Agent Prince

It's always been a dream of mine to one day be able to tell people how they should make a Wonder Woman TV series. Sometimes I have different ideas, but mostly they don't involve having the guy behind Ally McBeal give her three alternate identities and a backstory that sounds like he'd rather be writing a comedic Batman series. Just sayin' is all.

If, and this is a big "if", he manages to pull of something closer to his work on Chicago Hope than the last smattering of quirky legal dramas, there may be some hope for the show. If, on the other hand (and reports indicate this might be the case) he's trying to do a WW close in tone to Ally McBeal, then I'm probably going to be pretty bummed about the whole thing.

Mind you, I thought Smallville was going to be terrible and I ended up enjoying that show for about three years. Actually, it was pretty terrible for the first season. Then it got better. Then it got terrible again.

Anyway, for years now I've known exactly which shows should serve as the models for Wonder Woman: it needs to be somewhere between Stargate SG1 and NCIS.

Take an episode of NCIS. Replace the NCIS setting with either the DIA or the CID (they were in the Army Intelligence in the original comics). Combine the characters of Gibbs and DiNozzo for Steve Trevor (or maybe just sub in Chris O'Donnell's character from the other NCIS show for Trevor). Convert Ziva David into Diana Prince, and maybe McGee into Etta Candy. They go about their crime-solving/terrorist foiling business, but at some point David...er, I mean Prince, has to go "back to the car to get something", and Wonder Woman turns up to deflect a few bullets and get rid of the bomb.

The SG1 elements come into play in that occasionally they have to fight against aliens and mythological creatures, rather than just criminals and terrorists.

Also, Connor Trinneer should play Steve Trevor before he gets to old. He's already past 40, so people need to get a move on, here.

Osterbaum

Well, that was a quick turn-around - even for me. I went from "what the heck is an Easter Egg Tree, and why would anyone make one?" to "I'm going to make an Easter Tree!" in less than 24 hours.

Okay, not quite. I had borrowed a book on "Easter Treats" from my local library about a week and a bit ago, thinking it would contain things like recipes for marshmallow bunnies. Every now and then I like to pretend I'm likely to make something like marshmallow. I've never made marshmallow in my life (there may have been a 'cooking' project in primary school that involved making marshmallow, but I can't remember), but I do like to believe that one day I might.

Anyway, the book didn't have marshmallow rabbit recipes (or even Easter egg recipes, which I thought was a bit odd), but it did have some stuff about making decorative egg whatsits out of blown eggs. One of the decorative egg whatsits was something called an "Easter egg tree".

Now, I had never heard of an Easter egg tree before, and the picture in the book made it seem like something those bizarre home decorators on TV do to make themselves look creative and artsy (I can't watch those shows seriously after watching Life Support - it was barely possible before hand). So, I dismissed the entire concept of said EET as being pretentious and pointless.

And then I happened to catch a show that was never meant to be on TV (at least, it wasn't advertised in any of the TV guides, and when you hit the "info" button on the remote control the programme was identified as "unknown"). It was all about a group of German immigrants (and their children and grandchildren) who have been camping at the same spot every Easter since 1969. It was oddly fascinating, watching these people talk about the traditions that had built up over the last thirty years. And, on Easter Sunday, they decorated their tables with Easter Trees - which they had made on the camp site from carefully selected branches, eggs they had decorated the Saturday and whatever other shiny things they happened to have lying around.

My first thought: "Hunh, those Easter Tree thingies are actually real things that normal people make". This was quickly succeeded by several other thoughts which eventually cumulated in "I'm going to make an Easter Tree!"

Truth be told, I'd been thinking of decorating for Easter. It's always irked me that my family doesn't put any effort into Easter at all. It's always a bit of a struggle getting them to do things for Christmas (if my mother had her way, the tree would go up on the 24th and down again on the 26th), and Easter is practically a non-event. This year I just wanted to do something - paint an egg, make a marshmallow bunny, roll something down a hill (I can never remember if it's supposed to be boiled eggs or cheese)...

