Deep Impact

One of my favorite sci-fi/doomsday movies is Deep Impact, a story about a giant asteroid on a collision course with the earth and the efforts of mankind to save itself, or to save at least a very large handful of scientists, brains, farmers etc.

Anyway, I've recently started getting a daily quote from Delancey Place dot com. Extracts from relevant and interesting non-fiction books and articles and lectures etc. Today's was about asteroids and how often we narrowly miss being smashed to pieces by a stray chunk of cosmic rock.

"As Steve Ostro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has put it, 'Suppose that there was a button you could push and you could light up all the Earth-crossing asteroids larger than about ten meters, there would be over 100 million of these objects in the sky.' In short, you would not see a couple of thousand distant twinkling stars, but millions upon millions of nearer, randomly moving objects--'all of which are capable of colliding with the Earth and all of which are moving on slightly different courses through the sky at different rates. It would be deeply unnerving.' Well, be unnerved because it is there. We just can't see it.

"Altogether it is thought--though it is only really a guess, based on cratering rates on the Moon--that some two thousand asteroids big enough to imperil civilized existence regularly cross our orbit. But even a small asteroid--the size of a house, say--could destroy a city. The number of relative tiddlers in Earth-crossing orbits is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions, and they are nearly impossible to track.

"The first one [crossing near the Earth] wasn't spotted until 1991, and that was after it had already gone by. Named 1991 BA, it was noticed as it sailed past us at a distance of 106,000 miles--in cosmic terms the equivalent of a bullet passing through one's sleeve without touching the arm. Two years later, another, somewhat larger asteroid missed us by just 90,000 miles. ... It, too, was not seen until it had passed and would have arrived without warning. According to Timothy Ferris, writing in the New Yorker, such near misses probably happen two or three times a week and go unnoticed.

"An object a hundred yards across couldn't be picked up by any Earth-based telescope until it was within just a few days of us, and that is only if a telescope happened to be trained on it, which is unlikely because even now the number of people searching for such objects is modest. The arresting analogy that is always made is that the number of people in the world who are actively searching for asteroids is fewer than the staff of a typical McDonald's restaurant. (It is actually somewhat higher now. But not much.)"

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Broadway, Copyright 2003 by Bill Bryson, pp. 194-195.

Why Bother?

Changing course from applying to emigrate to the US to applying to emigrate to New Zealand meant a whole new round of paperwork. So I got started in mid-June.

On the 21st June, I sent off requests to the SA Nursing Council for verification of credentials and transcripts of training (supposed to take 4 - 6 weeks) and requests for police clearances (supposed to take 28 working days). Delay Number One: the police clearance was returned 10 days ago - but they only sent ONE instead of THREE! Delay Number Two: I just called the Nursing Council and they told me: "Yes, we received your money (R1000.00) on the 23rd of June, but we haven't started doing it yet. We are still busy with requests from May!!! Call again in two weeks time and maybe we'll be a bit further along ... "

So all my sweating to get my package of documents off last week - via courier instead of post and at a considerable price - was a bit of a waste of time. Not a total waste, as at least it meant they got there safely and did not get lost in the mail, but still. Why do I bother to do my part as best I can when the bureaucrats in the system just drag their heels and lose your stuff and couldn't care less?

Makes me sick. There are a lot of people who scorn those of us who prefer to leave this country instead of staying and trying to make a difference, but tell me how exactly one is supposed to 'change' a service mentality like this?

This is Africa. Enough said.

Militant Extremists ...

Who do you think is being described in the following excerpt?

"The rebels were sustained by the traditional faith of the common people, a religion of radical messages spread by itinerant preachers - messages about the wickedness of the 'sons of darkness', about the breaking of the 'covenant' between God and his people and about an imminent apocalyptic settling of accounts in which the 'sons of righteousness' would rise up against the rich, cleanse the land of oppressors and restore to the people the fruits of their labor."

Sounds to me like something a modern-day commentator might say about a radical militant terrorist group, like Al Queda or some other radical Islamist group opposed to the wicked West .... but it's not. It's from an article entitled "Hadrian and the Limits of Empire," written by Neil Faulkner and published in History Today (Aug 2008) and the rebels in question are first century Jews of Palestine and the diaspora, who had risen up against Roman tax collectors, Greek landlords and fellow Jews perceived as traitors.

