What I cooked last night.

The airless tram stopped, its door peeled open, and I stepped out into the shady archway of the gothic arboresque cathedral formed by the Royal Parade elms.  Summer, late afternoon. The sun, scorching, had sailed across 135 vengeful degrees, burying its heat into every hard dark surface that its hot blind fingers could reach.  I turned from the shade into a burning laneway, passed the brutalist angled academic buildings of the university and reached the Beaurepaire swimming centre. The building, a modernist cube of monumentally optimistic design, brazenly wears a multi-coloured frieze, an Aztec-like belt of mid-century zeitgeist, as if it were still 1956. As I passed its glass-walled blueness, I sensed, if not heard, the metronomic slap-slap of immersed students ploughing endless laps, subconsciously invoking a curious para-temporality designed to speed their five-year courses to an earlier conclusion.  Outside the glass, the athletics track hosts the same time-bending ri...

I had thought they went to the moderator (me? a moderator?) via email, but in poking about the entrails of the twentieth-century online word-airport called ‘blogger’, I found them huddled together in their own little virtual waiting room, hatchlings patiently eager for take-off. I ticked them off like a steward handing out boarding passes and off they flew. Apologies for the delay.

‘Artificial’ once denoted something made by humans instead of occurring naturally; for example, artificial flowers. The meaning has changed marginally. Artificial intelligence has all the appeal of those flowers, smirking like evil aliens in their soil-free and water-free vases.  In the early days of the internet websites such as this were assailed by humans posting opportunistic comments hoping to publicise themselves or their websites or their business.  The phenomenon has returned via AI, with dozens of machine-generated comments appearing on recent posts, sixteen at a time, all seeming to advertise concrete works or internet businesses or fish-scaling devices or personal development agencies or home soothsayers.  The comments, while cleverly (somehow) segueing neatly off the content of the post, then lurched drunkenly off into pidgin English territory so typical of those early internet interruptions: ‘Fastidious blogging is your forte!’ ‘ My sister is studying this ar...