the same group) - his son had just been murdered. There was an audible gasp of shock from the people sitting around me.

It started me thinking how removed from violence we are. This is the first time that even a friend of a friend has met an untoward death, and I can't think of the last time when somebody I knew was involved in any sort of violent incident.

Yet this sort of thing is taken for granted in many of the so-called civilized societies around the world. I toddle along in some sort of parallel universe, vaguely aware that somewhere in other places people are being shot, stabbed or strangled, but for all the effect it has on me it may as well be happening on Mars.

Maybe that's why the Port Arthur shootings shook Tasmania so badly in 1996. It was the sort of thing that happened "somewhere else". It was many years before we regained our traditional equanimity.

In fact a couple of years later when one of the tabloid television programmes broadcast an item about killer Martin Bryant that included a sound grab of his voice, I reacted badly to the string of previews for the show.

It was completely out of character for me, but I grabbed the telephone and rang through to the answering machine of the programme in question. "How can you do this?" I barked. "Have you people no shame??"

Apparently the producers were taken aback by the hostile response to the segment and made some token apologies (though it didn't stop them running it). Many people must have felt the same way that I did.

In fact just writing these few words and looking up the exact date of the tragedy is enough to make me feel uncomfortable, ten years on.

Especially noting the number of idiots with web pages claiming that the shootings were part of some conspiracy. If I'd happened to be at Port Arthur that day, I would probably have been dead at the end of the day. Pardon me if I don't feel like considering your crazy ideas objectively.

==========

An intriguing piece in Media Life:

Only a few years ago, many people believed the internet would grow forever, adding new users as it went. Whatever saturation point there might be was years off, only to be reached when all of the country’s households were wired.

But it turns out saturation is already upon us, or nearly so. According to a study by Park Associates, a Dallas-based market research agency, growth in internet penetration this year will rise just one percentage point, from 63 percent to 64 percent. That translates to some 39 million American homes without internet service, and with only 2 million of them planning to go online this year. Roughly 29 percent of the 1,000 households surveyed said they do not even own a computer.

But just why these people, called internet abstainers, are staying away from the web is unclear. Thirty-one percent said they had web access at work, 18 percent said they were not interested in the internet, and 8 percent said they weren’t sure how to use it. Most, 39 percent, simply cited “other” and gave no further explanation for not wanting to be wired.

The verdict seems to be that it's something that will change as the generations do -- like electricity and telephone connections, which are now nearly universal. The modern generation are unlikely to stop using the internet, so its penetration will gradually become almost ubiquitous.

==========


An unusual piece on ABC Radio National's Airplay programme titled "This Hideous Progeny", set on page 182 of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Mary is trying to write the final chapters.

It begins with The Monster rescuing The drowning girl. They are left alone on the page to ponder their fates and consider their past. The Monster becomes increasingly concerned about the development of his character. He is reluctant to become the hideous creature that Shelley appears to be creating.

In a desperate attempt to rewrite history The Monster, The Drowning Girl and a highly versatile The Rustic struggle to keep Mary on the page whilst Percy, Mary’s husband, becomes a constant distraction.

This Hideous Progeny is by Paul Livingston, perhaps better known as cult comedian Flacco. The cast includes Ralph Cotterill as The Monster, Lucy Bell as Mary Shelley, Meaghan Davies as The Drowning Girl, Keith Robinson as The Rustic and Richard Sydenham as Percy.



Listen to live music from deep in the heart of Texas on KZQX. Just click here.


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Sunday morning

How do we know anything about God?

Why is there a Bible?

Easy questions? No, but ones that our preacher Robert addressed in this morning’s sermon at church.

Is there a way of discovering things that we can’t understand through our senses? Yes, by revelation. For example, we don’t know what is going on in other’s people’s minds until they tell us. That’s revelation – they reveal this information to us. Similarly there is evidence of God’s feelings towards us.

This comes in two varieties, which the experts call General Revelation and Special Revelation. General Revelation is the sort of thing that’s talked about in Psalm 19 – the created world as evidence of its Creator.

But surveying the stars does not inform us about the personality of He who made them. That’s where Special Revelation comes in: the way God speaks specifically to Man.

