old records

some links that seemed to relate to the last post:
Mural may see the light after 21 years in darkness
The lost tribal elders of Collins Street may soon emerge from two decades of darkness. A shop in Temple Court, at 422 Collins, was sold last year without the property developer or buyer realising that a large mosaic, The "Eight" Aboriginal Tribal Headmen by Napier Waller, lay hidden behind a wall.
(the Hidden treasures link is a map of Waller murals in Melbourne)

An early 19th century board game How to Know London
There weren't any instructions with the game (other than the information printed on the board), nor were there any minor pieces included, so it not known how the game is played. Since there was neither a "spinner" nor dice with the game, we do not know how players progressed around the board. (via As Above)

(of course boynton could quite happily play a board game with the Melways sans pieces, spinner or dice - sans car. Just looking might be sufficient. Or maybe at at a stretch she'd play a game of melwaystare-out.)

While searching for any local variations we somehow found
The Ladies Social Reading Club 1903-05 by Victoria Emery
the reading of a group of ladies who formed a club in an outer suburb of Melbourne in 1903.
boynton especially wishes she could have caught the Rev. W. Fielder, Professor of Biology lecture on Sponges, to complement the reading of Darwin.

A great deal of effort was put into the success of this 'lecturette', reception, music, refreshment and hospitality committees were formed, arrangements made for the speaker to be collected from Brighton Beach, to save him the inconvenience of the tram service, and a gentleman, Mr Harris, was deputised to introduce and thank the speaker.
Papers from the Second History of the Book in Australia (HOBA) Conference 1996

More on Dr Snowball and Frosterley

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Comments: old records

A few other games that can be played with a Melways and no other equipment:

Melway Charades - like normal charades only the acting part is replaced by silently handing over a piece of paper to your partner on which only Melways map references are shown. For example; a film: 311 C4, 97 G9.

Navex - Each contestant is given the same pair of addresses of somewhere in Melbourne, and needs to come up with the least number of explicit navigation instructions to communicate how to get from one to the other. "Continue straight ahead" and "Turn left at the end" are implied instructions, so do not count. As you get better, you pick places further away. For example: Peppercorn Park (177 K4) to Kays Picnic Ground (124 D3). A very good score is 1 - the only explicit instruction is to get off freeway at Toorak Road.

Railway Ratios - this can be played solitaire - identify two stations where there are more stations involved in travelling between them than there are little blue grid squares to cross in a straight line. Your score is stations/squares. For example; Darling (59 K11) and Alemain (60 D11) are only 4 squares apart but 16 stations apart. This scores 4.

There are lots more...
Posted by phlip at November 19, 2003 04:14 PM

These are great Philip!
I was without a Melways at hand (can you believe) before and now I have one here (edition 23 1995) but I can see no map 311?
Does this movie star Mr. 54 K3 13 G11?
(A co-star with our fave 37 F10 89 C2? in Our Little Girl?)
Navex sounds fun. To get to a friend's house in Gippsland I used to give the instructions - turn left (onto Freeway) and Turn left (onto highway)
and turn left (onto road) and turn left (into street) about 196 kms.
I came from a `line' of poor railway ratios - the Lildyale where many squares lie between each station. I know some of the other lines like Epping are the other extreme. And you could almost see Surrey Hills from Mont Albert.

I'd be happy to play a team Melways Comp in a local hall somewhere (31 A9 or 40 C2) but I'm sure some of these could be adapted for this medium as well. Must think of some more myself.
Posted by boynton at November 20, 2003 12:33 AM

Ah, I see - editionally challenged, I find you. This is curious. Map 311 in edition 24+ is actually map 188 in edition 23. Now, you could count on one hand the number of times Mr Melways changes his map numbers like that (apart from the Warburton corridor and Geelong, I mean).

