UFO

Recently but relegated to the inside pages of print media and as a filler segment in TV news, we found the following:

A former Pentagon official who led a recently revealed government program to research potential UFOs said Monday evening that he believes there is evidence of alien life reaching Earth.

"My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone," Luis Elizondo said.

He said some aircraft they looked into were "seemingly defying the laws of aerodynamics".

What is known as well was the fact that the U.S. government had spent north of $22 M to study UFO phenomenon from early 2000, ending in 2012. This latest effort could have had more impact than the U.S. Air Force “Project Blue Book” from the 50’s and would have been a bigger deal except, perhaps, for a snippet of news that cast a shadow with a tint of political payback. 

“A pair of news reports in The New York Times and Politico over the weekend said the effort, the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, was begun largely at the behest of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who helped shore up funding for it after speaking to a friend and political donor who owns an aerospace company and has said he believes in the existence of aliens”. 

Nevertheless, we can set all that aside. Now, as difficult as it can be for most folks including myself who have our religious faith to reckon with, let's take a look at this phenomenon with a different set of lenses temporarily (if that is ever possible). 

In a population of people that are over 70% believers in faith-based Omnipotent power in one form or another also believe (65% among men, 46% among women) that UFO sightings are real, even though they do not have personal direct experiences with the phenomenon. Whether we believe that life only exists here and here alone or there is life somewhere else, we can suspend those at the moment and resist compulsion to argue or debate the two sets of ideas. Even among those who show no interest whatsoever, or those who profess agnosticism to the phenomenon, the term UFO is recognized without any confusion.

Science fiction fantasies, whether in the form of movies, short stories and novels, are difficult to ignore at this point in time when a good number of their depictions had been made real, i.e. radios, television, submarines, rocket propulsion, moon landing, even microwave ovens, etc. Ancient alien visitation theorists, space travel advocates, scientists and philosophers seem to  have independently mix together a concoction of ideas that says, "we are not alone" in the universe. 

Since records have been kept and organized, thousands upon thousands of UFO sightings were catalogued.  Thousands upon thousands had been explained, including current ones that come up, but there are a few hundred that remain unexplained, including those observed by military pilots back in 2004, off San Diego. The actual film footage with real time voice-over by the pilot were released which, by the way, was what prompted the news last week. There were pursuits in the past by military jets and observations by commercial pilots of flying objects described to defy current aerodynamic capabilities by any nation, and often describe to also defy the laws of physics, i.e. right angle turns at very high speeds or objects that are first observed to hover only to take off vertically and disappear at supersonic speeds. Then there were countless alien abductions – close encounters of the third, or is it now the fourth kind? 

UFO, we’re told, simply means, as its meaning suggests, “Unidentified Flying Object” but not necessarily that it is of extra-terrestrial origin. This reminds me of a tribe in the middle of the Amazon jungle that even up to this day lives in complete isolation from the rest of the world.  As far as I know they’ve been left alone except for the occasional fly over by single engine aircraft. That was how the tribe was discovered. The natives are seen in the film footage looking up and pointing to the strange flying object. To them that would have been a UFO compared to the familiar flying birds and bats.

So, where are we today on the issue of UFO’s? If we're not alone, what are extraterrestrials going to look like? Items One through Ten below are points to ponder while Finally is the counter balance that will or could far outweigh everything in the first nine. 

One. It is hard to imagine that in the whole universe of multiple billion galaxies, each galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars, that ours – an average size spiral one – is the only galaxy to harbor the one and only life-sustaining planet circling an average size star. It not only defies statistical probabilities, it is a very human-centric and hubristic view of our place in the universe. Philosophically, can we actually believe that all of these that we see around us, the whole universe where our little blue planet is the size of an atom, circling around a solar system the size of a grain of sand that is just one of all the grains of sand in all the beaches around the world combined, are solely just for us?  Next time you're on a beach or sand box, pick up up a grain of sand and convince yourself that it is the only one with something living on it and the rest of the grains of sands are devoid of any life form.