In the Old Testament, God worked through middlemen and go-betweens. The prophets and priests received God’s word and passed it on to their fellows. This might come in a vision or a dream or – rather scarily – an actual meeting such as Moses had on the mountain.

In the New Testament, God takes this a step further. He addresses his people directly, speaking to them face-to-face in the person of Jesus Christ. This is the reason that many churches do not believe there are any “new” messages from God being handed down today – after Christ, what else is there to say?

The study of the material world may awe us, but it can never instruct us in the way that the scriptures can.

And that’s why we have the Bible. Q.E.D.


God has spoken by His prophets,
spoken His unchanging Word;
each from age to age proclaiming
God the One, the righteous Lord;
in the world's despair and turmoil
one firm anchor still holds fast:
God is King, His throne eternal,
God the first and God the last.

God has spoken by Christ Jesus,
Christ, the everlasting Son;
brightness of the Father's glory,
with the Father ever one:
spoken by the Word incarnate,
God, before all time began,
Light of light, to earth descending,
Man, revealing God to man.

God is speaking by His Spirit
speaking to the hearts of men;
in the age-long Word expounding
God's own message, now as then.
Through the rise and fall of nations
one sure faith is standing fast:
God abides, His Word unchanging,
God the first and God the last.

Beyond Narnia and into the mud

I hope everyone saw the screening of the docu-drama "Beyond Narnia" on ABC-TV's Compass programme this month.

This was a fascinating look at C.S. Lewis and his most famous creation, blending interviews with a cast of actors led by Anton Rodgers as Lewis. It all worked very well and even I learned a few new facts about the author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Rodgers was very good as Lewis. That wasn't a surprise.

I've seen him in many things over the years, including a now-forgotten 1968 television series based on P.G. Wodehouse's novel Ukridge.

Back in the 1970s I also saw him on stage in Melbourne when the Young Vic Company were touring with their production of The Front Page.

He did a reasonable American accent, which is amusing because he is a very English actor.

==========

Julie's house was the subject of some attention by a crew from the Hobart City Council last week. In fact they were out there with surprising promptness after she finally phoned to tell them there was water running down the hill from the front of her house.

It was a problem that the stopcock for the water was in the middle of a veritable plantation of roses and blackberries. The thorn factor was pretty high, but they got in there.

Turning off the water over the weekend, though inconvenient for the house, should give us a better idea of where the water is coming from.

It had been getting worse over the last couple of weeks. Whenever I've taken Julie's dogs out into the yard, I've had to pick my way carefully. Last week I wasn't careful enough.

Even using a stick for better balance wasn't sufficient for me to keep my footing when I got into the mud. I felt myself sliding, but there was nothing I could do.

I think my left hip hit the ground first. My fall was broken by a pile of sandstone blocks left over from a building that once stood on the site – not a lot of give in it, I admit. My left arm whacked against a block and I said "Oh Gosh!" or something along those lines (or not).

The two dogs, hearing me fall, turned and raced back across the yard to my side.

And ate the apple that I'd dropped when I slipped.

I stared at them chewing in front of me while I gathered myself to try getting back to my feet.

"You're a disgrace to the canine species," I said. "I don't know what Lassie and Rin Tin Tin would have said."

==========

Stephen Deken had some sad news to announce this month:

There is no easy way for me to say this.

Diary-X has suffered from an unrecoverable drive failure. Due to a combination of issues, the last backup (from December 2004) contained only configuration files and other non-essential files. We do not have any other backups for the site. All journals, user information, forum posts, templates, images, and everything else are all irrecoverably lost.

In the past several hours, I have had to decide whether or not I should put the site back online at all. Only those users who backed up their own journals (either using the journal download tool or otherwise saving each entry) would be able to reconstruct their journals. Everyone else would have to start over. Whatever developed as a result would still be called Diary-X, but it wouldn't be the same.

I believe it makes the most sense to close Diary-X permanently. Tentatively, the site will go dark on March 31st, 2006.

This is sad news for all bloggers. Diary-X was my first introduction to blogging and I've been a member for years. Everyone who contributed to it will feel a loss at seeing it go.