Well, this year I made a quick-n-dirty Easter Tree. I tried to die the eggs, which didn't turn out quite as well as I had intended. It seems that brown eggs don't take food dye as well as white eggs, but I can't remember the last time I saw a white egg in the shops. I swear must still exist, but I haven't seen one for years. I also only had four eggs as I didn't want to waste any more than that in case it all went horribly wrong.

So this year's Easter Tree wasn't the greatest Easter Tree in the history of Easter Trees. Next year will hopefully see a bit of an improvement.





Oh, and just to prove that Easter Trees (or Osterbaum) are something real people actually make (in case you, like me, were raised in a cultural vacuum) take a look at these.

I have, of course, gone with an autumnal theme for my Easter Tree, as in this hemisphere Easter occurs in Autumn. I am nothing if not seasonally appropriate.

Mourilyan and Silkwood

I had been looking forward to seeing Mourilyan and Silkwood, for some unfathomable reason. Both featured strongly in Sugar Heaven by Jean Devanny, and one of them had a museum of the sugar industry. I was expecting things. Not sure what, but things.

I was expecting to be able to buy morning tea in Silkwood. As things stand, that's not really a possibility. Silkwood is one of those Australian towns that haven't quite worked out they're dead yet. People are still living in Silkwood, but they don't actually have any amenities beyond a pub, a butcher and a corner-store-cum-post-office. That's true of many towns in regional Australia, but most of them have fewer buildings that appear to have been gutted by fire. I was expecting some serious damage as a result of the cyclone, but a lot of those places looked like they were lost years ago.

As for Mourilyan? The town has a sugar museum. I thought maybe, just maybe, if I went to that museum I'd learn more about the sugar industry. You know, things like the history of sugar production in the region, different ways sugar has been harvested, the stories of the people involved... that sort of thing.

Instead, I was treated to a 15 minute long advertisement for Canegrowers Australia (which put me right off watching the other two tapes that were on rotation), saw a smattering of machinery that seemed to largely be there for the heck of it and learnt a little bit about the Kanakas. I say "learnt", because if I had known nothing about the history of South Sea Islanders in the sugar industry I would have learnt something. As it stood, the display basically told me a range of things I already knew.

I had come wanting to know more about planting, growing and cutting cane. Specifically, what it was like as a cane cutter - the life they lead, the way they worked, the mix of races from all over the world (after all, I knew that cane cutters were made up of Islanders, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Spanish, Asians, Croations, Britishers and all sorts - even some Indigenous peoples, I think, although they were mostly "employed" in the cattle industry). I got nothing of that. I left that museum with nothing. Literally nothing. I never do that. At least, not in a "real" museum.

There are, essentially, two types of "local" museums in the world. There's the kind that could be described as your grandmother's attic - it's basically just a couple of rooms full of stuff. Some of it is labelled, some of it is themed, but essentially it's a room full of stuff. This is the kind of local museum you get in most small towns - and they are a pleasant way to spend half-an-hour or so, but they don't have any pretensions and you don't usually pay to see them (you just put a few coins in the donations box to help them pay their bills). Most of the time these operate out of an old shop-front (that has been relegated to housing the museum after it's no longer likely to get a "proper" shop in there).

Then there are the museums of something-or-other. These are meant to tell you something. They convey to you something about the history and context of a place, a time, an industry. These are meant to be full of stories, not stuff. The stuff is there to tell you the stories. As you look at the stuff, the design, layout and interpretation of it all leaves you having learnt something about the something-or-other that the museum is for. These usually have "real" buildings that were built (or at least purposefully set aside) specifically for the museum. They have people who are employed to man the front counter. They charge you a fee - and that's okay because you are being entertained. You're paying your money to see the stories.

