Tag: Non Fiction

In a word: Mark

A teacher will mark a test in order to give the student a mark out of 100.  Yes, to mark a test means to ascertain right and wrong answers and score it accordingly, and getting a mark out of 100 could determine a great many different outcomes at school.

Whereas a mark on your clothes could mean you’ve been playing with fire, rolled in the mud or if much older having a salacious affair with an unexplainable lipstick mark on your collar.

A mark is someone that a con man believes will be easily deceived.

A mark is a catch in certain types of football.

You can have an identifying mark on some item of property.

it’s literally the x marks the spot for someone who cannot write, i.e. make your mark

There can be a mark on a rope that indicates the depth of water.

And many, many more…

But not to be confused with marque, which could be the make or model of a particular type of car

Or marc with is the refuse of grapes after being pressed

 

What’s in the news other than COVID 19

Other than the fact that the recent twitter storm of untruths and white lies is covering up something far more sinister that certain people don’t want you to find out about.

Well, we’re on the quest to find out what it is…

There’s the discovery of a perfectly preserved ancient Roman mosaic floor under vines near Verona in Italy that dates back to the 3rd century.  This is the same site that remains of a villa was found in 1922.

And thankfully there were very few people in Rome when a sinkhole appeared in front of the Pantheon where seven travertine slabs were found 2.5 meters beneath Piazza della Rotonda.

Hardly earth-shattering, but interesting none the less.

Also, I’m willing to bet you didn’t know that scientists were looking for a parallel universe in Antarctica, not that they found one, but it would have been interesting if they had.

For that matter, since there is nothing down there but ice and snow, would they have realized they had passed to another parallel universe that was exactly the same?

What they did find were neutrinos, which are tiny high energy cosmic particles that are often referred to as ghostly because they can pass through anything without changing.

Pity about the parallel universe.  I’m sure a lot of us tired of this one not working out so well, would like to go to another where we’re hoping things will be better.

Though, if you watched Stargate SG1, you’ll know parallel universes are not always good.

Lastly…

Today I discovered the humble light bulb was invented by Thomas Edison 129 odd years ago, and made at Edison General Electric Company (now better known as GE).  In 1935 the light bulbs had evolved so much they could light stadiums, a fluorescent bulb was created in 1938, and a halogen lamp in 1959.  LED lighting was invented in 1962.

 

I’ve been thinking about loss, and how easy it is to forget

There is this thing called the march of progress.

It can be good, or it can be bad.

But the inevitability of it means that we have to destroy our past in order to build for the future.  It’s a pity no one back around a hundred years ago worked out that a certain amount of land needed to be set aside for future infrastructure, and then build around it.

The pity of it is that those same practices are with us now, and unfortunately either the infrastructure is too costly to build because of the necessity to buy back, and it will never change.  No one, sadly, is thinking of the future.

So, all I have of my childhood years, over sixty years ago are now memories, and when I go, they will be lost forever, if I don’t lose my mind before that.

I remember, a long time ago now, the many holidays I spent at my grandmother’s place in the ‘country’.  Back then it was.

Now it is just another suburb of Melbourne.

I remember the drive, and it used to take about half an hour, perhaps longer, and as we traveled, it was mostly the countryside we saw.  Little towns like Beaconsfield, Officer, Berwick, oases in the middle of farming land.

The last time I went for that same drive, there were endless houses, and multi landed highways now called freeways.

My grandmother’s house was very large, and the land it was built on, extensive.  There used to be gardens, several garages, a number of old cars, and a huge workshop.

My brother and I used to spend our Christmases exploring, and on a particular one, found some tools and decided to recover some of the gardens.

We found a huge fountain buried beneath the overgrowth, the centerpiece a statue part of what must have been a remarkable display.

It was like we had our own secret garden.

There was also a fernery, it too overgrown.

Now, sadly, all of it is gone, and in its place a multilane highway that follows an alternate coastal route between Melbourne and Sydney.

All I have left is the memories of a time that will never return.

Perhaps it’s time to write it all down, and preserve it for future generations.

A new way of doing things

Well, welcome to the new world.

Perhaps in a lot of things, we should have been there a long time ago, but I suspect complacency and laziness has a lot to do with some of the issues.

Like washing your hands. It’s usually hell on earth to get a child to do anything and you have to be at them and at them to do anything.

I’m not sure about social distancing, but I’ve long wanted people in the supermarket to stop leaning over me to get stuff off the shelves when they could wait one minute longer.

Or being crowded into a restaurant where you can practically eat off the plate of the person at the next table. I like the distance, and the privacy it brings.

I’m also a fan of the new click and collect phenomenon where I don’t have to go out to get something I want; just get it delivered.

Of course, there’s still the necessity to go to a shop and physically see an item before you buy it, in my case clothes and shoes, but online sales for a lot of things are so much better, especially books and magazines.

