Melbourne miniatures: No. 1

I just found the exercise book containing the scribbles I made during a holiday in Melbourne in June; so, here's my first word-picture from that trip.

It's 6:40 am and about 9 degrees outside. I'm sitting at a bench inside Macca's looking out at Elizabeth Street; drunk people are returning home from who-knows-where. The combination of these happy drunks (several wave and wish me well), the four doughnuts I've just downed, and, to someone of my generation, comfort music such as the Eurythmics, Here Comes the Rain, Huey Lewis and the News, Hip to Be Square, and U2, The Sweetest Thing, are buoying me -- at least for the moment.

Now, here's a surprise: just within my view, runners, seriously dressed runners (read: lycra, short-shorts, singlets, garish colours), have started started streaming down Flinders Street. Given the temperature, seriously under-dressed is perhaps a more apt description. Nevertheless, here they are, just after sparrow's fart on a cold Sunday morning, running! I hastily leave Macca's to investigate.

"It's 'Run Melbourne'," I'm told by a lime-green-vest-wearing official. I cheer a couple of runners, to feel like I'm part of the action. As I later discovered, Run Melbourne is community charity event in which people run and donate money -- over and above their entry fee, which, from $40 to $70 depending on whether you run 5 km through to a half-marathon, is not to be sneezed at -- to a charity of their choice. Some people actively fundraise for their chosen charity: one bloke raised over $8,000! (My wife, who thinks running for fun is the height of stupidity, would utterly scoff at the idea of running long distances and paying to do so and giving money to a charity for the privilege! "Write a cheque to the charity, pocket the entry fee -- or, better still, donate it to the charity too -- and stay at home with a cup of tea and a crumpet," she'd say. She's got a point.)

Photo: Justin McManus,
http://www.theage.com.au/photogallery/2008/06/22/1214073033685.html

Here's an excerpt from a report about Run Melbourne in The Age (23 June, 2008):

One first-timer, pharmacist Siew Dooley, 40, of Kew, said the atmosphere was very friendly. "We were all suffering together," she said. "We were all wet and cold and miserable, and that provided a sort of camaraderie."

A touch of levity was provided by one runner dressed as the Riddler, the Batman character, who jogged in a purple wig and a green outfit with question marks.

One half-marathon runner dispensed with clothes altogether, running naked except for running shoes. [Yee-ha!]

The man reached the half-way mark in the marathon before police stepped in, because, they said, "he was actually a good runner, and it was hard to pinpoint where he was". But they did, and arrested him.

I wonder which charity nudie-rudie runner donated to. Given the weather, the frost-bite recovery centre would've been appropriate.

An elated dad

In warm-up mode, I'm practising for the real cigars.

It was only a matter of time ...

until our daughter's early-morning feeds gave rise to early-morning reading and blog posting.

The following, from Tim Keller's recent book, The Reason for God, are worth sharing:

Albert Camus on suffering:

[Christ] the god-man suffers too, with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him since he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha is so important in the history of man only because, in its shadows, the divinity ostensibly abandoned its traditional priviledge, and lived through to the end, despair included, the agaony of death. Thus is explained the "Lama sabachtani" and the frightful doubt of Christ in agony (p.31 in Keller, from Camus' Asseis, Gallimard, 1965, p. 444).

Dostoevsky on how the resurrection colours our view of suffering in this world:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrications of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, and the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened (p.33 in Keller, from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, ch. 34).

If these quotes don't whet your appetite for Keller's book, perhaps an overt plug will: Partly a response to the attacks on Christian belief and organised religion by Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris et al., this book has depth, insight, wit and an all-too-rare sensitivity to the complexity, ambiguity and perplexity of living and thinking in the (post-)modern world -- all this buttressed by Keller's scriptural acumen and encycolpedic knowledge.

Buy and read this book; and, give it to skeptics who you think might be prepared to "doubt their doubts" (a Kellerism).

PS: After talking with someone who knows far more about science than me, and who has read Dawkins, I don't think it's fair to label him a skeptic; by implication, he's probabyly not a direct target of Keller's book. As this person informed me, Dawkins is modern in that he holds that science and rationality can and do explain all things -- no post-modernist doubt is to be found in him. Pity.

Miss Walker

Miss Walker, born 16 Aug. 2008

Probably won't be blogging for a while -- my attention and energies are elsewhere...

Words, words, words

Confession: After reading the following comment by TroyG, "Activate the outdoor egress, get out and eviscerate the proletariat!", I had to look two of the words up in the dictionary. Speaking of words, tonight I stumbled across the following in an old dictionary: fabaceous. There's a word I like the sound of.

Without consulting dictionary.com or the nearest Oxford or Macquarie, is anyone up for a guess (perhaps a Boulderdash-style creative 'guess') at what it means?

Trivia: The same old pocket dictionary that contains fabaceous has a smudged read-pen inscription on the inside cover, dated 1928. Written in similar red-ink on the opposite recto page is: "I given off this book to Leila, 1944." Lucky Leila.

My small-pencil collection

In our world of throw-away items, the lifespan of some of these little tackers mildly comforts me. The oldest is about six years.