The Dreaded LoL

You can use an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence instead of a full stop. You then start the next sentence with a capital letter.

Writing for University Courses - Punctuation

Part of a letter circa 1990

I remember when I saw my first smiley. It was in ASCII and I had no idea what it was. I thought it represented a typo - a colon a hyphen and a right parentheses.

This was circa 1992 when I was introduced to email. A friend explained it to me. He said it was an American invention to show that the content was meant to be humorous, adding that Americans had problems with written English.

Well I don't know about that. But certainly things are in decline on both sides of the Pacific.

Actually I am quite taken with American shorthand in spoken English. I like the way they say, "The cat wants out," when it mews at the door. "Don't even go there" is another great Americanism that we all use now. There's nothing wrong with the language evolving. It's when it evolves backwards (is there a word for reverse Darwinism??) that I get concerned.

I first noticed the dumbing down (another Americanism) of the English language when one of my children referred to quotation marks as "talking marks". Then came the smilies. But at least, in the beginning, these were confined to brief emails, text messages and online chats.

It was with some horror that I learned last week, that the use of these symbols and social acronyms have crept into business letters.

Particularly ridiculous is the LoL which is being used by people who obviously have no idea as to its original meaning. It's now used as a written pause. "I went to the store Lol. I bought some perfume." "It was hot yesterday LoL so we went to the beach." A sort of longhand comma.

"Dear Ms Juliff LoL, pls reply 2 this letter b4 it is 2L8 LoL ROFL nbsp!!!"

OMG! What's the world coming 2?

An Imperfect Past and a Forbidden Fruit

Go on and eat forbidden fruit
It's mighty sweet forbidden fruit
It's quite a treat forbidden fruit
Go ahead and bite it I bet you'd be delighted

Nina Simone at Newport 1960

Apples in the Apple

"An Imperfect Past and a Forbidden Fruit" - I refer of course to the life and death of Alan Turing (1912 - 1954), one of the greatest minds of his generation, who died by eating a poisoned apple.

The forbidden fruit? Turing had sexual relations with a man. His punishment? Prosecution for being a homosexual, the stripping of his security clearance, and chemical castration.

Turing is famous for his code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during WWII, helping to create the Bombe that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines. He is one of the founding fathers of computer science. He conceived the "Turing machine" and the "Turing Test" which measures the intelligence of computers.

He is now honored by the Turing reward given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community". The award is currently sponsored by Intel and Google.

His favorite fairy tale was Snow White. Hence the poisoned apple???

The imperfect past? The British government's treatment of him. It is only now, over 50 years since his untimely death, that there has been an apology. Ian McEwan, Richard Dawkins and other notable artists and scientists backed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous apology by the British government, for its treatment of him.

The apology was given. Two days ago.

You can see the petition at Number 10.

Ada Lovelace , Woodman, Tinman and Ironman, Sandman, Pebbleman, Stoneman, Snow White, dining philosophers, poisoned apples - these are not words we normally associate with computers. Yet the history of computer science weaves a complex tapestry and is populated with some of the finest and most creative minds of modern times. Far from being a dry science or craft, computing is a fascinating and compelling discipline. As Djikstra said at his address on the occasion of his Turing Award in 1972, "in their capacity as intellectual challenge, they [computers] are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind."

As well, working with them is a great way to earn a crust.

Woodman Tinman et al were versions of a programming language designed by committee, and named Ada after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815 - 1852), the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron. Ada is said to have written the first computer program - in the 19th century - a program for a computer envisaged by Ada Lovelace's lifelong friend, Charles Babbage (1791 – 1871) - before it was built. She also predicted the application of computers to areas other than mathematics, such a the generation of music.

Perhaps the first person to recognise the truth of "garbage in, garbage out" Babbage is quoted as saying, 'On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.'

Then there's Dutch computer scientist Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930 - 2002) who refused to use a computer for his work, preferring a paper and fountain pen. He named his Volkswagen bus, "the Touring Machine", and on artificial intelligence said, "the question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim"

I stumbled into the field of computing by pure chance. I took computing 101 as an elective at Deakin University in 1980 as part of a Masters by course work.

And so it was that my third apple was Alan Turing's, lying half-eaten on the floor near his bed, lovelessly-laced with cyanide.

