COLUMN CENTIMETRES

with Olav Muurlink

Ishouldn’t say this, because I’ve been in the news business for many years, but sometimes I don’t feel like reading the news any more. But then something happens to change all that. My ears perked up when I thought some aliens packed themselves in silver cylinders, packed light— very light it seems—and ended up floating over North America, slowly, saying to themselves…”shall we? Yeah….nah?” But before they could turn for home, without bothering to land, the Americans shot a Sidewinder (price of the bullet? Around half a million Australian dollars) into the vessel and now it’s smithereens in the tundra of Alaska. Now we’ll never know why aliens are so indecisive. You know, floating over earth for around a century or more without ever buying any real estate…let alone invading a single country. Picking up the occasional lonely driver or sunset watcher and doing a probe or two to test what we taste like, but obviously never liking the sample enough to really settle down and farm us.

Meanwhile, back on earth, apparently Turkish skyscraper architects have brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “not learning their lessons”, building gingerbread houses on top of the rubble of the 1999 earthquake.

And closer to home, a 75-year-old man died earlier this month while waiting at a taxi rank in Margaret Street in Toowoomba. Not of

Editor: Olav Muurlink editor@thedailyjournal.ink

Publisher: Gordon Bratby

Journalist: Selina Venier stanthorperecord@gmail.com

Journalist: Kim Hanson-Ross kimberley.hansonross@icloud.com

Journalist: Jonathan O’Neill oneill.jonathan1@outlook.com

Sports Journalist, Gerard Walsh sports@thedailyjournal.ink

A little bit of legals in not-too-fine print

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And ongoing…. I have enough crusty old men in my circle to know what the mutterings are when we hear what’s happening everywhere from Margaret Street to Alice Springs. There are a disturbingly large number of people we want to, and seemingly need to, lock up, to keep ourselves safe. Assuming humans evolve, and sometimes I wonder, we seem to be evolving very slowly when it comes to understanding the lessons we are trying to teach ourselves. We’ve been imprisoning, fining, admonishing and re-educating young men for tens of thousands of years without quite succeeding. Indeed, a while back we even tried shipping them to Australia, whipping them, and hanging them from the neck until they were no longer able to shoplift and terrorise. And yet, like the aliens in aluminium, they still keep coming.

We are indeed, like Turkish skyscraper architects, slow learners.

Olav Muurlink is associate professor in sustainable innovation at Central Queensland University, and increasingly, a grumpy old man.