That bloody pulp mill project is back!

The Gunns pulp mill project is rearing its haggish head again. Click on this to see the campaign ad full-sized and readable:



for more info, or to be involved, go here:
https://www.getup.org.au/campaign/NoPulpMill&id=622

Feeling your mortality ... just a little

If I want to blog at all today, this is my window of opportunity do to it -- and (thank whatever guardian angel looks after these things) the Internet connection is behaving itself.

So, naturally, there's nothing remotely interesting to blog about --

Except this:

"...over the past 50 years more than 75,000 chemicals have been introduced into the environment with -- yes count them -- 300 synthetic chemicals now found in the bodies of almost every American man, woman, child and even newborn.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-dejong/the-dirty-word-in-clean_b_171464.html

That little gem is from a story, "The Dirty Word in Clean," which is running on Huffington ... and I challenge you to read the whole thing. Your blood will run cold.

Do you ever get days when you feel barely human? When you're sure you're turning green and moldy, and maybe growing a second head or a third leg? There you go. Now you know why.

I've been something of a "fresh air fascist" since I watched my father die of lung cancer. It's the kind of experience that turns your life around. At one time, I had my father, a grandmother and two aunts dying of cancer, all at the same time; then my cousin (only three months older than me -- and this was 10 or 12 years ago, so said cousin was still only about 40) had a series of strokes resulting in paralysis and wheelchair dependency. I guess I became super-sensitive to the crap we live among, what we put into our bodies by just breathing ...

In your 20s and 30s, you know for a fact, you're indestructible. I certainly was. I lost my immortality at about the age of 43 or 44. I don't know quite how it happened, but one day I woke up and realized, hey, time is catching me up. I might not be immortal after all. To misquote the commercial, "well, shoot, what a feeling."

Today, as I run off in the direction of work, I leave you with this parting shot from that feature on Huffington: "The Soap and Detergent Association is a one-hundred plus member trade association representing the $30 billion U.S. cleaning products market and -- oops -- it seems that they kinda' forgot to inform their brand loyal customers that their products might be killing them." Go read the whole story. I dare you.

Cheers,
MK

Blogging in the rain -- really!

Can't blog ... I'm too busy watching the rain. Not that you guys would call it rain, of course, but hey -- this is the first time WATER has dropped willy-nilly out of the sky, since something like October! So even though it hasn't rained much (most of the time you could count the splashes as they hit the pavers) you just had to stop and stare.

Of course, its all over now. The radar map shows blue skies behind the current overcast, and since the wind just got up these clouds will be gone before long.

But it was nice while it lasted:
There you are ... WET and everything. Water on the sidewalk. Clouds in the sky. Makes a difference, I'll tell you.

The rain is one of a couple of Significant Happenings in the last 24 hours. The second is that the proof copies of Equinox and Scorpio have arrived, and they are superb. CreateSpace has done a marvelous job, as usual. Now, we're waiting on the proofs for Stopover and Aphelion, and then -- the book launch at Amazon for the whole NARC series, all of a piece. For which, expect a newsletter...

Otherwise, it's work as usual. The Kindle situation remains in limbo ... I'm working on the reformatting for Smashwords, but it's going to be slow, due to the fact that I'm converting some very old, eccentric documents --

For example, Fortunes of War. This one was typed in Juniper Computing's Softword program (circa 1985), and SAVED TO TAPE. Much later, the tape-memory files were recalled, it was printed out, scanned in, run through OCR software and fed one page at a time into Lotus AMI Pro; the final edit was done, and hard copies were sent to GMP for publication in the early 1990s. The files were then stored on single density 3.5" floppy disks. These were, much later, read back into Lotus Word Pro and stored on an IEEE Firewire external harddrive that, at 30MB, looked incalculably vast when it was new. The "new" lotus files on the Firewire drive were of the LWF type ... which, thank gods, Serif PagePlus 10 reads extremely well. So, the DreamCraft version is in a Serif DTP format, a PPP document. For Lulu.com, this was published to PDF.

There is no simple .doc file ... nor has there ever been! ... for Fortunes of War. However, you can (!) select-all/copy a Serif PPP file to the clipboard, and dump it into Microsoft Word 2003 (not later versions; the more clever Microsquash gets, the less it shakes hands with other formats). Then, you save back the Word document -- not as a .doc, but as a Web Page Unfiltered. This gets rid of most of the passenger trash. Now, use Word to reopen the HTML file, and you're ready to run it through the process required by Smashwords to get rid of all remaining formatting.

Now, it's true that the new(er) books will be easy by comparison. But I have several golden oldies that are reader favorites from yonks ago. For instance, Fortunes is among my February bestsellers! Would you believe this? A book that's been out for over 15 years and has been through more editions (with more stupid covers designed by moronic artists) than you can shake a stick at, is still out there, selling so well --

Put it like this: if GMP were still handling this book, I'd have had to sell about 115 copies of this oldie in the month of February, to make the income it generated for me at Amazon (paperbacks), Payloadz (ebooks) and Lulu (hardcovers). I'm amazed, and pleased.

So -- yep, we're heading for Smashwords, one step at a time. In fact, after I finish this post I'm going to run one of the very new books through the conversion process, and with any luck, in a couple of days I might be able to run up a flag and tell you, you can get Dangerous Moonlight and The Lords of Harbendane for your iPhone, and as Mobi, readable on your Kindle.

Bear with me.

Speaking of all this stuff -- the Keegan sales figures were just tallied up for February, and I can tell you that we did more than double the business in Feb that we did in January. Nice, that. About 50% was ebooks, 45% paperbacks, 5% hardcovers. Of the ebooks, 75% were the regular PC/Mac version, 25% were specifically for the screenreaders, though I have no idea what kind ... the ones that can read a properly designed PDF, is all I know!

The book launch for The Lords of Harbendane obviously put that title out in front, with decent sales ... not brilliant, but in fact better than I'd secretly hoped for. Don't underestimate 1) the global recession, 2) the length of the unemployment lines, 3) the price of gas, and 4) the idiotic price of importing a Keegan into Aus and New Zealand --

It costs US$38.04 to buy The Lords of Harbendane in paperback and have it shipped via Amazon to Aus or NZ. Run the exchange rate (at .63c, as of this morning) and you get a price of A$60.38, ppd. That's two tanks of gas for a small car, or a week's groceries for a frugal couple.

