Cat education campaign

Tansy The Rainbow Cat lives next door to us. Despite her hippie name, she is quite aggressive and spends more time in our yard than we would like. She has even tried to get in our cat door. Hattie is not very good at defending the homestead, and usually comes off second best in fights. About a week ago Elf noticed she had a sore flank, and she was acting quite strangely. It turned out she had a bite that had become an abcess, and it meant an expensive trip to the vet.

The boys responded with some supportive yet instructive cards for Hattie.

Seasonal somethings

I have started running in the mornings again. I give it about another week, until it starts to get proper cold, and the whole finding-shoes-in-the-dark business palls.

But for now, I have a new route, up the hill behind us to the soccer ground, where I run 2–5 laps depending on the time. Its nice to run on grass, and on average each morning I see one human and one point five dogs. And I can daydream about great goals I scored and/or will score in the future if I ever play outdoor soccer again.

On the way back, this is the view I see when I am nearly home. As remembered last night just before going to the supermarket. I got a few things wrong but hey. Someone has a photographic memory in the family but it's not me. Our house is in the centre.

The warm dark walk home thing is definitely over. Now we are into the bitter windy walk home. Tonight there was a wierd factor when I got in the front door, and thought "what is casting that unearthly light in the boys' room?" It was the Moon (unearthly geddit?), which had been behind me all the way home. So something something seasons and orbits something something! Eh?

Graffiti at the school

Lets learn Luxembourgish!

Here is the entire list of handy Luxembourgish phrases and words provided by Wikipedia.

• Jo. Yes.
• Neen. No.
• Vläicht. Maybe.
• Moien. Hello.
• Gudde Moien. Good Morning.
• Gudde Mëtteg. Good Afternoon.
• Gudden Owend. Good Evening.
• Äddi. Goodbye.
• Merci. Thank you.
• Firwat? Why
• Ech weess net. I don't know.
• Ech verstinn net. I don't understand.
• Watgelift? or Entschëllegt? Excuse me?
• Metzleschjong. Butcher's son.
• Schwätzt dir Däitsch/Franséisch/Englesch? Do you speak German/French/English?
• Wéi heeschs du? What is your name?
• Wéi geet et? How are you?
• Politeschen Anstand. Political Decency
• Sou. So.
• Fräi. Free.
• Heem. Home.
• Ech. I.
• An. and/in.
• Mäin. my.
• Iesel. donkey.
• Mat. With.
• Kand. Kid/Child.
• Wee. Way.
• Gromper. Potato.

Now - your homework is to translate these ordinary sentences into Luxembourgish.

Hello. How are you? Potato! So please have the political decency to free my donkey. Potato! I am on my way home. Potato! Excuse me, I don't understand what the butcher's son has to do with any of this. Potato! Potato! POTATO!

Anzac Day

Anzac Day fell on a Sunday this year. I didn't get to the dawn service so I was very keen to get to the parade in town. We had a bit of resistance from the kids. "This is the worst day of my life!" - Michael. When its a public holiday you can use the "this is why we have the day off" argument, but it doesn't quite fly on a Sunday. So we fell back on the "do what we say and there will be treats" gambit.

We arrived downtown too early so we got the treats out of the way first. On our way to a good vantage point we came across the Light Horse enthusiasts, assembled on their steeds in the bus mall. We had a chat to one of them who was patiently answering questions from the unmounted public. Some of the leather gear they were wearing was 100 years old. Nothing kinky though. Marcus had never seen a horse up so close and couldn't get over the size of the hooves.

We got in position opposite the GPO and whiled away the time waiting for the kickoff. The boys were actually very good. Despite themselves they are quite interested in the military history, the flags and banners, the strange old military vehicles and so on. In that category, there was a DUKW amphibious vehicle, a boat with wheels. Printed  clearly on the side was ALWAYS INSERT PLUGS IN HULL BEFORE ATTEMPTING TO LAUNCH VEHICLE - from the same school of American military copywriting as POINT THIS SIDE TOWARDS ENEMY which I saw on Claymore mines when I was in the Army Reserve.

The most amazing vehicle was a Ford Thunderbird or something like it - a real Batmobile with fins, wings, chrome everywhere and about thirty feet long. I know it was a Ford because the next vehicle was also a vintage Ford, and the next, and the next. Dozens. A few of them had veterans in them, but most of them carried just a grinning Ford enthusiast, and possibly his kids. Why were they there? Don't know.

During a lull, I was telling Elf about a conversation between Marcus and Lana yesterday about who was going to play school basketball. They agreed Evie certainly would. "She's in everything. She's in soccer, netball, used to be in chess, she's in the choir and the choral group, she did the recital thing at the eisteddfod, scottish country dancing...." As I was relating this to Elf, Marcus interrupted - "there she is!" Briefly released from her other duties, there was she was, marching with the Scouts.

Dave Graney and the Lurid Yellow Mist, Republic Bar

Today is Anzac Day. I usually go to the dawn service, but last night I went out to see a band. So dawn went by without me this year.

Last night Dave Graney and the Lurid Yellow Mist played at the Republic Bar. I knew they coming to town soon but it took me by surprise to see them in Friday's paper, suddenly here. So rather than ring around the Graney fans network, I just trundled along thinking I would run into one or two of them.

In the event the only people I knew in the room were Dave and the Mist. They took forever to come on. The support band started at about 11. I did a few large circuits around the dark streets of North Hobart, occasionally passing the pub and checking out the stage.

I don't know the name of the first band - they were a kind of interesting twosome.

EDIT - I have looked them up and you can read about them here. But I have not corrected anything below because that would not be very "rock".

A cultivatedly unattractive guy played bass while a weedy younger guy sang, played some melodica and programmed something about the size of an iPhone. The vocals and 'tude were remniscent of Joy Division. One track ended with a the iPhone on its own emitting a discordant wail - on and on, until the weedy guy touched it and it stopped. [Applause]. He went back and forth from the iPhone to the microphone with a stoned stagger, but I could tell by his keen focus on the tiny screen that the stagger was all show.

