Travelogue, part 4 Rome, the Eternal City. Absolute chaos. More tourists than I've seen outside of the Louvre, in Paris. Our hotel wasn't great, but it was less than 2 kilometers from the Colosseum, another 2 to the Vatican, so we had no trouble getting around and seeing as much as we could in two days, which was a lot. Romulus' & Remus' mom doesn't look too impressed, but she's everywhere. The Swiss Guard really do dress like 1970's McDonald's employees, but with spears and metal hairnets. You cannot escape the crowds at any time of day.

Travelogue, part 2 Christo. I've missed all the installations he's done since I first learned of him, including the Central Park "Gates", so I didn't, even after reviewing the web site, have much sense of what the "Big Air Package" was going to be like. We trained out from Berlin to Oberhausen, where a disused "gasometer" stands, and where Christo has previously had an installation. It was built in 1929 and was the largest in Europe. It is indeed enormous, a tourist destination in its own right, apparently. Christo's installation on this occasion was an "air package", which is the format he started out with, back in the sixties, and has come back to now and then since. This is the biggest. There is no clear way to describe the experience other than "awesome".

Travelogue, part 3 So, after Berlin, we flew to Pisa, where we didn't stop, but caught a train up to La Spezia and then on to Riomaggiore, the southernmost town in the Cinque Terre region. This was a true highlight of the trip. The landscape was incredible, mountains straight up out of the sea, terraced for olives and grapes, but much of it still wild, too, with each of the five towns along the coast being perched and clustered right on the edges. Italians seem to like their cats, too.

Travelogue, part 1 So, first up, Berlin: Special notice in Berlin: Holocaust Memorial, designed by the same guy who did the WTC in NYC. Very evocative. Also, the Jewish Museum was very extensive and effective. And then there's the Walk/Don't Walk signs. West Berlin has the usual format. East Berlin, however, had it's own, which has been preserved. It helps orient you to where you are in the city, too, I think. It's all very different from when I was there in 1988, not to mention October being a bit cooler than August, and having locals to guide us through. Checkpoint Charlie has an enormous McDonald's on what was the eastern side, and many of the old East Berlin sites now host staged photo ops, like guys dressed as soldiers or in bear suits or Mickey Mouse, even. Segways everywhere, for the tourists, and otherwise the city is bicycle-mad. They keep a sense of their history well, without overindulging guilt. The role of Germany in the modern world is acknowledged with appropriate humility, as well as the divisions of the Cold War. I'm glad they're keeping what's left of the Wall. Some of that deserves to be pointed up, too, including the East Berlin Gallery section, which had a section of the Wall painted with pictures of other, current walls around the world. We still do these things to each other, and are insufficiently shamed by it.

Inscriptions Did I actually buy an inscribed (2nd edition) copy of "Sincerely, Willis Wayde"? Or is that someone else's signature? US$8.14 seems a little low for such a thing. Thanks, Strand Books!

Home Again Something longer later, maybe a series, certainly some pictures, but for now: that was an epic trip. Berlin was amazing, 25 years on from my last trip there, just ahead of when the Wall came down. Now, Checkpoint Charlie, where I stood and watched the East German and US armies monitoring the crossing, there's a big ol' McDonalds. On what was the eastern side. Cinque Terre was the best part, and Rome was anarchy. NYC was a nostalgic trip, including a visit to the Frick (no "Girl with Pearl Earring" this time, as we were just a couple of days ahead of a new show), but with enough new stuff all over town to keep it as interesting for me as it was for first-time visitors. Enough local knowledge remains to get around, but not much more, so advance research would have been a good idea, as data roaming was insufficient and WiFi only sporadic to know what we needed when we needed it. The trip to Mom & Dad's in NC was brief, but we got enough of the South, or that part of it, to satisfy some parts of interests for all involved, cat-head biscuits being a good starting point, if authentic pulled pork didn't get done in the time allotted. Well, there's enough barbeque around Sydney we can say we know what we'd missed. Nobody does biscuits, though, like Big Nell. I'm not looking forward to reviewing 3000 photos and picking through them for posting here, but I'll get it done eventually.

