Bright Ideas

The Blair UK government is well-known for its idiotic ideas. On-the-spot fines where you would be frogmarched to the nearest ATM. The A* grade in GCSEs. The Millennium Dome. Harriet Harman.

The Aussie government appears to be competing with them. From 2010, it will no longer be possible to buy the traditional incandescent light bulb. Only the fluorescent energy-saver bulbs will be on sale. This is expected to reduce the country's carbon emissions by, if I use the most optimistic estimate I could find, as much as 0.1%.

I'm somewhat torn over this one. While I do think we should be doing our best not to completely strip the planet of its resources before we've figured out where we can get refills, I would think that there are other things that could be encouraged to help with this. E.g. charging shops and offices high electricity rates after normal opening hours, so they're not encouraged to leave all their lights blazing because it might deter a burglar and it "doesn't cost much". The sooner economists come up with a sensible measure to replace GDP that factors in intangible costs the better.

(I also noticed this was in the news today, so it appears that they're also not averse to plagiarism.)

Plans for the long weekend - I'm using up one of my time-off-in-lieu days I got for working silly hours in January :

- Visit some gardening stores and buy a garden table and some local plants (local, hence drought-resistant ... I can only water my plants on Tuesday, Thursday and alternating Saturday nights, as I live in an even-numbered house. This is not a joke - see above re crazy Aussie ideas.)
- Visit furniture stores, to purchase a bed, a dining table and chairs and a sofa (which will largely complete my arrival, at least in a purely materialistic sense. Might think about getting a telly at some point in the future, but I'm really not missing having one)
- Visit Hanging Rock, something I failed to do a few weeks ago. (One of my colleagues told me a story which is probably only amusing if you've seen the film or are at least vaguely aware of the legend. She and some of her friends once went there dressed as Victorian schoolgirls, didn't realise the park closed at 5 so happily carried on walking, and the rangers found them after a major search 2 hours later. Well, I laughed!)
- Visit some other local tourist spot, which I haven't decided on yet. Might be The Rip - the entrance to Port Phillip Bay, on which Melbourne stands, one of the most dangerous stretches of coast in the country, and also where an Aussie prime minister named Harold vanished while swimming. (The disappearance of Harold Bishop was definitely a case of art imitating life, though, as the real Harold, Harold Holt, disappeared in 1967.)

My stuff did arrive on 7th Feb. Mostly, anyway. There were 3 mishaps. In increasing order of irritation - first, my stereo had been slightly dented on the top but remained perfectly functional, second, a corner about 2 inches long broke off my coffee table and third, they lost one of my packages altogether. Of the 24 packages they shipped, it was definitely the "best" one they could have lost - all it was was a sheet of plywood which formed the back of my flat-pack bookcase, and fortunately they sell wood over here, I've seen it advertised.

Stupid newspaper statistics misuse #1379845 - see the 22 Feb item here. Will people ever understand probability?

And to finish, a last memory of Venezuela - my tentmate Mark, a photographer and travel journalist by night (by day he works as tech support for a major insurance company), wrote this article on the trip. If you look carefully, you can see me swimming in one of the photos (if I'm honest, you really need to know that it's me there in the first place!) Note also the scary three-armed fruit-seller.