Dave, in head-to-toe black leather, was checking out the support act, with his wife/drummer Clare by his side. He didn't look that impressed. I will have to read his blog and see if he has recorded his thoughts.

It's a small venue, and the Mist walked past me and back again various times. I'm not sure why the lateness, but eventually they all were on stage at once, and launched into the show. After a long walk and some pretty challenging indie-rock I was ready to go home.

Stu Pereira plays lead guitar in the Mist, and he is so fluid compared to Dave that its almost laughable. Dave's guitar style is pretty studied. He likes to get front and centre, strike a pose first and then play the note, while looking meaningfully around the audience. Stu has got notes to spare and so much energy that while he is playing on the beat, his body is bopping about to something else entirely.

So, long story short - I enjoyed them a lot but by 12.30, only about 6 songs in, I was feeling old and tired, so I walked out on them. Sigh.

Self-portrait

This bit of writing is terrific - it just sums up perfectly how a kid's mind works. At least how Michael's works. As an amateur copy-editor I am hugely proud that he has correctly used a semi-colon.

I love scorpions because they live under a bucket at my house! I built a bridge of blocks at daycare once and it was half a metre long; and I went on stage and discovered a tunnel to the sports gear. I'm intrested in brains too. I live in xxx Cascade Rd 7004.

Definitely my favourite Super Wizard

 

(Found here)

The old school tie

Apparently the rich kids' secret of success is a Burnie High School tie. Ha! Now, what did I do with mine?

Warm and dark

The weather has been odd - quite still and warm. Forestry Tas have taken the opportunity to burn off, so the sunrises and sunsets have been lurid orange, to add to the weirdness. On Mondays and Tuesdays I knock off at 6pm and walk home. Since daylight savings ended, this has meant a walk in the dark, but I have been really enjoying it. It feels so nice, like I am in a cocoon. I usually listen to a good podcast, and I almost feel like I am in the radio equivalent of a cinema, even though I am walking. Does that make any sense? We supposedly have three or four more days of this, then there will be a reality check. For now, I am still employing shorts.

The joys of sitting down! / Birth imminent! / Larks in parks

We went to a cocktail party for Greta and Michael's combined 40ths on Saturday night. It was at the same venue as a wedding we attended in January, and we were a bit concerned that we would be standing up all night again. As we drove past looking for a park, we were thrilled to bits to see through the window chairs! And tables!

Michael is effectively a property developer. He has built and sold a series of houses and units. We always feel sorry for Greta and the kids, who obediently move on from one project to the next with him. On Saturday they announced they are building a place for keeps, or at least for ten years. And its just down the road! When they said they had bought a block in South Hobart I guessed it right off, as there aren't many.

We got a table with Nick and Anna and hung out around it all evening, sneaking off at about 11.30. The kids were nearby at Imp and Ed's and we stayed the night there too. The next morning we got up, scoffed some fabulous fat pancakes with lemon butter, and scooted home for the next thing.

Sally is getting verrrrrry close to having her baby, and we are giving her the cot that Marcus, Michael and Millie next door slept in. Does this mean their baby will be another M? Merhaps.

Nick and Anna and the girls came around in their ute for morning tea. Nick and I took the cot up to Sal and Matt's, and Matt and I wiggled it into what was Matt's studio, and will now be the nursery. It's always a moment of truth, when a room that is going to be the nursery actually acquires its' cot. Its one of the little steps that says "OK, this really happening - we are soon going to have a noisy, messy flatmate about a foot long". This matters much more to dads - by 39 weeks mums are in absolutely no doubt that something is going on.

Sal and Matt live behind an old shop, which is now a shared studio space, and a vacancy came up just at the right time for them to move their stuff there from the house. Their kitchen is bare, a paddling pool stands by deflated but proudly ready to serve - one day pretty soon there's a gonna be some natural birthin' round these parts.

We came home, morning tea snudged along a little more, then Nick and Anna and the girls left us. I went out to paint and sand the front railings a little more - this project is now into its' fourth month. While I worked, some yahoos drove past and yelled something - I couldn't make it out but it was directed at me.

An hour or so later the yahoos came to the house - turned out it had been Imp and Ed and the girls, and their buddies Lousie and Ashley and their kids Freya, Will and Max. Although they all live down at Kingston, they are big fans of the Cascade Gardens just downhill from us, and they had just been there. We had afternoon tea, and then took everyone for a walk up to Wellesley Park behind our house.

I can't really write objectively about the spot where we live - it's just superb. We live in a great place. And we enjoy taking people around and showing it off. The best thing about W Park is possibly just that it's right there, we go out the back gate and we're in it, and it's just a big space, really. No fences, not much in way of amenities, kind of lumpy and scruffy, but it's got a lovely outlook up to the mountain and over the river. There's usually no-one else around, and we simply love it. Louise and Ashley thought it was pretty good too.

School soccer resumes

This season Marcus is playing seven-a-side on a bigger field, with larger goals and goalkeepers for the first time. His team is even stronger than last year, and they had a great win first up on Saturday, 13-1. They looked like a competent under 14 team (they are under 8) the way they passed the ball around, spread out, and backed each other up. The score was about 10-0 when Mt Nelson finally scored, and all of us barracking for South Hobart gave them a very relieved round of applause - its actually no fun at all watching other kids getting a shellacking.

It was sunny and warm. Elf and Gina wheeled out the Saturday Soccer Sausage Sizzle barby for the first time this year. Their back-to-basics approach (nothing but sausages, tea and coffee) is very popular with the punters, and they raked in over $200 for the P & F on Saturday. Elf's sister Imp is now Treasurer of the P & F - the sisters are little by little getting the school in their clutches, one sausage at a time.