Wheeew, this MelCharades is harder than I thought! It took me ages to track down Mr. 54 K3 13 G11 (your Temple clue was great but I only looked that up after I had already found him) only to prove he was not in the movie 311 C4, 97 G9. The leading man was actually Mr 65 F7 98 J12, who is probably not half the actor your man was, even when you consider he was born 56 years later. I then spent another "ages" trying to work out what movie you thought it was, but ultimately had to give up on that - sigh. My movie's leading actress has a name which is made up of a geographic feature and road signage, believe it or not. The latter are all over the place in a Melways in various forms; there is an alternative one at 90 A3.
Posted by phlip at November 20, 2003 09:53 PM

Yes - alas melcharades is too hard for me, Philip, and I just can't get YOUR movie and star!
I'm sure other Melburnians armed with a Melways are saying 'der' boynton.

In the interests of those non-melburnians I should disclose that my Movie was actually
'The Palm Beach Story' see:
http://boynton.ubersportingpundit.com/archives/002472.html

I'm sure that this game has got potential - a few possibilities spring to mind. It's sort of like virtual orienteering.
Very interested in this edition discrepancy thing. I thought it was strange when I couldn't find Map 311 - the idea of map numbers changing with the editions is rather unsettling, give or take the Warburton corridor.
Another game possibility - mix and match the map numbers.
and/or Identify the map number from a detail.
Posted by boynton at November 21, 2003 11:17 AM


Of course! Palm Beach Drive does touch the quadrent of the reference, I missed that. BIt was Lagoon Place, around the corner, was the one on my mind. You couldn't get the first word because of the map reference controversy, but it is a walk in the Dandenongs called "Blue Track". So, Blue Lagoon was the movie, starring Christopher Atkins and Brooke Shields. I thought my pun about her surname was very witty when I said "there is an alternative one at 90 A3", which contained a route numbering shield on the Princes Hwy in Dandenong labelled "Alt 1".

Your suggestion about identifying the map from a snippet is good. Certainly favours long time Mel-starers such as yourself, but I'd be willing to take you on.

Here's a question. Give me a Melways reference for a complete and recognisable map of Australia contained in a single blue square.
Posted by phlip at November 21, 2003 03:10 PM

AHA - I got in one (well 17 secs) Philip! THAT is an excellent question.
So I don't spoil it for ALL the other players I won't give you the reference but will say that there is a BBQ where NZ should be. and a "B" around about Noumea.

I had been thinking Blue Lagoon. Got your Lagoon and Christopher but the 188 C4 (emerald?) turned up only Wright. And I knew Mr Atkins was not Mr Right.
And yes - that "Alt 1" is Xtremly clever - so much so that it went well and truly Over My Head -and it really opens thegame up now. I wasn't even thinking symbols.
Must think up some more now!
Posted by boynton at November 21, 2003 03:56 PM


Well, you really are a Mel-starer. You've impressed me before but that's a GOOD GET. Have you ever been to the location in question? I have been meaning to and have never yet made it. Looks like you can sort of wander in through Cape York and tour about... how curious is it? I have been wondering about ALL the other players, I suspect they have decided this is either too clever by half or too rediculous to bother. Love it to be the former but... come on, put your hand up if you even got your Melways out...

It could have been wright, you are right, as I write I notice there is a lot of wrightness in that area - forests and stations and roads, but in this case wright was wrong.

Did you know there is a Brisways coming? A friend stumbled upon a scrap of it on the web. Soon another whole city of people will be able to play Mel-games (or a version thereof).
Posted by phlip at November 22, 2003 02:05 AM

yes well to confess I stayed in the amenity over the road once...as I recall it's a bit like
2F H8 without the colour, but I must inspect it again one day, properly.
As for the other Melburnians - yes?
i'm sure there would be enough map enthusiasts to take this idea further. Perhaps a little application on the side - or maybe a new blog is called for? I'll keep thinking about this.
Glad to hear that Brisbane is soon to have a proper directory. I believe in cultural imperialism where the melways is concerned.
Posted by boynton at November 22, 2003 01:00 PM


Mmm. Am I missing something? I'm still thinking about that one, I thought the main point of 2F H8 was the colour - that and checking your watch of course. Well, I have decided that I am going to go and have a look at Australia-in-a-square, and come up with a report. I'll send you a copy once done if you like. Perhaps I could combine it with one of my occasional around the bay in a day trips, which I choose to do by car rather than bike!
Posted by phlip at November 24, 2003 09:00 AM

Yes - but the OZ in a blue Square - as I recall anyway - *doesn't* have the colour of 2F H8, (which is indeed the main point). I wonder if the former has been vandalised as much?
Look forward to your report, Philip, and am half tempted to venture bayward to have another look at this outstanding geographical feature.
Posted by boynton at November 24, 2003 10:33 AM

records

boynton has been strolling this Public Record Office of Victoria exhibition:
Our Nation's First Capital Federation and the story of Melbourne. " A Virtual tour of Melbourne's streets and buildings".
After inspecting the many splendid arches, boynton ambled round the 1914 map before stopping at Frosterley- built as consulting rooms for Dr William Snowball before being leased by the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology.

