A letter to Tuco

Tree pretty, Water bad

2006-11-13T22:35:00.000+09:30

One thing I noticed in the NT was that despite having some amazing and unexpected water features, Territorians avoided natural water like the plague. Talking with Sherdie, I discovered that it was just simple common sense. Whether by a tiny little sting or a great big jaws that snickety snack, water kills. Unless it has four walls of concrete, and you can see every inch of the bottom, it’s not worth the risk. This weekend I learnt to think like a Territorian.

We went to the entrance for our final weekend. Despite expectations and prior experience, it was a beautiful sunny weekend. To this point, the only truck I had had with the beach was in the deep evenings and at night, with imposing clouds and a flashing lighthouse. This weekend I finally got out into the surf. Dressed in tick lady’s rashy (which left far too little to the imagination), I borrowed a goat boat (like a surf board with a place to sit) and set out into the waves. The goat boat beat me up. When it managed to wallop me in the head, I decided enough was enough and exchanged it for a blow up boogie board.

I was then promptly dragged out to sea by a rip, and despite knowing what I had to do (swim perpendicular to the rip and back in to shore) and not panicking, I just didn’t have the energy to get myself back into shore, and had to be rescued by J!. Although the weekend continued beautiful, I had developed a healthy dislike of the beach and chose not to go again.

But I was not the sea’s only victim. G! suffered a nasty bleeding knock to his head, and A! managed to cut and bash her knee against a goat boat when she got dumped. An impressive injury, but far more impressive when it was discovered that she had managed to put her knee through the base of the boat.

J! was left with the task of telling his sister, over the phone, that A! had mauled her goat boat. J!’s sister thanked A!, and asked that J! give her an ice-cream as ‘know no-one will be able to pressure me to get on that bloody thing ever again’.

This is the second time in my life that the ocean has decided I might make a tasty treat, and I am now completely jaded on the whole Aussie beach ideal. It’s big, it’s nasty and it burns. Four concrete walls and a visible bottom for my swimming pleasure from now on. They’ve only tried to kill me once.

We saved the life of turtles today. During some blinding rain, they’d decided to cross a windy country road, and were in line to get some serious tire treads on their shells. We stopped and G! picked them up and moved them off the road, where they failed to be generous with their thanks. We also attempted to pull a tree off the road, but only really managed to dig up some red-neck’s driveway with a few wheel spins.

Oh well.

Monopoly is worse than Boggle.

The Good the Bad and the Ugly

2006-11-09T15:41:00.000+09:30

The good:
Hurrah! The Democrats are in power. First time in over a decade. If there's anything that lil' W needs it's a hostile house. Hooray!

The bad:
I've been erupting recently. Smart ass children have been finding themselves on the end of a very pointed stare and comments delivered with ice. Not all the comments have been original, but they've all worked wonderfully:

"This puzzle is stupid"
"You can't do the puzzle, that doesn't mean the puzzle is stupid"

"*Random smart ass comment*"
"Was that important? Was that relevant? Did that have anything to do with what we were talking about? Or was it just a stupid comment that was meant to make you look smart?"
"…"
"That failed?"
"…"
"Badly."

"Anyone have any idea how many triangles there are?"
"69!"
"Spoken like a true virgin. Next?"

The ugly:
Travel makes you boring. I can't believe no-one has noticed this before.

Each day, I wake up early, I drive for an hour to get to whichever school I am visiting today. I deal with the same five annoying kids you find at every school. I come home, I fall asleep during a movie. I haven't been blogging recently because there hasn't been anything interesting to talk about.

But it's not just me. Everyone knows one - they're the 'experienced' traveller. They go overseas for a few days or weeks, probably hang around a lot of touristy spots, or alternatively, the alternative tourist spots. Then they fly back into the country, and regale you with oft repeated and increasingly dull stories of their exploits. In the worst case, they develop an arrogance that you could never really understand(insert bog standard, vaguely adventurous travel destination) and how truly soul inspiringly, mind meltingly superior it is because you've never been there. Or if you have been there, you failed to appreciate it like they would.

Then they spend the rest of the time chewing your ear off (as you're attempting to chew your own leg off in a misguided but energetic attempt to get away) about how nice it is to get back to real showers and toilets, and the terrible belly flu they had and the horrible bog they had it in.

I've got a theory about how this works:

It's like they get thrown out of their social networks for a week, forget how they relate to them and turn back into the toddler who answers the question "How many apples?" with "My dog is called pineapple".

It makes me sick.

Worse, I'm probably one of them.

Just skip to the fourth paragraph

2006-11-05T22:18:00.000+09:30

You can feel yourself unravel as you travel the highways at night. Your soul dragging loose from your body as you follow meaningless curves down lightless roads. An evaporating trail of ephemera curling back to your origin.

The mind swells and the tongue becomes expansive, covering topics too personal for casual study, and too uncomfortable for eloquent discourse. Familiarity without source overwhelms you, and small prophecies escape your imagination and lodge in your subconscious, making you wary but resigned.

At the end you feel hollowed, your destination unreal and deeply irrelevant. It takes the sun’s warm light to convince you of that your surrounds are reality and not context.

Sorry about that, but I felt the need to wax poorly lyrical for a second. Night driving makes me feel wierd.

Second weekend at the Entrance, and we had a visit from the Squaddie’s respective other halves. It was wonderful to have the lovely Floor back in my arms, even if it was just for a couple of nights. I love you honey.

Discovered a second hand bookshop named ‘R!’s Bookstore’. It was everything a second hand bookstore should be. The books were inaccessible, the shelves imposing. The books were poorly categorised, and inexpertly alphabetisised. It was clear that the books were considered far more important the customers. All it was really missing was odd shaped rooms, stairways that go nowhere and a pile of books ready to fall on unwary readers and it would have been perfect. I heartily recommend it to any book lover.

A strange addiction overtook the coastal house. I am proud to say that I’m the only one who remained immune. Boggle. Dreadful game, utterly dreadful. Theoretically it improves word skills and sharpens the intellect. In reality it grates on the ears and encourages people to write down random permutations of letters that may possibly be words. If anything brings down western society, it will be indirectly connected to Boggle.

Our new accommodation is much more suited to our purposes than Eelah was, but it’s still not perfect. Damn. Oh well, individual bedrooms is a huge step up in anyone’s language.

Also, there are biscuits.

Pre-visit student pack

2006-10-31T06:00:00.000+09:30

As part of our job, we hand out teacher’s notes, giving teachers further information on our program and follow up activities. Theoretically, they’re also provided with a pre-visit pack containing info on what to expect and how to prepare for us. I’m thinking of extending the concept and sending a pre-visit pack to each student. Nothing complicated, just a few thinking points that it would have been best for them to think through before they see us.

Ahem, if you happen to be my parents, you probably want to stop reading now.

1) When we visit you, you will miss class to come and see us. Think about that for a gad damned second, Because of us YOU ARE NOT IN CLASS. Show us the damn respect that that kind of magic trick deserves.

2) If that doesn’t convince you, please keep in mind the following. We are a free program. That means that you pay nothing for us. It also means that your teachers can’t refuse to pay us if we make you cry or wet yourself. Don’t fool yourself. You wouldn’t be the first.

3) We perform for a living, we have all spent several years at university earning various degrees. Those degrees are not in Tourism. You are not clever enough to take us on in verbal debate. You are welcome to try, but do keep in mind point 2 above. Also, “I won’t need maths because I’m going to be a model” is not a clever rebuttal. It’s a good way to get your self-esteem shattered as we list your numerous unsubtle flaws.

If you were actually to clean up your skin, fix your teeth, lose your likeness unto a globe, develop visually pleasing features when you go through puberty, or some serious corrective surgery, and somehow obtained your dream career, you would still need maths to know how to cut your cocaine properly so you don’t snort a lethal dose, and die convulsing painfully as drool and blood froth bubbling through the scars from your facial ‘work’.

Don’t worry, it almost certainly won’t come to that. You’re not going to be a model.

4) Yelling ‘69’ to answer every question involving a number is not clever, or funny. In fact, let’s take that a little further. 69 is not an inherently funny number. It’s not even remotely funny until you’ve undergone the hilariously acrobatic antics required, at the point it becomes intensely hilarious, but then again, so does all sex.

Yelling out 69 does not tell your peers that you are sexually experienced. It tells everyone in the room that you’re still a virgin. Is this really a statement you want to make?

5) A smurf is a god damned blue critter from an eighties cartoon, I think their village was recently carpet bombed. Stop asking what they are. It’s called class, if you don’t have it, at least fake it. Yes it was better than this dragon ball crap. There may have only been one smurfette, but apart from that it actually made sense. Logic and consistency are what is missing from the junk-food like pop culture that you little cretins have been brought up on.

6) You are not cool in high school. Nothing will ever change this. No-one is cool in high school.

On a more personal note, I went to buy the DVD of Danger Mouse I had seen in the Kurri-Kurri video shop, but they’d sold out. Why oh why didn’t I buy it when I had the chance? Taste my tears of bitterest regret.

I think I’m getting sick.

So ridiculously teenage

2006-10-30T07:47:00.000+09:30

I'm unAustralian. It's the only possible explanation. I spent the entire weekend at a lovely beach house bare metres from the sand. The only time I got wet was in the shower. I only went down to the beach once, at night, and even then I was only there for as long as it took for me to get through my phone conversation.

Saturday I didn't visit the beach because I was in a reading and 'leave me the hell alone' mood. So I lay on a couch and finished my first book of the tour. An embarrassing state of affairs that I shall attempt to remedy this week with a bout of good ol' page turning.

That night we played a game of Catan. A necessary condition of my taking part was that I could be a bad loser, and sulk if I wanted to. This was to counteract my excuse for not playing, that I was turning into a bad sport and didn't wish to sulk afterwards.

I had a glass of wine, a wild turkey was off my nut. Apparently I have my mother's Cadbury tendencies. My brain was addled, but not too addled for the bout of extreme logic that sluggishly crawled through it. Firstly, I was much drunker than anyone else, despite having no more of the devil's drink. Secondly, if I couldn't win sober, there was absolutely no chance of me winning with one foot already under the table.

So I played like a monkey, made madly generous trades, viciously defended worthless territory, and snuck up on the win so subtly that people were still trading with me on the final round when I laid the smack down and played 3 points at once. Usually, when you're ahead, no-one will trade with you for fear of giving you a win, but for some reason a giggling fool lying on the floor playing with exercise equipment isn't perceived as much of a threat.

I was a little bit shocked, and a little bit disappointed that I wouldn't get to sulk after all. There's nothing more fun than a good old tanti. That's two wins to uncountable losses since the tour began, but it was such a fun win hat I may be willing to play next time.

The night continued from there, and I felt very, very juvenile. We drank, we played playstation, we debated very deep discussions that made no sense, and worst of all - we saw the sun come up. It was like being a teenager all over again, without the inconvenience of someone kicking down a fence. The flashback experience was assisted by there being three boys to one girl, about the right ratio for the hallowed Easter parties.