Two. According to one estimate, using the Drake Equation (you can look this up but you don’t need to because it is staggeringly unimaginable to contemplate the probabilities), it is calculated that there should be quite a number of habitable worlds similar to earth in our own galaxy alone that could be home to civilization with advanced enough technology to communicate beyond its planet and a million fold more in nearby galaxies who may already have the capability to traverse the vast space between stars to reach other worlds. Of course, this prompted one scientist to ask in jest, “But where are they?” Until such time when a UFO does land somewhere and out comes an entity proclaiming, "Take me to your leader", the contentious debate continues.

Three. It is always about distance, distance, and distance. When the first explorers first set out to see the rest of the world or what’s out there beyond the horizon, they faced fear of the unknown. They couldn’t and didn’t worry too much about what they could not possibly know at that time. They didn’t know how long before they reach anything, speculate on what they will find, or whether they had enough provisions to last the entire journey and whether they can retrace their way back to return and come back home safely. The rest is now part of our history. Today, we know enough what lies ahead if we must embark on a journey towards the stars. The prime impediment is, of course, distance, distance and distance. If you were a light beam, blazing at 300,000 kilometers per second it will take you 4.2 light years to get to our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri. That is a distance of 39 quadrillion kilometers. It is not exactly the next town over yonder, is it? NASA just announced that it will launch a spacecraft for Proxima Centauri in 2069. That much lead time will allow the agency to have come up with a vehicle and propellant system to achieve 10% the speed of light. That, by the way, is a very tall order in terms of overcoming technological barriers to propel a spacecraft to 30,000 km/second that could cost the entire global GDP (gross domestic product); yet, it will not reach our nearest star-neighbor until 2113. If it does get there we, our great grandchildren actually, will not know till after 2117 whether the craft made it all right. Any more communications after that will have an 8+years turn around each time.

Four.  The first man-made space craft to leave our solar system is hurtling through space right now at a breakneck speed (by our current standards) of 61,142 kilometers/hour. For all that time, it had not encountered anything. It is a machine although by today's technology a rudimentary one. It is a bottle with a message floating in the vast ocean of empty space that we hope will be picked up one day by some unknown life form able to decipher earthling language. It is a probe that, in retrospect, will direct the finder to us. It is being debated today whether that was the wise thing to do. Well, we can't worry about that now because every second of TV and radio broadcast, every time we talk on the phone, beacons of electronic signals are broadcast far and wide into outer space. The signals can easily be traced to where we are. Electronic bread crumbs are pretty much all over the nearby area of the cosmos to lead to us.  Still the odds are far too great against E.T. listening in, let alone be interested to launch an expedition based on feeble electronic signals.

Five. It is also about physiology, physiology, and physiology.  Life forms as we know them - from microorganisms to the blue whale – are bound by laws of biology. The basic biological unit - the cell - grows, sub-divides, consumes  nutrients to convert to energy, support other cells but each one has a shelf life of only so much and its expiration date is inviolable. The reason earth is teeming with life today is because the genes that control the cells are able to retain information that is passed on from dying cells to the replacement cells, from parent organisms to their offspring. In effect, the information from each gene is re-incarnated over and over. The instincts of birds and rodents, for example, to mate with their own kind, to care for their young the way generations of mothers had, or for salmon to go back to the place where they were hatched to lay their own eggs when their time came, are all governed by information being passed on. Scientists, biologists in particular, have no reason to believe that life, if it exists anywhere else, will have developed and evolved differently from the ones here. 

Six. We and other animals in parallel development that had survived so far had adapted so very well that our present forms today are far superior to previous models from generations ago. We live longer, almost twice as long as our ancestors only a thousand years ago and we had amassed so much knowledge that we may one day stretch our life span twice more. Suffice it to say that a civilization that had attained space travel to hop scotch from one star to another or from one galaxy to the next one will likely have solved the issue of immortality. If they had, it will not be purely biological. You read it here first – those folks will have come up with a life form I will call bio-bots. They will have successfully merged life’s original biology with artificial intelligence and non-organic body parts. These alien visitors will not look like E.T. at all.  We will not recognize them to have anatomical forms of biology. They will not look like robots either. The extra-large head, buggy eyes, and skinny limbs are not likely to survive the amount of acceleration to attain the necessary speed and prolonged travel.  Why feed a body with nutrients your ship had to carry as extra cargo? Consuming nutrition is but an extra step that can be eliminated when the goal is to provide energy for the most part and for maintaining and growing body parts. Why not then pack along a renewable energy source and minimal amount of nutrients or none at all if artificial body parts are indestructible?

