Trying To Be Ann O'Dyne

Shrimp is no Barbie

2012-01-29T22:12:00.003+14:00

These are my VOGUE stacks, going back to 1969 and the issues from 1970 to 1973 are in handsome navy red and gold stamped VOGUE binders.

Jean Shrimpton is on many of the covers, and while the girly 1960's are typified by MOD culture evolving, the concurrent prevailing 'look' was known as 'DollyBird' and she was their goddess.

A film has been made based on the early part of her career when she went to New York City for a VOGUE shoot with David Bailey.I won't be seeing it, and the publicity will irritate me, but I have all these
for my Shrimp fix instead. She is a recluse now and I don't blame her one bit.

Meanwhile, over at WORN OUT it is Flamingo Park time so please visit.

wealth for toil

2012-01-26T13:36:00.000+14:00

Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free; we've golden soil and wealth for toil; our home is girt by sea; Our land abounds in nature’s gifts of beauty rich and rare; in history’s page, let every stage advance Australia Fair. In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia Fair.
Twigs Of Yore blogger has a genealogy meme
(I found thanks to My Western District Families a Victorian blogger, with whom I share the fact of our ancestors both coming here from 'the Royal burgh' of Haddington SCT in 1854)

Twig's meme is based on how did your ancestors toil? so I submit -

one of my G-G-grandfathers - George*Sedgwick (1830-1898) toiled in Portland, Victoria, making furniture, and that is a c.1890 photograph of him in his workshop at 137 Percy Street. He built the Rocket Shed on the Portland foreshore, as well as doing all the interior carpentry of the first Town Hall. He did amass wealth for it, although none trickled down to me. I do wish I had known him.

I have been toiling on my genealogy database since 1997 when P0RN was the biggest thing on the www ... and now GENEALOGY is the biggest thing on the web, so this 26th January I celebrate nothing but this small bit of positive evolution.

today in the 'Rat

2012-01-17T22:01:00.015+14:00

Today I went to

Ballarat Fine Art Gallery

and saw an exhibit of works

by Michael Shannon.

Any of them would be a

pleasure to view daily.

I also had to see the re-installed and

revered Eureka Flag after the restoration work.

The room it is in is very dark and flash is not permitted,

so I am surprised at the image really.

Seeing this flag is my version of

hallowed ground.

"The design of the flag was taken by Captain Henry Ross, one of Eureka's miners and a Canadian expatriate, to three women, Anastasia Withers, Anne Duke and Anastasia Hayes, to sew up in time for a large rally at Bakery Hill, at 2.00 pm on 29 November 1854. ".

Can you imagine the life of a woman on the diggings? All mud, dust, and tired drunken men. A bit like waiting for a popstar boyfriend to strike it rich with a hit record.

As I came out of the gallery a bike club

was assembled to resume

their ride to Warrnambool.

If you click to embiggen, you will see

a Ned Kelly doll lashed to one bike and he

has a Smurf in his pocket. I had not

been aware that Ned's infamous suit of iron

even had a pocket, but I did enjoy

the outlaw confluence of bikers,

Ned, and

The Treacherous Event Of 1854.

From the bus stop on Sturt Street,

this alley next to the old post office has

a view of the Art School built behind the gallery recently ...

... and this is the view I had

while waiting to go

11 kilometres out to

the gum trees on the edge of town

where, in spite of the CFA advising

that the area is

not defendable should there be a bushfire,

it is very pleasant to be.

Update:

An attempt to enlarge Ned & his pocket Smurf.

The flag by someone allowed to assert themselves.

walking the doglet

2012-01-02T18:07:00.002+14:00

Walking the dog at 7AM on The Steve Moneghetti Track, a newish name for the path around Lake Wendouree. It is stinking hot at 36C / 102F and I just loathe people who don't think about dogpaws on HOT HOT footpaths like the bricked ones in Rye 3941 which are hell for dogs.

do your felf a saviour

2011-12-30T14:04:00.004+14:00

'Herald-Sun April 2010
Apparently Molly Meldrum was devastated by the news about the Melbourne Storm, when someone located him in Bangkok and told him. We were informed that Meldrum goes to all the Melbourne Storm games when he's in town, which would, of course, be more difficult to do when he's in Bangkok in the middle of his beloved team's NRL season. I feel for his plight. He may have been so distraught that he shifted his cocktail glass to the other hand. BILLIE JEAN BEANBLOSSOM, Blackburn'

'ThaiVisa.com Posted 2011-12-19
He has a Thai boyfriend and is well known for trawling the boy bars in Patong for decades.
He doesn't come for the temples or local arts and crafts …'

News.com December Brother Brian Meldrum said the … star … was uttering words, but they had no context and were difficult to understand.'

So no change then?

'He said Molly spoke a couple of words on Sunday for the first time but it was difficult to decipher what they meant.’

Your suggestions on a postcard please, ‘most likely’ can win a free Bar Tab at Molly’s Bangkok ‘business’ –

Crippy Crimble

2011-12-18T14:10:00.003+14:00

This festival is promoted by Christian cults and retail trade. Parties, $pending, credit card blowout, and none of it related to baby Jesus. It is impossible to opt-out. I blame the 'three allegedly wise men' allegedly following a star (as if) and bearing those wildly inappropriate gifts. We all know that joke -
"What would have happened if it had been three Wise Women instead of three Wise Men?
They would have asked directions,
arrived on time,
helped deliver the baby,
cleaned the stable,
made a casserole,
and brought practical gifts.
and
when they left...
"Did you see the sandals Mary was wearing with that gown?"
"That baby doesn't look anything like Joseph!"
"Virgin, my arse! I knew her in school!"
"Can you believe that they let all of those disgusting animals in the house?"
"I heard that Joseph isn't even working right now!"
"And that donkey that they are riding has seen better days too!"
"Want to bet on how long it will take until you get your casserole dish back?"
"That drummer boy was hot."

Hoping you all come out the other side of it all ... X X X

wild weekend

2011-11-28T20:41:00.008+14:00

My photo, taken from our table, of the smug city seagulls on their million-dollar Federation Square perch, complacently observing us eat.
After a big Saturday Night in the best seats At The Opera thanks to the generosity of That's So Pants, how lovely it was for us both to Sunday Blogger-Brunch with Hawt Highriser, the legendary, elusive and saintly R, and Copperwitch.

We were, however, scanning the horizon for Sanity Clause who failed to appear because he was looking for his phone, left in someone else's car for the second time in a week.

After the delicious food, Pants and I really enjoyed the British Watercolours 1760-1900 collection of the NGV just up the road. See my groovy image left, showing how blatantly 'designer' Roy Grounds regurgitated the style of Le Corbusier.

See that desk top right? That is the place for paying membership fees to the NGV association. When I approached waving the application and money, the 'Attendant' fled, claiming it was closing time.

For some reason Pants blogger finds this hilarious.

We then 67-trammed to my cousin in Caulfield for a garden party with poodles, dragging ourselves away to do battle with Vline and the horror that is So Cross Station, to get back to opposite sides of regional Victoria. What a weekend.

Not a joke Joyce

2011-11-11T00:14:00.002+14:00

Under all this crap is a drophead Riley some car restorer would kill for. This disgusting collection belongs to avid Xtian Fundies who are too busy accepting the lord JC into their hearts to cleanup their bloody yard. I should never have climbed the compost heap to look over the top of the fence. No complaints will be made, as disturbing this lot will only cause mass migration of all the rodents and reptiles so comfortably housed within.
This is a temporary post just for commentors at Hawt Andrews Highrise, where Sedgwicke The Younger referenced my new neighbours (well actually I am their new neighbour and we are not gonna be good friends). . The origin of the saying "It's a joke Joyce" is the legendary In Melbourne Tonight of the 1960's where a regular comedy skit The Wilsons had Graham 'King' Kennedy playing George and Tivoli veteran Val Jellay playing wife Joyce bickering at the kitchen table, with Joyce never getting the meaning of sarcastic humour. Another George Wilson was the actual manager of GTV9 at the time and his teenage son George got studio tickets for all his Brighton pals when The Rolling Stones recorded there in 1965. Those were the days.
His 21st was at The Royal Oak on Bridge Road, where all the GTV9 staff drank, and it later became The Tiger Room where Radio Birdman played their first Melbourne gig and The Boys Next Door played their first pub gig. i was there for that too ...

better stop, but I could go on and on and on.

Majesty

2011-10-25T10:20:00.004+14:00

Pre-Olympics Melbourne was so very different when Her Maj arrived in 1954 when small children were shepherded to the front of the crowds lining the streets, and sat cross-legged in safety, waiting for a glimpse of Her Maj. Those of us in school received a medallion, and I have been wearing mine this week, pointlessly in my remote seclusion.
This surreal illustration which appears to assume an 'inclusion' of various members of 'our society' is less real than if PIXAR had done it. embiggen, and then shreik.
The 'Pieta'-like glamour lubra and child defies opinion. I searched for artist name, they wisely 'anon'.
For those of you who have never trekked to the immediate proximity of Her Maj, trust me, the star thing applies. May she live long and prosper ...

a good clean show

2011-10-19T21:59:00.006+14:00

A friend took this photo in WA. If you CNTL+ to embiggen you will see the poster has A GOOD CLEAN SHOW on it, not once, but twice. The good old days.

Newspaper Article
https://www.trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/49004386
DAWNETTE AND THE PERFORMING Wonder Dogs. M2211. Available floor shows and par ties.
At a Christmas Eve party,children living nearby will see
"Dawnette" give a show with her performing dogs. Lady
an Afghan hound, is to be the dogs' Father Christmas and will
wear a long beard and scarlet cloak.

just Ducky

2011-10-09T01:23:00.004+14:00

At the end of my street there is a swamp the council calls 'a lake' and these 12 baby ducks were bobbing around on it today.

billabong birdie

2011-10-01T22:33:00.008+14:00

Eastern Rosellas in this burkes backyard.Parent birds look horrified to have bred a Thorpedo child.Scientific name Platycercus-eximius may have confused bird into swimming like a platypus.I enjoyed it all without even leaving my chair inside. It's freezing in Ballarat right now, and bloody Summer Time starts tomorrow getting up an hour earlier than it 'feels like' - up with the birds as they say.

swanning about on the lake

2011-09-18T15:52:00.006+14:00

Cob: "hey Beryl! - don't take the kids near the bloody traffic ... "

Cob: "Jeepers darling, it's dangerous on land."

Pen: "Sheesh."