All that changes next week with the arrival of the long suffering maths groupies. As they are generally more important than the squadders, they shall receive complete pseudonyms instead of the lazy *! pattern that I've been following so far.

Joining us next week will be the lovely Floor, D'Urberville and Tick lady. I'll leave it to them to discern who is whom.

Not really maths thingummy #1

The words 'that' and 'had' have something very special in common. What is it?

Jungle fever

2006-10-26T23:19:00.000+09:30

There is a tradition on entering the Outreach program. J! offers each person, on their first day, the chance to trial some of his insanity chilli. I, being well aware of my chilli woos status, declined. G! not only accepted the challenge, he’s been back to the bottle repeatedly since. He says he enjoys the hallucinations and that cheese dulls the pain.

Tonight he met his match. G! could not master the Jungle curry at the Thai restaurant we visited tonight. He started on it, and was sweating almost immediately. About a quarter of the way in, the restauranteer shouted him some extra rice. About half the way in, he brought out some complimentary cucumber, that I enjoyed very much, as G! is allergic. By this point he had gone quite white. He gave up not long after. The sweating did not stop for some time.

Four shows today, my voice failed on the third one, but was a fair bit better by the fourth. J! is saying that we’ll get a PA to protect my voice, but I honestly don’t think I can use one, just feels unnatural. Just call me Kermit.

Our landlady seems slightly shocked by us, I don’t think she was expecting what she got. We’re not like holidayers, we’re a tad more messy, and a tad less likely to eat out. We’ll clean the place before we leave, and we would do dishes if we could, but the accommodation simply doesn’t have the amenities. Still, we’re here fore two more weeks, so we have to keep good will going for that long at least.

Saw a wonderful shopfront for Vile & Vile Solicitors today. Also saw a board outside a church that listed what the minister was praying for

1. Family
2. Rain
3. World Peace

Now I don’t mean to be rude, but aren’t those priorities just a little bit whacked?

Pet peeves

2006-10-25T22:59:00.000+09:30

Sometimes, people just refuse to avoid stereotypes. Today, I successfully navigated us to our destination, a small school a little way from Maitland. All fine and dandy. We did our thing, had a good day, packed up, tried to go home.

This time I was driving and A! was navigating. At one point I seriously questioned her directions, feeling that the scenery we were viewing now, was not at all the same scenery we passed on our way in, and that we had twice travelled contrary to signs that read ‘to Maitland’. She said ‘no, it’s right’ pointed at the map authoritivly and on we went.

Further and further from our destination.

Eventually, I requested the map, and pointed out that if we were in Woodville, then we had most definitely come the wrong way, and that the gravel road should have been (and was) our first clue. Never trust an authoritive map poking unless you actually take the time to realise what they’re poking at.

Also, as I seem to be whinging a bit, I’d like to give my ‘up yours’ award to Sanity music Maitland, whom had season five of Family Guy on display, had a price tag on the back of the box, and had it mixed in with the other Family Guy seasons, but nevertheless, did not actually have it for sale. The product was apparently not released yet, but I was more than welcome to reserve a copy. I checked afterwards, in not a single of the three locations was there any indication that it was a ‘coming soon ‘ advertisement. I don’t like deceptive advertising. It’s obnoxious and arrogant. While I have avoided purchasing from Sanity in the past, I will now endeavour to never enter one of their stores again.

I also dislike banana, ginger, dogs licking, the Wiggles and the letter 'W' as it takes too long to say.

Oh, and the fact taht there are only three vegetarian jokes in the world, yet everyone thinks they're so clever when they repeat one.

At least today

I’m fickle like that.

/end whinge

I am Buster, hear me croak!

2006-10-24T23:22:00.000+09:30

Firstly, yes, the site needs updating, I am no longer in the NT, I am in the Hunter valley. Secondly, happy birthday, hope you had a great Singstar experience.

Today I took an objective, balanced, test of my skill. It was a mechanicl test of skill or ‘skill tester’ if you will. A robotic crane was harnessed to retrieve a desperate giraffe, haphazardly piled on top of other unlikely animals.

Thanks to me, Yuli, the giraffe, was rescued, and now sits in my bedroom awaiting his presentation to Floor, who will carefully rehabilitate him.

Yes, my skill was tested and I was not found lacking.

In another test of skill, a rematch of Catan vs. G! had a much more satisfying result, with me managing to utterly slaughter him in the first round, and he narrowly winning the second game. I think that means the night goes to me. I don’t think I can play it again tomorrow.

J! has finally made the TV work. Which is a problem, as it is pay TV. There’s a problem with pay TV, although there may not be something good on, there’s always something that you’re willing to watch anyway. For normal people of strong will and character, this does not pose a problem. For people like me, who remove themselves from a form of entertainment only when it ceases to be entertaining, it can be deadly. Curse those clever bastards who invented the comedy channel.

My voice started to go today. Anyone who still remembers when I used to do birthday parties with any regularity will remember the croaky monstrosity that plagued my vocal cords after a couple of hours in the trenches. Some will also remember that I continued to do parties for hours afterwards, and could wreck my throat for days, giving my voice the richness and deepness that puberty so cruelly neglected.

I’m afraid that that might happen to my voice this tour. Four weeks of constant vocal cragginess, I’d like to avoid it if I can, but now it’s set in there’s no way. Oh well, maybe the extended duration will give me those lower octaves I’ve been searching for.

Here's more boring than the NT

2006-10-24T22:50:00.000+09:30

Those of you who know me well, will probably be aware of a game called ‘The Settlers of Catan’. A board game I find irresistible. Tonight J! and I played this clever little game against G!, who had never played it before. He thrashed us. Twice. Soundly.

I don’t think I can play anymore. Maybe some poker instead tomorrow night, so I can get enough money to buy back my dignity.

I dived into the horrors of the tax system today, to provide for my paltry refund. A! mentioned a number of ways in which I could increase my take. I was shocked. Shocked, appalled, and took notes. I chose to avoid major dodgieness becase in some small way I agree with taxes and think that we Australians don’t pay nearly enough. I’m sure many of you will disagree with me. We’ll have to agree to disagree, but you’re wrong.

Its odd getting back into the mainstream schools, if there has been any epiphany arising from the experience, it’s that kids are kids everywhere. In other words, they’re all shits.

They other thing I learnt was that my reaction to libraries has changed. I walked in today and thought “I could sleep here”.

Memorable quote from today “Little Johnny came to school without underpants today”

The context isn’t as interesting as a lack of context, so I’ll let you all mull over that one.

The accommodation’s feeling a little cramped due to having only a single living area. We may have to hold a survivor like removal of a team member. I vote for G! for his being unsportingly good at settlers.

I'm back.

2006-10-22T21:54:00.000+09:30

Well, after feeding the native fauna with electronic devices and droping into sacred sites willy-nilly, M! has decided to leave our little team for the happier prospects of evil Phil's playground. Apparently J! was too much for her. There aren't many people we couldn't say that about though.

G! has joined our little team, and with even more cursory training than M! and I recieved has been thrown into the deep end and is accompanying us on our tour to the hunter region.

We're trapizing the maitland/musswellbrook area. The observant will notice that the touring area is closer to Canberra than the distance we covered in a single day -from Katherine to Lajamanu - on our last tour.

Interesting things I saw today

'Organic Water' for sale. Ummm... yeah... those with any knowledge of science need no explanation, those without will probably not accept any.

'5 star toilets' or so they said, with one backed up urinal, two covered in black plastic garbage bags, and a sink with motion sensors.

Sinks with motion sensors have always seemed a good idea to me. You wave your hand in front of a sensor and the water runs, meaning you don't have to put your hand on a dirty faucet that Steve the raincoat wearing trucker has had his hand on.

Unfortunately, the soap was still operated by push button. Somewhat defeating the exercise.

It wouldn't have been so bad, except that "5 star toilets" was their main selling feature, it was on a giant banner outside the Cafe. 2.5 at best.

This tour's a little different, we have a home base we're staying at / despoiling during the week, taking away the whole nomad culture I developed last tour. I'm going to miss that a little I think.

Maths thingumee #n+1

There's an island with an odd custom. If a man is unfaithful, his wife must kill him if she finds out. Apart from this (or perhaps this is because) they are very logical and intelligent people.

Despite this, every one of the women likes to gossip and every one of the women know the faithfulness, or lack thereof of every man on the island except her own husband.

A missionary stayed with the villagers for a few months, when he left he gathered them all together and said he was disappointed in them, as during his time on the island he had witnessed at least one man being unfaithful.

Nothing happened the first night, nothing happened the second, third or fourth night, but on the fifth night, shots rang out, and in the morning the corpses were counted, and all the unfaithful husbands were dead. How many were there?

Better late than never

2006-09-21T16:58:00.000+09:30

My apologies for not writing for a couple of days. Tonight (20/9/06) the minimax modem is unfortunately in a puzzle box, which is at the school, while we are not. Instead we’re staying in a lovely three bedroom seaside villa. It’s lucky we are, we almost weren’t. Last night, I just didn’t feel like writing because lured by the light, some random inhabitant tried to break into the school building we were staying in. When his (maybe) efforts proved fruitless he emptied a jug of water against the wall, or at least managed to do something that sounded like emptying a jug of water against a wall. The imagination shies from extrapolation.

We finished up the schools on Bathurst island (q.e.d. the NEW PLAN) and faced the challenge of getting ourselves, five weeks worth of luggage, six tubs full of puzzles, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends over the strait between Bathurst and Melville island. If you look at the two islands (two islands, one country, as an interesting old guy at the pub told us) on www.whereis.com, you’ll see that a road extends between the two islands, nice and handy for getting across.

If you actually fly to the islands, look out the windows and watch for the strait as you come, you’ll see a marvellous and amazing sight, a completely invisible, intangible, inconsequential and indeed totally absent bridge. It will shock you.

So, in the absence of the promised bridge we had to follow these steps to get from Nguiu to Milikapati.

1)Load five weeks worth of luggage, six tubs full of puzzles, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends into a troopy and drive the 500 metres to the river.

2)Unload five weeks worth of luggage, six tubs full of puzzles, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends to the river side. Wait for ferry.

3) Be yelled at to move the five weeks worth of luggage, six tubs full of puzzles, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends to another spot because they’ve decided to take a bigger boat, not because of the five weeks worth of luggage, six tubs full of puzzles, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends, but because they’ve decided to ship a paddy van from one island to another (complete with cop inside).

4)Move five weeks worth of luggage, six tubs full of puzzles, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends to the other point and onto the boat, while A! suspiciously has to take a phone call and sadly misses out on any hard labour.

5)Take a very nice trip across the strait in a boat with a cop car, a local family, five weeks worth of luggage, six tubs full of puzzles, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends. While on the boat we watched a high speed chase between two kids on bikes and another paddy wagon. The kids won. Though I’m not sure hiding behind bushes is really the right style for a high speed pursuit.

