Life's a beach
A beautiful afternoon at a very low tide lighthouse beach - it felt like there was 1000 acres of sand exposed. There was a good baitfish run happening as evidenced by the gulls, terns and jumbo jet pelicans, along with an occasional dolphin glimpse. The kids and I struggled against the 2 knot north flowing rip, but enjoyed the perfect water temp and the lack of river flood silt in the water (now that the rains have eased off).
I have been so looking forward to the twins fourth birthday that I had forgotten about my own b'day the next day. That's way cool - I have been trying most of the last twenty years to have the day drift past un-noticed... What a pity the twins weren't born 24 hours later! BTW the church sign generator is here.
The Chemistry has gone
Nana arrived today from Sydney to stay with us for the twin's birthday week. I scored a pot of NZ honey which is a better birthday present than most I can think of. The Third Test in Johannesburg appears to be heading for a draw (hopefully) as SA start day four at 1 for 42. Brett Lee got 64 at nearly a run a ball - the boy's a wonder. At the urging of the older kids I downloaded Ice Age 2 via bit torrent (doubtless several months before we buy the DVD for real) and 1.5 Gb later it turned out to be Ice Age 2, the PC game... I don't want to go through the bandwidth strangle from bigpond again like we did for half of march so they can wait til later on this month. Used up a few bananas in a cake this evening, but varied it by adding a third cup of coconut, rolled oats, golden syrup and a cup of vanilla soyamilk and sultanas. Cooked it much slower (about 130) for an hour or so. Tis very nice hot from the oven, and I don't think it will survive long enough to be iced.
Potestatem obscuri lateris nescis
One of those days. Trying not to get annoyed by multitudinous small things like, unable to find operating system discs to rebuild friends system, finding the oven was turned off 5 minutes into the one hour cooking time of a birthday cake, windows and doors constantly left open admitting flies and letting out air-con, lack of sleep due to brainless call backs to work, several pointless spam phonecalls... Fixed mood with an hour of Kick Axe and Bruce Dickinson at a volume level high enough to kill flies, rattle windows, close doors, drown out the phone, reinstall windows, and recook the cake forlornly sitting on the kitchen bench.
4 x 4
The fourth of the fourth has arrived and the new four year olds were up at quarter to six find their birthday presents. I had arrived home from work after midnight to find the lounge decked out with streamers and balloons - so I blew up another forty or so to add to the mess... The wee girls spent the morning in their party hats playing Bob the Builder - Knights of Cannalot on Lach's PC, whilst the older kids did their morning maths, science and latin also in party hats. I managed to crawl out of bed in time to ice and decorate the two heart shaped cakes (baked yesterday - white chocolate mud cake for Bella, and dark choc for Genna) and make a batch of choc chip muffins for the park party with the Nakasakis (it being Jumpei's birthday also) which we will ice and candle again just for fun.
Retro Computer Thoughts III
Some time in late '87 I jumped into the 16 bit revolution. The Amiga 500 ran used Motorola MC 68000 cpu which ran at 7.1MHz and had three coprocessors named Agnus (MMU), Denise (video), Paula (Sound & I/O). It had 512kb of ram, 256 rom with AmigaOs 1.2, 4 voice 8 bit PCM sound, and could graphically handle 320x256 (32 colours) to 640x512 (15 colours). I ran it through a Philips 1084S stereo sound monitor, and remember than sometime during it's first year the 3.5" floppies dropped to $1 each... My two favourite games would have been Ports of Call, and Soccer Manager. I didn't do as much programming on it as the Amstrad, mainly because it had better games
Home Again
My Dad has made it back home after his coronary bipass surgery. He's not exactly outside swinging an axe or even playing his saxophone yet, but he's back. If we're lucky he'll be up this way to stay a month or so by late june. We will all attempt to keep him on the dietary straight and narrow (that's not "straight to the fridge, and narrowly missing the veges as he reaches for the corned beef" either) until it becomes habitual. I have got hold of the new album by Sonata Arctica, a Finnish power metal band (sort of melodic speed metal with better vocals), called For the Sake of Revenge. They have a typical european metal sound (I don't mean bad english) with non-growly vocals, mostly positive feel lyrics, and are really cool even if they do use keyboards...