So, if you drop out the "lost" Aussie and Kiwi readers, and factor in an adjustment percentage for the global recession etc., the fact is, Harbendane is doing very nicely. There was a time (2002/3) when DreamCraft would organize a book launch and we'd ship about 250 copies of the new title in THE FIRST WEEK. That doesn't happen these days, and I don't expect it to; but I have high hopes for the future, when advertising, technology and economic recovery have conspired to change the way things currently are. For the moment, I'm extremely pleased with sales -- and looking forward to seeing how the books' availability for iPhone and Kindle, via Smashwords, will add to the numbers.

Interest in the Legends digital novel project could be higher, I'll admit -- fact: a lot of people just don't have a use for electronic files, or else have no interest in a serial! However, the emerging book has a strong core of about 50 - 75 readers who swing by either every day or once a week ... not bad going for a project that only launched three weeks ago and has had very, very limited promotional exposure.

Right now, I'm looking out for listings, directories, where Legends can be, uh, listed. There are loads of them, but almost all have a downside. Either they're owned and operated by people who have a problem with gay fiction (and that's okay, because where a directory is a personal project, the list-mom/dad has the right to decide what gets into their list) or else the automated systems are so vast, one will vanish into the primordial ooze --

For example, www.blogcatalog.com is an amazing directory, but it's the size of the Death Star. Searchable -- yes; but the tag "gay" pulls up 42,884 items. "Fiction" pulls up 28,272 items. "Books" = 130,260. "Gay fiction" = 1,746 ... getting warmer, but at 10 results per search page, you're still looking at 174 pages -- and if it's anything like Google (and it is) people don't look past Page One.

Legends needs a lot more of a shove to get it properly launched. I had hoped, initially, that "viral marketing" would take over, that people would email people who emailed people ... with the URL. This happened for the first few days, tapered off and stopped. Now, you and I both know the readership is vastly bigger than this! But it seems one can't look for much in the way of user participation -- which is fair enough, too. (It's an experiment, and this is one of the facts that just fell out of the data.)

Statistically? About 500 "unique" visitors checked out Legends in the first week; about 50 of those are still reading; 20 more have come on board in the last couple of weeks. So you had about 10% of the check-out crowd (those who like to read; like fantasy; like Keegan; have the fascination and/or patience to stick around; and like ebooks) who became regulars, plus 10 new readers per week finding the book and becoming followers of this serial.

This is actually pretty good. If the numbers remain stable, it means 250+ regulars by the time the book is finished, and 500 new readers finding it, and grabbing the whole thing, during any one year. That's a reader base which is quite vigorous enough to support the advertising with the occasional shopping spree at Amazon which started out on the Legends page, and so on.

Speaking of Legends -- two posts are up today:
A Bargain by the Jackal Throne (conclusion)
and
The Oracle Speaks

And now, I'm going to spend a fascinating hour or so shoving Dangerous Moonlight headfirst through what Smashwords terms as the "meatgrinder." If everything comes up Keegan, I'll let you know tomorrow!

Cheers,
MK

Save the planet? According to Kevin Rudd, why bother?!

Just a quickie this morning -- I'll be back later with something significant to say, but right now I have something rather significant to show! It's been a long time since I supported Kevin Rudd and the Australian labor government, even though [sounds of retching] I actually voted for them, because at the time it seemed that any change from "Jackboot John" Howard would have to be an improvement. A lot of people thought that way, which is why KRudd rode into office so easily. But time (and it didn't take much of it) proved us dead wrong. Like so:

Obviously, click the pic for the lare, readable version -- it's the ad which is circulating down here right now ...

Right now, you've got a rampaging Christian in the Responsibility Seat, who takes a dim view of gay marriage rights, is ambivalent about foreign policy, wants all of Australia to drop off the Internet to save a handful of parentally neglected children from the faint possibility of blundering into disgusting websites ... and frankly he doesn't give the proverbial stuff about the environment.

And I voted for this guy. Gee-Zeus. I swear it, I'm going back to voting for Daffy Duck, even though Brendan Fraser said he was (and I quote), an a$$hole to work with...

TTFN,
MK

Thursday in Keegan Country

It's just odds and ends today, with life, locally, as a flat calm. The weather remains cool, with this as the forecast for the next few days:


If we were not so dry, dessicated, it'd be not-too-bad, not at all. What worries you is the fire danger ... and the knowledge that several fires were lit by some lunatic in Belair National Park a couple of days ago!

I'd give you the update on the fire season situation, but Dave has already done this, and I'm going to give you the links instead:

http://alaskandavedownunder.blogspot.com/2009/02/australian-bushfire-updates.html
http://alaskandavedownunder.blogspot.com/2009/02/australian-bushfires-2009.html
http://alaskandavedownunder.blogspot.com/2009/02/adelaides-deadly-heat-wave-of-2009.html

The LEGENDS launch has been a terrific success. The ClusterMap at the foot of the page is taking forever to update, I have no idea why, but the true story is this -- depicted on a may generated by Statcounter instead:

You can enlarge the map with a click on it -- I uploaded it with enough pixels to make it readable. Not bad at all, for about 40 hours since the site opened. That's over 600 page loads.

The only thing people have to do now is to cotton on to the fact that they should notice the advertising and click something occasionally. (Thanks to those two people who did indeed, uh, click something. Now, if the other 200 would be as helpful --! Heaven only knows, it's not going to cost you anything...)

In fact, no one would be happier than me if the digital novel concept proves out -- and there's every reason to believe it will. Very, very early days, as yet, and already nice traffic. I received an email just this morning from someone asking if I'd be interested in this:

http://www.writer4me.com/ -- "Writer 4 Me," being the "World's most popular ghostwriter hire service." In fact, it's most interesting; it's also depressing, when you dig into the details and find that some illiterate twit of an entrepreneur can hire (!!!) an ICON writer for $25/hour.

An icon writer is a known name, long published, with a fan following ... who's so short of cash, s/he is hiring out for $25/hour, which is less than is earned by laboring hands.

Still, they have it rich by comparison with the website developers, who'll get $100 to build someone a small website (no shopping cart), and an extra fifty bucks for the time and sweat it takes to add the shopping cart. (Anyone here speak MYSQL gibberish?! Joomla?) There's talent out yonder working for $5 an hour -- sweatshop wages. I find it sad.

So let's talk about something happier: penguins. Seriously, penguins! Have you seen this:

http://www.bgay.com/news/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=759&Itemid=23

This little story ran on BGay.com a few days ago. Let me give you the teaser:

A pair of gay penguins at the Polarland Zoo in Harbin, China, turned out to be such a great parenting pair that their keepers thought they deserved a reward and let them marry.

I must be getting sentimental in my old age, because I gotta love that. A happy ending for a change. Go ahead, read the whole story -- it's short, and worthy of a smile.