6)Unload five weeks worth of luggage, six tubs full of puzzles, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends onto the other side of the strait. The cop got out of his car and back onto the ferry.

7)Wait with five weeks worth of luggage, six tubs full of puzzles, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends for your lift to arrive. Eye off the cop car as a viable alternative.

8) Load five weeks worth of luggage, six tubs full of puzzles, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends into the back of a troopy. Sit, pinned to a wall by five weeks worth of luggage, six tubs full of puzzles, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends in the back of the troopy, because your lift has brought along three other people. Drive for an hour.

9) Unpack six tubs full of puzzles into a school room. Repack troopy as extra helpful helpers have offloaded much of the rest too.

10) Drive 500 metres.

11) Unpack five weeks worth of luggage, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends underneath a stilted house that is to be your home for the next few days.

12) Enter the house to find it noxiously infected with 15 teenagers.

13)Decide to sort this whole thing out, but need to protect luggage first, so carry five weeks worth of luggage, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends up a flight of stairs into stilted house without enough floors pace for us and 15 teenagers to sleep on.

14) Wander down to pub to get it all sorted. Be told that you’ll probably be spending the time with just a few (maybe 5? 10?) of the infesting teenagers, the others will be moved out.

15) Enjoy a drink with an interesting old aboriginal guy who has seen more of the world than you ever will.

16) Wander back down to stilted, infested house.

17) Discover that they’ve decided to move you instead of infesting teenagers.

18) Carry five weeks worth of luggage, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends down the flight of stairs.

19) Pack five weeks worth of luggage, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends into a third troopy.

20) Drive across town to a lovely seaside villa, be quietly satisfied.

21) Unpack five weeks worth of luggage, two laptops, a pillow named Norman, two statues (one pointy), a painting, and a few odds and ends from troopy.

For those who weren’t counting:

We loaded a troopy three and a bit times.
We unloaded a troopy two and two half times.

We loaded and unloaded a boat once.
We carried it all (bar puzzles) up and down a flight of stairs once.

I hate our luggage.

Back in town come Friday, those of you without a good excuse get in touch soon, I leave again in a few weeks!

The NEW PLAN!

2006-09-18T22:22:00.000+09:30

Those boxes that were supposed to come over this morning because they didn’t come over last night. Well, we called at eight o’clock and were assured they were on the runway and about to be loaded on the plane. We knew we wouldn’t get it all, but were hoping to get most of our puzzles. Worst case scenario, we got half our puzzles and tried to do a workshop with those.

Then the flight came in, we drove down to the airport in a Shanghaied troopy, very kindly driven by one of the TAes to collect our haul.

Not a single piece of our luggage.

Not a box, not a backpack, not even a straw.

So A! got on the phone and talked to them. They said they didn’t know how long it would take, and that if we had informed them how much luggage we had they would have advised us to do it otherwise. Apparently mentioning it to three different people in an organisation that can’t employ more than six isn’t considered sufficient notice.

The worst part of the whole thing wasn’t that we didn’t have the puzzles, it was that they kept trying to turn it around on us.

In the end we chartered a cargo plane to bring everything up that morning, because if we don’t have our stuff here, there’s no point us being here, we’re just impinging on the good will and hospitality of the schools.

Our original itinerary had us going to Xavier college the first day, crossing a river and convincing Milikapiti school to drive a two hour round trip to pick us up. Do Milikapiti that day, convince them to drive us the same journey back again, cross the river again, and do the primary school directly next to Xavier, not even a road between them.

Neither me nor A! know why J! initially arranged it this way. The best we can come up with is that he’s been licking the toads after he kills them. We’ve quietly rearranged our schedule to do Xavier, the school directly next to it, then Milikapiti, so we only have to do the trip once! It’s brilliant, I’m very proud of the NEW PLAN! It’s cheaper, it’s less annoying for the schools and less stressful for me and A!.

I’m very clever.

A!’s ego got a wonderful boost today when we walked into the senior boys class (yr9-11) .

“Alright everyone, this is A! and Rich.”
“Hi A!”
The room was swimming with goofy grins and puppy eyes. It was hilarious.

Her ego was not so high when I had a talk with a young girl on our way back from the shop;

“Hey Mista! What’s your girlfriends name?”
“Oh, she’s not my girlfriend I just work with her”
“What’s her name?”
“She’s A!”
“What about that man?”
“That’s A!”
“Is that man or girl?”
“Girl”
“Nah”
“Yes”

The rest of the conversation was even more scandalous and disturbing, so I shan’t reveal it unless there is major public outcry that the truth should out.

Happy Birthday to me

2006-09-17T23:25:00.000+09:30

First, I’d like to say a big congratulations to a friend of mine who has tied the knot and finally made an honest man of her fiancé. Congratulations C!, hope you had words with the Pastor after he tried to start the wedding without you, doesn’t the best man have to step up to be married in those circumstance? I’m not sure P! would have been at all happy about that.

My birthday was par for the course for these yearly anniversaries of my birth. Fairly awful. After a lacklustre breakfast, A! and I parted so that she could spend some time with her friends who are touring Australia. I went to an internet café and passed the time catching up on my strange little world.

We went to the airport, where we had been assured that there probably wouldn’t be a problem with carting our gear to the Bathurst and Melville Islands (where you can’t go, because you need a permit, this job has its perks), and were told they wouldn’t be able to get it all in the flight, as some bugger ahead of us had put on 89 kg (we had 110 kilograms between us, including our six tubs of puzzles), and they’d stagger it through a few flights tomorrow.

Needless to say, we were slightly aggravated, but there was nothing much we could, we didn’t have any other options for transporting stuff to the islands. So what get left behind? Not some of our stuff, as they suggested at first, but everything except our personal luggage and food.

Do we have the puzzles to do workshops? Nope.

Do we have the straws to do bridges? Nah.

Do we have the numerous ingredients of our make a puzzle workshop? Nuh-uh.

Do we even have all our food and gear? Not so much.

We’ve arranged that we’ll do Xavier college, our Monday school, on Wednesday, which was to be a rest day, and we’ve managed to convince ourselves that there’s nothing else we could do. This is probably true. Still it puts a damper on our final week, and introduces all sorts of logistic problems for us tomorrow.

As birthdays go, fairly standard.

At least I’m not doing an exam this year.

Old old old

2006-09-17T09:38:00.000+09:30

Well, that's it. I can no longer pretend that I'm still in my early twenties. Still, I'm cushioned by knowing that Sherdie and L! are both way ahead of me.

Last night we decided to go to vegetarian restaurant to celebrate my increasing decrepitude. I asked at reception, but none of them had any idea where one was. The girl standing behind me in queue insisted she did though, and told me how to get to a place called 'Nirvana'. Yum, thinks I, sounds like a nice Buddhist joint.

J! informed M! that we would be going to a vege joint, and would be visiting it for dinner. "Will there be meat?" she asked.

No-one was quite sure how to respond to that.

We walked ten minutes down Smith street and found Nirvana. It looked like a dive. We looked at the menu on the door, and were able to find a single dish without meat 'Vegetable and cheese triangles'. Sadly, I did not feel like Vegetable and cheese triangles. I had forgotten the one cardinal rule of travel. Most backpackers, most of the time, are mostly full of crap. Exactly why she had thought that this restaurant was a nice friendly vegetarian restaurant, and not the squatting purveyor of liver cirrhosis and artery slowing that it was, I'll never know. Also, the fact that M!'s stupid question turned out to be not so stupid was crushing.

We made our way to a Thai restaurant that A! & J! had been to before and I had a very nice sweet and sour vegetables and some miso soup. Finishing the night off with a disappointing and girly cocktail - a 'satin pillow'. J! spent most of the meal enthralled by a woman whose front had been reengineered by medical science. I don't think it was through any form of lust, more he felt insulted that the laws of nature had been so cruelly abused.

I'm old.

Another's voice

2006-09-16T00:12:00.000+09:30

As is my wont on weekends, this post is particularly half-assed. In fact, I didn't even write it, that honour belongs to J!.

This is a couple of e-mails that unfolds the edges of the amazing story of the adventure that that other TQMS team had this week. I'm posting them here with his permision, but I'm altering company names, and removing rela people names. I'll add a little bit at the end.

On another note, it's really nice when I hear from people who've been reading the blog, when I started it, i assumed I would have an audience of one, my ever devoted Floor. So it's nice to hear that others are enjoying it too.

Anyway, those emails:

Email 1: dagh- there must be something about even weeks

Right- 35 km of unsealed road between us and the highway. (that in 20km connects to the stuart highway, which in turn takes us to mataranka in about 50 km)

"The engine's sounding a bit weird", said J!, blocked of nose and half full of sleep.

"Yeah, I know," replied M!, constantly optimistic.

"Maybe something's wrong with the tyres," they concluded and proceded to inspect them. Not much wrong here. Not much wrong there. Ho hum- let's see what we can do.

20 km out of Mataranka the gods of a long forgotten (and particularly technophobic) civilisation crop up and (so it seems) smash one of the wheel bearings. Amazing grinding sounds erupt from the wheel, the steering gets slowly heavier. Pulling over there's not much for it, other than try and limp into Mataranka, which we do successfully.

Then because one phone is in a croc and the replacement isn't working yet (a pox on you telstra) and the other phone is still in Katherine, due to a Laurel and Hardy-esque pack up on Sunday morning, we're mostly phoneless. We have the sat phone, for what it's worth.

It looks like we may have to get towed back to Katherine. If that's the case, the Jilkminggan looks unlikely. We've let them know we're having trouble.

Email 2: We're Safe
call off the search- we're alright.

In Jilkminggan now.

The tow truck that eventually came to get us actually broke down as well. so we were stuck in Mataranka for 4 hours for a fix that should take less than half an hour in the first place.
Mogcar have supplied us with a car (surprisingly a landcruiser with swingarm!) to trade over the Patrol that we have been using, and it slowly falling apart on us.

The catch is that it was being repaired and it seems like (according to the guy who dropped it off) that it still needs a bit more work. He also reckoned that the problem with the Patrol is easily fixed and we should be able to swap the Cruiser back for the patrol on Thursday. Assuming that the fix is as easy as they suspect. Actually, this suits me fairly well.

So, as long as Mogcar agree to this simple yet brilliant plan, it should all be smooth sailing.

We took the Cruiser on with half a tank of fuel and xyz12 km on the clock.

Lets see what's in store for the next few days?

Commentary by Mechanical: Apparently, there were some kids who did not like J! and M! at the school they had just left (Manyulaluk). The wheel nuts, which had been fine for the last fifteen hundred kilometres, were suddenly too loose, and consequently, left the wheel. The wheel was riding on one good bolt, which shredded the thread on that nut, and caused the bearing to shatter.

Whether the nuts loosened 'just because' or if there was some malicious intent is unknown. We prefer the just because interpretation, out of a general faith in human nature, but it certainly seems suspicious.

After this wondorous turn of events they heard that Adelaide River, there last school for the week was surrounded by bush fires, and they couldn't contact anyone at the school.