==========

We had planned to go out to the movies on Monday afternoon but the arrival of our broadband modem distracted us. By the time we worked on setting it up and made out a list of things we needed to pick up while we were out, it would have been difficult to fit it into our day.

With any luck, Walk the Line will carry over for another week at the Village Cinema complex.

At the moment we're trying to get used to not having to log off when we finish checking our e-mail.

Venetian Twins

The Venetian Twins is the first production in the 80th birthday year of the Hobart Repertory Theatre Company.

In 1926 a group of leading theatre workers gathered to develop the concept of a Repertory Theatre Company in Hobart, to guarantee a number of 'suitable' productions each year. His Worship The Mayor of Hobart presided over a meeting, held in the Town Hall on the 21st June 1926.and Miss Olive Wilton was chosen to be Repertory's first Producer.

The Hobart Repertory Theatre Society purchased a building and renamed it The Playhouse Theatre. The Society used cash reserves to fund the necessary additions and alterations, costing £5700, and the first production in the "new" theatre was William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew directed by Miss Olive Wilton the Founder of the Society.

Since its purchase of the building in 1937, the Hobart Repertory Theatre Society has carried out extensive renovations and improvements to this fine old building. The Playhouse has seen hundreds of fine productions and has been the training ground for many actors, directors and playwrights who have gone on to national and international acclaim.



Two hundred years ago, Carlo Goldoni's The Venetian Twins was the first commedia dell'Arte play successfully to be staged with the actors neither wearing masks nor improvising freely around a basic scenario, but following a set script. In 1979 Nick Enright adapted it as a tongue-in-cheek musical which had its first performance at the Sydney Opera House (directed by the usually serious Shakespearian actor John Bell).

The result is as though Bob Hope and Bing Crosby had taken time off from their Road movies to star in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. The lead actor plays the two title characters with just a change of style, and the villain often seems to be channelling the late Kenneth Williams.

A lot of fun.



One interstate reviewer summed it up well as Commedia del’arte, slapstick comedy, Aussie strine and vaudeville all collide in this enjoyable, if chaotic, revival of Nick Enright’s 1979 play. Enright’s script itself is an adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s 18th century comedy "I due gemelli Veneziani", but in typical larrakin style, he’s added plenty of Aussie references and humour into the mix. The result is a colourful, if confusing evening at the theatre.


==========

Listened to Just a Minute on the BBC Radio 4 website

Chairman Nicholas Parsons is an old pro at trying to make sure the panel abstain from deviating, hesitating or repeating themselves (at least for 60 seconds). Paul Merton, Jenny Eclair and Graham Norton join veteran Clement Freud with hilarious results.

Graham Norton in particular was amusing, his frenetic style recalling the heyday of Derek Nimmo.

It's a great show - it's a shame that nobody in Australia under 40 would be familiar with it, since these days ABC airs it at 5:30 in the morning. Its audience in this country is presumably made up mostly of milkmen and nightwatchmen.

Maybe one summer the ABC programming department should think about putting it to air at a time when people are actually awake and listening.

==========

The broadband connection is in hand. I've signed the necessary paperwork and we should have the new modem in a few days.

But the problem this week was of a more human kind. The last couple of months my inbox has been fairly dull and predictable; checking my e-mail has seemed less urgent than it once might have been.

So of course the one day I didn't check it at all there was an unexpected message that I would have wanted to see. Respected theologian/archaeologist/author Dr Clifford Wilson was speaking at a midweek meeting at my church on Wednesday night. Naturally by the time we found out it was on, the meeting was just winding up.

A shame - I remember reading his book Crash Go The Chariots back in the 1970s, a trenchant analysis of the then-fad for Chariots Of The Gods. It would have been interesting to hear his talk.

==========

I nearly had a crash in the car while I was out yesterday. I couldn't get into the car park at Officeworks, so I had to make a big circle around the CBD to get to Corporate Express.

Just as I was heading up Argyle Street, a moth crawled down my face. It must have been in my hair I think. Anyway, it was very distracting, especially when it crawled between my glasses and my face.

