"First and foremost, I'd like to congratulate you on a great job done in compiling this Australian English Dictionary. It has been a tremendous help in educating my foreign contacts in the vagaries and nuances of our language. I realise this is probably still work in progress, but can you tell me if or when you plan to make it fully searchable by keyword, instead of having to search by primary letter and scrolling through each section?"

Oh, and Yes, there will an e-commerce section added to JoyZine, where you'll be able to buy the CD, plus books and software. But that's a few weeks away.

In the meantime, I've simplified the main menu, to speed up downloading of the page for those poor souls who don't yet have broadband available. Instead of every article being reachable from the main menu, you will in some instances be directed first to a main section page. Within each section, you will then find a submenu on each page. Also, throughout the Australia section you'll find a "Tools" menu just below the navigation. From here, you can search the dictionary, convert tem- perature or currency, or bring up a map of Australia or each of the States and the Northern Territory.

The fans scream in the cold at New York City's Idlewild Airport at the arrival of their four idols, whom they hadn't even heard of three months earlier. The press asks the mop tops when they're going to get a haircut, and George gets a laugh when he replies, earnestly, "I had one yesterday." In a crowded elevator, Paul lightens the mood by announcing, "Ladies and gentlemen, on your right you'll see the Washington Memorial." Running down a hotel corridor, George mimics the mob outside - "Ban the bomb!" - and John ad-libs, "Ban the Pope." Trapped in their suite, Ringo plaintively asks, "Are we going out?"

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of their conquest of America, Apple Corps reissued on 3 February the feature-length documentary The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit, with a 51-min. add-on of outtakes and reminiscenses. The original film, a cinema verite record of the group's tour by Albert and David Maysles, is a brisk rough sketch of A Hard Day's Night, which the boys started making later that month. Same dashing from train to limo to photo op to TV stage. Same use of wit as armour against imprisonment and ennui. And the same amazing display of grace and good humor by four blithe Liverpudlians, ages 20 to 24. Leaving their hotel room to go to the Peppermint Lounge, they wave a sweet goodbye to the two-man camera crew. Did celebrity ever take such innocent pleasure in its own good fortune? Was the world ever this young?

by Richard Corliss
Time, January 2004

Here is a vision Roald Dahl would have loved, perchance he was partial to a tipple of the drop once called navy rum. It's in a darkened shed in out-of-the-way east Bundaberg, where the contents of a pungent well (reportedly a good three storeys deep) are shimmering bronze - as pure molasses apparently does in quantities of 5 millions litres or more. Sixty-year-old timber vats hold up to 70,000 litres of a golden fluid that has become something of a Queensland icon.

The first barrel of Bundaberg rum rolled out of the production line in 1888. The Bundaberg Rum Visitor Centre is a historic Queenslander that holds a shop with extensive merch- andise, a taste-testing bar and a lifelike museum display.

"One off the principal things we set out to do is maintain consistency of flavour. So the most crucial thing about making the rum is to always make it basically the same way." That means ensuring the sugar cane used is always from the local Bundaberg area, to guard against taste differences created by other regions' climate or soil difference. It means using the same American White Oak wood chosen by the original distillers two centuries ago to preserve the character absorbed by the rum from the vats in which it is matured.

"One vat will use about six tonnes of oak," says Dr Muller, nodding resignedly when asked if it is an expensive import. There aren't any Australian trees as suitable (for the maturation process) and even if there were, we wouldn't use them. We use American white oak. To change would alter the taste."

As much as Dr Muller's role is about preserving traditions of yesterday, it's also about taking advantage of technology. After all, who would have thought the clinical science of DNA fingerprinting would be part of a rum distillery? But the optimum strain of yeast, which is the starting point of the rum distillation process, is sent to special microbiological stores - yeast culture collections - in Brisbane, London and Denmark - where they can be kept without fear of contaminations. Dr Muller and his team can call in the samples to replicate the DNA of the yeast time and time again, so there's no chance of beginning with a mutated basic ingredient.

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