They had to go through yesterday, an it turns out bushfires aren't that big a deal up here, so the school was open for business, but it did top off a hard week nicely.

There's also the matter of the Kangaroo in a bag, the didgeridoo and two people heading to a party. But that story belongs firmly to J! & M! and will only be revealed when they choose to tell it.

It's a long way

2006-09-14T23:23:00.000+09:30

Grrrr… blogger seems to be changing settings at random. If something has changed that you’ve noticed, please mention it so I can change it back. Simon, I checked what you mentioned, it’s already on full, I didn’t change it.

Tipperary station – it was bought in the early 80’s by a reckless millionaire. He wanted to be remembered as Lord and benefactor of the station so he pumped in $70 million dollars in 70 days. Remember, this is in the early 80’s before the recession we had to have, and before the massive inflation that preceded it. You could still get lollies for one or two cents back then.

This will forever be my understanding of inflation, as it was my initial awareness of it. You couldn’t buy a lolly with a one cent coin anymore, then you couldn’t do it with two, five cent wouldn’t get you a bag, and twenty cents a feast. Throughout this time my parents quietly refused to budge on pressure from the ABS and the RBA, wages for household chores remained constant throughout the period.

To fulfil his master/servant complex he designed it in faux African plantation style, a style completely impractical for the Northern Territory. Take the school; it has brass electrical fittings and wooden shutters, lending the school a grandiose colonial feel. It doesn’t have a staff toilet, or any storage space, or many other things that probably would have been more useful than brass light switches.

He pumped in the money, then the stock market crashed in ’87 and he was hit hard, the station started to fall into disrepair. Recently, Australia’s most expensive QC bought it, and has breathed life back into it. The pre-school and caravan park remain dead, but the rest of the station is thriving.

To our desertified minds, the place is wasteful, it has sprinklers sprinkling all afternoon, the grass is greener than most lawns in Canberra, and the hundreds of (sadly not quite ripe) mango trees are in full fruit. Parking on the grass is a sackable offence, to avoid the possibility of tyre treads spreading seeds to the lawn. The water is taken directly from the river, and the river flows mightily without it, and almost directly into the ocean. The aquifers here are all supersaturated. The water isn’t being wasted. The northern Northern Territory has no water crisis. It’s an odd turn of affairs.

There are 96 rooms for single men, and 14 for single women. There are 150 people living here at the moment, of which only 12 are of primary school age. It’s and odd little place, and the only word I can think of is ‘opulent’. It has its charm, but its charm is rooted in it being divorced from reality. It’s a hobby farm for a very rich lawyer that will never make any money, but doesn’t have to. Strange place.

Delayed posting

2006-09-14T21:18:00.000+09:30

Douglas Daly experimental station. The easiest stop on the tour, just six kids, non-indigenous, with Teachers who’ve been pushing maths beyond arithmetic. We managed to keep the kids going the whole day, and branched into a few areas we haven’t touched so far on tour. It was nice to be able to plumb the depths of my vocabulary again, with words like ‘plumb’ ‘depths’ and ‘vocabulary’. When I’m presenting to indig kids, they’re usually ESL group, so I have to curb the more syllablistic ponderings of my turgid prose.

We went to the ‘club’ tonight, and found three guys watching TV in a roofed open air area with a fridge full of beer. We chatted with them for a while and turns out that the experimental farm is government run, so everyone here’s a public servant. Finally, public servants with a more unusual public service than us. I almost died laughing on the inside when one of the ocker farmers mentioned his power-point presentation. As far as I can tell, you must have a digital slideshow if you want to work for your country.

On to Tipperary tomorrow. I was singing ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ in class today until the kids corrected me ‘It’s just down the road!’

I have discovered I have a fondness for cooking chillies. Apparently you can’t get them wrong, you just throw in whatever vegetables are getting too droopy, simmer for a while and wallah, instantly edible.

Still 25. Or as I told the kids today, I’m the square of the cube root of 125. This job may just be affecting the way I think…

Back in reception no.2

2006-09-14T21:17:00.000+09:30

No coverage on Tuesay or Thursday, here are the posts:

Well, the butterfly oddness continues tonight, we drove a very shaky dirt road seventeen kilometres to find Butterfly gorge. Once again, the promise of butterflies provided misleading. We saw one butterfly. Worse, it was the same type as the few we had seen at the butterfly house. There’s something very strange going on and I won’t rest until I find out why the Northern Territory is hiding its butterflies from me. Answers must be sought!

Along the winding way to the misnamed gorge I got to make my first few real river crossings. Well, puddle crossings really. We also had the opportunity to go to the Douglas river hot springs, and unlike M! and J! completely failed to defile a sacred site. We also saw the ‘Warning: Quicksand and hot water’ sign that they completely failed to realise had an implicit ‘Don’t!’ very unsubtly suggested.

Have arrived at the Douglas Daly school, we’ve managed to meet half the kids here already, as they sprung from the Teachers loins. Literally half the kids.

I’m out of reception at the moment and probably will be for a day or two, so by the time you read this it’ll likely be Thursday. It’s hard to believe, but as of Tuesday I’ve just ten days left on tour. It’s wavering between the depressing and the exultant at the moment.

Ten more days! But I’ve barely started!
Ten more days! But I’ve been out so long already!
Ten more days! Ah, just ten days to Canberra.
Ten more days! Imagine what I can pack into them.

I am still twenty five and will remain so until Sunday.

Miss Mechanical

2006-09-11T22:36:00.000+09:30

I have learnt to play cribbage. It’s the perfect game for me, not due to any turn of skill or style, simply due to the sheer number of possible double entendres.

For example, I can stick a Jack in my box so that I might get the point from his knob later. And if I play my ace at the right time, I could get a three run and get some good pegging done.

Ah the genius of it all.

Pine creek today, a depressing experience. The school is divided into two halves, the K-2’s and the 3-7’s.

The K-2 class is mostly white and they were quick, great with the puzzles, willing to sit down and work, and willing to listen.

The 3-7 class is almost totally indigenous, and the kids didn’t want to try, some were so innumerate that they couldn’t add 0 to 3 (no, I’m not joking) and one kid whenever I asked him a maths problem shouted out a random number and smiled, and when I said no, he’d shout out another number. There were others who were quite numerate and on the ball, but there were far too many of the first kind than there should be.

After talking with the teachers we discovered that when the white kids reached the senior school they mostly bussed the hundred kilometres to Katherine. We also discovered that the boy who shouted out random numbers had been at school for three days this year.

It drives you mad to see kids lost this way. Utterly frustrating.

The kids performed nominal gender reassignment surgery on me.

“Miss! Miss! How do I do this?”
“Miss?”
“Miss! Miss! Miss…ter…”

Maybe it’s the effeminate way I hold my hands sometimes, maybe it’s a language barrier, maybe it’s the fact that after four weeks without shaving I still don’t have a beard worth a damn.

Maths Thingummee #15

What weighs more a pound of gold or a pound of feathers?

Traveller's belly

2006-09-10T21:52:00.000+09:30

There is a universal rule of travel; Whenever you are on any type of significant journey. You will be struck by, what can politely be termed ‘express bowel’ at the worst possible time. I’m happy to say that we can stop waiting, because it struck today, and it was mighty inconvenient.

We started the day with a breakfast cruise down Katherine gorge. We were on a small flat bottomed barge, with minimal facilities, and I was awfully uncomfortable. Beautiful, even gorge-eous (sorry) scenery, with the sun rising in between the gorge walls. My, did I squirm.

Worse still, when we made our way out to Edith falls, I went to the public amenities. I sat down at the first stall and was ready to… complete the transaction, when I had the sense of mind to check for toilet paper. None. A sense of relief passed through me, I’d dodged a brown bullet. So I moved to the other stall and checked for paper - there was paper. There was also such a god awful mess that no right thinking individual could possibly have used the facility.

Panic struck me, I was in desperate need, but both stalls were unavailable. After seven whole seconds of pure, leg crossing panic, I realised that toilet paper was a transportable commodity.

And the day was saved.

We said goodbye to Katherine, and the lovely Jan’s B&B today, a place that is worth missing, it’s an oasis of civilization in that depressing little town. A! was nice enough to pack my towel. Which I found odd, as my towel was safely packed in my suitcase. After a brief discussion, it was discovered that two towels was one too many, and obviously one of us had made a mistake. Given I hadn’t taken my towel out of the bag, we guessed it was likely A! was the incorrect party. Personally I think she was just trying to swipe it, it was very nice and fluffy.

Maths thingumee #14
The state of Indiana attempted to legislate pi to equal 3.2. They did this because a crazy mathematician sent them an illogical and senseless proof, and offered to let them have the proof free for use if they legislated pi to 3.2. Other people would have had to pay royalties to use the proof.

The plan was only scuppered when one of the legislators offered a mathematician friend of his a chance to meet the esteemed gentleman who had ‘proved’ that pi was rational.

He replied that he’d met enough crazy people, and was invited by the politician to speak to the legislative to convince them of the insanity of the proof. It didn’t take long.

Gorgeous

2006-09-09T23:36:00.000+09:30

Apparently blogger decided to activate some extra options when I modified the way comments work, it should work again now...
Our boss, A!?!, came to stay with us this weekend, he had a conference in Darwin and decided he’d like to see how the newest Maths Squad members were adapting to life on the road.

He asked us an interesting question today. Do we think we’re making a difference to any of these kids? It’s difficult to answer. On the one hand we’re engaging a whole lot of disengaged but very clever kids. On the other hand, how long does that last? Do these kids actually have a changed attitude, or did they just enjoy maths. Its absolutely shattering to meet these kids, interact with them, and then think that they’ll just slot themselves back into the cycle of poverty.

I remember when I first came into contact with these puzzles. I was around 10 (1990ish), and there were puzzle sessions being run weekly at Questacon. My mum was willing to take me along, and I really loved it. I was solving high school puzzles within the week, and usually fairly blitzing through them. Or so I remember, my mother’s memory of my mental acuity may paint a less positive and more realistic picture. I loved doing those puzzles, and they probably helped my maths skills immeasurably. But I went back week after week, there was some continuity in it, some development. Kids here don’t get that. We tour Australia once every twelve years. If a child is really lucky they may see us twice in their schooling careers. Can that help? Can that change the kids attitudes? Maybe, but probably not hugely.

It’s a little crushing to think it may all be for nothing.

I’ve started to become very playful with the English language. I’m not sure where this new interest came from, but every time I see a sign or a headline these days, I pick at the ambiguities and poor turns of phrase.

The Territorian, the local rag, is a great storehouse of poor editing, almost a living museum of unintentional false meanings, and misleading clues.

Take for example a recent front page head line ‘Man runs over wife in toilet’. The story is about two of the silver nomads, they’d parked in the middle of nowhere and the wife got out for a squat, directly in front of the car. The husband promptly ran her down. He was quite chagrined, she was quite injured. Bt from the headline, it could have just as easily been the story of a man who got into a wheeled porta potty, farted hard enough to loosen the chocks, and had it then freakishly run over his poor wife.

