the big blue

it seems that hurricanes, earthquakes, global warming, melting of the polar caps et al, are not enough. i read that it’s possible that the earth’s polarity may change (leading to god knows what kind of global destruction), that there could be mega volcanic eruptions which would destroy all of life ( two likely candidates mentioned are krakatoa and yellowstone). of course, there is also the very distinct possibility of an asteroid strike ( maybe 63 million years in the future someone may find this!).

voyager will take about 75,000 years to reach the nearest star. the dude who picks up the little space craft will hopefully go into the trouble to retracing it’s steps and finding out where the intriguing gizmo came from. we would like that. unless of course it’s something out of alien. in which case humankind would be better off dead. who wants to end up as insect fodder after all? not that it matters because we will all probably be dead long before that time. i don’t mean me (although i may well be star dust by that time) but all of life as we know it and not by natural disasters either. devastating as they may be, natural calamities have been with us for 4 billion years and will be apart of the earth for 4 billion more years.

the explosions in delhi over the weekend are a totally different issue. so too the statement by the iranian president that israel should be “wiped off the map”. a little earlier we had the bombs of bali and london and madrid. and, of course, we have the war on iraq. our capacity to wipe ourselves off the face of the earth with increasing malignancy and guile grows with each passing day. and one day, perhaps, we will succeed.

was it for this that the clay grew tall? the alien dude will scratch his carapace in vexation.

planet earth

what’s with the planet anyway? floods, droughts, aids, tsunamis, hurricanes, melting polar caps, earthquakes, avian flu. give us a break dude. if i was the religious kind i would be standing at the corner of chatham street and queens street with a cardboard sign saying “ the end is neigh. bye.”

for all our technological advancement we still fail to understand the planet we live on. aristotle once said “nature does nothing uselessly” but perhaps chief seattle said it best…


“humankind has not woven the web of life.

we are but one thread within it.

whatever we do to the web,

we do to ourselves.

all things are bound together.

all things connect.”
- chief seattle, 1854


perhaps the cardboard thought was not such a bad idea after all.

herbie goes bananas!

car driving as a manual art, died on saturday in the mojave desert in nevada. not that this is necessarily a bad thing, mind you. speeding back from galle, also on saturday, the lady driver ahead of me very calmly put on her left blinker and turned smoothly across the galle road to her right. then she shook her fist at me when i politely called out the error of her ways. it struck later me that this was a kind of inverse déjà vu.

for, at roughly the same time, 23 automated vehicles guided only by on board gps, lasers, cameras, infra red sensors and loads of computing power were racing each other in the desert at the other end of the earth for a usd 2 million prize offered by the us defense advanced research projects agency (presumably voldermort was not a committee member). the vehicles raced each other to the finish over the 240 km obstacle course and were truly automated in that absolutely no remote control was allowed. a souped up volkswagen won.

no driving. think about it.

(remember those quaint stickers on cars - “ no hand signals” ???)