Leaf insect

I was sitting opposite Elf the other evening talking to her, when a strange movement caught my eye. Walking across the wide expanse of timber floor behind her, on his way somewhere, was a leaf insect. I'm sure they can fly if they want to - it's their wings that give them the leafy look isn't it? They probably walk up and down a branch or stem, safe in the knowledge that although they are moving, they still fit in well enough to get by. However this guy was strolling, as brazen as you like, his bright green-ness standing out from the brown floor like a neon sign. When I got closer I could actually hear him whistling.

Pizzicato abuse

Desperate Housewives - have you seen it? Elf watches it occasionally and I love to hate it. Even being in the same room with it, I find it offensive. Since our living area is just one big room, I sometimes resort to headphones to get away from it.

The synopsis is: affluent neighbourhood full of people stealing each other's money, adulterising and plotting to murder each other. Pretty standard really, pretty Melrose Place. Except - every time someone is up to no good, looking in someone else's rubbish bin or slipping off their wedding ring on their way into a bar, there is a little 8 bar vamp of pizzicato strings. Someone has asked themselves "what is the sneakiest music there is?" and that's what they came up with.

I put myself in the shoes of the session violinists. Granted, some of them may believe that the end justifies the means. Some of them may be proud of having slept their way to the top in the incidental strings world. Some of them may believe everything is relative, you've got to look out for number one, and there's no free lunch.

But what about that one straight-edge, clean living, upright citizen, who turns up at the office with his viola every day, plays the sheet music he is handed, with care, energy and brio - perhaps he's a pizzicato specialist, flown in to LA from the East Coast for a big job lot of pizzicato work. Calls his wife and kids every day while he's away. Dedicated. Caring. A moral beacon in this increasingly Paris Hiltonised world.

How is he going to feel when he sits down to watch Housewives and realises that his dedicated plucking is the soundtrack to ugly suburban depravity?

Fun Fact: In Vietnam the show is just called Những bà nội trợ kiểu Mỹ - American Housewives.

Blog burst

I have been blogging rarely of late, but don't worry, I have been saving up some burning issues. Should I put them all in one bumper post, or give them each their own little headline, and moment in the sun? I think the latter.

As this little post is not itself about anything, this is where I'll put these drawings I have been doing recently. One of them looks like a laughing alien that has disguised itself as a hill. One of them looks like those mega expensive Coogi jumpers that used to be for sale only in airports.

The Great Italian Drought

Despite the title, this is actually a (fairly accurate) description of the eruption of Vesuvius and destruction of Pompeii, in 79 AD. I borrowed this from Michael's desk at school.


PS - I asked him about the title and he said it was a mistake. It was meant to be the Great Italian Flood of Lava.

Does education kill creativity?

Very interesting. About 10:00 he starts talking about an education system that produces as its highest achievement, university professors.

"There's something curious about professors … typically, they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, in a literal way. They look upon their body as a kind of transport for their heads. It's a way of getting their head to meetings".

Les Jackson: not an actual monarch, as such

North west Tasmania, slightly before I was born. If I had a time machine, that's where I would be heading first.

New constellations

Michael says "I made some new constellations." I interviewed him but that is all he wants to say. They each have a scientific name and a common name.

1. Saturrisesines, "the Spear"
2. Portus, "the Crocodile"
3. Proximi, "the Box"
4. Cezaninas, "the Dartboard".

A person named Person

A selected list of New Hampshire Governors, featuring my favourite, Person Colby Cheney. As I have always said, you don't need money or family connections to run for Governor of a United State - just a really strange name.

Governor Person C. Cheney

• Robert O. Blood
• Styles Bridges
• Person Colby Cheney
• Moody Currier
• Lane Dwinell
• Samuel D. Felker
• Ichabod Goodwin
• Henry B. Quinby
• Vesta M. Roy
• Onslow Stearns
• Ezekiel A. Straw
• Meldrim Thomson, Jr.
• Hiram A. Tuttle
• Meshech Weare

The classies

Our newspaper is fairly small, and on weekdays the classifieds are not very full, so they kind of all run together. The classifications into which they have been classified probably need to be made a bit more prominent to keep them apart a little. Here is a sampling from today.

IN MEMORIAM

BLANK, Barry 28.1.72 - 5.4.2008
Beautiful memories of a precious nephew.
Forever in our hearts,
Wayne, Leanne and family.

GENERAL

GENUINE Cougar, brunette,
looking for that something on the side.
Txt Barbara to 0418 ΘΘΘ ΘΘΘ

♥ CHANNEL AREA ♥
lovely Asian, busty, sz 7,
0418 ΘΘΘ ΘΘΘ

PETS AND LIVESTOCK

JAP QUAIL
10 for $20 Pullets 12 wks $10ea
62ΘΘ ΘΘΘΘ

POODLES, MINI, brown females,
ready to go. Vet checked.
62ΘΘ ΘΘΘΘ

CAREERS

MASSAGE, casual spots avail,
topless non-sexual studio.
Training provided.
62ΘΘ ΘΘΘΘ

Work move on the cards [sigh]

I heard last week that Roar Film will be moving out of South Hobart when the lease runs out in June. We are going down to Salamanca Place apparently - the artsy craftsy touristy strip down by the water. We will be in a heritage-listed sandstone ex-warehouse somewhere in the Arts Centre.

My boss is in his late fifties, and had a heart scare last year. Our current office is smack bang in the middle of a giant home for the aged, and I think that's the main reason he wants out. I will be sad to go - the school is just five minutes up the road, and home another ten-fifteen minutes after that. I have jokingly said I will have to get another job to stay in South Hobart, at the newsagents or post office. Possibly I can flog spangly harem pants at Bizarre Bazaar, or I might become a loam specialist at Males Sand. As long as I never have to leave South Hobart, I'll be happy.