And now I have to go back to work, so I'll leave you with these links to keep you up to date with my other posts to the other blogs:

LEGENDS, Chapter Five:
http://mel-keegan-legends.blogspot.com/2009/02/chapter-five.html
and, at DIGITAL KOSMOS:
Colonial Memories
Seward, Alaska: Where the boats come in


Cheers,
MK

Australian bushfires ... changing the face of the nation

The news from Victoria continued to intensify as the afternoon and night wore away ... it's official: this is the worst firestorm in the country's history -- and we've had some bad ones. You might have heard of the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983, which affected both South Australia and Victoria; and before that, Black Friday, in 1939 (before my time, but I know the stories). The death toll right now is quoted as 109, but you know it's going to be worse; and I don't think the cost of suffering can ever be counted. Emergency services are so far stretched, you'd think this country was at war.


1983 -- Ash Wednesday -- is "loud in my head." This season is worse, but '83 was so close to home, I could still cough on the smoke. What concerns many of us is that 11 of the 12 hottest summers on record have fallen in the last 12 years ... and there is no reason to suppose this trend won't continue. There's the dreadful feeling in the pit of the belly, that heatwaves and fires which used to be the event of the decade, or quarter-century, will become commonplace.

The cool change came through SA without rain, and have a look at the forecast for the coming weekend:

(Here's the whole page at Bureau of Meteorology, if you're interested...).

Back up into the heat at the weekend; next week? There's cause for concern, because SA is already so dry, we're like a stack of tinder, kindling ... and traditionally, historically, our bad, bad bushfires are usually in late February or March. In other words, we're not out of any wood yet.

Check out the FireMap which is being constantly updated:
http://mapvisage.appspot.com/fires/FireMap.html">


What the above map doesn't reflect is that there are 46 fires burning in New South Wales:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/02/09/2485754.htm?section=australia

At this point, South Australia is getting off lightly (this being a relative term). We've had numerous fires, but they've all been contained. We have another four or six weeks to get through before bushfire season is over for 2009, and the fingers, toes and eyes are crossed. Memories of 1983 are haunting me: don't want to go there. I could swear that every summer is hotter and dryer than the last one ... and I find it so hard to believe that we have a Labor government that's shilly shallying, playing silly buggers with its policies as per carbon reduction.

Or was that last week? PM Kevin Rudd looks like the proverbial stunned mullet at this point. Perhaps he just had his personal epiphany? We can hope.

Mr Rudd: get your head out of the Internet, drop the whole stupid nonsense about Internet filtering, worry less about what a handful of precocious, badly brought-up children might be seeing on the WWW if they deliberately go hunting for p*rn ... and worry more (a lot more) about what real, live kids (and their parents) are suffering in the real world, where the country's emergency services and infrastructure will need to be strengthened -- a lot -- if the local climate is going to go on getting hotter, dryer, every year.

More later --

Cheers,
MK

Adelaide heatwave, Victorian bushfires and ... summer can go away now. Soon, please.

Many thanks to the folks who swung by to check out the book launch (If you're looking for it, just scroll down to yesterday's post), and in particular many thanks to the readers who invested in a copy, be it electronic or paper. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Today, work continues on the LEGENDS project, and I hope to have it ready, and up, in the late afternoon. If all goes according to schedule, look out for a newsletter later today, or tomorrow.

In the meantime ... this is going to be a little brief. The cool change did "come through" and made a big difference to the temperature; it also dumped a tonne and a half of tropical humidity on us. Add this to about 10 drops of rain and some crash-bang-boom thunder and lightning before dawn, and then the sun came out, and -- where's my scuba diving tank?! Breathing ain't easy.

If you've been following the news from downunder, you'll know we've been having a torrid time of it. I have a couple of links for you -- slideshows: the Victorian bushfires, and the baby koala in the tub of water, which has been appearing in newspapers around the world.

Click here to see the whole slideshow on ABC News.

The other story that has been making people just shake their heads is the tale of the little koala (a baby) who was apparently abandoned and came in out of the bush seeking shelter and water. Now, it's common knowledge that koalas don't drink. Ever. All the moisture they get -- or, at any other time than this, need -- is derived from the eucalypt vegetation they eat ... and they eat ONLY the foliage of bluegums and river redgums. So you can imagine how hot and dry it would have to be to make a koala actually drink:

Click here to see the whole slideshow on Channel 9 News
(starts with the koala in Hahndorf with his head in a garden sprinkler!)

As hot as it's been in Adelaide (45.5C at our hottest; 115F), your heart goes out to the people of Victoria, where Melbourne suffered 46.3C yesterday. SA suffered the bushfires a few years ago -- get me to tell you that story; we had a view that was way too close for comfort -- but this time is Victoria's turn, and they have my sympathies.

And, the weather outlook for the next week? Four days of respite, of which this is one; and then 37 by Saturday. Sunday? They're not saying ... all bets are off, but I know what I'm hoping for!

Have you seen Jade's post on Digital Kosmos? Check this out: Waiting For Rain. Yep, this is what we're hoping for!

Cheers,
MK

Sizzling in South Aus

If you're wondering about the weather in Adelaide, you can check the forecast here:

http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDS10034.shtml

And we're making headlines:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/01/29/2476856.htm

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24975111-12377,00.html
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,27574,24975204-2682,00.html

This is a choice quote:
Commuters were warned last night that the city's public transport system is "not out of the woods yet" after it literally buckled under the strain of extraordinary 45C heat yesterday.The closing of the Noarlunga train line and tram services sparked confusion on North Terrace during the afternoon city peak hour.

A section of the line at Clarence Park buckled in the extreme heat and repair crews were last night trying to straighten the line for the first service this morning.

Acting Transport Minister Paul Holloway said "similar issues may occur on rail services over the continuing unprecedented heatwave over the coming days".
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,27574,24975204-2682,00.html

They're not kidding. Check out the tracks:

Now, that's just begging to have a train derail. And the authorities have closed the national parks:

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/heatwave-shows-climate-scientists-are-right-wong-says/1419596.aspx

...and we're dreaming of winter. Or New Zealand.

Ciao for now,
MK

Grilled gay novelist with ketchup and onions

The sounds you hear issuing from the hills area of Adelaide right now are squidging, squodging noises ... the kind of sound a piece of cheese makes when it MELTS as it sits on its cracker, and slips off the plate and slithers onto the floor and goes ... squodge. It's a technical term from the Latin, meaning "to be reduced, by inescapable outside influences, to a goo-like consistency which has little or no potential for life functions to continue within."

It's not just Keegan making these sounds. It's most of the city.