The sugar museum at Mourilyan was meant to be a "museum of something or other" (and charged like it was) but it was more like a grand-mother's attic with hardly any stuff. It was as though they thought all of the big pieces of machinery around was enough to justify the existence of the place. I don't mind big machinery, as long as the interpretive signs give me a sense of the time and place in which it was used and the people who used it. In this place? Not so much. And they really only bothered to put effort into telling the one story (that of the Kanakas), and in a way that was depressing. They didn't even have any of the good stuff about what the South Sea Islanders went on to achieve in this country.

You can do better, Canegrowers Australia. And you can start by changing that stupid video you "recommend" everyone watch before being bored to tears by your museum. I don't need to waste 15 minutes of my life hearing about how wonderful the cane industry is. I want to know where it's come from and how it got here. I paid $8 (so generously reduced from $10 while you have displays supposedly in the middle of changing - don't think I didn't notice the dust on the areas set aside for the new displays) to go to a sugar museum. I didn't pay that money for the privilege of watching an ad and seeing a small handfull of bits-and-bobs.

So, yeah, Silkwood and Mourilyan were a bit disappointing. So was South Johnstone, but for reasons I'll go into in a different post.

Mena Creek will also be discussed in a later post.

Whether you like it or not.

Language Learning Can Be Fun

And sometimes it just hurts my head.

Especially Estonian. There are days when I think I finally understand something with this crazy-stupid language, only to realise that the logical connections I have made were running on the wrong logic, and I actually don't have a clue.

Take imperatives, which I've been working on lately with my tutor. I read the rules in a grammar book, and think "Okay, I've got that. It's unnecessarily complicated, but I've got it". Then I find out they don't apply to irregular verbs - but only certain irregular verbs.

I'm looking at two irregular verbs and trying to work out what the difference is between them - why one would use the stem of the present tense and the other would use the stem of the -ma infinitive - and I can't quite convey to my tutor what it is I'm having trouble with. To her it all seems perfectly logical.

--The second one is an irregular verb - that's why.
--But aren't they both irregular verbs?
--Yes, but the second one is a complete spelling change, while the other is an internal change.
--In the first word the present tense form only has one letter in common with it's infinitive - and the second word also has letters in common with the infinitive...
--Yes, but the second one is an irregular verb.
--But so is the first word. Is it because the first letter is the same for both the present tense stem and the infinitive in the first word?
--It's just because the second word is "go", we'll move on now.

I've been trying to talk myself out of the mindset that Estonian is wrong. I often look at the rules and say to myself (and anyone within earshot) "That's just daft. Why would anyone do that?" But I have to remind myself that the language just works on a different logic to English, and I'll have a better chance of 'getting' it if I stop resisting it.

But I went home after my Estonian lesson the other night and listened to a couple of Italianpod podcasts last night, just to stop my head from hurting. I find the newbie Italian lessons relaxing and simple, and somehow refreshing after trying to wrap my mind around Estonian grammar.

Not that I'm learning Italian. I am so not learning Italian. German and Estonian are enough for this year. Seriously.

Dogs

Actually, the thing that amazes me most about this report is the fact that they actually counted the dogs.

I'm not accustomed to such circumspect consideration of path users.

http://www.bv.com.au/general/bike-futures/92510/

Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin was one of my childhood heroes.

I was obsessed with space travel when I was a kid. I built models of the space shuttle, I had posters of astronauts on my wall and I dreamed of one day going to Space Camp in America.

I borrowed books about Skylab and Mir, the Apollo missions, the various bits and bobs of space junk floating around up there... Not to mention Astronomy magazines. I think I borrowed every single one in my local library, and occasionally managed to convince my mother to buy a few for me.

I started to form a real interest in Astronomy until I hit my teens. Then I don't know what happened. I think my childhood love of all things science ran into the wall of my teenage hatred of all things involving maths. Actually, I think it had something to do with Star Trek. I started to find science fiction infinitely more interesting than science at about that time.

My interest in Space had a bit of comeback in the late Nineties when I simultaneously discovered NASA's satellite tracking website and the television series Space Island One (an uneven TV series featuring a crew of scientists working on an International Space station in the not-to-distant future) and found myself following the progress of the ISS with a lot of interest. But, by that stage in time, I had almost completely abandoned science for literature. Plus, I had worked out that I would never pass the physical to become an astronaut.