Seven.  For prolonged travel and to lessen the effects of extreme acceleration, radiation and minimum life support system, space travelers ought to be miniaturized from whatever real life sizes they exist in their native habitats. It only makes sense for as long as the information they carry and need is kept intact and viable during the journey and upon reaching their destination. The world they will have reached will be so different from where they came from that whatever size they originally had was immaterial.  Surely, they will either find organisms much too large or much too small, or both, as we have here on earth. Therefore, it does not matter what size they are during travel or upon arrival for as long as their original information are intact. They can and will likely be able to evolve according to the new environment. The time required for evolution will be inconsequential considering it may have taken thousands or even millions of years of space travel to get to their destination. Co-evolving with the present life forms in the adopted environment sets the clock to the present moment. We know how much information can be packed inside the male and female chromosomes that will turn a minute embryo to a complete and well defined adult mole rat or gray whale or to a human being with attributes unmistakably similar to the contributing parents. So, why not pack everything inside the size of a virus and let it fly away quadrillion miles to the next star or gazillion miles to the next galaxy.

Eight. So, what about the virus? This microscopic entity that cannot be classified truly as alive the way most organisms can be described is a survivor. It cannot replicate itself on its own but it can trick a living cell to make a perfect copy of itself while maintaining all the information that defines it as a particular virus, adapting and mutating as necessary. It is the ultimate survivor. Why can’t it be a model for any extraterrestrial that wants to make prolonged journey and survive the trip? How do we know the virus is not an extraterrestrial? It is perfectly designed, highly adaptable, and likely to have survived through eons and eons of environmental changes, including extreme cataclysmic events, and perhaps even influencing how organisms that it had “infected” manage their adaptation. Or, did the viruses that plagued us over time not help us adapt, or made us stronger? Each time a virus causes some sort of epidemic, survivors were those equipped with special antibodies that were passed on to their offspring. The common cold virus may provide just the right training agents for our immune system to stay alert and remain strong.  The flu virus kills a lot of people every year but a lot more survive.  The survivors, like all others who survived most viral attacks, developed life time immunity. Vaccines are also developed using the very virus that causes the illness.

Nine. The tiniest wafer of technology made of plastic, metal and silicon that we know today to be the latest smart phone is perhaps the ideal precursor to bio-bot technology. Today’s smart phones are packed with so much technology to carry on multiple functions of command, control and communication wirelessly. Imagine what it can do decades from now when today it will open garage doors and other entry points, turn on/off lights, close drapes, play music, store and transmit vast amounts of data, take photos, make facial recognition, etc. The computational power linked to miniaturized replicas of highly evolved life forms make for a perfect space crew, traveling as bio-bots requiring the least amount of payload for life support systems thus making multiple thousand year journeys at extremely high speed possible. Space aliens may not come in dramatic fashion in flying saucers or sausage shape space ships.

Ten. It is also about timing, timing, and timing. For 160 million years the dinosaurs dominated life on earth. They were at the top of the food chain while early mammals eked out a living under the shadows and crevices beneath rocks or vegetation. For all that time - 160 million years - if aliens had visited, no intelligent life forms were here to welcome or discern them and the place may not have been a welcoming location to them. Astronomical distances, because it takes a very long time to cover or traverse them, also separate life forms from various locations in the universe by time. It takes millions of years for life to develop and for civilization to emerge at various places in the cosmos but likely not at the same time. For example, as one intelligent life form develop technology to reconnoiter the cosmos they may find a world where life is  still at its primitive stage; or, such a civilization may already have destroyed itself. Timing is crucial for one intelligent life form to intersect with another. 