I found this PRV site through googling George Dunderdale after David alerted me to GD's "The Book of the Bush". A reference was found in this long but fascinating PDF of The First Years of The Victorian Archives

It seems that Dunderdale was one of the first archivist heroes of the colony.
On page 16 there is a plan of the Alberton court house with the text:

In this tiny court house in the Gippsland Port settlement of Alberton, two men of letters, Alfred Howitt and George Dunderdale, were magistrate and Clerk in 1883-84. When missing shingles led to swallows defiling the records of the court, Howitt and Dunderdale listed and protected the records, sending precious Convict Indents back to Melbourne by sailing ship for preservation.

Again, the power of records to evoke the bigger picture.
The mix of historical circumstances that aligned momentarily obscurely in Alberton.
Later it was disturbing to read of the pulping of records during WW2 in an economy drive. Vast amounts of records lost from regional court houses that carried so many voices and stories between the bureaucratic lines of archival code.

Provenance a new journal of Public Record Office Victoria. Drawing on the wealth of records within the Victorian State Archives, the journal aims to promote archival research within Australia

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Comments: records

Thank you VERY much. What a good thing to find. I had a trawl for Mr Dunderdale, but didn't find that..
Posted by David at November 18, 2003 08:35 PM

Interesting man. Of letters.
It worried me that I hadn't come across GD in my travels. I had read a bit of Howitt here and there.
btw - I've tracked down a copy of GD's book so may be abe to read it one day.
Posted by boynton at November 19, 2003 09:22 AM

miruner

Latest in the Google related searches is this curious linkage:




Que? I quite like the sound of this verse, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge and New Zealand white pages? Alas - a couple of my favourite poem generators seem to be down so I can't run the boynton.uber.data through to see if a random poetic blend could shed any further light on this freshly spidered connection.

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Comments: miruner

favourite poem generators eh.
which ones would they be?
Posted by Declan at November 21, 2003 05:01 PM

My 2 faves (and often employed) are
Leevi Lehto's googlepoem - makes a poem from search words.
http://www.leevilehto.net/google/patterns.asp

and Rob's Amazing Poem generator - put in an url and get a poem of the page.
http://cmdrtaco.net/

both seem to be 'broken'?

Starting to like this unofficial one - google related searches. I know it's just reflecting my recent content, but I love the way it throws up
strange combos.
Posted by boynton at November 21, 2003 06:15 PM

Well there's http://www.crummy.com/devel/eater/
(Man Fakes de Minimax)
Posted by Toph at January 20, 2004 08:29 AM

merci
"I rarest havana a namelessly y'knowledgeable"
Posted by boyle at January 20, 2004 12:25 PM

nature photos

In the Forests post below, the photo of the Mountain Greenhood orchid Pterostylis alpina was from this Orchids of Australia Wild Terrestrial Orchids in South-Eastern Australia site. The photo gallery is quite beautiful.

Via the Nature Photo webring link, I found my way to A Donegal Hedgerow
This website is a documentary of one year's life in a Donegal Hedgerow. Day by day, the sights I see are presented in pictures and text.
On my slow connection the text appears before the images. But this can be a good thing. I like to read the intriguing lines like:
The Nipplewort has returned after a few months' absence
And the Candle Snuff Fungus has returned. I last showed it in February
and then see how the image matches up.

flash whimsy

whimsical animations for fancyteeth from mantlepies productions
(via fiendish is the word)

forests

sticking to the path in a dry foothills forest with blackened gums from recent deliberately lit fires, you could almost miss the rare things that endure almost miraculously as the new suburbia settles.