Most of what I learnt during my Space Age has subsequently fallen out of my head, which is a pity.

Yuri, though, will always rock. The man is a legend. He did the most dangerous thing in the history of the world, without knowing if there was the slightest chance he would survive. I mean, being strapped onto a giant explosive and sent outside the planet to a place where the only thing between him and certain death were a few feet of metal and electronics? With no guarantee that there would be no leaks? That takes some guts.

I always associated Russia with top-of-the-range technological development because of their Space programme. Sure, the American's made it to the Moon first (and second, and third), but everything else was Russia. Russia put the first satellite in space. Russia put the first animal in space. Russia put the first man in space. Russia put the first woman in space. The only space stations that managed to last a decent length of time were Russian (at least in part). They just seemed to do the Space Thing so much better than anyone else.

In fact, I used to harbour a secret dream to be a cosmonaut, rather than an astronaut.

It was really weird to hear about their submarines. The Russians appeared to do mechanical so much better than the US for a while, that it was really weird to find out that they didn't do electronic very well at all.

For some reason, I was never as inspired by Valentina Tereshkova. Probably because I could never remember her name. But, you'd think the first woman in space (who was also, technically, the first civilian in space) would be quite the inspirational figure for a young girl with a space fixation. She sort of was, in that I knew she existed and was the first. I just wouldn't recognise her name instantly like Yuri's.

Monopoly

If the world were a giant game of monopoly, then it would make perfect sense for someone to buy Russia out of the Baltic Sea.

Seriously. Whenever Russia starts looking at buying boats, all of the other countries on the Baltic Sea put a hand on their metaphorical sword-hilts while trying to look nonchalant. Wouldn't it just be easier if they all pitched it to buy that weird little piece of Russia that sits between Poland and Lithuania?

Sure, Russia would still have that stretch of land in the Gulf of Finland, so Estonia would still have to keep looking over her shoulder, but at least that's on the same side of the country as the land boarder. It makes for easier deployment of defences...

Not that anyone would think of deploying defences, of course. The very suggestion would be an insult to Russia. You just ask the Russian government. The same Russian government that thinks it's perfectly reasonable to bolster their own defences against...

What, exactly? Is anyone thinking of invading Russia? I know the French and the Germans gave it a good try before realising that invading Russia is a bad idea. That was quite a few years ago, though, and if history has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that invading Russia is a bad idea.

My knowledge of Russian history is admittedly limited, but from what I remember Russia's greatest threats have all been in-house. The only people even capable of taking on the Russians in Russia are other Russians.

The Chinese might be able to do it, but quite frankly I think they'd just focus on that part of Eastern Russia out to the Sea of Okhotsk. Even that might fall into the too-hard basket.

The fact of the matter is that only Russians are capable of making a decent fist of Russia. They're the only race on the planet with the fortitude for it - with the possible exception of the Inuit, but when was the last time the Inuit ever invaded anyone?

The Vikings could have done it, I suppose, but I think we're out of those now.

So, here we have a country which is is known for a) being really difficult to invade, and b) quite successfully invading other countries. And Russia feels she has a legitimate reason to keep a "defensive" presence in the Baltic Sea, which will be easy enough to justify for as long as there is a piece of Russia touching the Baltic Sea.

So, why don't the other countries with Baltic frontage buy them out? I'm sure it could be done - if not wholesale, then piece by piece. It's the 21st Century, after all, and everything has a price...

In the mail

So, I finally got around to filling in the "Intention to Graduate" form today. I even put it in the mail!

With any luck, it will actually get to it's intended destination, and I would have really finished my Masters.

Maybe then I'll feel smart.

Pants

I like to think of this as a parable which, if you contemplate it and tease out the deeper meaning, might sum up everything that is currently wrong with modern society:

I have two pairs of pants. They are actually two different sizes of the same style of pants. One is a size 14, the other a size 16. The 14 is so tight I can't comfortably keep things in my pockets; the 16 is so loose I need to hold it up with a belt. There is no 15 - such a thing does not even exist.