Finally. So there they are. They’re merely a contrasting and sharp backdrop of a few speculative thoughts not to confound you but to sharpen the view or views you may already have all along. Now we can discard all of the above. In the realm of philosophy, we go back to the question of whether religion or the religious belief in the Omnipotent all-knowing God is incompatible with the existence of life somewhere else simply because everything you were taught precluded that. Do you know that if we believe that life only exists here actually limits God’s ability to create life anywhere? God will have created and will continue to create life wherever He pleases. I do not see anything wrong with believing that the God who created the universe has in His power and might the ability to create life everywhere He wishes them to exist. And I repeat that if we continue to foster the belief that we are alone in the total vastness of the universe speaks only to the height of human hubris. Galileo was forced, for fear of excommunication, to abandon his idea that the earth was not the center of the universe. Of course, the church was wrong. Today the Vatican Observatory has a team of cosmologist priests who are attuned with the latest in cosmological research. 

In every religion it is almost universal for the Supreme Being to have come from the heavens and even return there after many forms of earthly manifestation. It is not heresy to proclaim that Jesus is from out of this world, that he arrived as an extraterrestrial, the Son of God from the heavens. His miracle birth was made known to the wise men by a guiding star or light source from the heavens. He ascended to the heavens three days after his death and is prophesied to return from the heavens someday in an event that is the Second Coming. Both Islam and Christianity do believe in the Second Coming, albeit in terms that for now are irreconcilably discordant from each other. Judaism is not accepting the Second Coming in that they have yet to see and experience the First Arrival of the Messiah.  The Egyptian Pharaohs believed that their reincarnated forms  sailed in ships that soared to the high heavens. Many other religions allow for similar transformation of the physical bodies into other forms viable for heavenly transport.

"At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory" (Matthew 24:30)

The above passage and many similar passages from different books of the Bible, including from the Old Testaments, unequivocally present a picture of the Messiah descending from the heavens. 

Now, if you thought you already had your mental exercise after reading this you'd be pleased to know that actually it had just begun. 

Australia

Visitors to that place from down under may leave still a bit burdened in their mind whether it is the largest island or the smallest continent, or is it that incredible land of marsupials where the Koala isn’t really a bear after being told severally that it truly isn't. However, they will undoubtedly, and perhaps surprisingly, depart with an impression they did not expect. The landscape, the different natural settings, the sounds and sights can all be captured in photos and videos but what we did not expect to bring back with us was the beauty of the Australian people. It was so totally unexpected, never much talked about in travel brochures, that when my wife and I began to sum up our experiences, we keep thinking and going back to about how well the people of Australia are defining the place that was founded as inauspiciously as can be imagined. While America barely began its first grasp at independence in 1776, Australia was first populated by a people weighted down by the identity markings of “convict” with a less than even chance at securing freedom or redemption.

My early recollection about Australia, when it was far too distant to be listed as one of a handful of places in our bucket list to visit, was a country unique in its location, almost an aberration in that part of the world where its history was a bit hazy to me. Today, very clearly, if it was not the lead story or highlight of their history then, Australians now talk with unabashed pride about the struggles of their forefathers who first arrived over two centuries ago, who were unwilling participants in a forced migration, bound in chains and cramped spaces of the cargo holds of ships that took them away from a world 24,000 kilometers to be transplanted to a very strange land.  I will talk in a bit about the First People, the aborigines, and how Australia is coping with this human issue in ways quite differently from what we know about this unique collision between colonization and assimilation.

Imagine a place halfway from across your world. It was a penal colony. How low can a place be down in the hierarchy of places when your destination was perhaps considered just a step above a leper colony? Eleven ships left Portsmouth, England in 1787, carrying the first 1500 or so convicts, to relieve overcrowded prisons. Before that, America was the first destination of choice in the 17^th century for England’s convicts but that changed overnight after the American Revolution. By the time the First Fleet of 11 ships left Portsmouth, the prison system swelled with convicts and England had no choice but to ship them abroad. Between the years 1788 to 1868 four generations of convicts summed up to a total of 162,000 men, women and children were brought over. It is on record that some of their transgressions were as minor as stealing a loaf of bread to feed a family, or inability to pay one’s debts but hardly hardened homicidal criminals who were deemed too dangerous to transport and mixed in with low level offenders.

