Portraits

It feels odd putting a picture of myself up here, even though it's my blog. I'm so used to writing about other people's situations, excising my own views or opinions and being completely neutral, reporting the bare facts, that it seems egotistical or something to have myself in here. For a long time there were only glimpses; now I've stepped boldly into the open. A humble hack on the highways of print; now it's a record of everything that was, everything that could be. It's a strange but interesting process. I always wanted something like this, a daily diary of events which included pictures. Because swear as you might that you will remember everything, the events so vivid, in fact much of it is washed away by declining memory. I remember once, when I was 12, as the plane climbed out of Los Angeles heading to Mexico City and the sunset across the mountains was astonishingly beautiful, that this was an experience I would never forget. Now the technology has caught up with the dream; and a life recorded, for what purpose I know not. I think of Vincent van Gough's beautiful three volumes of letters; and wonder what he would have done if there had been the blogging technology way back then.

I've called in sick and am just spending the day at home. Normally I just go to work, no matter how I feel, day after day, year after year; the slow evolution from young hopeful to old hack, from talented to experienced; from star to has been. She didn't pick the same things I would have, but then.... I start to say to my boss, when he asks about the performance of a young intern. But then, I've been around a long time. You're an old hack, my boss says, without meaning offence. I laugh, it's true, I've seen so many stories come and go now. We were thinking on Sunday morning of various stories, and one hardy annual up for grabs was the streets of Sydney after Mardi Gras.

You could write a really funny story, I said, it's the main thing going on in Sydney today, the hysterical collections of washed out party goers still bopping into the daylight of the morning after, looking a sight in their bedraggled costumes; their ecstasy tablets wearing off as they keep drinking, refusing to give up. Tens no hundreds of thousands may have paired off and gone home with whoever, whatever, but others just wanted to stay out. Sydney didn't have much nightlife anymore, there were too many rules, the grey and repressed culture that we had become saddled by the puritans and the bureaucrats and the ideologues. Well, it's the main thing going on in Sydney, today, I said of the remnant partygoers, but the problem is the story never gets a run. By Monday Saturday night's Mardi Gras is already old news. And having worked Sundays on general news in Sydney for the past 20 years, I knew perfectly well the fate of the story we decided in the end not to write. At least us old guys know where the furniture is. Young editors, 20 years my junior, rise the corporate ladder and I sit in the same place, under the same flourescent lights, watching as they come and go. They walk past me as if I don't exist, only useful when a crisis is on, and wonder, what the fuck am I doing?

THE BIGGEST STORY:

THE first badly injured Australian survivors of an airliner that exploded in flames on landing in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta are expected to arrive home this morning.
Five Australians are feared dead after the Indonesian Garuda Boeing 737-400 overshot the runway at the provincial capital's airport yesterday and exploded in a fireball about 7am local time (11am AEDT).
Some of the 133 passengers were burned alive in their seats.
Garuda last night said 22 people died, including one of the seven crew members, while 118 other passengers and crew escaped.
With at least five more Australians surviving, some with severe injuries, Australian authorities scrambled emergency teams to evacuate victims.
The first of the Australian repatriation flights was expected to touch down in Perth early today.

MORE CHAOS IN IRAQ; From playfuls.com

At least 30 Iraqis were killed and 29 wounded Wednesday in a suicide attack at a cafe west of the Iraqi city of Baquba, local media reports said. The attack followed one in southern Baghdad that saw least three more Shiite pilgrims killed and 11 wounded by unidentified gunmen. In the later attack, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the cafe in Balad Ruz town, 35 kilometers north of Baquba in a mixed Shiite- Sunni region in Diyala province north of Baghdad. The earlier Baghdad attack was a continuation of violence against Shiite pilgrims walking to Karbala to take part in a memorial ceremony marking the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. The victims were shot at in the Sunni-dominated Doura district of southern Baghdad. The violence came after Iraqi authorities had announced Tuesday that security had been beefed up in and around Karbala in preparation for the ceremony due to begin Friday. The death toll of Tuesday's twin bomb blasts also targeting Shiite pilgrims near the Iraqi city of Hillah climbed to 120 on Wednesday, with 170 others wounded, medical sources said. Two suicide bombers wearing explosive belts blew themselves up in quick succession amid a crowd of pilgrims on the road linking Hillah and Najaf, sources said. Imam Hussein was martyred in 1680. Shiites still commemorate both his death on Ashura festival and the memorial of his death 40 days later in accordance with the ancient tradition of honouring the dead. Also Wednesday, US-led coalition forces detained 24 suspects during raids Wednesday morning across Iraq targeting the al-Qaeda terrorist network in the country, the US military reported.