Surreal flowers of Australia

Australia is home to the many of the world's most surreal plants. Here are some examples that are in flower now on the south coast of New South Wales.

Grevilleas
at Booderee Botanic Gardens (formerly known as Jervis Bay Botanic Gardens) Jervis Bay

Fringed Lily (Thysanotus tuberosus)

A favourite of mine, this minute flower is widely distributed, yet as Warren and Gloria Sheather say in their superb site, A View from Yallaroo, " The plants are invisible . . . until they flower. " Even then, they are invisible to those who travel faster than a walk. The flowers are so tiny, they'd be useless as a corsage – and anyway, they die as soon as they're picked, so in season, they can always be found in their most beautiful settings.

Alfar's Kite of Stars and Other Stories - A virtual launch

First of all, it's against my code as a reader looking for truth in blab, to rave positively about a book that I secretly don't respect. Second, I was delighted to have the chance to wax diarrheic about Dean Francis Alfar's The Kite of Stars and Other Stories, just physically launched in Manila by Anvil Publishing.

The Kite of Stars and Other Stories by Dean Francis Alfar

Blindfolded courier pigeons, insatiable appetites, overwhelming pride, toes painted blue, spooned soursop, the AsiaPac community station in geosynch orbit around the moon, love without a heart, tragedy and absurdity; stars of course, in many forms; and always, riddles. For those who like their stories rich, their wit dry and their history served with a twist, this gorgeous collection from a cynical romantic deserves a global readership. Alfar writes of many times and in many styles including the classic fairy tale, but in two ways he is a 21st century English-language-plus writer. His use of words and surprising vocabulary is so wonderfully, playfully true to meaning that he can only be an English-as-a-second-language writer (among which are the best users of English in the world today). And he writes of place with a calm assurance of its importance, not as some ethnic other than the default normal western setting, but as important in itself. I have to add that I particularly love his historical concoctions, especially the footnotes.

To make a long (and wholeheartedly enthusiastic) blurb one sentence longer: Dean Francis Alfar's Kite of Stars and Other Stories is bold and penetrating, warming and luscious as a durian but legal as airplane carry-on.

See natural wonders without tourists and gift shops

Cappadocia, Warrambungles, and Monument Valley are spectacular, but to those who aren't size-prejudiced, spectacular sites are everywhere.

The magnifying glass attitude

Peter Magellan, in a recent letter in New Scientist and on his excellent blog, Effing the Ineffable, advocates a symbolic magnifying glass to fill a need – We (atheists, freethinkers, rationalists and assorted brights) need a symbol under which we can unite, much like the Christian fish.

Peter Magellan's proposed "Rationalist Lens"

He calls this "an unambiguous alternative to symbolise all kinds of rationalist world views, not just atheism - which defines us by what we are not, rather than by what we are."

Magellan's stance contrasts with the Scarlet Letter of the Out Campaign advocated by Richard Dawkins as an answer to a need expressed by the irrepressible PZ Myers –
"a logo for the godless"

Richard Dawkins' proposed "Scarlet Letter"

Myers says: Now, though, there is one possible option: the RDF has started the Out Campaign, an effort to get atheists to publicly and proudly declare their status. It has a slightly different meaning — it's not exactly a symbol of atheism, but more a symbol of the willingness to come out about your disbelief — but it's nice, it's simple, it's clean. It's a simple red Zapfino "A", the scarlet letter.

I am wholeheartedly for the magnifying glass, for a number of reasons.

Defining what we are is always preferable, I think, to what we are not. Advocacy stimulates and inspires, whereas defining from the negative adds legitimacy to the other side.

The question of whether God exists, any god, is irrelevant. The pathology should be the only issue, and in that, no person who believes in any god can refute the simple evidence stuck in the pudding of care. God is either supremely indifferent to what happens on earth, and to every living being, or sick enough that the greatest meanies who ever lived, including the greatest terrorists – are milktoasts in comparison.

If God exists, the very randomness of who and how the living suffer and do well should negate a reason to either give thanks or to say please. But that doesn't mean that it's worthwhile arguing with people who still think that their god will treat them differently.

The more effort one spends on refuting what can never be proven to exist, the less one can explore the wonders of what does.

Which brings me to the other reason I am so keen on the magnifying glass as a symbol. While I don't usually enter competitions, I entered the following earlier this year in the New Scientist/Australian Museum Eureka Science Photography competition just for the chance to express my feelings. (Though the winner of this and previous years' competitions, and other runners-up are far out of my league, so many of these gorgeous and inspiring pictures concentrate on the small.)

Veranda Space *

Outer Space isn't the last frontier. This picture was taken five steps away from my office, on the other side of the wall. It is both unique and usual in its shed skin, mummified life, eggs, silk, plant life and randomly beautiful 'design'. There are countless inter-related frontier galaxies that exist right here on earth, from the seas to the barely visible with the naked eye, to the Biosphere Mary E. White writes about in Earth Alive! From Microbes to a Living Planet. As for problems, no big picture can be understood without the small. Concerned about global warming? "Insects are the first things to go," CSIRO scientist Don Sands says. "They're the best indication of climate change that we have because the impact on them is almost immediate."

But who notices insects, except to squish them? Mostly people who were bitten with curiosity as kids, like the Chew family of Brisbane. Now more than at any other time, people are screened off from the natural world. Computers can't spark the insatiable curiosity that is the basis for a lifetime in science (and problem solving) anywhere near as well as a $7 magnifying glass and a shove outdoors.