Australia, a land mass just a tad smaller than the USA (contiguous states not including Alaska and Hawaii) is today populated by just 25 million people (330 million for the U.S.).  It is obviously one sparsely populated country, where it is ranked no. 55 in population density, yet it has a land mass ranked no. 6.

It would be unfair to comparably set side by side Paris, London and New York with Melbourne or Sydney.  Nevertheless, on a given workday morning, its busy streets are also filled with a crisscrossing of souls in a hurry to go to work. Just outside Melbourne’s Convention Center one such soul not only stopped her well-practiced daily morning cadence to give me a detailed direction and, not content with the already good deed, offered to take us to the place. We arrived in Melbourne a few days ahead of the beginning of the tour so we had time to explore the area. There were of course many chances to take the wrong tram, or be disoriented by city streets as you watch out for cars coming from one’s unfamiliar peripheral vision. It was a busy lunch crowd we encountered at one time and after disembarking one tram (free to anyone boarding them and disembarking within the city) we could not locate St. Paul’s Cathedral. Desperately but considerately, making sure my question was answerable by a short “yes” or “no” I phrased it to a young lady carrying a cardboard tray with two cups of coffee in one hand, “Are we heading correctly to the St. Paul’s Cathedral?” She stopped, and with her one free hand while the other was still holding the coffee tray, pulled out her smart phone, punched some buttons and a city map appeared on screen. She went on to explain the few turns we needed at what streets to get to the location. Who does that while on a hectic lunch break?

On another occasion I stopped a gentleman for directions (again) but he was clearly not familiar with the place. A younger gentleman, passing by, overheard our conversation and he stopped to listen. Not before long he interjected and gave us the details we needed. With these experiences, we never hesitated to ask questions because far from being intimidated we were encouraged to ask. These are anecdotal but because the total experience was 100% positively pleasant we can be held blameless to come away with such a memorable impression of the average Aussie.  They can be “flat out as a lizard drinking” but they will always stop to help. That is one of a handful of colloquialism our Tour Director taught us. It is not obviously as obvious as the more familiar western expressions, “Busy as a bee” or “busy as a beaver”.  Our Tour Director, an Aussie who is one of fourteen children, had in every way epitomized the indefatigable virtues of the ideal host to a collection of tourists whose different backgrounds and origins quickly amalgamated to a single family of 35 people. The Tour Director made us all feel that way. She was the consummate Tour Guide.

Another sort of peculiar point of interest was the absence of a line or space for TIPS that most western diners are familiar with as the check or bill for a meal is presented.  Yes, we were expected to tip the bell hop or tour bus driver but no such expectations are accorded to many other service providers. Strange but refreshingly liberating; yet, the services we got from the sales clerks, hotel desk personnel and everyone in the service industry were markedly superior.

One more and I will go on to some other special features of Australia. Part of our schedule was to attend the 50^th wedding anniversary of one my wife’s high school classmates. The celebrant-couple is now part of the myriad races of transplanted people who call Australia their adopted land. It was apparent that they too had been infected by the Australian malady of hospitality and a balanced well-being. We happened to share a table and sit next to an Aussie couple. The lady’s family tree, as far as she knows, can be traced to a family of convicts, while the husband is a transplanted Londoner, via S. Africa. We had a great conversation and equally enjoyed the evening. It was 10:00 p.m. when the party was over and drizzling outside.  We came via Uber and we could easily have done the same to get back to our hotel. The couple insisted to drive us over to downtown Melbourne. Who does that?  We are forever grateful and indebted permanently to all of these Aussies who made an indelible mark in our memory.

The First People are as unique a phenomenon as the land of their ancestors whose early existence before Australia, if they had come from somewhere else, is still debated. They are the longest continuous race of people, unchanged and unadulterated for 40,000 to 60,000 years.

“According to a new study published this week in the journal Nature, researchers conducting the first-ever genomic study of indigenous Australians have found evidence of a single “out of Africa” migration for modern humans and confirmed a long-standing claim that Australia’s Aboriginal civilization is the oldest on the planet, dating back some 50,000 years”.  

