22.12.2003 - 10:41 a.m.

Wayhaayyy, it's nearly easter, lurve those choco eggs, wouldn't like to see the chickens though.

Two snowmen sat in a front yard, one says to the other "can you smell carrots ?"

If you saw or followed the banner here last week then it must be working, my eternal thanks to that hard working chap at 'The Blue Room' for cobbling it together as per my strange and convoluted descriptions, if you were wondering ( and i don't think many will ) the names of the hamsters are (l-r) Jim-Bob, "shotgun" Harry and Ace, the banner is in for repairs at the moment but will be flying again soonish.

Spoke with Captain A last week who is busy loafing all over Sydney, he was calling from a payphone in Chinatown ( which was the quietest payphone he could find in Sydney ) and all I could hear was the sound of background busyness in the sunshine drowning out his words, from what I could gather he's luvvin it, ( and who wouldn't ) before the satellites went out of position we managed to talk about moon-brackets and the shapes things are ( rhomboidular tending towards cononical ) before the static got too bad at my end and delivery drivers started reversing into immovable objects at his end, his last words were, "i'll try and find a quieter phone in the park" and that was the last I heard from him, no doubt he's blind drunk at the beach somewhere or generally having fun in the sun.

I'd give nearly anything to be there with him.

Am in the middle of reading a book ~gasps~ which was partly lamenting the lack of foresight our grandfathers had when regarding the world around them, more specifically the best places to dump waste from the fledgling nuclear industry, at the time, nearly every nation who was generating this shite would push the drums down a mine or dump them at sea, out of sight and out of mind, until those drinking from the water table started developing a broad range of interesting cancers, and then they said it couldn't possibly be the nuclear waste because it was stored to government standards ( this is always the get-out clause for business, it doesn't matter that the standards are too slack, they always comply with the letter of the law ) The grand old US of A had several hundred different dumping sites, all of them uncomfortably close to human habitation. The ones mentioned were around a place called the Fallarone Islands, about 50 miles of the califonian coast, in between the early forties and 1990 ( 1990 people !! ), thousands and thousands of standard 55gal drums full of nasty nasty stuff were dumped at sea, and when they floated, the navy would shoot holes in the drums to make them sink - This represents a singularly short-sighted view of the world, which I suppose was common back then ( and now when money gets involved ) - So at the moment, out at sea ( not even past the continental shelf of N.America ) are about 30,000 rusting barrels of Strontium, Uranium, Plutonium and similar, slowly leaking out through the bullet holes into the Pacific, if there's any seals out there who live on the californian coast and are reading this, please gather up a bucket load of righteous indignation ( or toxic waste ), and bite Schwarznegger in the arse repeatedly until his legs fall off. I bet there's some really unhappy clams out there, slowly mutating into Godzilla like proportions.

The only thing that makes me even slightly happy about the situation is that all the shellfish and crustaceans who live round there and the fish that eat shellfish and crustaceans will eventually end up in restaurants on the west coast, ah the delights of being at the top of a food chain. It makes me smile to think that the people who decided that the ocean is a good place to dump this stuff ( and the general population ) have had it served up to them at expense on a regular basis over the last half century or so. Now that's what I call poetic justice.

All in all though it doesn't matter, we can poison ourselves all we like, the human race hasn't been around very long and given this planet's tendancy towards extinctions, we may not be around for as long as we'd like. In another 100 million years all that waste will probably have been subducted back into the earth to reappear as an interesting rock strata another 100 million years after that. There's not alot we can do to the earth that can't be fixed given enough time, we might kill ourselves off in the process but life ( minus us ) will go on, hurrah for life.

And then when the sun runs down it's fuel and the earth is just a big cinder floating in space, there'll be a long period where the extra heat will have melted the oceans on Europa and life will probably have a few hundred million years to really get going there ( if it's not already ) before the sun dies completely. Life doesn't care where it lives as long as it does, it will tenaciously hang on to the tiniest of cracks for billions of years even if it's no more complicated than bacteria and given the slightest opportunity it'll complicate itself into single cell organisms and elephants and badgers and so on.

So next time you hear someone going on and on about how wonderful we are and how we're the pinnacle of creation, and how the whole world exists just for us to be somewhere, and praise the lord, remember me and punch them in the back of the head.