This blogger has come in from the goat paddocks out west, and now has swans at the end of the street. SPRING.

woo hoo

2011-08-06T02:09:00.006+14:00

Masked OWL, well-spotted by this bird sook, while walking across the bridge yesterday at 5pm. He thought he was hidden, in trees on the Campaspe.

This species is on the 'threatened' list.

(Both these images are virtually copyrighted Annie ODyne )

Click on the images for larger.

clean air

2011-07-29T22:39:00.007+14:00

I haz been in Flinders on Westernport. This cottage is in the main street. Not far from the truly glamorous handmade chocolates shop.
Very lovely there, even in winter. The coast road past Cape Schanck is like a roller coaster and apparently: 'The cleanest air in the world
Fill a bottle with the air at Cape Schanck, which is bottled by CSIRO scientists after gale-force winds blow pure, uncontaminated air directly from the Antarctic' (Follow this Flinders link for more).

Named after Matthew Flinders who - 'In 1804 while imprisoned by the French in Mauritius, Matthew Flinders completed a map showing his circumnavigation of the continent, which he titled ‘Australia or Terra Australis’.

This original map is stored at the UK Hydrographic Office in Taunton Somerset.
Flinders returned to England in 1810, and his account of his explorations, A Voyage to Terra Australis, was published in 1814. A new map with the order reversed to ‘Terra Australis or Australia’ accompanied this two-volume work.

This was the first map of Australia to be published, and it is this map that is normally reproduced.
Matthew Flinders died on the day before the publication of his monumental work, and thus 2014 is the bicentenary of his death. To mark this anniversary, a campaign has been launched Bringing Home the Birth Certificate of Our Nation.
There is evidence to suggest that this 1804 map was not the first use of the term Australia on a map. But this quibble aside, the 1804 map is of considerable historic significance for Australia, and anyone wishing to support the call for the British Hydrographic Office to relinquish the map can add their name to the online petition.'
That's enough about him, so back to me: I was in a house with a mirrored wall and can report that seeing all of oneself every minute of the day, takes some getting used to ... I preserved this image of a Santa statue ... just for you.

rock and roll

2011-07-05T16:55:00.006+14:00

'Geoscience Australia says Victoria has been shaken by a small earthquake.
The 4.4 magnitude quake was centred north of the town of Korumburra, in eastern Victoria. The quake was felt across Melbourne, the suburbs and into Gippsland ...'
Instead of thinking 'it could not happen here', I thought - 'OK first turn the power off at the board, turn the gas off at the main, get the dog and cat into the car so at least they are contained, a bottle of water, umm ... '
Some people have a Go Bag, but my entire life is by Go-Bag so I'm right on that score, but really Dear Readers, there is no reason at all why we should think this really bad stuff only happens in Guatemala or Turkey or Wellington and Christchurch.
Those Go Bag links are to the wiki one and the City Of Sydney one - each different from/to/than what I would have. Do you have a shake powered torch?
What would YOU do/pack first if the walls started cracking?

lucky me

2011-06-30T01:59:00.007+14:00

Today included passing Lake Wendouree in Ballarat and of course I had to say hello to these swan babies gliding around in the winter sun. Swans are monogamous, vegetarian, and very good parents. What's not to love?

(images copyright Annie O'Dyne)

revolution in the air

2011-06-19T00:55:00.010+14:00

As I walked away from capturing this moment as they gathered in outrage, trams were unloading hundreds more.
I would have joined them if I hadn't another revolution to view a block away where the Bolsheviks would not have been amused at their story playing Her Majestys' Theatre.

(image by Ann O'Dyne)

It was wonderful (especially from the third row) - design, costume and performances. Recommended. Thank you to That's So Pants for making my day.

do or diet

2011-06-15T15:33:00.007+14:00

Dawn French

Now and Before.

Peter Jackson, Before

and After.

I'm on a weight-loss diet.

Update: after 27 highly disciplined days without any edible fun, I am one kilo lighter. one.

dawn in frosty paddock

2011-06-08T12:19:00.007+14:00

(image copyright Ann O'Dyne May 2011. Newborn calves at Navigators, Vic. 3352)

Thank you , thank you dear PM Gillard.

Update 5 days after:
Errol Simper writes in The Australian Business Section:

Four Corners' report on animal cruelty is what journalism is all about ...

'Tony Jones interviewed Meat And Livestock Australia's export manager, Michael Finucan, last Wednesday and must have felt rather as you might after smashing your head against a brick wall for hours. The way Finucan had it, all would be well with a bit more training of Indonesian abattoir people, a bit more community patience and a massive belief in the MLA's honourable intentions.

Jones: "You're talking about sending in trainers to train (Indonesian abattoir) people, yet again. But as we know, Australian trainers from MLA had recently visited two of the worst abattoirs Four Corners filmed at. The worst of them all, the Gudrun abattoir, had six visits by Australian experts like yourself in the previous 14 months. This whole process seems not to have worked at all."

Finucan: "Well, what we've learned is that we need more intense training."

To be fair, Finucan gave viewers no reason to suspect he was anything other than a decent, well-meaning bloke. For all that, you had some empathy with Jones' next interviewee, Bob Katter. Jones: "You've just heard what the industry specialist (Finucan) on the ground is saying. What do you say in response?"

Katter: "Almost every single aspect of that interview filled me with anger, almost every single aspect of it . This person admitted they knew what was going on, that they'd sent people in to have look at this. They've known for years and years about it, and they've done absolutely nothing . . . They've been paid a fortune to carry out things in a toweringly incompetent manner."

Meantime, some will be grateful for small mercies. White, the RSPCA and the Four Corners reporter who somehow did the abattoir story without having a nervous breakdown, Sarah Ferguson (with nudges of help from Xenophon and independent MP Andrew Wilkie), have at least managed to get the grisly trade in live cattle suspended."

Thank you Errol! and Go Sarah! - dry your eyes, take the sleeping pills, and find a gown for accepting your Walkley Award.

Now the sheep exports ... ?

leafing through my past

2011-06-08T00:55:00.005+14:00

Image copyright Ann O'Dyne June 2011

This is the entry area of the university of Ballarat. The only thing about the place that this ex-student can recommend is the autumn landscaping. There is only one road from the centre of Ballarat for the 10 kilometres out to the site. It has two lanes and there are seven schools on it. Buses buses buses, 40 kms limit = Total Gridlock, and that is before the city of Ballarat allowed a huge State Revenue Office to be built next to it, joining the huge premises of IBM. Total gridlock at 8am when they schedule lectures at 8:30am. One road.

That link at 'Buses' leads to a Coalition policy to fix it and I have no faith in it since their plandescribes a right turn that cannot be made by 95% of the traffic problem.
In their laughable School Of Business, they have lecturers in marketing who have never heard of Calvin Klein, or Tiffany stores, or Homer and the rest of The Simpsons. I know you don't believe me but it is true.
John Guyas said he got the job via the internet and wanted to work here because he liked the TV soap Neighbours. Never heard of The Simpsons.

When I expressed astonishment at this failing of a Marketing Lecturer, since TIME magazine voted it the TV show of the century, a third-year Business Degree student said to me "nobody watches that anymore anyhow".
I observed while there that the 'university' is merely a front for their truly profitable business - photocopying and the retailing of crisps and fizzy drinks.

Tooting and coming

2011-06-02T23:20:00.006+14:00

As you all know, SoCross Station is my natural habitat, and as I passed through last week I just had to record seven regional trains but thankfully not the noise level of the seven engines roaring.
But wait, that's not all, I also bring you Tutankhamun whose HUGE effigy stars there at the moment.
(images copyright Ann O'Dyne 2011)
I wish the ancient civilisations had invented trains. They might have evolved sufficiently by now to be bearable.

now and then

2011-05-22T01:19:00.006+14:00

You would never guess him from that one. I just love Harry and will be furious if they kill him off as I want him to go off into the sunset with brainy Ruth.
He would probably want his ashes in one of these urns when he dies.

He is the prime character in one of our favourite shows ...

for 9 seasons.

It has no actor credits, start or at the end. have you ever noticed that?.

arsing around

2011-05-16T02:23:00.019+14:00

Bridesmaids rarely look stylish

(refer to movie 27 Dresses ),

and this may be why the idiot-press

is now fixated on a total side-bar to

recent events in London.

"Great minds discuss ideas,
Average minds discuss events,
Small minds discuss people" ...

and if Eleanor Roosevelt,

to whom that is attributed,

was still with us, she might add

... and total plonkers discuss backsides.

Although, there are backsides ... and there are backsides:

Does my arse look big in this?

'The bulk of the gluteal muscle mass

contributes only partially to shape of the buttocks.

The other major contributing factor is that of

the panniculus adiposus of the buttocks, which is very well developed in this area, and gives the buttock its characteristic rounded shape.

Although the gluteal muscle bulk and tone can be improved with massage and exercise, it is the disposition of the overlying panniculus adiposus which may be responsible for the "sagging butt" phenomenon.

Exercise of the body in general which can contribute to fat loss can lead to reduction of mass in subcutaneal fat storage locations on the body which includes the panniculus, so for leaner and more active individuals, the glutes will more predominantly contribute to the shape than someone less active with a fattier composition. The degree of body fat stored in various locations such as the panniculus is dictated by genetic and hormonal profiles ...'

Is it a relief to know it is not diet forming that huge stern we are glad we cannot see?
Photograph of Her Majesty at top, is copyright Andrew Milligan.
Bottom photo is Dita Von Teese and JeanPaul Gaultier.

Crashville Skyline

2011-05-05T02:59:00.004+14:00

Autumn twilight, 5:30pm Ballarat CBD. The air has changed from crisp to chilly and the birds are making their Close-Of-Business calls. People buying dinner while rushing home from their work. Warm lights through windows of houses on hills while driving ... not 'home', merely 'back'.

Back to paddocks with young steers steaming as they wait in damp grass to become burgers, and to a naughty cattledog who killed a ringtail possum last night, and to two rough types building new steel stock chutes down by the old sheds.

The mood is triste, ennui settles over me. Then I remember I bought chocolate.

The Rex Pistols

2011-04-28T11:11:00.001+14:00

I
LIKE THEM
AND
WISH
THEM
SUCCESS
IN THEIR
BATTLE
AGAINST
THE
RESENTFUL
WHINERS.

Just don't
honeymoon
at the
Chelsea
Hotel.
(artist:
Rich Simmons)

However,

regarding the family

Catherine is taking on:
Here are the coats of arms of Uncle Andy and Uncle Prick Chuck:

This is the Andrew lion and unicorn
enlarged and calm loins -

and this is Prince Charles very excited unicorn and lion loins -

Has this princely priapism

been discussed historically and I missed it all?

