Here is an example of what I mean.

This week has brought news of a just-discovered galaxy that is (prepare to be mindboggled) 12.7 billion light years from Earth. This means, the news reports say, that astronomers ogling it today are seeing it as it was about a billion years after the Big Bang.

Yes, your columnist gave an amazed and bewildered "Gosh!" at those facts and figures but then went "Gosh!" again at this week's report in The Canberra Times about ACT poker machines. For those of us who don't ever play the pokies (although I own up to a galaxy of other vices) the pokie facts are startling. The 2015-2016 annual report on the ACT's pokies shows that the ACT has 4585 of these fiendish contraptions from which the clubs that have them made $168 million in that year. The most profitable machines, each one Hoovering up $50,000 a year of the working classes' hard-earned pennies, are in the four Labor Clubs.

The issue of the goodness or evilness of pokies is a complex one, since for example eight per cent of ACT pokie revenues are diverted to community groups. But in this same week we learn that a coalition of 42 Tasmanian church, union, council and community groups has called for the complete removal of poker machines from Tasmania's clubs and pubs. The coalition accuses that poker machines rob Tasmanians of $200 million a year and so cause endless misery.

For homework about this subject, I sallied forth to a giant Canberra club to enter a den of pokies and to watch people playing them.

Back to my forensic probings in just a moment. But first the unremarkable thought that for all of us life is full of gambles.

For example marriage is, notoriously, a great gamble. Elizabeth Gilbert muses in her Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, "Maybe the difference between a first marriage and a second marriage is that at least the second time you know you are gambling."

Mystically I offer this unscientific thought. What if, given that the establishment of the federal capital city here beside the Molonglo was such a gamble (critics said there was not enough water here to nourish a single cabbage let alone flush away our sewerage and keep us safe from typhoid and leprosy) there is something in our city's chancy ambience that makes gamblers of us, that drives us to the pokies?

Some of my anti-gambling puritanism has to do with the way in which gambling especially afflicts the already downtrodden working classes. George Bernard Shaw saw that: "Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich – something for nothing."

One particular reservation about pokies is that their poor players, observed, have so little fun. They tend to illustrate Charles Bukowski's observation that "gamblers are dry and empty souls, their hearts have been sucked dry, there is no music in their walk, they are colourless and condemned".

I sallied forth (like all motorists doing a little everyday gambling with my life) to a pokie-rich club to test my long-held negative impressions of pokie playing that it is "play" that gives its players no joy.

Alas, my olde prejudice seemed confirmed. The solitary pokie player's attitude to his or her chosen machine (today's machines turn out to have exciting names like Witches' Riches and Cash Express) looks joyless, dogged and grim. Some of the weirdness of pokie playing lies in the contrast between the silent, morose, doomed-to-lose colourless player and the (of course electronic and fake) exuberance and gaiety of his or her plaything with its flashing lights and its cheerful whizzing, jangling noises.

No wonder it, the machine, is the exuberant one of the two since it is calibrated to win. It knows it will always do by artful electronic embezzlement what bushrangers like the Kelly Gang at least had the decency to do (and outdoors in the fresh air) with up front, in-your-face, outrageous daylight robbery at honest gunpoint.

We will probably never rid the ACT, Tasmania, anywhere of these revenue-raising pokies. But what if we could insist on pokies that are not so mindless and vulgar and are perhaps even stimulating and a little educational? You may say I'm a dreamer (but I'm not the only one) but I am dreaming of, say, Mozart and Shakespeare pokies.

They might be called Amadeus Dollars and Bard's Megabucksrespectively. Everything about them, the subjects of the patterns of symbols and the music they trill and tinkle could refer to the genius of those great men.

Normally morose pokie players would struggle to remain grim and bitter if, at play with an Amadeus Dollars, they were being parted from their money to the accompaniment of Mozart's joyfully toe-tapping Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. They, the pokie players, would leave the club penniless but would dance to their (modest, working-class, early model) cars still with music in their walk.