Fortunately the car in front of me wasn't any closer, or I might have run into it when I tried to brake and shake my head simultaneously.

Those who've read Eric Frank Russell's novel Wasp will be amused, but it wasn't that funny at the time.

==========

My sister has always been a bit of a night owl, but there are limits even to her endurance.

I went to bed last night while she was backing-up her hard drive to the external drive. It was difficult for me to fall asleep because one of the chickens Julie keeps in the front hall was making a lot of noise. Finally I dozed off.

A couple of hours later, I got up just before dawn to answer a call of nature. I was only slightly surprised to find all the lights still on in the back of the house. Julie was asleep in her chair with the computer purring away smugly next to her.

I tapped her on the shoulder and her eyes shot open. "You probably should lie down for a while before the sun comes up," I said.

She looked a little groggy but nodded in agreement.

First time that's happened for a long time. I remember when we first had a computer there were a couple of times that she was still at the keyboard when I got up the next morning.

But we've all done that at one time or another.

==========

The ABC has picked up The West Wing and is beginning the fourth season this week. It has been running on one of the commercial stations but was notorious as one of those programmes that the network feels it has to move around a lot, causing much angst amongst viewers.

I've never actually seen an episode of it, so while I was in the supermarket I picked up a $10 DVD that has the first four episodes of the first season. I figure that way at least I'll know who most of the characters are and have some idea of what's going on.

Otherwise there would be a temptation to tune out because the learning curve would just be too steep.

There was a television critic in Melbourne once who'd never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and figured he'd tune in and look at an episode. Having no inkling of the five years of backstory involved, he couldn't make head or tail of what was going on.

evenings with poultry

We ended up in the back garden last Friday afternoon, which was a lot hotter than I expected. The weatherman predicted a warm day with a possible thunderstorm later. It was certainly warm and humid enough, but when it clouded over a little we braced ourselves for a storm.

Didn't happen. The storm veered off and the only ones who got hit were the people of Bruny Island, who were subject to an unexpected fall of hailstones.

My sister and I moved out onto the back lawn, where she occupied herself by fitting together some metal fencing she'd bought at a local discount store. This allowed her to put all the poultry out on the lawn together – instead of having them dotted around in various boxes and cages in and around my house.

It was a virtual poultry suburb.


We sat out there with a cold glass of wine while the goose and the cats wandered about at our feet and the chickens pecked around happily on the dry grass. Every so often a cool breeze would pass over and we'd go "Aaaaaah."




** ** ** **

Listened to the radio nostalgia programme Those Were The Days over their website.

This is the second of two special programmes they're doing to celebrate Jack Benny and Mel Blanc. Every February is Jack Benny month apparently

Includes PHIL HARRIS - ALICE FAYE PROGRAM (4-2-50) Phil tells his daughters the story of the Easter Bunny. WHAT’S UP MEL? (2-11-06) “The Man of a Thousand Voices” is the second of four special features by animation historian Curtis L. Katz on Mel Blanc and his Warner Bros. cartoons. JUDY CANOVA SHOW (7-6-43) First show in the series as Judy returns to Rancho Canova after a WW II bond-selling tour in Hollywood. JACK BENNY PROGRAM (9-25-49) As Jack arrives at CBS to do his third show of the new season, he bumps into Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Amos ‘n’ Andy and Red Skelton, now all CBS stars whose programs began that week.

They don't make 'em like that any more .

** ** ** **

Valentine's Day again last week. Which is also my mother's birthday. Not as painful as last year, but I couldn't help experiencing a twinge late at night, that part of the day when the house is quiet and memories come floating across the back of the mind. *Sigh*

** ** ** **

You may have seen the coverage of Georgina Richmond's art exhibition on this page yesterday. Unfortunately I missed out on tickets for her concert at Runnymede on Friday.

I spoke to Kookaburra books and they explained the music room at Runnymede only holds 45 people so the tickets sold out quickly. I should have been quicker.

Oh well, next time.

** ** ** **

I enjoy John H. Dircx's stories about black homicide detective Cyrus Auburn. The latest story in the series, with the unlikely title "Bubble Brain and the Fat Ladies", appears in the November 2005 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

Can Auburn establish a link between the local occult bookshop and a body found outside the bowling alley?