(My thanks to www.VanityFair.com for printing that last image without studying it in detail)

Resurrection

2011-04-25T01:20:00.005+14:00

Easter is not a sensible time to drive four hours on the A300 from Mt. Buninyong, and then the B110, and today I proved my senselessness.

The traffic into Queenscliffe crawled along for miles before the turnoff, slower than walking pace.

The ferry over to Sorrento was so packed that the movable mezzanine level was lowered, loaded and raised to cram 54 cars above and below

BUT

as He was risen and renewed on the third day when the stone was rolled away,

the 5pm sun setting over Geelong was my magical moment of reward,

and what at first looked Godly,

was merely our stratosphere struttin' its' stuff.

Use your Easter Monday to celebrate stirrers of every place and time - not just Christ, J., but Bradley Manning too, and every other provocateur The System tries to quash.

not easy being Queen

2011-04-21T02:40:00.001+14:00

The Queen was born

Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary

at 2.40am
on April 21 1926
at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair,

the home of her mother's parents,

the Earl and Countess of Strathmore.
She was the great-great-grandchild

of Queen Victoria, and she is Head of State,

the Armed Forces, the Commonwealth and

the Church of England, and

has been married to the Duke of Edinburgh

for more than 63 years.

Her Aries horoscope from Shelley von Strunckel via TATLER magazine's current issue says:

'You know that certain restrictive habits and activities must go, but feel stuck.'

Indeed.

I hope she has a happy birthday. If I were her I would string all the tiaras up my arms and laugh like a madwoman.

anodyne fail

2011-04-17T12:52:00.006+14:00

from The Age this morning:
'Social security and welfare account for 32 per cent of the federal budget. That's $115 billion a year - three times the education budget and twice the health budget.
The disability support pension alone, which is more generous and subject to fewer work tests than the dole, costs $13 billion, the fifth largest single Commonwealth expense.'
Now hang on a sec ...
That frightening figure of $115 billion above, is NOT the amount dispersed to the needy. It is in fact, the cost of welfare plus administering the amount dispersed to the needy.
It includes the cost of flying to Canberra, every single month, 300 Centrelink Managers, and their accommodation and expenses.
It also includes the cost of leasing Centrelink office buildings across the country. It includes the cost of fitting out their staff rooms with 3-door refrigerators, microwaves, and all equipment and supplies for morning and afternoon staff refreshment. It includes the cost of security systems for these buildings, and the cost of heating them in winter to a tropical standard.

It includes the cost of highly sophisticated computerised telephone systems for 100+ staff, so that when I clocked on at 8am and took the first call from the phone box on Coochiemudlo Island, and said
"good morning this is Annie, how can I help you?"
the caller could say
"me money's not in".
It includes the cost of running the stupendous software allowing Annie to instantly get onscreen every detail of that person's situation.

The '$115 billion' includes the stupendous cost of hiring Centrelink staff, who have a high burn-out rate, mainly due to the many abusive and obscene calls they take, that they know they cannot report to their manager (the one flown to Canberra every month for debriefing).

Centrelink staff are trained for 10 days intensely, by human-resource companies with criminal accounting practices, making a killing from their billing.

The $115B includes the cost of these Centrelink claims:
'We have over 300 Customer Service Centres Australia-wide, more than 500 Agents and Access Points in rural and remote areas and other specialist outlets.
Compensation advisory service - state-based Centrelink teams provide services for customers, solicitors and other organisations regarding compensation issues.'

It includes the cost of subsidising the wages of hundreds of Sudanese refugee men who work in slaughterhouses across regional Australia, and the cost of dozens of people employed to administer these refugees assimilation.

Is Julia's Labor government so resentful at their narrowest of electoral margins that they are turning on their traditional voters - the needy.
That '$115 Billion' is a deliberately misleading gross figure used to frighten the people who do work hard, into thinking they are being used, when they could equally feel philanthropic.
Governments of all countries rely on the majority of their electorate not examining any of their pronouncements, and the majority do not.

This links to a feature in The Age with profiles of some 'battlers', and the stories show that their 'battle' is mainly with not being very bright.
That returns the thread to our education system - the system The Age says gets an amount equal to only one third of our spend on Centrelink. Mike Moore would say "Hmmmmmmmmmmmm"

Divine retribution

2011-04-06T13:53:00.005+14:00

Roof collapses on abbatoir workers Herald Sun
Abattoir worker dies after roof collapses
Sydney Morning Herald - Stephanie Gardiner - ‎28 minutes ago‎
A man has died after a roof collapsed at an abattoir. NSW Hunter Valley emergency services attended the Primo Smallgoods abattoir ...

The voodoo continues to succeed. I do not repent. And I am weary of people mentioning that Adolf the Austrian was a vego. There are no vegetarians in the news pages of paed0philes, rap1sts, or guys who chuck their children from bridges. There are no vegetarians in the bowel cancer wards either.
La vache qui rit, and I, both have something to rit about today and I am riting like mad. A pox on all abbatoirs - they are all foreign owned too, as if you care.

Dairy cows have a rotten life, their calves are born when the frost is heavy on the grass, and ripped away from them so WE can have the milk which results. The male calves have a really bad time at the saleyards before they become the veal for your $12 Parma & Pot. The female calves retained to add to the herd, bawl all night for their mothers, so a clever farmer invented rubber gobstoppers for them. The Weekly Times is a horrific, but very political read if you dare try. Do not buy supermarket chain milk which rips off the farmers, because the less money the milk earns, the less care the herd gets.
I wish I had not gone for the Weekly Times link where this upset me -Cow damage slows CityLink traffic
Fkn foreign owned 'CITYLINK was forced to close the centre lane of the Domain Tunnel after a cow reared in a truck and it's head hit a low-clearance overhead sign.'
I SO HATE ALL TRUCK DRIVERS. MORONS.

Perigee Moon update

2011-03-22T11:41:00.008+14:00

UPDATE: Here is our moon, another time (6pm winter 2010) and place (Yeo Victoria 3249), taken with same lens and merely standing in the home paddock. It was red and hanging on top of the trees on the horizon of a paddock. It was much more impressive 'live', I can assure you.
For scale, the far left of this second image (same place and time) has a bonfire of tree-trunks in the paddock.

(Ann O'Dyne claims rights of/to these amateur 'snaps'.)

"When the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars,

then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars ... "
NASA has the tech talk -

'the Moon is still 356,577 km away. That is, it turns out, a distance of rare beauty'

... so when I captured this Perigee Moon image, 10pm Monday night in Ballarat, I didn't bother with Zoom on my camera.

read it and weep

2011-03-14T03:26:00.010+14:00

WordRapt, a commentor at my favourite online read which was lamenting a decline in bookshops, lead me to discover a Catalan artist - Ramon Casa i Carbo, who had one great picture and this is it.
This woman having a physical reaction to a yellow book.
I know the feeling.
The closing, despite my patronage, of McGill's Books which was in Elizabeth Street Melbourne for many decades, is extra sad because it was THE ONLY retailer of The Guardian in Victoria. Please be aware that every time you purchase printed material at a supermarket, you are causing the closure of newsagents which carry esoteric magazines and papers, that the supermarkets will never bother selling.
This is a situation which could be taken to the United nations organisation, if it was any use.

Style ? !

2011-03-08T23:22:00.020+14:00

This is how it goes:
Step One: Make a post linking back to the person who gave you the award.
Dear Elephant's Child, a Stylish Blogger herself, has dubbed me in her list of regard, and I thank her sincerely.
Step Two: Share seven random things about yourself:
I go mental over distressed animals.
I have six blogs.
I am a nomad.
I have bailed-out a person from the lock-up.
Been taken in for questioning in two cities ...
and have a convict ancestor.
Am an only child Virgo who married an only-child Virgo.

Step Three: Confer Stylish Blogger Award on 15 bloggers.
so
Here are my Fab Fifteen -
1 Great Southern Jayne
2 Miss Boynton
3 Hot Andrew
4 Gone Chocco
5 Stirrers Dream
6 Red Nomad OZ
7 Not Really Austrayan
8 Cazzie Don't Do Mornings
9 Confessing Food-Nazi
10 Petticoats And Chrome
11 Fen Into The Sound
12 Redoing The Undone
13 Deanna's WORD
14 Sherry's Too Much August
15 Elisabeth In Line

Step 4: Advise your recipients of their BlogHonour.

hold that baby

2011-03-02T12:00:00.003+14:00

Yesterday in Melbourne I got this photo of the Manchester Unity facade.
While there I also used an ATM which told me I had zero balance. That's not right, I thought, and pressed 'Withdraw Money' anyhow, and wandered off with my cash.
Today's news of the CommBank software snafu explains it all.

In Sydney there were insane scenes of crowds and cash, but bless his larcenous heart 'Sam of Marrickville got $40' he did not have in his account. $40. Sam seems to know 'context is everything'.

Here is that Manchester Unity facade in context:

In Melbourne 'A 20-year-old man was charged with dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception, and my first thought is that new prisons will have to be built if that law was properly applied for godssakes.

Just looked at my account balance and it shows a large balance with no evidence of yesterdays withdrawal.
I feel sorry for the executive in charge of the bank IT.

I roo the day

2011-02-26T12:27:00.007+14:00

Early morning and only 5 minutes drive from a shopping mall, 15 kangaroos grazing in the front yard of this house of which I am temporary guardian. They refuse to take direction so are not all in the photo. Two of them had a bit of a bitch-slap ...

... and then they all left.

(please click to enlarge any of these images)

The baby kanga could not jump the fence and was left behind, going up and down several times until it found a section of the wire it could squash through underneath. While fretting over all the other baby kangas abandoned beyond fences, I will be out there very soon, making that hole bigger .

Christchurch NZ

2011-02-22T18:23:00.002+14:00

"Residents are reporting bodies lying in the streets of Christchurch following this afternoon's magnitude 6.3 earthquake.
Police said fatalities had been reported at several locations and that two buses had been crushed by falling buildings. Christchurch mayor Bob Parker has declared a state of emergency.
Christchurch resident Jaydn Katene told the Herald: "We've had friends in town call us and say there are just bodies lying around; lots of dead bodies outside shops just lying there just covered in bricks.
When it hit we were knocked to our feet. Everything in the house fell down, nothing was left still standing. There's more damage than the first earthquake, the roads are completely torn up; sewage coming up and flooding. It's crazy.
The elderly are all crying. The next-door neighbours around us were all bawling their eyes out, it was horrible. People can't get out of their houses," said Mr Katene.
We've seen cars halfway sunken into the road. We've heard there's a bus which is sunken halfway into the road just around the corner. Buildings are half-collapsed everywhere. It smells horrible. The roads are packed with cars. There aren't enough police or ambulances. Houses are all collapsing. It's pretty shocking; a total warzone."