The weather forecast for yesterday was 41C, and we actually suffered 43.2C.

The forecast for today is 44C. If the Bureau of Meteorolololology misses its collective guess by the same margin, we shall be stewing in 46.2C degrees. Let me do the math for you, using the rough old rule of thumb calculation to convert Celsius (or Centigrade) into Fahrenheit (or Real Temperatures.) You double the number, subtract the first digit, and add 32. Therefore, 44C is 112F. And 46C is 115F.

And just to make quite sure US and Canadian readers are in no doubts, the sadistic morons the the B of M measure temperatures down here IN THE SHADE. Whenever you see a weather forecast for Australia, those are SHADE temperatures. You can add anything from 30F to 50F to that, to get the sun temperatures.

And the news is, this "hot spell" continues for the foreseeable future.

Hence the squidging, squodging noises. We went out for groceries at eight in the a.m., and the parking lots were already fairly full; by the time we walked out of the mall, they were full. The problem was, the overnight "minimum" temp was 95F, so it was like an oven outside at dawn.

Fortunately, this doesn't happen more than a couple of times in the year, and if it's going to happen, bet your bottom dollar it'll be in January and/or February. The rest of the year is more or less fine and dandy --

Hold that thought! Now I'm going to give you a link back to a post I, uh, posted, on Tuesday, August 5, not much under six months ago: On strike for a shorter winter. Click back to that. Go on, I dare you.

Right now, it's long COLD, RAINY GRAY DAYS I'm dreaming about, while the country bakes like a potato on the grill. The garden is getting charcoal broiled.

This is what we want, and keep it coming:



Well, you can dream. This particular dream will come true in something like May -- possibly even April. There's an annual horse race meeting locally, at a place called Oakbank. It takes place as a family camping event on the Easter long weekend, and there's such a tradition of the weather breaking with a monster storm at Easter, the Oakbank Races are affectionately known as Croakbank, because it's paradise for, uh, frogs.

Roll on Easter.

Cheers,
MK

Sunday in Groovetown

A long time ago (in a galaxy right around the corner) there was a movie made about how the Apocalypse hit Aus. It was made in 1977 or thereabouts (it actually was on the big screen at the same time as Star Wars), and top of the cast was one of everyone's favorite gay actors, Richard Chamberlaine ... still quite young and handsome, and very charming.

The movie was called The Last Wave, and in this prediction of The End of the Antipodes (they never said anything about what was happening in the rest of the world), it started with a massive tidal wave -- like something out of the director's cut of The Abyss -- clobbering the fair city of Sydney.

But throughout the movie, it was water ... water ... water. Rain, rain, rain. Floods and more floods. WATER. Eschatology never had it so wet.

And right now, The Last Wave's take on the apocalypse is looking mighty appealing. We look less like the Australia of this movie than like Tatooine. Seriously.

It's still October -- meaning, mid-spring here. Yesterday it was the Celsius equivalent of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, massively too hot for the average temp. for this month. The wind direction changed and it's cooler today, and SIX whole spots of rain fell this morning. I know they fell; I counted them.


Right now, we'd be happy to have the kind of apocalyptic scenario depicted in The Last Wave ... at least we wouldn't be heading back into water restrictions! What basically happens is that you carry a lot of buckets of water, without which your garden will die, because by January you won't even be allowed to hand-water with a hose.

If you like your garden, you get callused hands. Meanwhile, a lot of people are taking the gardens out and putting in concrete or pavers. You'll certainly have softer, smoother, younger looking hands, if you have concrete where the lawn used to be.

Now, the city of Adelaide does, at the very least, have a lot of reservoirs; we've never (yet) reached the point where the government has turned off the water (though rellies in the UK have reported their water being turned off in the worst heat waves; one shudders at the thought).



At this point, I'm still making light of the situation, but in fact it's no joke. Desalination and storm water capture are necessities for the very near future ... or we'll be renaming this city Mos Eisley and keeping a weather-eye open for ships matching the description of the Millennium Falcon ... which wouldn't be so bad, if Han Solo were to show up unexpectedly at the local boozer now and then, but with our luck we'll get JaJa Binks (and no, I have no idea how to spell that, and am disinclined to learn).

Seriously, we need some rain -- we need a LOT of rain. The hills are already burned yellow, and October has been way too hot for this time of year. Global warming ... it's hard to believe that there are still people out there who deny the reality. Not too many of 'em live down here.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go chase the Jawas out of the driveway before they make off with the car --

And you're absolutely right: nothing is happening in the Keegan Zone. Well, nothing you'd want to read about on a blog post, anyway.

Ciao for now,
MK

All quiet on the Keegan front

The Mel-0-Sphere is a flat calm today ... which is good. Actually, it's nice when things are not going awry, and you can stop and catch your breath, think about trivial things ... go Christmas shopping.

Yep, the stores are stocked to the rafters with Christmas stuff, and we thought we'd beat the rush and get the gift shopping done ahead of time. It actually feels like time to go shopping for "chrissie pressies," as they're often called down here ... it's getting hot. The weather is still very changeable, buy dry and dusty is the way of things right now, and you can't help feeling we're heading into another drought as summer approaches.

THE SWORDSMAN still has to make its appearance at Amazon.com (another week to go), but it's available at CreateSpace:
https://www.createspace.com/Customer/EStore.do?id=3356474

Both NOCTURNE and TWILIGHT have been uploaded to CreateSpace, but they won't be showing up on Amazon.com for weeks yet. As I noted in an earlier post, it's a month-long slog to get a title through the CreateSpace/Amazon process, and available for sale, which is why THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE may not make it onto Amazon for Christmas '08.

I have to admit, when it comes to shopping I'm not as impressed with the CreateSpace interface as with the Lulu.com interface. It's very hard to search. For example, if you just logged on to http://www.createspace.com/ and hoped to be able to search on Mel Keegan and find me, you'd draw a blank, even though I'm there. You have to click through to the SHOP, and then search ... and the problem is, the only searches we can find are for DVDs, not books, so you still won't find me.

So, shopping via CreateSpace itself won't be a terribly rewarding experience for anyone who's just browsing. You need to know what you want, right down to the URL for the page -- like THE SWORDSMAN page, which I was able to give you above, which leads you to this screen:

As I was saying a few days ago, it's a long, slow process, but in January or February of 2009, all the Keegan books will be there.

As I go into 2009 myself, I'll be finishing the haunted house novel (!) which was shelved for extra work a few months ago, because I'd written myself into a corner and had to think my way out. A while ago I was reading a book on paranormal encounters -- ghost hunters, that kind of thing; and the solution came to me. So the novel is now "on" for early/mid 2009.

