We humans are fascinated with the thought that there are other intelligent beings out there in the universe. Statistically speaking I would suggest that it’s impossible that we are alone but whether or not we will ever meet intelligent life forms from other parts of the Universe is another thing.

Books and movies have explored the idea of that meeting and we have had everything from War of the Worlds and Independance Day to E.T. and My Favourite Martian but what if they arrived and we didn’t even notice?

What if they didn’t arrive in huge space ships or didn’t bother to make intelligent contact with us?

There are some scientists who now believe that the aliens have arrived and we missed the event. Not that it was much of an event and not that it happened anywhere really important … if indeed it did happen but something happened.

At first it looked like just another shower of rain but then the people of Kerala – a district in western India – noticed that the rain was red. In fact it was blood red and when it started on 25 July 2001 it began to turn people’s clothes pink and destroy the vegetation on plants.

It rained on and off like that for two months and then stopped and never returned.

Scientists are now wondering if what the people of Kerala witnessed was the arrival of an alien bacteria and now they are beginning to look at samples taken from that crimson rain and wonder what they are actually seeing.

You can find the full story, as published in the Observer’s online edition of March 5 here.

USAToday.com is reporting the story of a Judge who sentenced a man to 10 to 20 years in prison and then immediately performed his wedding.

It’s reported that the groom wore a gray suite, tie and shackles on his wrists and ankles – the shackles were removed for the wedding.

Right! You can stop your heavy breathing and salivating right now!

This is a serious news story and if I can stop giggling I’ll try and tell you all about it.

If you look down at the bottom of the main page you will see a multi-coloured gizmo. That basically is a counter and it loads whenever someome opens up Hervey Bay Gossip. Its purpose is to record non-identifying information about the person who is looking at the page.

It is provided by a business called Sitemeter and it’s handy to have because it gives us useful information that we can use to develop the site. Among other things it tells us what search terms people have used to find the site.

This morning I was wandering through those details and was looking at the search terms. Much to my surprise I found that someone had accessed the site by typing ‘sex in Hervey Bay’ into MSN.

Now search engines can sometimes throw up some unusual results when people search for information and this term certainly brought up some unusual listings for the person who found the Gossip with that search term.

Number two on the MSN result page was a questionaire for backpackers. Number three on the list was information about the dog pound while number four was information about the Pacific Whale Foundation. The Hervey Bay Gossip came in at number 10 for a piece we did on domestic violence.

And did our intrepid searcher find the information he or she was looking for? Who knows … do we really have sex in Hervey Bay?

Did I miss the memo on that one?

Yesterday saw the Hervey Bay Gossip crew take a return trip to Brisbane to visit a specialist and take some of the kids back to Roma Street to start their journey back to their home south of the border.

At 9am the BP service stations at Caboolture (both sides of the road) were selling unleaded petrol for 102.9 cents per litre.

At 2pm as we returned north the same service stations were selling unleaded petrol for 113.9 cents per litre.

We had to drop into Cooroy Spring Mountain Waters so we filled up in the back streets of Cooroy for 106.9 cents per litre.

It seems that the days of black and white – truth and lies – friend and foes have gone and in their place are various shades of expediency.

Newsweek in the United States this week will be running a story on the fight against drug traffickers in Afghanistan.

It seems that some of the biggest drug traffickers in that poor country are ensuring that the authoritites leave them alone by taking a hard line agains terrorism. It seems that if you’re one of the key allies of the US in the war on terrorism then no one is going to mind if you’re the biggest drug runner in the country.

So much for honesty and integrity in international politics. It’s alright if half your population has their brains addled with illegal drugs just so long as the terrorists don’t get a chance to blow them all up.

Remember the NASA Rovers that were designed to motor around Mars for a maximum of three months? They landed on Mars two years ago and they are still going strong.

Admittedly they’ve only travelled a total of seven miles but then when was the last time that your car had to operate in temperatures of around 67 degrees below zero?

I bet neither of them have electric window winders

Mt St Helens, in the north west of the United States, has been erupting continuously for the last 15 months. Every three seconds around 10 cubic metres of lava comes out of the volcano but scientists don’t know where all the lava is coming from.

If the lava was being generated by the mountain itself then scientists would expect to see the mountain begin to change shape but apart from reshaping the crater now and again there has been no real change to the mountain’s shape.

So where the 102 million cubic metres of lava that has been blown out of the mountain since it started erupting has come from is basically anyone’s guess.