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?".

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

Hot in the city tonight

'Hot town, summer in the city back of my neck getting dirty and gritty' *

Winter might be easier than summer in that one can layer on the wool, whereas to combat heat we can get down to naked and still be hot as well as NSFW.
Maybe we all need to be watching every film about people who are snowed-in: Christmas In Connecticut, Ice Station Zebra, Jeremiah Johnson, Nanook Of The North, or Downhill Racer and documentaries on Shackleton in the Antarctic, while the aircon is roaring across the state.

Pride may be one of the Seven Deadlys but I don't mind saying I have used no aircon, just a fan, because thanks to my new fascination with Pinterest, I have been totally distracted from the heat by

Pinboards devoted to cats, kittens, cowboys, cottages, castles, costumes, models, and OTTERS. It may be that otters outnumber Elvis Marilyn Audrey and LOTR pins. Oh yes it can be as mindless as it is enriching. Sourcing images has sent me off on delirious educational historical tangents, or after Ruthven Todd's  Space Cats books.  For an instant involuntary chuckle go here and enter Space Cats in the search box. Pinners devote a board to their particular interest, and there are some interesting people out there.

Shoes are big, and commenters who say "OMG Shoes!!!"  Actually someone may have put up a new shoe image like the Jimmy Choo Ugg boots selling at $1000 to very cashed-up bogans indeed so I have to get back to Pinterest now ...  X X AOD
*was written by John Sebastian and his brother, Mark, as a high school assignment for which he got
an ‘F’.
When John became the singer of the Lovin' Spoonful, the Kama Sutra label recorded and released it and it was 3 weeks at #1 on the Billboard chart that summer of 1966.
I hope that F marker noticed.

PS actually there might be more interior design than cats, check this carwash bedroom -

Wishing you all a cool breeze.

up in a puff of smoke

Martin Sharp has died of emphysema on 1st December 2013 and this beautiful portrait of him is by his lifelong friend, Garry Shead another Australian painter whose work I also just love. This is what Mr Shead said of his portrait -
'Martin Sharp is one of Australia’s foremost pop artists as well as a cartoonist and songwriter. His psychedelic posters of Dylan and Hendrix are classics of the genre, while his posters for the Nimrod Theatre Company are also iconic in theatre circles. He also designed record covers for the rock band Cream. From 1963 to 1965 he was art director of Oz magazine. In 1970, inspired by Van Gogh’s house in Arles, he founded The Yellow House near Kings Cross which he converted into a 24-hour performance art space. During the 1970s, he was a champion of Tiny Tim and of Sydney’s Luna Park.
Martin now has emphysema. When I began visiting him I suddenly had the compulsion to paint him,’ says Shead. ‘Once I began the portrait it was like he was directing me. Martin has a museum of toys. His image of Mo (Roy Rene) became the face of Nimrod and Ginger Meggs. When I put Ginger in I suddenly realised it symbolised the boys killed in the fire at Luna Park (in 1979). Martin had the job of revamping the whole place and he enlisted the help of his artist friends, myself included.’
Shead says about the portrait, ‘I learned about Martin’s great love for Vincent van Gogh, which then influenced the way I painted it. I also saw that for Martin, Luna Park had become a metaphor for the world.’
Garry Shead has known Sharp for 50 years, first meeting at the National Art School in East Sydney. Sharp appeared in three of Shead’s experimental films, the DVD of which was released in 2011. They also published the Arty Wild Oat newspaper, which was the inspiration for Oz magazine.'

(I decided the SMH would/should have to have the most accurate Obit for him,

although one of the later paras needed a proofreader to sort the jumbled rewrite.)

In 1976 when I lived near the Paddington gallery of Clive Evatt who represented Martin, I bought a couple of signed and numbered Sharps - the gold metallic The Getting Together Of The Heads (No.22) , and The Haymarket (No.20). The first has a collage of every hippie stoney thing from early 70's counterculture London, and the second has every cartoon character known to every Baby-Boom Australian, as well as the ironic Eternity of Arthur Stace which Martin included in more than several works.
He was responsible for one of my life's magic moments when he introduced me to his friend Wandjuk (Wandjuk Djuakan Marika, OBE) who handed me his didjeridoo and explained to me how to speak into it and hear that mystical rumble. Of course I didn't achieve much, but the experience was thrilling. Thanks Martin for that, your life, and the art.

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

love the liberry

Love The Liberry is a journal blog by librarians, on all the batty customers who come to their counter. There are some gems in there that make me think they should get a pay raise for absence of any homicides. Today there was no homicide after I entered my library

I had been there a week ago, looking for a particular biography, and failed to find it, despite knowing my Dewey very well.

Today I tried again so intensely that I actually asked the librarian who replied "In the Business section because it's a biography of a business-woman". Right ....

and this is the exit view across Sturt St to the Memorial Bandstand dedicated to the band on The Titanic. The weathervane has a Titanic shape silhouette. There was probably a librarian on the ship as well, but no memorial for her.
Ballarat - you're welcome to it.

Inanimate inamorata

Dear Readers

I have the Blogging Blahs and can only submit, in lieu of any constructive thought, an image of my Barbie* collection.

Mostly $2 each from opshops, I fixed them to a stretched canvas bought very cheaply from a garage sale.

When I divested superfluous clutter on moving from Brighton to Ballarat, I sold the whole thing for $400.

Opshops Barbies are always minus their clothes, so I made the black leather suit, the psychedelic shift and the gold, white lace and red spot frocks myself.
*OK one is a Skipper, and a Brooke Shields, and a Ken wearing a Jacko suit.
I miss them all actually.

Shrimp is no Barbie

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.

Not a joke Joyce

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.

rock and roll

'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?

dawn in frosty paddock

(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

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.

The Rex Pistols

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)

Divine retribution

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.

read it and weep

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.

hold that baby

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.

nothing to sneeze at

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)

my own Midsomer Murder

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.

on The Barongarook

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.

best foot forward

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.