Right after that, it's HELLGATE ... two novels, back to back, finishing out the whole series. Two paperbacks into print for Christamas '09, and then the re-cut of the whole thing as three big hardcovers. This project will keep me busy for most of the year -- and that's cool. I like to be busy.

Other news? There really isn't any! The Keegan Zone is absolutely, totally event-free at this time, and there aren't even any bees buzzing in my particular bonnet. Other than Christmas shopping in the heat, which I realize is premature ... also weird, at least to folks from the north, because even now, after 37 years downunder, I still think Christmas ought to be cold and snowy.
Alas, it never is. Christmas is about a walk on the beach in the morning, champagne and strawberries and apples and blue cheese for lunch while opening pressies; Polynesian pineapple pork for dinner; and a dip in the pool, with a beer balanced on the side.

I admit, I do have fantasies about spending Christmas in the north, at least once. Maybe one of these days ...

Oh -- last note as I sign off. We should be able to show you the cover art and the first couple of chapters of THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE in the next week or so.

Ciao for now,
MK

On Any Thursday

I'm blogging in a complete vacuum today ... life is a completely Event-free Zone, so this post will be an exercise in trivia: odds and ends, bits and pieces, that are floating around in the Mel-o-Sphere. Nothing earth shattering (which is a good thing, because there's too much depressing stuff happening lately), and possibly good for a laugh here and there.

An update on LORDS OF HARBENDANE might certainly be useful for folks who're getting themselves a Chrissie pressie -- or thinking of giving the book. The new release date is Thanksgiving, about a month later than previously planned. Still in plenty of time for Christmas shopping. The reason for the delay is that we're launching on Amazon, and it's s slower process than what we're accustomed to.

(Amazon uses ONLY CreateSpace as its POD printer; CreateSpace does NOT have digital printing partners around the world, so the proof copy has to be sent out here be USPS Priority ... cost: US$26 -- estimated delivery time, four WEEKS. Omigod, what is US Mails going to do with it for four weeks, for $26?! We'll be on Amazon for Christmas, guys: bear with us.)

We're enjoying mid-spring on this side of the globe, and the weather locally has been glorious. The downside is, it's not raining. It doesn't even rain when they forecast rain. We've had a tiny fraction of the rainfall we were supposed to get last winter, so we're going into summer with an existing water shortage. It's going to be another drought summer. Hmmm.

Now, the other noteworthy thing abut spring turning into summer is that the Cricket season is almost upon us. In fact, I think the first games are already being played somewhere. And the thing you notice most about the TV coverage of the cricket is --

Batting? No. Bowling? No. Punch-ups on the pitch? No. Century scores? No. Streakers? Sometimes. Moronic commentators? Alas, too often. But mostly --

The beer commercials. And occasionally they're actually not too bad:



And of course, beer is of vital importance to Australians, as witnessed by the following song from the late, great Slim Dusty ... which is frequently mistaken for our national anthem:



Good on ya, Slim. Nice one.

In other news ... well, there isn't much, if one doesn't want to ramble on about the state of the world today (and I don't, because it's way too depressing, and I've talked about it a dozen times in the last month. In fact, I have only one more political thing to do today. I want to give you this link:

http://palinaspresident.com/
Welcome to 2009's oval office ... give the Flash movie a little while to load ... (then roll over and click on EVERYTHING. Enjoy! We sure did).

... So, there not being any news, let's look at some surprises, not all of them altogether pleasant. Would somebody please tell me how this:


Turns into this:

I'm extremely curious to know, so that I CAN STOP IT HAPPENING TO ME.

Pardon me for shouting there. I feel a little better now. Maybe it's something to do with not eating white bread, getting more fiber?? Vitamins. That's it. Vitamins. I'm sure it has something to do with vitamins.

In other news, the fair state of South Australia is about to be hit by a kind of biblical plague. Seriously. Locusts. The little buggers are hatching right now down in the southeast ... and there is no upside to that. I wish I had some locust humor to share, but the closest I know would be something like this:



And my parting thought for today, before I go back to THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE:



I shall be more coherent tomorrow.

Ciao for now,
MK

Fairbanks on my mind (alas, not Douglas)

Fairbanks is a place as well as a person ... actually, two people if you count Doug Jr. as well as Snr. -- but you'd have to be a movie historian to know either one of them. We've reached a point where kids don't know who Harrison Ford is, and it takes an archaeologist to delve back far enough through time to unearth 2001: A Space Odyssey. Somebody had better invent a time machine sometime soon, or we're going to lose the 1960s utterly.

That said ... it's Fairbanks the place which is on my mind today, though I couldn't tell you why. Brain wiring or some such abstract human expression. I just stumbled over the data highway to link back through to the mnemonic circuits where Fairbanks is stored in the chaos and clutter of my memory. For some reason, the sounds and smells of the place -- the fell of loess between my teeth! -- are all bright and sharp.

So,with Fairbanks on my mind, let's go there, if only in pictures. Here's a photo essay, complete with a yack-track. Better than getting roped in for a slideshow with beer and popcorn, because this way you can turn me off when I get boring. The images were scanned at 200dpi, so click on a picture for a larger view. The only thing I haven't done (no time today: gotta work) is enhance them to take UFOs out of the prints. Sorry ... but if you ever want to be reading THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE, I have to stop blogging sometime, and start working! Here goes:

