wolf

We almost missed the wonderful Peter and The Wolf when it screened quietly on Tuesday at 10.



Luckily it's repeated on ABC2 this Sunday at 7.
 

life

Actually, those red shoes in the banner image appear in a Life Cook Book circa 1960 in my possession.

I searched for the image to no avail at the LIFE photo archive hosted by Google via J walk

But I did find some related images on a modernistic theme

one can easily jump around while watching television.

watering plants in the living room

Family and friends sitting in a modern home, with lots of glass

at his push-button house displaying guests sitting on the couch and playing bridge during a cocktail-party.
 

mud cintury

and speaking of mid century interiors

peanuts

At Comics.com, all of Peanuts online... via Daily Jive

That was a blast from the past. I spent an hour or so yesterday in the early fifties looking for a strip I read in the early seventies. I was looking for mid-century interiors, commentary thereof. I think this might be it:




and who knew there would be a strip about blogging, or blog ennui
 

shoes two

Update on the shoes:



It seems we're in good company...


Just Jared: Natalie


Natalie and Charlie

 



(seen via herald sun)

cup eve

Some scenes from National Velvet - the TV show.

(I've been waiting for nv to make an appearance on the yt nostalgia machine.)
 

red shoes

- And speaking of op shops, I bought some new Dunlop runners (dog-walkers) at the Salvos, which was timely as the old ones are on their last legs.
At op shops, if you're lucky enough to score a new pair of shoes in your size, the colour of the shoe isn't an issue.

But they are very red.

But when she wanted to go to the right, the blue heeler and the red shoes walked to the left, and when she wanted to walk up the room, the blue heeler and the red shoes walked down the room, down the stairs through the street, and out through the gates of the town. She walked, and was obliged to walk, far out into the dark wood...

She was frightened, and wanted to throw the red shoes away; but they stuck fast. She tore off her stockings, but the shoes had grown fast to her feet. She walked and was obliged to go on walking the blue heeler over field and meadow, in rain and sunshine, by night and by day—but by night it was most horrible via

 

boss

 



- narrowly beating Snake in the grass ends day at races in the best headline stakes.
 

donc

You know there's a disconnect happening at Doncaster.



Opulence and crisis rubbing shoulders in newspaper columns.
Butlers/stylists/valets for the meltdowntowners.

From a few k away, we saw the new Shoppingtown steadily rising on the horizon by about 11%, opening for trade just as consumer confidence fell by 11%.

We checked out Donc* a few weeks ago in the not-quite-ready or Playtime phase, with visible cable lines and scaffolding surrounding the food-courts and fishmongers, and ye olde valets directing vehicles around the car parks with thumbed aplomb.
I liked the old Donc, actually, with its long narrow walkways of 70s mall, where walking groups of 70 year olds would sometimes stroll, its many exits, its mid century scale, its aspect looking squarely at the suburbs.
I am uneasy in Chaddy sized centres, disoriented in their no-place interiors, and certainly disturbed by pretensions of opulence in shops.

More at Sterne

* I don't think this name enjoys wide currency.
 

six up

soft drink can generator via J walk

six years today
 

finance talk

I heard this sequence on ABC radio this morning in a discussion on the latest market moves:

Is it a dead cat bounce?

One swallow does not a summer make.

But the elephant in the room -

I wish finance talk could be less esoteric.
 

see also
via presurfer
 

conditional

 


Via Customers who purchased this product also selected... at the rnd_time infinite wall clock


Collection of Unusual Clock Designs via The Presurfer
 

more micro

via Genevieve

More on microblogging trends at ReadWriteWeb State of the Blogosphere 2008.
From the comments:

People write where they hope and believe they have an audience to listen and possibly respond to their thoughts. i.e vanity of the blogger

Right now the audience is now on Twitter and/or Facebook/Friendfeed, so that is where the conversation has moved. In the future it may move to video e.g Seesmic, Qik, Kyte

So that's where the party's gone?
Funnily enough, I've always been a micro tumberly twitterly link blogger, so I may have to start writing long posts to stay well in the nichey-kitchen at parties.
 

indie blogs

Quiet around here lately.
And not just here (computer issues), but more generally. There did seem to be a mass desertion lull. Has blogging palled?
Content appeared to be going mainstream as a commodity, or perhaps it was invisible, facebooked elsewhere.