Cashews and Olives
So, was the milky bar kid actually an evil genius as Fraser suggested? If so then white chocolate is actually BAD. There are several sides to this argument, but the only one that matters is this: the kids still go to sleep on time when the eat white choc. Now we know that chocolate is derived from cacao beans and contains the flavonoids epicatechin and gallic acid, which are antioxidants that help protect blood vessels (by slowing the oxidation of LDL cholesterol thus reducing atherosclerosis), promote cardiac health, prevent cancer and to counteract mild hypertension. These positive effects appear only with dark (no milk added) varities, and seem to be negated in milk or white chocolate consumption. So white chocolate basically contains just the fat extract from the cocao beans (cocoa butter) of which two-thirds comes in the forms of a saturated fat called stearic acid. No health benefits, no theobromine, nothing - not even toxic to small red dogs. Evil git. Still, the kids are asleep. I'll just stick to cashews and pepper stuffed olives.
According to Wiki, "...line dancing used to have a cowboy image, and it was danced predominantly to country-western music... but today, country music may make up the minority of a DJ's play list, with the balance spread through a variety of many different musical styles both new and old. Genres including Celtic, Swing, Pop, Rock, Big Band, Folk, and almost anything else that has a regular beat." (the things you find when you hit 'Random Article'). I was just thinking of them dudes in their leather calf high boots needing resuscitation after getting down at a speed metal concert.
What about God?
Have been thinking (after reading Bravus' blog 8 April 2006) about literal creationism and the extent to which we can trust a bible handed down through multiple languages, cultures and ages. There was a certain university lecturer in hebrew who invariably started each year with the statement: "Gentlemen, this is the language that God spoke". Undeniably we can claim that God speaks every language, and indeed understands all thought, every intricacy of society, and even advance in scientific and philosophical endeavor that man has and will ever manage. To the One who spoke the universe into existance, death is impotent and love is everything. Could He have created the world in six literal days? Could He have directed the writing of His book AND taken care of it's integrity of meaning and instruction throughout the ages, cultures and translation from one language to another? If so then we can reliably direct our lives from it's messages, if He didn't, then of course christianity is all meaningless. About itself, in King James english, the bible says:
2 Peter 1:21 For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness
I appended the above as a comment on Bravus' blog today. Another lovely afternoon at lighthouse beach. Water temp perfect, undercurrent vicious, sandcastle huge, no sharks. The sun set on us at the top of the tide and we drove home westward into an autumn sky - shepherds are happy.
Old Bikes
Happy birthday Bravus! Life, the universe, and all that stuff. It was ten years ago this week that I became a non-biker. It's not often in one's life that your ZZR1100C becomes a deposit on a house. I was hoping it wouldn't sell... put it on commission in a back street bikeshop and some mongrel rode in on a mid 70's CB750 with a wooden big end bearing, and rode out on my bike into late summer thunderstorm and didn't stop till he was home in Cairns. I got licenced on a Honda CM250 custom (a plastic Harley according to Greg) and rode it until I got a real job irradiating real people and then turned it into a Honda VT250F2D for the remaining six months of my provisional licence. The day my P's disappeared I rode a Kawasaki 750 Turbo into a rainy Newcastle winters night and chased Andy's 240Z all the way home via Freemans Waterhole. Eight years and some 120kkm later it became a Kwaka ZZR1100C which gave me all the adrenaline I needed until that horrible day a decade ago...
What about God again?
So why are there so many gods, so many religions, so many different bibles? Is there but one God, who has a one true church, with direction and correction revealed through one inspired work, or is that culturally selfish and egocentric? Maybe true spiritual enlightenment is achieved only in the acceptance of the validity of all forms of worship, and the rejection of the notion of any (including oneself) having a monopoly on the revealed will of God. Thus there are as many 'stories' of the origin of the universe and mankind as there are tribes, generations and meatpies at a boxing day test at the MCG. Accepting and absorbing such diversity would still leave you short of spiritual perfection were you to ignore the presence of those aspiritual, who have no-one to trust, to blame, or to worship save the tower of their own intellect. All of these considerations are missing one key element, a most important element on earth - the principalities and powers behind the darkness of heart, the misinformation, duplicity, and counterfeiting of truth. What's the best place to hide a book? In a library.
