The Online Temple of Chris Parkes: January 2006

Call to reveal more on $37m jet crash

An environmental group (Australian Conservation Foundation) has called on the United States Navy to provide more information on the fate of the FA-18 Hornet strike fighter plane which ditched in the sea.

"Even though this is an accident we would hope the US Navy, in cooperation with Australian authorities, would ensure this plane was removed or give us some very good reasons why not,"

I've got a good reason why you wouldn't go out and haul a pile of junk off the ocean floor;

The pilot ditched into the sea around 200km south-east of Brisbane...

Any idea how much that operation would cost? For what benefit? To stop a couple of hundred kilos of avtur leaking out? Seriously, don't you have something better to do with yourselves?

Eric Joyner

Did I ever tell you one of my favorite toys when I was a kid was a little robot with three huge cannons on his chest? He would shuffle across the floor then pause, like he was considering his options, think "nah, screw that," spin 360 degrees and blast everything within range. That's why I liked him. He wasn't programmed to take any crap. Shoot first and process data later was his motto.

I kind of think that one day, when humans and robots are friends, the image of the psychopathic killer robot laying waste to the landscape will be as frowned upon as love Thy Neighbour or
Golliwog biscuits.

I wonder whatever happened to that little guy? Perhaps he's watching a fight or invading foreign lands, but I really hope he's happy. And dreaming of destroying civilisations.

This little game has held my vice-like attention for at least five minutes. Use the cursor keys to move your fish up-down-left-right and swallow any fish smaller than yourself. Gradually as you swallow more and more fish, you become larger, enabling you to swallow bigger fish, etc, etc. It becomes lots of fun once you become bigger than any fish in the pond.

And, in a shameless attempt to influence the google ads - remote control blimps, bonsai plants, pilot shop, fisher space pen.

Do you have any lonely socks?

I recently got a cat. It has been quite a while since I had a cat in the household, and I totally forgot how keen they are on sleeping. I mean, I knew they lived for it, but I had forgotten just how seriously they took the whole thing.

Our cat sleeps like 23 hours a day, minimum. He makes it his life's work to find a spot to sleep in that is;

a. completely inconvenient for whatever I happen to be doing at that time.

b. as uncomfortable-looking as possible.

He sleeps, wakes briefly to eat, scratches himself, then finishes off his day with a nap. In short, he is my new God.

I can't help wondering what the hell the domestic housecat did way back before they were domesticated. When they had to earn a living by catching, killing and eating other animals, rather than annoying the bejeezuz out of me until a open a tin. What sort of predator gets away with sleeping 23 hours a day? Probably a lion can get away with that stuff because if you even broached the topic with one he'd slap you silly, like that bloke in New Zealand. Possibly he said something like, "so, are you lazy bastards going to get up now and go chase some antelope or something?" And then the lions are like "that's real funny, bitch, howsabout I ventilate that torso of yours while you lie down and have a think about it?" Not because they felt a need to respond, but because he woke them up and they needed to remind him of the fact that they were actual lions.

Sorry, what was I talking about? Oh, yes, new flying post here, subtitled In Which I Take My Fiance Flying.

Better late then never - I took some photos of the Airbus A380s visit to Sydney late last year but never got around to posting them. The first three are from my mate Carl.