And my fourth? New York of course. My adopted and much loved city. The Big Apple.

She'll be apples!

See that apple over yonder if you'll take a bite
You and Adam both are bound to have some fun tonight
Go on and eat forbidden fruit
It's mighty sweet forbidden fruit
It's quite a treat forbidden fruit
Go ahead and taste it you don't wanna waste it

Nina Simone at Newport (1960)

An Apple in the Apple

My first remembered encounter with an apple was in the front seat of a Fiat Bambino, circa 1969.

It was a bright red Fiat, almost the color of the very apple that my "date" was in the process of crunching into. I believe he was in the process of dropping me home after seeing "Last Year at Marienbad" or some other just as incomprehensible film. Certainly it would have been in black and white. Like New Yorkers, the self-proclaimed Melbourne Uni elite didn't "do color".

Except for apples that is. And Fiat Bambinos. No one could accuse us of consistency.

You would not believe this, but after taking several large crunches of said apple, my date turned to me, exhaling his apple breath and tried to kiss me. Needless to say I hot-footed it out of the Bambino lickety-split. I was not to see him again for thirty years!

By then The Date was a solicitor, almost retired, and I was a computer person. It was at an art gallery somewhere in Melbourne. I was at the opening of an exhibition so eminently forgettable that I have forgotten what it was about.

"Michael S is here," someone (equally forgettable) hissed at me. I assume she told me because she thought he was important. Something like "my son the doctor", "my friend the solicitor".

I looked around. I couldn't see anyone even remotely like him. There were some old guys over in the corner. Paunchy-looking legal types. Was he one of them?

I asked the person who had informed me of her friend the solicitor's presence, and she pointed him out, the oldest looking one of the paunches. I interrogated her in some detail, as the person she had surreptitiously indicated looked nothing like the tall slender young apple-breathing person I'd last seen hunched over his apple core in a red Fiat.

"Yes yes I am sure it's him," she snapped. So I hot-footed it, this time towards the apple eater.

"Michael S, n'est ce pas! I'd recognize you ANYwhere. You haven't changed one bit!" I lied to humour myself, correctly predicting his conceit. He looked chuffed, in that sad way that only old men can. "Where's ya apple?" I asked, doing my best Elaine-Benes-mixed-with-Annie-Hall impersonation.

When it was all sorted out, who I was, how many times we had both been married, what we did after 1969, how many and how old were our children, he asked what I'd meant by the apple remark.

Funny, he had no recollection of the incident.

The next apple I remember was in about 1978. By then I was into color films and was married to a man who didn't believe in washing machines. I used to boil the clothes in a wood-heated copper and heave the steaming stew around with a stick. Don't ask me why. The stick bit, I mean. By then I had also born two children, the youngest of whom was around three year's old when he suddenly developed a phobia about my mother.

Now I'd had one for thirty odd years, but it seemed strange for my little chap to express his at such a young age. When we, our little nuclear family of myself, the man who didn't believe in washing machines, my daughter and little Pog as he was then called, were about to pile into the car to visit my mother, he'd dig his heels into the ground and scream blue murder.

When the car drew up outside her house he'd undo his seat-belt and try to crawl under the seat.

I though of taking him to a shrink but decided that any man who didn't believe in washing-machines was unlikely to believe in shrinks. So I tried my own methods to wheedle out of my little Pog, just what WAS the matter with his relationship with his grandma.

I was patient and it paid off. Turned out it was those shiny red apples she'd polish in anticipation of the grand-children's visits. She was a witch. It all fitted. The trendy whisk broom she kept in the corner of the vestibule. The peacock feathers. Her laugh. The apple was the clincher.

"It's OK, he doesn't hate you," I took pleasure in explaining to my mother on the phone. "He just thinks you're a witch. Cool it with those apples!"

You'd have thought by now that I'd have had enough of apples. But this wasn't the case. There was another very important apple lurking in my future. This particular apple would be 55 years old if it were around today. It was, in its time, a most mysterious apple, closer in many ways to the imagined witch's apple, yet left half-eaten like the law student's before he lurched so futilely towards me all those years ago. It was an apple both past and future. It pre-dated the season of the witch, but it was yet to affect what is now part of my history. It was let us say, simultaneously a prequel and a sequel.

