Woo Woo, Mondrian

Late night TV showed the wonderful deco credits for Poirot, surely one of the best TV intros ever. So I watched and was delighted with the plot, the acting and of course the delicious props. The episode was Four And Twenty Blackbirds - one scene was set in the most beautiful gallery with quite stunning artworks. And there he was again, just a corner but unmistakably Mondrian.

Woo Woo, Thetans

On Monday a court convicted the French branch of the Church of Scientology of organised fraud. The Scientology Celebrity Centre and a related bookshop in Paris were fined a total of €650,000 ($1 million). On the same day, Oscar-winning filmmaker Paul Haggis severed his ties with the Church of Scientology in protest against the sect's position on gays and its treatment of members. A few days earlier, on October 22nd, Tom Cruise, John Travolta and their partners joined 4000 others celebrating the 25th anniversary of the International Association of Scientologists in England.

One hesitates to comment due to the sect's use of litigation and "other methods" to silence critics.

The cult religion is based on the works of L. Ron Hubbard, one of whose Sci-Fi books sat on my bookshelf for some years when I was a teen. I'm not sure why it lived there - perhaps I thought one day I would finish it, but I'm sure I never did. It was terrible.

"According to the 1965 Report of the Board of Enquiry into Scientology in the Australian state of Victoria, Hubbard falsely claimed scientific and other credentials and his sanity was "to be gravely doubted".[143] The report concluded that while Hubbard's followers are taught that they are entitled to question the beliefs, they are conditioned to believe that the teachings are correct.[144] It also notes that Hubbard's claims of finding a cure for atomic radiation is unsupported by evidence.[145] The Scientologists' response was a pamphlet entitled Kangaroo Court, describing Victoria as "the riff-raff of London's slums [...] a very primitive community, somewhat barbaric".[143]"

Wikipedia on L. Ron Hubard, Dianetics and Scientology

A public face of Scientology currently, Tommy Davis, has had many intriquing interviews. They don't have the same barking quality as some of Tom's, but you will be entertained. (or would have been had Youtube not terminated the account - not under any pressure, of course)

Tommy 'footbullet man' Davis on Youtube (9 mins)

Nov 2010: I could not find the video, but I did find an interesting site which lists other Scientology interviews. Mark Bunker's Xenu TV

Pregant Pause

There is a phrase "waiting for the other shoe to drop" which refers to the anticipation experienced by the occupants of the room below awaiting the thud as the second shoe drops on the wooden floor of the bedroom in the apartment above.

On Monday police in Belgium had little trouble tracing the perpetrator of the theft of one shoe. He had only one leg.

SMH: One-legged suspect caught with one stolen shoe

And in AWAD this week:
otiose
Def: 1. Superfluous. 2. Futile. 3. Indolent.

Sixstroke

The press has finally picked up the story of Malcolm Beare and his battle against far superior forces. He has on his side Melbourne businessman Steve Eleftheriadis, a brave and good-hearted man who has been Malcolm's champion for several years. They are facing a ruthless and cunning deleted who wields as a club the enormous clout which the Jack Brabham name carries. It's a juicy tale which stretches back several decades.

Both the SMH and NineMSN write:
"This case involves ... corporate greed and predatory behaviour," said Peter King, barrister for the Caseys and Sir Jack.

Peter King speaks the truth!

Brabham vs Beare in the SMH

Lo and behold

On October 29th (or perhaps Sept 2nd), the internet turns 40. In 1969 boffins first connected two computers at UCLA. I was introduced to it by my friend Jojo who asked me in I think 1995 if I knew about email, but the only reference I had was to a Sydney company called Email, gone now apparently.

In 1997 I signed up with Ozemail and after stuffing about for a few days I phoned them up to ask how I got any further than wherever it was I was - I was using something similar to Teletext, my only previous online experience. They mentioned the word browser. A few days later, a copy of Netscape arrived on a 5 1/4 floppy disc.