Wiki work

I have been putting in quite a bit of time drawing maps for Wikipedia. It started when I wrote a couple of articles, and felt they needed maps to make sense. One of the articles was about Arnold Potts, one of the heroes of the Kokoda Campaign in World War II. One of the old hands in Wikipedia insisted I write about Potts' time at the end of the war in Bougainville. It's very much a minor part of his story, but he was quite adamant. Turns out he is an authority on the Bougainville Campaign in 1945, whic is generally seen as a sideshow to the main action of Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, the reconquest of the Philippines and and so on. So now I have drawn a bunch of maps of Bougainville, and I am starting to get general requests from further afield in Wikipedia.


I really love being able to draw a simple map, that just locates half a dozen places in relation to a major landmark and provides a scale. It can make an article suddenly so much more comprehensible. The latest map I have done is for the Battle of Bita Paka in World War I, when Australian troops invaded German New Guinea and captured a couple of radio transmitters. I had never heard of it until I was asked to do it.

Fred builds a doorbell

I haven't been blogging very regularly of late, so I will try to recall what we have been up to that bears retelling.

Fred arrived the day before Good Friday, and we have been noodling around with him all Easter. He is extremely scientific, interested in the world around to him to an astonishing degree. If something is broken he is compelled to fix it, whereas I am compelled to lie down. When Fred is in town we have an amazing burst of experiments. He made us a beautiful doorbell yesterday from wire, meccano and an alarm clock. Or perhaps it was a bomb. He said it was a doorbell.


Today he made a radio transmitter, out of the doorbell. And so on. Marcus loves the end result, but is too busy out climbing trees or reading to sit in for the process. Michael loyally sits through the process talking nonstop and making ingenious but impractical suggestions. Fred has the patience of a saint, and listens to all this without putting Michael in a sleeper hold (which is what I want to do when I am busy and he won't shut up).


Today we drove to Snug and went for a walk to the falls there. Snug of course is a funny name for a place, and it has certainly not gone to waste. There is the Snug River, Snug Falls, Snug Beach, Snug Primary School, Snug Tavern and of course the Snug Butchery. The walk in was mostly downhill, through fragrant bush - quite peppery. We are not sure what "mountain pepper" is but possibly this is it. There were a few parked toddler strollers on the way in - the track was much too rocky and rooty for them. We passed the family carrying their littlies out. There was not a lot of water in the falls but it was a very pretty spot. Popular too - we had to wait a few minutes for a parking spot to open up. Marcus and Fred went off to explore the lower reaches of the river with strict warnings and threats of direness if Marcus got his feet wet. When they returned he had fallen in a puddle but heroically got only his shirt, hair and the top of his pants wet. On the way out we passed the family with the toddlers again, still struggling upwards.


Yesterday we also went for a walk, around the Risdon Brook Dam. We went over that way to check the puppy situation at the Dogs Home - once again, no suitable pups in residence. We are always promised that there is a puppy tsunami just around the corner. Sigh. So we went for a nice long walk around the dam - it's about and hour and a half I think. Very pleasant when you have nothing particular else to do. By the end I was very hungry and wished I was the resourceful type who had packed sandwiches.

I have been nibbling away at the front deck railing, sanding a bit and painting a bit each day. We suspect the builders used an interior wood finish, as the more exposed parts have weathered down to a cracked and blistered mess in two years. When I started the job I was listening to cricket while I worked; now it is football. I hope to finish it before we are back to cricket again.

Bedtime reading

Elf reads to the boys at bedtime, nearly every night. She reads, and reads, and reads. I usually use this time to get on the computer and blog, or fix my Supercoach football team, or work on Wikipedia stuff.

Once in a while Elf has to work or is away, and I get the reading job. Whatever she is reading to the boys nearly always turns my stomach. She has simply run out of good boys-y books to read, so at present she is reading the Anne of Green Gables series (that title was followed by Anne of Avonlea, Anne Sits On A Tuffet and Anne's Bonnet Gets Eaten By A Pony.


I decided to go for a similar historical period, but different subject matter: Basic Physics Volume 3.


Here is a typical extract from our respective books.

1. Gilbert drew her close to him and kissed her. Then they walked home in the dusk, crowned king and queen in the bridal realm of love, along winding paths fringed with the sweetest flowers that ever bloomed, and over haunted meadows where winds of hope and memory blew.

2. Musical notes are heard whenever a sufficiently regular and rapid succession of impulses reaches our ears. If, for example, a tapping key is operated at regular intervals, say four times per second, the noise resulting from each tap is heard as a separate sound. When, however, the rate of tapping is increased to twenty or more times per second, a continuous humming sound of definite pitch is heard and the greater the rate of tapping the higher the pitch of the hum.

The funny thing is the boys enjoy them both just as much.

TV spots, Outdoor Signage, Dinosaur Rights

Australian companies are sponsoring archaelogical digs, then getting the dinosaurs named after themselves. Dinosaur naming rights. I had no idea this was going on. Atlascopcosaurus was discovered in 1984, Qantassaurus in 1996. It's probably cheaper than making a TV spot, and more durable than a billboard. It could even be an alternative to taking a yellow pages ad.

David Attenborough: "What a sight it must have been - a mighty herd of TasmanianCarpetCleaning236689-osaurus browsing in the Cretaceous jungle, while chicken-sized www.LegsnBreasts.com-oraptors scampered about their feet..."

Marcus, fleet of foot with spoon or without

Marcus did really well at the school athletics last week. His team won the relay, and he finished 1st in 100m, 2nd in 200m, 1st in 400m, 2nd in 800m and to top it off he clinched the blue-ribbon event, the egg-and-spoon race.

Yesterday he represented the school at the inter-school athletics carnival. He brought home a couple more ribbons, for 2nd in the 200 metres and 4th in the 100 metres. South Hobart came 3rd in their first year in Division D, a great effort I think.