FAIRBANKS MEMORIES

The Chena River runs through the heart of downtown ... if you can call it "downtown." You're looking at it. Downtown, that is. Alaskans call Fairbanks a "city," but even Aussies would call it a town. At 35,000 people, or thereabouts, it's something like Murray Bridge or Mount Barker, which are towns in Adelaide's neck of the woods...
It's actually prettier in winter, when a light snowfall will turn the whole landscape into a sort of "winter wonderland," right out of an animated movie. As a bod from downunder who hadn't seen snow in 25 years (since the family moved out from the UK) I was enchanted. Also frozen to the bone marrow. I was wearing two pairs of socks under the boots, leggings under the ski pants, thermal shirt, plus long-sleeved tee-shirt, plus sweater, plus jacket, insulate gloves, and hat. And I was still cold. I'd fly out of Australia in February or March, where it would be 95 degrees (summer), and arrive in Fairbanks ... on a night flight, of course, which would land long after nightfall, with temps of 20 below zero and a skating rink for a parking lot. Woah, such fun. (And the weird this is ... it was. It was different, challenging, and there's something of the "exotic" about Alaska -- unless you're an Alaskan, of course, in which case it's just same old, same old. They think Australia is exotic. Yaaawwnnn.)
Alaskaland is a kind of theme park, where Alaskan history is sorta-kinda encapsulated within a ... park-type area. It's bordered on one side by Airport Way (which is the main drag running through what they call "Retail Row," linear miles of stores, and on the other side by the Chena River, which follows the line of the railroad for a few miles. My favorite area was the riverbank behind Alaskaland, where several little footbridges went over the water. You could stand in the middle and watch beavers on a sunny day, or hike over and take weird tech-noir photos of the railroad marshaling yards ... or see the ice carvings, in winter: the World Ice Art Championships are held about a mile from what you see above.
The heart of downtown is Golden Heart Plaza ... Pioneer Square ... with a clock that plays musical arrangements on its chimes (Frank Sinatra, Sound of Music, Camelot ...!) and a fountain around which are inscribed, on bronze tablets, the names of the pioneer families who opened up the region in the days of the riverboats and gold miners. Also, see the great bronze statue, the monument to the pioneers. The bronze stands in the middle of a pool and fountain ... which freezes solid in winter. There's another shot of this, below, in summer.
Fall arrives at UAF, on a hill outside and slightly above the town. This view of UAF is from the back side of the campus, around by the paddocks used for experimental agriculture. The campus is vast, the size of a town within itself, with students from every continent. It has a great museum, complete with Blue Babe," a mummified ice age bison. Very impressive.
On a summer day, looking down from the campus, you can see all of Fairbanks, and the snake-like meander of the Chena River, which almost ties itself in knots in places. Looking back at this photo, I do believe it was cottonwood time. Folks in the US will know what this is about, but for benefit of Aussies and others ... "cottonwood" is a tree that grows like a weed throughout many parts of the US. Alaska is full of it, and in springtime the trees fill the air with strands of ... well, cotton ... pollen. You lie flat in a patch of sun and look up, and you think it's snowing again. Very pretty -- not quite so great for those who have allergies. Fortunately, I was immune at the time.
And what would a photo-tour of Fairbanks be, without at least one good refinery shot? A large part of Alaska is about oil. There's no drilling in the Fairbanks region, but there are several refineries. This one belonged to MAPCO Alaska Petroleum, which in 2000 or so became Williams (at least as far as gas stations were concerned). Don't know if they changed the name of the refinery, but the service stations all changed. This photo was taken on a hot, dusty afternoon in 1997.
There you are, Virginia, Santa Claus does exist, and this is where he lives when he's not jetting all over the world delivering parcels. Seriously ... this is a store which sells Christmas goods all year around, located at North Pole, which is (!) south of Fairbanks by about fifteen miles or so. Fairbanks and North Pole are part of the "Fairbanks North Star Borough," which is what the Lower 48 would call a county. Cute store. Weird, but cute.
This was fun. There are very few roads that run OUT of Fairbanks, and this is one of them. It goes about 70 miles to Chena Hot Sprints (a resort hotel in the wilderness, founded on the, uh, hot springs), and there, the road stops. In spring, the hundreds of creeks over which the road crosses become swollen with meltwater. The water can overwhelm the road and close it, or ... it can be a foot deep over the road and be big fun. Like this. I was taking the photos here. The trick is to hit the water fast, and throw up a spray about ten feet high.

Winter ... they plow the streets out, or you wouldn't be able to make your escape to get to work. This area of Fairbanks is known as Arctic Park -- a suburb, where Lathrop and Kennicott intersect and the Captain Bartlett Inn stands on the corner of Airport Way, just around the corner from the Big Dipper Ice Arena. Around the back of this hockey rink, the City of Fairbanks dumps the snow which has been plowed out of your streets. I learned how to drive on snow and ice in the parking lot there, which doubles as a snow dump. Wheeee.
And here's the little car that shared so many adventures. A 1996 Pontiac Sunfire, as imaged by Keegan on one knee in the snow, in March 1998, off one side of a road ... I have no idea where, short of, uh, Fairbanks, Alaska! You would not believe the places this car went, and the things it did. If you click to enlarge the photo, you'll see an electrical appliance plug sticking out of the radiator grill. USns will know what this is (well, Floridans might not), but for the benefit of those of us who hail from more tropical climes, I'd better explain. When you park a car outside in Fairbanks winter nights (which can be fifty or sixy below zero), if you don't want the engine block and oil pan to be frozen solid, the battery flat and the radiator turned to solid glue, you (!) plug the car in for an hour or two before you want to start it in the morning; or you leave it plugged in all night. You run a loooooong extension cable to a powerpoint in or on the house and feed the car some juice ... keep the core temperature of the engine up just high enough so it'll actually turn over for you. Cooooool.
And this is the one you've been waiting to see, right? The pipeline. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline itself ... the pride of the Alyeska Pipeline Company. Crude from the North Slope travels at high velocity to the oil terminal at Valdez, on Prince William Sound. Alaska has been about oil for a long, long time (before which, it was about gold), and very soon it'll be about gas. There's not much oil left in them thar hills, but there's enough gas to be interesting. The problem is, getting it OUT of those hills without killing the environment. Think about this: the GROUND in the tundra is flammable. Seriously. You can strike a match and set fire to permafrost, due to the percentage of methane, or marsh gas, frozen in this ground. You really want to be dilling for gas in the middle of the equivalent of a lake of gasoline...? Hmmmm.
As promised above, the image of the tribute to the pioneers memorial statue, in summer, when the fountains are running and you can actually see the engravings on the bronze tablets. Golden Heart Plaza on a glorious day. In the background, in the early afternoon (when this pic was taken), the clock would be chiming out selections from Camelot or Oklahoma! for your listening enjoyment, while coach loads of tourists from Japan and Korea, Russia and parts of America itself, go through. I would take a half hour, sit by the river and watch the world go by: people watching.
And here's a pungent memory. Only in Alaska! Oh, okay, and Canada, all right, point taken. Caribou Crossing. One of my best memories is of fiddling with a long lens off one side of the Richardson Highway, while a herd of caribou -- wild as anything in Jack London -- galloped into the blue distance. I gave up on the lens and just enjoyed the sight. One of those "never forgotten" moments which come along too rarely.

And now --

Back to work. More tomorrow -- when DreamCraft and Keegan might just have something new to show, and I hope to be asking for test pilots. In other words, there's a couple of new Keegan book pages you might like to help us test, and tell us what you think.

Ciao for now,

MK

Spring has sprung

I do believe spring just arrived. The bird population certainy thinks so, and the introduced (alien, as in, not native?) flowering trees are all going gangbusters. The Christmas decorations will be in the stores in about five weeks (!) as our hours of daylight increase and the longer days get rapidly warmer. We have a thermometer in the backyard, and it's reading 62 degrees (F) in the shade in a part of the yard that doesn't get the sun. It feels almost balmy...