Interesting ... ;-)

Then and Now

In the year I turned 40, I rediscovered myself as a writer.

I'm not going to detail here the strange, mystical, spiritual experience that preceded it, but suffice it to say that one long, dreary Sunday afternoon, while my kids were away visiting their dad, I sat down at the computer and decided to try writing something. Following the adage 'write what you know', I produced a couple of pages of story about an overweight, single mom trying to make ends meet, trying not to feel like a loser, agonizing about finding love again ... in general, all the issues that were plaguing me at the time. (I think I still have it buried in a file somewhere...) It was fun! Words flowed, in an odd kind of way, and I felt good about my ability to create.

I carried on, writing scenes, descriptions, chapters, events - nothing cohesive and certainly nothing publishable. And I enjoyed it hugely! I started a little writer's group - a few friends who met up once a month and read their ramblings to each other. Then, through the internet, I got connected to a Christian writers' group and in 2002, was given the opportunity to attend a Christian Writer's Conference in the USA - all expenses paid. What a gift! Part of attending a conference, however, is that you are expected to bring along a sample of your writing and to receive critical feedback on it from real, live editors or agents or published authors. So I took my collection of scenes and chapters and pulled them together into a kind of a story. Wrote up a synopsis, polished the first chapter and printed it all out. Took it to the conference and got raves from the two editors I submitted it to.

Now, if memory serves, the writing wasn't all that good. The story was about a man who lives for twenty years under an assumed name, hiding his real identity from his first and second wives and his sons. Then one day, something overturns his world, his little daughter's life is in danger and he goes on the run, trying to prevent his carefully-fabricated world from collapsing. The story was heavily imbued with religious elements (befitting a Christian story) and had a redemeptive theme.

Since then I've written a lot more, mainly fiction in the form of a few short stories and a few more attempts at a novel. My writing has been heavily influenced by whatever is going on in my 'inner life' at the time - and for the greater part of the last few years, that has had to do with my personal spiritual journey / odyssey / whatever you want to call it. And interestingly, a recurrent theme has been to do with hidden identity - with things looking like one thing on the surface, but underneath, there is something completely unexpected going on. Characters are never quite who they seem to be, but they all manage to fool everyone around them (and themselves!) until suddenly, for some reason or other, the system breaks down and the old masks no longer serve ... then the real journey of self-discovery and redemption begins!

Now I have turned 50 and once again, life is imitating art to a degree. Not only is a new emigration plan underway, but I think my writing life is getting a revamp. I seem to have lost all interest (for now) in building a 'world' and in developing characters. I am still trying to make sense of the spiritual. My thinking has undergone a 180 degree change in the last two years and after being a Christian for well over 30 years, the most honest thing I can call myself now is 'agnostic'. And that upheaval is the thing I most want to get to write about.

Not as fiction, though. Maybe as literary or narrative non-fiction. We'll see. I hope it will still be fun, though!!

Brilliant Bloggings

Out of the blue, I got this ultra cool award, from Kelly It was totally unexpected and I am quite sure mostly undeserved, seeing as I hardly ever update here... but I'm very grateful and VERY happy to have it! Thank, honey!! :-)))

Now, what I am supposed to do is this:

1) Put the logo on my blog. DONE!
2) Add a link to the person who awarded me. DONE!
3) Nominate 7 other blogs. UMmmm...
4) Add links to those blogs on mine. More Ummm ....
5) Leave a message for my nominees on their blogs. Well.....

Thing is, I don't hang out and chat on all that many blogs ... since I started working fulltime again back in April, all the stuff I used to do has kind of fallen away and a great deal of RL has taken over. I miss my cyberlife, especially all the long, long chatty emails I used to exchange with my bestest cyberbuds ... so, I'm not too sure who to nominate seeing as Kelly already has one of these awards thingies. I think what I'll do is just hang on to it, until I find a blog that makes me go "Yeah!"

Till then!!