There is nothing I can say about this - sympathy to all in Christchurch, and the hope that no family of any of our blogpals have had loss or harm. I am house-sitting for someone who went to NZ at dawn today and hope he is in Wellington and safe. We are all clinging to a hurtling ball of molten rock, and should never forget it.

Patron faint

2011-02-14T02:48:00.011+14:00

St. Valentine was a Priest, martyred in 269 at Rome.
He is the Patron Saint of

fainting,
bee keepers,
engaged couples,
epilepsy,
plague,
and unrequited love.

Beechworth, Victoria

2011-02-08T14:41:00.010+14:00

As Hot Andrew Highriser did back in January, I too, had to photograph the heraldry above The Royal Arcade in the centre of Melbourne's CBD, and then I wondered how grateful those royals must have been, to allow the use of their very own coat-of-arms with Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense ... could it have been all the stonking great tons of gold we shipped back to The Empire?

Our commonwealth c-of-a has a sheep, a wheatsheaf and some goldmining tools, whereas the Royals just seem to have a lot of lions.

If AUS updated ours, it would have a cellphone surrounded by credit cards and barbecues.

I wish I had a coat-of-arms signifying the fabulousness I represent. It would have a keyboard au courant, surrounded by cats and winebottles possibly.
Last week I made my first visit to goldrush town Beechworth out in Victoria's North-East, and loved this coat-of-arms on an 1856 bank. Isn't the crouching lion just cuddly, and not even slightly looking like he will eat Skippy & The Roadrunner ...

(I do have some readers in other countries so will just explain for them that we Aussies diss our Commonwealth heraldry by referring to the kangaroo by the name of a TV show kanga, and to the emu as that beep-beep US-desert bird)

not so Bright

2011-02-07T22:54:00.008+14:00

Missed all the Melbourne flood drama while spending the week of rain drinking a lot on the deck of a cabin right on the banks of the Ovens River, just beyond Bright in the Victorian High Country. This photo is a zoom of our foggy mountain view, and I am sorry it does not include the friendly ducks which appeared every time we did.

We visited every winery and country bakery for miles, so it was Pies & Pinot all the way from (the Heritage Listed landscape of) Wandiligong, to Mudgegonga, Beechworth and Mt.Beauty. Country-baked pies are always superior, and the historic Hides Bakery in Benalla was worth two visits for their triumphs in pastry.

We saw a male lyrebird by the roadside as we went very slowly in deep fog on the winding road over to Mt.Beauty (which isn't called that for nothing), and here is my photo
of the raging Ovens River in the centre of Bright township, where, despite at least 10 signs warning not to swim, a man and his son about 9 years old were on rubber tyre tubes oblivious to the danger of being swept away. I hope you and your companion animals are all safe, dry and undamaged.

nothing to sneeze at

2011-01-13T20:43:00.007+14:00

Trying to be anodyne honestly, but I want to be virus free at the same time.

The cost of airborne infection, to We The People, is huge. Sensible use of

a proper handkerchief would save every dollar of it.

This infectious person always seems to be behind me on a tram, a train, a bus, or in any queue. If it was Sweden I could charge them with assault. A tiny balled-up paper tissue does not confine their germs from the air we share. Neither does that crooked knuckle they touch to their nose, after they sneeze, on the train, while they stare me down.
(image thanks to BetsyVintage.com I found via The Green Blog)

Are you free?

2010-12-29T17:26:00.004+14:00

It's been driving me to distraction every time I see his photo
and thankfully Vanity Fair magazine solved it for me.
Editor Graydon Carter pioneered the
'Separated At Birth' joke at SPY magazine back in the early 1980's.
Hopefully at the end of all the meaty Swedish legal ballsup, JA will also be able to say
"I'm free!".

nothing concrete to go on

2010-12-21T19:34:00.003+14:00

This is my photo of partially demolished giant silos of

Joe White Maltings.
100 years an employer in the small regional city of Ballarat, the company was recently subsumed by a foreign multi-national and closed down. The land sold for housing.

The people who used to work there will be lucky to find replacement jobs, so next time you find yourself assessing another human as a benefits parasite, ask yourself first, how did they get that way.

This sort of thing is happening all over OUR country that we used to own but now just rent grace-and-favour style.

Country roads

2010-11-19T18:46:00.005+14:00

Yesterday I was on the road from Shelford to Skipton and so was this mob of ewes and lambs.

I love the west (except for the part where the stock dies).

Just the ticket - 1966

2010-10-17T22:55:00.001+14:00

This is the swing-ticket,
and I still have the dress as well. It's a white crepe Dollybird dress.
Puff sleeves covered in rows of lace, covered buttons all down the front.
I wore it with white patent Mary Jane shoes bought in Regent Place.
Totally sweet Sixties. The Sixties I'm in now, are not so totally sweet that I can get more than an arm in it. But at least I am not alone, as model Pattie Boyd says in her recent memoir that she looks at some of her Sixties dresses and they appear to have been made to fit a doll. Dolly birds.

Amis a miss

2010-09-23T12:57:00.019+14:00

Recently I saw Roman Polanski's excellent film of The Ghost - the excellent novel of Robert Harris.
The protagonist is a hack writer, and in the establishing scenes, he is asked to 'just have a look' at a manuscript he would rather not, especially as he flicks swiftly to the final page to register with horror that it is 'page 624'.

This came to mind as I slammed shut the 470 pages of The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis.
Amis is, apparently, 'the finest English fiction-writer of his generation', but I suspect that quote really means 'of all the English writers born in 1948' - which must be no accolade at all. I have sought this novel merely because a character in it is a renamed Christopher Hitchens whose memoir Hitch 22 I have just read twice and simply wallowed in every phrase, every clause, every quote.

Any book-cover quotes must be read with caution. On the Amis cover, Jonathan Rabin of The Observer raves - 'first rate, inventive, shocking' (Jonno must not have read any Elmore Leonard, poor thing) and The New Statesman says of Amis "he is original". Pretty funny to read that after reading the author's Acknowledgements of quoting throughout his novel: Ted Hughes, Eric Hobsbawm, Franz Kafka, Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, William Blake, William Shakespeare, (I may have left one or two quotees out of my list, due to my bored state) but Jane Austen is quoted so extensively that she deserves a cover credit.

Amis refers obliquely to 'Cielo Drive' and at least credits his reader with that level of cultural frame of reference, which reference brings me back to the film of 'The Ghost', titled The Ghost Writer in case the audience is too dumb to think.
Do pay attention, when you see it, as you must, to the nerdy lumpenfrau receptionist in the Norman Batesian motel, as she is played by Morgane Polanski.
The other joke in the very bleak film is the line by Our Writer to the marvellous Pierce Brosnan playing an energetic ex-PM : " oh I know a writer on The Guardian who works out".

Christopher Hitchens writes frequently in Hitch 22 of his love for Amis, so MA must be OK on a personal level, but I wouldn't give any of his novels as a gift.
A bit silly of this Nobody from Nowhere criticising an apparently Great Novelist, but I am encouraged by my UK blogpal Prof. Norm Geras, who is brave enough to similarly ask 'why oh why do people want to read Anita Brookner stories?'.

I love Norm, and I met Pants at his place. She gave me the Hitchens book so I love her too.

(For those of you who read 'Cielo Drive' and could not immediately understand, it is the address where Mr. Polanski's bride, and his unborn son Paul Polanski, were viciously stabbed to death by lunatics allowed to roam free.)

Virtually de luxe re 24-8-48

2010-08-24T21:47:00.012+14:00

Welcome friends - this is a fabulous Virgo blogger party and

we are drinking the Dom Perignon -
and it won't run out

and this is our venue - a garden restaurant at cocktail time. Virgoan Food Nazi approves of our other divine treats -

The one and only elegant professor of melody and rhyme, Mr Randy Newman

is blessing us with a recital of his music -
I Love L.A.,
Mama Told Me Not To Come,
Rednecks,
Simon Smith And His Amazing Dancing Bear, culminating in the irresistible
'You Can Leave Your Hat On', and we are singing and dancing and laughing.

When Mr Newman leaves, we console ourselves with karaoke requested by Virgoan Miss Boynton. Plenty of Torch Songs and some Cole Porter too - What a swelegant elegant party this is, and after our virtual good time,
here is your Thank-you-for-coming lolly-bag.

On the road

2010-08-16T00:59:00.001+14:00

Leaving ...

I will miss the chickens.

I will miss the kangaroos.

I will not miss the creeps who logged away the kangaroo dormitory, and hope they go bankrupt for gouging the earth and spewing diesel fumes 12 hours every day.

I will miss these calves

that I meet every morning at the mailbox.

(poor things live 12 freezing weeks before slaughter so some dolt can get bowel cancer having a 'Parma & Pot $12' at the pub).

I will really miss seeing the sun the very moment the horizon meets it in the morning - it is magically different every time:

... and now I am in Ballarat the city built on gold, leaving slag heaps everywhere

my own Midsomer Murder

2010-07-29T19:55:00.013+14:00

This is Cairn Cottage, on Market Square, in Hanslope Buckinghamshire.

Hanslope is in The Domesday Book.

My ancestor was the cottage tenant in 1779, leasing it from the Lord of the Manor Edward Watts, who owned everything in Hanslope, except the two houses opposite this one, owned by my ancestor's brother - the local butcher.

The Hanslope church of St. James The Great has a huge spire and my lot William Law and Frances were married there in 1728,

their son Richard was married there in 1777 to another Frances and those two were the cottage tenants.

They had a daughter named Frances and her wild sons Elijah and Eli were swinging machinery smashers in the Aylesbury Swing Riots of 1830.

So Eli, my grandfather's grandfather got a free cruise to Tasmania for that one (his brother got 2 months in the local slammer).

After his pardon he came to Victoria, where his daughter married in 1859 and had my great grandmother named ... Frances.

(Clearly my ancestor's had a names issue. My other side had this guy Robert Lyon Milne b.1854 Adelaide, who had used several variations of it and is well-documented. I must discuss this with Bwca Brownie and Marshall Stacks.)

The Lord Of Hanslope Manor's grandson fared a lot worse than our above tenants - his was a mid-summer murder in 1912, walking home from church with his wife when he was murdered in front of her. Maybe C.I. Barnaby's grandfather investigated it.