This only partially solves the mystery because there is no evidence of sea-faring artifacts that point to an ocean crossing episode in their past. If they did it while Australia was still part of Pangea – the single land mass that connected all lands at one time – then the First Peoples are even older than the genomic evidence suggests. Australia has done much to give the First Peoples their due and recognition far more quickly than by colonizers of other lands that took centuries to fulfill.

Australian Rules football was hard to ignore because there were nightly matches going on. I hesitated at first but then one free evening I decided to watch a whole match in its entirety, on TV. As a form of comparison I imagined two reels of film: one Australian football and the other the NFL. I imagined further to cut and splice only the action segments of film and throw away the extracurricular down times and interruptions. With Australian football I would be left with 95% of the original reel, while perhaps a mere 10% of the NFL. For example, time spent between downs that include forming the scrimmage line was a full one second where it would take minutes in the NFL to get the players together, then provide action that takes 3-5 seconds followed by minutes of setting up again for the next action. Referees hardly interrupted the game while the NFL referee spends a whole paragraph or two to explain the infraction, after a committee hearing among them. There was no stoppage for injuries in the field in the entire match played by burly men in short shorts, with no padding and helmets, who hit each other no less violently than a stock car roller derby.

Cricket was a little different. There is nothing intuitive about the whole game. You see, most games can be watched by any extra-terrestrial visitor and in due time will be able to extrapolate the nature and objective of the game. Cricket is different in that a special mental algorithm is required of the average watcher to decipher what the heck is going on. A few years ago while on temporary assignment in Barbados, I spent a whole weekend afternoon to immerse myself in the game. It was befuddling but really very confusing when I was told that the game will continue the next day and perhaps another day after that before a conclusion can be reached. But, our dear Tour Director came to the rescue and gave us a very simplified explanation of the rules in an 8-1/2 by 11 sheet. I share that with you below:

Cricket Rules Demystified

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in.

Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out.

When they’re all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out.

Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man goes out and goes in.

There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out.

When both sides have been in and all the men have got out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are out, that is the end of the game!

You got all that? Does that not give you a better understanding of the game? I was no longer confused though mentally numb when I first read it because I lost total capacity to comprehend anything, albeit temporarily, and fortunately so, for recovering quickly. I would, however, re-read it from time to time because temporarily losing the ability to comprehend this incredibly incomprehensible set of rules re-assures me that I still have full control of my sanity.  I think. (Our Tour Director, of course, was teasing about the set of rules... but not entirely)

We took, as tourists obligatorily do, over a thousand photos but it is not justifiably proper to include all of them in this musing. Click to enlarge each photo.

Melbourne straddles the Yarra River that empties into Hobsons Bay. It is a daily sight for rowers and tourist boats. Photo is from our 8th floor window at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Across from the Melbourne Convention Center is the Crowne Plaza Casino. Melbourne is of course the site of one of the Four Grand Slam Tennis tournaments - The Australian Open.

The ship in the background is about the size of the ships that first came ashore over two hundred years ago. Below is the view from the river's edge where along both sides one may find close to two hundred different international dishes - testimony to the diversity of people in Australia today.

 Except for Alice Springs that sits alone in the Outback, all major cities are along Australia's coastlines. The beach and Australian's love for sun and sea go hand in hand with population growth being where they are. Of course, water - scarce in the outback - is the determining factor, as in almost all places, for human development.

 Non-arctic penguins, smaller but behaviorally similar to their bigger cousins, had colonies by the thousands along many locations along the coasts for thousands of years. The parade of penguins on Phillip Island is a tourist spectacle. Their sanctuaries on the island were made possible by government intervention to protect their habitats and now maintained by non-profit organizations. Penguins would leave at dawn to feed and bring back fish for their young.  Some may stay out for days before coming back by nightfall. Those coming back at night for waiting tourists to watch come at random intervals so one night there could be a thousand of them waddling back or just a hundred will. Their burrows are all over the place including in between parking spaces but that part of the island is theirs. 

