I was horrified to see my former best friend from high school rushing towards me in the supermarket with her youngest daughter in tow.
So glad to see me she spilled her life's story out there at the checkout.
She thought it was great to see me. Eventually, she wondered what I'd been doing for the past few decades.
The betrayal this woman had committed - let's just say, my head spun around like she'd hit it with a baseball bat.
I have never understood it.
New century, all sins forgiven? No sir-eee. Not a chance!
I could have faked excitement for her benefit but my thoughts floated in space in slow motion, while she nattered on and on, while flashing her toothy grin.
High school ended and so did our friendship - with not even a word or explanation.
We had sat in classes together for years, played sport together. Shared thoughts and dreams. I thought we were friends.
I tried to keep in touch, even though our lives moved in separate directions. I was at uni. She went straight to work.
She never made time for me.
And here she is at the check-out trying to re-establish contact.
I gather all my conscious being up to be polite to her - not thrilled to know that she lives in the same suburb - just blocks away.
She's a really smart girl. Smarter than I ever was. More popular than I ever will be.
She was my best friend through senior - we were in the same home class in Year 8.
The dereliction of a friendship smarts every time I even think of her. Some hurts never fade.
High school was the longest time I stayed in one school: I never spent more than two years in a primary school.
Moved in Grade 2, moved in Grade 4, moved in Grade 6 - that was another big one but I found my best friend from Grade 5&6 and we do keep in touch.
Just watch Stand By Me to see why it's a big deal. A really big deal for kids.
Friendship, Belonging, Betrayal. The last one doesn't belong in the same sentence.
I found a photo I took of my nieces with their pet black rabbit, Sparkle = :-)
Sparkle died last year.
He used to sit beside me in the sunshine when we were by ourselves - just being together.
I never really thought much of rabbits before him. Now I think that rabbits are just as good as dogs.
He really did have a Sparkle personality. His death hit everyone hard. Very unfortunate circumstances.
He died under the knife. He had a broken leg. The vet told my sister that rabbits don't react well to the trauma of operations but he wouldn't have lived without one.
It is believed that he fractured his leg when her littlest girl tripped and fell while carrying him. I never got to say goodbye.
Nothing to be done. I found a photo of him yesterday and cried - his big feet, that toothy grin, and he was wearing sunglasses.
We all used to have such fun being together!
Well, anyway, last week I went to a different supermarket. And guess who I saw? No, not Rabbit.
She coolly walked past me and my trolley, with her youngest daughter in tow.
I'd seen her out walking in the mornings too. I crossed to the other side of the road or just smiled without stopping to chat.
She got the message. I don't want to be friends now. I do believe in turning the other cheek.
But when you still feel the knife in your back...
And well might you say that she didn't intend to hurt my feelings.
All I know for sure is that no one was to blame for the death of Rabbit.
As they say, Shit Happens.
Sat up last night to watch the live feed from London of Reboot UK. One big question came up which seems pretty serious. The bulk of all public cultural, arts, media funding goes to large conglomerates like the ABC, the BBC, Channel 4 and yet everyone knows that the action is happening elsewhere - beyond the control of the controllers.
I listened to the author of We Think, Charles Leadbeater, find him on Twitter @ WeThink, say that today's tiny start-ups were going to change the world.
Everyone knows that, just look at Microsoft, Google... Giants grow from seeds.
The other thing which seems to be a problem is that these seeds are viewed by "The Establishment" as weeds to be controlled.
But Leadbeater told them that it was the pirates, the scallywags, those who even seem "bonkers", the mavericks who will lead the way.
Perhaps he had just watched Ice Age 3 where the crazy hoon returns the herd to safety also.
Truth in Fiction.
And then, via Twitter, I discover that a Lord Drayson - a British minister is not just Twittering he's actually consulting twitterers for their visions of a better Britain. Are we seeing the start of something here? Twittervision!
I have to say it's a little better than pandering to the bidding of Rove McManus "It's Twitter Time!" - as Kevin Rudd did last week.
An artist who rips it up like Salvador Dali, like Turner, like Degas ... Banksy is my hero! At the Bristol Museum
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This NASA multimedia is so cool.
Hear the TWITTER between the Earth and the Moon in historic audio grabs.
"What inspired you to produce animation?"
British producer Alan Dewhurst had just finished describing to an auditorium full of aspiring animation students at QUT the herculean effort of putting together a deal that saw in this world the Oscar-winning short film Peter and the Wolf. http://office.breakthrufilms.co.uk/peterandthewolffilm/about_us_alan.html
He had a young director who had never made a feature-length film before. They worked in a spartan conditions through a freezing European winter in an unheated warehouse with camera equipment that the Polish animators had stolen from Berlin after Hitler was defeated in 1945!
Several million for a short film of a breathless, terrible beauty.
If you have heard Sir Peter Ustinov narrate Peter and the Wolf you'll understand that even without images it's quite frightening.
And Dewhurt's version looks even bleaker, so no, the film has not even broken even - he remains undaunted though.
What keeps him going? What inspired him to foolishly go down this insane path?
The answer was Richard Williams, the animator who created the 1971 classic retelling of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
"It was all hand-drawn," Dewhurst cooed.
As a lad, he hunted Williams down and landed work as Williams' go-for.
So I come home, google it and watch A Christmas Carol. I remember watching it on TV as a child.
And, for reasons of my own, I jot notes: "Every person has the power to do great things".
Yes. "Fall seven times, get up eight" - says the Japanese proverb I tore out of a newspaper long ago that sits beneath a magnet on my fridge.