That’s probably why I enjoyed this sign so much:

It was at a pumping station in Katherine Gorge, which we visited today. M!, A!?! and I went on a short two hour walk, A! & J! stayed behind as A! is not in the best of health. It was a well paced walk, with a nice gentle but long rise, that crests at a stunning view at the top of the gorge, followed by a quick but very steep descent into the gorge and back to the visitor’s centre where you started.

We did it backwards, so we climbed a very steep ascent, had a glorious view, and then a fairly dull 3km trudge back down an easy slope.

Maths thingumee #13b (apparently the last #13 was the same, but better written than #12. Whoops.)

How many colours do you have to use to colour in a map, if no two countries touching can contain the same colour?

Assume the world is a doughnut. Does this change the number?

Picture of a puppy

2006-09-08T23:43:00.000+09:30

Back down past Barunga today, on to Beswick. This is a place that gets flooded every year, and they were just recovering from last season’s April floods, when most of the school furniture had to be thrown out for fear of waterborne diseases, and then yesterday it rained. To say they’re vaguely annoyed about the whole thing would be an understatement, as they’ve been waiting for a new school to be built since 1998 or so, and Eva valley has had one built despite needing it more recently and less urgently. Eva valley is more touristy, and as such a higher priority. That makes no sense at all.

I was very impressed by the kid literacy and numeracy skills. The main thing missing here was an aversion to reading that permeates so many of the schools here. When we walked into the Junior class they were reading the Amazing Mr Fox aloud, other schools we’ve been too haven’t bothered having non-picture book fiction at all. They’re apparently on an ‘accelerated literacy’ program that really is working, though I’d believe that a lot of the kudos must go to the teacher, who you could tell from looking round the classroom went above and beyond for these kids.

Saw two kids, a boy and a girl, constantly fighting. Apparently they were cousins, and a couple. Hopefully they’ll grow out of it.

All community’s have camp dogs - dogs that don’t belong to anyone, are half wild, but mostly safe, and roam around the community living off scraps. Each community has different looking camp dogs, as most re the long term descendants of just a few dogs. We saw our first puppy camp dog today, and as well as looking tiny and young, its dirty mongrel fur made it look about 15 years old. It’s very cute now, but it will be ugly as sin when it grows.

Maths thingumee #13

A census taker comes to a house to do a census with a blind man. The census taker asks the blind man how many people live in the house

“Me, my wife, and my two kids.”
“And what gender are the two children? Well there’s my daughter an….errrrrgggg” and promptly collapses into catatonia.

Annoyed, the census taker leaves the blind vegetabilised man spasming on the floor and decides that he will just have to make it up, but he wants to put in the answers that have the greatest probability of being correct.

So, what is the probability that the other child is a son? (It’s not 50%)

If you instead knew that the daughter was the eldest child, it would change this probability. What would the new probability be and why does it change?

I had more pictures

2006-09-07T14:14:00.000+09:30

But the internet ate them when I pressed 'spellcheck' stupid internet. They were great.

Happy Birthday to my mother, who on at least one occasion has saved my life, and is not as old as my father.

Amateur photography Part 1

2006-09-07T10:24:00.000+09:30

The beauty of an internet cafe is that work isn't paying for it, and the connection is fast. So I have no qualms in bringing you a whole heap of photos that I've been itching to post. Sorry W!

Week 1:

A castle in Batchelor. Who'd 've thunk it? Apparently a replica of a Checkoslavakian castle, put up by a Check immigrant who wanted to make his people feel welcome. Very odd.

A!'s Marrionette, Johansen, escaping from the other side of the castle. He knows how to get out, and knowledge is half the battle. Go Yo!

Thia odd looking chicken was hassling A! throughout the butterfly house aviary. She was scared it was going to jump her when she wasn't looking. Personaly I thought she was ascribing too much intelligence and discernment to a chicken

Again the chicken hassles A! There's something fowl about this situation, A!'s worries aren't poultry, errr... I'd put in a pun about birdflu, but I've already scared off enough readers

The plunge pool at Litchfield national park. Gorgeous isn't it? At least from this angle where you can't see any drunk tour bus tourists.

The rains cometh

2006-09-06T21:49:00.000+09:30

Up until this point I thought that I’d been dealing with the heat remarkably well. Sure it was hot, but I was adapting, even enjoying it. Definitely better than Canberra winter or the never-ending winds and magpies of spring. I was a little fed up with the empty blue sky.

Yesterday the clouds came, and with them, the heat. It didn’t actually get any hotter, just a lot stickier and less pleasant. The rains aren’t coming yet, they probably won’t be here ’til after we’re gone (my what a lot of apostrophes), but this is the first sign that they’re on their way, and travelling through the syrupy heat is going to be a whole lot less fun. Thank God all our big travels are done.

The general disorganised feel of Barunga continued well into today, with the school arranging a workable timetable for us, but completely forgetting that they were getting a visit from the health centre, so we had to improvise a new one in the middle of the day. It’s interesting how different schools have completely different feels and attitudes, and that sometimes you can pick them just by talking to the principal for a few minutes on the phone. Still the kids were good, clever, and I don’t think the school is doing badly, just not set up for changing circumstance that well.

Our makeshift sleeping arrangements of last night were less than great. There was a display fridge on all night (the type with a glass door and bright lights). Not only did the fridge have the accursed inescapable light, that sifted into every corner of the room and through your eye lids, but the fridge’s motor was on top and made the whole thing shake and rumble each time it came on. Neither of us slept more than an hour at a time, and both A! and I were completely drained by the morning. Worse, the toilet and shower were across the quadrangle from where we were sleeping, and there were people wandering through the area all night. I felt vaguely uneasy whenever I had to cross, and I can only imagine the experience was that much worse for A!.

We decided we’d feel more comfortable, and well rested if we stayed in Katherine for the next couple of nights, so now we’re holed up in the backpackers for a couple of days. I’d forgotten the heady atmosphere of backpackers, full of the young, the economically disadvantaged and the socially maladjusted (I‘m not saying that if you stay at a backpackers you fit into those categories, but if you fit into those categories, you usually stay at a backpackers). Still, free pancake breakfast, and that’s not to be sniffed at.

Maths thingumee #12
You're a census taker, you come to a house, and they refus to give you full information, so you have to take a guess, but you want to write down the most probable scenario.

You have the following information:
They have two childern
At least one is a girl.

What is the chance the other is a girl?
The probability changes if you know that the the eldest child is a girl. Why? What is the new probability?

I received my first spam comment yesterday. Woohoo. I may need to change the way comments work to stop it happening again, sorry for any inconvenience for those who use this feature.

Bearucratic bungling

2006-09-05T21:28:00.000+09:30

After finishing off Mataranka school and doing the touristy thing in the morning, we made our way to Barunga CEC (community education centre).

I was a little worried about Barunga, as first we had talked to them on the phone and asked if we could stay some extra nights at their school as the next school on our list was unable to accommodate us, but was only 30 km up the road. They said that was fine.

The fax they sent us contradicted this, claiming they were unable to accommodate the presenters.

I then called the principal, who told me that they would indeed have accommodation for us. She just didn’t know exactly what yet.

Today we called the principal again to say we were on our way. She seemed slightly surprised, but told us we could stay at the house of a certain teacher who had two spare rooms and wouldn’t mind.

Dubious, but confident we could always drive back to Mataranka we set out for Barunga.

On arriving we were greeted by a lovely and very helpful lady who had not been told where we were staying. We filled her in as best we could, and she set about finding and confirming with our billeting host.

She managed to contact the teacher after we discovered what her name was, and called her on the phone. It was one of those conversations where you can only hear one side, but you can read the other

To my complete lack of surprise, the billeting teacher had never heard of us, had not talked to the principal and did not want a bar of two young shifty mathemagicians staying in her house.

Tonight we sleep in a kitchen. It’s not bad accommodation, it’s fine, it’s what we’re used to. But the run around we got this afternoon bodes ill for the program tomorrow.

Maths Thingumee #11

There is a mathematical problem known as the hairy ball problem. It says that you cannot lay down all the hairs on a hairy ball, one will always be standing up. You’ll be pleased to know that there is no hairy doughnut problem. Hairy doughnuts can be well groomed.

Crocodile tears

2006-09-04T22:01:00.000+09:30

Drove out of Katherine this morning, on our way we passed two toy dogs, obviously some sick person’s idea of the perfect companion. Nice to see them reverting to their natural ways as they ripped the guts out of wallaby road kill. Road kill seems to be taking up an increasing amount of my mental space. I should probably be worried about that.

We arrived in Mataranka and had a great day with the kids. After the school day ended, we headed down to the touristy thermal pools, walked past them and ended up at the river, signs informed us that we could swim, but that there’d probably be fresh water crocs. A! and I dithered a bit, then decided to be safe little tourists and headed back to the safe and friendly tourist pool. Ah, the heady smell of sulphur.

We had dinner with the teachers, they all have huge families because they get given bigger houses if they do. Don’t know how they can manage without killing them

M!&J!’s care broke down about 50km out of Katherine. We’re having so much luck with these hire cars.

Cane toads are hideous creatures. Taking care or a tree frog has given me a general antipathy towards anything with that basic body shape, but cane toads are their own type of gruesome.

Also, although I may never have been fond of his work, and it’s easy to question the effectiveness or point of his message. The world has lost a popular, if ADHD inflicted, science communicator. Rest in peace Mr Irwin. Crickey.

Lazy Weekend

2006-09-03T21:10:00.000+09:30

Wow, these kids sure do move round. I’ve been called Kuminjay twice now since I left Lajamanu. Once in Top Springs (the nasty segregated roadhouse) about three hours away, and once in Katherine, six hours away. The royalties payments mean that there is a lot of movement right now.

I’ve had a lazy, lazy weekend in which I finaly had time to sit around and play with Lappy. Apparently I can connect it to my phone wirelessly. Why I would do this I don’t know.

J! and M! are even closer to the boil than before, feeding the crocodile the phone wasn’t exactly a bonding exercise.

Since I’ve got nothing much to report I’ll leave you with some photos of our newest sport. TQMS carries their puzzles in 40 and 60 litre plastic tubs. Although not coastguard approved they make passable floatation devices. So, we invented tub racing. Everyone sank.

Maths Thingumee #10
A French attempt to decimalise time failed miserably.

2006-09-02T00:03:00.000+09:30

Here's that first flat I was talking about.

Also, I've commited an internet goof, and mentioned someone who did something nice for me and not linked to them, I shall remedy the situation...now This is Lindsey's blog, I haven't read it yet.
It’s a lucky thing that we had two spare tires. It’s a lucky thing that I can control a car going at 130 km/h on a crappy bitumen highway. Pigeon hole roads could moonlight as a quarry, shattered igneous rock sticking out at odd angles, I’m glad we didn’t have a third or fourth puncture, as we were fearing.