The victim had the same name as his father and grandfather. You could do that when one's circle was only the immediate village and they all knew who was who; and this was a snip in the days before credit cards connected Debt to ID and made it more meaningful.

Here's a photo of my great-grandmother Frances with her husband William Brown and his brother George Brown.

They were all born in far western Victoria in the 1860's. Frances never set foot in a pub, and nobody ever mentioned the ex-con.

Steer me through the fog

2010-07-23T04:08:00.005+14:00

These steers are weary as I am of the endless fog - this photo of them and their friends the cattle egrets was taken in the afternoon yesterday. Everyone is very relaxed so I guess the egrets have eaten all the ticks off the steers and are just hanging out.

Yeo woe woah.

2010-07-14T02:03:00.013+14:00

This is where I am. See on the right, the piles of bulldozed trees?

Now see them at 9:30PM tonight, on fire, with winds gusting at 44 kph, with the white light on the left being the verandah light of the house where I will not be taking off my boots and jeans to sleep tonight.

I mean, could you sleep soundly next to this? -

I will be watching Le Tour de France all night thanks to SBS, and through the window I will keep an eye on all those floating embers. Geez.

our planet

2010-07-11T10:53:00.005+14:00

8am Friday 9th July - the paddock next door, Yeo 3249.

A year ago, this was a forest of pines,

all of them silently, constantly, converting carbon-dioxide to oxygen while kangaroos slept on spongy dry layers of forest-floor pine-needles ...
and now it's not.
I took this next photo at a later time-of-day,
from the exact same spot, facing the opposite direction-

on The Barongarook

2010-06-28T04:04:00.009+14:00

Until August, this C154 across The Barongarook is the road home for me.

Scot Hugh Murray landed from Geelong in 1837 to be the first European in the area belonging to the Coladjin Aborigines. The two earlier 1837 arrivistes, Gellibrand and Hesse, simply disappeared.

They must have been less friendly than Hughie was to the Coladjin tribe, who allowed him to build his 3rd Colac house on this hill, which he named Barongarook House, and lived there until his death in 1869. On the right of the photo, white rails frame a marker of the place.

Nothing will mark my own stay here, except happy chickens.

way out west

2010-06-19T23:11:00.000+14:00

This week I drove the C146 and enjoyed, as I always do, the sight of this spire emerging from distant trees and telling me I have reached Rokewood where my Tuxedo-Cat Miss Kitty lives on a farm with my friend.

The church under this spire was built in 1862 by

Edinburgh-boy Alexander Davidson who

had eloped here with his cousin Eugenia Cooper, to avoid

a scandal and be married by their uncle the Revd. John Cooper.

They built themselves a substantial cottage in Rokewood and as well as his uncle’s church under that steeple, he designed bluestone mansions right across Victoria’s Western District for all the rich graziers competing with each other for the most rooms and biggest ballroom -
Kurruc-a-Ruc and Wurrok both in Rokewood, ,
Mooleric, and Barwon Park in Winchelsea,
Barunah Plains in Inverleigh, Narrepumelap in Wickliffe, Darra at Meredith,
Titanga and Gala at Lismore, and just up the road from me -Yeowarra which was originally called just YEO -

Photos of all these rockpiles can be found at the National Trust Register

And here’s a fact for Hot Andrew - Between June 1885 and March 1887 Davidson held the appointment of Architect for the Melbourne Tramway Trust and designed the MMTB building at 48 Nicholson St Fitzroy.

In the centre of Rokewood with a lovely view of the church spire (and the pub), Wilbur the hog accepts the admiration of passing travellers. I finally stopped to capture his magnificence for your enjoyment He knows I don’t eat ham or bacon or pork.

fickle finger of fate

2010-06-12T12:14:00.002+14:00

My DELL laptop with Windows XP has died of an unfixable 'fatal error' and has been replaced with this Toshiba rubbish with frkn Windows7 I hate and now I cannot upload a photo to a blogpost and I am just as unhappy right now as Andy Muirhead, creator of beloved ABCTV show The Collectors.
The only thing I have to say about his terrible situation is encapsulated in this news:
"Australian Customs says it will apologise to a Darwin man who spent three nights in jail for bringing bottles of shampoo and conditioner into Australia.
Neil Parry was arrested last Friday at Darwin Airport after a test allegedly found he had 1.6 kilograms of MDMA, also known as ecstasy, in his toiletries.
His boat and the houses of two of his friends were also searched by police.
Mr Parry was given bail after posting $10,000 surety.
But further testing on Wednesday revealed the substances were just shampoo and conditioner and all charges were dropped yesterday morning.
Customs says it will write to Mr Parry to express its regrets.
Mr Parry says the incident has ruined his reputation and he is considering legal action."
Here at O'Dyne Inc., we hope and suspect that these incompetent Customs badge-wavers have cousins on the Feds Computer Stasi. The charges state the alleged offence occurred "between 15th May and 6th June". Recent, yet they were right onto his computer. This aspect puzzles my analytical Virgo mind.

While we wait till August for the evidence on Andy, you all watch what you are guugling for. I looked online for a culotte pattern one time, and got some very evil photos in image results.
Must go, I hear jackboots on the verandah ...

My Avalon

2010-05-27T13:02:00.004+14:00

Autumn dawn over Yeo by Ann O'Dyne.

No husband, no partner, no kids,
I'm Queen Guinevere (on the skids).

No wheels, and no home, this region I roam,
It's not good, it's not bad,
It's just different.

signs of life

2010-05-21T03:18:00.002+14:00

Even in the middle of nowhere, my natural habitat, choices are offered if one sees the signs.

Eucalypt, Yeo, 7am.

2010-05-21T02:59:00.009+14:00

In a foggy Autumn dawn, from the front door of my present haven, this gum tree soars over the old dairy shed.

The realisations provoked by this sight, put me back in my tiny place in Time and on planet Earth, as it revolves, for the moment, in dark space, relying on a flaming sun for each new day.

Later, a pair of Gang-Gang cockatoos landed in it, getting my attention with their very funny call, which sounds just like a big old creaking door - 'waaarrrk!'.

(Of course I didn't get a photo ... I found this one thanks to www.pixdaus.com.)

Delena cancerides indeed!

2010-05-19T18:55:00.013+14:00

I'm Winter-ing in The Otway Forest area and keeping the fire roaring is a crucial daily activity. Last night I learned to never gather logs from the woodstack at dusk, even if spiders don't upset you as they do so many others.
When I grabbed a log it absolutely seethed with freaked out Huntsmans.
The things you see when you don't have the darn camera!
So just now I searched online for a photo of 'Huntsman spider nest' and found this sad story:

'Dr Linda Rayor, of Cornell University, a Visiting Fellow at Canberra's ANU, says her study of Huntsman spiders (Delena cancerides) has shown it is the only one of the 1039 known huntsman species, that lives a social life with family members, and, of the 40,000 known spider species only 1% are social like that, and this species one of only two that does not spin a web.
Rayor believes the communal lifestyle has been thrust upon the spider by a lack of suitable accommodation in the wild.
With an adult female weighing up to 4.5 grams and with a leg spread that can exceed 14 centimetres, Rayor says the spider is limited in finding large enough spaces to live.
"They are trying to fit themselves into retreats under the bark of wattle trees and it turns out there are remarkably few of these habitats around," she says.
"The colony is producing all these offspring that want to start their own colony but they have no where to go."
The nest can be home to more than 100 spiders with up to 30 sub-adults, but the family ties only bind as long as the mother of the spider nest is alive.
Rayor says the mother defends the nest against predators and seals it off from attack, brings prey home to feed the family and generally keeps the peace.
On her death however, she says, familial loyalty is forgotten.

Because of the lack of habitats there is intense competition between sexually mature sisters to inherit the family site from the mother.

"I've seen sisters in fights to the death," Dr.Rayor says.'

( Gosh I hope I didn't start a Huntsgirl death fight when I dropped the log.)

Then, my Inbox had, in that amazing coincidental way the world unfolds, my usual newsletter from

REMO's Store in Sydney featuring

a Spider Catcher!

I hope all my new friends stay outside in the logpile tonight.

acCumulated Kyneton

2010-05-18T00:37:00.009+14:00

Autumn in Kyneton Victoria copyright Ann O'Dyne.

Joni Mitchell looked at clouds and saw ‘rows and flows of angel hair and ice-cream castles in the air’.
The technical names for cloud formations are conventionally Latin words chosen to match characteristic shapes, and so when weather-watchers recently identified a new type of cloud that has hitherto escaped classification, the name proposed for it was the Latin word asperatus, meaning ‘roughened’.

*goes off singing a beloved composition* ...

David 'asperatus' Ruffin's -
'I've got sunshine, on a cloudy day,
With my girl.
I've even got the month of May,
With my girl ... '

Now please do visit the absolutely enjoyful Cloud Appreciation Society for an evanescent good time. The founder named his child Cirrus.

(thanks to Chambers Dictionary blogspot.com/ for some of the text above)

way out west

2010-05-05T22:32:00.001+14:00

This is my late Grandmother and her children in a paddock somewhere near Hamilton Victoria in the early 1930's. The photo is from her album and is labelled 'Smithy', so I assume it is Sir Charles Kingsford Smith. One of those happy children is my father, now 87, and right now he is unbearable.

Today when I took his car for service, the garage people told me that back in January when he told them I was coming to take care of him, they thought I would only last a week.

just sayin'. *stomps off looking for empathy*

all just anodyne here

2010-05-01T11:08:00.003+14:00

This is my photo of a gorgeous baby alpaca that I looked after while the owners were on holiday.

Note it is wearing a tiny Drizabone coat. Mother Agnes is the tall red alpaca left of the group.

The proper name for a baby alpaca is 'cria', so put that on your Scrabble board for free.

Last Impressions

2010-04-28T01:51:00.007+14:00

Arrangement in chrome and ochre, Bendigo 2010, © Ann O’Dyne.

These yellow roadcases carried valuable paintings from Woollahra, NSW, to the Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, for
Frederick McCubbin ‘Last Impressions 1907-17’

70 works depicting Melbourne and Mount Macedon (where McCubbin lived at ‘Fontainebleu’) have been curated by Dr. Anna Gray from private collections and all Australia’s major galleries.
Hanging Rock is in McCubbin country, and to enhance your gallery experience, Peter Weir’s film Picnic At Hanging Rock is on the big screen nearby at Eaglehawk’s Star Cinema ( the one with sofa-seating).
Mark your diary Saturday 29th May, and hit the Calder Highway early enough to see the paintings before the picture starts at 2pm

(picnic baskets included in the $22 ticket and drinks at bar prices) .
Adjacent to the gallery, the Botanical Gardens currently hosts The Bats, and on a footpath I saw this sleeping (I hope) baby -
for scale -... dear little Haunted Creature Of The Night.