But the difference between the verb "to do" and the verb "to be" is as great as the difference between nouns wisdom and knowledge - I think.
To be great you have to do great things, don't you?
A lot of people aspire to "be great" - add a dash of reality TV to YouTube.
Unfortunately, you can't recoup a few million dollars on a short animation that way.
Perhaps construct an online persona, every time you Twitter you see your photo and every utterance published for the world to read? Nah. Won't work.
Meanwhile, in some back room, in some warehouse, in some laboratory, some eager beaver with a purpose decides to see something through, even if it takes 20 years.
In the past week, I've spoken to several really interesting Australians from various backgrounds.
On Thursday, I spoke to the 2006 Australian of the Year, Professor Ian Frazer, a Scottish immigrant, who talked about the fact that science, progress, is not an individual pursuit. Scientists build upon what others discover. Without Galileo there would be no Hubble. It took Frazer 20 years to get a vaccine for cervical cancer on to the world market. "Every person has the power to do great things". A seemingly insignificant discovery could lead to a huge leap in human knowledge.
On Wednesday, I spoke to a commercial lawyer, Heath Ducker, who's written a book (A Room At The Top) about his childhood. He was raised in abject poverty, one of 10 children, and he also believes in this idea that "Every person has the power to do great things". He hasn't read Charles Dickens. His is Pip's story from Great Expectation
s.
Centuries away from Charles Dickens who wrote "...to hear an insect on the leaf" - another phrase I jotted down from A Christmas Carol.
The founder the Trading Post, who kept self-help group Youth Insearch afloat as an anonymous donor, paid his uni fees.
Friday comes and I'm interviewing an Aboriginal activist, Sam Watson, who has written a play about one fierce woman, a poet who had such a way with words. She was Watson's aunty, blood relative. And even for him, her poems are particularly poignant because they marked the first time the Aboriginal story got a mention in Australian school curriculum. He'd only ever heard Australia's European history taught in school. He learned Aboriginal history around the campfire on Stradbroke Island at the feet of elders such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Kath Walker. In the 1960s and 1970s, a black woman in a white man's world dared to raise her voice and demand justice. Watson's put her words on stage and hopes to tour it around Queensland and maybe Australia to tell the stories and show that "Every person has the power to do great things".
So these scrawls I made while watching A Christmas Carol, I've just noticed them pinned on my calendar.
Ignorance and Want cowered beneath the billowing garments of the Ghost of Christmas Present.
These two things my father always sought to eliminate for his family. These two things Ducker works to eliminate for disadvantage youth.
Kath Walker fought to defeat ignorance and want. The Ghost of Christmas Present - the world grappling with cultural revolution, financial crisis and climate change.
My father died in April. And on his grave he had engraved, for reasons of his own..."Never compete, create".
Our opinions differed on many things but he'd chosen the words of a philosopher I admire, Bertrand Russell, who wrote Education and the Social Order.
Here was a man (my dad) "not educated in this country" - as my dad was fond of reminding us - who knew more about a lot of things than most people.
He knew because he was interested.
He would have liked to have had an education - but I don't think he believed enough in himself to do it.
"I'm a simple fitter and turner," he would say. If something broke, he could fix it. If the house needed painting, he'd do it.
I'd say the equivalent of a 1950s fitter and turner may be a 2009 web developer.
You probably don't know any fitter and turners - there aren't many around these days - but if something was just a millimetre out, if something was not square, if something was amiss ... have you ever tried to get a graphic designer past the fact that something on a draft isn't quite lined up yet? Just line it up and be done! There's no way around it.
My migrant father learned to read English by reading the newspapers. He learned to speak English by going to the picture theatre and watching what are now called "old movies". That's how important popular culture was back then. Today we think advertising culture. I wonder what would Dickens think? All of this is now found in one place on the world wide web.
As a family, we watched every BBC production that the ABC ever showed on a Sunday night.
"You'll never understand me because I'm from a different culture," my father'd say.
It was an argument I could never win because I just disagreed. If he could understand Dickens and Australians, I could understand Tolstoy and him!
Anyone know who Tolstoy was?
A small band of us followed his casket to his grave - my father's not Tolstoy's. There were no songs sung, no fabulous celebration of his life with celebrities galore.
His voice was not heard around the world. He quietly went about his business, he started out in poverty working several jobs to put food on the table, he worked six or seven days a week all his life, and he gave each of his children the best education that was of their choosing.
He died at home, as peacefully as could as a man who could barely breathe. And the last words he heard on Earth were Papa. He provided opportunity. He chose it as his reason for being and saw it through and through all the circumstances beyond his control. So we continue his story. "Every person has the power to do great things." The day before he died, aged 72, I came in to find him sitting in front of the computer opened at the stock market. He also loved to dabble.
New Media pioneer Bill Thompson created this short audio boo of his #webat20 Talk.
@billt | http://www.thebillblog.com/billblog/
Quick transcript:
Web: provides access to knowledge.
available to 20 percent of the world.
It's the evolution of a new human sense, development human eye, you see stuff that's out there but didn't have access to before.
It's much bigger than TV and Print.
the fundamentals of printed text have not changed that much.
audio boo: Billt.
http://audioboo.fm/boos/40267-webat20-talk-cut-off.mp3">Listen!
BBC Digital Revolution Blog link:
Hear the man who invented the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners Lee, explain the past and the future of the www.
A world where TV stations will become defunct as random access to programs on the net becomes the norm.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/digitalrevolution/2009/07/tim-bernerslee-and-the-w...