And it will be THIS apple, past imperfect that will be written about in the future.

Stay tuned.

Remembering 9/11

It's almost 9/11/2009 - 11th September - 2009. And so I'm posting something I wrote on another of my websites, shortly after "9/11" 2001 - Little has changed.

The Insensitive Australian

"I've seen him in the headlines
And on the evening news.
I saw him on the sidelines
When stones were thrown at Jews.

And marching in Montgomery
Pretending that he cared
I saw him wink
As though some old conspiracy were shared.

He was in the crowd at Dallas
At the close of Camelot.
I spotted him on Campus
When the students had been shot.

In an oriental village
With civilians left to rot
He was hanging out with soldiers
Trading heroin for pot

And he was smiling ... Smiling...

Dory Previn, Dopplegänger

Several years ago, when I was going out with an American, lets call him Chuck, I went to a dinner party in Melbourne. This was around the time of the spate of school shootings in the US.

Now Chuck had never owned a gun, had two children of his own, and was definitely anti-gun. He was no believer in the "right to bear arms", and was ashamed of his fellow Americans who are.

We settled in at the restaurant. It was a lovely balmy Melbourne summer night, the food was excellent and the wine top quality. There was the hum of conversation, and just as I was thinking how wonderful it was to be back home, one of the party shouted across the table,

"Chuck, what does it feel like to come from a society where children kill children?"

In my naivety I expected a stunned silence of embarrassment. Yet it seemed that only myself and my partner were shocked. The other guests wanted to know what it was like too.

I can't remember how Chuck responded. Indeed I'd forgotten the incident altogether until the other day when I was talking to another ex on the phone. One of "they-are-getting-a-taste-of-their own-medicine" breed, this ex (thank god) proceeded to sound off on how Americans deserved the tragedy of September 11.

Somehow Americans are fair game. As another Australian in America commented, "People tolerate slurs against American and Americans that they would be horrified to hear about impoverished, dark-skinned, nations, especially those who consider themselves part of the left."

An article by Melbourne novelist, Olga Lorenzo, a Cuban American on this topic was published several years ago. I remember reading it back then, and an Australian Abroad writer quoted it in a recent net discussion. Olga wrote, "What is interesting, however, about the prejudice against Americans I now encounter because I speak with an American accent, is that it doesn't usually come from the far right, as it often did when I was a child. Then it was most likely to be from ignorant rednecks and Florida "crackers", poorly educated and socially disadvantaged people. In Australia it can come from left-leaning university lecturers of social work, who are so sure of the political correctness of their prejudice that they announce it at dinner parties."

How true. And how sad. Again, "The people I hear say things about "Yanks"such as "I don't understand how anyone can find an American attractive" would never say the same thing - no matter what their private beliefs - about Greeks, or Italians, or Indonesians, or Arabs. Try substituting another nationality for Americans in all the above incidents, and see what I mean."

I have to wonder why my own countrymen have this bigoted attitude. Definitely more pronounced amongst those who consider themselves left-wing and who are university educated, you just have to wonder how they came to almost hate a group of people who are effectively innocent. No one is asking them to like American foreign policy of American culture. I don't particularly like the current Afghani culture and foreign policy. But I would in no way feel self-righteous about insulting an individual Afghani. And I suspect that the Australians who find it so easy to insult the American at the dinner table would go out of their way to be ultra-polite to a Middle Eastern guest. No racism for them!

Somehow it is just plain wrong to be an American. Recently I was accused by a reader for being a "ra-ra American" when I wrote an article about life in New York post September 11. I could not understand it. But then, on talking to the ex mentioned above, and hearing his happiness at our tragedy, I started to understand. These people really don't like Americans. It isn't the foreign policy, it isn't the culture. Could it be part of the tall poppy syndrome? Do they like to see Americans cut down and killed? But even if they do hate Americans, this is a poor excude for rudeness.