Onya bike Carl

2010-04-20T13:26:00.011+14:00

Babyface Nelson was a gangster spawned by US alcohol prohibition about 1930, and his crimes distracted the less-affluent class of society, from the privations of The Great Depression.

Recently, the activities of our very own baby-faced criminal has distracted tabloid society. Carl*Williams was bred into crime and could not take any other path in life, or out of it.
We can only hope his child escapes this heritage.

The photograph is copyright, and I thank the owner for the use.

This image should not be lifted and used without permission of the owner, whose name I will give on enquiry.

A family friend expressed dismay at the fact that Williams was killed in jail.

''It's supposed to be maximum security, isn't it?''

Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner said it was ''too early to say'' whether the killing was linked to a report in the Herald Sun yesterday saying Victoria Police had paid Dhakota Williams' private school fees.

I wonder why it is too early to say? The resourceful murderer dismantled an exercise bike to use as a weapon. Even I could have seen the potential, so I assume prison management was complicit.

"Williams' ex-wife Roberta arrived at the prison last night.

A man who answered her mobile phone said ''f--- off, you goose''. (from The Age report.)

best foot forward

2010-02-17T12:33:00.006+14:00

another update: ADRIANNA SASSOON has a beautiful blog with the best Roger Vivier shoe post ever and I stole the above photo from her to show a lace shoe from 50 years ago.
Of course they're Parisian. I wish my social life fit these magic shoes.
(from www.coppeliapique.com/)
Update photo of whole wearer of magic shoes, since The Blogger On A Cast Iron Balcony rightly pointed out the legs were invisible in the first one.

Queenscliffe - Sorrento

2010-01-18T00:03:00.011+14:00

Today I crossed Port Phillip Bay.
This is my snap of the other ferry passing on the opposite crossing, and that protrusion on the horizon is Arthur's Seat. Sometimes you can see it on this webcam at The Rip.
The wind off The Rip today was beyond description, The Spirit Of Tasmania crossed our bow, and the south end of the Mornington Peninsula was absolutely jumping. OZONE was in the air.
UPDATE: here is photo of Kath Blurb From The Burbs Lockett coming through The Heads on The Spirit of Tasmania.

from my window

2010-01-13T23:28:00.002+14:00

The day after we endured 44.3 degrees celsius and a howling wind, the sky blushes over
Tarndwarncoort hill, occupied since 1840, origin of Polwarth sheep bred out of the first Merinos to leave Spain. 'Merino' means 'fugitive without a home', as so many of us are.

@RustyRockets

2009-12-29T11:58:00.014+14:00

He wrote a genuine (no ghost writer) autobiography, My Booky Wook, which is more than most of them can claim.
He was brilliant to stand-out from a stand-out bunch in the recent St.Trinians movie .
He does stand-up comedy.
He basically played himself in Forgetting Sara Marshall and stole the movie.

I just adore @Rusty - follow him on Twitter and be beguiled.

Not only could he look like Jaqueline Onassis if he tidied up, but also, he has a website - RussellBrand.com. He has just bought a house in Beverly Hills with Katy P so I would not be surprised if he does clean up his appearance. That's what happened to Billy Connolly when he moved there. LA will do that to you. Both of them obsessive character types (Mr Connolly is a recovering alcoholic) and another one is also one of my favourite dark funny clever bad boys Robert Downey Jnr. Of course if you're reading this, you may have an obsession with your keyboard/ISP nexus, and don't look to me for help either.
This post inspired by a discussion on obsessions at Elisabeth's SixthInLine blog.

birdy num num

2009-12-22T14:21:00.004+14:00

After yesterdays barren North view, here is the south side of the house where four yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos are eating unripened peaches. Well, trashing the tree actually. When I got too close they flew and it was beautiful - they are huge and very glossy and their wings flap slowly, wingtips almost meeting underneath their body before the upward flap - it was beautiful.
THIS is where I am, photo taken from cemetery on south side. There was a stone church on the block between this house and the cemetery but only some corner stones remain as it was destroyed in the 1944 bushfires.And here is another pic of the black cockies hanging in the peach tree.
(click for big beady black eye view).

My view

2009-12-22T02:27:00.002+14:00

The horizon is the Princes Highway at Warncoort. Eight horses have 5 of the acres. They don't belong to my host, but to a madwoman. I spoke with her on the telephone to ask if she was going to bring them some feed.
"I've got a bad leg." was her excuse. Claims she is a dressage coach.
and I'm Liz Taylor I should have replied.

Le Style Moderne

2009-12-15T16:46:00.005+14:00

This building is the corner of Murray Street and Grant Street.
Space-age.
This next building in Corangamite Street just 2 doors from Murray Street, has been ruined over time, but the glass-brick tower survives -If you like art-deco style buildings, do visit Art Deco & Moderne, Melbourne, and Walking Melbourne for great pictures and discussions.

Turbine Travel 2.

2009-12-08T18:41:00.019+14:00

Main Street Birregurra 7th December.
The two MACK bogies pulling the monster, were supported by another two pushing at the back. All were yoked together with iron rods.
The turbine was suspended in the centre of the trailer, and apparently, when it achieves it's destination, is lowered into place from the trailer, on exactly the correct position.

Origin Energy is behind all of this, and Singapore is behind Origin. Lampson are the freighters - just Guugle image them.
At least 50 people suddenly appeared at 9pm last night at my corner of Warncoort, to watch it turn onto the Princes Highway, and this one admits to the thrill of proximity to a mechanical mastodon.

Please Click-to-enlarge this photo - far left are the lead Mack bogies, just left of centre, for scale, there is a green highway sign partially obscured by the turbine itself, then the 34 rows of eight-wheels before the two rear bogies far right, and pushing the thing toward Camperdown, taking all night for a trip that is 25 minutes in a car.

Can I stress that this pic looks like a stream of traffic but is just one vehicle.
Beyond this pic, there were about 10 support vehicles - one a mobile light sign superfluously saying MASSIVE LOAD.

Others have loaded better pix at their Flicker.

more power to Birre

2009-12-07T19:10:00.007+14:00

In Birregurra this morning, this massive THING occupies the entire main street.
FIVE gleaming new MACK prime movers and their 256-wheeled trailer articulated in two places and loaded with a turbine travelling from

North Carolina to the Mortlake power station.
It moves westward tonight at 9pm and will pass this house 6 kms later.
Pictures may be the equivalent of 1000 words, but I have no words to convey to you the sheer massiveness of this thing. Boys of all ages will line Murray Street Colac tonight, to witness this walking-pace uni-procession. Such a boy-thing.
History of Mortlake, Western Victoria

Wreck the rink

2009-11-11T18:55:00.000+14:00

Thanks to Leo at TheChive.com for the derby demon image above, and thanks to the derbutantes for this delight -
Gosh I love a good sub-culture.

With a clear recollection of the LA T-Birds Mexican spitfire

Little Ralphie Valladeres ramming through the pack

when roller derby was regular fare on Melbourne TV in 1960, I canardly wait till

The Derbytantes Brawl Rocks The 'Rat on 29th November.

I wouldn't miss it for the world.

Rough-housing and
great clothing choices are the key elements of the derby dames.

Get a look at The Nutcrackers team.

If you don't get to the Rat Wreckery, try to rent a dvd of Raquel Welch's

killer Kansas City Bombers movie (the

girl version of the fabulous Slap Shot)

it will get you in the frame to enjoy Drew Barrymore's first directorial effort WHIP IT

out here soon, and you don't have to thank me for this alert to the zeitgeist.

Just remember you read it here before Catherine Deveny columns it.

Bunker Hill update

2009-10-29T13:33:00.007+14:00

So hot today the kangaroos went into the dam (click for zoom-in).
That's the 6AM view West from my bed in Western Victoria that I woke up to this morning (just as I saw a fox). The Waubra wind turbines are on the horizon and have red flashing lights in the night. Below is the view from the table I'm sitting at now. My week in the paddocks is done and I was loathe to leave.

Meanwhile over atMarshall Stacks there is evidence of the innocence of Colin Hay.

Blogger On A Cast Iron Balcony

2009-10-24T12:04:00.004+14:00

Overlooking the marina at Cannes 1976. This photograph shows a person who has just eaten their first ever croissant, and bowl of milk coffee. Later that day she did a favour for Rockin Reggie Vincent who played on 'School's Out' and he hugged her. Not a bad Brush-With-Fame. Please tell me all about yours ...

Regional Art Deco

2009-10-07T22:24:00.011+14:00

This is the frock salon of Walter Davis in the Bridge Mall of Ballarat.
A symphony of silver and black.
Inside the store has pressed Wunderlich metal walls, and all the original old cabinetry like glove drawers and the glass doors on the cabinets where lovely gowns once hung, and a row of chandeliers for lighting. Ballarat Courier's photo of the interior. Follow link for their 2004 story.
This is what the facade looked like in 1938 when Ballarat went crazy for it's centenary -

good old days indeed,

as this is yesterday's unglamorous and chilly street scene.

09-09-09

2009-09-09T12:42:00.006+14:00

NINE
Deep Space NINE
The Law Of NINES
Revolution No: 9
and he was born on the 9th -

dear Dr. Winston O'Boogie said of Revolution No 9

"I think it was the best thing I've ever done".

(I should have cropped the murderer out of that picture. dear John.)

THE Rolling Stone

2009-08-30T21:06:00.007+14:00

1. Brian Jones asked Mick Jagger if he would like to join HIS band.
2. Brian was a masterful and innovative musician.
3. The dreadful behaviour of his reputation was clearly an undiagnosed brain disease*.
4. Resentful of Brian's hedonistic lifestyle they witnessed while renovating his house, some lowclass builders murdered him.
There's a book which inspired a film, and today some new evidence.

'Officially, Jones drowned, aged 27, in his pool at Cotchford Farm, Hartfield, East Sussex, on July 2, 1969, allegedly "under the influence of drink and drugs".
An inquest recorded a verdict of death by misadventure, even though the post-mortem report said there were no illegal drugs in the star’s body, just the equivalent of three-and-a-half pints of beer.'

* The Terry Rawling's book linked above, describes the erratic behaviour that caused the other Stones to cease coping with Brian. It sounded to me like a rerun of the Dudley Moore situation:

"On 30 September 1999, Moore announced that he was suffering from the terminal degenerative brain disorder progressive supranuclear palsy, some of whose early symptoms were so similar to liquor intoxication"

(from the wiki on D.M.)