I guess future traffic jams won’t be cars but delivery trucks.

I like the idea of working from home. Aside from having to face time with colleagues every now and then, if you don’t have to be in an office, then give it up. It will reduce pressure on roads, public transport, and reduce the concentration of the population in one place. You might even get to work on time, and get something to eat before you arrive!

As long as they get the internet right, which in this country is a pretty big if.

And perhaps now people will stop blaming 5g for the COVID virus.

Perhaps this homeschooling thing might work as well, as over the last few weeks I’ve seen it in action, and in most cases it works. Of course the isolation of students could be a problem, and there is always a need for face time for teachers and other students for interaction with contemporaries, but perhaps a compromise could be found.

Among the negatives in a time like this is the fear of using public transport, a fear no one is taking lightly, leading to children having to be taken to and brought home from school, and the fact there are potentially 800 cars needed to do it.

I used to leave home 30 mins before school end and was first in the pickup queue. Now I leave 45 minutes before and the closest I can get in nearly a mile from the school. And the traffic is a dangerous hazard in the main street, blocking driveways, bus stops, and lanes. It’s basically a mess, and it cannot continue without more organization.

Or we find a cure, or at the very least, a vaccine.

But there’s another problem. The anti-vaxxers. Everywhere in the world, it seems, not more than 50% of the population will get vaccinated, so it means that we may NEVER get past where we are now.

And the very worst problem that this new world has sprung on us, we may never travel again. Anywhere.

Perhaps we really do need a miracle.

In a word: Not

You will not go outside, you will not go to the movies.

The word not, when used by your parents when you are a child is the key in the lock keeping you from having fun.

It is the very definition of everything negative, and much harsher than just a plain no.

That you will ‘not…’ has been the gateway for many an exploit or adventure, because anything you have done contrary to the ‘not’ is all that much sweeter.

Until you get into trouble, but, then, isn’t that how you learn life’s lessons?

But if you are a programmer like me, not takes on a whole new meaning in a language like,

‘If not like …. then’

meaning in layman’s terms if something isn’t like a specific value then do something else.

Hang on, isn’t that a bit like reality?

This is not to be confused with the work Knot which is,

A blemish in a piece of wood

The speed of a ship, winds, and sometimes a plane

But basically,

Something you tie to keep your shoes on, or around your finger to remind you to tie your shoes before getting on the 36-knot high-speed ferry made of knotty wood.

It is also something you find in tangled hair and is very painful trying to remove it.

It is also an unpleasant tightness in body muscles and you need a masseuse to get rid of them.

Mount Ngauruhoe, New Zealand

Mount Ngauruhoe is apparently still an active volcano, has been for 2,500 years or so, and last erupted on 19th February 1975, and reportedly has erupted around 70 times since 1839.

The mountain is usually climbed from the western side, from the Mangatepopo track.

This photo was taken in summer from the Chateau Tongariro carpark.

In late autumn, on one of our many visits to the area, the mountain was covered with a light sprinkling of snow and ice.

On our most recent visit, this year, in winter, it was fully covered in snow.

It can be a breathtaking sight from the distance.

Wishful thinking

My phone, being smart and all, has been creating a notification that tells me I have some memories stored on it for this day a year ago, or two years, or many years.

The pictures it is showing are of our trip to China last year.

Not much chance of going back, and, back then, neither of us could imagine that everything that has happened in the last six months could happen.

But, it did.

And one of the effects of those events is no more overseas travel

No more travel of any sort at the moment with the travel restrictions in place.  We can’t even fly to another state.  Come to that, we might not have an airline to fly on.

Travel, of course, is the main escape, where we can get away from our daily lives, and go somewhere quite different from where we live and experience a different world.  The people, the food, the sights.

What is probably more significant is that we might not be able to go away again, if there is no cure for the virus.  No one will want to risk catching it in another country, simply because of the medical expenses, the chances are that travel insurance will not cover you for the Coronavirus.

And no cover, no travel, even if you are able to.

So, it means that any travel we will be doing, when we can, will be in our own country.  We can do this without a vaccine because we have so few active cases, and the measures we have is stopping it in its tracks.

So too for New Zealand, and we may be able to travel there.

One day.

Until then, my smartphone is going to keep sending me gentle reminders of what it was like in another lifetime.

After the anger, the serenity

I wanted to write a bit about how my day was going, and then I got angry.  It was a slow fuse because most of what I was angry about I’d been reading this morning.

And, yes, it’s about COVID 19, it’s about political leaders, those in power and those in opposition.

Listing to our opposition leader, briefly before I turned him off to watch a rerun of McHale’s Navy, it annoyed me that he had no answers to offer, only criticism.

Unfortunately, he’s not alone in the world.

