Rachel Carson - The Silent Spring

My friend the factory-farmer uses pesticides as most people do, and if you dear reader saw regional TV the advertising of agricultural chemicals would shock you. Paddocks full of mammals full of stuff to keep worms and fleas at bay, and that stuff is in your meaty dinner. The pasture is full of chemicals too because factory-farming, where stock breeding numbers are artificially inflated by artificial insemination, needs the grass to grow faster to fatten them.
All these chemicals are produced by big agri-pharma and they would do anything to eliminate the evidence of Saint Rachel Carson, who has today had the Google banner accolade.
Ms Carson was a pioneer of ecological awareness and is the patron saint of all those tree-huggers who understand the balance of the planet. Leaves make oxygen and that is so good, concrete production is a worse polluter than anything else.
My blog pal Kath at Goofing Off In Geneva really misses the oodle-ardle song of the Magpies since she had to leave Melbourne. Imagine if there were no birds at all.
Please follow this link to the Wiki of hero Ms Rachel Carson if you have never read
her 1963 book The Silent Spring.

love the liberry

Love The Liberry is a journal blog by librarians, on all the batty customers who come to their counter. There are some gems in there that make me think they should get a pay raise for absence of any homicides. Today there was no homicide after I entered my library

I had been there a week ago, looking for a particular biography, and failed to find it, despite knowing my Dewey very well.

Today I tried again so intensely that I actually asked the librarian who replied "In the Business section because it's a biography of a business-woman". Right ....

and this is the exit view across Sturt St to the Memorial Bandstand dedicated to the band on The Titanic. The weathervane has a Titanic shape silhouette. There was probably a librarian on the ship as well, but no memorial for her.
Ballarat - you're welcome to it.

rock and roll

'Geoscience Australia says Victoria has been shaken by a small earthquake.
The 4.4 magnitude quake was centred north of the town of Korumburra, in eastern Victoria. The quake was felt across Melbourne, the suburbs and into Gippsland ...'
Instead of thinking 'it could not happen here', I thought - 'OK first turn the power off at the board, turn the gas off at the main, get the dog and cat into the car so at least they are contained, a bottle of water, umm ... '
Some people have a Go Bag, but my entire life is by Go-Bag so I'm right on that score, but really Dear Readers, there is no reason at all why we should think this really bad stuff only happens in Guatemala or Turkey or Wellington and Christchurch.
Those Go Bag links are to the wiki one and the City Of Sydney one - each different from/to/than what I would have. Do you have a shake powered torch?
What would YOU do/pack first if the walls started cracking?

Resurrection

Easter is not a sensible time to drive four hours on the A300 from Mt. Buninyong, and then the B110, and today I proved my senselessness.

The traffic into Queenscliffe crawled along for miles before the turnoff, slower than walking pace.

The ferry over to Sorrento was so packed that the movable mezzanine level was lowered, loaded and raised to cram 54 cars above and below

BUT

as He was risen and renewed on the third day when the stone was rolled away,

the 5pm sun setting over Geelong was my magical moment of reward,

and what at first looked Godly,

was merely our stratosphere struttin' its' stuff.

Use your Easter Monday to celebrate stirrers of every place and time - not just Christ, J., but Bradley Manning too, and every other provocateur The System tries to quash.

Divine retribution

Roof collapses on abbatoir workers Herald Sun
Abattoir worker dies after roof collapses
Sydney Morning Herald - Stephanie Gardiner - ‎28 minutes ago‎
A man has died after a roof collapsed at an abattoir. NSW Hunter Valley emergency services attended the Primo Smallgoods abattoir ...

The voodoo continues to succeed. I do not repent. And I am weary of people mentioning that Adolf the Austrian was a vego. There are no vegetarians in the news pages of paed0philes, rap1sts, or guys who chuck their children from bridges. There are no vegetarians in the bowel cancer wards either.
La vache qui rit, and I, both have something to rit about today and I am riting like mad. A pox on all abbatoirs - they are all foreign owned too, as if you care.

Dairy cows have a rotten life, their calves are born when the frost is heavy on the grass, and ripped away from them so WE can have the milk which results. The male calves have a really bad time at the saleyards before they become the veal for your $12 Parma & Pot. The female calves retained to add to the herd, bawl all night for their mothers, so a clever farmer invented rubber gobstoppers for them. The Weekly Times is a horrific, but very political read if you dare try. Do not buy supermarket chain milk which rips off the farmers, because the less money the milk earns, the less care the herd gets.
I wish I had not gone for the Weekly Times link where this upset me -Cow damage slows CityLink traffic
Fkn foreign owned 'CITYLINK was forced to close the centre lane of the Domain Tunnel after a cow reared in a truck and it's head hit a low-clearance overhead sign.'
I SO HATE ALL TRUCK DRIVERS. MORONS.

Perigee Moon update

UPDATE: Here is our moon, another time (6pm winter 2010) and place (Yeo Victoria 3249), taken with same lens and merely standing in the home paddock. It was red and hanging on top of the trees on the horizon of a paddock. It was much more impressive 'live', I can assure you.
For scale, the far left of this second image (same place and time) has a bonfire of tree-trunks in the paddock.

(Ann O'Dyne claims rights of/to these amateur 'snaps'.)

"When the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars,

then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars ... "
NASA has the tech talk -

'the Moon is still 356,577 km away. That is, it turns out, a distance of rare beauty'

... so when I captured this Perigee Moon image, 10pm Monday night in Ballarat, I didn't bother with Zoom on my camera.

Christchurch NZ

"Residents are reporting bodies lying in the streets of Christchurch following this afternoon's magnitude 6.3 earthquake.
Police said fatalities had been reported at several locations and that two buses had been crushed by falling buildings. Christchurch mayor Bob Parker has declared a state of emergency.
Christchurch resident Jaydn Katene told the Herald: "We've had friends in town call us and say there are just bodies lying around; lots of dead bodies outside shops just lying there just covered in bricks.
When it hit we were knocked to our feet. Everything in the house fell down, nothing was left still standing. There's more damage than the first earthquake, the roads are completely torn up; sewage coming up and flooding. It's crazy.
The elderly are all crying. The next-door neighbours around us were all bawling their eyes out, it was horrible. People can't get out of their houses," said Mr Katene.
We've seen cars halfway sunken into the road. We've heard there's a bus which is sunken halfway into the road just around the corner. Buildings are half-collapsed everywhere. It smells horrible. The roads are packed with cars. There aren't enough police or ambulances. Houses are all collapsing. It's pretty shocking; a total warzone."

There is nothing I can say about this - sympathy to all in Christchurch, and the hope that no family of any of our blogpals have had loss or harm. I am house-sitting for someone who went to NZ at dawn today and hope he is in Wellington and safe. We are all clinging to a hurtling ball of molten rock, and should never forget it.

Eucalypt, Yeo, 7am.

In a foggy Autumn dawn, from the front door of my present haven, this gum tree soars over the old dairy shed.

The realisations provoked by this sight, put me back in my tiny place in Time and on planet Earth, as it revolves, for the moment, in dark space, relying on a flaming sun for each new day.

Later, a pair of Gang-Gang cockatoos landed in it, getting my attention with their very funny call, which sounds just like a big old creaking door - 'waaarrrk!'.

(Of course I didn't get a photo ... I found this one thanks to www.pixdaus.com.)