The mystery classic in that issue is Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd", which I haven't read for nearly 40 years. Not much of a punchline, but an engrossing tale about a man who abhors solitude.

art show

In a city the size of Hobart it's easy to find yourself enmeshed in overlapping networks of friends and acquaintances, as Friday night demonstrated.

We had had an e-mail from artist/singer Georgina Richmond, who we'd first encountered at a concert at the Moonah Arts Centre, to say she was having an exhibition of her paintings at the Inka gallery in Salamanca Place. So Friday night Julie and I made our way down to the docks and past Parliament House to the little gallery just off Salamanca.



Inka is a small operation, so half a dozen of Georgina's (rather large) oil paintings took up two walls. We arrived right on time, took a plastic cup of cask wine and inspected the pictures. Georgina has a bright colour-filled style - I particularly liked the patterns and textures in the one inspired by the wildflowers on the foothills of Mount Wellington.



The place started to fill up quickly until it was almost shoulder to shoulder. We found a few familiar faces. Julie ran into a woman she used to work with at the Wrest Point Casino; she hadn't seen her for 18 years. She remembered that she'd been worried about her expecting her first child in Europe at the time of Chernobyl, just to peg it in time and place.

And we spent quite a while talking to Chris Webster, the state's newest magistrate, who was at university with Julie. I was amused to discover that he lives next door to the parents of Julie's old friend Madeleine - we must have been within fifty feet of their home when we were at Madeleine's Australia Day party.



The crowd emptied out as quickly as they'd come. A cynic would suspect they were doing the circuit of openings, since Salamanca Place has always been known for its abundance of arts and crafts venues.



We waved goodbye to Georgina and stepped out into the street for a breath of fresh air before calling at the Greek restaurant around the corner for coffee.



This week seems to mark the kick-off of the cultural year. An arts exhibition today, a play next Wednesday and a concert next Friday. Things are in such a state of activity that if we wished, we could go out to some sort of event every night of the week.

But I don't think I'm up for that. I have to ration my time out or I'll simply exhaust myself.

---

FROM HIPSTERS TO GONZO

A discussion about the days of Tom Wolfe and New Journalism on the Tony Delroy radio show reinforced my belief that the modern media has become increasingly diffused. The era of the general magazine is almost gone - nearly every popular periodical these days aims at a niche market, whether it be scrapbooking, celebrity cooks or computers.

When I was growing up, there were still weekly magazines like Everybody's, Look, Punch, Australasian Post and Argosy. They aimed at appealing to the interests of the entire population, young or old, male or female, city or country. The paperback revolution and the ubiquity of television gradually ate into their readership and one by one they fell by the wayside.

One eminent British novelist later snarled "Reading? Reading is what people do when there's nothing good on television."

Aside from New Yorker subscribers, few people are willing to sit down and read a 10,000 word feature article. The advent of the Internet has not helped either; we've been conditioned to skim rather than read each word, picking out the gist of an article that has already been edited down to as short a length as possible.

By a strange happenstance, on the same radio show there was a segment about latest gadgetry that included a mention of the so-called E-Reader. This is an electronic device that lets you load the text of novels onto a portable screen, simulating the act of reading a book. It's claimed that this will do for reading what the I-Pod did for music.

Prices are up around US$300 at the moment, but if there's one thing we've noticed about electronics is that the price plunges as soon as they go into mass-production. It will be interesting to see what they're going for in two or three years.

Maybe the book isn't doomed after all, perhaps it's just going to be transformed into a new format, rather in the way that the hardcover book gave way to the paperback.

This concept will probably horrify collectors of first editions and I can sympathise with them, but it's encouraging to think that the simple experience of reading will still be with us in generations to come.

---

And speaking of the Internet, we're seriously considering moving to Broadband in our household. For the last few years we've been on a dial-up of about 50K; before that, we were on 36K for a couple of years when we first went on-line.

It's not so much that we need the higher speeds (though that would be nice), but it would be very convenient to be able to use the phone while we're using the Internet and especially to have more than one person on-line at the same time rather than taking turns.

