BigBlog

I now have my own domain name. It's easy to remember and won't change.

The address is:

www.moretonbayhistory.com

Log on and you'll see that I am developing a new webpage there.

It's less wordy and more interactive!

All my future blogs will also be from this site.

The blog site is at:

http://web.me.com/peter.ludlow/bay/Blog/Blog.html

Hope to see you there!

 The movie ‘Avatar' has, thanks to blanket advertising, thrust an unfamiliar word back into popular English usage. Computer gamers, of course, have known about it for years - since way back in the 1980s in fact - when the term was first used for a movable icon to represent a person in cyberspace or virtual reality graphics.

However, I was surprised to learn that it was not the computer industry that introduced the word. It's origins are ancient indeed, from the Sanskrit avatāra ‘descent,' from ava ‘down' + tar- ‘to cross.' In Hindu, avatar is a manifestation of a deity or released soul in bodily form on earth; an incarnate divine teacher.  One of their Gods, Ganesh (The Remover of Obstacles), has an elephant avatar.  I saw an image of him outside the Elephant Cave in Bali in 1989 (see photo).

Avatars (or incantations of God) are common to many other religions too. Christianity has Jesus, for example.

I find it interesting that such a new concept as the computer can breathe new life into such ancient religious beliefs. A perfect example of ‘what's old is made new again'.

I think I’ve reached the age when I subconsciously utter “Eh?” to everything my wife says. It’s either my hearing or my attention span that is waning. Even the radio news seems to anticipate my problem because every time they report on a news item, they follow it up with an eye-witness account of the person saying exactly the same thing.

Well, perhaps it doesn’t happen ALL the time, but often enough for me to mutter “Eh?” after the announcer’s report, so that the eye witness will repeat, seemingly in response to my “Eh?”, exactly the announcer’s words. It gives me a laugh when it does happen.

Try it yourself next time you are listening to the news on the car radio. Go ahead, make your day! Clint Eastwood put it just as succinctly: “Go ahead. Make my day.”

My family travelled overseas for 6 weeks earlier this year. During that time we managed to visit Dubai, England, Eire, France, and Italy. We worked out our itinerary with the help of an agent. All went well but on arriving home we wondered why we were worn out. Our first impulse was to put it down to our advancing years, but then on one sleepless night recently I thought through our arrangements (I like to revisit past happenings in my mind as a way of getting to sleep).

The results:

A third of our six weeks abroad was spent preparing for transit travel, travelling or recovering from travelling. We had 22 luggage transfers in our six weeks.

No wonder we were worn out!

New years resolution:

Just visit one place.

Into space with Richard Branson perhaps?