I’ve been thinking about death recently. Not enough to become really morbid or anything, but pondering what will be left in the way of memories. Will I leave my mark on the world? Will my thoughts and deeds live on?

Not that I’m in any hurry. Life’s way too good. But I wonder what to expect. Will it be an empty nothingness, a void? Or an afterlife? Reincarnation? I know I had one dream as a kid which was so vivid that it gives me reason to believe there’s something there. (Hey, you’ve got to get your beliefs somewhere.)

Kerry Packer famously had a near-death experience and claimed there was absolutely nothing there. Others have claimed they’ve seen things.

Maybe like in Sam Lowry’s last dream, you see what you expect to see. End up where you expect to end up.

An article on BBC online recently pondered whether websites live on after their owners die. Some people are lucky enough to find their sites archived by bodies such as the National Library of Australia (myself included — and those of you who leave comments here may be interested to know those are archived there too). The rest of us will only last as long as the domain name and hosting bills get paid, though many will live on as long as archive.org is around.

One story last week discussed plans to download peoples’ brains into computers, a bit like the holograms in Red Dwarf. An interesting idea, but it’s not immortality. No matter how good the software, it’s still a simulation of you; it’s not you.

In the mean time, I’m trying to make the most of the life I’ve got.

Over the years, I’ve grown to like tea immensely. I’ve moved from not liking tea, to liking bog standard teabags, to preferring particular types of teabags such as Irish Breakfast, to being in a state of distress when there’s no leaf tea in the house.

The tea at work has generally been a few steps behind, with corporate policy apparently favouring the coffee drinkers (who, to be fair, are probably in the majority). But a couple of weeks ago, someone in a position of power brought a blessed gift to the tea drinkers in the office: a whole range of different teabags in little jars: the standard Liptons, a green tea, a couple of herbals, and miracle of miracles, my old former favourite, Irish Breakfast tea.

(Herbals aren’t actually tea, of course. No, they go by the official name “Herbal Infusions”, a phrase that reminds me of Kryten in Red Dwarf describing eggs as “boiled chicken ovulations.”)

Within days, the Irish Breakfast jar was empty, and a chat with a fellow tea-drinker revealed I was not the only Irish Breakfast tea fan present. No wonder the dozen or bags had gone so quickly. We bemoaned the lack of strength in the other teabags.

But last week, seeking my morning cuppa and resigning myself to having to have one of the Liptons, what should I find? A brand spanking new box of 250 100 Twinings Irish Breakfast teabags.

From all the tea drinkers, all praise to whoever is responsible.

Review: The End of Suburbia. I saw this at a PTUA screening to about 60 people a week or two ago. A fascinating film about the consequences of the forthcoming shortages of oil and natural gas.

The film is North American-centric (as you can tell from the subtitle “Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream”), and so the problems of natural gas running out and its extensive use in electricity generation in there, don’t apply to us, so we’re not in as deep doo-doo in that department. (Though of course our electricity generation is filthy.) But we’re pretty much in the same creek in regards to the peaking and subsequent decline of oil production.

Suburban low densities and form aren’t quite as bad in Australia as in the US, but there are definite similarities. I liked the comment that new suburbs are named after the natural features that they destroy.

The film paints what I think of as an alarmist view of things. I suppose it’s trying to get people’s attention, but I find it hard to believe that the car/oil industry, with its billions of dollars of resources, will just roll over and let itself self-destruct. Will it fight back, and find some other way of making its profits? Not sure.

The conclusion of the film seems to see urban design as the main solution to lessening the impact of these coming shortages, almost assuming that many people could live and work almost entirely within their own suburban neighbourhood. Thus it skirts over issues such as public transport, which I think is a shortcoming — even with advanced telecommunications, people will still want to travel within their cities for work and play, and they won’t be able to do it all by walking or cycling.

A very interesting film though, which raises some important questions about the future of western cities.

Those of you who make the extra effort to seek out ethical or organic products might be interested to know that Cadbury is taking over Green & Black’s chocolates. As one blogger commented — hey, at least it’s not Nestle. (via Andy)

From time to time I’ve sampled G&B’s. Yummy stuff, and I for one will be disappointed if Cadbury’s merges it into their existing lines. Not that I expect them to — assuming there’s a profitable market for organic ethically produced chocolate, there’s no reason to assume Cadbury would want to change that, particularly if it’s the only prominent brand out there.

Meanwhile, the Store Wars is promoting organic foods, featuring Egg Stormtroopers and full of bad Star Wars/food puns. Funny stuff.

So, is organic better? To my mind, not necessarily. As per usual, it’s not a black and white argument with black representing the evil processed, pesticided McCardboard muck and white representing pure natural gloriously delicious food. Mud is pure and natural. So are locusts. Doesn’t mean I want to eat them. So nope, personally, I don’t generally go out looking specifically for organic produce, though I do look out for stuff that’s fresh, and not overly sprayed or genetically modified (I have a nagging feeling that GM foods fall into the “we don’t yet know enough about this to know if it’s good or bad” category).

Speaking of ethical products, you can now get sweatshop-free sneakers (distributed in Australia by Community Aid Abroad shops). I do need some new sneakers. Not sure I had their limited styles in mind, though.

Programmes such as Fair Wear are helping to spread information about manufacturers who commit to fair wages and conditions of their workers, though in Fair Wear’s case, it’s limited to products made in Australia, which I guess explains how Nike got onto their list of signatories. Until there’s a unified list of products and manufacturers (and maybe there is, but I haven’t found it), it will remain difficult to find and buy from them.

After yesterday’s little circus, it had to happen…

I get off the train at Flinders Street and go through the gate.

“Hello!” says the barrier attendant.

“Uhh, hi.”

“Are you the transport minister?”

Oh, well done fella. Hint: the minister has a beard.

“No…” and I tell him who I am. I am, if anything, the anti-minister.

“Oh… I thought I recognised you from the TV.”

Not quite.

If you didn’t see it on the news, here are some images from today’s funeral of a tram stop.

Cafe Armenia. I’ve lived in and around Carnegie for upwards of ten years, and for much of that time I’ve joked about eating at the Cafe Armenia. Well on Friday we finally did it. I had no idea what to expect — there’s only so much you can glean from cowardly peering at the menu in the window.

Ordering some soup and a barbecued lamb dish, we were given some tomatoey-garlicy dip (very garlicy actually, the smell on the breath lingered well into the next day) and some bread. Shortly afterwards the old Armenian bloke gave us a dish of chilli, cabbage and pickles, proclaiming the chilli suitable for male consumption only. And I’ll tell you, it was hot. A kind of hot that kept on giving.

The soup arrived, bubbling away in a huge clay pot thing. Perhaps more of a broth, with lamb and potato and chickpea, it was utterly delicious. We both tucked-in and barely got through half of it before the lamb arrived. The Armenian bloke used some bread to pull the lamb off the skewer. It was incredibly succulent, and I hesitate to use the word delicious again in the one paragraph, but that’s the only suitable description. So too were the accompanying potatoes, quite possibly the finest potatoes ever seen on this planet.

As we staggered out into the cold Friday air, full to the brim with good food, the main thing on my mind was me wondering why on earth it had taken so long to go and eat there.

• RestaurantRants review

Following the decision to close tram stops in Collins St, Flinders St and Victoria Pde, and expectations that more will follow, there will be a funeral for tram stop 7 at Russell and Collins Streets on Monday:

Please bring your friends and colleagues, and join the Collins Street Precinct Association, the Public Transport Users Association, Collins St traders, residents and others to pay your respects to a tram stop that has served Melbourne well.

More information