The point of my intended conversation wasn't to bemoan my lack of readers - content here has always meant to pleases only myself and perhaps a handful of others - but to maintain that microblogging and social networking combined with time constraints have made indie blogs obsolete.
Anne - in Comments at the wonderful Ample Sanity

But then The Presurfer turned 8:

It was great fun to start The Presurfer on September 24, 2000, and I'm still enjoying updating the site every day.

and I like is 6 and still going strong.

Every year I promise myself a bit of a sabbatical, changing tack for a while to talk more about why I do it, what I've learnt, where I think it's going. All a bit more meaty than the seaside and bubble cars. But then I think a lot of you are probably here for the seaside and bubble cars, not to hear my inner thoughts and there's the eternal conundrum.

Meanwhile, the meta musings at things (introductory or between the links) are always interesting

sometimes we think the internet is best simply for lists of things

A while ago, Fed By Birds posted a great link to the scrapbooks of Lewis Carroll, observing that the whimsical collection of items of interest resembled a blog.
I like that analogy. And whenever the blogging ennui strikes, it's good to keep in mind that a blog is allowed to be simply a web log of browsing.

And finding a fab new blog always helps.



(Update: I drafted this on Friday. Kim at LP today marks some local blogiversaries with related thoughts.)
 

mr cool

 
Mr Cool
 


(which reminds me - we liked the sundry pun here)


 

crystal dream

Fri night's dream: I was offered a pile of books including a Girls' Crystal Annual 1946.
I don't have this one in my collection, I said, excitedly.



The dark side of the dream was that this offer was then retracted.
 

footbowl

Ramage directed me to Hanuman, and this post on the Chinese–Australian Historical Images in Australia Database.

And this photo.

(It's a timely image on Brownlow night, as the dull countdown tolls in the background, and with Test cricket looming too early on the horizon. This near merging of the seasons is unseasonal)
 

entertaining

Don't do this
 

musicians

The Devil Went Down to Georgia

(farewell swapatorium)



garage band: unfamous musicians in everyday places

teen knits from letslookupandsmile

guitar hero from superbomba
 

sunny day

Has the large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?

via Dr Fish @ LP


Nah - Melbourne is too perfect today for the end of the world, to misquote the misattributed


what to wear

 

oz modernism

City of Sound: A collaborative map of modernism in Australia

via things
 

dominion

animal politics

Palin Shows No Love for Baby Wolves Huffington

From “Dominion” to Domination: The Duplicity and Complicity of Matthew Scully

Amazon Customer Reviews: Dominion via Animal Person
 

by seagirt

Harry Nilsson on The Ghost & Mrs. Muir - March 29, 1969


He appeared in the episode "The Music Maker", and his character name was Tim Seagirt. wiki
 

veep

Foxy Lady To Guard Henhouse? Say NO
Palin’s record on issues related to energy and the environment



Prodem at Zazzle


Aerial Wolf Gunning 101
 

gardeners

ABV 2 Cooks and gardeners

vale
 

powerful

Powerful Powerful Owl
- with brushtail possum

According to Dr Raylene Cooke from Deakin University, Powerful Owls eat an astounding 250 to 350 possums a year. Dr Cooke analysed 2500 owl pellets to determine this fact. scribbly gum

umbrellas

 

old news

via Genevieve

NLA Australian Newspapers beta Historic Australian Newspapers, 1803 to 1954

Yesterday I immersed myself in The Argus, September 1945, but only scratched the surface.

Raw POW accounts, missing airmen and ads for tennis racket restrings
Civilians who died in the first days of Peace and the scarcity of lemons
Flat or House required by quiet Protestant
atomsite


(I'd need days, weeks, with this wonderful resource- and that's just the Argus)
 

miss beanie

Inspired by many others, I tried to create a manga avatar a few times, but it wasn't until I spied a beanie (on the ♂ menu) that I managed it. So it's a bit mix-and-match but there you go.