For my own personal amusement

Ja, wir haben keine Bananen.
Wir haben keine Bananen, heute.
Wir haben Bohnen und Zweibeln, Kohl und Frühlingszwiebeln,
Und alle Arten von Obst, und doch
Wir haben eine altmodisch Kartoffel
Ein nett, saftig Tomate,

Aber, ja, wir haben keine Bananen.
Wir haben keine Bananen, heute.

My Mother's Car

I'm currently using my mother's car while my uncle is borrowing mine. His ute is currently being serviced, and I have a station wagon so he borrows my car to take his dogs around.

We've done this on more than one occasion in the past. Usually I take the bike while he has my car, but this time the weather is not bike friendly and my mother is on vacation, so I have her car.

I do not like driving my mother's car. It's like a box with a few slits in it. I can't see anything that isn't directly in front of me. I look over my shoulders, and all I can see is the interior of the car. I glance behind me in the mirror, and (unless I have the angle just right) all I can see is the interior of the car. The little tiny windows that exist are almost entirely obscured by the headrests of the seats.

If I took the time to peer out of the small patches of glass available to me, I might be able to see something, but by that stage in time I probably would have run over something in front of me...

Also, the lines of the car are so bad that I can't tell what the dimensions are while sitting inside. I don't know where the front of the car starts, I have no sense for how wide the thing is and if someone is too close behind me I can't gauge how far I am from the front of their car.

I'm mildly convinced I'm going to hurt someone. Probably run over a cyclist, or something.

Who designs these cars? Why do they think it's a good idea to steadily reduce the visibility until the car is basically a giant blind spot? Why aren't people stopping them from doing that?

Saving Daylight

So, Daylight Saving is over for another year and the entire east coast of Australia is now in the same time zone. On the one hand, this makes things easier for those of us who live in the DS free zone to co-ordinated things with our southern neighbours. On the other hand, my 6pm lesson is now a 7pm lesson, so I'm sitting in my office until 8pm rather than 7pm.

So ist das Leben.

I've never understood the point of Daylight Saving. Getting up an hour earlier in order to stay up an hour later seems counter-intuitive to me. Growing up in the Tropics, there's only really about an hour's difference between sunset in Summer and sunset in Winter anyway. To gain the extra hour's worth of sunlight, most of us would be getting up in the dark - which is entirely unpleasant.

I was willing to accept, though, that in more temperate regions, where the sun rises earlier in the morning, that Daylight Savings might be a more practical concept. Then I moved to Tasmania. I came to realise you don't need sunlight after 9pm. I'm sorry, but you just don't.

Most people, by that time, have gone home and are watching the TV. You don't need extra sunlight for that. The argument is, of course, to have more daylight to play with after you get home from work... but you have that anyway because it's Summer. You already have a few more hours of daylight to play with than you do in Winter.

You leave work, play in the sunlight that is already there (because it's Summer), then go home to eat with your family... and mostly just stay there after that. Most of my neighbours weren't out in the backyard playing after-dinner cricket or footy in their saved daylight. If I was coming home late from a walk (at, say 6.45 or 7ish - the latest I'd be out), I'd be passing other people on their way home - I very rarely passed someone who was heading out to enjoy a stroll by the river in the after 8pm sunshine.

Heck, I lived alone and had nothing better to do than go outside and play in the saved up daylight, and I rarely ever did. Mostly because it just freaked me out. When I leave a building at night time I expect it to be dark. I would watch TV, even though it bored me, or read a book rather than go outside and enjoy the saved-up daylight. I was not alone. My street wasn't full of the sounds of children playing and adults enjoying the open air.

Maybe Daylight Saving worked 70 years ago when most homes didn't have a TV and people actually spent their evenings talking to their neighbours. Right now, though, I don't see the point.

Feel free to enlighten me.