Call 'em cock jocks, sluggos, nylon nasties, budgie smugglers, the banana hammock or the True Test Of Manhood but it breaks my heart to see the way the great Aussie cossie is being scorned by a new generation of beach goers.
When I was a kid, the right style of a bloke could get away with wearing scungies to the shops (with thongs) to buy a hamburger ... "and give us a Chocolate Moove with that as well, will ya?"
If it was a hot enough day, a young man could even catch the bus home from the beach in his Speedos - ankles crumbed with sand like cutlets - and not turn a head.
Sadly, if you tried this nowadays you'd be written off as either an oddball foreigner, retarded or a kiddie fiddler with a metal detector hidden in your backpack.
The thing that saddens me most about the attitude towards sluggos is that we've largely bought into a conservative American fashion aesthetic and don't realise it.
Americans, prudes they are, have always opted for shorts on the beach and when they started to dominate the Aussie surf wear industry in the 80s, they brought their uptight attitudes with them.
-- SAM de BRITO
The machinery that's pumped so much meat into our lives over the last half century was never built to last, and now it's breaking down big-time. Feed is more expensive. Gasoline is more expensive. Milk, rice, butter, corn -- it's all going through the roof. And for the foreseeable future, it's not coming back down.
-- DAVID CHANGNeuroscientists consider it settled that the mind arises from the cooperation of billions of interconnected cells that, individually, are no smarter than amoebae. But it's a shocking idea to some that the human mind could arise out of such an array of mindlessness. Many express amazement that emotions, pain, sexual feelings or religious belief could be a product of brain function. They are put off by the notion that such rich experiences could be reduced to mechanical or chemical bits. Or they worry that scientific explanations may seduce people into a kind of moral laziness that provides a ready excuse for any human failing: "My brain made me do it." Our brains indeed do make us do it, but that is nonetheless consistent with meaningful lives and moral choices.
In arid lands where the sightlines are long, you often see a band of rain falling and evaporating before it reaches the ground. That is a virga. It looks like a dark, slanting smudge between the clouds and the horizon. On Mars, an arid planet, NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander has spotted a snow virga. Shining a green laser straight up toward a layer of clouds, the lander detected crystals of ice swirling above the planet’s surface.
This is a scientific scene ready for recasting in the form of a snow globe.
When eBay started, it liked being a bit scruffy. It let any old Joe make money out of the crap in his garage. It was happy to be the internet's car boot sale - and that image did pretty well for the company. But in recent years, eBay has been hinting that it's more like Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady -- a bit of posh in the guise of a backstreet scrubber; something classier than we ever imagined. How? By buying other companies in an attempt trying to prove that it's got more than just secondhand auctions up its sleeve.
Proving that to the public is not coming easy, though, and eBay has been locked in a downward spiral for some time. So when the news emerged today that the company was laying off 1,000 members of staff, it was a disappointment but not a surprise. What used to be an auction house for the rest of us has now become a treasure trove of weird investments and bad decisions.
What is required is a brake on hubris, an abiding love for the natural world, and a willingness to resist what Tolkien calls the "bewilderment" of treasure. The solution to our technological dilemma is nothing so simple (or so dangerous) as throwing a ring into the fire in which it was forged. But a little Hobbit pluck and Hobbit restraint might serve us well as we feel our way into an uncertain future, embracing the beneficent artifacts of knowledge, but holding fast to all things that live and breathe and grow.
-- CHET RAYMO
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