Opposites

Ugg Boot Face-off

To find oneself, at 50-something, studying astrobiology (under duress) as a subject in a Bachelor of Arts (Linguistics) degree is a little discombobulating, to say the least. Particularly if your last contact with the fields of chemistry, mathematics and physics was some 30-odd years ago (and geology, never). But the university at which I’m studying crawling through my degree has a rule (which only came into effect after I started) that every undergraduate student must complete a Planet unit and a People unit outside of their stream in order to complete said degree.

So, every week this semester just past, a very grumpy band of Arts students, including me, would huddle together in the prac room, muttering furiously over concepts such as chirality; and biomarker composition; and whether the lump of rock before us was sedimentary, metamorphic or igneous; and whether another lump of rock before us was a stony, iron, or stony-iron, meteorite; and whether the earth was oxic or anoxic when another lump of rock before us was formed.

On the opposite side of the room, sat a bunch of engaged, aspiring astrobiologists, scientists and geologists, who spoke in a language even the polyglot Arts student doesn’t care much for. We were strange bedfellows; almost different species. 😀

What a discomfiting experience.

But, it blew my mind!

I learnt so much. About how far (and not) scientific knowledge has come since I was at school; why the exploration of our solar system (so what’s the big deal about a bunch of dead rocks and gassy balls in the sky?) is deeply interesting; the mysteries of the vast and strange universe that we find ourselves in; and, most fascinating of all, the extent of the microbial and extremophile world around, beneath, on, and in us. I even had a bit of fun with the Design-a-Lander-for-Titan assignment (the tutors mentioned that they were looking forward to the Arts students’ designs. Yeah, I thought, some comic relief).

There is much value in seeking out our opposites and differences in knowledge, beliefs, philosophies and interests.

What have you learnt recently that has broadened your mind?

Curve

I’ve had the good fortune to travel to Shanghai twice in the last 6 months for work. On my most recent trip there, I was lucky enough to be shown around by wonderful hosts, and so I got to see the some of the incredible architecture in the Pudong area for the first time.

This is the interior of the Shanghai Grand Hyatt hotel from the top floor, a view not for the fainthearted.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Symbol

Bob—my minion, courtesy of my husband—is a symbol of my excesses:

Too much chocolate and champagne: I, like Bob, am a candidate for the cakewalk rather than the catwalk.

Too much grieving: my father, who was affectionately called Bob (not his real name) by our extended family, died 13 years ago, but his ghost still looms at dawn.

Too strange a sense of humour: dark, subversive, and sometimes toilet.

And now I’m laughing too long and too loud.

Have a silly weekend.

😀

For more entries to this week’s WPC, see The Daily Post.

 

 

Secrets from the Crime Scene – Unsavoury Delights

This year, I avoided the poetry bashing workshops at the Sydney Writers’ Festival and attended a couple of interesting panel talks, one of which—Secrets from the Crime Scene—I reviewed, and I thought I’d share it here.

Crime, it seems, pays handsomely for crime writers, not necessarily in hard cash but in endless material on the peculiar machinations of the criminal psyche. And mid-morning on this glare-bright winter’s day at the 2015 Sydney Writers’ Festival, The Theatre Bar at the End of the Wharf is packed to the raw, high rafters with an eclectic audience, from school-goers to retirees, dying to know more about what the panel facilitator, Tom Wright, refers to as “life as they imagine it might actually be led away from their fairly safe existences”.

Competing with the hiss of the venue’s overworked espresso machine, the conversation nevertheless flows easily amongst the Secrets from the Crime Scene panel: Kate McClymont, Fairfax investigative journalist, known most recently for He Who Must Be Obeid, an exposé on Sydney businessman Eddie Obeid’s corrupt dealings; Sarah Hopkins, criminal lawyer and fiction-crime author, her most recent novel being This Picture of You; and Michael Robotham, Australian journalist turned successful international crime writer, his latest book being Life or Death.

Kate, with her permanently quizzical left eyebrow, is an expert on the depths of Sydney’s criminal undercurrents, from the murderous mentality of organised crime and bikie gangs to the sociopathic undertow of white-collar crime. The audience roars when she says, “One of the things I really love about Sydney’s criminals is they are so stupid”. And vain: one of her regular informants, who was jailed for abducting Terry Falconer (subsequently murdered), whined to her that the actor portraying him in TV’s Underbelly: Badness “makes me look like a gay porn star”.