The Rollling Stones have not been musically interesting without Brian.

His fans will be pleased if this new investigation removes the impression that he fell in his pool while out of his head.

Gorgeous Photography

2009-08-06T12:57:00.013+14:00

Feeding our spiritual health is just as important as eating for physical health,

and visual beauty is everywhere to find.
Even in pigs.
I love pigs.

I don't eat them either.

This dear Babe of a piglet is a

Gloucestershire Old Spot .

The breed is known for having a strong maternal instinct and because of this, the lowlifes who factory-farm pigs, tried to add this strain to the less glorious pigs they torture.

This picture was made by Jo Sax in London for The Times as part of a set illustrating jewellery. Do follow the link for the beautiful mouse peeping out of a sparkly evening purse.

Put some joy in your heart.

If Jez Coulson* thinks it's good, that's all you need to know.

(* he said so in a comment at my previous post: Tiara for CopperWitch's birthday)

Maximum RnB

2009-07-19T12:54:00.012+14:00

This post came
and then went
to F.G. Marshall-Stacks.
To those who get this via a feed, my apologies for missing the intro and the beat.

blame it on the talent

2009-06-26T14:25:00.005+14:00

If you don't get up and dance when you hear
Blame It On The Boogie, then you must not be breathing.
We have to thank him for that pleasure.

The sad news of his death today, makes me contemplate the poor parenting he had, his incompetent medical providers, and those poor kids.

In 1983 Michael Jackson won

13 Billboard Awards,
5 Billboard Video Awards and
was Rolling Stone's Artist of the Year.
1984 he deservedly won 8 American Music Awards,
2 American Video Awards,
5 Billboard Magazine Year End Awards, and
4 Canadian Black Music Awards.
1984 Best Performance Video, Best Choreography and Viewers Choice at the first MTV Video Music Awards show and
EIGHT of his 12 Grammy nominations.
The success of the Thriller album commercially also rejuvenated a slumping music industry that at the time hadn't seen an album with sales numbers like it for nearly five years.

******** A week later:
His burial looks like it is going to be a media armageddon.

His father and his plastic surgeon butchers, and that incompetent 'physician' with him when he died, should be buried too.

2nd UPDATE 16 July: Today's news mentions a homicide charge because
A SURGICAL-ANAESTHETIC WAS USED FOR MICHAEL's INSOMNIA !
Please follow this link to the use of Propofol on MJ. Why did I immediately remember the death of Heath Ledger and it's link to insomnia drugs ? Was he Propofol-ed by some murderous quack too?

Can The CAN !

2009-06-19T03:18:00.002+14:00

The Canberra Press Gallery Annual Midwinter Ball.
What a night.
Our Deputy Prime Minister
was there with
Her Minister For Coiffure & Blokes Affairs.
(that WAS him in the photo above)

Our Fearless Leader arrived with 25 kgs-less-wife.
The Intern For Womens Affairs did
a bit of groping and has now resigned.
Peter Costello missed it though.

Pity, as he will have to follow one of those links to read

about the journos choir singing

'The Leader Up The Back'

Fairytale Audrey

2009-06-08T03:33:00.004+14:00

A booky-blogger - Me and my big mouth, says this is his favourite photo of St.Audrey of Hepburn and he gets no argument from me

He also mentions Harry Lime as swine:

Harry Pigg, the only surviving brother from the Big Bad Wolf attacks, has set up business as a private detective in Grimmtown, only things aren't going too well.
Down on his luck, with bills to pay and no clients in sight the outlook is poor.
But then in walks local businessman Aladdin who needs someone to help him track down an old lamp.
What follows is a case of nursery-rhyme noir.
Funny, thrilling and always entertaining, Harry Pigg is an old breed of hero for a new generation.
It's as if Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney had walked into the middle of a bedtime story. A comedy caper for all ages. The first in a major new series.
The author, Bob Burke lives in Ireland. This is his first novel.

(That's the book-rap at Amazon.com and it appears to be suitable for children of all ages)

Mediabonic Plague

2009-05-28T12:22:00.010+14:00

UPDATE: this post was made before 1000 people here were diagnosed.
Get yourselves over to my Melbourne pal Health Trip where there is a link to

Medical Journal of Australia’s online report this week
”Swine flu update: bringing home the bacon”,

several characteristics of this virus have been observed:
- on average there is an incubation period of 3-4 days between exposure to the virus and onset of symptoms

- in the US over a third of cases have diarrhoea and vomiting along with the usual symptoms such as a sore throat and malaise
* * * * * * *
The whole thing is a gift for the eedjit meeja.
We all say we have 'flu, when really we only have a Swine-of-a-cold.
All Influenza strains can kill infants and the elderly ALL the time fer chrissakes.
AND our eedjit govt could have kept this particular strain of H1N1 flu out of the country by giving masks to all new arrivals and instructing them to wear for a week. That simple, and god knows they had all the warning time in the world.

We can only hope that the whole thing will bring about something I have wanted for years -
1. an increased understanding that sneezing and coughing really, really spreads your germs onto other people who then get sick in turn; and

2. a pissy little scrunched up paper tissue is NO USE in public - you must carry proper handkerchiefs for coughing on buses.

I brought this image from a UK blogger who wrote a great post on Dirty Dancing which is worth a click-through.

Your homework on this topic is to find and view

Panic In The Streets: a great old

B-movie with Richard Widmark saving New Orleans from a pneumonic plague.

"this goes to 11 ... "

2009-05-06T14:30:00.007+14:00

Marshall in England first developed amps for
Pete Townshend and John Entwistle in the mid 1960's.

Marshall amps appeared at Melbourne gigs c.1966 -
Stan Rogers of The Adderley-Smith Blues Band
recalls -
"WE WERE approached, by a new amplifier company to test their amplifiers in actual performances. Our mandate was
to try as hard as we could to blow them up.
Every Monday I would take them back and get a new set,
... and I am talking about a wall of amplifiers and speakers,
the full width of the stage of The Catcher.
That was the beginning of Marshall in Australia."
Later, -
in the 1970s the band Blue Oyster Cult -

On Your Feet Or On Your Knees' - "this is what a true live album sounds like, because it was taped and not cleaned up. You can smell the people, the smoke, the beer, the amps, etc.. I just wish the young music fans could be exposed to BOC, but unfortunately MTV killed this kind of Rock, and in turn killed the truth"

used an entire wall of full-stack Marshall Amplifiers ...

read details via - Gareth Owen on STACK EVOLUTION.
and:
the entire sub-culture culminates gloriously in

The Wonder That Is SPINAL TAP

oh ROCK ON.

sad verdict on Phil Spector

2009-04-14T14:17:00.003+14:00

"teenage genius who rose to become,
for a short and incandescent moment,
the most successful producer in rock and roll"

"He found his salvation in music"
writes Mick Brown, in The Guardian.

Many found their salvation in his music, his Wall Of Sound between them and the bad stuff, and today their sadness spans the music-loving world.

Having linked to a superior British music writer above, I will quote an American writer lifted from If Charlie Parker ... blog, on 'Music':

"And, of course, that is what all of this is - all of this: the one song,
ever changing, ever reincarnated,
that speaks somehow from and to and for
that which is ineffable within us and without us,
that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom,
that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on,
senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of
mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and
fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs - that song, endlesly reincarnated -
born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan,
or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it.
That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses,
that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train,
that Rocket '88', that Buick 6 - same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness."

-- Nick Tosches, 'Where Dead Voices Gather'

I'm nobody in Nowhere, tapping this out and weeping for The Music, but I know that simultaneously, really important writers are tapping out their Really Important view of The Man Who Built Walls Of Sound.
I hope one of them mentions that as well as creating the soundtrack of our life,
Mr Spector saved Tina Turner from Ike.

'the wordless blue moan' indeed.

Out to sea - Rhys and me

2009-04-11T13:11:00.000+14:00

In 1964 my favourite music was by Little Walter, Howlin Wolf, SonnyBoy Williamson and Junior Wells. How does this come about in a baby girl in rural Victoria? Via The Beatles and the Rolling Stones mentioning those artists in press interviews of course.
By 1966 I was in the big city and 'Rhythm and Blues' was the Mod musical currency. Soul baby.

So yesterday, 43 years later, enthralled by the 129 wonderful minutes of The Boat That Rocked, and recognising two bars of Junior Wells's 'Snatch It Back And Hold It' ... underscoring a plot point perfectly, I just felt 17 again

Mods Gods featured in this film -
All Day And All Of The Night - Dave & Ray Davies
Friday On My Mind - Easybeats (Vanda & Young)
We Gotta Get Outta This Town - Eric Burdon & The Animals
For Your Love -The YardBirds
Dancin In The Street - Martha & The Vandellas
These Arms Of Mine - Otis
Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) -Darlene Love
The Stones - Lets Spend The Night Together,
Jimi Hendrix,
and of course Miss Dusty Springfield.

To me, a negative Movie Show review is just a challenge.

Xan somebody reviewing for The Guardian called it 'pallid'.

Variety-the-showbiz-bible, said it was 'too long'.

WHAT WOULD ANY OF THEM KNOW?

None of them was a hip Mod teen in Melbourne 1966.

The Boat That Rocked was wonderful.

Nighy was wonderful.

Rhys Ifans was wonderful.

The music was wonderful.

The editing was too.

The 129 minutes not too long for anybody who first heard all that music when it was in it's chronological cultural context. Please do treat yourself to this film, and don't waste your money by expecting it to be a documentary, as it is in the mold of an Ealing comedy, the popular cinema of that era. It has a nod to Richard Lester's Sixties cinema-style. You will recognise that dippy secretary of Doc Martin's in it, it has Ken Branagh positively CHANNELLING Ealing comedy-era Peter Sellers characterisation in
I'm Alright Jack-
Ken is cast as the meanie again - he was the bad guy in the St.Trinian's film - is it because nobody likes him?

Did I mention that Rhys Ifans and Philip Seymour Hoffman give us Academy Award-winning performances?.
Rhys may have been catalytically-converting his angst over silly-Sienna, and the plot gives a nod to that kind of thing. You won't be seeing her in any Richard Curtis films I can tell you now.
Rhys plays a cool DJ.Melbourne Mods didn't suffer the deprivation of London's.
We had a cool DJ and in 1964 all hip 5th-Formers had transistor radios in their schoolbags so we could listen daily at 4:30 pm. Melbourne's cool DJ was
Mr Stan 'The Man' Rofe.

