So many books, so little time

'I was surprised when my eye was caught by an advertisement: wolf cubs for sale. A few hours later I was paying $500 to the woman who had placed the ad. I took my wolf cub home with me that very afternoon. And there we began thrashing out the terms of our acquaintance.'

This fascinating book charts the relationship between Mark Rowlands, a rootless and restless philosopher, and Brenin, his extraordinarily well-travelled wolf. Brenin goes everywhere with Rowlands, even to his philosophy lectures, where he lies in the corner of the lecture hall and dozes. More than just an exotic pet, Breinin exerted an immense influence on Rowlands as both a person, and, strangely enough, as a philosopher. He led Rowlands to re-evaluate his attitude to love, happiness, nature and death.

By turns funny (what do you do when your wolf eats your air-conditioning unit?) and poignant (in the pages describing Brenin's last weeks with Rowlands), this is a life-affirming book that will make you reappraise what it means to be human.

And what lessons did the philosopher learn from the wolf? Well, many, but one was this: that wolves, unlike us, live without hope. And what is most important in us, is what is left when time has taken our hope from us. In his words, "We do spend a lot of our time obsessing about the future and obsessing about the past in the way that no other animal does. The drawback is I think, that we have a hard time making sense of our lives once we're hooked into time in that sort of way. I think that is one of the drawbacks at least."

"Because we're what philosophers call temporal creatures, we experience time in a certain way, as a line stretching from the past into the future. We face a problem. And the problem is we know that there's going to be an end to this line. And so then we have a fundamental choice to make: what is our stance going to be to the fact that there is an end to the line of our lives? And it seems to me we have two fundamental choices: either we tell stories to the effect that there isn't in fact an end, that what we think of as the end is not in fact the end, there is something else; we can do that. Or we can live our lives in the acknowledgement that there will be an end."

"Part of what I wanted to do certainly in the latter half of the book, was to try and show the ways in which making up stories about there not being an end, about death not being the end, doesn't allow us to be what we are capable of being."

"You think of life as a game of football, or something like that, but the significance of the sort of an error that someone makes, for example, is different whether it occurs in the beginning of the game or the end of the game where there's no chance to sort of rectify it. So I think significance is tied to time, in that sense, and the fact that our lives are going to come to some sort of abrupt end."

"Which is what Janacek's opera, The Macropulos Case is all about, but life just becomes meaningless if you go on, and so Macropulos eventually ends up just wanting to die."

"The problem is, understanding how life can have a meaning if it doesn't go on, as well I think, that's the other side of the coin. So either way we're going to be in trouble. The worry about meaning that comes from the fact that our lives will be - it always reminds me of Shelley's poem, Ozymandius, when he talks about a traveller in the desert coming across these two trunkless legs of stone, underneath written 'My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings, look upon my works in mighty despair.' And the traveller looks and all he can see is desert."

"Everything Ozymandius achieved has been erased from history. That's the fate of all of us. Given that's what's going to happen, where does the meaning of our lives exist? There are two basic stories, the meaning of life on the one hand is happiness, but there are problems with that because people can be happy doing all sorts of apparently meaningless things. Suppose your conception of a good life, a meaningful life, was to sit around all day watching sitcoms, or something like that, then you're happy, but intuitively, that seems to be a sort of sad waste of a life rather than a meaningful one. So the problem with identifying meaning with happiness is that you have to be happy doing the right things, meaningful things. So happiness doesn't get us what we need."

"But on the other hand, you say OK, well it's not happiness, it's purpose. And that's the other main option. Well then we face the Ozymandius problem, no matter what we achieve, it's all going to go. There's a sort of famous myth which the existentialist Albert Camus used to talk about, the meaningless of human existence, the myth of Sisyphus. Now Sisyphus was condemned, for whatever reason, we don't need to go into, to roll a big rock up a hill for all eternity. When he gets to the top, it rolls back down again and he has to start all over again. And the analogy is supposed to be something like this: Sisyphus' journey to the top is like our lives, and every step he takes on this journey is like a day in our lives."

"But why is that punishment of the gods so nasty? What's the problem with it? Is it the fact that it's so difficult? Well, you know, you can imagine a sort of variation on the myth where Sisyphus doesn't roll a big rock up the hill, he just sort of carries a little pebble, you know, he could stick it in his pocket or whatever, stroll to the top of the hill, pebble, well it doesn't jump out, it drops out and then rolls back down again. There's no more meaning there than there was in the original telling."

"Well, suppose the gods decided to be slightly merciful and inculcate in Sisyphus an intense desire to roll big rocks up hills. He was never happier than when he's doing this. Then it seems we still don't have meaning. In fact Sisyphus' position now in some respects seems to be even worse than it was before the gods decided to become merciful; now he's the deluded stooge or patsy of the gods. At least before, he possessed some kind of dignity, you know, nothing but contempt for the gods and this stupid punishment they'd inflicted on him, but now that all is gone. So dignity is lost and in its place is happiness. It's not clear that we've made any great stride forward there."

(Mark Rowlands' books include Everything I Know I Learned from TV and The Philosopher at the End of the Universe. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami.)

A rear view of history

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.

Why did the English built them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Rome's army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses (two horses' asses.) Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important?

Ancient horses' asses control almost everything... and
CURRENT horses' asses are controlling everything else.

P.S. Australia, having more horses' asses than any other place in the world, has THREE different gauges which meant that not all that long ago a person, wanting to cross the continent east to west, had to change trains six times. The three different gauges still exist, but the state capitals are now linked by one uniform gauge.