Michael says his books “tap into everyday fears” and that he often has to tone “down the truth to make it palatable, because people will not believe it in a book of fiction”, even though “truth always, always proves to be stranger”. Tom remarks on the frequent prescience in Michael’s novels as is exemplified by the story Michael tells of The Wreckage, a novel that was based on the idea “that $250billion of drug cartel money was laundered through major western banks, because during the Global Financial Crisis, banks were so short of funds, they waived all money-laundering laws simply to stay afloat”. The novel was reviewed by an incredulous Joe Nocera, financial writer for The New York Times, who said that no major Western bank would launder money for a drug cartel; it simply wouldn’t happen. With a larrikin air of perpetual amusement, Michael says that now every time there’s a factual report of such events, he sends Joe a tweet: “Say it ain’t so, Joe, say it ain’t so”.

Sarah, who has the demeanour of a meditating monk, rather than someone professionally mired in the mess of criminality and the constipated bureaucracy of social institutions, is more serious than the other panellists, but no less interesting. Through her creative writing, she questions who in our society gets to define what a crime is and the fact that, until recently, “criminal law wouldn’t reach its arm into the home” because “a crime, traditionally, has been about transgressions in the public realm”.  As Tom notes, her books are now very much focused on the notion that “the place where your body and mental health is most likely to be at risk is in the home”, an unsettling thought.

In response to a question from the audience, Sarah says she’s never been threatened by a reader, but Michael’s tells of his stalker and many “angry emails” from Americans who objected to this line in an early novel: “something didn’t quite look right, like seeing Bill Gates in board-shorts or George W. Bush in the White House”. And then there is the intrepid Kate, who has had her fair share of legal action and life-threatening phone calls in the middle of the night.

Crime writing—it’s a dangerous but thrilling life.

Tom Wright, Michael Robotham, Kate McClymont, Sarah Hopkins

Weekly Photo Challenge: Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Blue. Indigo. Violet.

Robot Restaurant Floor Show

For more entries to last week’s WPC, see The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: On the Way

On the Way to the Theatre

For more entries to whatever-week’s-WPC-this-was, see The Daily Post.

Much Violence, Zero Harm

If I were a voodoo-hoodoo, my more annoying clients might experience the mysterious onset of a headache around 7:30 on a certain week night.

“Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good.”

Alan Turing in The Imitation Game

But the only violence I like is the kind that doesn’t hurt anything.

Chu-daiko and Shime-daiko

So Taiko is perfect. Thus far, we’ve learnt the basics of the Miyake and Yatai-bayashi  rhythms, fantastic workouts for the body, brain and voice.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Broken

I know what you’re thinking…
..but I haven’t taken to my husband’s head with a meat cleaver.

Being time-poor, I don’t cook much, but when I do, I like to try something new and recently attempted this MiNDFOOD recipe.

The problem is that the whole tap-the-pomegranate-skin-with-a-wooden-spoon-and-the-seeds-will-just-fall-out trick didn’t work so well. Hence the pomegranate bloodbath.

For more entries to last week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Symmetry

Sydney Opera House

For more entries to last week’s WPC, see The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Depth

One of the things that sticks in my head from a photography course that I did is the instructor’s mneumonic for depth of field settings: F-stop 2 = 2 fence posts; F-stop 22 = 22 fence posts.

For more entries to this week’s WPC, see The Daily Post.

Torii Gates – Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto

Weekly Photo Challenge: Yellow

Taxi – Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo

If you love people-watching, Shibuya Crossing is a fascinating place to linger – just a pity that there are not enough decent outdoor street-level cafes to do so. 😦

For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Twinkle

Often
in the crowd
a ghost flies by
in a smile, in a walk
in the twinkle of an eye.

A Wild Night in Tokyo

For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post. (Although, when I last looked, their pingbacks weren’t working.)

The Beauty Of It

Oliver Sacks is loving it. Frederick Wiseman forgets that he’s it. Ellen Langer thinks that it’s possibly nothing but a mindset.