Marcus is getting taller all the time, his legs are long and he just looks like an athlete. I still think he has a lot of improvement to come in his running style, but he has only just turned 8. so there is plenty of time to work that out. I now officially declare the athletics season over. We have a couple of weekends breather, before soccer starts again.

Handwipegate

You may have seen this story regarding George W. Bush and Bill Clinton shaking hands with crowds in Haiti. It is alleged that Bush wiped his hand on Clinton's back. The story is a beat up in my humble opinion. End of story. But I want to talk about the whole "...gate" cliche, which is based on the Watergate scandal from nearly 40 years ago.

I encountered the Haiti story on The Age website, which used the term "Handwipegate". If I ran a newspaper, any journalist who used "gate" would be put on lawn bowls duty immediately and permanently.

It occurs to me that many journalists now working are under the impression Watergate was actually a scandal about water.

Our monochromatic buddies

Birthday - part B2 (the prequel): wayfinding

I just remembered a sign I saw at Melbourne Airport. Alex, who was picking me up, is an information designer, and very interested in wayfinding, which "…encompasses all of the ways in which people and animals orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place." - thanks Wikipedia. So I needed to go to the toilet, but was running late to be picked up by Alex out the front of the terminal. The toilets down the long, long concourse were all closed for cleaning anyway.

I was about to go down an escalator, and through one-way security barrier, when I saw a laser printed A4 sign taped to the escalator.

THE TOILETS ARE BEHIND YOU
AT GATES 2, 6 AND 10.
THERE ARE NO TOILETS DOWNSTAIRS!
EXCEPT...

And that's where I stopped reading, as my momentum was carrying me down the escalator and there were people behind me. At the bottom I turned right and there were the toilets, where they have always been. I wish I had stopped to read what the exception at the end was.

Birthday part B - bad coffee, Pixies, racism.

My last birthday duty was a quick trip to Melbourne on Saturday to see the Pixies play. I say duty as I'd been shouted a ticket by Alex, and although I wanted to see them it wasn't exactly my idea. Left to myself I would have had a quiet, low-cost Saturday night at home in Hobart, probably reading an encyclopedia and eating toast. I flew over still feeling like I'd rather be spending the time in beige seclusion.

Airport coffee. I know there are few original observations left to be made, but why are there so many cafes and the coffee is all bad? Is there a bylaw that the price of coffee goes up and the temperature down when you drive onto Federal property? It really seems like although airports are still 70% about moving people and stuff around the country, they are about 30% about bad coffee.

Alex picked me up. I whined about the coffee, and he humoured me. When we got to his place in Windsor, and walked in through its hip arid-zone backyard, I was amazed to see a toddler fence. Etta is walking! Etta is 19 months old now and just unbelievably supercute. She is very friendly and will just walk up and ask for a cuddle. Pretty winning. Suparna is a full-time mum now, and its very hard work. She has tried to blend traditional Indian and western child-raising techniques, and to my eyes it looks like Etta is a bit spoilt. She won't sit in a high chair and isn't happy in a stroller, so she eats on someone's lap, and is carried around the streets a lot, although now she can walk when it's safe to.

Michael Lean dropped in with a few beers and we had a very nice low-key catch-up. He also just walks up and asks for cuddles sometimes but it never does him any good. He is exercising a great deal and looking sleek, like an Eastern Suburbs seal. Alex is getting fit too, and he and Michael talked a lot about BMIs while we ate fatless snacks.

Then Alex and I caught a train to the city to stuff ourselves with cheap Chinese dumplings before the gig. The place we were headed to had a line out the door, so we found somewhere else, and it was excellent. I love having a bunch of condiments and being able to add hot chili, sweet chili or soy sauce and whatever else as the spirit moves me. On the wall of the laneway outside the dumpling place was an old sign saying COMMIT NO NUISANCE.

At the nearest pub to the gig we stopped to whet the whistle. Already there were signs this was going to be the biggest gathering of Indie-Rock Dads since Indie-Rock Dadfest 2000. Many grey-haired and/or balding men in casual shirts, all of them wondering what you are supposed to wear to a rock gig once you turn 40, nervously drinking expensive micro-brews. The Pixies, for anyone unfamiliar with their work, put out 3 magnificent albums of surf-punk country-thrash black-humorous sci-fi guitar rock, in 1988-89-90, then stuttered and broke up. They reformed 3 years ago and toured to wide acclaim. On this tour they had planned one gig in Melbourne, but after it sold out in 4 minutes they added another, and another, until they had 4 solid sold out nights in a row, at creaky old Festival Hall.

Our tickets said to enter through Door 14. We found it after a while - in fact the sign said it was Door 14 and 17. We were patted down - a big Maori fella asked, his nose about touching mine, "How you going, alright?" I had never been inside here before - in fact, I had never been to any indoor gig this big before. We were way off to one side and about 5 rows from the back, but we could see OK.

I had not really done any homework on this, but it turns out this is the Doolittle tour, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of that album. And after starting with a few B sides, they cranked into track 1 and worked their way through to track 15, in order. It was brilliant - I just enjoyed it so much. After a lot of stamping and yelling they came back on for a short encore, then went off again waving.


They were selling discs of the gig afterwards, so at this point we went down near to the stage and Alex paid, and was handed a coupon. There was still heaps of yelling and stamping but we were pretty sure it was all over. Then suddenly they were back, and started in on "Bone Machine", from my favourite album Surfer Rosa. To our amazement they just kept going through that album, skipping forwards and back, and throwing in just one song from the last album Trompe le Monde.

They really played the house down, and there was no sense at all that these were old guys saving something up for another show tomorrow night and the night after that as well. This is not a review exactly, but more an account of how my birthday got back on the rails. I felt totally magnificent afterwards and so happy to have been there.