SMH - Internet turns 40

A school friend invited me to visit his workplace, the IBM building at Circular Quay in the early 70s. When the PC came along I was immediately a fan, but opted for an Apple II, and then an Apple III which did sterling service in my motorcycle shop in the early 80's. It even had a Winchester hard drive with a whopping 10 megabytes.

Jenny Walker, our devoted office person/data processor/photographer/guzzisti somehow managed to press the wrong key sequence and deleted the contents of the drive. That was the day I learned the meaning of the word "backup". Poor Jenny spent the next several weeks re-entering it all from hard copy.

That wonderful Apple was replaced by a PC inaptly named Apricot, as it was really something of a bright yellow and rather tart. I wasted a year or so stuffing about with that horrible thing before replacing it with a slower but much more reliable XT, then AT, 386, 486, Pentium...
I offered it to the Powerhouse a couple of years later but it was recycled as landfill.

Photo by Jenny Walker

Stop Licking Me

I have the equivalent of writer's block at the moment. To alleviate the sensation of uselessly thudding my head against the wall I fossicked in the cupboard and found a movie I'd bought at a garage sale a couple of years back that looked mildly interesting. It turned out to be quite beautiful, an elegant example of American cinema - Life as a House.

And while I'm on about movies and wasting time watching them, ABC or SBS showed The Human Factor, a 1979 British spy movie with Derek Jacobi and Robert Morley who plays a rather sinister MI5 spy with a fake Piet Mondrian on his office wall. I mention this because I have a painting in my loungeroom by Walala Tjapaltjarri who'd never heard of Mondrian when he walked out of the Western Australian desert after a prolonged drought, meeting another culture for the first time. When first I saw his work I assumed that he'd been influenced by Mondrian. Wrong.

Uplifting

I'm researching a strange cloud which was soared at Bicester around 1987 by several pilots. If you know of anyone who remembers this event I would greatly appreciate it if you could put me in contact with them.

Here is the information I have so far:

RAF Bicester Gliding Club
Wave cloud Bicester England @ 1987
Roll cloud which remained fairly stationary a small distance from the airfield.
It was not very long, possibly 50km, and lasted about 2 hours.
Lift reported by tug pilot Phil Stonebanks at 6000 fpm (yes, that's right, six thousand). Several other pilots apparently confirmed this. Tug/glider combinations were climbing at an angle of 45 degrees in front of the wave in lift which although of enormous strength was dead smooth. Sink on the lee side was also very smooth and of similar strength, according to Phil. They stopped winching as the cloud got closer to the airfield ( I take it there were both winch and aerotow operations)
RAF GSA Gliding Club, now moved to Halton.
http://www.raf.mod.uk/rafgliding/

Lachlan Runs Dry

You've probably heard that the drought is bad. It's worse. The Lachlan River in NSW is about to run dry which means that towns like Forbes and Cowra may have no water by the end of the coming summer. Thousands of homes will be effected.

The Wyangala Dam, on the Lachlan, holds about twice the contents of Sydney Harbour. After 7 years of drought, it's down to 6%. It is expected to drop to 1% of capacity.

SMH 24th October 2009

Foxy morons

This one is just delicious:
"Turn your head ever so slightly to the left, just before you approach Art Photo Expo, avoiding the carelessly parked black-and-fluoro Vespas propped like drunks at a gasoline bar. You will delight at the entire wall of Carla Bruni nude photographs, visible from the footpath, as if you were peering through the venetian blinds at the French presidential palace."
Charles Waterstreet in The Age

Summer Heat

"By the year 2000 there will be about 25 per cent more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than at present. This will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable through local or even national efforts, could occur."
Lyndon Johnson's scientific advisory panel, 44 years ago. SMH 091017

Motorcycle Safety

This email arrived just now:
subject: idea
Email: siavosh_hajinazar@yahoonu.com
message: hi
i am siavash from iran.i have a new idea for using airbags in motorcycles.how can i be in more contact with you in this case?

