Water

I think my world has just flipped on its head.

Well it was actually my Mum who passed on the tip. She had just finished watching a doco about the root bridges of Cherrapunji in Shillong, India. Intrigued I did an image search and almost swallowed my tongue.

Cherrapunji is toted as being the wettest place in the world. Which is an interesting factoid in itself, but what captured my imagination were these living bridges. The locals train the trees to grow and span across the provinces many waterways.

The process takes between 10 to 15 years, yet with each passing year the bridges grow stronger. Some of the more robust bridges are over 500 years old. I think I need to include the ‘land of oranges’ to my India itinerary.

[Root bridges]

Buoyed by the plethora of documentaries at our fingertips, Mum and I settled in to watch Gaslands. Needless to say this had a completely different spin on water.

What started as a why of understanding what natural gas mining would do to his family's farm in Milanville, Pennsylvania, Josh Fox winds up becoming a 'detective' and fields the complaints of hundreds of people nursing the side affects of mining in their backyards.

What he unearths, could only be described as wild west style shenanigans of major corporations. Yet that was the most profound fact is the coroporations are in fact acting 'within' the law. As due to loopholes in the clean air and the clean water acts, the mining processes are currently unmonitored in USA. As a result of the fracking process, the waterways in the ‘red zones’ are contaminated with some 580+ chemicals. Chemicals that would scare you senseless if you read about them let alone ingested the equivalent of molotov cocktail of them without knowing.

The homespun style of video footage, spliced together with interviews of ailing citizens and facts about the mining process, made for heart wrenching viewing. I definitely recommend anyone to watch it, as Fox finishes off the doco with the comment that Natural gas mining is becoming a major interest around rest of the world. Gulp.

Crying Game

I cried on the weekend. I tried to hold it in, but my throat seized up and my eyes prickled and stung, till streams of salty tears flowed down my cheeks.

I cried over a child.

I cried over the deprivation of hundreds of children.

The subject of the American education system may seem dull and perhaps irrelevant for an Aussie to watch. But ‘Waiting For Superman’ has a compelling argument about the multifaceted destruction of the American education system.

The film balances startling data and national policy, with stories of five children and their families. Each child is struggling to achieve basic literary and numerical skills in an extremely complicated and rigid system. A system which rewards crappy teachers to keep doing a crappy job. At the same token, it prevents fantastic teachers doing a fantastic job.

Their opportunity for a better education is based on a lottery.

Some may argue that the film is extremely one-sided, perhaps even anti-unionist. But I don’t think anyone wouldn’t find the lottery utterly heart wrenching, knowing that those who don’t get drawn out are in for a tough battle (life) ahead.

And so I cried.

A hive of bees and a dash of hairspray

The ever chic ginga ninja of the delightful blog Yours Truly - has put up a tutorial about how to create a beehive!

The step-by-step tute makes it look so straight forward, but my butter fingers and clumsy clips means that my beehive is more crappy than snappy!