This is my preferred headwear in a Melbourne winter, although it could be tartan. Also, add about 25 years of course.
 

an update - non-shopped from the ♀ menu, but alas, still with head-wear in lieu of comprehensive fringe options. (Although it is around this time of the year that I swap my purple beanie for purple TAC cap when walking canines, that much is true.)
 

post modern

These cakes remind me of this tattoo


Cake Wrecks via Making Light
 

whiff

boynton has fielded many queries today re table tennis or


whiff




whaff


See also ping pong


thanks Boris*
"Ping pong was invented on the dining tables of England and it was called whiff whaff".

soft drink

Dispensing Machine




  
Country Cordial Manufacturers' Conference

  
slightly less cordial
 

informal

Informal portrait
 

dog chair

Dog Chair via grow-a-brain

Horse table via bifurcated rivets
 

art v sport

on the way to pub trivia
which is neither sport nor art
we heard dweeb on sportsradio attacking cricket critic
on article on art and sport,
the mindlessness of sport
(and abstract ballet)
the transcendence of art.
Dweeb took issue with this because
melbourne is the only place where you go to the football
and then the (classical) ballet

when really we all know
this is one of those issues that could be settled
by a debate between say macrob girls and xavier.
 

every child

Every child drew a banana in their pastel book with Reeves pastels.

The School Paper . . . for Grades V And V1 (1917)
Selected articles from the Burwood Bulletin No. 108 (Autumn 2008)
 

equestrian qotd

Re:Who is idiot Equestrian Commentator?

Who cares? It's horses jumping over mushrooms, dragons, cottages and bridges.

Well, I did enjoy watching the 3 day event. That is, watching the moments that swimming-centric ch. seven let us see between swimming heats
And I enjoyed Simon Marshall's commentary. (Though ideally he'd share the gig with Lucinda Green, for the yin and yang equestrian commentating dream team.)
 

pageantry

"Television is the major player ushering in the pageantry," says Kevin Wamsley, an Olympics historian with the University of Western Ontario. "It became part of the entertainment package that is the Olympic Games"...
Most include a retelling of the host nation's founding myths -- often in a hilariously fragmented and abstract form. When a large birdlike contraption ran across the stadium during the Atlanta Opening Ceremonies in 1996, NBC's on-air hosts blurted out: "My best guess is that this is about the Civil War" salon

I'm of the school that thinks low-tech might be the new black in future olympics pageantry.

Sir,
Would it be to much to suggest a return from the mind-boggling hypocrisy, propaganda, and panoply of the opening ceremony to the simplicity of the athletes' entry, the local and olympic anthems, a speech by the OC president, and, the most symbolic action, the lighting of the olympic flame? Times online

It would take something as simple as a ron clarke running around the arena and up the stairs to match the mega extravaganza of recent flame lighting. imho.


see also: recent search request
 

fido friday 5

AGB reminded me: Boynton's dog got "smiled at" by a rotty*.

I saw the rotty the other day actually, 3 years on, in situ, same old park, same old man walking her, his kindly-gentleman appearance belying the fact of his being in possession of a dangerous canine weapon, the dog itself impersonating a more benevolent labrador from a distance. The only give away is the lack of an otter tail, the lack of a tail at all.
When Bronte got biten by rooti on hunches, I'd almost led her into the jaws of faux-labarador myself, not dissuading her as both dogs advanced across the oval. Next thing there was the sound of dog fight, which for certain reasons I was determined to hear as a mere skirmish and not a serious biting which could have been fatal, according to the vet. The certain reasons involved Flo, of course, whose inclination to nip white dogs (not bite, if there are degrees of these things) was sometimes greeted with great alarm. This was a rather lax attitude on my part, I concede, harking back to some imaginary golden age when dogs had minor spats and skirmishes in public and people moved on. I concede belatedly that there are no degrees in these things*, a nip is as good as a bite, and Flo is never off the lead now - has never been off the lead for years.
So when Bronte got biten on hunches,and the kindly looking old gentleman shouted an enquiry of sorts across the oval, I shrugged and waved in an exaggeration of casual acceptance, in an effort to signal minor skirmishes between dogs are fine; they sort it out...
It was only after he drove away with his rooti (did I wave?) that I noticed the extent of her injuries, which were not at all minor. We limped back home in shock.