Indeed, this might even be advantageous to my health, enabling me to get more rest instead of having to extend my waking hours till my sister finishes bidding for items on e-Bay. Years of night shift have given her the habits of the Night Owl, but that makes it difficult for me sharing a house with her.

---

By coincidence, Jules Verne's birthday was this month and it came round while I was reading one of his more obscure novels The Purchase of the North Pole, first published in 1889 and also known as Topsy Turvy or Barbicane and Company.

At first this seems like a sort of sequel to Verne's famous From the Earth to the Moon, involving some of the same characters. But it doesn't take long to realise that Verne has his tongue firmly in cheek and the project that Barbicane and his friends are involved with here is outlandishly implausible.

Buying the mineral rights to the polar regions, the protagonists have a plan to tilt the earth's axis to make their property more accessible. The consequences would, of course, make global warming look like a church garden fête and there's widespread panic as the nations of the world begin to understand what is involved.

It's quite fun and there are several references to the ways of the world that are timeless - such as the ignoring of the interests of the Eskimo and other indigenous inhabitants, the squabbling of the nations and the vaguely approving attitude of the Republican party.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

You can download this for free from the Gutenberg.org website or from the Arthur's Classic Novels website.

---

The facial tumours that are killing a lot of Tasmanian Devils in the wild seem even stranger than first thought.

A previous theory suggested that the tumours could be the after-effect of fights between Devils. Now a team led by Anne-Maree Pearse of the department of primary industry has performed a genetic analysis of tumour cells from 37 animals - and found them to be genetically identical, suggesting they did not arise in the animals own cells.

Cue the X-Files music.

All the tumour contain cells with 13 "grossly abnormal" chromosomes instead of the usual 14. The cancerous cells seem to be leading a sort of independent existence, the team concludes, probably originating in a single Devil with cancer.

Cancer genomes are usually very unstable but somehow this line is "stable and persistent." The only example of such a disease is one in dogs transmitted during mating.

I've never heard of anything like this before. It was alluded to briefly in one news report I heard on the air, but I haven't seen it in print except in the February 4th New Scientist. Possibly it was just too weird for some of the news media.




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snow day

After the hot weather last month, it was a shock to hear the weather forecast on Monday evening predict snowfalls in the mountains. And indeed it was quite brisk when we were leaving the New Sydney Hotel after the monthly quiz night.

Our results at the quiz were not exactly a tonic. Last month we won by a comfortable margin, but this month we sank right back to second-last. We didn't do too badly in some categories but the Sports/Television questions brought us undone. Sports are often our achilles heel and the television questions -- well, they were simply about the wrong programmes.

---

Listening to Brian Kay's light music programme on the BBC Radio website. It featured music selected by Secretary of the Robert Farnon Society David Ades, plus recordings by composers including Angela Morley, Robert Farnon, David Rose, Clive Richardson, Trevor Duncan and John Fox.

What surprised me was that the Robert Farnon society is celebrating its 50th birthday this year. Back in 1956, organizing a fan club for a composer would have seemed more than a little eccentric.

Of course these days every creative person of any type has their own Appreciation Society, their own website, their own newsletter ... ephemerae that used to be thrown away is now sold for a fortune on e-Bay.

---

Georgina Richmond writes: "I am in a concert 17 feb at Runnymede 8 p.m. -- celtic style harps, violin, flute etc very dreamy! If you want to come tickets are $15 or $10 from Kookaburra 62231019. Also I am having an exhibition 10 feb 6p.m. at Inka next to the Fairy shop in Salamanca Place."

---

. Maybe it's the milder weather this year, but there seems to be a lot of wildlife around. The other night we were leaving Julie's house and there was a rustling noise from a mass of blackberry plants.

Julie shone her light up at the top of the plants and after a moment we saw two black eyes staring back at us. Moving to one side a little we could see a round russet body and a furry tail.

The possum blinked at us, apparently unafraid. His wariness of us was balanced by his desire for the ripe blackberries.

Eventually we shut the light off and left him to it.

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.

---

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"?

---

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.

---

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.

---

---

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.

---

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.