We're a species that is capable of almost dumbfounding kindness. We nurse one another, romance one another, weep for one another. Ever since science taught us how, we willingly tear the very organs from our bodies and give them to one another. And at the same time, we slaughter one another. The past 15 years of human history are the temporal equivalent of those subatomic particles that are created in accelerators and vanish in a trillionth of a second, but in that fleeting instant, we've visited untold horrors on ourselves—in Mogadishu, Rwanda, Chechnya, Darfur, Beslan, Baghdad, Pakistan, London, Madrid, Lebanon, Israel, New York City, Abu Ghraib, Oklahoma City, an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania—all of the crimes committed by the highest, wisest, most principled species the planet has produced. That we're also the lowest, cruelest, most blood-drenched species is our shame—and our paradox.
-- Jeffrey Kluger, What Makes Us Moral, TIME

The perfect way to celebrate the pause that happens between the chaos of Xmas and the bittersweetness of New Years: a lunch of leftovers in the cool breeze by a riverbank in the western 'burbs of Sydney, followed by a dinner of crispy skin chicken vietnamese soup in one of the few parts of the city still open (ie. Newtown). Nothing puts you in touch with the ebb & flow of your own humanity than good food & good company after the party's over, eh?

That a damn good dose of festive fatigue!

(On another note, how can there be aNOTHer 'alien vs. predator' movie? Didn't we resolve that one already?)