Now, having said all this, Nostrakeeganus, he predicting prompt return to winter for three more weeks, with freezing temperatures and leaden-gray skies.

So, just so you know I'm not pulling your leg, here's the evidence: (click for a larger view. In order -- almond blossom in the yard; flowering native shrubs in the hills; a koala, actually awake for a change -- note the blue sky! A kookaburra -- note same!! And wild flowers, something like forget-me-nots)







Now, having posted these, we are absolutely certain to lapse back into winter for weeks. Did I just put the kiss of death on spring?

Someone noticed that I haven't said much, if anything about the Games of the 29th Olympiad. Um ... I've been busy. Seriously. I actually enjoy the winter games more than the summer games, but I do follow the cycling (road variety rather than track,) and one or two other events ... none of which have been given any TV coverage down here. Fans of swimming were well catered to, because the Aussies always do very well in those events. However, swimming ain't my thing. And for events where no Australians are competing, they just don't seem to send the cameras.

There was a somewhat critical little ditty going around at the time of the Sydney Olympics. It went like this:

Here's thanks to the Olympic Committee
For sending the games to a city
Where you can't eat the food,
The locals are rude,
And the TV coverage is totally ... Aus-centric.

Like the US and Canada, we're a nation of immigrants. Less than half the population was born here, and although -- yes -- we "bond" with the country, we call ourselves Aussies and take an almost inordinate pride in this country's achievements ... there remains a fondness for the old country, and an enduring interest in it. Some of us remain staunch supporters of teams from the old country, and thanks to the internet (and SBS) you can actually keep abreast of Manchester United, or the Raiders, or whomever.

And sure, we enjoy watching the events in which the Green and Gold are going great. We LOVE to see Aussis win. But wouldn't it be nice to see some of the other events, even though Aussie stars aren't competing?!

This country has folks from every corner of the planet: we're very probably the first true cosmopolitan culture, because we don't have ghettos or reservations inside which indigenous peoples are required, culturally and socially if not legally, to be. Just once in a while, I'd like to see Aussie Olympic coverage recognize the truly cosmopolitan nature of the audience to whom they're broadcasting. It'd be nice.

Having said that: the athletes were great, the stadium is fantastic, the opening ceremonies were dazzling, the Chinese government doesn't seem to have put its foot in it *too* deeply or too often, and the Chinese people have been great. I'm told Beijing by night is glorious, you have to see the city lights to believe them (no, the TV coverage didn't extend this far either), and the Games themselves have been remarkably smooth. For those of us who are old enough to recall Munich 72, the idiotic political boycotts of Los Angeles and Moscow, and the depressing though critically necessary Black Power statements back at the end of the Sixties, beginning of the Seventies ... well, the Beijing Games have been laid back, relaxed, open, friendly. Nice. Kudos to all concerned ... except maybe the TV directors, who concentrate on the Green and Gold to the exclusion of virtually everything else. They've done a fine job in technical terms (kudos to all concerned there, too), and if they'd just remembered their cosmopolitan audience, we'd have been unanimous in our praise.

On strike for a shorter winter

Tuesday finds me looking for a way to put a positive spin on the fact that winter blues are six feet thick ... yes, it's August! One longs for day-long blue skies and weather that invites you to go and get lost in some national park. (Well, to be fair, it would be just as easy to become immersed in the national park in August, but I don't know that I'd do it without full foul weather gear!)

It would be true to say, winter is starting to outstay its welcome. A bit.

But (positive-spin-wise; now, is that deosil or widdershins, when you're in the southern hemisphere?) the hills are green as Ireland, the reservoirs are steadily filling up, thank gods, and everything in the world is in bloom (kerchoo). If it was a measly little 20 degrees (F) warmer, you wouldn't be hearing these whining noises! The tradeoff for the green hills is temps around 35 degrees overnight, and maybe 55 as a daytime high ... and by August, every year, you've forgotten the the summer heat.

Short memories, that's our problem. Four months from now we'll be like this:



Very picturesque, and all. In fact, so picturesque, here's another one:


Ahhh ... memories of summer, drifing back. And hour here and there at the beach, hunk-watching ... and the "cafe culture cruising people," (good grief, the acronym, Carruthers!) who sit under the big umbrellas and watch the stuff that's strutting past in. uh, assorted wet spandex.

And summer brings its own rewards, various events which take some beating, when you think about it ...

I leave you with this thought: there is a reason one watches bike races.

We go to look at the bicycles, right? Right.






(Not quite the Tour de France ... in fact, the Tour Downunder. Pictures are clickable, if you'd like a closer view. At the bicycles, that is.)

Invisible vampyre, drought, and local politics

Or -- ooops. We did real, genuine booboo, for which we apologise profusely: the site upload happened on time, on target, but in the hurricane of work required, we forgot to go over to Lulu.com for two minutes and nudge the vampyre novels over onto the public list. Sorry, guys: honest oversight.

NOCTURNE and TWILIGHT are now available, and to smooth out the wrinkle, I'm going to give you a link right here -- not a link to go to the website and order up, but a link to Lulu to get the damned books right here:

Order Nocturne from Lulu, right here,

and,

Order Twilight from Lulu, right here

That'll save you a trip to the webpage. (Those links are for the paperbacks, incidentally. The eBooks were available from Payloads on time; and the hardcover versions are still in the works.)



The US is gearing up to celebrate July 4th, and so long as you guys don't get invaded by aliens, you'll have a grand weekend. Down here, the winter sun is shining, but that's something of a mixed blessing. Sure, it's nice to get the blue-sky days just a couple of weeks after the solstice of winter, but this country (and particularly this state) is the the grip of the worst drought on record...

So far, during this winter, we've had only 25% of the rainfall we would normally expect (and we never get much by the standards of Europe and North America). If it doesn't rain soon, we'll slither into next summer with some reservoirs showing only 15% of their seasonal average ... and this is bad news.

The summer water rationing started a couple of years ago, but it was mild by comparison with what'll need to be done next summer, if we don't get dumped on before October of '08. We live in hopes of a forty-day, forty-night deluge.

