Happy New Year

from the SCHAER cats to you all and especially my dear blogpals Copperwitch, Cat Politics, Highriser, Hels Art & Architecture, That's So Pants, and Tony on Hebden Bridge. Thank you all for the pleasure of 2016, keep 'em coming.

PARK! the herald angels scream ...

Wishing youse all a very merry Christmas but frankly I got very Victor Meldrew yesterday after a 3-hour drive from home when I joined the mongol hordes at the shopping mall. Just look at this selfish parking. and here is another one - who ignored the difficulty I had reverse parking into the spot behind him, despite my deliberate provocation of getting as close to his open window as possible,

that guy sat in his car reading with his foot on the brake for 40 minutes while I went and returned from the queue in the post office I just don't believe it or as That's So Pants would say "What is wrong with these people?".

My Day

This is what I was looking at tonight around 7:30 PM. Several hundred acres of The Western District. Very very close to where Victorias first/earliest settlers settled. Those bloody Hentys. My Nan always claimed that our lot helped the Hentys get their luggage off the boat.

My farmer is interstate so I went round the boundary at 7:30 to make sure no cattle were on the road. Noticed a sign flat on the ground, face down.

Should have stopped to read it and restore it because halfway along the hillside road there had been a serious landfall.

Woops. Think Top Gear in Bolivia who would have been laughing as they roared along the remote and narrow unstable precipice.

So of course I came up behind the sign at the other end of the road, the one that everybody else just went around. Sigh. Obviously there are other road users but I saw none of them. Total peace and quiet and fresh fresh air.

For contrast, earlier, at 11 AM I was 40 kms away in town seeing the Absolutely Fabulous movie and I thought it was. Edina finally having some kind of realisation about her shallow life pool as her grand-daughter picks up the fashionista baton. All the fun of vicious comment/observation on puerile media frenzy and every other societal sin "we're in the south of France darling, everyone's a criminal",  and "Kate Moss has never been so in-demand as since she went missing", a Princessian mountain of flowers at the crash site, with a collection of plush toys and childish portraits of Moss [and a pair of Hunter wellies with Glasto mud on them], with Edina reprising her star turn 'falling out of a car', and Hotel Du Cap, Nobu, Jean Paul Gaultier in several scenes as a Riviera beach fossicker, Bubble the dippy PA in the background laughing as she read a book by Friedrich Nietzsche. Star turns by Rebel Wilson as an Air Hostess, Joan Collins, funny Jerry Hall, her daughter Georgia, Lily Cole, and Barry Humphries playing a now aged old flame of Patsy Stones in his best Sir Les Patterson lewdity, and I am sure I saw John Galliano pass by. I now know that they all mouth 'Thurrssday' when cameras appear. 
There was an Al Wei Wei joke, book publisher jokes, and poor Lulu was trashed rotten as always. The only time the other 5 women in the audience laughed was at the 'discomfort of unknowingly eating wasabi' scene. The script was only as shallow as the viewers cultural frame-of-reference. I was impressed by the choice of Janis Ian At 17 [a commentary on society's beauty standards] for Saffy to sing in a gay club and leave them all in tears. Her wonderful "duck saliva" response [in the Hearst Corporation EYE magazine which was as close to the legendary UK  NOVA as the USA could get]  to the moronic interview question that passed for  record promo - "what is your favourite beauty product?" has been a treasured memory of mine.
I was amused that the Coming Feature trailer was for The First Monday In May a documentary about the very people "we MUST have Rihanna" that Ab Fab was ridiculing. There was some serious cast overlap too.
No muddy roads in either film.
My no-shades-of-grey day.

Western District awash

The farm fence was submerged this week by all the rain here in the Coleraine area. Hibernating snakes all got a wet wake up and a sheep was swimming down the street in Casterton.

This image is the same place as the one above, taken from the bridge the next day with all the flotsam caught in the fence wire. Bit of work ahead to replace it all. At least the dams and tanks are all full.
This image of the nearby Nigretta Falls

is from The Age and please do click this link to it's entry World Of Waterfalls. Not only did flying kangaroos wreck their rental and inspire them to publish several images of kangas leaping across their bows but they went in November when the falls were dry - here is their image of that:

World Of Waterfalls I wish they could see it now.

Koalarama

On my way home from shopping [in Hamilton, Victoria 3300 the heart of the wonderful and woolly Western District]

eventually he left the road ...

and went up a tree.