Taking photographs during the penguin parade was prohibited. The birds eyesight are so sensitive that flash photography will blind them as their eyes are like night vision goggles when they're in the water hunting for prey or when they come out of the water at nightfall. The digital age made this photograph a virtual reality, of sort.

These formations took thousands if not millions of years to carve out from edges of the continent.

 In the twenty days of the tour, flying was necessary to cover the wide expanse of Australian geography. The Outback that used to be a huge inland sea in primordial times is one red carpet with a sprinkling of hardy green vegetation that look the same for hundreds of square miles around. The Uluru or Ayers Rock is an Outback icon that is the center of the First People's story of creation. Here an aborigine shows their native proclivity to draw, which is part of their culture handed down through generations.

The larger painting to the left was created by an aborigine. We, the tourists, had our chance to emulate and had something to show after an hour (smaller patch works).

The children of the Outback, separated by miles and miles of distance between ranches, farms and communities benefit from the digital age through a specially designed school system using the internet to connect teachers and students in real time school schedules.  Similarly, health and emergency coverage are linked through a network of planes and hospitals through non-profit and volunteer programs.

The reddish clay soil indicate a high concentration of iron oxides and sure enough the country is a huge producer of iron and a net exporter of iron ore.  Coal is its other main export. Emus and kangaroos keep their activities nocturnally for the most part in dealing with the heat or seek refuge away from the scorching sun.

Little known fact - camels were brought in from Afghanistan to transport goods and people to and from the Outback in the early years. They were released, mostly to the wild, once the railroad took over.  They are now overpopulating the Outback.

 Sydney's skyline and that of Melbourne are about as cosmopolitan as any modern coastline cities.  The iconic Sydney Opera House cannot be mistaken for anywhere else. When it was picked from a design contest in the late 50's, it was way ahead of its time and still is when juxtaposed against the straight vertical lines of glass and steel skyscrapers. It was many times over budget and years beyond the original completion date but today it stands to represent the risks that Australia was founded on.

 The nautically inspired architectural drawing submitted by a 38 year old Dane, Jorn Utzon, did not come with civil or structural plans, let alone signed by structural engineers. The curved sails house not just one venue. Aside from the main hall there are other smaller theaters for separate performances.

A guided tour of the place is worth the time.

I almost forgot. Let's get back to Melbourne for a bit. The life-size painting of Chloe below is not in travel brochures when visiting Melbourne but a rather word-of-mouth tourist attraction and a historical footnote towards a convoluted definition of Australia's social mores. Google explains.

"Chloé made its first debut in the Paris Salon in 1875 with great success. With that success, it and Lefebvre won the Gold Medal of Honour in 1875. It was subsequently displayed in art exhibitions such as the French Gallery at the Sydney International Exhibition in 1879 and the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880.

Chloé was then purchased by Dr. Thomas Fitzgerald of Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, for 850 guineas.^[2] Controversy arose when the painting was to be exhibited on Sundays. The Presbyterian Assembly found the painting to be too scandalous to show on Sundays, so it had to eventually be taken down from galleries.^[3] Upon Fitzgerald's death in 1908, the painting was auctioned off to Norman Figsby Young.^[2] Henry Young and Thomas Jackson bought Chloé in 1908 from Norman Figsby Young and placed the painting in the bar of their hotel."

Interestingly, Young & Jackson where the painting now resides on the second floor, is displayed with very little drama next to a window in a small venue good for just a couple of tables for a handful of clientele to enjoy their beer.  One of them offered to take our photo (above). Chloe was modeled by a 19 year old, named Marie, whose sister the painter married. Marie/Chloe, as the story went, was distraught by the marriage because she too was actually in love with the painter.  One day she hosted a party and amidst all that she took poison with her drink and died. When you get a chance to visit Melbourne, check out Chloe.  Young & Jackson is directly across the corner where St. Paul's Cathedral stands.

It was a balmy and warm time to spend Thanksgiving in Australia. It took some getting used to see Christmas decorations and store displays when it was 95 F degrees outside early this month. However, the photo below says it all. 

Merry Christmas Every One!!!