The Lighter Note

Novel move, elementary 

It’s not just miners in Western Australia who have developed an acute interest in the periodic tables.

Certainly the amount of Fe and Au found by geologists scouting the state’s remote interior accounts for a fair bit of focus on the earth’s elements, as the bank balances of WA’s resources elite proves.

But miles away from the corporate climes of the CBD and West Perth, Naomi van Bentum’s focus on the elements is a little more creative.

Frustrated by the lack of fun in science education, Mrs van Bentum invented a card game called Elementaurs, which is based on the components of the periodic table and their chemical properties.

Not satisfied with that, she has now written a book to bring the game to life with a kids’ adventure story.

Splash it about

The Note admits to being drawn to the ABC’s Kitchen Cabinet.

While at times we’d like to see a more vigorous approach from Annabel Crabb in her lunch-guest/interviewer role – more roasting, more carving and more skewering – that might reflect our old-fashioned, meat-and-three-veg approach to meals and their preparation.

In general we like the subtlety. Like, for instance, was that a bottle of the Leeuwin Estate Arts Series Riesling gracing the table when Ms Crabb took on federal Health Minister Tanya Plibersek over a plate full of stuffed zucchini flowers?

In the week the mining tax was passed, the ABC’s props team showed a little glint of humour, albeit mischievously masked by turning the bottle’s label away from the camera’s prying lens?

While Leeuwin’s owners, the Horgan family, might not fit Wayne Swan’s idea of billionaire vested interests, patriarch Denis Horgan did make his early gains as head of Barrack Mines back in the 1980s.

Personally, we think a bottle of Voyager might have been closer to the mark.