He played the hip stuff.

Stan would have just loved
The Boat That Rocked.
You will love it too.
Don't get up when the credits roll, sit and let
STAY WITH ME BABY
roll over you like a train.

Corey Maxson Tucker says:
"In 1965 Frank Sinatra was slated to record this but cancelled due to illness. Lucky for us, the studio and orchestra were booked and paid for allowing back-up singer Lorraine Ellison to step in.
Ellison unequivocally slays this track. Ellison's version starts with a calculated and soothing build up. The Janis Joplin cover crashes right into the pathos. Yet both renditions stop you in your tracks – Ellison and Joplin display a rare power to erupt in an
utter and desperate longing.
If these songs don’t make you emote and empathize with the singers,
then you are clearly dead inside and have a heart two sizes too small."

I am going to see this Mod-fest movie again.

Some Light Relief

2009-04-02T14:47:00.002+14:00

Lingerie needs to be pretty. This is French of course, by Aubade.

Put that into Guugle image search and enjoy yourself.

R.E.Brand-ed

2009-04-01T23:46:00.006+14:00

I first noticed his terrific update of the beloved Flash Harry in

The St.Trinians movie, then when I saw

he was in Forgetting Sarah Marshall

playing a British rockstar (named Aldous

fer godsakes,a blend of Doherty and Gallagher)

well I just lapped it up.

The man is a contortionist or half-spider.

My days have now gone to hell as I follow in his

@rustyrocket Twitter wake (along with a million

others, most of who seem to be women he met on

tour in Australia).
It's FUNNY.
or
Get yourself to amazon.com and buy his genuine autobiography 'My Booky-Wook'.
It was 'Biography Of the Year 2008'.

I hardly ever want anything ...
anything at all, I really don't,
but I do want Russell
There is nothing more wantable than a clever funny bad-boy,
and apparently, one does not get too old for it.

My previous Big Hero was the late great self-destructo

Peter Cook, who was much more than just funny

bless his heart and soul.
And now Russell Brand has appeared - and he

is just as good as Peter Cook.

If you are scoffing, please do follow this link to

Brand's eulogy to Jade Goody.

His screen CV

where you can see he is in an Aldous sequel (of course) and also playing opposite Helen Mirren in Shakespeares The Tempest (no links required for that lot)..

Just look at this nice boy with this family in Malaysia (March 2009) - did I mention he was awarded Shagger Of The Year several times by The Sun?
You probably saw him on ROVE when they covered that. Rove failed to mention that Rusty also writes a great sport column in The Guardian
(sorry no more links, work with me here)
A truly renaissance man.

Portland, Victoria

2009-03-31T01:29:00.000+14:00

Dawn, main street, Monday,
Macs Hotel on the right
(blogger's room not visible).
My ancestor landed here in 1853 from Manchester,
and this is his bluestone house built then, and it is still right there, in the main street.

Got the clap

2009-03-26T19:43:00.025+14:00

I love reading The Guardian.
Today they got my attention with that old photo of a

shirtless Mick Jagger doing Jumpin Jack Flash
(yes kiddies there was a golden age of those wizened old millionaires)
... then (David McNamee) tells me that clapping ...

started with CHOLERA in 1473!

"Slapping your hands together was a signal to those around that you were infected.

(so now I understand how Winy Amehouse and Pete Drugerty get applause)

"Eventually it became a token of applause, a way of keeping time, and then, by the 1800s,

a musical device in its own right.
How does it work? In disco and funk, group handclaps would reinforce the snare drum, usually on the second or fourth beat of a bar.
With the advent in the early 1980s of handclap-emulating
devices like the Simmonds Clap-Trap,

claps in hip-hop replaced the snare entirely.
The playground rhyme catchiness of handclaps in 60s girl-group hits, meanwhile, lives on in retro-loving, faux-naive indie-pop."

My Sixties Time-Warp mind immediately conjures up a 1965 Melbourne hit-single
'The Loved One' ... "Two things marked that landmark recording - the unique double rhythm, a complex musical achievement made accessible by a clever use of handclapping; and Gerry Humphries’ sometimes bluesy, sometimes soaring voice. ‘The Loved One’ was like nothing we’d ever heard before, from Australia or from anywhere else in the world".

Clapping Games: Larrikin Warren Fahey managed to videotape schoolgirls

without causing a Henson-type-ruckus, and this dear little site starts with a cute Blinky Bill koala image, and ends with a Year 6 game called Dick Flop.

That causes me to try working in a reference to that AC/DC composition 'She's Got The Jack', bringing this whole story back to the cholera connection.

goes off singing the Playschool song:

"If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands!

If you've got a deadly illness clap your hands!" ...

Portland

2009-03-08T22:28:00.006+14:00

Last week I spent some time with the the helpful people (thanks Darren)

at Portland Family History House, and

they showed me a list of houses built by

my ancestor George Sedgwick.
(He also built the original Town Hall in 1863, which now houses the History Group, and they told me he wrote his name on the inside of the front doors).

These are my own pics of his earliest Portland project:

5-7 Tyers Street, now a B&B called
Victoria House
(that link has better photos than mine)

Old Sedgwicks 14" skirting boards and beautiful door frames are

just as immaculate as in 1853 when he hammered them in. What a guy.

Sharks R People 2

2009-02-27T21:44:00.004+14:00

These fibreglass sharks are mounted above fish n'chip shops allover Victoria. There is one in Glenhuntly Rd Elsternwick, and this one is in Lakes Entrance.
Poor Sharky gets such a Bad Press for being a shark. Doesn't seem fair to me.
His space is invaded and he reacts with the only weapon he has, as we would when ours is. "Mmmm those tanned muscly surfers sure taste good."

Off The Rails & On The Road

2009-02-27T20:18:00.007+14:00

"I hear that train a'comin', coming round the bend,

And I aint seen the sunshine, since I dont know when ..."

Since it is the birthdate of the Late Mr John Cash,

a rail-related post is required.
If His Beatness J.Kerouac

had owned a Hello Kitty

wheelie-bag, while ridin the rail, he would have

photographed it having breakfast

at the Ballarat Station Dining Room.

Those of you with sharp eyes will note

the impressive Mars display in back of the KittyBag.

The 'Rat is the home of Mars Confectionery, and

they also own Whiskas, so stand by for chocolate-coated fish bars, or caramel flavoured catfood. Nothing would surprise me.

remembering our 'first'

2009-02-22T17:04:00.002+14:00

The first time I ever went onto the WWW, the easiest site to find was The White House one, and I clicked on 'Socks The cat' and heard him miaow.
My degree of sophistication has hardly improved in the subsequent 17 years, and I will always remember dear Socks fondly.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Socks, the cat who won international fame during his years in the Clinton White House, was euthanized Friday after months of treatment for cancer.
He had been a stray and was adopted by Chelsea Clinton, the Clintons' daughter, when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas.
The cat had been losing weight since November and had been treated at the clinic, Dera said. He had been suffering from a cancer in his mouth and jaw.
Since the Clintons left the White House in 2001, Socks had lived with Betty Currie, former President Bill Clinton's secretary. The Clintons were known to have visited Socks, and Currie, when in Washington.
Socks, born about 1989, was put to sleep at Three Notch Veterinary Clinic in Hollywood, Maryland. Veterinarians say he was probably 19 or 20 years old.
(I suspect assassination by the CIA who heard he had pawed a tell-all book)

Dalek outta control

2009-01-10T16:13:00.004+14:00

Isn't this groovy?

Can you guess what it is?

I photographed it while at Birregurra rail station.

Hawt Andrew

has Guess This posts, and so does

Southern Jayne,

and now I'm having a go.
A book prize to the first correct guess

(and no, it isn't an unwanted xmas-gift).

Elegantly Dressed Bear

2008-08-30T01:07:00.004+14:00

I don't usually like to mention The War,
but Kaiser Karl is a funny funny guy.

Ben Locker made me do this.

Update: better photo of the bear
worth going here for, and I recommend
the kewl Karl kommentary here.
We shouldn't laugh at him - he will be
70 years old on September 10.
Achtung Baby!

EDW Giddy up!

2008-07-04T01:07:00.008+14:00

By the 18th century,
the clothing of rich women
needed to loosen-up a little
to allow them enough physical freedom
to enjoy the popular pastime
of horse-riding.
This woman festooned in metres
of silks is probably incidental to
Alfred Dedreux's
painting of the Arabian horse, and she appears to also be incidental to horsey's plan to get deeply involved with a large body of water, or, they may be just inventing the first Moire Silk out of her fabulous 'riding' outfit.
If you enjoyed this, find more, and better,
Elegantly-Dressed Wednesdays at Ben Locker's Blog

Percy Grainger - EDW

2008-06-12T00:18:00.008+14:00

Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961)
His most popularly known composition was

'In an English country garden', but Percy Grainger's innovations, which seem avant-garde even today, included work with Hammond organs, electronic sound-producing mechanisms, and hand-built machines to create "free music" (i.e. unconstrained by traditional pitch or beat).

Percy's work on these early music synthesizers, installed in his living room, can be seen in the archival photos at
The Grainger Society website:

eg: Percy's "Kangaroo Pouch" Free Music machine,

set up in his living room, ca. 1950)
His musical virtuousity enabled his sartorial virtuousity it seems.
The Wiki on Grainger says that “In 1910 he began designing and

making his own clothing, ranging from jackets, to shorts, togas, muu muus and leggings;

all made from towels, and also intricate grass and beaded skirts".

If you enjoyed this, find more, better, at Ben Locker Blog

New Beau Brummell

2008-01-17T20:43:00.000+14:00

For Elegantly-Dressed Wednesday
this week, we have
Style UNREPENTANT, in the unrepentant manner of
Beau Brummell.
Days ago Corey Delaney was just another 16-year-old who decided to party while his parents were out, but defiant performances in the media and his stubborn refusal to return home and face the music have transformed him into a poster boy of teenage rebellion. The thin youth with bleached-blond hair has appeared on prime-time national television in oversized plastic yellow sunglasses and a hooded camouflage jacket left open to expose a bare chest and a pierced nipple, nonchalantly declaring that he was planning another party — though at a different venue.
The interviewer advises him to “go away and take a long hard look” at himself.
He replies: “I have. Everybody has. They love it.”

My LinksPal NINAFAT said it precisely: " ... shame doesn't work on the unshameable.
And for a generation of kids who have grown up with Big Brother,
notoriety doesn't just resemble fame - it is the same thing exactly.
Desirable in every sense."