* well, who wants to think of a severity spectrum in such moments, or the objective assessment of the severity of biting problems based on the evaluation of the wound pathology




cattle dog in sulky



I'm a great fan of the unsolicited comment from strangers as you walk your dog, daydreaming about horticulture.
Last week as I walked Flo, the unsolicited comment yelled across the street was simply: Ritalin...
 

correct

the correct way to punch a football

 

wordle

 
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide.

A couple of takes from the current b.esque mix.




 
Could I have thought of such a fine string as labrador hoodie shrinks, or Karenina Doncaster/just knew mention?
 
via Hooting Yard
 

misadventures

Like Beau Geste or King Kong or Anna Karenina, the saga of Greg Norman's misadventures when leading a major golf championship with 18 holes left to play has had more rewrites - most of them with the same old endings - than absolutely necessary. source

A party of passengers
 

unsuccessful

Character note:

Her daughter, now in her 30s, for many years unsuccessfully tried to meet (with a view to marrying) an elite footballer. The Age

(I think the parentheses got her)
 

unsharp

A Friday sort of search request:

how to unsharp the tooth of labrador

(Is puppy. Is sharp. Do not touch.)
 

east

the way eastlink shrinks your long-held sense of distance.

One minute you're driving along at Doncaster
you go through the tunnel and next thing you're at Cadbury Canterbury Road?

Not to mention what the roadscaping does to your until now reasonably stable mental map.
Who knew Ringwood would ever look this?





So anyway, suddenly being in Bayswater North, we thought we may as well go to Bunnings to source shower rails
Just before I entered the store I saw I was wearing Bunnings colours.
I don't normally dress like a Leprachaun, but there you go.
In that vast cold barn was I paranoid to think Security was tagging me, with my ploy to impersonate a shop assistant and snaffle screws under my crismon hoodie?
(At least I didn't get asked about stationery lines as I did once when I accidentally wore Royal blue into Officeworks.)
 

dolittle

Harris writes with a wit that's sly, not show-offy. He can encapsulate the woes of shooting "Doctor Dolittle" in four words: "The rhinoceros got pneumonia."

Charles Matthews, Washington Post
Amazon review of Pictures at a Revolution

recommended by Self Styled Siren
 

barbie birds

The Birds Barbie Doll

via As Above
 

update: psycho We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock.

 

book care

Last Fri I met Zeppo B to take in the manuscripts on display at the SLV.
Along with many many Melburnians. So many that the queue stretched out the door and onto the steps, with that strange weather thing happening that we Melburnians have almost forgotten - the unfolding of the umbrellas.
Inside, there were so many people in the room we were advised by the sentry to forget the linear journey and navigate via available space over the glass encasements. (This is often my preferred pathway as it turns out)
And it was beautiful.


And this is not especially related, but it did occur to me as we talked about the remarkable feat of history and preservation. I mentioned that recently I had seen a technique demonstrated very soberly on an instructional film from the fifties, Books and their care (see 03:24)
The ms in question is The World of Pooh

(And for ZB and others sans broadband, the technique is explained lo fi here - Opening a new book - along with the Improper use of a paperclip.)
 

mov 2 live

Elsewhere, my musical taste has been questioned.
I took this to heart and sought out one of my top ten fave live hits of the 1790's for consolation.
 

oranged

6. ORANGEMEN: Forget the Big Three. The most eye-catching grouping on Friday at the U.S. Open was Miguel Angel Jimenez, Shingo Katayama and Boo Weekley.

Strictly by coincidence, each player stepped to the first tee with an almost identical bright, burnt orange polo shirt.

Commenting on the colorful triumvirate, ESPN anchor Mike Tirico, a Syracuse Orangeman himself, came up with this gem: “Are they rooting for the Dutch?”
Golf week

I think I caught a glimpse of this phenomenon on TV over the weekend, but there is no trace of it anywhere online. (Well, if you search through getty images for CA: U.S. Open - Round Two * you can see the ensemble but not the ensemble.)

See also: Bad jumpers, dodgy strides
The Very Worst in Golf Fashion
A look at golf fashions through the years
 

metres

 

hitching

This was one of the photos I found through searching for Muriels + wedding at Picture Australia. The hitching appears to be an accidental pun...

