groove

In the days of the heatwave that preceded the calamity of bushfires, I remember listening to music in the low-fi cellar, having just read about just hear it at J Walk

Via the comments @ J walk, Grooveshark
Play any song in the world for free

so I've been catching up with some absent friends (CDs being elsewhere)
 

unlike

Clicking the Like link next to something that you enjoy on Facebook is an easy way to let someone know that you like it, without leaving a comment...

Will I be able to unlike (and remove me liking something) after I click on the Like link?

bernie

FX posted about Blossom Dearie.
I played the excellent 9 min clip, and then went looking for some old faves.

I eventually found My Attorney Bernie

see also 'S Wonderful ('S João)
 

disaster

From the safety of the suburbs, I listened to the radio on Saturday as it changed from an extreme-weather story to a firestorm story as the whole state seemed to ignite with over 400 'fire events'. All you do is keep listening to reports from the fire front, a continual stream of emergency messages and tragic stories.

Kinglake local shares story on Victoria fires
Age Photo gallery
the township has "virtually ceased to exist"

Boston Globe: The Big Picture via peacay
 

footer

At 12:12 PM   boynton updated her footer

miss tree

look and learn

When I was a Brownie, when I was a Sprite, * I managed to pass my Tree Badge, which required reciting the roll call of exotics and being able to identify a tree from its leaf in front of a judge, who was the rostered neighbourhood expert in the field. In this case the judge was my father.
I passed by memory skills, with no help from the family green thumb, which I did not inherit.
While I may still know my elms ok, I think I have rested on my Brownie laurels.
Recently I was trying to describe a tree I'd seen to a professional expert in the field and fumbled clumsily for words, non-latin words to boot. In fact it was akin to struggling for language in a foreign land, busted for not doing your homework, for not being sufficiently tree-lingual.
Then days later I was still trying to put a name to the tree with a search directory, one of those uses of technology they once lauded in ads for printers. I was eliminating varieties of banksia and grevillea when I stared out of the window. My eyes rested on a tree and I said "That's it!" - life imitating TV, the tropes of sitcoma.
Anyway, the embarrassing confession is that this tree, for so long anonymous and invisible to me, is a very common species. Naming it has summoned it into existence in sudden profusion. It is everywhere in the urban environment.
It's as if I had said to this expert: have you ever heard of a rose?
Still, a fortnight ago, when it was unknown and exotic, I saw the tree in question forming an avenue of striking colour in a dry landscape. It was a temporarily remarkable first contact.
 

air con

If the United States is going to get serious about the deep cuts in energy consumption that are needed, the whole idea of air-conditioning has to be questioned
Air-conditioning: Our Cross to Bear

While air-conditioning clearly isn't the sole culprit responsible for global warming, its use looks set to increase, not decrease. Experts agree that the best long-term plan is to make sure that new housing takes climate change into account.
Why Air Con is Ruining Our Environment

“In this way, solar cooling has the potential to reduce peak demand on the electricity grid by reducing the amount of electricity that is required to meet those air conditioning demands on the hottest days of the Australian summer,” Dr White says.
Keeping cool using the summer heat

As air-conditioner sales soar and concrete abounds, the role of trees, grass and other plant life in helping reduce carbon emissions is often overlooked
It's time literally to go green

How to Cool Yourself Without Air Conditioning
 

heat waves

In an era without refrigeration, air-conditioning or effective sanitation, and with polite dress being thick, three-piece suits and long skirts, the effects were traumatic. Ice-works worked flat out to try to keep up with demand
1908 heatwave BOM

Stock collapsed and fowls dropped dead in the blistering heat at Sea Lake
1939 Black Friday ABC

...Clerks and typists ate ice-cream at work. Some girls fainted on their way to their offices
Black Friday

Incidents of the hot season
 

temp predicament

(Title coined by peacay)

For how can you not mention the weather in a Melbourne heatwave, in a house with no air conditioning, when it's on the way to 43 again, when the washing takes 10 minutes to dry, when the bird bath is tepid by four?

In a house without air conditioning, one finds relief in the cellar at night.

This is true and I seem to note it annually. But there are still no obvious articles about underground rooms as a sustainable alternative to the environmental scourge of air con. Seems pretty simple to me: if you're under six foot with a reasonably small footprint and like bad TV reception amid the eskis and wet-suits of storage, then this cellar is the place to be.
 

fido friday

The couple's white Maltese poodle, called Sumo, has a history of frenzied fits and became increasingly prone to making "vicious, unprovoked attacks" despite receiving treatment with anti-depressants fox

Living dog-free is living in a world more ordinary. The Age

twitteresque

Slowly watching Brideshead Revisited again.

Have revived the coupe in preference to the flute.

Chemically incorrect, but we like it.
 

non green

The seasonal dumping of the pine trees post Christmas is a familiar and well documented sight, but this is the first time I have seen a plastic tree discarded on the nature strip in January.
 

09

Happy New Year

 

waht part

And speaking of googling and troogling, this question just landed at boynton from the searchers:



During this part?




Or on the cusp



os the next century?


 

next question

Recently one of our trivia team-mates coined the word Troogle for a quiz question that would seem to require googling, a question that causes a certain sense of citation needed.
(And a team-mate also pointed out last night that while the derivation is Trivia+Google, it also sounds like true-gling: to verify)

Of course a troogler has to be cautious, as some of these facts enjoy a degree of (page rank) authority. Google, noun and verb, cause and effect.

There are some faux facts that do the rounds of email lists and quizzes, as documented on the blog Popular Misconceptions

Some time ago, I had the idea of compiling a collection of ‘popular misconceptions’ - those nuggets of information that get passed from person to person, told with an air of authority, but which turn out to be completely false...

Anyway - the other day I found my way to an online Pub quiz at Spiegel.



I guessed A.

As you do.



More of a blooper than a troogle I guess
but as is often the case
we were both
wrong.


 

zeitgeist heist

some found sounds from the aggregation of billions of search queries google zeit:


australia


top of mind


- and I do like this regional highlight couplet:


 

wet saturday

raining all day
Bronte whining all day
on post-operative painkillers
at two o'clock
I played Best of Baroque
to drown out the sound
and soothe the pain
and to chill the crossword filler
complaining
Air on the G string with terrier
Four seasons and a jack russell
we handled the weather together
 

old dogs

Fauntlaroy


Old Dogs
I used to collect really old photos that had dogs in them until EBAY screwed it up for everybody.

via bifurcated rivets.
 

cocktail types

More from the LIFE photo archive...
Tony Randall impersonating

cocktail party pests.



the joker, pouring beer in martinis.

"The Thinker"

the confider.

the indestructible, eternal college man.

the non-drinker
 

short wave

From a Vintage Magazines flickr set via J walk



The perils of blog short wave addiction.