Post 5: Did you know that the Nintendo Corporation ran a puppet government in Latin America for a number of years?

They were pursuing a policy of supermarionation.

A word on Australia. It is rather big. That in itself is no real secret. However, it should reasonably follow that there are a variety of climates on a land mass of such size. Having paid no real attention to the place until quite recently, this quantum leap in deductive logic was beyond me when yuletide plans for 2006 were drawn up. Residents of Melbourne will happily explain to you how the meteorological powers-that-be conspire to create a relatively temperate local climate which is prone to swift changes in conditions. Maybe it's due to the fact that I'd heard these explanations one too many times, but when it came to planning for Christmas I chose to ignore everything the locals had to say and happily operated in simple tourist mode. That train of thought went along the lines "Australia. Sun. Barbeque". As it turned out, the weather on Christmas day was more akin to Ireland in March than anything I had come to expect down here. The turkey, I am ashamed to say, did end up in the oven, but as a small consolation we did manage to get out on the balcony to barbeque a few prawns during a break in the blustery conditions.

However, making unrealistic weather assessments for Christmas day did not serve as the catalyst necessary to usher in the Age of Reason. Unfortunately I only emerged from the Dark Ages after a slightly more painful lesson a number of weeks ago. The problem, I maintain, is that I still don't fully understand the process of sun tanning. And when I don't fully understand a process I tend to ignore what other people have to say on the matter. Here's the thing: you wear sun cream to protect your skin from UV rays. That bit I get. And many people like to sunbathe to darken their skin. OK, still no problem. Now, I think that it's the UV rays which stimulate the production of melanin, the pigment that makes skin darken. If this is the case, then why do would-be tanners lie out in the sun only to go to great lengths to protect themselves from the very source of a tan. I'm not advocating skin cancer here, nor am I saying that tanning is necessarily a good thing, I'm just questioning the logic of spending all day lying in the sun trying to get a tan whilst wearing skin cream that essentially stops you getting a tan. Why not wear no cream and only lie in the sun for a fraction of the time? This was the question I asked myself whilst eyeing up the sun loungers on our balcony when summer finally did arrive in Melbourne in mid-January. You can all see where this is going of course. I'd just like to point out that I knew what I was doing. I'd spent a little time in the sun in the preceding days, and had a fair idea (no pun intended) of how long I could be out in it before reddening. Unfortunately, this fair idea, was not reliable and on the day in question, it turned out that rather too much time was spent in the sun. But there is a silver lining. I discovered that just before you start to peel, doing rigorous exercise can have interesting consequences. I guess because it is dead, the soon-to-be-peeling skin does not seem to accommodate perspiration very well. The result is that once sweating, you begin to look like you are made of bubble-wrap as this outer layer traps the sweat. I think this is the first documented case of radiation (in this case UV) actually conferring super powers. "Bubble-wrap boy with his incredible immunity to stress and worry, chiefly due to his almost inexhaustible supply of bubbles which can be burst in a most soothing and calming way". Unfortunately, bubble-wrap boy's powers are short lived and he soon turns into the much less talented "Incredibly itchy skin man".

The whole episode is reminiscent of Beethoven's reported approach to his progressive deafness. Having been given some medicine, his doctor instructed him to take a certain dosage every day. Ludwig, knowing better, reasoned that this was a waste of time when he could simply take all the medicine at once and reap the rewards immediately.

I would like to say that I have learnt my lesson, and will be open to advice in the future. Thankfully, the sunburn has subsided at this stage – a bonus since we finally did some touristy things this weekend. One of Melbourne's main attractions is a beach about an hour's drive out of the city where you view what is known as the "penguin parade". At sunset every evening, droves of little penguins (their actual species – the "little penguin") emerge from the water and bolt for their burrows. It's quite funny to watch as they're incredibly nervous, and you can't help but feel sorry for the ones that look so bewildered wandering around the carpark of the adjacent interpretive centre. There are even signs telling you to check under your car before you drive off. I have to say I feel less sorry for the clueless Chinese tourists who are oblivious to the fact that people aren't transparent, and that if they stand up for a slightly better view, you can't see through them. I was on the verge of pointing this out when I noticed that some of them were wearing surgical masks. Perhaps it seems like a sensible thing to do from their perspective what with bird flu being a big deal, but it just left me shaking my head, wondering if we were from the same planet. I mean, last I heard, the only instances of humans being infected by this virus were when people came into close (possibly intimate) contact with poultry on a regular basis. And the closest human contact these little penguins probably get is when they're buying their super-strength triple espressos at starbucks to keep them sufficiently jittery for the rest of the day.

In other news, I still haven't seen anyone get caught using Melbourne's "free" public transport. Although my flatmate (and landlord) did have a tram related run-in of a slightly different sort after attending an all-day party a few Sundays ago. The party in question was fancy dress, and Chris decided to go as Die Hard action hero Det. John McClane (a.k.a. Bruce Willis). The costume was pretty good – dirty ripped jeans and wife-beater along with a pistol and holster, just the right amount of fake blood, and an Uzi in case the bad guys really got serious. To Chris's misfortune, it was actually the tram driver on the journey home who got serious, and notified the five-O that there was a lone gun-toting psycho on his tram. With the block sealed, and their real shooters poised for action, the cops persuaded him off the tram and face first onto the tarmac. Apparently his drunken disbelief and insistence that "I'm John McClane!" didn't faze the officers, who informed him afterward that any movement toward his toy guns would most definitely have precipitated a hail of hot lead. He made the local paper. Which was nice.

Finally, the technology section of this blog. I mentioned in the last post how I thought some of the gadgets offered by google were just great, and how I was particularly impressed by their predictive text search bar that slots into the top of your web browser. Another little beaut is their "analytics" feature for e-commerce webmasters and voyeuristic bloggers the world over. When you create a google analytics account, you are provided with 3 lines of custom-made HTML which you can stick into the bottom of your website. These 3 lines of magic code will report back to your analytics account with a whole range of temporal and geographical information about your users. Rest assured if you are part of the diaspora, and are not reading this from anywhere in the British Isles, I will know who you are and when you read this post (it's also a bit of an ego boost to claim a readership that extends from Oakland to Perth, Brooklyn to Vienna – take a bow guys, you know who you are). It also allows you to track how people have arrived at your site – i.e. whether they have navigated directly to it or if they have followed a link from another site. Which leads me to my new google-derived source of concern. Someone out there has found their way to this site from another blog - http://theaurora.blogspot.com/. A blog belonging to a bunch of guys best characterized by the country singer Todd Snider as "Conservative Christian, right wing Republican, straight, white, American males. Gay bashin’, black fearin’, poor fightin’, tree killin’, regional leaders of the South. Frat housin’, keg tappin’, shirt tuckin’, back slappin’ haters of hippies like me. Tree huggin’, peace lovin’, pot smokin’, porn watchin’ lazyass hippies like me."
There appears to be a closet neocon amongst us.