Afterwards we waited in a queue for ages to pick up the CD, the walked back into town, with a lively little sprint at the end to get onto the train back to Windsor. On the same night in the same part of town the national league soccer grand final had been played. A sprinkling of Melbourne Victory fans walked past us in the opposite direction. Judging by their faces I said to Alex "Melbourne lost on penalties" - turned out I was right.

The next day not much happened! Alex, Suparna, Etta and I went down to St Kilda pier and got blown sideways. It had been cloyingly hot and humid the day before so I was pretty pleased to get big lungfuls of cold sea air. There is now a swan viewing platform there, and we viewed two swans who were sleeping standing up. They had uncomfortable-looking tags around their necks. These two were S45 and S76. Alex and I walked along swinging Etta and counting "Ek, Do, TIN!" We are both very proud of our small amount of Hindi.

There has been a lot in the news about anti-Indian violence in Australia in the last 12 months. I have always planned to ask Suparna about it, so I did. I wanted to know if the incidence was growing quickly because the Indian migrant population was growing quickly, in other words the percentage of Indians being bashed/stabbed was actually not changing. She thought more that the growing population was scaring xenophobic people with a propensity to violence, and they were lashing out more as a reaction to seeing more Indian faces. It's unfortunate that the State government, who are financially benefiting from the Indian student boom, are not in a position to give an unbiased answer to the question "is this racist violence?". This is possibly getting in the way of successfully dealing with the problem. While we were discussing all this Etta said very clearly "racism". Sigh.

Alex also told me about their honeymoon in Malaysia, which I hadn't heard about. As Suparna is brown and he is white, they were abused here and there by Muslim men, who assumed he had picked her up. Mostly people were very kind to them, particularly when they saw the henna wedding patterns on their hands.

Alex dropped me at the airport yesterday afternoon and I flew home down the back of a very bumpy plane, dozing between two people who I both knew very slightly. That's just what you get flying in and out of Hobart. It's great to be home.

Birthday part 1

I had my 42nd birthday last week. Ideally I like birthdays to just slide by without much fuss. I think it's because I don't like fuss generally, rather than any dislike of growing old. I actually find growing old quite interesting. Anyway, a small amount of fuss was made, and that was OK. My mum and dad drove down to spend a few days with us, and Elf cooked a nice curry dinner. On my actual birthday she had to organise a work event, so I cooked a nice salmon dinner for myself, Mum and Dad and the kids, and Sally and Matt came over too. I scored a couple of nice books as gifts, one on the history of Penguin book covers was particularly beaut [but I chose it so that is perhaps cheating].

Elf knew I wouldn't stand for a party, but she had a great idea instead. She sent stamped addressed envelopes and cheap 'n' cheerful blank birthday cards to all my friends she could find addresses for, and reminded them it was my birthday. The cards arrived en masse over a few days. It took me a while to twig that there was something afoot. The writing on the envelopes was suspiciously familiar, and the messages on some of the 30 cards betrayed bemusement and/or slight reluctance. They cracked me up.

Despite all this I was a bit of a sad sack for a lot of the week. Minor things kept going wrong (after the major thing, losing my glasses) and I had a continual feeling that if everything would just STOP ... ah, it would be so nice. But it didn't. Since New Years Day I have lost my wallet and glasses and my watch has stopped for good (ironically) - so in general I am not quite feeling myself.

Genealogy

Here are some pics from April 2004. Michael is about three months old, and that is my dad's mum Ibey holding him, her great-grandson. This was the last time I saw her - although she lived until November 2007. She was not recognising my Dad a lot of that time, and he thought if I went to visit it would only upset her.



I am just doing some genealogical research, spurred by a convict-heritage-y thing we are doing at work. Ibey's grandfather's grandfather Beni Griffiths was sentenced to death for murder, but that was commuted to transportation. Queen Victoria received a petition for clemency from all the jurors in his case, and hundreds of others, to the effect that nobody liked the victim much. He had informed on Benni and some of his mates for poaching, and they went to teach him a lesson. That was in deepest Wales, in about 1840.

1. Beni Griffiths - labourer, murderer, transported to Van Diemens Land 1841 aboard HMS Tortoise
2. David Griffiths - son of Benni, came to Van Diemens Land with wife, children and mother 1855 aboard Ocean Child
3. John Griffiths - b. 1855 aboard Ocean Chief. Later was Postmaster Chief Linesman at Queenstown, Tasmania
4. ? John's daughter must have married a Stubbings around 1900-1908 [Ethel Emma Cordelia Griffiths married Daniel Herbert Stubbings on 17 Jun 1903. Their daughter Ivy Enid Stubbings married Elliot Elwick Rees on 17th Feb 1934 - thanks Ruth]
5. Ivy Enid Rees - b. 1909, d. 2007 - drapery shop assistant, mother of 2
6. John Rees - b. 1936 - teacher, footballer, father of 3
7. Chris Rees - b. 1968 - graphic designer, father of 2
8. Marcus Rees - b. 2002 and Michael Rees - born 2004

Synaptical analysis (1) - lawnmowers

Yesterday while walking back from the optometrists (I now have contact lenses) I walked past a Jim's Mowing ute, with all the mowing gear in the trailer. Fella inside had just finished a big mow. As I walked past I could smell the 2-stroke, the hot metal and the fresh grass clippings. Unbidden, a tape started playing in my head - the sounds of football on the radio. In my brain there is a strong synapse connecting those smells with the nasal twang of commentators and roar of the crowd as heard over a small AM radio. Interesting.

Oops

This afternoon we all had a paddle at Nutgrove Beach, Sandy Bay. Marcus is getting around really confidently now. Michael has overcome his fears of paddling in more-than-knee-deep water - he really enjoyed it today. Everything went brilliantly until I was tipped out by an invisible wave, and lost my glasses is reasonably deep water. A pretty expensive wobble.