In Japan, they know how to style it.

Ginza O-Fashionistas

Forget the Erololi, Ero-Kawaii and Gothic Lolitas of Akihabara, and the Cosplay kids of Harajuku; it was the quirky, fun and completely unselfconscious fashion sense of the older generation that stood out for me on the streets of Tokyo.

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Dreamy

Sleeping Lovers – Tokyo Subway

Heads together, each propping the other up, these sleeping young lovers were no doubt in a dreamy place of their own.

For more entries to the Dreamy theme, see The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Zigzag

Exquisite Botanical Art – Ho Chi Minh Square

I missed last week’s photo challenge…
..and my 4th blog anniversary.

And because of M-R’s powers of suggestion, I got only as far as selecting three instead of the usual five photos for my list of favourites on the WPC theme.

Just as well I’m not OCD. 🙄

For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post.

 Five Three standouts from this week

tea and paper

2812 Photography

Margaret-Rose Stringer

Weekly Photo Challenge: Room (to express oneself)

Ladies of the Wurst Kind

Weekend wine walkabout
lures the alter egos out

For more entries to this week’s WPC, see The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Split-Second Story

Hostage Situation

 

Gunman: “Anyone moves, and the girl gets it!”

Public 1: “She can have it.”

Public 2: “Careful she doesn’t go down on you.”

For more entries to this week’s WPC, see The Daily Post

Weekly Photo Challenge: The World Through My Eyes

A long time ago I had an unpleasant experience which precipitated a few changes in direction, the most curious of which was in my reading tastes: almost overnight, a previously voracious appetite for serial-killer fiction evaporated and, in general, I no longer enjoyed reading fiction much at all. I’ve never worked out why–life is a strange journey. However, recently, I’ve had to read a lot of children’s literature for an elective study, and am surprised at how much enjoyment I’m getting from reading young adult fiction, in particular. And how much I’ve learnt from it–
about the world, about myself.

What we see in the world has the power to change what we read. And what we read has the power to change the way we see the world and ourselves.

How marvellous.

What have you read recently that has changed the way you see yourself?

See The Daily Post for more entries to this week’s photo challenge.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Dreaming

For me, dreaming is about possibilities, and none so wonderful as those brought by travel.

I became a xenophile at around the time I started school, and dreamt of going to live in exotic places, mostly Japan and rural China, and of flying off to wonderful cities, such as London, Tokyo,  Amsterdam and Marrakech. Years on, and living in a different country, I’m grateful that I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to many parts of the world, and to have experienced incredible adventures and fascinating cultures as a result.

And the dreaming continues – I’ve yet to get to Japan or China 😀

To dream is to travel: to travel is to realize a dream

On these themes, a re-post of a poem I wrote a while ago –

Dreams of a Love Gourmand

He ate Suzi’s paella

and dreamed of Impanema,

of romance in Marbella

and Rio de Janeiro

–

He ate Fleur’s rindless blue,

his dreams were psychedelia,

he dreamt he was Theroux,

da Vinci and Ophelia

–

He drank Ping’s green absinthe

and dreamt he was a fairy

with eyes as green as minthe,

his wand, a blue canary

–

He ate Fang’s chou dofu,

her durian, then balut,

and napped as King Shi Chu

at war with King Canute

–

He ate Ann’s cherry duck,

nightmared of Gordon Ramsay,

who served confit of muck

with jus of some philandery

–

Then came Maeve’s Irish Stew,

no dreams his sleep disturbed

and as he woke he knew

his food of love’d been served

**************************

And for the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, Dreaming has a very special meaning – it encompasses beliefs about the origins of the earth, the stars and all living things, and the connections that exist between them, and is brought alive in wonderful stories, art and music. You can read more about the Dreaming and the Dreamtime here.

For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Dilettantes of Disaster

Image via http://www.sxc.hu

The shadows draw long
through our limbs,
impoverished pulses from
indolent hearts carve us
tragic sinkholes for eyes; we are sallow
spectres in the night–
mirror, painting ourselves
in dishwater tincture
for dream-time, a sludge palette
of effete sorrow.

Until abstraction
manifests from the canvas
and chokes us by the throat,
we do not know gratitude.