Cheese 'n biscuits

There's nothing better than cheese and biscuits for breakfast.. A small pile of super crumbly cheddar teamed with a water cracker is just about the best thing in the world, any time of day. Mmm... 'Specially when the cheese is so sharp it makes your brain contract.

"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Time for a Quickie:

I accidentally drove through the stupid new 'Clem 7' tunnel last night, and now I have to pay the toll. How annoying. I have to pay for accidentally driving to the other side of Brisbane and consequently being 20 minutes late for my dinner with Dad. That damned tunnel is like a vortex, sucking cars in left and right. You have to be on the ball to avoid its gaping maw... Clever sods.

Had dinner with Dad at Sizzler. Ate far too many pork ribs slathered in sauce. It was good.

We got a table next to a sweet transvestite and 'her' date. I quietly informed Dad of this interesting development, whereby he stared for a bit, had a chuckle and started talking Afrikaans so that we could privately pass judgment undetected. (Rather rude, really. Better not make a habit of that. I had a couple who lapsed into 'secret' Afrikaans in the shop while I was serving them, and they looked VERY shame-faced when I promptly joined in the conversation, making it clear I knew exactly what they had just said, and that it wasn't very nice. Yes, nice try, folks.)

'Sjoe, Kyk na die hande!' (Wow, look at the hands)

It's true ... No matter what a transvestite does, the hands are the giveaway ...
Huge, manly hands poking out of a fashionable, feminine tight-fitting top just blow the cover entirely.

I'm so glad I was born in the right body..

Tenuous

"Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice."
- Will Durant, US historian (1885 - 1981)

Accretionary Wedges

"Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries, we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years."
- Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, 1957

Just wrote my mid-semester marine geology exam.

I tend to study the diagrams that I find pleasing to the eye... You know the ones. They're in focus, nicely photocopied, don't require microscopic vision and vast amounts of brain power to process... I successfully predicted 3/4 diagrams.. Needless to say, the one diagram I didn't count on being in there set me back a bit. And I am annoyed. Stupid deltas and their stupid deposition lobes and channels and stuff. And stupid me for not studying it.

I have come to the realisation that I am not a fan of marine geology. I do not care at what depth and pressure little bits of dead carbonate animals dissolve. I do not care about deltas. I find the idea of marine snow to be more than a little repulsive. I do not care about estuaries. I do not like turbidites (they remind me of the atrocities suffered at Rockhampton). I do not care about the Bouma sequence. I do not like underwater landslides... I most certainly don't care about Milankovitch cycles and first and second order thingies.

The only thing I like about Marine is accretionary wedges.. They sound ever so cool and are even cooler. I also like complaining about the stuff I don't like.

...And I guess some of these little guys are slightly awesome, too.. (Radiolarians and foraminifera. Microfossils and incidently these are some of the little dead bits of animals that fall to the ocean floor in clouds of {to quote my delightful lecturer} 'sea snot').

Ah... Geology.

Some days it's good. Most days it's awful. Other days you see the all-encompassing beauty in a piece of old skarn and think to yourself, 'Yeah..'

Reminds me of a quote I read a while ago:

"I have a Bachelor of Science degree in geology from the City College of New York, and my great contribution to the field of geology is that I never entered it upon graduation." - Colin Powell

Faulty Poultry

The chickens have returned! Actually, they were dragged back here (kicking and screaming) by two kind old people.. Once let out of their cage they surveyed the garden with jaded chicken-y eyes and looked for all the world as if they were annoyed to be back...

Fudge: Oh fuck it, not this place again!
Caramel: I know, right? You'd think they'd let us go after all that crap we had to deal with.
Fudge: I fucking hate that seedy shit. You'd think they can take a damned hint. Humans!
Caramel: Dude. If it wasn't for all that corn we'd be dead ages ago.
Fudge: Damn straight. I got so sick of fucking corn. God! (pecks the grass thoughtfully)
Caramel: Oh well, back to semi-starvation and long, dark nights (takes a big crap)
Fudge: Not if I can help it... (ominous silence as Fudge begins to plan Escape Number Two)

The old guy who brought them back informed us that their wings have been clipped.. And he didn't do a half bad job! They are more or less wing-less compared to the epic wingspan they used to have... and yet I watched them more or less effortlessly fly onto the compost bin and begin scavenging... The compost bin requires a certain amount of flight on behalf of the bird, and they are still managing to achieve an effective lift off despite the mutilated wings...