A recent Age article about a man who has spent the past three decades single-handedly creating his own forest on what was once a dairy farm in East Gippsland’s Strzelecki Ranges.

Googling for the link also led to this earlier article about the Ada tree in Gippsland
This is a story of two trees in Gippsland. One, in a paddock near Thorpdale in the Strzelecki Ranges, became a very long log. The other, still standing in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range, may be the most massive living thing in Australia...
"When some visitors come into this forest they burst into tears when they see the massive, rotting logs."

The Strzelecki State Forest - History repeats itself

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Comments: forests

Thanks. That's great. There is a story that when Count Strezlecki first set out from Melbourne with his wagons and horses, his party made it as far as the Kooweerup Swamp (now a paradise for the asparagus gutser..). They became irretrievably trapped for weeks, until they ran out of food. It rained so hard they couldn't even light a fire. They survived on raw koala bears.

Dr Tom Griffith's recent book "Forests Of Ash: An Environmental History" is exquisite. It made me cry.
Posted by David at November 17, 2003 05:41 PM

that's a great story - especially given the swamp's relative close proximity to 'the settlement' of melb. Raw koalas - not even rare. Were they called 'monkey bears'?
I read Tom Griffiths' earlier "Secrets of the Forest..." I remember being really moved by it -
a wonderful book.
Ashamed to say that I haven't yet read 'Forests of Ash'. I imagine it would be very heavy-going and heart-rending but well worth it for the beauty, passion, scholarship, stories.
Definitely another book on the list to read.
Posted by boynton at November 17, 2003 06:08 PM

goody - I didn't there was an earlier one. Then again, this room is strewn with stuff to read, and I just keep roaming the internet, fascinated by interplay.

I am quoting this from memory, but there's a book called "the Book of the Bush" by George Dunderdale, published in 1898, which had the above story. And has this one too:

The original White inhabitants of Port Albert, down by the Prom, lived a hand-to-mouth existence on seals and potatoes, with no contact with Melbourne. One day a surveyor called Tyers (yes, the Lake Tyers one) came into town on a horse with a troop of soldiers, having marched all the way from the city. He lined up all the residents and told them that they were squatting on crown land. They needed to pay a license fee or he would burn their huts down. Some of them managed to scrape together the requisite twenty shillings in bits and pieces, and others said no. So he burnt their huts. The best ones, though, were the people who found bits of paper and carefully wrote cheques drawable at non-existent banks in Sydney. Tyers went solemnly off and didn't discover his mistake until he gave them to the State Treasury officials in Spring Street. The town apparently picked itself up and moved to a corner of privately owned land down the road, where they were safe. Tee hee.
Posted by David at November 18, 2003 12:17 AM

Yes - there's something about Gipppsland...
I once studied the history of Port Albert but never encountered this book or this writer or this story! I do know that those non-existant banks did a fair trade in the colonies.
btw The Port Albert Historical and Maritime Museum is another great musuem.

Another great story, which has led me on a trail from Dunderdale to some great finds, David.
Posted by boynton at November 18, 2003 09:15 AM

kilter

On saturday we close up the house and sip fluids judiciously inside as the temperature hits 39.1. On sunday I am layered, scarfed, parka-d and shivering as I read a map on top of Mt Dandenong. You are Here. Even a well-tempered melburnian can find such vicissitudes odd. As if someone is fiddling with thermostat.
Meanwhile people are throwing rocks at trams and a wave of copycat attacks is feared. And when a country train is derailed after hitting a car on the tracks, the first reports speculate whether it is a prank or an act of sabotage.

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Comments: kilter

On Saturday we likewise closed up the house. Then we set off in the early morning to avoid forecast heat of the day with "grand daughter in residence" on our 5 hour round trip to visit the great grandmothers.

This was always a trip undertaken dutifully but reluctantly.

Half an hour into the trip grand daughter begins shock and awe projectile vomitting. Car turns back home.

A canary down the mine for safety. A grand daughter in the kiddy car-seat for sanity.