Every one has a right to her opinion, but there are times when a little sensitivity is in order. What I would like to ask my fellow Australians back home, is think a little. How would YOU feel if your city just lost 6,000 of its citizens, and was under constant threat of losing more? Who do you imagine these people are who were killed or bereaved? Do you think they were all rich Wall Street brokers (who surely also have a right to life)? You are wrong. The people killed and affected are people of all different ages and races, of different ecomomic means and social position. Some were working, others were homeless living in the subway underneath the towers. Many had children. And now we have the postal workers. Sure, "only a handfull" have died, I read in the Australian press. One article even stooped to attempt to slur saying we had more chance of getting shot by our neighbours' handgun' (illegal here in New York by the way) than by anthrax. I am sure that would be very reassuring to the thousands of postal workers here, who have good reason for concern. I just hope none of them read the Age online.

As for me, I am finding it increasingly hurtful and disturbing too read the press of my country of birth. It is getting that I am not even looking forward to going home this Christmas. How can I listen to people saying things like "A bit of their own medicine", "they had it coming", "they asked for it", and take it lightly when, like my fellow New Yorkers, I am already upset about what was done to our city and its citizens.

I would ask my fellow Australians to show the people of New York and Washington, the same compassion they show the people of Afghanistan. Think please before you say something that might be very cruel to the listener. And if you are talking to a New Yorker or Washingtonian, can you think first. You just might be talking to someone recently bereaved.

Kate Juliff
New York
October 2001

Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
Gerald Manley Hopkins 1918

"Whatever is fickle, freckled ..."

Gerald Manley Hopkins has, for as long as I can remember, been my favorite poet. How was I introduced to him? It certainly wasn't by my parents, true atheists both, and in my father's case, vehemently anti-Catholic and especially anti-Jesuit.

My favorite Hopkin's poem is the very short, "Pied Beauty". With its last line of, "Praise him", its purpose is clear, and so I was surprised to read in a New Yorker review of Paul Mariani's "Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life" (reviewer, Adam Kirsch) that Hopkin's praise of the world's beauty has raised concerns of pantheism.

"He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change"

Apparently Hopkins was aware of "the gulf between his artistic vision and his religious one", and regarded his poetry as self-indulgent.

I remembered "Pied Beauty" as I walked down Second Avenue to brunch, this sunny dappled Sunday. For amidst all the construction that's going on (Smile, You're on Second Avenue) , amidst the garbage, the heavy machinery and the chain fences blocking out half our neighborhood, I indulgently noticed the dappled things.

The phrase, "quality of life" has been used to death - pun intended. It has been exploited to a degree such that it means nothing. "Quality of life", "quality time" - to use a most annoying Australian-ism, "same difference".

And so while I was, as an American advertising captioner might say, "stopping to smell the roses", I couldn't help contrasting the dappled things with the trite, tepid "smell-the-roses" scenario of the CitiBank billboards of a few months ago.

Like "green", "wind-power" and "solar energy", "quality of life" is "in". One suspects that with the almost 10% unemployment figures, that advertisers are reduced to pushing something as nebulous as "quality".

"With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim"

I stop briefly in Rupert Park on 91st Street.

There are people reading books, feeding birds, watching their children play. This is a Manhattan that I, like many others, rarely stop to notice, let alone partake of.


Do these people really need to see signs like this?



Or this?



I look for more dappled things. They are everywhere.

"All things counter, original, spare, strange"

At 93rd Street I turn right, past the ice-cream parlor and right again down the driveway.

There's a man walking his dog. It's a dappled thing!

I smile. "May I take your dog's photo?" I ask. "Sure," he smiles back. A true New Yorker! "Be still Ruffles," he commands. Ruffles ignores him. A true New Yorker.

I take the photo when Ruffles is as still as he's ever going to be and thank the stranger. Like a true New Yorker.

Yep we New Yorkers don't need those CitiBank signs to tell us how to be.




Things cannot be too bad, when even an atheist can say, "Glory be to God for dappled things."

Barong Days

The moisture in the air is just off being water. It's hot and steamy and eight in the morning.

Restaurant workers, tired from last night's activity, are hosing down the sidewalks. Water on dust turns to a murky steam.

Short brown people sweep up last night's mess left by revelers and workers who were just too tired to pick up after themselves.

Flower sellers are arranging their wilting freesias hoping that today's sales will be an improvement on yesterday's dismal returns.

There's a white guy leaning against a wall next door to one of the flower vendors. Out of it. Whether by alcohol or hard drugs, whose to know. Or to care.

Ever bright-eyed, little children frolic by, hair braided and beaded into corn-cob rows. One of them stumbles - the pavement is pitted, pockmarked, pedestrianed-out.