That was all cute and groovy and I mooched further toward home only to find

a tortoise on the road. sigh. of course I had to pick it up and put it safely away from the hurtling logging trucks which most certainly would not swerve to avoid a fatal end.
If Copperwitch [hi Coppy] was writing this post she would make it hilarious. She shops at Southland which probably has koalas and tortoises too.I can only sigh.

Casterton's Annual Kelpie Muster

Well darling readers I was there this morning for the 20th annual shebang and this pic is the actual muster where skilled working dogs compete on the banks of the Glenelg River. Below are the other competitors mounted and waiting with their dogs.

Dogs dogs woof woof it was dog city from far and wide you wouldn't believe the range of number plates from distant places. The next pic is my friend Julie Honey and her famous clever dog FLASH a rare Miniature Kelpie - he's the one in the red bow tie winning the Kelpie Egg&Spoon Race in the main Street.

I mainly shopped the muster - the stubby holder, bumper sticker and food food food. Tomorrow is the great auction of talented dogs where they go for thou$and$.  I don't really need a pet but I may be a sucker for the concurrent auction of a special edition VicRoads rego plate with a Kelpie on it. Watch the freeways my friends. Woof Woof.

The Quarrymen rock the west

Yesterday I got this image of a western district quarry when I went there to order some driveway surfacing.
It was beyond fascinating and sorry to say it is also beyond my descriptive capability to do the thrill any justice. Of course there was a huge huge tiered hole in the earth and many trucks. Actually there was every truck ever used by three generations of quarrymen. They could sell tickets it was so amazing. However, the guy asked me not to reveal the location "if you put that photo on the internet". I hope you like it as much as I do.  It's the earth's crust, people.

Cape Bridgewater, 3305 Vic.

St. Stephen's Day having lunch at the cafe on the beach with my friend Stephen and a walk through the fascinating rocky limestone tundra with mystical wind turbines all round. Packed with visitors and hikers and all wonderful - read this and then GO there.

Beyond the windscreen today

Those are my snaps of some of the trucks which hurtled along the B160 today making no speed allowance for the pouring rain. There were 20 in the first 40 kms of my trip, and the ratio continued over the entire 220 kms I drove. Most of them were actually logging trucks but I couldn't photograph any of those as they all took up too much of the road and were doing about 120 kms ph.

Manager of The Port of Portland, Victoria, Malcolm Geier said woodchip truck movements in and out of the port would total 290,790 by the end of the 2015 financial year. 
From Portland to Japan to make Hello Kitty lav paper probably.
"Australia is Open For Business"

 I'm out here, so you don't have to be.

over the hood

West out of Lake Bolac Victoria in a brief burst of sunshine in a day that otherwise just rained and rained, and here comes the 77th logging truck of the day.
They roar east, they roar West. After 6pm with no light but pouring rain, 22 of them hurtled past me in the 40 kilometres East of Skipton alone.
Please do follow the link for the story of the great twister of 2006.
I am out there, so you don't have to be.

The Western District today

approaching Dunkeld and seeing Gariwerd loom a different colour every time is always thrilling and I think of the Jardwadjali and Djab Wurrung people who lived here 500 years ago and how mystical it would have seemed to them, as it certainly does to me today.

after 500 kms the sign toward home also seems fairly mystical

500 kms of long straight flat road needed enlivenment

and yet I live to see another sunset.

smart as Jeffrey

Today on Mount Mercer looking toward home and Mount Buninyong 

I thought the view was a painting by Jeffrey Smart.

Anywhere I look is 'toward home' because I have had no home for far too long.

Boxing belongings all week and having to assess the retainability-factor of every thing.

Exactly how much of it is necessary? Does the Dalai Llama pack?

Does he cling to favourite books?

some of these came by mail from The Gotham Book Mart and still have the notes inside that Patti Smith wrote. After a while she put in a copy of her 7" vinyl single 'Hey Joe', she must have been so pleased to have it out. and then she didn't work there any more. 

British VOGUES 1971, 1972, 1973 all arrived by air-mail and so did their binders.

Joyously received and 40 years later I am no less shallow of thought.

Do I tote all this with me to my very end or find the strength to treasure the memory and yes I'm looking at you Marcel Proust.

le temps perdu indeed.

(images by author, text is first draft, only draft)

wind turbines Mt Mercer

My days are lately spent on this road over the Fagg farm on Mt Mercer where there are 50 wonderful white wind turbines. 50.

they are BIG

If Wordsworth the poet had been wandering along this road and came upon a host of snowy wind turbines, those daffs that dazzled him would have been history.

only skin-deep

Sunday silliness (I took from Clem Bastow's Twitter). 