Number 4

A beautiful little house in South Hobart I walk past sometimes. I took these on my way back to work from Chess Club at the school today.

Not endorsed by Hitler

Reblogged from Zoomar.

Michael's monster move

On Saturday nights we all watch Monster Moves, a great doco series about moving large buildings and other objects from place to place. The kids are just spellbound by it. Here is a sample clip.



This week it was about the relocation of a heap of old Egyptian temples, especially Abu Simbel, the one with the four massive statues of Rameses out front.

You know, this one

The next day Michael spent a couple of hours constructing a Monster Mover with an old toy truck, magnets and meccano bits. He balanced an encyclopedia on it as a platform and tried moving a castle made of mega blocks. Talking to himself the whole time in very professional terms about jacks and levels and angles.

Michael drew this the morning after the show. That's a vulture on top.

Breaking News: NZ accent is amusing

Dave at work has been listening to Australia's cricket tour of New Zealand streaming on the internet. The coverage has a terrific mix of clipped EnZed cricket pundits and gloriously bad local radio ads.

At the moment the Bleck Ceps have just broken the sheckles with a sex over mudwucket. "Just a fleck of the wrest and over she goes". Before the Australian atteck was "like a peck of wild dogs". The spunners are getting a lot of grup off the putch.

Meanwhile the new Mitsubish Triton truck has "up to six trucking airbags. And Triton has hardened the truck up with a bigger tray, and loads of trucking power". Also "you can demege yourself, end your blinds, wristling them un and out of their breckets."

Michael's study area

Michael reads while squatting. He leaves a trail behind him across the floor, of open books. This is an area near the bookcase that he frequents, and I thought I take the chance to document what he is reading these days by means of aerial photography.

Knackered 4 drew with Head 4

On Friday night we played a semi-final against Head. As usual, I was terribly nervous beforehand. Even on the afternoon of the previous day, I only had to think of the game and my stomach plunged two or three floors.

On the drive to the game Paul, our fearless leader, started sketching out his plan for a new system of subs - swapping two players at a time instead of one. I really hate tactical theorising - I am not a thinker when it comes to sport. Tell me my job and I'll do it. But it sounded to me like a complication we didn't need.

We dominated the first 10 minutes without scoring. I was in goals by then when the lanky bloke who usually plays in defence for Head took an early shot. I was just trying to narrow the angle at the time and was on the wrong foot, expecting I had another second to get set. It went into the bottom corner.

I was on the bench when Cam scored just before halftime, and the half finished 1-1. It was obviously going to be very tight.

Early in the 2nd half I put us ahead after Brett put me through with a well-timed ball. Very soon after I got another, can't remember how. 3-1. There was not long left and I thought we might have done enough to hang on. Just while I was thinking that, their nippy forward Always-Wears-Long-Pants-Guy, got round me very easily and scored, for 3-2.

Our new sub system was not going well. We almost conceded a goal when the game restarted after one of our substitutions. We were all daydreaming while their goalie simply rolled the ball to an unattended forward but he messed up the simple chance. Not long after Long-Pants scored again from a free kick. Adrian had hovered too close behind him and been pinged for a "tackle" from behind. 3-3. I was off again at that stage.

With 3 minutes left I went back on and scored again, 4-3. As usual I was trying to do too much, got caught and involved in a messy scramble. A gap opened up and I toe poked it in. One minute to go, and I thought we had done enough. We tried to hold possession but coughed it up. In trying to win it back one of our guys clouted the ball into Long-Pants' knee and it rebounded into the net. 4-4.

I don't know how many of the others on court knew what a draw would mean, but I didn't. I assumed we would have a short extra time or penalties. It wasn't until the hooter went and we were shaking hands that someone announced that Head would go through to next week's Grand Final because they were above us on the ladder. I really wish I had known how it worked.

I was disappointed about it, but I quickly realised that we hadn't played well enough to win so it was a fair result. We missed plenty of chances and mucked up some substitutions. Our defence and midfield was pretty good, so I guess I carry the can for too many shots straight at the keeper.

In the other semi one of the teams could only field three players. a) That puts in perspective the low, low level we are playing at, where a team all-but-forfeits a knockout final. And b) the team that won that semi are not world beaters. If we had gone through to play them next week i would have put the house on us to win. Sigh.

Great line from a documentary tonight

"They put Rameses' face on a truck..."

Photo by Hajor via Wikipedia {{cc-by-sa}}

South Hobart this morning

We have had a solo raven visiting our area a lot lately. He has some quite odd behaviour, and we think he might be injured. He sat on our front verandah for quite a while, guzzled water, and sat with his beak open facing into the wind. This morning he hopped onto Andrew and Sharyn's tin roof next door and trotted up and down - tink tank tink tank tink tank - for a while. The boys came out to look and I took the opportunity to snap them, as they haven't been in the blog for a while.


The magpie family have been regular visitors all summer. The baby is still cheeping maniacally, but is able to feed itself now.

Rectangular Stadium 2

Imagine a world where all the advertising and
marketing people had mild aspergers syndrome.

TONIGHT AT RECTANGULAR STADIUM
10 men in blue shirts and 10 men in red shirts will kick a spherical thing about.
Sometimes it will get caught in the two big nets. There are also two men
wearing orange and one man wearing black, who sometimes blows a whistle.
There are white lines painted on the green grass. Most of them are straight lines
but there is a circle in the middle. Although it will be night time you will still be able
to see what is happening because there are very big lights.
The men in orange also wear gloves.

Oh Boy

Rectangular Stadium

A new stadium is under construction in Melbourne, for soccer and rugby. All the other grounds in Melbourne are oval, to suit Aussie rules and cricket, so the current working title of the new venue is Rectangular Stadium. I am sure they are going to sell naming rights for squizillions, and it will end up being Consolidated Superannuation Stadium or something. The current name is so right, so soothing, so - sincere. In a sane world they would just keep it.