Riverbend News

A small house with a big name

Here's another one of those compound nouns Germans are so fond of: "Schrankenwärterhäuschen" (which is just a short form of "Eisenbahnschrankenwärterhäuschen"). It describes the small cottage next to a level railway crossing lived in by the guard and his family. It was the guard's job to crank down the barriers, to stop what little traffic there was from crossing the railway, whenever the one or two daily trains passed through. When I was a boy in Germany, there existed a surplus of cheap labour, men returned from the war had to be employed, and human labour had not yet been replaced by technology, and with railways criss-crossing the country, those little cottages were dotted all along the line.

In my days with the "Fahrenden Gesellen" I hiked all over the countryside and passed many of those seemingly idyllic places, far away from anywhere, flower-boxes on the window-sills, children playing outside, and the guard relaxing in the sun, smoking a pipe or reading a paper. Other boys may have dreamt of driving a fire-engine but I always thought being a "Schrankenwärter" would be absolute bliss as it offered a contemplative life free of stress and with plenty of time to read and write and think.

All this came back to me when I recently discovered a whole website dedicated to the disappearing age of the "Schrankenwärterhäuschen" and I reflected on the different course my own life had taken: instead of a contemplative existence, I went from job to job, some fifty in all, in more than fifteen countries across four continents. However, all's well that ends well as I now live in my own small "Schrankenwärterhäuschen" at "Riverbend".

P.S. Of today's 237,000 employees of the "Deutsche Bahn", only about seventy are still employed as "Schrankenwärter". Here's a clip of one of this dying breed, Schrankenwärter Laumann, filmed at Groß Düngen in deepest Lower Saxonia in 2006:

Click on box next to volume control for full-screen viewing

To lighten "Schrankenwärter" Laumann's 'tristesse', why not send him a pretty postcard? I did! Send it to

Schrankenwärter Laumann
Posten 'Hockeln'
D-31162 Groß Düngen
GERMANY

(No need to write in German; in the new Germany everybody understands English - those who don't will be shot! Just sprinkle your message with a bit of Schadenfreude, Gemütlichkeit, das Ding an sich, Kindergarten, Sauerkraut, Bratwurst, and Prost, and he'll know what you're talking about as there's very little else that matters - to a German anyway! - just don't mention the Blitzkrieg.)

If you can't get enough of the romance of the "Schrankenwärter" 's job (or its loneliness, tedium, and sheer boredom), here's the three-part clip "Auf verlorenem Posten":

Part 1 56132 Miellen an der Lahn, Stefan Löhr, Posten 55
Part 2 5420 Friedrichssegen-Ost an der Lahn, Uwe Ortner
Part 3 65558 Balduinstein an der Lahn, Udo Meister

And there have been attempts made to automate the job - see this clip - but it would help if you understood German!

That was the week, that was!

First the good news: about 1,500 garden gnomes have been saved from the scrapheap. The collection of small cement people was left behind after the death of an elderly Cootamundra woman, with the new owners of her property not keen on keeping them hanging around. But a solicitor acting for the deceased estate in southern NSW contacted the Australian Gnome Convention seeking advice on how to dispose of the garden ornaments. The convention, established by the Lower Blue Mountains Rotary Club, is held annually in Glenbrook, west of Sydney, and has become the spiritual home for Australia's gnomes. Convention organiser and "gnome master" David Cook said he did not hesitate in organising a rescue party. "We didn't want to see them put in a skip and taken to the tip and all smashed up," Mr Cook said. The four-member rescue team joined with Cootamundra locals, working for almost four hours to load "every square inch" of two vehicles and a trailer. The gnomes will be fostered out to various locations across the Blue Mountains but will be reunited next Australia Day for the sixth annual Australian Gnome Convention. "Welcome gnome!"

In Romania, a teenage girl was electrocuted after dropping her laptop into the bath as she twittered in the tub. Police said they believed Maria Barbu, 17, had tried to plug in her laptop with wet hands after the battery died during a long session on social networking site Twitter as she took a soak at her home in Brasov, central Romania. Beware! Twitter is a killer app!

And here's another killer: recent evidence shows the human papilloma virus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer in women, is poised to become one of the leading causes of oral cancer in men because of changing sexual behaviours. Could somebody please explain this to me?

Remember that self-confessed 'total idiot' who claims to have got lost for twelve days in the Blue Mountains and allegedly lived off seeds and weeds to tell the tale? Afterwards he appeared on the Nine Network's 60 Minutes program, which paid him $200,000 for his story. The teenager and his father Richard Cass had signed with celebrity agent Sean Anderson, who said the pair intended to donate some of the money to his rescuers, however, not one of the many organisations involved in the extensive (and expensive) search have received a single cent. In fact, there are reports the teenager has cut his father out of the television deal and the pair apparently had a fall-out when the kid said he was keeping the money, UK newspaper The Sun reported. Some fathers do have them!

On the homefront, the Government is considering to lower the voting age, allowing 16 and 17 year olds the right to vote. Research has shown that handing out MARS bars is cheaper than $900-cheques.

And why not at the same time up the retirement age? Federal Opposition frontbencher Tony Abbott has urged his Coalition colleagues to support his call for the pension age to be lifted to at least 70. In the Budget the Government announced a plan to lift the pension eligibility age to 67 by the year 2023. But Mr Abbott says the Opposition should go further, and "give people the opportunity to work for longer". He's always been one with words!

As has been good ol' David Glasheen on Restoration Island who's back in the news again: they gave him a haircut and a wash and flew him down to Sydney to inspect some of the "Miss (Always) Right" candidates who want to join him on his tropical island.

Of course, Dave would need to start changing his underpants more regularly than did astronaut Koichi Wakata who is returning to Earth still wearing the same pair he had on when leaving a month ago.

And while on the subject of mad hatters and strange dress-behaviour, 335 years ago, Phillipe, Duke of Orleans, was born. He was brought up as a woman, and used to lead his troops into battle wearing high heels. But you knew that already, didn't you?