Labour Day Weekend, Part 1

After returning from Stradbroke Island, I was looking forward to a gentle and long weekend. I wanted to spend some more time exploring the city, catch up on sleep, hang out with some friends, and get a head-start on my write-up for my research project. Guess which one of those I did not do...

I met up with Corinne and Alissa, who wanted to hit an outlet mall in the outskirts of the city. Despite being a way ways out there, we had a good time.

Hats for the most fabulous gangsters

cookie monster and rainbow brite

the ugliest, most uncomfortable failure to make me change my mind about nike

We came upon this store called U.S. Candy Bar. It is a bizarre thing. The store sells a variety of U.S. sodas, candies, and hot sauces. Cases of sodas. Displays with tons of candy. Stacks of pop-tarts and lucky charms. A display of "rare" Mexican Coke, which we explained to a shop clerk next door was a waste of time and money for her: sodas in Australia are already made with cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup, so Mexican Coke (despite its apparent rarity) would really just taste like Australian Coke.

We then found this store devoted to ridiculously over-the-top dresses. These were dresses with massive mirror tiles (with angles that make sitting down imprudent) and massive amounts of sequins and whatnot. It was like some weird prom dress store. Naturally, I insisted that the girls try some on. Corinne and Alissa both looked knock-out...

Then we went out for a gentle night on the town.

Brisbane City from Southbank

The Treasury across the Brisbane River

Lights on the water

The pillar of light that is the Brisbane Ferris Wheel (I still need to put up the photos of our time on it from our second night in Australia).

That night, my walk home was quite noisy. Every bottlebrush tree I walked under would start shaking. I found it that these were the culprits...possums!

Lots of spooky glowing eyes...

The next day, Mia and I decided to embark upon further gentle explorations of the city. We started with the deep-water exhibit at the Queensland Museum. It turns out Mia's mentor is a major contributor to the exhibition, and his name and photos he took were all over the place, much to Mia's delight.

After lunch on the riverbank, we took the City Cat over to New Farm. There we wandered around the Brisbane Powerhouse and meandered through the surrounding parks, where people were engaged in LARP combat, family outings with sing-a-longs, tight-rope walking demonstrations, and varieties of footballs (American, Australian, soccer...).

It was such a gently beautiful day, we found ourselves sprawled out on the grass by the river thinking that everything was practically perfect. Gemütlichkeit might just be the only word to describe it, since English is rather wanting.

We decided to wander back fairly early to avoid having long waits for buses.

Rainbow lorikeet

Mia enchanted by the ride on the City Cat

Matthew mit Brisbane

The bluffs of Kangaroo Point

Some monument on the bluffs

sailboat on the river

Story Bridge

Mia and I on the City Cat

I swear this building looked like the Addams' Family Marina

The exterior of the Brisbane Powerhouse

Shadows of adventurers

Mia had the brilliant and much welcome craving for ice cream, enjoyed at a sidewalk cafe on a sunny day

31 October must be a special day at this school

Late afternoon Brisbane

An old-fashioned riverboat called the Kookaburra Queen...sadly no dixieland jazz

The neighbor's dog hanging out on the table in the yard, naturally

I ran out of time to upload photos, but I will get my last day's excursions (the actual Australian Labour Day) up soon.

Hypothesis: The weekend will fall firmly into the "Doesn't Suck" category.
Preliminary findings: tend toward rejecting null hypothesis.

Straddie Round-up - the last day

Coral through the water

Sea pens

Sargassum, the weed of deceit (see Blood Waters of Dr. Z or ZAAT for better understanding)

Bluespotted sting ray.

Looking south along the Pacific side of Straddie

Bianca in mid-photo

Leah, Mia, and moi

The brave faces of Dan, Selena, and Anna

I had a change of heart and realized that I still had so much to live for, despite the failure of our research.

Mia looks wistfully at the sea

Kyle looks wistfully at the sea

Rubics looks wistfully at the sea

Tibbetts, Ryan, and Dan in a tidal pool

Jon in his natural state

Mer-Anne

The last night at the Moreton Bay Research Station was a good one. Our different research teams presented our findings (or lack thereof), and the winning group was awarded a package of differently flavored TimTams. I do not know what the flavour was, as my group did not win. Sigh.

After that, the gaggle (complete with tutors and Tibbetts) moseyed off to the pub. I thought about going along to be social. However, there was the possibility that close-toed shoes would be required. Jon did not have such things with him, and so I lent him my boots. My decision not to go was further reinforced by the fact that it was karaoke night. Happy to remain at home!

