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

misc links

Bakelite doll's house furniture
bakelite museum I like


also via I like, and The Lark,
Ladybird prints
contains over 4000 images from the Ladybird Books, now available to browse and buy

and I googled my way back to The Lark after searching for Topsy and Tim.
I grew up with Monday and found Tuesday recently on a Friday.



After seeing the map cape, another cloak via fed by birds
The hood could be used to carry shopping or other possession, or even a young baby, as in the 1814 print shown below.


Kombi sidecar at the Presurfer

clusters

I've been in the reading, not posting lurking mode, which means an accumulation of things seen, and a couple of musings on the nature of blogging (by two of the finest) were noted:

...the ausblogosphere is simply not one sphere at all. It’s built like a minimally overlapping bundle of 3-d venn diagrams. We all form our own clusters and tend to think of the one we live in as the ‘real’ blogosphere. When all the time there are dozens of other gangs rubbing along out there just as self-sufficiently. It’s not just generic clusters either. There are christian knitters and lefty knitters, diy aestheticians who are more interested in the concept of knitting than in extreme technical proficiency; conservative and progressive lit bloggers; and there are people who just blog about whatever but run together because of temperamental affinities
Laura at Troppo

...fortunately one of the beauties of blogging is in the delicate balance that one can maintain between self-presentation and the cerebral.

But whatever the nature of that balance, a sense of common cause and fellow feeling is what motivates the interaction between bloggers. There will be, at the least, a seepage of data from even the most tight-lipped of writers and with those a little more ready to transmit the odd signal or two, much will go inferred by a reader on the same general wavelength.
Dick

(something of an aside in a post concerning the most fundamental verities that drive my life forward, but I love that phrase: "a seepage of data")

where-able

Wish there was a Melways version of this analogue gps map cape.
I could wear that.