It's Winter Again

If you have read my profile then you probably noticed that I'm from Australia. The illusion that it's REALLY hot here in Australia, has been exaggerated by the media. Even though there are places in Australia where that statement is true! I live right down the bottom! (at the rear end of the world) and it is not warm here! let alone hot. It is smack bang in the middle of summer and we have jumpers on.
It seems that summer is getting shorter and shorter. We only had 10 days of hot weather this summer and now it sucks again. For 10 days, we had fans pounding away, sweet dripping, and discarded clothing, and now...
I guess summer is over again, time to bring out the heaters :s.
I need to move somewhere warm!!!

Things you may not know.

I was reading a Blog post at RankySpanky called: Why? Or true things which do not make sense and it made me think of this e-mail I got about 3 years ago it is very interesting:

Things you may not know

• Money isn't made out of paper. It's made out of cotton.
• The 57 on the Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickle the company once had.
• A rat can last longer without water than a camel.
• Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.
• The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.
• The dot over the letter "i" is called a tittle.
• A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.
• Susan Lucci is the daughter of Phyllis Diller.
• A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.
• A duck's quack doesn't echo. No one knows why.
• A 2 X 4 is really 1-1/2 by 3-1/2.
• 40% of McDonald's profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.
• Every person has a unique eye & tongue print.
• The "spot" on the 7-Up comes from its inventor who had red eyes. He was an albino.
• 315 entries in Webster's 1996 dictionary were misspelled.
• During the chariot scene in "Ben Hur", a small red car can be seen in the distance.
• On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.!
• John Wilkes Booth's brother once saved the life of Abraham Lincoln's son.
• Warren Beatty and Shirley McLaine are brother and sister.
• Chocolate kills dogs. Chocolate affects a dog's heart and nervous system. A few ounces is enough to kill a small sized dog.
• Daniel Boone detested coonskin caps.
• Playing cards were issued to British pilots in WWII. If captured, they could be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map for escape.
• Most lipstick contains fish scales.
• Orcas (killer whales) kill sharks by torpedo-ing up into the shark's stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode.
• Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants.
• Dr. Seuss is actually pronounced Seuss such that it sounds like Sue-ice.
• Ketchup was sold in the 1830s as medicine.
• During the California gold rush of 1849, miners sent their laundry to Honolulu for washing and pressing. Due to the extremely high costs in California during these boom years, it was deemed more feasible to send their shirts to Hawaii for servicing.
• American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in First Class.
• Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.
• The number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per side in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000.
• Upper and lower case letters are named "upper" and "lower" because in the time when all original print had to be set in individual letters, the upper case letters were stored in the case on top of the case that stored the lower case letters.
• There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.
• There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with orange, purple and silver.
• The numbers "172" can be found on the back of the US 5 dollar bill, in the bushes at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.
• The name Wendy was made up for the book Peter Pan. There was never a recorded Wendy before.
• The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin in World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
• There are 4 cars and 11 lightposts on the back on the US 10 dollar bill.
• Leonardo Da Vinci invented scissors. It also took him 10 years to paint Mona Lisa's lips.
• If one places a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.
• Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to s-l-o-w film down so you could see his moves. That's the opposite of the norm.
• If you have 3 quarters, 4 dimes and 4 pennies, you'd have $1.19. You would also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make change for a dollar.
• The first CD pressed in the US was Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA".
• The mask used by Michael Myers in the original "Halloween" was actually a Captain Kirk mask painted white.
• The original name for butterfly was flutterby.
• The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
• The first product Motorola started to develop was a record player for automobiles. At that time, the most known player on the market was Victrola, so they called themselves Motorola.
• Roses may be red, but violets are indeed violet.
• By raising your legs slowly and laying on your back, you cannot sink into quicksand.
• Casey Kasem is the voice of Shaggy on Scooby Doo.
• Celery has negative calories. It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.
• Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
• In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift described the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, giving their exact size and speeds of rotation. He did this more than 100 years before either moon was discovered.
• Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
• Sherlock Holmes NEVER said "Elementary, my dear Watson".
• An old law in Bellingham, Washington, made it illegal for a woman to take more than 3 steps backwards while dancing.
• Sharon Stone was the first Star Search spokesmodel.
• The glue on Israeli postage is certified kosher.
• The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from Public Libraries.
• Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them.
• Back in the mid to late 80s, an IBM compatible computer wasn't considered 100% compatible unless it could run Microsoft's Flight Simulator.
• Bats always turn left when exiting a cave!!

On How to Live

“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard, think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common - this is my symphony.”

- William Henry Channing, American writer and philosopher

Humans and the Universe

On the way driving home tonight, my partner and I were discussing a local law that we have here. I was thinking to myself how very small humans are when you look at the universe. And how unimportant all these social norms, laws, rules, and expectations really are in the scheme of things. It's a humbling thought, when you consider how tiny we think we are, and how tiny we possibly could be. Perhaps our entire universe is no more than a quantum particle, which makes up an atom on the back of a drake somewhere. And that drakes universe is another quantum bit and so on... Who knows? it is all speculation on our part. Even the calculations we currently have, our ours and ours alone!
All we have is the here and the now, all we have are our emotions, think about it they are us. Even logic, it just feels right, right? Well this is what I have been thinking anyway.

My favorite all time saying is from Monty Python's Meaning of Life, and is in the Galaxy song, which I managed to find on Youtube for your entertainment:

Have fun, and "Just remember when you feeling very small and insecure how amazingly unlikely is your birth, and pray that there is intelligent life somewhere up in space cos there is bugger all down here on earth."

So I guess all I have left to say is; have fun and enjoy life. There is nothing else, so "Always Look On the Bright Side of Life":

What an Amazing Universe We Live In!

I was looking at this site, this morning: Astronomy Top Ten, of 2006, and I saw this link: Portrait of a Frightening Stellar Crib. It is so amazing. The image has remained with me all day. Even in the darkness there are millions of Galaxy's.