Just passing through

I drove through the Lane Cove tunnel yesterday. It was like a visit to the halls of some underworld king – a six lane highway into the bowels of the earth. Instead of the dim caverns one expects, everything is overly bright… and just enormous. The tunnels swallow you like a whale swallowing a gnat. Huge fans line the ceiling looking for all the world like the jet engines of some cavernous, inside-out jumbo jet, somehow giving you the impression that you’re in a kind of elongated airport hanger. It’s quite long too, almost monotonously. In the underworld, you lose all sense of time and space…

And then suddenly you shoot out again, like some kind of Orphean missile, not looking back, emerging into a different time and place. Only a few minutes, a few kilometres, but who knows how the world has changed?

Filed under: Lane cove tunnel, experiences, mythology

Sisyphus 2.0

Pushing a rock up a hill only holds it’s street cred for so long. Sisyphus needed to get with the times. Serious rock pusing needs to be dragged kicking into the twenty-first century; it needed to become extreme. And so, after hiring some consultants, and conducting a little market research, he came up with the following solutions for his FMGB (Fast moving geological body) business:

- Installing a lift to the top of the hill
- The building of a slalom course and ramps, jumps and grinding rails on the way down the hill, with the possible extension into a winter Olympics site, (hey, he is Greek, after all).
- Creating a website, www.sisyphus.co, where users can play an online game, trying to roll a rock to the top of a hill to while away the hours at work.
- Arguing for OHS standards with regard to the pushing of large objects.

Sisyphus is also reportedly in negotiations with Persephone over installing a rollercoaster to travel beside the perpetually rolling monolith as a major feature of a new theme park, Underworld. There have been also rumours of discussions with Bob Dylan over a rights deal for the use of his music as a sound track.

Filed under: mythology, random thoughts