My car is dark grey. A recent study found that dark-coloured cars are more prone to accidents. In the rain, like this morning, I drive with my lights on, for visibility.

It’s like my friend Merlin, who rides a motorcycle. Where he lives in Canberra, you apparently don’t have to ride with your motorcycle headlight on (or didn’t, when I asked him about it a few years ago). But he said “my bike is road-coloured, so I do”. Sounds fair enough.

But note to self: Turn car lights off when parking.

That way, I won’t get back to it 9 hours later and find the battery flat and have to call the RACV guy and run the motor for a while to get the battery charged again. Like I did tonight.

…

On the bright side, at least I didn’t park it like this, across two parking spaces:

Or go driving like this:

It’s Priscilla, Queen of Collins Street

Pictured on Monday, workmen putting a giant shoe on top of a bus in Collins Street, for the launch of the Priscilla musical.

A shooting yesterday morning in the city (a few blocks from where I work) left one dead and two injured. Quite an unusual event, which had police and media swarming over the area. A Channel 10 cameraman I spoke to said it was pandemonium in their newsroom. (But no, despite what you might have read, the CBD did not go into “lockdown”. A number of buildings were sealed, and streets closed. No more than that.)

One can only feel for the family of the man killed, who was apparently a bystander seeing if he could help a woman being attacked. Ren just about saw it happen.

Having it happen nearby is one thing. People with a personal link to you dying makes it all the more real. It turns out a colleague’s mother-in-law passed-away over the weekend after a long illness.

And — more of a shock — an ex-colleague, who had come out of retirement recently to resume working had also passed-away, suddenly, on Friday. If he’d been unhealthy, he hadn’t complained about it. Always cheerful. RIP, John M.

I’ve been thinking a bit recently about mortality anyway. It might have been sparked by my grandmother passing away, or getting more conscious of my kids growing up and me getting older. (Is there a median age for mid-life crises? Ah, it’s 46 apparently.)

Some people have particular religious beliefs that come into play. I don’t. I guess I’d be defined as a Weak Agnostic: Maybe some people have figured it all out, but I haven’t yet.

So I don’t know what to think about issues such as life-after-death. A very strange (and spiritual) dream I had as a kid, accounts from others of near-death experiences, and I suppose plain simple hope leads me to think there’s something. Quite frankly the prospect of nothingness, of completely ceasing to be after death, scares me a little.

Okay, so I’m rambling. Whatever the truth, these are the sorts of background thoughts that have me occasionally talking/posting about the kind of “get off the bench” stuff that Cam’s been talking about. Making the most of life. Seizing the day. That kind of thing.

The Doctor Who spinoff series Torchwood starts tonight on Channel 10. I’ve seen a few episodes — at first it seems to revel in its adult timeslot, with (arguably gratuitous) use of sex, swearing and violence. Then it settles down a bit and starts telling some good stories, though none seem as deep or well thought out as the best of the recent Doctor Who scripts.

The third series of Doctor Who itself starts next week on the ABC, and evidently the final episode of Torchwood ties back-in to its parent show.

Unfortunately, by my calculations, the way they’ve been scheduled (and assuming each channel sticks to one episode per week without missing weeks) the bit where Captain Jack jumps out of Torchwood will air two days after he jumps back into Doctor Who. Whoops. Maybe Channel 10 will show the last two episodes of Torchwood together, like they did in Britain… that would solve it.

A few pictures from Friday.

Bentleigh station, 9am.

Collins Place, 9:30am — The fog had lifted a bit in the city, but it was still evident a few hundred metres up.

Swanston Street, 1:30pm — By lunchtime it was quite hazy.

Swanston Street, entrance to Chinatown, 7pm — In the evening it got cold and dark quite quickly, and gradually the fog descended again.

Wanted fugitive Tony Mokbel got busted in Greece last week.

Did you see his fake driver’s licence in the newspaper? Take a look.

A licence supposedly for NSW has a VicRoads logo on it. That’s sloppy, that’s what it is. How and why would you fake an ID that was so obviously flawed, such that anybody in Australia who is reasonably observant would recognise it as a fake straight away?

And his passport… why is the fake signature (John somebody) completely different to the fake name (Stephen Papas)?

Talk about sloppy. What a damning indictment of the standards of Australian craftsmanship.

(Oh damn, I’m not the first one to notice.)

Last night was the coldest of the year so far, and I certainly felt it. The BOM weather monitoring station closest to me would be Moorabbin, and apparently it got down to 0.0 at 3:35am. Not as cold as Scoresby though, -1.3 at 7:32am.

Certainly it was the first time this year I’ve found ice on the car in the morning. If the weather is going to keep this up, it might be time to crack out the flannel sheets.

But on the bright side, should be plenty of snow this year — hopefully even more than on our last visit, two years ago.

In my years of blogging, I have so far managed to avoid mentioning Paris Hilton. Because up until now, I’d considered her to be nothing more than a waste of oxygen and newsprint. Seriously, I’d hoped that her incarceration would mean she’d be out of the news for a few weeks. I should have known better.

She broke her parole, being caught twice driving after being disqualified for drink-driving. That’s not just wasting oxygen and being dumb, that’s thumbing your nose at the punishment for being a dangerous idiot.

Her stupidity is legendary. If she’s not actually stupid, she’s doing a damn good imitation of it. Look at her eyes. Do you see an ounce of intelligence? And witness (even as she’s claiming she won’t be acting dumb anymore) her assessment of being in a jail cell, which “…felt as if I was in a cage”. Duh. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.

One can only hope that jail knocks some sense into the stupid bint.