The Mob I enjoy science fiction. Sure, a lot of it is polemical, or, worse, just fantasy, but some of it really has some science in it, and that can be really fun, especially going back and seeing the stuff that's already come true. Like John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider." Interestingly, this is a response to Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock." What it does with that, however, is remarkable, especially, perhaps, in retrospect. The book predicts the internet, and very well, including smartphones, to an extent. The computer viruses and so forth are believable and a good prediction of what such interconnectivity would bring. ave The society in Brunner's novel may not be quite what 1975 thought 2013 would be, but it's not all that far off, in the bigger picture, if not the particulars. But one thing has always stood out to me since I first read it. Governments rely on threat and trauma to survive. The easiest populace to rule is weak, poor, superstitious, preferable terrified of what tomorrow may bring, and constantly being reminded that the man in the street must step into the gutter when his superiors deign to pass him by. What's being described here is the resemblance of government to organized crime. Government is the mafia, more so than the mafia has been for a very long time. There are those who will say, in Australia, that's Labor, because of its union origins. False. Or false in any modern sense. The unions have been long ago relegated to irrelevance by the Liberals, who operate more in line with what we know of as the Mafia. The Liberals legitimize their . . . business, just like the Mafia families were just "olive oil importers" or whatever. We can't see the true power brokers, and that's the point. Is it any different in the US? The GOP is run by business interests. How unlike the mafia are the Koch brothers, for example, buying politicians to deny climate change and preference petrochemical businesses over its alternatives? We need to wake up to the lies. The data is at our fingertips. And the power of our votes and our dollars can have an effect. But more importantly, we must all speak out at every opportunity. Object to the lies. Tear off our own blinders and let anyone who hasn't done the same know that it only hurts for a little while, and then feels a whole lot better.

Bridge Run The Sydney Running Festival includes a marathon, half-marathon, 3.5k Family Fun Run (walk across the bridge with a pram), and the 9k Bridge Run, which has been my elected option the last three years. This year saw nearly a four-minute improvement over 2012, and just a little slower than 2011. I credit work for particpating in the Global Corporate Challenge, a fitness-promoting program that encourages you to walk "10,000 steps" or more per day, which ran over the last four months. I included training runs in that program, but breaking training was compensated for, it seems. It's tremendous fun running across the Harbour Bridge, somewhat less so through the Domain, when the streets narrow and the course loops back on itself, so your pace, for those of us not destined to actually compete, can be forced to a shuffle as you look for a gap through the walkers and (even) slower participants. The reasonable starting hour makes it a good choice, although by 9 a.m. at this time of year it's getting warm: 20 degrees by the time I got to the finish. I'd go for another half if it didn't start at 6:15. There's still the Sydney Morning Herald Half, in May, or maybe the new one out at Olympic Park at the end of October (not this year, though, which I'll miss even the 10k event, due to only just having completed a long overseas trip).

The Poor You Will Have with You Always Tony Abbott's Liberals have won the 2013 federal election. What a shame for the country. Abbott ran on Labor's budget deficit and the large number of illegal entries by asylum-seekers by boat. The "budget emergency" was a furphy: the LNP's proposed budget needs only $0.6 billion to return the country to surplus in the same period of time Labor would have re-attempted. But Labor made too many promises over too many of each of the last three years that we'd be back in the black "next year". And large numbers of fools believed that deficits are inherently and always bad, even when we can see how Britain and other European countries are struggling with austerity economies, how the US struggles to keep on track (blaming Obama all the way, despite the Bush tax cuts and two endless wars he started). And fear of Muslims, a nice dog-whistle issue since the days of John Howard, make all refugees arriving by boat a deadly threat to the nation. We'll all be wearing burkas next! Labor's lurch to the right on that issue also had large numbers swinging against them. Without being a viable third party in their own right, Greens preferences helped staunch the damage, but xenophobic mainstay Pauline Hanson got into the Senate. We can only hope that she will challenge Tony Abbott's agenda just on principle, if she actually has any, for his attempt to have her imprisoned back when she was first standing for a federal seat. But too much of her agenda coincides with his to be truly hopeful on that point. Bye-bye carbon tax/emissions-trading scheme and hello warmer planet. I may have a coastal property sooner than I'd like, as in at all, under the circumstances, but I can't say I won't be paying for it, as Tony's plans for the country mean people like me will carry the weight for the wealthy. The acceptance speech Abbott gave started out ungraciously and ended up with a promise that Australia is "open for business". That is not a promise I am anxious to see how it plays out. I can't believe the country voted for this guy.

City2Surf The biggest foot race in the world went off this morning with 85,000 entrants, including me. Better result than last year by a fair bit: 84:49 by my clock. We'll see what the official results are, but that should be pretty close. I finished behind my bib number, but that watch is pretty accurate: 84:46.

Where's Whaley? Thar. The container ship was on the horizon line, so probably too far to see all the activity, except on sonar, but we got quite a show. The last twenty minutes or so had lots of breaches, tail slaps, and even some waving, although I doubt it was any of it for our benefit. The northern migration is nearly over, so it's lucky we got booked in when we did or we'd be waiting for them to head south again, which won't actually be all that long from now. Might have to do another cruise, if we can get as good a deal as we did with Sydney Adventure Cruises. A Groupon deal, and not much of a discount, really, but worth it.