Newley Purnell pointed me at this astronomy picture of the day by Antti Kemppainen:

Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town. On January 26, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes. Comet McNaught continues to move out from the Sun and dim, but should remain visible in southern skies with binoculars through the end of this month. The above image is actually a three photograph panorama digitally processed to reduce red reflections from the exploding firework.

Indeed, the skies haven’t seemed this heavy since I saw Aaron Koblin’s Flightplan.

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TV star and crocodile hunter Steve Irwin is dead after being stung by a stingray on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

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Alan Moorhead, in his 1952 Rum Jungle — a sort of casual ethnography or serious travelogue — explains the uses and attitudes towards alcohol in his native Australia:

[...] I took it for granted that for all social occasions, at any time of the day or night, beer was the drink. You did not take it with your meals, but before or afterwards and in considerable quantities. Beer was the solace of life and the white man’s true vision of bliss. You drank it, either at home in pint bottles, or standing up in a bar (from which all women were excluded) in thick glass pots. And since beer exercised so potent a spell and was so delectable in every way, it was only natural that all public houses should close at six in the evening and that the sale of all alcoholic liquor be prevented by law until nine o’clock the following morning. On Sunday the pubs were closed altogether. Had men been able to drink at leisure at any time of the day or night there was no saying what they would do; that was the underlying fear.

I learned of the book from a mention in Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country. It wasn’t as exciting a read as the title might suggest — the name comes from a region of northwest Australia where uranium had then recently been discovered and was being mined. Moorehead offers a rather unbelievable story for the cause of name, so I’ll pass on repeating it here.

What I will note is his description of the US Army’s activities in the northern territories during World War II.

The Americans are remembered now for their extraordinary celerity. They went up into the Atherton Tablelands — the massif that rises from the coast behind Cairns — and built camps almost overnight. When they had no bitumen with which to make airfields they tool barrels of molasses from the sugar-cane factories and made runways out of that. With DDT they banished the mosquitoes (which have since returned), and they brought more life to Cairns and Townsville than the local people had seen in many a long day.

If nothing else, Moorehead’s work reveals how, in 1952, the risks of uranium and DDT were unknown and, instead, they represented progress and wealth.

tags: alan moorehead, alcohol, alcoholic liquor, australia, beer, bill bryson, liquor, native australian, night beer, northwest australia, pint bottles, public houses, rum jungle, social occasions, sunburned country, unbelievable story