Ripping into Jamie

Elizabeth Farrelly in the SMH writes a very readable article on young Mr Packer, a man who lost some two billion dollars recently and for whom the nation weeps not.

Here's an excerpt:
"I mean, a normal person might feel compelled to do something useful with the loot. Not just $X million to uh, cricket, or to the Victor Chang Institute on the basis that "research can also make money". But a school for Zimbabwean AIDS orphans. A continent-wide array of solar cells. A writers' colony (I picture them nesting and squabbling on some windswept headland, like gannets, but I digress…)"

Facing it

Hard to believe that an old hand at html should be such a newbie with social networking... tonight I discovered that facebook has a chat thingie, and ended up exchanging messages with Kerrie, a glider pilot with whom I trained back in Orville's day. And another of those little coincidences. Shortly before the chat began, I spotted the profile of the instructor who trained us both, and sent him a hello. What's that wonderful Jungian word?

Kerrie rides motorcycles, too. Here's a page she put up about her latest ride:
http://www.amazonheart.org/AHThunder/kerrieclaffey.html

Sooo Predictable!

I wrote an email to Nigel a week or so back suggesting that there might be Morning Glory waves on the 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th. He replied with a cute photo from the cockpit of their glider on the Glory of the 13th October, 2009. 20 years to the day.

They had one on the 11th, too, the first decent wave in nearly a fortnight. That of the 12th was a ripper, with lift of 1500 feet per minute. Amanda of Savannah Aviation tells me that Fuzzy Bob went up with Nigel this morning (the 14th) and they soared a weak one.

There will be a couple of MG tourists from Thailand tomorrow, so hopefully they'll get to fly in one of Savannah's aircraft as Rob and Nigel left after the wave this morning and theirs was the last glider. A great many MG clouds are not visible from the ground.

Cloudspotting

I just love coincidence, even tiny ones fascinate me. No-one ever sent me an email about wired.com before. Today I got two from different people about unrelated subjects. The first was about a BMW concept car, and the second about a new type of cloud, the first in 50 years.

Here's the the link to the new cloud discussed in Wired Magazine -
undulatus asperatus

And since we're speaking of clouds, here's another from Wired. The post says that these noctilucent clouds seen in the night skies of Europe and America could be yet another sign of ongoing global changes attributable to global warming.

The Youtube video 'Independence Day' cloud hovers above Moscow has been removed, but here's a link to it on NineMSN

Beer, sparkling cold delicious summer beer

Don't drink beer. At all. Ever. That's what she said, SWMBO. It's full of maltose, the worst of all possible sugars. But, but, but said I. No buts. No beer. Period, said she. Maltose. Look it up.

So I did.

The quote below is from an article on the University of California's UC Davis site:

In his research review, Bamforth notes that Arthur Agatson, who developed the South Beach Diet, originally labeled beer as "the most fattening of all alcoholic beverages" due to its use of the sugar maltose.

Agatson later retracted that claim and lifted his ban on beer when it was brought to his attention that maltose is removed by the fermentation process. But by that time, the brewing industry already had begun marketing "low carb" beers, which, according to federal standards, must contain no more than seven grams of carbohydrate per serving.

http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=7525

The following two articles support this view:
http://www.magazine.ayurvediccure.com/how-alcohol-strikes-hard-on-low-carb-diet/
http://www.realbeer.com/edu/health/maltose.php

There is no argument that beer contains carbs, however, nor that carbs are fattening. So don't drink too much beer, and don't eat too many potatoes. But beer, per se, is not bad for you - in moderation.

Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the first Morning Glory flight - Friday 13th October, 1989. Just returned from Burketown where much has changed. It was dry, raw and rednecked. Now it's green and mostly peaceful; friendly, integrated.

For years I flew alone on the cloud and revelled in having such a vast sky to myself, a grand and beautiful wonder all my own, sharing sometimes.

Now, now there are fleets of gliders, and film crews and helicopters and footblenders...