Wiki success

My first article in Wikipedia (on Maj. Gen. Cyril Clowes) has done really well. It was nominated to be a Do You Know on the home page, accepted by the Wikicommunity as sufficiently interesting, and appeared on 25th Feb as the lead item. I didn't manage to get a screenshot because it was up through the middle of the night here. I just got the statistics and it got 5300 hits during its moment in the (Greenwich Mean Time) sun. It has been edited by nine others since I launched it, all good minor improvements.

I am very happy that "Silent Cyril" Clowes has got a little more recognition for his efforts, but I'm not sure what I should write about next.

Jazz, man, jazz.

On Thursday night I went to the Clarence Jazz Festival with Mum and Dad, at the old Rosny Schoolhouse site. They've always been big jazz fans, and have been meaning to get to this annual groove-fest for years. They made sure of it this year because my sister Sally was featured as an artist-in-residence. She is a video artist, and had made two different pieces on show around the site.

When I arrived Mum and Dad were watching a fairly trad combo on the main stage. There is a unique crowd dynamic with trad jazz - the "clapping after the solo" phenomenon. When the trumpeter finishes his fancy bit, and the sax player starts his, there is a little time lag and then people give him a hand. A really good solo gets a big round that drowns out the first half of the next solo. "Trad" is probably not accurate - there was no banjo, straw boaters or suspenders. Perhaps "classic jazz" is a better description. The vocalist/alto sax was very Vince Jones-y.

When the trad guys finished we went to see the next act, inside an old stone barn, built in 1815. One of Sal's works was looping on a screen on the back wall. She filmed ten jazz standards, as "sung" by three different sign language practitioners. It worked very well - there was no sound, but Sal said she knew many of the audience would know the words very well anyway.

While it looped silently behind us we watched a tight jazz-rock-blues combo called King Cake - Randall Muir and Pete Cornelius on keys and guitars, and a drummer from Melbourne. They reminded me a lot of Directions In Groove who were a Triple-J radio staple in the nineties, although King Cake were purely instrumental.

At one point they did a very modified version of Cocaine by JJ Cale. At the end Randall called out "Can you pick it?" Sally was briefly thrilled to the core as she thought he had asked "Can you dig it?", and and of course everyone lives for the moment when a jazz man actually says that.

During a break between sets it was time to go out and see Sal's second piece, which was consisted of three films projected one after the other in different locations around the yard. Sal had filmed her mouth in extreme close up, miming along to three more standards - I forget the first, but the next were Ella Fitzgerald doing A Tisket A Tasket, and Fats Waller doing Seafood Dinner - I hope that's right. All you could see were the red lips, projected up into a tree, onto a pile of boulders, and on a screen behind some kind of historic 9-pane window. It was entertaining and very well done.

Snakes In The Rain

Today, Marcus turned eight. The boys slept in. At 7.30 we heard some action - although Marcus was still asleep, Michael was quietly doing "explosions" with his hands under the doona. Pretty soon they were both up and about. Elf tracked down some great presents for Marcus; plastic spherical transformer things called Bakugan Battle Brawlers. He just loves them, and so does Michael.

Elf lined up the Reptile Rescue people to put on a snakes and lizards show for Marcus, Michael and a dozen invited friends. The reptile guys were quite hard to get hold of and pin down - Elf's persistence and perspicacity came to the fore there. But they were well worth the trouble, they were fantastic.

We invited everyone to meet us at Cascade Gardens, just up the road from home. The weather outlook was mixed, so we had our fingers crossed. The snake guys, Justin and Chris, arrived early, shook hands with Marcus and showed the boys the lizards in their tubs. They had an impressive large plastic bucket marked DANGER Venomous Snakes.


As the kids and parents arrived they got out the lizards and handed them around. They had blue-tongues (two adults, two two-day-old babies) and some lovely little mountain dragons.

Clockwise from above left: Lana, Marcus, Caleb, Adrian, Cameron, Michael.

After everyone had had good fun with the cuddleable reptiles, Justin and Chris brought out the non-cuddleables. First they each extracted a tiger snake, holding their tail and keeping the head away, curled around a special snake stick. The tigers looked very different from one another - one very dark, and the other quite green with a yellowish belly. Next they brought out a copperhead. He was much slimmer, kind of khaki. I was wandering around taking photos at this stage and didn't get a close look at the copperhead, but there is apparently a metallic orange-pinkishness about the headular area.

These and the tigers are highly venomous - a good bite would kill an untreated adult in about 5 hours. The little white-lipped or whip snake is less venomous, although Chris said new research suggests that they are capable of laying you low, as their venom varies a lot in toxicity.
Next Chris and Justin demonstrated (with a large rubber red-bellied black snake) how they catch a snake, how they release it, and then how to bandage a snakebite on the arm. The kids asked lots of questions and were very interested. Someone asked how to bandage a bite on the stomach or the back. Justin's advice was "Er... just do your best".

It was raining solidly by this stage, so we just handed around barbecues sausages in bread and left out the tricky stuff like plates and salad. The snake men took a break while people ate, and joined us afterwards for cake and sour worm lollies. Elf excelled herself, with a vivid green chocolate snake cake.

Elf laboured over a perfect potato salad that came home untouched, but having just eaten some at dinner I can say - spot on.

Once everyone had eaten, Justin and Chris broke out the lizards again. Parents and siblings arrived to collect the guests, and they too had a go cuddling lizards. Of all the things in the animal kingdom called "blue", the blue-tongue's tongue is the most rewarding. Eventually the snake men said their farewells. Just when we were wondering when we would get rid of everyone else, the rain kicked up a notch to Reasonably Heavy, and we finally moved off home to get dry and get coffee.

More real estate comedy

Those wags at Roberts Real Estate - will they stop at nothing to make us laugh?