Death comes to us all, and Leonard Nimoy sadly, passed away today. He was a goodly age, as they say, and full of philosophical thoughts until the very end. "A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" he tweeted only hours before his death.

As Mr Spock in the original Star Trek, he loomed large in my childhood. A Vulcan complicated by his half-human failings, he stood astride the middle ground between James T. Kirk and the emotional Dr McCoy. He was for logic and reason and struggled with and against the emotions that held his fellow crew members in thrall. This element was critical to the dramatic tension of what otherwise might have been just a science fiction adventure.

Live Long and Prosper, cited in the tweet above, was a Vulcan motto that Spock often espoused. It has now passed into the lexicon and for all I know, is flying at light speed past the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond into deep space. In fact, it has passed into other star systems, many light-years away. Thence, it has boldly gone.

Rest in Peace, Leonard Nimoy.

Tom is back at school and seems quite happy this year. Hazelbrook PS have a policy of composite classing. Students are formed into classes around educational stages, not strictly by their age. So this year Tom is in a 4/3 class, with an equal mix of kids from grades 3 and 4. It seems to work well on the academic level, though I harbor some misgivings over social development.

I am still with Anglicare ER on Wednesdays and enjoy it as much as ever. I think that I was built to help and I get a huge amount of pleasure from doing it. I said once that being an ER caseworker is the closest match to a perfect fit for me. There is no greater satisfaction than seeing a client leave an interview with their life less fractured and their prospects heightened. It is all about change and though these changes may be small, they offer the opportunity for continued improvement.

On Fridays I am still toting my guitar and amps downstairs to our cafe, set up specifically for our clients. The free coffee and food, live music and friendly conversation are great but incidental to the fact that people get to leave their houses and social isolation and mix it up a little.

I have been coming to the cafe for 3 years now and it has truly been a blessing. I don't know how much longer the dance will last as wheels of sorts are in motion and I don't know where or how they will end up. Who does?

I am reminded by recent events that we seem to living in interesting times. By which I mean, there is a greater uncertainty about a lot of what we once took for granted.

In politics, decades-old business-as-usual has been turned on its head, with two state governments being thrown out in their first terms. We have had multiple Prime Ministers and leadership challenges are more commonplace, with sometimes remarkably little regard for precedent.The recent backbench revolt against Tony Abbott only underscored the turbulence of the present era, contrasting as it does with the usual elitist nature of political assassinations.

Partly this is due to the (previously alluded to) 24/7 media scramble that we exist in, where news is both process and product, or neither. Partly it is the bland bullet-point political discourse that sucks any authenticity and vitality from what should be a genuine contestation of ideas.

Strangely enough, the times may well be suited to the rise of straight-talking nationalists with an authoritarian streak, not unlike that odious group who emerged in the 1920's and 1930's. It may not be fascism per se, but it will have democratic values and pluralism in its sights.

Listening to the Slate Political Podcast this morning, I was bailed up by a line of John Dickerson's in reference to a serious mistake made by the subject of discussion. He said that it was his belief that "The worst thing about you becomes the most true thing about you." It got me to thinking about and mulling over (redundancy!-ed.) the veracity, or otherwise of Dickerson's assertion.

With public figures, this is almost always the case these days. Celebrities who have offended against children are often as not defined by that fact, no matter what changes they make to their lives or how much time passes. The Gillard Prime Ministership seemingly lost legitimacy as a result of the " no carbon pricing" backflip, which Gillard wore herself as a badge of dishonour in the eyes of many electors. In our own lives, people who commit serious breaches of trust in one way or another do tend to get stigmatized and thus redefined by the nature of their offences. But is this "most true thing about them?"

The 24/7 hyper-environnment makes matters worse, for reasons that are obvious. No-body can be let alone or allowed to atone for whatever misdeed or misjudgment occurred in their past. Even when the offence is false or unproven, the mud sticks and the truism may still apply. No-body ever said life was fair, nor should they.

Just finished Bill Bryson's One Summer: America, 1927. As usual, very entertaining. Bryson has a knack of organising his subject material in a way that makes you smile even as you are informed of something you didn't know. Which is a lot, in my case. Anyway, enough of sentence fragments!

As strongly hinted at in the title, One Summer explores events and people in a year that Bryson contends is a kind of seminal one for the emergence of the United States as a cultural and technological power. We already know that the US emerged from the Great War as a political and economic heavyweight, factors which necessarily background the book. Here Bryson weaves the stories of famous Americans (such as Lindbergh, Coolidge, Capone and Babe Ruth) with a sense of what was in vogue or newsworthy or downright scandalous at the time. The skill is not only in creating engaging vignettes and coherent stories, but in bringing the whole together over the "summer" of 1927. The stories are governed by the timeline - not being entities in themselves, but rather interwoven with each other. For some readers who prefer stories to stand as independent through-narratives, this may be a challenge. But I found that the wait was almost always worth it.

Some forty years ago a best friend and I used to troop regularly to the old Sydney Sports Ground to watch the Socceroos play home games. The Australian team at the time comprised a collection of mostly journeyman footballers from the UK, with some notable home-grown players in the mix. They were part-timers in what were then largely ethnic-dominated Australian leagues. The team played a largely defensive game, with a lot of players behind the ball.

How different today, with a strong national A-League, and a Socceroos side full of native-born footballers who play a decidedly attacking game. The win over an excellent South Korean team last night to claim the Asian Cup presents another milestone for the Socceroos. Qualification for World Cups (starting with Rale Rasic's trail-blazing 1974 side) has been achieved 3 times now. The Asian Cup puts the first major trophy on the shelf. The game can only develop from here. In one direction, methinks.



The 1974 team vs West Germany. Muller scores.



Contemporary legend Tim Cahill bicycle-kicks vs China in a modern iteration of the Socceroos. Asian Cup Quarter Finals 2015