February 9th, 2009
I walked past Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, in the Exhibition Gardens this morning (Monday, 9 February 2009), shortly after 7am, on my way to work. He was speaking to a news crew, with the backdrop of the parched gardens behind him, a false Autumn of dead leaves shed from heat stressed trees lying at his feet. He looked sincerely grave.
Reflecting on this, I phoned my father. He told me that the death toll from Victoria’s bushfires, still burning, had risen from 93 confirmed dead at 5.45am this morning, when I turned on the radio at breakfast, to 108, and is expected to rise.
We spent Saturday indoors, of course (apart from an insane outing by my mother and I in her new air conditioned car to buy craft and food supplies). I looked out the window mid afternoon and felt drawn outside. It wasn’t that the sky looked menacing or spoke of the horror that was going on elsewhere. I couldn’t even smell the smoke from the fires, as we could in January 2006.
The sky looked flat and dead. Everything looked dead.
I took a handful of photos that capture nothing of what it was like at that time, which turned out to be precisely when the temperature peaked at 46.4 degrees celcius (around 115 on the old scale), the highest ever recorded here in Melbourne.
The dead grass crunched underfoot. No metaphors other than the obvious can describe the wind. It was straight from hell. It was as if it were lying in wait for me, swirling around my bare legs, piercing blazing needle sharp fingers into my flesh. The camera felt like it was melting in my hands and I went straight back inside.
I couldn’t stop listening to the ABC radio emergency broadcast. There were fires around Bendigo, and between Camperdown and Pomborneit, where I have family. At one point the town of Cowwarr, where my parents lived for 15 years was threatened too. They are all okay.
But Marysville. A whole town. Gone. Many’s the time we’ve spent lovely long weekends there, part of our honeymoon there, even a week of peace working on my book back in 2004. We stayed at a family friend’s house just outside the town. Like almost every other dwelling in Marysville it has gone, including the houses of all the neighbours. Those friend’s son’s house and business in nearby Narbethong has gone too. They are all okay – but people died in Marysville. It is all gone. A whole town. The 100 year old houses and trees and the new.
If only the sky would darken and rain would fall. I don’t want to see the sun today.
Posted in personal, 2 Comments
December 30th, 2008
The Hives @ The Forum, Melbourne, 29 December 2008. Feet killed me, despite the bogan attired feet – running shoes to support my arthritic toes! The bounce was almost gone (mine, not theirs) but I loved the Hives, again! Maintained a three person buffer between us and the mosh pit (is that what they call it these days?), clapped, screamed and bounced (after a fashion) on Howlin’ Pelle’s queue (he does have the best job in the world), and realised that Two Timing Touch and Broken Bones is probably my absolute Hives fave.
Not in order, I think they played: Die, All Right!, Main Offender, Hate to Say I Told You So, Two Timing Touch and Broken Bones, Walk Idiot Walk, A Little More for Little You, Diabolic Scheme, Tick Tick Boom, Try it Again, Hey Little World, Won’t Be Long, Return the Favour, Square One Here I Come, You Dress Up for Armageddon, Bigger Hole to Fill, plus two covers (one being Stormy Weather).
Enjoying oneself that much (the unnecessary aches and pains of age aside) makes me also realise that life has not yet passed me by, and 2009, please, has got to better than 2008!
Gig review at fasterlouder.com.au.
Posted in fun, No Comments
December 10th, 2008
… And destined never to be a human being, on delicious anyway. I failed delicious’s CAPTCHA test twice this morning! (The term stands for Completely Automated Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – so where does does the P come in? Wikipedia, as at 10 December 2008, is more enlightening on this than the Carnegie Mellon official page – the term, apparently, stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. But I digress.)
According to the people who invented the CAPTCHA, “A CAPTCHA is a program that can generate and grade tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text… current computer programs can’t”. So, not only am I a human being posing as spam, I am also a current computer program. It reminds me of the man who thought he was a stamp…
Posted in trifles, 3 Comments
September 6th, 2008
I have a good visual memory, which has recently been triggered by looking over my colleague’s shoulder as he does computer geewhizzery using Gvim (‘an extended version of the Unix VI text editor with syntax highlighting’). It is the differently coloured text that swims against the black background that’s done it.
I learnt to read at primary school from wall charts that were just like this: black with lots of groupings of letters in a rainbow of colours. Tonight I asked my mother if she knew anything about them (she was herself a primary school teacher contemporaneous with my primary school education) but she knew nothing.
Googled ‘learning phonetics chart black color colour’ and brought up some US patent information – nothing that looked right. But mention of something called a Fidel wall chart looked promising. A Google image search reveals it to be the chart of my memory.
And a fascinating thing it is. Developed by Caleb Gattegno, the charts are part of the so called ‘Silent Way’ of education, silent ‘because the teacher remains mainly silent, to give students the space they need to learn to talk’ (so that’s where I get my ability to talk, talk, talk from). Gattegno also popularised Cuisenaire rods, which perhaps come more easily to mind for most people my age. I don’t recall being taught in the Silent Way (and we were being taught our mother tongue, not a foreign language, as it appears to have been designed for), I just remember the fabulous colours and the contrast. Perhaps that also explains my love of colour, in particular those of the French artists known as the fauves.
It’s no wonder I love words. I think I would like a set of these charts for Iris.
References:
The Silent Way, Wikipedia
Silent Way Charts
Image source: Silent Way Charts
Posted in memory, 4 Comments