After getting to Katherine we discovered why the other team’s phone was out of use. They fed it to a crocodile. Just a hint people, but if you want to keep your telephonic device in good working order DO NOT give it to a crocodile. The reptilian bastard will eat it, that is what crocodiles do.

Learnt my first two aboriginal words today. The first meant ‘fly’ as in small buzzing insect. The second meant ‘dirty whitey’, unfortunately I have forgotten them both. The girl who was teaching me was quite embarrassed when she realised what she was teaching me, and her friend had to explain what it meant.

Nice to get back to Katherine, we’re staying in a gorgeous and huge B&B with individual rooms and a pool all to ourselves. Interesting guest book. Scrawled on the current page, dated August 15th is the message “thank you for letting us use your BnB take care in these last days thankyou”. Apocalyptic poetry for the ages.

Maths thingummee #9

Alright, friendly warning, mum you’re not going to approve of this.

What’s the result when you get the square root of sixty nine?

Eight something

The half life of a dead kangaroo is four days

2006-09-02T00:00:00.000+09:30

On Sunday, as we drove to Lajamanu, we passed a dead kangaroo in the middle of a narrow one lane, two way highway. We stopped with the intention of moving the carcass off the road, and discovered it to be fresh but ruptured. Our good intentions went unfulfilled, as with guts akimbo we felt unwilling to poke it with sticks.

Today we passed by the kangaroo’s carcass - still on the road - again. Half of the kangaroo was gone to scavengers. Thus the half life of a dead kangaroo is four days.

One thing I forgot to mention about Kalaringi, is that it’s mostly the home of the Garindgi people, whose 8 year long strike and land claim was immortalised in the song ‘from little things, big things grow’, poor bastards, they deserve better than Paul Kelly. To be honest, I’ve been humming the song since Wednesday.

We drove out to Pigeon Hole today, after 40 or so kilometres of very rocky road, we took a wrong turn and ended up on the station instead of in the community. After asking for directions from a strangely accented woman, we backtracked and took the right fork labelled ‘community’ instead of the left fork labelled ‘station’. If only we had thought to do that in the first place.

About a kilometre from the community, or, more correctly, in the middle of fucking nowhere, the car started to make a disturbing thud, thud, thud noise. We stopped the car and got out, sure enough the back passenger side wheel was flat. Well flat is a bit of a polite way to put it. I prefer to think that it was ravaged.

Finally proving that my Y chromosone was healthy I put all my training into action and changed a tire. A! helped as much as she could, but it was a one person job, and to everyone’s eternal shock it turned out that my rubbery frame was stronger than hers. I am strong, like bull.

We had to dig underneath the wheel frame to get enough space to get the new wheel on even with the jack at full extension, but we finally got it on. There’s something very zen about changing a tire. There’s no questions to be asked, or opinions to be sought, at least not after you’ve passed the “where the hell’s the bloody jack handle!” stage. It’s pure action to a purpose, very peaceful.

Maths thingummee #8
A golden oldie tonight, there are three different answers to this one. The first is the answer that most people struggle to find when they first hear the poem, the second is the one most people use after they’ve listened properly, the third is the correct answer, which very few people manage to properly articulate.

I want the third answer.

As I was going to St Ives
I met a man with seven wives
Every wife had seven sacks
Every sack had seven cats
Every cat had seven kits
Kits, cats, sacks, wives
How many were going to St Ives?

All quiet on the Northern front

2006-08-31T00:17:00.000+09:30

Not much to report today.

What a difference one hundred and twenty kilometres make. While the children at Lajamanu were friendly, they tended to give up easily and while they may engage with the puzzles, there was no self-direction to it, it had to be almost force-fed at times. It’s different in Kalkarinji. Admittedly our sample size is small. In two of our lessons only five of twenty kids showed up, because someone has just died here and many kids are travelling around with families to various royalty gatherings.

Even so the difference is amazing. The literacy and numeracy levels were much higher. We were able to bring out logic puzzles (lots of writing) and arithmetic puzzles. We didn’t have to explain how to do each puzzle. We dipped heavily into the high school puzzles. The kids kept focus throughout, they didn’t get bored and start wandering around as so often happens. One group we had for over an hour and a half, and they probably would have gone for longer if it hadn’t been lunch time.

After the stressful environment of Lajamanu, where you had to desperately try to keep as many kids entertained as possible or risk having a small number disrupt the whole group, it was nice to be in a situation where we didn’t have to spend all our time on crowd control and instead could really focus on enriching the experience for the kids.

I think part of it is because they had the three kids complete their year twelve there a few years back. That made all the papers and probably engendered a more positive attitude towards school amongst the community, which leads to more pliable kids. It also allows the teachers to control the students better as they can be more sure that the parents will care that their child is at school.

Of course, I have no idea why it really is, this is just skin deep analysis, there’s all sorts of things that could contribute to the difference. It was just nice to have an easy day.

Oh, and I’ve been linked to by someone I don’t even know. All the fame is going to my head.

I'll be outside reception the next few nights, so don't expect another post before the weekend.

Maths Thingumee #8
Most of you probably know this proof, but I’ve always had a soft spot for it.

To prove that 0.9 repeater = 1
0.99999...= x
10 x 0.99999... = 10x = 9.99999...
10x -x = 9.99999... - 0.99999...
9x = 9
x = 1

This one is true, you can try to disprove it, but it’s airtight, so you’ll just have to accept it eventually.

Motorvehicle Mayhem

2006-08-29T22:57:00.000+09:30

Don’t know what happened with the comments on yesterday’s post, but I’ve turned them on again, and hopefully for today’s post they’ll be turned on automatically.

We left Lajamanu today. It’s one hundred and twelve kilometres of dirt road before you hit the main highway. Which you need to do if you want to go, well, anywhere. I don’t know how many of you have done proper dirt road driving before, but when you’re on a dirt road there are places where the road tries to tell you where you should drive. You try and avoid those spots, but sometimes it’s simply not possible, and you have to fight the road to stay on track and not (say) annex a cow.

The road was especially bad today, as it had just been heavily used by all the people coming to Lajamanu to collect royalties, so these spots were more frequent than I would have liked, but mostly the road was fine, except that we had to keep up a decent clip to get over the corrugations (another pleasure of dirt road driving).

Coming off one set of corrugations, I found myself being led off the road by the furrows in the dirt. I pulled Gustav around as gently as I could, but to get out of the rut I had to turn a little bit harder than I would have liked, and our nose ended up pointing toward the opposite side of the road. I applied the brakes gently but firmly, steered lightly A! woke up and we came to a soft stop parallel with the road, but beside it, having calmly beheaded a few wildflowers.

Although disgusted with myself for getting in that position, I’m happy with the way I responded when the situation occurred. If I’d slammed on the brakes any harder, we probably would have had a brake lock, a tail slip, a spin and ended up on our roof. If I’d tried to swerve any more we probably would have just rolled. The side of the road was flat, no ditches, but even if it weren’t, I’d prefer to hit something with the front of a four wheel drive, where I have a nice long crumple zone and a willing airbag, than to roll and possibly kill A! or myself. I really am surprised I didn’t just freak out and try and swerve and brake at the same time. Yay me, perhaps this driver training stuff worked a little. We noticed afterwards that Gustav had popped out of 4wd mode, so I’d been driving with less traction than I thought, though the largest part of the responsibility definitely falls on me.

Afterwards we discovered that J!&M! had popped a tire and hit a tree (at an ant’s walking speed, reportedly the ant did not survive). They only had one spare so they may be in trouble for the rest of the tour, or the Rental place may be able to replace it on the weekend.

Lajamanu was very stressful today, with both the middle-school groups acting like hooligans prior to lunch. At lunch, we had a pleasant surprise as several of the kids who had been in the middle school, but hadn’t had the chance to finish their bridges thanks to their classmates came and finished, refined and tested bridges with us. One kid managed to make his bridge strong enough to hold a brick.

After lunch we had the senior school, a surprisingly sensible mob. They had been going for eight days straight, and were a tad exhausted, but they came in to see us, sat down, did puzzles and if they did get bored with them, they didn’t destroy anything or bother any of the guys who were working, nor cause any sort of disruption. Great bunch.

I got my picture from Lilly. Apparently I got quite the bargain, though I did pay her more than she’d asked. I wanted to pay her more, but didn’t know she was planning to come down to the school, so I hadn’t got the money when she brought it down in the morning, as it was I had to borrow from A!. I think Lilly liked me because I was working with the kids and I called myself Kuminja, proving that even if I am an uncultured white person I am at least trying.

Maths Thingumee #7

An inspector walks into a restaurant across the road from where there has been a drive-by-shooting. He talks to one man who had been sitting by a table at the window, from where he should have had a perfect vantage point to witness the murder.
“In your own words, what did you see?” he asked the man, flipping out a notepad.
“I’m sorry officer, but I didn’t see anything, my table was wobbling, so I’d leaned down to place a napkin under one of the legs when I heard the shooting. By the time I was up, they’d already driven off.”
“This table here?” Asked the detective.
“Yep, that one” nodded the witness.
The detective looked under the table and saw that there was indeed a new serviette carefully folded beneath one of the three legs of the table.

“Take this man in for questioning, he’s lying to us.”

Under police brut… interrogation, the man revealed that he was indeed a knowing accomplice of the murder, how had the detective known?

I have the overriding suspicion that Floor is going to want to ring me after reading the above post. Floor, we're in Kalkariji tonight and tomorrow night, and have CDMA reception during that time, so you can call me on the tour phone. Thursday night we'll be in Pigeon hole, and I don't think we'll ahve nay reception there.

Kuminjay

2006-08-29T01:22:00.000+09:30

Remember yesterday I mentioned that the names of deceased people are taboo to the people here? Guess what! I am Kuminjay. It’s a word that means all things taboo, I think. My name can’t be spoken around the locals. They’re good about the times we’ve slipped, but there’s no reason to be rude. Besides, there’s a strange freedom in not having a name, and a true feeling of satisfaction that if you die your name goes with you. Given the number of people with my name that we’ve met up here, it’s not surprising that my name is taboo, especially since the taboo can last years after someone dies.

The Lajamanu school is the first of the true community schools we’ve been to. All the descriptions of camp dogs, awful attendance rates, and a desire to talk in the indigenous tongue rather than English, have all held up here. The communities friendly though, and we don’t feel worried about walking around provided we’re together and it’s not night, and that’s more about the half-feral dog packs than about the people.

The children down here who have desert blood in them have hair a bright white-blond that’s hard to believe. It goes away as they grow up, but the contrast with the dark skin is really quite stunning. Apparently a lot of the teenagers dye their hair blond after it darkens, but in the little kids we’ve been dealing with it’s all natural.

There are two famous indigenous artists here and I commissioned a painting from one. I’m embarrassed by the price that she asked, and feel guilty for not being able to pay her what the painting will really be worth, but I am going to give her more than she asked for, because the exploitation of indigenous artists here is really sickening.