It's noisy. Horns beep. On corners people are handing out fliers advertising new restaurants (not another one!) and clothing sales.

Most of the tourists are still asleep. They'll be up shortly and the streets will be even more congested. Hopefully they'll spend money and help to buoy the economy.

Ah, there are some German tourists. They are up early, hoping to take in the sights before the tourist rush gets into full swing. They are each holding an end of a large map. One of them spots me looking at them.

"Excuse me," he says in heavily accented English. "But how am I getting to Roosevelt Island from Manhattan? This is 59th Street, yes?"

I assure him it is, and give him detailed directions.

He thanks me.

I catch the Q60 on Second Avenue, and head to work.

Don't Cry for Me, Argentina

This week's blog was going to be about the South Carolina governor, Mark Sanford, who disappeared off to Buenos Aires with his soul mate, leaving behind his wife, kids and constituents who thought he was hiking in the Appalachians.

But things took a dive last Friday, and I'm wiped out, computered-out, fazed out, burnt out and, well, to be perfectly blunt, out of it.

I'd planned to work this weekend. From home and for my salaried job. I stocked up with easy-to-cook food like eggs and canned peaches. I should have ordered canned laughter ... but as they say, rear-vision is 20-20.

Friday night came and suddenly everything went haywire. In the short span of 48 hours I had to

- do my salaried job
- reprogram my phone connection
- redo http://wwww.gumnut.com
- change my personal web-hoster
- set up my new iPod Touch (OK, I didn't HAVE to do that, but it was a NICE THING)
- look after my husband's email and transfer it to somewhere in the Timor Sea

Yikes!

And all this on top of everything else a woman has to do in New York in a weekend.

I tell anyone who cares to listen to me - which is zero, as no one listens to anyone in New York - we just talk, that I hate computers. And that, my friend, is why I am successful in the I.T. industry. For believe it or not, I am.

It all started a hundred years ago, in Bellbrae Australia. Bellbrae is a sleepy little coastal town, not far from Bell's Beach (known affectionately by the ten locals, as "Bell's"), where surfers surf, housewives gossip and men well, men do whatever men do.

My children were both school-age or almost school-age. Supposedly I'd soon have time on my hands. I thought I'd do a course. Post grad. Keep the brain cells synapsing. And I enrolled in a masters by course-work program at the closest university, Deakin.

Although I started off studying for a Masters in Psychology, a weird little new subject intrigued me. "Computer Science 101".

"Yeah, I'll be the mug," I thought. And enrolled.

It was bizarre. This was during the pre-historic, pre-PC age. None of the students had even seen a computer. And if you thought that they'd show us one, well you just weren't around in the heady days of Deakin University's coming-of-age.

We had to write in computer "languages". Stuff like "A$ =1" and "goto label-1". I'd studied French, Latin and Indonesian. Surely I could master this ...

One day, one of the more pro-active students in our little post-grad group asked to "see" the computer. "It's a PDP 11," the instructor sneered at him, but nevertheless escorted him to some strange place forbidden to ordinary mortals. Our fellow student returned. He looked nonplussed.

"Well," we said. "What does it look like?"

"Like a fridge," he said.

We sat there in wonder, and went back to writing stuff like A$ = B$.

Little did I know back then, but my life was at a TURNING POINT.

I passed Computer Science 101 and went on to all sorts of glorious subjects. Subjects like, "Compiler Construction" and "Pascal, ADA and Algol". It's a wonder I didn't fry my brain. Or did I?

But I persevered and when I finished, I ENTERED THE INDUSTRY.

My life has never been the same.

Yeah, I know, I should have taken up surfing. Joined the Bell's crowd and worked for Rip Curl.

But I didn't.

And the upshot is, here I am In Manhattan, surrounded by cables, ATA's, routers, phones that don't work, a very sad iPod thirsty for a song, something called a Garmin Heart monitor, and this morning's breakfast dishes.

I'd write some more, but I just HAVE to get the VoIP phone working. Either that, or buy a ticket to Argentina.

Streaming, flaxen, waxen

A hive for the bees

I want it long, straight, curly, fuzzy
Snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty
Oily, greasy, fleecy
Shining, gleaming, streaming

Hair ©1967 Rado and Ragni

So the now oft-maligned baby boomers have done it again. Taken a stand, that is.

