Sunday - Thursday, July 21 - 25 2013 (diary)

Finally, almost overnight, the mango trees starting to come into bloom. Due to the extraordinary mild "winter" (if you can call it that) this event is a month later than usual.
This year we have had rarely a night here dipping below the 15°C and that is undoubtedly the reason for the late blooming.

The Liverpool Football Club arrived in Melbourne earlier this week and played last night (Wednesday) a match against the local Melbourne Victory team.

The match was held at the the famous "MCG" stadium (Melbourne Cricket Ground) with a total sellout crowd of 95,446 enthusiastic spectators, many of them devoted Liverpool fans. The stadium was a sea of red shirts, scarfs and hats. It represents the largest live audience the Liverpool club has ever played in front of.

Emotions ran over by all Liverpool players when the whole audience to a man sang Liverpool's Club anthem before the start of the match.   Liverpool won 2-0 but the Melbourne Victory team played outstandingly well against their famous opponents.   There is no doubt that soccer in Australia is becoming more and more popular by the day, which I find most heartening.

Friday - Wednesday, July 26 - 31 2013 (diary)

There was an interesting program on SBS this passed Sunday, The Observer Effect, where prominent personalities are asked to give their perspective on current political and social events.
First up was Ita Buttrose, founding Chief Editor of the hugely successful weekly magazines Cleo and Woman's Day in the 1970s, now heavily involved in charity work and current Australian of the Year.
She stated categorically that current Editors, journalists and media in general were involved in dumming down of all information, with little intelligent content.

The second person interviewed was the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss (author of "A Universe from Nothing"). He stated that surveys held in America consistently revealed that about 50% of the population still believed that the sun is circling around the earth and not the other way round.   (Australians are slightly better, but not far behind with respect to this fact.)

Galileo would turn in his grave to realise that after hundreds of years people were still that incredibly ignorant.
Mind you the Catholic Church has much to do with that. It was only 20 years ago (in 1992) that they officially admitted that Galileo had been right, and that the earth did move around the sun.
When Krauss was asked whether he was on a crusade for atheism and against religion he replied that he was passionately promoting reason.   Reason, of course is the most feared enemy of all religions, and they have always done (and still do) their level best to suppress it.

In my own modest way I too am a enthusiastic crusader for reason in the benign spheres of music, contract bridge, general awareness through my efforts online. Judging from the numerous positive comments I receive I do have some success.
But in general I am enormously disappointed about the lack of interest and awareness in general of so many people. The world is drowning in trivia and irrelevancies, boosted manyfold these days by the online social media, like Facebook, Twitter, etc.