A desalination plant to supply the city is being build on the site of the recently-closed fuel refinery, but it won't go online for a long time. We've been hearing estimates of 2012, 2014. That's going to be too long. Last summer, for the first time scientists began to say 'IF the rains return.' Not 'when.' Looking back across the last century of record-keeping, it turns out this state (if not the nation as a whole) has a history of long dry periods. We could be entering a 30- or 50-year dry ... which is a grim thought. The last time the state suffered this, the population was around half of the current level. Sure, more reservoirs have been built since then (the city of Adelaide is ringed around by them), but there's industry and agriculture here, now, which sucks more water than the human population ever did. The desalination plant that'll keep the city hydrated won't help agriculture, and although I've seen brochures for small desalination systems suitable for dairy, vinyards, orchards, the problem is the pricetag. What bankrupt farmer can afford a cool quarter million bucks for a machine to make the mineral-heavy gunk he pumps off the water table over into useful fresh water?

Time for the government to come to the rescue, you ask? I would agree. The problem is, a lengthy span with a Liberal government has landed this country in a fiscal swamp, and the Labor government that was voted into office only last November, has to slow down the juggernaut of decay, get it stopped and turn it around. They probably don't have the funding to put pocket-size water machines into thousands of farms. (The US is surely going to go through a similar trial by ordeal, after the hand-over in February 2009.) Things are still getting worse down here; new taxes are being levied, interest rates are up, so is unemployment, and so on -- the usual round of social woes. All of which gives the Liberal opposition a vast supply of heavy-cal ammo to shoot at the current government! The voting public just has to grasp that the problems we're struggling through now are the result of the aforementioned economic juggernaut still careening down the road to hell as a result of its own momentum! The brakes are ON, but she won't stop on a dime, and till she does, and starts to back up ... patience.

That's what I keep telling myself. Patience.

Meanwhile, it's a glorious blue-sky day in the middle of winter, and I'm going to grab the camera and go enjoy it!

Calling Red Adair! And possibly International Rescue.

If you haven't already, go over to Google and search on something along the lines of 'door to hell gas fire.' There's more than enough keyword specificity in those five terms to get you there; and at least three pages (besides this one, now) show up in the first ten results, featuring what looks, at first sight, like nothing so much as the pit of hell itself.

From time to time something comes along which knocks you flat on your backside; you don't know whether to be impressed or appalled. I saw this yesterday, and was both:


[Looking at this, I was reminded forcibly of the scene in SCORPIO, where Jarrat and Stone are on the job in citybottom, Mostov, the old city under modern Thule, when the missiles fell in the wrong place. This is exactly what I described. At the time, I was halfway concerned that I was describing something so way out in left field, I'd strayed into the parking lot without realizing it. Turns out, something very like Mostov has been blazing for a long, long time...]


Photo Credit: haven't a clue. I obviously didn't capture these images ... they're popping up all over the web, so I'd like to thank the photographer, and would be delighted to put a credit on this, if only someone would tell me what!



The story goes that a company in Uzbekistn, in the region of a town called Darvaz, was drilling inside a mineshaft ... they might even have been drilling for gas. If so, they certainly got their wish, and a whole lot more. If they were hoping to find a source of natural gas that could be capped and exploited, they would have been thrilled -- for the .45 seconds they lived before the whole operation, mchinery, mine and all, fell into the pit. They had struck an unspeakably vast cavern full of gas that must have been right under the mine. When the whole operation caved in, there was the quite understandable fear that the gas would escape and poison the town, and -- perhaps not surprisingly -- someone high in the old Soviet chain of command decided the best, fastest, safest thing to do was ignite the gas, burn it off before it could kill people, in the same way natural gas used to be burned off at the waste stacks on oil platforms at sea, and oilfields on land.

Burning the gas probably seemed an excellent idea. In 1973.

But 35 years later, the fire is still burning, the gas supply seems limitless. And nobody, nowhere, ain't doing nothing about it.

In fact, as awesome as the fire itself is, more awesome still is the fact this inferno could be raging since the latter days of the Vietnam War, and it was only 'discovered' a couple of months ago, and even then it was publicized so narrowly that folks like myself just stumbled over the story by accident.

You want to know what a gas fire that size is doing to this planet's atmosphere? You have to ask how many more of these little jewels are hiding out there ... and why gas fires or oil fires, the size of this one in Uzbekistan, were not seen from space by the satellites that were scanning for Soviet missile sites. This one must have been seen. The US Air Force and NATO must have known about this inferno, because they had spy satellites over every square inch of the old Soviet Union.

Which leaves you with the question, why is it still burning?

I quite understand why it started: basic ignorance accounts for a lot of the apparent evil men do. (Who knows what stupidity lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows, but he can't get anyone to listen to a word he says.) Sure, the Soviets decided to torch the gas and save the town, and in 1973 it probably seemed like an OK thing to do. Bruce Lee was the smash hit at the box office that year, in ENTER THE DRAGON. Mick Jagger was a young man. Everybody was kung fu fighting, even though they had no idea what they were doing, and were mostly flailing around for the fun of it ... and it *was* fun; STARSKY AND HUTCH had never been dreamed of, the cameras wouldn't roll on it for another two years. Elvis wasn't due for his ultimate rendezvous with the aliens for another four years; the news was full of Richard Nixon and Watergate. American boots were still on the ground in Vietnam. STAR WARS was so far in the future, if you said 'R2D2' people thought you were commenting on their arty decor, and started babbling about their new curtains.

In 1973, nobody (well, not in Russia, anyway) would have bothered to ask, "Uh, how much gas d'you reckon there is down there, komrade? Just before we set it on fire. Y'know, just so's we can figure out how long she's, uh, likely to be burning." (Or if anyone did say that, he's still pushing a boulder up a mountainside. In Siberia.)

Many, many years ago (oddly enouh, back in the 70s, I believe), I read a statistic which rocked me. Two thirds of the world's supply of natural gas was thought to have been burned off as garbage, at the waste stacks on oil rigs and fields. Only later did we wake up to ourselves and realize natural gas is at least as important as oil to our future. Uh huh.

Fast-forward 35 years, and we're looking at such a crass waste of energy, I'd say I was speechless if I hadn't just written this column. We're also looking at such a source of atmospheric pollution, you'd be forgiven for saying, 'what's the use' and starting up the old car, with a gastank full of high-octane leaded and one cylinder out of eight not firing! Millions of us across the developed world take the train, and switch to green electricity and drag our own canvas bags to the grocery store, and meanwhile, they let monsters like the Darvaz hell-pit burn on. And on. And on. As I said, one understands how it got started. What's impossible to rationalize is why it's still burning, over thirty years after the aliens made off with Elvis.

(Don't get me started about the leaking Siberian oil pipelines, and the fact that the very ground beneath your feet in the arctic is flammable ... or about the real story behing bio-diesel fuels ...)

Cheers to all,
MK