So. Annoying.

So - the plan is to fatten them up significantly. I will achieve this by means of deep-fried potatoes soaked in butter and hand feeding. A Dodo-esque chicken is a flightless chicken. Here's hoping they do not die of massive heart attacks before reaching egg-laying age.

The old lady informed me that their new names were 'Molly' and 'Polly'.

Like hell.

At this point in time

So, at this point in time I should probably be studying for my upcoming Marine and Ore mid-semester exams, but the old, siren-like lure of the blogging world has proven too strong to resist tonight. Must be something bloggy in the air. (I do believe that Stu has just started a blog, too? He freaks me out sometimes. He makes street lights go on and off at will. No, really. So, small wonder the man has totally been tapping into my brain waves.)

Neither the study of ore deposits nor the murky world of marine geology is particularly earth-shattering stuff. (Wait, what? Why is everything I say these days somehow related to geology?) It is proving quite difficult to get excited about the delicate intricacies of a magmatic sulfide deposit... this is a sample of the glorious crap I have to magically memorise before my exam on Wednesday:

The genesis of magmatic nickel-sulphide deposits depends on the formation of immiscible magmatic sulphide liquids (the natural analogue of blast furnace mattes) in magmatic plumbing systems, where large volumes of magnesium- and iron-rich magma penetrate the Earth's crust or erupt over it (Figures 1 and 2). The process of ore formation is analogous to that of separating matte from slag, and involves two processes: addition of sulphur to the system to generate the "matte", than physical segregation and accumulation of the metal-bearing sulphide liquid. The essential process is the same in both komatiite-hosted and gabbroic intrusion-hosted deposit types.

Massive magmatic nickel-sulphide deposits occur where the following two essential elements are present.

• A major magmatic plumbing system (intrusive or extrusive), where large volumes of magma flow over a long period of time past a suitable deposition site;

• A source of sulphur in the crustal rocks which are intersected by or underlie the plumbing system. Assimilation of this sulphur has two effects: firstly, sulphur will dissolve in the assimilating magma until it reaches the point of sulphur saturation, where no more sulphur can go into solution. Any addition of further sulphur then causes formation of an immiscible iron-sulphide liquid, into which copper, nickel and platinum-group elements are partitioned very strongly.

Yay. I am just burning to cram all that the night before I am due to regurgitate it for my poor lecturer to grade.

I made a token effort to study yesterday (omg) but was quite gratefully distracted from my exhaustive pursuit of knowledge by my trusty Stu, some termite traps, Chinese food and the consumption of copious amounts of wine and odd movies/documentaries... (Not my fault... sulfide immiscibility and little bits of dead animals that fall to the bottom of the sea to form rocky stuff is just not all that interesting).

Other than procrastination: A concerted effort will be made this week to cut down on alcohol consumption which has spiked in recent months and continues to follow something of a worryingly steep upward trend...

Beowulf is a disgusting movie.

Sam Neill has an awesome hologram device in which he created the universe.

My dog is awesome.

My chickens have fled the garden but may be returned at some stage. (They will likely be enormous upon return, as they have been gone for a good couple weeks since Easter when they decided to run away over the fence and sup upon greener pastures...)

My finches are procreating, we assume. (Nobody is game enough to dismantle the nest and go egg-hunting)

And this is possibly the 10th blog I have created in four years, and will likely suffer the fate of all the others... A death caused by an initial, escalating neglect, then rampant, passionate deletion of posts, and then a slow and painful demise of decay as it rots back into obscurity within the great wide world of teh internetz.

But yes, where would we be without our avenues of procrastination?

Time to go and eat some toasted cheese, or something...