We’re back at Lajamanu school tomorrow with a day almost entirely devoted to bridge building, then we’re off to Kalkaringi. A school most famous for getting four indigenous students through their year 12 in recent years. It’s sad that that is a news worthy matter.

The desert nights are not nearly as cold as I was led to believe, at least not here, probably much more so down Alice way. I’m vaguely disappointed with the stars as the community light stops it from being as impressive as it could be. The dozen or so large solar dishes on the edge of town more than make up for this disappointment however.

Maths Thingumee #6

The largest calculation of pi pre-computer was to roughly 750 decimal places. It took him 15 years. A test by early computers showed that beyond the first 500 decimal places or so it was complete garbage as he had made a mistake in calculation. This isn’t such a big deal however, as once you know the value of pi to 39 decimal places, you can work at the circumference of the known universe and be wrong by one atom (or so I’m told, I feel uncomfortable with the description of the known universe as a sphere).

Death in the desert

2006-08-27T22:28:00.000+09:30

Six hours of road travel on roads with an unrestricted speed. We are now as far South as we will penetrate in this tour, and the land has changed dramatically. No more palm-trees, no more scraggly but verdant forests. Now we have rich red dirt and the world flatter than can be imagined, even the hills are flat.

We stopped for lunch at the Top Spring’s roadhouse where it appears that segregation is still the acceptable practice, provided you didn’t talk about it. Also don’t ask for a large orange juice. You’ll get a litre.

Lajamanu is the home of a dispossessed people. They were moved off their homeland, so they quietly made their way back, so they were moved off again. The cycle continued until the exodus stuck and they settled in Lajamanu.

We came at a bad time. The people here take death very seriously, so seriously that if you have the same name as someone deceased in the last few years, you’re not allowed to use that name, you have to use a different one. Currently, the people here are mourning a funeral. Funerals are important, you don’t have a choice whether or not you go, the disrespect you’re showing if you don’t is immense. So there are many people from other communities here at the moment to honour the deceased. This makes it a very social time, a time to catch up with old friends and relatives. Which is as good a reason as any not to go to school.

Worse, it’s royalty time. When the goldmine pays royalties to the people whose land they’re using. This means that anyone with any tenuous connection to the land turns up in town to get their share, which again makes it a highly social occasion. Exactly how many kids turn up tomorrow is anyone’s guess. The principal assures us that although some kids will be missing, others from outside the community will come along with their family. It should be interesting.

My parent’s-in-sin bought me a (premature) birthday present today (thanks guys!), a therma-rest self inflating mattress, which I went and got eagerly today as I was sure we’d be lying on a school room floor for the next couple of nights, and my old blue foamy thing wasn’t cutting it, instead they’ve put us in a house that is considerably larger than where I live, and has a fridge for me and a fridge for A!. I also thought I’d be out of reception, but that is apparently not the case. Every time I assume something here, I’m wrong.

Our troupe has gained another member; Pepé an unshaven lego-man who has tragically lost his hands.

Maths thingumee #5

Here is a proof that shows 1=2. Find the error, here’s a clue, you can use the same error to prove anything you like
Let a=b
Multiply both sides by a
a^2= ab

Add a^2 to both sides
a^2+a^2 =a^2+ab

That is
2a^2 = a^2 +ab

Subtract 2ab from both sides
2a^2 -2ab= a^2 +ab -2ab

Or
2a^2 -2ab= a^2 - ab

Therefore

2(a^2 -ab)= 1(a^2 - ab)

And factor to
2=1
You know it’s wrong? Prove it.

Anthropomorphism man

2006-08-26T23:06:00.000+09:30

I have a bad habit of naming things. Which wouldn’t be a problem except that when you give ‘things’ names, they have a dreadful habit of developing personalities. This can be difficult when you’re treating objects in a way that you would never treat a real personality,

For example, A! has just bought a pillow. Or rather a big pink fluffy ball that she intends to use as a pillow. As soon as I saw it, I determined that it’s name was Norman. Then the problems began, because I looked at Norman and knew that he was grumpy, and he was grumpy because he was lonely. So I decided that Norman needed a friend.

Sizing up Norman I decided that his ideal partner was a similar but yellow puffball, whom I would name Sherman. I endeavoured to purchase Sherman but could not find his like anywhere. At his point I feel I should apologise to Norman, not just because I failed to procure him a partner, but also because he didn’t need a partner prior to me christening him Norman.

I have also named A!’s marionette (an itty bitty feathery troll form Norway) Johansen - his favourite pastimes includes, pillaging, defiling, looting and crocheting) and our four wheel drive is dubbed St. Gustav (though I haven’t told anyone). All of these names have effected how I treat these items. It’s vaguely annoying, but I can’t shake it.

We went on a crocodile tour today. Those things really do look like dinosaurs. I have finished both my books. Katherine is a hole of a city, it’s very depressing.

Tomorrow we head South to Lajammanu, down on the edge of the desert, I can’t wait to look up at the stars and see the milky way stretch from low horizon to low horizon.

Back under the sattleite, hear me emote!

2006-08-25T23:50:00.000+09:30

Hey, back in reception range again, so I've posted yesterday's entry as well.

Also I'd like to give a big shout at to my father-in-sin who has also entered an older and slower period of his life in the last few days. Happy Birthday H!.

Also guys, a lot of addresses of people I meant to send this to bounced, especially N!nu and J!ju also H!Ju and many others, please pass this address onto them if you're able. Now on to the real message:

Our windscreen is a killing field. A! thought it was raining because the sound of bugs terminating their existence on glass was so constant on our way down the Stuart highway to Katherine. Of course, we were ding 160km/h, so we didn’t exactly give them a sporting chance.

I was impressed by Woolaning Homeland Christian school, all three groups of kids focused well on the puzzles. I think the kids are really helped to focus by being at boarding school, because it gives a clearer division of home and family life.

I walked out of the classroom today, and saw shadows flickering on the pathways. I looked up, and there were six eagles circling low over the school. The birds are beautiful. Perfectly adapted predators, creatures of the air. The awe subsided somewhat when a passing teacher told me they were always around at this time to collect the lunch scraps.

We met up with J! and M! in Katherine and all went to dinner. They have not killed each other yet, but there seems to be a slight undertone of exasperation to both of them that they may not be aware of yet. Still, we’ve got three more weekends for this to develop, it’s like a weekly soap! The MJ!

Going to keep it short tonight as I need the sleep and it’s already 11, I get to sleep in tomorrow for the first time (A!’s a slavedriver! : )) and I need it, I also have a nice queen bed to myself, much better than the fare we’ve had to date.

Maths Thingummy #4
Two fathers and two sons go fishing, they catch one fish each. They go home and make a fish dinner out of the fish they’ve caught. Being messy male chauvinists, they leave the plates on the table, when one of their wives comes to clean up there are three bowls to clean, each with the remains of one eaten fish.

How can this be?

24/8 - Out of reception, out of mind

2006-08-25T23:47:00.000+09:30

Finally on the road again, our job today - drive through Litchfield National Park to get to our next school, Woolaning home stay Christian college.

We peppered our trip with visits to various park features, it’s a tough life. Our first stop was Buley rockhole a series of paddling pools and waterfalls. Sitting in a waterfall is a wonderful massage, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who considers it.

I never used to enjoy swimming. I still feel uneasy whenever I have to first put my head underwater. I think it’s because I almost drowned as a kid when I decided I wanted to learn to swim. I walked determinedly down the steps of a pool until the water swirled above my head. Thanks again for saving me mum! I didn’t think that the Northern Territory, being the driest part of Australia, was likely to affect my bias.

The broiling temperatures, mixed with some gorgeous scenery, have turned my head, and I had great fun at every swimming hole we’ve visited. Screw man-made pools though, the real thing is so much better. Waterfalls, rocks, sand and fish all help to build the experience. The only downside is wondering if maybe, just maybe, you’re about to be a tasty treat of crocodile nibblets.

We stopped at a second and even more beautiful watering hole, Wangi falls. It was a huge rock wall with two waterfalls driving down it, one had a tight but deep paddling pond about two and a half metres up into the waterfall itself. I got thoroughly wet on both occasions.

There was a site on our map that no-one had mentioned to us as a must see. It was intriguingly titled ‘the lost city’. As no-one had mentioned it to us, we naturally wanted to see it, even though it was located down the end of a 10.5km 4WD track. So, variously humming and singing the theme to a certain 80’s cartoon favourite, we made our bumpy, bumpy way to ‘the lost city’.

After a while we thought we’d missed it, and started wondering if there’d be a sign at the end of the track saying ‘Did you find it?’. As a practical joke it would have been grand, but as a waste of our time it would have been monstrous. Finally we arrived to find huge chunks of rock sticking out of the ground in all sorts of contorted positions. We also discovered that our numberplate was hanging off our car by a single screw, swinging back and forth comically. The place felt old beyond belief, the forces at play so distant from our own tiny frame of reference as to make us insignificant. I thought it looked less like a lost city and more like the remains of shattered giants, but I’m like that. We fixed our numberplate, but it fell off again soon after.

We arrived at Woolaning and had a good chat with the principal about the philosophy behind the school. The school is in the middle of nowhere. There are no towns or communities nearby, a placement that is quite deliberate. It was an attempt to stop the school as being seen as owned by, or the territory of a single tribe. The kids are boarders, but not in the traditional sense, they have ‘school families’ of a few kids and a pair of ‘house parents’ to help make school similar to their usual learning environment. It’s interesting that every school we go to has been trying a different way to engage the aboriginal kids in education. We have so many different methods, but I’d make a rough guess that no-one knows what really works, not yet.

The problem isn’t an aboriginal one, it’s a common problem in social groups with lower levels of formal education. Education begets education, mistrust of education begets mistrust. If you don’t break the cycle, you end up with a culture that puts no high value on education. I don’t think that the aboriginal people put no value on education, but I think there’s something in the culture that makes classical western systems of education less effective to people growing up in that culture. It’s certainly not intelligence, as I said in an earlier entry, I’m awed by some of these kids. I don’t know what it is, nor what can be done about it. That’s the impression I get from my time so far - that there is an unresolved issue that is keeping aboriginal children from getting an equal education to other Australian children, maybe I’ll have changed my mind in a week.

Maths thingumee: #3 You are on a game-show called ‘Got my goat’. On this show, you’re given a choice between three doors, two of them have a goat behind them, one of them has a million dollars behind it. You get to keep whatever you find.

You choose a door. Before you can open it, the host tells you to wait, he opens up one of the two doors you did not pick, behind it is a goat.

Having revealed the location of an unpicked goat, the host then offers you the choice of either the door you originally picked, or the third unopened door. What do you do?

(Presume for this exercise that you would prefer the million dollars over the goat, and the prize is equally likely to be behind any of the three doors)

Ps. For those worried that my albino legs will lose their lily white complexion to the harsh solar barbeque, fear not! They’re still as pasty as always thanks to liberal applications of sunscreen. Also, my face grows hair, but still not beard.