I am faffing away idle moments on similar images at Pinterest in order to avoid facing this -

This is a person treating their solar keratosis with a cream which destroys cancer activity. I have these keratoses on my forehead and cheeks and have been ignoring the tube of cream for 3 weeks. I just can't do it.
They are all over my forearms as well. The 20gram tube cost $59, but I'm lucky as Americans pay $400.

Untreated facial skin cancer spreads to a neck tumour and then to the most vulnerable part of a body, which in smokers would be their lungs. That was my father's story and he is dead now. He did not seek medical advice for pink scaly tender patches as I did.
This cream acts like paint stripper and wherever there is a cancer cell growing, the skin turns red then blisters itches and peels.
Twelve weeks from start to recovery. Q: where can I draw some strength for this?

a Claytons post

Forty degrees is only funny for the first week. Now I want it to stop.

I got the potato crop in. More than this amount, with no care whatsoever, and all from a few Past Their UseBy leftovers that I flung against the back fence. Lots of potato recipes on the food boards at Pinterest where I have taken up residence trading with JahTeh - see link in sidebar.

This is my Kooka friend who has a baby, or Early Kooka, up in the high trees waiting for mince deliveries. Why do I feed them mince? I want to distract them from eating the tiny lizards of course.
Going away now to Google "heat stroke"
x x

Bat-immobile

Clearly Batmobiles do not function in daylight on
Nepean Highway, Moorabbin.

My photo, c.1990, using Nikon SLR and I could just spit for missing the front end like that. 
While I am in some other world, the car is now at Movieworld QLD.
Anton Furst got the Oscar award for his production design on the 1989 Tim Burton batmovie and this particular vehicle.

Things are quiet Chez O'Dyne, out in the paddocks looking after 3 cats (and one can open doors), and a very furry dog which is shedding it's coat. Apparently German Shepherd people refer to this as "blowing their coat". It's everywhere and the ducted vacuuming just blew up.
Mainly it's quiet because I am recovering from being 'flamed' by a grouchy relative who doesn't approve of my posts.
If you are reading this you must be on the list of bloggers allowed by the last time AOD went under the radar.
Life is too brief to be bothered with people who bring nothing but aggravation.
Batman thinks so as well. He has left his busted Batmobile to the pit crew above and flown away. Haunted creatures of the night and aren't we all.

vote early

Today at The Guardian - 'whistleblowers play a crucial role in keeping the "public reason" alive. Assange, Manning, Snowden, these are our new heroes, exemplary cases of the new ethics that befit our era of digitalised control. They are no longer just whistleblowers who denounce the illegal practices of private companies to the public authorities; they denounce these public authorities themselves when they engage in "private use of reason".

We need Mannings and Snowdens in China, in Russia, everywhere. There are states much more oppressive than the US – just imagine what would have happened to someone like Manning in a Russian or Chinese court (in all probability no public trial). However, one should not exaggerate the softness of the US: true, the US doesn't treat prisoners as brutally as China or Russia – because of its technological priority, it simply does not need the brutal approach (which it is more than ready to apply when needed). In this sense, the US is even more dangerous than China insofar as its measures of control are not perceived as such, while Chinese brutality is openly displayed.

It is therefore not enough to play one state against the other (like Snowden, who used Russia against the US): we need a new international network to organise the protection of whistleblowers and the dissemination of their message. Whistleblowers are our heroes because they prove that if those in power can do it, we can also do it.'