We are showing off our hair again, in all it's natural glory.

I feel liberated. I first noticed a change in my hair back in the eighties when henna, which I'd been using for close on a decade, started turning it a brassy orange instead of lustrous chestnut.

Out went the mud and in went the dye. Till I like many others of my generation decided to let it all hang out and grow out.

Shoulder length or longer

I wonder though, whether I''m alone in thinking that my own gray hair is chic, rather than an indication of age. Somehow I just don't see my own gray hair as I saw the hair of my uncles and aunts.

Actually, I prefer to think of my hair as silver, rather than gray.

The band "The Hip Replacements" now "Hip Tones" might be stuck in the past singing covers of the fifties and sixties, but my idea of hip has nothing to do with bones. I think my hair is hip. Cool. Silver. Platinum even.

So what's the difference between my silver hair and the hair of people who grew old last century?

To discover this difference I scoured my photo album and was shocked to discover there was no one in it over fifty.

down to there hair

Did the olds as they call them in OZ, hide from the camera back then? Do we? Now?

The photo album didn't hold the secret so I was left to my memories and came up with the following for last century's olds. For the female of the species, that is.

- They wore brooches (pins for you lot in the States)
- They rinsed their hair blue.
- They all had variations of the one hairdo that was round and fluffy.
- They wore nightgowns to bed.
- They wore hats to weddings and to funerals.
- They were invited to weddings and funerals
- They used a teapot to make tea.
- They thought black was what one wore to funerals

Here baby, there mama

- They had husbands who had steady jobs and mowed lawns
- They wore matching tops with finely printed pastel floral terralene skirts
- They didn't eat when walking down the street
- They owned sewing boxes with thimbles and pincushions made of little Chinese figures around a pink padding center.

Not much fear of us boomers falling into THAT stereotype.

And to the "Hip Tones" née "Hip Replacements", I have this to say. You might be ga ga at the go go, but I intend to Flow it, show it
Long as God can grow it
My hair

The Iceman Cometh

Those Were the Days, My Friend

Picture this. An upper working-class suburb of Melbourne, Australia. A hot summer day. Early 1960's. A lone man walks along the street holding a very large block of ice on his shoulder. It's partly draped with a hessian bag, in order I suppose, to stop it slipping. "Anyone for ice?" he's calling out.

Bad timing Mister Iceman. By then we, yes even my family, had fridges. I suspect we were the last kids on the block to own a fridge. Before that we'd had ice-chests. And for the bulk of my readers - an ice-chest was a pre-fridge cooling device for use in the home.

The ice-chest looked like a very small refrigerator. If I remember correctly, there was a compartment for the block of ice at the top of the unit. The resulting cold air would convect down to cool the food that was stored, fridge-like, on the shelves below. The blocks of ice for the ice-chests, were delivered to the home by an "iceman" who had a refrigerated van for the purpose.

I googled "ice-chest" and came up with lots of pages, but they all referred to ice coolers or Eskies as they are known in Australia. Modern day portable devices for keeping things (usually beer) cool at sporting events or at beaches where there are no electricity outlets.

Ah, I am getting old my friends. Soon I'll be, horror of horrors, a receptacle for oral history, as opposed to ... better not go there ...

But to get back to my theme before my fragile brain wanders even further afield.

Second Avenue Subway Construction - A Four Year Project

The iceman of the suburban street of my childhood was a dying breed. I don't know how I know this, but that particular iceman on that sunny Australian day had just bought the business. A bad business choice.

I thought of the iceman when a new business started up around the corner from our apartment in Manhattan - a magazine store!

Not only had the business person chosen to buy in the middle of a downturn in the economy, in a place where drilling for a new subway was ripping up the street and keeping prospective consumers away in droves, but he (I assume it was a he) had decided to sell paper magazines. Un-Green, unWanted and unProfitable.

Poor Magazine Shop Owner. Poor Iceman.

The number of jobs that are becoming obsolete is mind-boggling, and one has to wonder why people enter into such business lack-of-opportunities and career paths when all signals screech, don't do it.

On the way out are paper boys, magazine stores (were they ever 'in'?), paperback writers (remember the Beatles), people who remember the Beatles, people who remember icemen, people who remember ice-chests.