Bridges and Brats

2006-08-23T22:25:00.000+09:30

Not much to report today, we’re still in Batchelor, and visited Batchelor area school today. It’s the second biggest school on our schedule at a massive 150 odd kids. (Hey Sherdie, is this your old school?)

The high schoolers were first up, and we made them build bridges, unlike the Belyuen kids, they didn’t just blindly copy A!’s good bridge. Instead coming up with a mish-mash of different designs. One group had intricate clever plans that they got half way to realising, then they were told they had five minutes left, so they took all their bits smooshed them into a ball, and held it all together with half a roll of sticky tape rolled around and around and around. Such auspicious beginnings, such crap results. Time management is your friend people!.

We then moved onto the opposite end of the spectrum with the four and five year olds. One of the girls was an utter kleptomaniac. She pocketed puzzle piece after puzzle piece, and did so badly. Her sleight of hand wasn’t exactly sleight, it was just ‘of hand’. When we were packing up the puzzles we had lost a piece (the third she’d try to steal from the same damn puzzle, I‘d caught her in the act the other two times). The teacher suggested that we check the floor, and that everyone check their pockets as it may have ‘accidentally’ fallen in there. Guess where it was?

A big loud boo-yah to my father, who entered a new and older phase of his life yesterday. Happy Birthday Dad!

Maths thingumee #2
This one is courtesy of J!
Imagine a list of all the teacups in the world. None of the items on the list is going to be the list itself, because the list isn’t a teacup. Call that a type A list, and have our working definition of a type A list be: A list that does not contain itself.

Now imagine a list of all the things in the world that aren’t a teacup. Amongst ‘A brain’ ‘a heart’ ‘courage’ and ‘saxophone’ would be the list you are making. The list itself is not a teacup, so it is listed in itself. Call this a type B list, our working definition of a type B list is: A list that contains itself.

Now make a list of all the Type A lists in the world. What type of list is this list A or B?

Alright, here are the more impressive termite pictures:

This is a cathedral termite mound

This is a magnetic mound

This is a lot of magnetic mounds.

Butterfly brothels?

2006-08-22T23:22:00.000+09:30

First pictures of termite mounds as promised...

We went to Batchelor area school this morning to sort out a few odds and ends for tomorrow. We got chatting with the receptionist about this and that, and we told her we planned to visit the butterfly farm. Her face took on a disapproving cast, and she mentioned that the guy who an it was ‘quite a character’.

Adequately warned, we decided we’d go anyway. When we arrived we discovered a café with a wide balcony, on the balcony were some gorgeous mahogany tables. Sitting at one of the tables was a lady of more than generous proportions. I didn’t have the most, ahem, revealing, vantage point, but she seemed topless.

We paused, unsure how to proceed, she saw us, and in an aggravated tone told us to ‘come on up then’, a command we wearily obeyed. It was then we made two important discoveries. One, she was just a customer not a staff member, and two, although her dress appeared to just be a skirt, it did pull up at the front to maintain her dignity. Satisfied that we had not stumbled upon some bizarre entomologically themed brothel we bought tickets for the butterfly house tour.
Before the tour began, an odd man in purple pants gave us a large scrapbook to look through, it was many pictures from the creation of the butterfly house. It became clear very quickly, that the whole Butterfly farm was one man’s eccentric but friendly vision. It did contain some amazing information.

The butterfly farm was staffed by WWOOFers (willing workers on organic farms) giving the whole place the inviting feel of a commune. The mahogany tables came from some trees that had been planted after cyclone Tracey and knocked down by cyclone Billy. These glorious trees had been on their way to the dump until the butterfly farmer offered the tree haulers a couple of cases of beer for them. There was one photo showing a bushfire nearby that just said ‘the smoke and dust killed all our butterflies’.

Purple pants, a Lancastrian/Irish hippy came to give us the tour he showed us around the Northern Territory’s largest man-made waterfall (not very big). The pool at the bottom was meant to be a crocodile pond, but his daughter had demanded a swimming pool. Knowing kids as I do, I’m sure both desires could have happily been accommodated.

We passed by a full clothesline, and the BF turned to A! and told her that ‘This is when you find out if he’s worth marrying! I’ll say go, and then he has to get as many clothes down as he can, as quick as he can, and you can see if its fast enough for you’. I took down no clothes, and A! has not yet proposed.

In the butterfly enclosure we saw all of 4 butterflies, maybe, and all the same type. This was more than made up for by the aviary. There were some bold, crazy looking chickens that A! was sure were going to attack her, some peacocks, and the oldest most pathetic looking turkey you have ever seen.

After a nap we went out to the Litchfield National Park. The flora here is mostly snake like trees sticking out of the ground with sickly yellow green leaves, most of the time they’re barely taller than the ant mounds, which can, admittedly, be quite large. Even so, the place is verdant and lush, teeming with a million different bugs. Many of which I have squashed.

We arrived at a tourist spot, that looked like it came straight out of a pamphlet. Two waterfalls had cut a basin into rock, and the pool at the bottom was cool, clear and croc free. On our way down to the pool we passed a lady wearing a leopard skin swimsuit, army boots, and knee high black socks. Her swimwear did not completely hide her rear. It was an odd combination.

We swam over to the waterfalls and had them crash on to us. The falls were powerful and being underneath them was an onslaught of force. The experience was ruined by a bus load of drunken contiki tourers doing stupid shit, but we’d had our fun so we left.

On the way back to Batchelor we passed some more termite mounds. Yesterday’s mounds were made by cathedral termites, and were impressive enough, but these were the work of the magnetic termites. There nests are flat. Two and a half metres tall, one and a half metres wide and only twenty centimetres thick. They look like fields of giant gravestones.

Anyway, today’s maths thingumee, this is a riddle we ask the kids, and it was also in a Scrubs I watched last night, so I thought I’d share:

I have two Australian coins, together they are worth exactly thirty cents. One of them is not a ten cent piece. What coins have I got?

Belyuen and Batchelor. Bloody brilliant

2006-08-21T22:57:00.000+09:30

Sleeping on the floor isn’t as easy as I remember. The Belyuen kids were great, I took the older (yrs4-7) kids and they really engaged with the puzzles, with all of them telling me what to do when I was demonstrating the puzzles. They were all really lovely, but it was obvious there were huge cultural differences between us. The puzzles that are usually easy, the basic arithmetic ones, were almost universally shunned by these kids, while the shape jigsaw ones were adored.

I’m not saying these kids were dumb, they really weren’t, most of them are bi, tri or even tetra-lingual, while all efforts to make me understand more than English and the bastardised English we import from the land of the great brown hamburger have failed miserably. One kid who came to chat with us at lunch and discussed what can only be described as the rudiments of the flat-land hypothesis, something he’d seemed to develop by himself. I know adults who don’t understand flat-land.

Making bridges also went well, and I’m happy to say that the local kids made stronger bridges than the (anglo) kids who’d come down from Dundee beach to join in. Their teacher had a Joey that she’d found by the side of the road, apparently she’s raised dozens of Orphaned roos.

Most of the kids had skin problems, one had a partly black tongue. It scares me how bad health care is up here. I’m also frankly glad that the school had a big bottle of disinfectant soap. Unlike the more anglo schools we’ve performed in, the kids don’t perceive a physical contact boundary between kids and adults. So they’re always grabbing, pulling, poking. Not in a violent way, just to tell you ‘oi, over here’. So the ability to scrub yourself clean before eating is more than welcome.

A! and I drove down to Batchelor today, past many a gigantic termite mounds - photos to come- and past a tree that had grown into itself. That means we’ve got tomorrow mostly off and can go and see the butterfly farm. A! assures me they don’t slaughter them for meat, so I’m wondering how they milk them.

Batchelor Area school has put us up in there Outdoor Education unit. We have tiny rooms with two beds in them, in the interests of not getting bitten by anything, I’m going to sleep with my blue foam mat on the bed frame, rather than on the seedy and possibly crawling mattress on the second bed.

I cooked tonight, a Stir fry of vegetables that were probably about to go off, and with a little help with my darling Floor (almost her real name) who called while I was making managed to do a passable impression of an edible meal.

Watching : Scrubs
Reading : The Eyre Affair
Playing : Nethergate (romans)

Signing out,
Mechanical

The barmy air of Darwin

2006-08-20T21:58:00.000+09:30

Sunday the 20th, 9.22 pm. My second day in the Territory is coming to a close. We finally arrived yesterday after a slight delay in our flights because a man two rows behind me had to be rolled out in a wheelchair with a paper bag over his mouth. Maree was told he had a heart-attack, but I'm not sure it was that serious. If offered the chance to watch Mission Impossible three, just say no.

Darwin's an odd city, and not as backward as I'd hoped, the airport is in the middle like a bizzare centre's piece, and the whole thing feels as backpackery as New Orleans. We'll be going back on my birthday weekend, which is nice, because I'd like to see it a little more.

The two teams split this morning with M! and J! heading off early, that's going to be an interesting dynamic, M!'s never had an older brother, and J! Is the world's older brother – with all the good and bad that entails. A! and I ended up leaving Darwin a little later than we had planned this morning because our four wheel drive wasn't ready to be picked up until Midday, so we hung around the Casurina shopping Centre (freakishly similar to Woden Plaza, but not for any reason you could put your finger on) and did some random shopping, Miff, they have Woolworths up here. I bought a game called Wetrix. It's awfully odd and cost me $2.95.
I Noticed that a large proportion of cars have vanity plates. Apparently it's free. The best one I've seen yet is 'Eggplnt'[sic] which almost, but not quite, beats my old favourite of 'mmm Pie'.

We arrived at Beluen school, up on the cox peninsula, after a two hour drive through a suprisingly green and tropical countryside. They burn off a lot around here, but it grows back just as fast. It was strange to see 2 metre tall termite mounds grey and charred on the outside.

We lucked out with our first school, there's a giant TV and DVD player in the library. As well as hot and cold running internet. The buildings seem nice and new as well. Beluen is not a dry community, and when we walk between the staff room and the library we hear some noises that are probably just normal everyday noises, but creepy none the less. The wonderfully friendly principal tells us the community is a nice one, and there's never been an incident with the school. We saw two of the kids earlier and they asked us if we had a video camera. They seemed disappointed that we didn't.

There was apparently a band playing at pub down the road in the Mandulah, but A! and I opted to stay in and take advantage of the large TV instead. A! made dinner, but her forgetfulness shone through and when I went to get beverages, I also had to turn off the hotplate.

If you get a chance to watch best in show, do.

Opening thoughts

2006-08-20T21:53:00.000+09:30

Whilee I'm stomping round the top end, internet is going to be a rare and precious commodity, I'm going to use this blog as a way to communicate with as many people as possible. I can't promise that it'll be particularily interesting, but I'll try.

This way I can type up new posts on my shiny new laptop (Lappy McTavish as the networks know him) and then publish them when I get access to the net. So if they get updated at no other time during the week, they'll probably get updated on the Weekend, when we're in Katherine, so look for new stuff on Mondays.

Anyway...