Thank you

Dear readers: thank you for reading my blog this year, and for your kind comments, even though my posts have often been intermittent at best.

I plan to blog much more regularly from now on.

If you would like to win one of two calendars I am giving away free, just let me know in the comments below. I will randomly select the two winners next Friday (4 Dec). Free postage to anywhere in the world included :-)

At last

The 2010 calendar is finally ready. The illustrations are a bit of an assortment: a few linocuts, a couple of watercolours, pencil drawings, even a multi-plate etching and a screenprint. here are some images that are a few years old, but I liked them and thought they needed to come out from just sitting in an art folder.

As usual, the calendar is printed on recycled card and is in a CD-style cover that folds out. If you would like one (or more), you let me know via the Edition9 website, or here. If you already have a cover from a previous year, I can send pages only at reduced cost.

Hope you like it!

Comet

The moon sleepily cast its silver light over the meadow, as the gentle cow still nibbled on dew-covered blades of grass, late into the night.

A strange box-shaped comet burnt across the sky, but nobody saw it, and nobody heard it.

Alien food

I found these pictures again yesterday. They are from a few years ago.

They reminded me of the time when Malo told me that he was half-alien. For some months, my little half-alien would only eat mash potato with sauce pictures. I was endlessly peeling and boiling potatoes. Mashed with butter and milk, then got to work with the sauce bottle. There were sauce family portraits, sauce drawings of the moon and the stars, our car, our house, and Malo's name (frequently). But these are the only ones I took photos of.

Anyway, he survived the mono-diet and seems to eat 'normal' food now.

The cosmologist said...

I vanished for a while. Sorry if you missed me. I slipped into a wormhole and took a while to find the way out again.

Anyway, last night I had dinner with my friend Catherine and she told me that she recently had a conversation with a cosmologist. That must be an interesting job. I wonder, are they physicists or philosophers or both or neither? The cosmologist commented that, when humans on our planet look up at the dying sun in 5 billion years time, those humans will have as much similarity with us as we do with amoeba.

For me, that idea is simultaneously completely comprehensible, and utterly incomprehensible and beyond imagination.

White laminex

When I hear the phone ring, the first thing I do is pick up a pen or pencil. The second thing I do is pick up the phone.

It doesn't matter if I don't have a piece of paper I can use right there, because the top of my desk is white laminex.

As I talk on the phone, I subconsciously scribble and draw and take notes on the laminex desk top. When there are so many scribbles that there is no room for any more, then I wipe the top of my desk clean with eucalyptus oil or metho, and I start again.

Postage Stamps

All day, I design imaginary postage stamps and I dream that, one day, Australia Post will ask me to design real ones for them.

Chain letters

A week or so ago, my son received a chain letter. (See letter to the right. Click on it to view larger image.) I was wondering what I should do. He was overwhelmed by a guilty kind of sense of responsibility, but to help him to keep the chain going just went completely against my gut instincts. So I wondered some more, and did a bit of thinking, and then I wrote a letter back to the parents of the (very young) child who sent the chain letter to my son:

Dear Friend,
You say that the chain letter you sent to my child was commenced in 1998, and has never been broken. If this were true, then it would mean:

1. If one child started the chain letter in 1998, and sent it to 6 other children, and each of these children then sent it to 6 others, then after these 2 rounds, 36 kids would be involved.
   
2. The chain letter instructions state that it must be sent on within 4 days. Let us just assume (to make the mathematics simpler) that the post takes 3 days to deliver each letter. So then, this would mean that every 7 days (or each week), the number of participants increases by a multiple of 6.
   
3. Thus, after 8 weeks, already 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 children are involved. That equals 1,679,616 children. After only 8 weeks.
   
4. From 1998 to 2009 is 11 years. In 11 years, there are 52 x 11 weeks = 572 weeks.
   
5. So, if the chain has never been broken, that would mean that the number of kids involved in the chain is 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 ..... and so on, for 572 times) ie, 6 to the power of 572.
   
6. Now think about this for a moment. After only 200 weeks, the sum would look like this:
   
   
7. The chain letter was two hundred weeks old in approximately 2002 or 2003 and already the number was incomprehensibly, ridiculously astronomical. It has 155 noughts after if, for goodness sake. There are not even nearly that many people on the planet. Probably not even that many insects. But you never know with insects.
   
8. Therefore, it just is a mathematical impossibility that the chain has never been broken and the contents of the letter must be a hoax.
   

You see, chain letters operate on the basis of guilt. The recipient is made to feel that you will let down ALL THE PEOPLE BEFORE YOU if you do not keep the chain going.

It is not good to be manipulated by feelings of guilt, especially where that guilt serves no productive purpose. If I write letters premised on guilt, then I prefer that they be for Amnesty International, where pressure through feelings of guilt might serve some useful purpose, like saving political prisoners. Or something like that....

It is pathetic to manipulate children through mindless guilt.

Therefore, I am sorry that I am unable to allow my child to participate in this alleged Guiness Book of Records Chain Letter.

Kind wishes,
Ulrike

Swimming Pool

I was 17 when I discovered that not everyone else saw the world as fuzzy as me, and that I needed glasses. Wanting so badly to be cool, wearing glasses just didn't fit the image I was pathetically striving for.

My parents were always pretty tight with money, but somehow, I managed to persuade them to get me contact lenses. That was in the days when contact lenses were very expensive and had to be cleaned with a cleaning solution and then boiled to disinfect every night.

One summer Saturday, the parents of the two little girls I regularly babysat, told me that I would be babysitting the girls at the house of a friend of theirs that day. As it turned out, a mega-rich friend with a fantastic mansion and enormous swimming pool. The girls would have their cozzies and I could bring mine too. There was another little girl at the friends' house and I was looking after all three kids while the parents were out.

It was a hot day, and we had such fun playing in the pool. Such fun, that I completely forgot that I was wearing contact lenses. It wasn't until it was time to go home that noticed that my right contact lens has vanished. Into the pool, obviously.

When I got home, I was terrified of telling my parents. I knew they would not react well My dad yelled at me: did I have any idea how expensive contact lenses are, and why wasn't I more careful? He said there was only one thing to do: he was going to get his scuba diving equipment and find the missing contact lens in the pool.

Like a drowning fish, I gasped. In disbelief. In horror. Was he completely insane to think it was even remotely possible to find a tiny invisible plastic sliver in a big swimming pool? Did he truly think that the pool owners would let a complete nutcase go scuba diving in their pool? Did he want to ruin my life?

In an instant, he was already putting the scuba gear in the car. I pleaded, I begged, I promised I would never ever be so careless again. Eventually he relented. I've never been sure if he realised himself what an idiot he would look like, or if he eventually figured the health insurance would pay for a new contact lens.

The memory still sends shivers of panic and embarrassment up my spine.