Last week I travelled 11 hours by car to Rubyvale for a reunion with my siblings and a couple of in-laws. Twelve years ago, we were alone together for a week, packing up and sharing our parents’ possessions. This time we wanted to reminisce, share old family photos, play some card games, cook for each other, and hang out. It went well, very well – most of the time. We laughed with and at each other’s quirks and gauged how we are faring. I found this photo of my brothers and me (third from the left) from long ago when we were still young and, dare I say it, handsome.
They figured it out
An article in The Times that appeared in The Australian on 3 August greatly amused me. Headline: Sperm swim like playful otters. Apparently, since the invention of the microscope, it was widely assumed that sperm move by flapping their tails from side to side. But, now, 3-D microscopy has revealed this: “Human sperm figured out if they roll as they swim, much like playful otters corkscrewing through the water, their one-side stroke would average itself out, and they would swim forwards.” Attributed to Dr Hermes Gadelha, University of Bristol. Furthermore, from Dr Gabriel Corkidi, University of Mexico, co-author of the study published in Science Advances, “Our discovery shows sperm have… ingeniously solved a mathematical puzzle at a microscopic scale by creating symmetry out of asymmetry.”
This information had me imagining how one sperm must have worked it out and passed it on to his brothers, who somehow passed it on to sperm in the next ejaculation. “Hey, guys, this is how you do it, just watch me!” Such ingenious creatures! Such creative problem solvers! Fancy being the first to figure that out – you’d be a hero and win the race!
Quotable quote
The cross of Christ – the incarnate God – is the site of cosmic inversion where all that is not supposed to be is absorbed by the Son, taken to the depths of hell, and vanquished by the resurrection. Evil isn’t answered; it is overcome. God doesn’t abstractly solve a ‘problem’; God condescends to inhabit and absorb the mess we’ve made of the world. James K. A. Smith
From the soundtrack of my life
Do you find that different artists and different songs trigger reminders of time, place, and circumstances? Play a song from my iPod, and I’ll tell you where I was and what was happening in my life when I first heard it. I have Mt Coolum albums like Paul Simon’s Graceland, Van Morrison’s Enlightenment, and Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust. Coldplay and Moby are bands from our West End days. When we lived at Toowong, my wife loved Patty Griffin’s Heavenly Day and MLK, while I was into Wilco – especially the Sky Blue Sky album. Commuting to and from Boonah it was Fleet Foxes’ Helplessness Blues, Indelible Grace’s Joy Beyond the Sorrow, and Sandra McGrath’s Desire Like Dynamite and In Feast or Fallow.
It’s amazing how music transports us back and, though familiar, often reveals new elements in the background or in the lyrics that we missed the first time around.
In My Life 
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