Where Does Our Information Come From?

I recently read Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster. He travels around China by train.  He has lots of interesting things to say.  Sometimes his attitude can be a bit annoying, but it’s still an interesting book.

Nothing puts human effort into better perspective than a ruined city.  "This was once a great capital," people say, pointing to fallen walls and broken streets and dust.  Then you stand in the silence of the lifeless place and think of Ozymandius, King of Kings, covered by a sand dune and forgotten.  It is very thrilling for an American to consider such a place, because we don’t yet have anything that qualifies – only ghost towns and fairly insignificant small cities, but nothing like the monumental corpses of once-great cities that are known in the rest of the world.  Probably American optimism arises from the fact that we don’t have any devastated cities.  There is something wearying and demoralizing about a lost city, but it can also give you a healthy disregard for real estate.

http://www.vladstudio.com/wallpaper/?typographic_world_map

It was a dark and stormy week.

There was lots of rain in northern NSW and south-east Queensland.   My parents’ house is okay, but some towns near here had to be evacuated and some of the roads were cut off.  A couple of people were killed in the floods.

Two weeks ago one of my Irish relatives and her boyfriend stayed with us for a few days.  She’s my cousin’s daughter.  (At first I thought that made her my second cousin, but she’s actually my 1st cousin once removed.  My nephew is her second cousin.  Gets confusing!).  She and her boyfriend had been doing a working holiday and travelling around Australia.

We went down to Byron Bay for the day.  We also had a look at the beach near my parents’ house.  It’s a 10-minute walk to a really nice beach.  The weather was great.

After my cousin left, the weather got bad.  The storms washed away a lot of the sand from the beach.  On Friday I went down to the beach and took some photos and a video.  The wind was blowing lots of foam in the air.

It’s still in beta stage, so they don’t have a complete listing, but this web site is making articles from Australian newspapers (from 1803-1954) available online.  Great for historical research.

http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home