I stayed in and passed a lovely evening chatting with one of the lab managers, Martin. It turns out Martin has terrific taste in music and was exposing me to all sorts of seminal punk bands from Brisbane and Australia from the 70s, as well as other bizarre and entertaining tunes from later decades (by bands such as TISM, Radiobirdman, Regurgitator, John Kennedy and the Cuban Crisis...). We swapped a lot of tunes, and then realized it was late.

When we emerged, everyone had returned from the pub quite toasted. The pub had remained open well past its usual hours to accommodate the Americans, who responded by pumping well over a week's worth of usual dollars into the local pub economy. It was remembered that there were jars of nutella, and lacking knives, people were dipping cookies directly into the jar, emerging with large amounts of nutella on their hands and faces. It was entertaining for a little while, but I wanted to sleep.

The next morning, many heads were feeling rough (somewhat evident in the above photos). I had to suppress the urge to start fucking with people. Part of me wished I had cymbals to clang periodically, just to watch folks cringe and complain about feeling it inside their eyeballs. We packed out of the station (few, it turns out, felt up to consuming breakfast...such light-weights) and headed for the Pacific side of the island. We walked out on a jetty at Amity Point, and then went for a walk along the coast near Point Look-out. We stopped for lunch and gelato. Then, we tried fishing for worms (worming for fish?) by dragging chopped sardines along the sand to see if we could lure certain scavenging and predatory worms (renowned as bait) to come out of the sand. We had no luck. After that, we hit the beach. I enjoyed playing in the waves, body surfing, finding non-stinging jellyfish tumbled up inside my t-shirt, and being out in the water. All too soon, we had to get changed and re-loaded onto the bus to catch the ferry back to the mainland.

More than half were antsy to catch their flights for the weekend up to either Darwin or Cairns. The rest of us, myself included, were looking forward to the long three-day weekend ahead.

Straddie Update

In addition to my previously mentioned research into the unlikely existence of koalas, the team I belong to has been busy with our research into possible attractants for rabbitfish. Today, we finished our experimental and control trials. While we were excited to be finished with the hard work of research, we soon realized that clicking stopwatches and moving fish was nothing compared to sitting down, conducting statistical analyses, and preparing our findings for presentation and final papers.

You might ask yourself what findings did this intrepid team of researchers uncover. I hope you are sitting down for our Earth-shattering results. We discovered that the fish did not have a significant (a word not used lightly in science...it means statistically significant, which is a rigorously conservative test) preference for any of the attractants we presented. They did not even have a preference for the right side or the left side of the tanks. Rather, they had a strong preference for whatever portion of the tank was farthest from the walkways between the stacks of tanks that people used.

That is correct. We found that fish tend to avoid people. The impact of this study...we may finally be able to explain why humans and fish occupy such different ecological niches. Wow! Heady stuff. Look out Nobel...

So, to celebrate our ground-breaking achievement, here are some pictures before I go to bed.

Happiness in the lab.

Mark is upset that care appears to be reserved for Anglos.

Ryan and Dan trudge off to search for cool sea life.

An afternoon's tantalizing view through the door of the lab.

Sometimes it is important to step away from the lab to take in a sunset.

One day, Dr. Ian ("Tibbets" or the "Tibnado") turned up to disrupt research and take us out snorkelling. Realizing that we could not resist such a force of nature, we just decided to make the most of a morning off, swimming around on the reefs in the bay and being out in the sun.

The Tibnado

Tutor Hendo - possibly never photographed with his tongue put away.

I only managed to snap some photos of the small group of us on the single boat. Afterwards, I was busy swimming around looking through corals (found a beautiful nudibranch) and the seagrass (came upon a seahorse) before lounging in the shallows of the beach. Then, we were boated back to get back to work.

Andrew and Anna

Corinne and Shira

Arizona and Ian (the other, non-professor one)

Ryan (Rubics)

Alyssa and Laurel

Upon completion of our experiments and an emergency trip to the hospital to remove oyster fragments from one of our friend's foot, our tutor Ben took our chemosensory team on a little outing. We saw some lakes, something that could pass for a koala (see previous post), and a popular dolphin watching beach (there were none).

The team:

Ben, the tutor and statistician extraordinaire

Alyssa

Mark

Shira

Alissa, always ready to look pleasant

Now, bed.

Inconclusive Results

Following previous disappointments, I have developed the hypothesis that koalas do not actually exist. Rather, they are likely an invention of the Australians to make their fauna seem less deadly and terrifying.

Recently, in our time on Stradbroke Island, these pieces of evidence have presented themselves.

Folk art depictions are useful but ultimately inconclusive

This could easily be a burl on the tree, caused when insects lay eggs in the tree and it grows a lump around the disturbance.

As I said, inconclusive. Parsimony suggests that the motion we saw was either random breezes in the trees or animatronics used to perpetuate the hypothesized ruse perpetrated by the Australians.