Political leaders tended to blame everyone else for a pandemic that was not prepared for, totally unexpected and looking like it’s going to be a huge disaster, not just here but everywhere.

Oh, God, I’m back on my soapbox.

Forgive me.

I’ll shut up about it now.

 

It’s cold today, about 14 degrees Celsius, when it’s usually 27 degrees Celsius.  The sun is letting us down, and I suppose I should be grateful that we are not suffering from an ice age.

To be honest, I was seriously considering lighting the log fire.  Instead, we have reverse cycle air-conditioning, which is probably, in the long run, cheaper.

Have you seen how much it costs to buy wood?

But…

That could have made it difficult to write.

Not to come up with inspiration, but literally write, because my office is colder than a chiller room.  My beer in storage out here is colder than it is in the fridge.  Well, that sounded better in my head than on paper, but you get what I mean.

So, instead of writing, we sat down and binge-watched Sweet Magnolias, a light-hearted series from Netflix, and is of the same vein as Chesapeake Shores, etc, and more the sort of program I’d expect from Hallmark.

It was good.  It hooked me.

Three sets of lives intertwined in a largeish town in middle America perhaps.  I heard Charleston mentions so perhaps it was in South Carolina.

The good thing about it?  Not one mention of COVID 19.

Just good old-fashioned heartache, and trials and tribulations of trying to live your life, bumping up against the obstacles life throws up at you.

The town was called serenity, so there’s a pun in there somewhere.

It’s going to be warmer tomorrow so maybe I’ll get some writing done then.

In a word: Holiday

Some call time off from work whether it is for a day, a few days, and couple of weeks, or maybe longer, a holiday.

Or leave, leave of absence, annual leave, or long service leave.

Others may call it vacation.

It depends on what part of the world you live in.

But the end result is the same, you do not go to work, so you stay home and do all those things that have mounted up, you drive up, and for some reason it is always up, to the cabin, for a little hunting shooting a fishing, or you get on a planr or a ship and try to get as far away from home and work as possible.

That’s called going overseas. It seems if there is an ocean between w there you go and where you live, no one will be able to disturb you.

Sorry, I bet you didn’t leave that mobile phone or iPad home did you?

But, of course there are a few other obscure references to the word holiday.

For instance,

It can be a day set aside to commemorate an event or a person, a day when you are not expected to work, e.g. Memorial Day, Christmas Day, Good Friday. In Britain they used to be called Bank Holidays.

It can be a specified period that you may be excused from completing a task, or doing something such as getting a one year tax exemption, which maifh also be called a one year tax holiday.

Yes, now that is an obscure reference, particularly when no tax department would ever grant anyone an exemption of any sort.

An editorial of sorts

I always wanted to write an editorial.

A long time ago when I spent time at a newspaper, I wondered what it was like to get to write what essentially was an opinion piece.  Did it have to tow the newspaper owners’ point of view?

I was idealistic then.  I believed in freedom of the press, and that cornerstone of democracy, freedom of speech.

I did not realize then that freedom of speech also meant the freedom to spread ‘plausible’ lies, dressed up to be the truth, to achieve a particular result.  In just one instance, and editorial, and the editorial line of a newspaper had the opportunity to influence an election, favoring one party over another.

With age came wisdom?  Perhaps it was more cynicism because now I tend not to believe anything I read in the papers, when I deign to buy a paper which isn’t often, or read online, or listen to on the television or radio.

What happened to factual reporting?

What happened to opinion pieces being labeled as such so that we know that it is not a representative opinion, just the columnists?

What we all tend to forget is that everyone makes mistakes.  Whether they’re deliberate, or stupid, they happen, and they can cause a large number of casualties, or cost a lot of money.

What’s lost in all the screaming and yelling is the fact we should be looking for answers so that it doesn’t happen again, not blame every man and his dog, or those in opposition, for everything that is wrong in the world, and, quite likely, your own mistake.

What’s also lost is the truth.

In every ten tons of rubbish that are coming out of the media, so-called reported directly from the horse’s mouth, there are just a few grains of truth.  That’s what we should be listening to.

But, drowned out in all the lies, half-truths, and outrageous statements that on the surface doesn’t make any sense, we get to a point where we no longer know what the truth is.

Or do we?

We all have one thing in spades, common sense.

Unfortunately, we sometimes suspend it, because we all have our biases and idiosyncrasies, and beliefs and these can sometimes get it not the way.  Now is not the time to forget that common sense or the fact we should be using it to filter out what is not relevant and get to what is.

And what is relevant?

You.

You matter.

Your life matters.

The life of others, whether you like them or not, those lives also matter.

And when we all realize we are in this together, and then rise above the petty and stupid lies and fear-mongering that is being peddled, will the world, yes, the whole world, finally overcome the worst assault on it ever devised.