* I love the fact that the shed skin in the foreground is from the larval stage of a (terrifying to curators) creature that even when full size, is noticeable more from the evidence it leaves behind than the sight of it. Like Ebola, it is part of the Great Unseen to the uninterested, but indisputably and importantly, real.

as the grains of sand

Tapping the sand out of this sea urchin's shell, these less weighty though not much larger


copepods fell out.

Subterranean magazine #7 – stories I liked and why

Though I'll say again that I'm not a reviewer, I do want to jot down a few thoughts about some stories I liked in the new Subterranean magazine #7, edited by Ellen Datlow and published by Subterranean Press.

The mother-daughter relationship was very touching in Lisa Tuttle's Old Mr. Boudreaux, and so real. And the importance of place was done with style and the sensitivity of that curiously titled person, the "expatriot". Age also, was something that I thought Lisa Tuttle wrote about with great trueness. The end was a surprise. A lovely surprise. I had only just read Tuttle's magnificently creepy short story, The Mezzotint, in Gathering the Bones (eds. Jack Dann, Ramsey Campbell, and Dennis Etchison) and am looking forward to reading more by her, as these were two very different stories indeed.

I liked Terry Bisson's Pirates of the Somali Coast! I don't know the fine points of how kids write to each other in emails (though I thought the spelling might be too good to be true), the only kids having emailed me I've had to say 'no' to, unless they could stop sending me attachments and they couldn't – but I do know that it isn't just kids who are getting their reality and fiction messed up; and who think that no matter what they do, no consequences for them will arise. Like 4-year-no-interest purchases or beating up on others who aren't expected to be able to hit back. The counselling was, I thought, the perfect touch, which leads me to recommend this superb piece by Andy Coughlin in a recent New Scientist:
Counselling can add to post-disaster trauma

Lucius Shepard's Vacancy reminded me in terms of tone and character, of some James M Cain (not The Postman Always Rings Twice, a story I've always thought weak) though I think Vacancy is better than anything Cain wrote (though that might be unfair to Cain whose stories suffer from emotionality and themes that didn't age well). Shepard's story is a splendid character portrait and has great annoyance power in that, once started, though I had other things to get to, I couldn't put it down till I had finished.

I've never read an M. Rickert story I didn't like. Holiday was another perfect gem, and I was surprised that I liked it because, like a cow who won't eat an orange that another cow has picked up and dropped, I generally don't like stories based on people the headlines have covered with slather.

My favourite story in this issue is Jeffrey Ford's Under the Bottom of the Lake. I like its circularity, but even more so, I loved the playful way he wrote it. There are certain places it just sings. Beautiful characters, too, made all the more real by the unexpected humour. His people who aren't yet adult have the integrity and dignity of being individuals in all the poignant, funny, idiosyncratic oddness that is a person and not a character.

Say "yohmmm" and eviscerate your durian

There's nothing like a durian to make you feel the interconnectedness of the natural kingdoms.

A durian as a companion has more personality than most of your modern dogs, and any supermarket fruit and veg.

A durian's smell is not what you might expect. This one just got more and more exotic as the days went on.

When it was finally torn open (do it with your bare hands, gingerly!) the insides were a sight to behold.

Take a tip from the ones who know the best. An orangutan would never use a knife to cut it, let alone that abomination, the effete spoon, to scoop it out.

Durians and your bare hands and your mouth and your stomach, and your durian-scented burps of remembrance. Incomparable!

So open wide!

The best portal on the web for everything about durians (including durian-flavoured practically everythings) is Shunyam Nirav's delightful Durian Palace.

Wikileaks proves its worth

It has taken only weeks for Wikileaks' first project — "primary test country: Kenya" to make an impact that is good for Kenya, and good for everywhere else as well.

Burma, and the world's "golden future" - We can all be goldsmiths

We are a disgrace in the whole world because of our rulers. But we hope for a golden future. We hope for the freedom of Aung San Su Kyi. Kyi, Rangoon - Accounts inside Burma, BBC News

It's funny what a role model is. The Guardian's current cold-sell snail-mail letter appeal(I got one last week) to get new subscribers for their weekly, brags about Nelson Mandela reading it. He probably read about the new statue of him unveiled in London, but he didn't have to because he was there, soaking up the praise in person. Lately, Aung Sang Su Ki has been called 'Burma's Mandela', as a compliment to her. And if she were ever freed, it would be interesting to see whether that would prove to be true. I think not. I don't think she would be content to soak up praise and do nothing of substance. When I think of the power that Nelson Mandela has and hasn't used, it makes me want the world to talk of the meaning of disgrace, and the worth of role models.

What would Zimbabwe be like now, if he had cared?

Why did South Africa, of all countries, vote against the recent UN Security Council resolution on Myanmar, a resolution largely the work of 'retired' Archbishop Desmond Tutu "who has been in the forefront of human rights in Burma" and former Czech President Vaclav Havel? And when that disgraceful act of unsolidarity occurred, why was it not condemned by the world's most admired man?

Desmond Tutu, on the other hand, has been audacious enough to talk about the gap between rhetoric and reality in South African democracy, and in the world at large. He has criticised the racism that is the basis for the respect for the dictatorship of Zimbabwe – for respect it is, to have let it go on as it is.

At this moment, there are thousands of people who are risking their lives for the common good. Almost none of their names will never be known.

The only disgrace is when we waste our attention in hero worship while ignoring those who cannot change the disgraceful way they have to live, because they are too crushed.

Suu Kyi on the road, August 2000 (that long ago?)

The awkwardness of adolescence

isn't just a problem for our species.

Adolescent male Australian King-Parrot Alisterus scapularis

See how males are supposed to look.