I’m 70 now. That is a time of life when one reflects on this miraculous journey that we take, and, hopefully, comes to some informed conclusions about what it is all about. I recall many years ago reading the late Dag Hammarskjold’s “Markings”, in which he jotted down his thoughts on this life. I’m not nearly as original as he was, so have to rely on the thoughts of others for my markings to guide me along the rocky road of life. One such marking that has had a marked impact on…

On the delivery of powerful imagery and perceptions of what our lives either should be or actually are, television has done a wonderful job as a messenger, so far.

From the far heights of the Hollywood hills to the shores of the Greek islands, television shows have set the standard on what we westerners all wish to mimic as cultural consumers. Before the American dream of prosperity and wealth failed, it still managed to evolve into the universal dream of much of the civilised world. American TV shows have become the guidelines to…

No one knows how life on Earth began, or why, and so Man has created religions to find answers that humans can relate to, which answer the questions on the meaning of life, and what happens to us after our death. These religions can be a solace for many in the absence of anything else that makes sense, but since humans are but an infinitesimal part of the universe, isn’t it rather presumptuous for us to assume that all was created just for our sole benefit?

And does the truth have to make sense to us?…

It’s fashionable at the moment to present the world as diving into chaos and to claim we are suffering ever-reducing personal standards and that, as a result, governments should legislate away every last bit of free will in the misguided theory that to do so means all their new rules will be followed without question. ‘The War on Terror’ is an archetypal example, a presumption by which the result is that we will be decades mopping up the mess. And Australia has its own very enlightening example in the case of Dr. Haneef, whose mere…

Photo by Miles Ranno

I’m the first to admit that I think high fashion is silly. One of my favorite magazines, Vanity Fair, is absolutely gorged with full-page ads for ostentatious brands like Fendi, Louis Vuitton and Versace, and I only tolerate them because they are what keeps the cover price in a somewhat reasonable range. I appreciate fashion from an artistic standpoint (Project Runway is probably the best ‘reality’ show I’ve seen), but the overall need to be chic – succumbing to fashion for fashion’s sake – seems like little more than an insipid hobby for those…

By Renee Comer Miller

I wasn’t going to watch it. My sister actually worked the phone lines. I, on the other hand, was pretty uninterested. Maybe I just didn’t want to hear. Maybe I’m done with it. Maybe I hate it so much I want to turn it off.

But cancer won’t turn off. Instead it just keeps killing more than half a million people a year. I didn’t know that before tonight. I should have.

I am a two-time cancer survivor.

I was 26 years old and pregnant…

As a fan of science fiction, I have been wondering how long it would be before someone started talking about terraforming planet Earth, and it has finally come up for discussion with scientists talking about pumping sulphur high into the atmosphere.

(See the transcript of Radio National’s Background Briefing here)

Anyone nervous yet?

History, rather than science fiction, is where we should start looking when this idea starts to grow legs. And grow legs it will, because
cheap and nasty will always appeal to economic rationalists.…

A month has passed since Steve Jobs’ latest keynote speech during the opening ceremony of the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Despite the malicious rumors about Jobs’ health, he succeeded in presenting another captivating and passionate speech. The “main course” was none other than the second generation iPhone 3G. Yet, the announcement of the MobileMe service was what a stuck a chord with everyone. MobileMe is the new .Mac service wherein along with the already known features (virtual hard drives, personal websites created by iWeb, e-mail addresses, online photo galleries, etc.) a new…

You know, we’re well past the age of hairy chests and gold chains, yet I still see men who cannot seem to grasp what the true nature of manliness actually is.  They do the most insipid things to appear virile and masculine, thereby succeeding only in revealing to everyone the basest aspects of being male. As a result, there are quite a lot of women in the world who think that good men simply don’t exist. If he’s not a cheater, then he’s an abuser.  If not that, then he must be either a drunkard or a pill-popper.…

The other day a teenager asked if he could use my cell phone and when I told him that I didn’t have one, he just stood there with a confused look on his face.  His dumbfounded expression got me to thinking about how different phones are today compared to when I was a kid. Back then, we had to walk two miles barefooted in the snow, uphill both ways, just to make a phone call. Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but it was definitely different.

When I was growing up, we only had rotary phones. I…