Anyway, after this, an email from Ann O'Dyne * inspired me to go browsing for more:

Hampton
Trehare (Treharne, Trahar, Trahare ?)
Tallangatta
mandolin
marquee
methodist H & C
 

blog wars

There's a comment over at Troppo on old blogwars*, siding with the
people who neither know nor care about the history of this matter

One thing that's been interesting to observe in the recent great big blogwar shakeout of the cyberbullies of old* is how quickly people forget. Even with with google. Or maybe your google-fu is only as good as your inclination to remember.
It used to seem that the blog in question was one of the major blogging players, here to stay. I witnessed the rise and rise of it, and was always baffled and dismayed that its essential nastiness, that for me negated any cleverness, drew such a big crowd. I always suspected that Snark would run its course - in the end it's a reductive slide to a place where everything is meh. But I didn't predict this ending. Also, I could not have predicted the extent to which people forget, blogs disappear, communities move on.
So we're all ephemeral, and blogs feed off the present despite the permalink that presumes a record of the past.
And I suspect that a history of oz-blogging (if it ever gets written) will be a fairly standard chronicle of clusters and stats that will forget the gossip and the various spats and brain-snaps of maverick voices.
Does anyone care? Yep - I think it's all fascinating, and as always history is enlightening.
And maybe it is more fascinating because of the sense of historical proof that permalinks provide, it strengthens the inklings of memory into a gotcha.
 

something good

About 20 years ago a friend observed:
We've given up on op-shops now. Dimmeys is cheaper.
Well if you're talking best of popular music CDs, he was right.
Herman's Hermits Greatest Hits for a dollar was pretty good.


and this is good too
 

outdo

comments policy update
 

sagas

well, we love the Aga Saga woman.

(along with with Pru and Trude, we're surrounded by 'em)
 

the searchers

Your Search is Over
Fed by birds responds beautifully to the googlers.



(see also the Tugboat files)



meanwhile this might be the best answer to my most requested...
 

football stories

Via Brownie, in a comment at AGB



"The Goal Umpire’s Assistant (Leitchville)


Football Stories from Country Victoria
21 Films by Malcolm McKinnon

mind map

via the Presurfer, I've enjoyed sampling Text2Mindmap
a web application that creates a mind map out of a list of words



(Click for better view)
 

qotd

I drove past Bogan Avenue in Sylvania Waters the other day on the way to Bunnings.

first line of a comment at Are you living in Coconuts via ABC Melb
 

green man

Red was wondering whether Gumby (the original) was ever on television in Australia...



Yep. Mid to late sixties. I was a big fan.
And sometime between kinder and school, I was given the 'bendables'.
Gumby and Pokey and a coupla hats and gloves.
My favourite was the guitar combo.



Gumby survived the fate of most forsaken childhood toys by being so stylish. He has always adorned my bookshelves.

Feats of Clay

tv 9 to nought

Continuing my random tv countdown begun here

9: I'm over the treechange/seachange dramas where jaded city souls are healed by rolling hills and bucolic quirk. I'm still waiting for the obvious: treechangers find life in the country much the same as before, or sometimes a bit dreary unless they do sport. Not accepted by locals for at least 25 years, which is of course outside the time frame of most TV shows. Until then cityblowins may be loitering with intent to mine their experience for story lines for a future ABC drama series.
Diver Dan the bottomless pit

8. But I did enjoy the rural view in Love's Harvest

The beauty and serenity of rural life is jolted regularly by the reality of hard work and uncertainty

Funny how this review can get it so wrong:

Victoria and Gilles seem like a nice enough couple but there's not a lot going on here. It's like watching a well-produced home movie - sweet, but of little interest if you're not part of the family smh

not a lot going on here? It's all in the beautifully observed detail. These 'home movies' are telling universal tales.


7. OMG. I watch Ladette to Lady. (It was on the ABC first, y'know.) Can't say why this staged piece of realityshite appeals. Catchy theme? Memories of schooldays and unresolved issues with Home Economics?