text of kin

This is the Paris grave of the magnificent Tartar dancer Rudolf Nureyev, designed as one of the Tartar a.k.a Azerbaijani carpets he collected.  It is in the Russian cemetery, surrounded by the tsarist nobility who got out of  St. Petersburg and MOCKBA c.1917 as the philistine hordes were trashing their treasures. I am buried deep into revolutionary Russia lately, tracing the family of my dear and cultured friend Ariadna*Vladimirovna - and patronymics now have meaning for me. Her second name tells us her father was Vladimir. Actually pre-1917 he was Woldemar Hesse, but Russia loves change. When a Russian maiden married, her surname became her husband's but with 'a' added. Vladimir Davydov's wife would be Natalya Davydova, meaning she is one of them, Davydova also meaning the entire family.
Added to the shifting sea of people's names, post-noble Russia changed all the place names as well, ie: St. Petersburg became Leningrad., and the Bolshie hordes trashed all the noble graves as well. As one website wailed 'the miracle of Russian genealogy, is that it can be done at all'.
My obsession with genealogy (anybody's) may be the result of never really being a part of my own family. I was a satellite of their orbit right from the start.
Just looking for a link to explain the dissociative disorder I definitely have, I found the founder, and do please just shriek at what he considered to be 'a trauma':
"By the late 19th century there was a general acceptance that emotionally traumatic experiences could cause long-term disorders which might display a variety of symptoms. These conversion disorders were found to occur in even the most resilient individuals, but with profound effect in someone with emotional instability like Louis Vivé (b.1863) who suffered a traumatic experience as a 13-year-old when he encountered a viper." 
A viper? Amateur hour Louis, pull yourself together. My viper was a rattlesnake in long grass doing the full rattle. Brushed that off without a sweat. My traumas have all been as 'pure Sandoz' was to any old LSD.

The person to whom I am the next of kin, just loved the open road - well Eastlink and the tollways anyhow.  Aged 90 years and with four speed fines and a collision in the past 2 years, that I know about, his licence to drive has been taken from him, and with it, his will to continue.
Today while wading through the admin of it all (and that will be another post, get your notebooks ready) I discovered this appropriate vehicle for travel to farthest horizons:

My fellow mourners of the smelly, randy legend that was Nureyev would understand.

My next of kin is blissfully and intensively medicated, receiving those who care for him, and I pray he lasts until tomorrow at least, because today is the 7th anniversary of the brutal murder of my sweet Puppy, a six kilo Shih Tzu ripped apart in our own driveway by a bikie's 120 kg English Mastiff, escaped from guarding the meth lab across the road. I know what grief is, and so does everybody who lived in that street that day.
Until I decided to include Puppy, my first thought for this post title was Good grief Charlie Brown.
Here is the Pupster guarding Kitty when she was only months old

capTURING an innocent person

Today I was pleased to read that other people are aggravated by those silly twisted CAPTCHA words.
I don't have Word Verification on any of my blogs.  It's already hard to get comments.
The Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, abbreviated as CAPTCHA (instead of CAPTTTCAHA )
My favourite acronym is FFS.  (I actually think I pioneered it, but that's another post for another day)
That the developers have dragged poor Alan Turing into this blurred vision also aggravates me. Poor innocent man had enough trouble in his life without this.
That is all.

Nymph & Nymphaeas

what a thrill to see in Melbourne, 50 paintings by Monet, the guy we all know for his nymphaea (a.k.a water lilies). He began painting in Paris about 1860 and was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1865.  By 1890 he had purchased Le Pressoir  (a cider pressing house and orchard) west of Paris at Giverny where  he spent 20 years creating his garden, and fighting with the local council to get a permit for his pond. He had a rowboat made as a floating studio and spent the rest of his life recording the changing light on the pond, the bridge and the plants. Most of the works now at NGV usually reside in Paris so do try to see them here - think of the expense you will avoid. Since art is money and the money rests on the provenance, I always want to see the back of famous paintings, so here is a Monet and also his palette with the outer curve sawn off, probably when he

got too much paint on the cuff of the suitcoat he seems to have worn for painting.

 

The NGV missed the obvious opportunity unique to them, of covering their own ponds 

with waterlilies. Their giftshop was selling rubbery ones for $20.

After the art, the tart.    Nymphette Chloe

.

 - then with my dear friend and tolerant arty cohort Art Of Pants we had a delicious wine in the  Chloe room at Young and Jacksons, reputedly Melbourne's oldest surviving pub where the painting called 'Chloe' has always been the main attraction.

Painted by a contemporary of Monet, Jules Le Febvre, a medal winner of the 1875 Paris salon, she was purchased in 1880 by a Melbourne surgeon Fitzgerald. Melbourne was shocked when it saw her nudity on loan to the art gallery and she was removed to Dr FitzGeralds house where he hung her so she was visible from the street. Publican Young bought her in 1909. She hangs alone these days, but 'Young' was a big art collector and over 200 paintings, sketches and statues used to be on display throughout the hotel.

Do please click here for the story of how the damn commonwealth bank nearly ruined the corner of Swanston and Flinders Streets (the same way they succeeded in ruining what had been a fine historic intersection in Ballarat); and here is a very very old photo of Y and J's before YandJ bought it.