On the way up are I.T. people, clouds, cell phone designers, greenies.

It's a mixed bag for yours truly. Oops - on the way OUT are people who sign off with

"Yours truly"

Yours truly,

Kathleen

Wild Strawberries and A Walk on the Wild Side

Panna Cotta at Stockholm's Cafe Albert

"I've lost all that Bahamas feeling; it's like I was never even there!" grumbled a co-worker, two days after returning to work from her Caribbean vacation. "Tell me about it!" I replied in New-York-speak. "It's like I was never even IN Sweden!"

I took the photos of the desert and the fish during my last days in Stockholm - so I could later remember the taste and ambiance of the place. Cool, crisp and civilized. But Sweden I've discovered, has another side, and as I waited in line at security at Stockholm-Arlanda Airport on my day of departure, I realized that the dark Bergman-von-Sydow-side of the Swedes had taken a hold on my psyche. What WAS the point of the vacation, any vacation?

Arctic Char at the Hotel Diplomat

It seemed to me that a vacation is merely a winding-up followed by an unraveling. It's like you do a heap of things and then proceed to UNDO them in reverse order.

Ten days before, I'd packed. Traveled TO Newark airport. Placed my case on a conveyor belt. Waited. Traveled to Stockholm. Taken my case off a conveyor belt. Caught a bus to a hotel. And now - I had traveled on the bus from the hotel back to Arlanda. I was about to undo everything and to return to Newark airport. Get a bus back to the apartment and unpack everything I'd packed in step 1. Bizarre!!!

Is a vacation like Bertrand Russell's table that ceases to exist when one is no longer looking at it? It seems so. And as I waited for security, my mind wandered further. WHY did I take those two photos? Was I like the blind man in Jocelyn Moorhouse's film Proof, taking photos to prove the existence of an unseen whatever? Whatever.

Clearly my Swedish experience had had some effect on my mental stability and had brought a new dimension to the term, "The Stockholm Syndrome". I was certainly identifying with the glass-darkliness of human existence - yikes, "existence" - that word again.

On arriving at the gate area I noticed several Swedes drinking straight vodka. Bloody hell; it was only six in the morning. I also noticed that the chairs were not cramped together as in U.S. airports, but separated by attractive wooden tables which clearly DID exist. Well they did when I was looking at them ... Pity though, the spaciousness meant there weren't enough seats for the 400 plus people waiting for the boarding call.

I stood waiting for the call and pondered my trip. I'd enjoyed it. I'd seen both sides of Sweden. The dark and the light. I remembered the guide at an archeological site at Birka where Vikings once ruled the northern seas. "We will be stopping digging shortly. We must do so because it would not be fair to our sister archeologists in the future if we took everything. We must leave them something to find". Sounded like a vertical job-sharing plan over the millennia. Personally I thought it was a bit over the top. Social-correctness gone viral.

The boarding calls started. More unraveling. I boarded the plane. I took my seat and fell asleep almost immediately. I dreamed of cool places in a land where the sun never seemed to set. Of blond citizens and cool designs. Of clean subways and girls wearing thick leggings under flimsy summer dresses. I dreamed of a land of contradictions where death plays chess and archaeologists don't dig.

Through a bus window. Darkly

And then I woke. Unraveling I got up where several hours ago I sat down. I left the plane instead of getting on it. I walked OUT of the airport instead of entering it and took a bus away from the airport, instead of to it.

Reality check. What was this? Where were the cool people walking leisurely down wide streets? Where was the silence? Horns beeped. The temperature was 100 degrees in both scales and rising. Look at those people. Frazzled. All different colors. Where were the blonds?

I arrived back at my apartment building and went IN through the revolving doors where last time I'd gone out. I unlocked the front door instead of, as before, locking it. I UNpacked.

The Wild Side

I was unraveled.

And then a great insight from some place that cannot exist as I cannot see it, descended into my New York frazzled mind.

Unraveling.

Maybe the Swedish archaeologists should be putting their archaeological finds BACK into the earth for their as yet unborn colleagues. After all, that would be the fair thing to do.

Perhaps I'll them write a letter suggesting it.

I'm already planning my next trip to Stockholm. To collect my Nobel Prize.