Obituary for a stranger
He drifted into vision one face among hundreds swirling round my street cafe table anchorage. As familiar as a face gets on a stranger, eyes squinting against the public glare, unshaven and driving forward lowered left shoulder first. Gothic horror t-shirt under a high collared fifties leather jacket over black jeans and bare feet, searching need creased over the face. A head taller than the crowd, a sudden panic - he was looking for me and I dared not bare my soul and share. My vision buried down in the nearness of apple juice and shredded wholewheat righteousness refocused on those still feet at my table. Prickling heat of shame at cowardness dragged my sight upward to a face of loss and sadness directed over my head and over the street. I blinked and he vanished. Someone had let him down, I had let myself down.
from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal
Has it been raining? No. Has it been cloudy? No. Has it been foggier than a nuclear med scan? Yes - every morning for the last week... I have it on hearsay that mecury, uranus and venus are in a spectatularly small area of pre dawn sky on the eastern horizon. Bloody fog. Good Things of the week: Interesting test match v Bangladesh. Bad Petrolhead Things of the weekend: Rossi, Alonso, and Tony Stewart won. It will be interesting as to the outcome of the P.M. being summond to the judicial commission about his knowledge of the AWB Iraq kickbacks, although it may all just disappear in smoke and mirrors.
Another Sabbath
Family out and about, and I'm home keeping company with the phone. My services were required this morning at the base for the discernment of secret women's business, nothing urgent, just piece of mind. Have dug out some old musical memories - Alan Parsons Project. A quarter of a century later these songs have the ability to dig out feelings, images, and faces that otherwise I could never disinter. I have a theory about music. It will never gain the power of memory recreation if you never let it go - if Peter Paul and Mary, or Pink Floyd remains your standard diet for these many decades then they lose temporal clarity like a camera shutter left open too long - things blur. But how horrible is that: no variety, no spice. Another way to knacker the deja vu ability of the eighth cranial nerve is to overload those memory associations with numbers. Be a new music freak with catholic tastes, priding yourself on an enormous and everchanging range of self bombarded audio drivel. But neither the saturation nor insatiation methods are foolproof - there will always be one song that can trigger that trip back down memory lane, or nightmare alley.
Little Green Leaf that Genna gave me
It's about 2cm long, 1cm wide, dark green on top and light green underneath with six ribs and overall I'd say it was lemon shaped. I think Genna has a photographic memory, maybe all kids do, but I've been trying her's out on Bob the Builder Trivia. Not just what colour are Scoop and Lofty, but Wendy's hat, Bob's shoes etc and each time she just gazes at nothing, defocuses and check her memory - she actually has to have a look to answer the questions. It works with Thomas the tank engine (Edward, Henry, Gordon, James, Percy, Toby etc) and Postman Pat, Blinky Bill... Cool, I wish I could do it. The gang are away at a dinner and talk evening at Alstonville, and I'm at home minding the phone as usual. Am now eleven days late sending the radiation TLDs back... Can only give Russell so much time.
The blues festival last week - they had 200mm fall on them overnight! That's biblical rainfall! - I wasn't actually trying to be prophetic last week :-) Australia won the Bangladesh test series and Dizzy got a double ton. A bit amazing that. Thought I saw some comet fragments last night, but tonight I'm not totally sure I even found Corona Borealis. Also I have missed two clear mornings by over sleeping the pre dawn pale by half an hour. I think Uranus it going to be blown away by Venus if I get to see them tomorrow morning, they'll be too close. So who's Joan Miro? Going through some music in my collection sent me to Dark Lyrics to work out what the hell Atreyu, Trivium, Sonata Arctica, Korpiklaani, Hawkwind, and Evergrey were actually singing. A large portion of the songs appear to be demonic first person commentaries on being stuck on earth, and how pathetic humans are. And they are forever quoting the bible, and always the King James version. Maybe it's just the genre formula. Or maybe not.