6. Lines from my latest Google Poem compilation:

a retired Australian rules football
jock Sam Newman manhandled the doll

full version

5. and I'm just about over football. Culture. I'm over the wisecracking.
Football analysis should be earnest, like Talking Footy and Football inquest .



(A childhood staple. An enduring memory of host Mike Williamson biting into an Arnott's Teddy Bear biscuit between bouts of inquest. Or maybe it was Butternut Snap - the presence of Teddy Whitten may have confused me.)

Football should be earnest.
(well, if it has to be Entertainment it could at least aspire to be Drama/Crime Thriller and not a telethon.)

4. Meanwhile newbiscuit has the dirt on Grand Designs

‘Every time you were trying to dig foundations or pour cement, this posh bloke kept getting in the way going on and on about the bloody ‘integrity of the materials to the natural setting’ or some other bollocks. One of the lads threatened to deck him, but he just turned to camera and said something about tensions beginning to show on this high-profile and controversial project.’

See also Sustainability Blog on Grand Designs Craziness

where people you inevitably become irritated with try to rebuild a Middle Aged church tower/divert a river and create a pastiche castle/dig a massive £300,000 hole and then plonk a German prefabricated modernist house in the middle of it. On a hill in Bath. With traditional stone cladding.

3. That Armstrong Miller Flanders and Swann Show
(My companions found the A-M scatological take on F&S amusing, but I sat "po-faced" throughout)

update - po-faced out of a sense of nostalgic loyalty to F&S, one of my father's favourites, and who I loved listening to.

2. (It was disturbing to watch the Armstrong Miller Dentist sketches on the eve of dental appointments. (an inappropriate dentist, who treats his captive audience to tales of the state of his dog's prostate and swinger parties *).
Luckily my Dentist favours Foxtel over Confessional. Although, as I noted in a recent comment, I didn't find Life After Humans a particularly relaxing progam to watch in that position.)

1. Humans are Dead?
Flight Of The Conchords was heralded by os blogs I like, and I was not dusapointid.
 

p123s5+

Ann O'D tagged me with a new 5th sentence meme, which seems to have gathered 100 pages in 4 years (see p23s5). I always take these things literally, so the nearest book to where I sit blogging is a recent op shop find: The Penguin Book of Women's Humor

"Not my son, assuredly!"
Heathcliff smiled again, as if it were rather too bold a jest to attribute the paternity of that bear to him.
"My name is Hareton Earnshaw," growled the other; "and I'd counsel you to respect it!"

fang

Players wear masks (which are included) and try to break the other players' snakes with their own snake's metal fangs.

I was all set to link to the wonderful TV commercial of this 1967 game, but alas, a day later and it has been removed due to terms of use violation.

Update! Fang Bang is back: Lost Toy Commercials for Boomers (around 02:30.)

"Working for Marvin Glass was wild...The atmosphere was a cross between James Bond & the Playboy mansion"

Oh! Dr Kinsey!
A Photographic Reaction to the Kinsey Report, by Lawrence Lariar, 1953.
via grow a brain

cool

thinkers

Smits's work equips him to bring the orang-utan's plight to a global audience. His tales include that of a female orang-utan who stumbled from a burning forest with her child. She waited until a human drove by then remained deathly still as the man raced from the car, rescued her baby and drove away.
Only when she saw her child was in the hands of humans did she turn around and clumsily go back into the smoke of the burning forest," Smits says. SMH

Willie Smits Thinkers of the Jungle: The Orangutan Report
Melbourne launch (see BOS)
Sydney

baked

I purchased this heavy tome on Cakes:




It sells for about 75 dollars, (insert thrifty disclaimer here about vouchers and discounts) and is rather swish in the manner of these thick as a brick, sensitive new age manuals, with fabulous triple-tested recipes and beautiful photographs. I like it very much.

Not sure if the history has been triple-tested though:


Eventually, in the early 19th century, electric and gas stoves were introduced...
 

ex jewelry

Ex-Boyfriend Jewelry via bifurcated rivets

The thumbnails create a strange gallery where iconic imagery is given a new script.





(Or where semiotics is given the finger)

car 30

- and this clip set my lift-phobia back a few years/floors.


Update Nick Paumgarten on Late Night Live