Tricycle Bella and I Am Did It Genna
The dark age that Taff and Lach feared most has arrived. Competition from the twins. These last weeks have seen an almost complete transition by the wee girls from TV and videos to PC games, which leaves the older kids with less than two PCs between them. Sometimes two less than two. Tonight Jennie has gone off to support a revelation seminar and for the first time in history Genna opted to stay home with Dad. I have a feeling that a certain Bob the Builder PC game may have swayed her decision, either that or the anzac biscuits and lamingtons. Bella has had a tricycle now for at least two days and has nearly worn out one set of tyres, not to mention a circuit in the concreteon the driveway and under the veranda... We spent the afternoon at the Perindenya skatepark in the hope that Bella would sufficiently deplete her energy so as to give us a quieter evening, but she still managed another half hour on three wheels after we got home!
The things you hear... am up to 94% on my broadband 10Gb limit again. aaaarrrggghhhh!
Petrolhead Day
Lachy has set up a slotcar track in the lounge and styled it after the PIR which the nascar boys are thundering round on the TV at present. They are on lap 158 of 312 as I type this, but unfortunately at 1300 we will be switching over to the real V8s who are hooning this weekend at Pukekohe, using the foolish reverse grid thing in race two of three. That should be over by 1700 which gives us enough time to make dinner before the Troy and Troy show hits the Valencia round of SBK and keeps us sniffing digital petrol fumes until 0100 ish. Somewhere in there I will try and see if Schumi can convert his record 66th pole position into a win at Imola, the same track where the previous record holder Ayrton Senna achieved his 65th pole the day before he died, 12 years ago.
Cry Babies
We are all a bit buggy at present - nothing dramatic, just puffy eyes, sneezes and bad late 90s graphics on NFS2SE. Taff stayed up with me last night for the first half of the San Marino F1 race because she couldn't sleep with what to her sounded like a bunch of babies crying. The developers of these 2.4L V8, 750bhp @ 19000rpm engines would be proud to know they need a nappy change. Mind you, in a sport where in order to pass an opponent under brakes, you need to have at least 20% better braking performance (i.e. to make up 2 car lengths from the 80m board at 250kmph) which doesn't happen even vaguely often with first vs 20th, so they have blue flag rules which cause the tailenders to leave the track, climb out of their cars, put down a red carpet, offer light refreshments, and wave placards imploring the front runners to pass them before they are fined out of the sport. Schumi was 4 sec a lap slower than Alonso, but couldn't be passed. In fact the only passing that ever occurs is in the pits. Exciting, wooohooo. That's why F1 fans don't like Nascar - imagine a sport where passing occurs in the thousands per race, rather than three times in one's career? Enough to need a nappy change. The Troy and Troy show was good in SBK. Troy won.
Someone at work today annouced that an all conquering antibiotic had been isolated from goat's milk. Excellent. It won't be long before GMRSA joins the growing list of multi-resistant organisms. Doing a Wiki search on it uncovered (indirectly) Robyn Williams comparison of Wiki and Britannica. The former has 8 times the articles and only a comparable number of errors. Long live Wiki. Williams also covered the response to an early april article in the BMJ about disappearing teaspoons in the workplace:
Then there’s the spoon version of osmotic pressure ...
‘The greater the number of spoons collected in one locale,
the greater the observable increase in spoonification.
A flow of spoons from high density spooniquaries to
regions low in spoon density.’
We have the same problem with pens at our hospital and have decided to respond in a similar fashion to this walking stapler reaction:
‘While I repeatedly lost a stapler marked in an inconspicuous manner
(later recovered each time in a distant common room),
that same stapler was never moved again once I marked it for
all to see with a simple and subtle deterrent message:
‘This is my third stapler in six months. Be advised of this;
if you take my stapler I will hunt you down and kill you.’
ANZAC Day
My Grandfather was at Gallipoli, was on the beach April 25, 1915 with the New Zealand Field Artillery. According to Wiki, a full 10% of the New Zealand population (then just under 1 million) served overseas during World War I, and New Zealand had the highest casualty and death rate per capita of any country involved in the war. I arose before dawn as is my recent habit, and observed the planetary parade until the paling of the sky - a sort of private ANZAC march. Saw an interesting ABC TV program this week on that 1915 conflict, Revealing Gallipoli (ABC program .doc file here) attempted to retell the story from both the Turkish and ANZAC points of view. Did so very well. The Turkish died in a ratio of 2:1 to the invaders. Winston Churchill's good idea, not.
Spent the day oncall, but have only been bothered once, an incoming polyhydramniotic tide secret womens business thing. Helped Taff and Jen write an article for the local paper on home schooling from Taff's viewpoint. Not sure if I helped, more confused than anything. Got hold of two new metal albums: Kamelot - Epica, and Nightwish - Oceanborn. Like them both, even if Kamelot is American, and Nightwish can only be described as opera metal... Only five days till end of bigpond strangle.
Victim of Advertising
Have been troubled recently with the recurrance of specific (rather crippling) athralgias and myalgias - returning for the fourth time in as many years. A fortunate 'Archimedes" eureka moment (i.e. 1st person singular perfect indicative active of the Greek verb heuriskein, meaning "to find"; it means "I have found it!", or more accurately, "I am in a state of having found it".) led me to connect these occurances to my sometime obsessive relationship with Pepsi Max and more recently Coke Zero. As deliberately confirmed by self experiment in the last fortnight, there was something in these drinks that flare the symptoms within 24 hours of consuming, which then became progressively worse with continued use to the point of incapacitation, and then disappear within a few days of ceasing consumption. Reading the side of the bottle tonight revealed aspartame:
"...the name (Wiki) for an artificial, non-carbohydrate sweetener,
aspartyl-phenylalanine-1-methyl ester; i.e., the methyl ester
of the dipeptide of the amino acids aspartic acid and phenylalanine.
It is marketed under a number of trademark names, such as NutraSweet and Equal."
A simple google further Jennie found from the 321recipes web site:
An impressive, but unexpected, finding in an analysis of complaints associated with aspartame, a sweetener currently being consumed by over 100 million persons in the United States, was troublesome joint pain.
This turns out to be only the tip of a large block of glacially separated floating oceanic cold white stuff that penguins live on and very large boats collided with in 1912. So you probably all already knew this, but I feel both more of, and less of, a complete dill now that I have found out...
For my next personal learning adventure I will explore the relationship between diet, antioxidants, leptin and angiogenesis, but I will make that white chocolate mudcake first in case I never want to again. Genna is now powering around on the tricycle as well (this reasonably tolerated by Bella) and almost has the concept of steering down pat. Was pleased to discover that rhubarb takes more than one season to take off properly - I had expected it to grow similarly to spinach and was about to rip it out after six months of dawdling... I'll develop a green thumb if I stick at it for the next forty years.
Herbal Remedy
Tonight is our For Convenience Mother's Day because the real date is less that helpful due to factors beyond our control. Said occasion marked by the presentation of a mother's size tea set of the fine china, african violet decorated type, four matching mugs, and a mega-calorific slab of Guylian twists. Today is also my cousin Julie's birthday - happy thirty something Jules. (brief intermission as phone rings...) Telemarketers should be hung, drawn and halved twice. At least the last one was from within this continent. Definitively located fragment C of Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann just the east edge of Corona Borealis the last two nights - it will apparently improve from 9th mag to nearly 5th by mid May. I will try and follow it each night as it swings through Hercules, Lyra, Vulpecula, Pegasus and on to Pisces.
Comets again
Another marvelous april day. SS and church was Geoff Youlden doing his thing on health and baptism. Eyeballed Paul and Vanessa's new bub for the first time - very cute. Used Jennie's PDA to follow the bible texts and flip over to Pocket Stars when it got a bit boring to plan out my viewing attack on comet 73P/SW3-C as it drifts into Hercules. Lunch was a black bean and honey tofu noodle stirfry mainly because I forgot to make anything else yesterday. Leaving 29degC at home we went back along the well beaten track to lighthouse beach where we found a cold (maybe 22degC) northeasterly breeze and chop for surf with the sun behind clouds more than not. I was forced to build a two and a half tonne sandcastle to work up enough of a sweat (or until the twins let me stop) to brave the water, only to find the Tasman sea wonderfully warm. Isobel must have run her electric window up and down twenty times on the return trip in order to maximally annoy her evaporatively cooled brother in the third row. It worked.
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