(That said, we ended up doing the hard yards on Sunday. Sadly my quick Sunday scrabble through the tailings at Ararat yeilded nothing remotely Midas like.)
Posted by Sedgwick at November 17, 2003 09:29 PM

Ah - so is this what the old 'baby on board' warning signs mean?
They should also face the inside of car to keep driver sane/clean? ;)

It was easy to be fooled by the concept of 'hot' on Saturday. Still novel in November.
But when you step out into it - it bites.
On the other side of January, 39 won't seem so
impossible or fantastic.
Posted by boynton at November 17, 2003 11:04 PM

fake tate

Where did that come from? (amazement and anguish)

from Julian Hill fakeTate Gallery In Fashion opened 9 Oct

also on a seaward theme from Life Cycle

Mine? (night navigation and the perils of the sea)

symbol

 
°  ∴ ƒ ß ô ∞ ∴   ¿
 

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Comments: symbol

clever
Posted by David at November 17, 2003 12:47 AM

I'm a bit thick - can you explain?
Posted by wen at November 17, 2003 12:25 PM

sorry, wen, to b bewildering.
the last symbol may explain the reason.
but this may not explain the post.
(I had done a version in pictures but did not wish to upload yet more into the uber archives gallery galores)
Posted by b at November 17, 2003 12:43 PM

seaward

The dogs are panting. The mowers are sounding. The cold has lifted.

because of the sudden rise in the mercury our thoughts had already turned seaward when we caught Today in Literature
On this day in 1797 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge began a walking holiday in the Quantock Hills of Somerset, during which they would conceive "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
"Biographer Richard Holmes (2 Vols., 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year) says that up to the time of writing the poem, Coleridge's only experience at sea was a crossing on the Chepstow ferry, but that at some instinctive level "the image of the lonely sea-voyage runs through all Coleridge's thought," as well as much of the 'tortured Romantic' legend "

Kilve shoreline

as previously speculated, some of my ancestors well may have gazed out to sea along the Kilve shoreline before a couple of their desendants took that long sea voyage out to the colonies.

a woman, wearing a veil, on the beach with a row boat coming in on the left and a moored sailing boat in the background Point Lonsdale 1914

a woman on a balcony at the Hotel Pacific. She is looking out over Loutit bay. 1933

Images from Museum Victoria Collection - The Biggest Family Album

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Comments: seaward

even seventy years later that is instantly recognisable.

If anyone is in Lorne at the right time, the historical museum is pretty fab. Many snaps of butchers lined up before their produce. Strangely for a town that was so Greek, the history is all anglo...
Posted by David at November 14, 2003 03:39 PM

and John Fowles, eat your heart out..
Posted by David at November 14, 2003 03:39 PM

I haven't been to Lorne's historical museum. Sounds good. I wonder how it compares to the splendid Cable Museum down the GO road at Apollo Bay?
Seaside museums often dish up the best eclectic mix.

I like the relection of the woman on the balcony
myself.
Posted by boynton at November 14, 2003 04:10 PM

the lorne one is smaller, more concentrated and open less often. the cable museum has a lovely chaos in the corners.

but then, lorne has always been so respectable, and apollo bay is inherently raffish. lovely word, raffish...

my favourite lorne photo from the collection is of a stagecoach wrecked in a river. its the erskine river, where the road hangs a left after the caravan park and the supermarket. there's a bridge but in 1911 it was a ford. the daily stagecoach came thundering into town and rolled in the ford, sadly killing the driver. theres no mention of the horses,
Posted by David at November 14, 2003 07:38 PM

I thought of Fowles too, David - but it was the words, not the picture "A woman, wearing a veil, on the beach." Really could've been any sort of woman - quite odd.
Posted by wen at November 14, 2003 08:20 PM

David - know the corner, must look up the photo next time I drive through Lorne on way to its raffish neighbour. .
Used to stay in a house within a stone's throw of the Cable Museum - only open Sundays and public Holidays. We were given an unsolicited guided tour by an enthusiastic volunteer which was very informative but prevented the rambling and sifting thorugh the chaos in corners at leisure.
They have a great collection of photos - which alone needed a good unfettered hour. Must go back!

wen - I was reading the descriptions and almost became distracted by them on their own terms.
You could just post a list of such captions...

Err actually now I think about it I did that once before:
http://boynton.blogspot.com/2003_05_11_boynton_archive.html#94381517
Posted by boynton at November 14, 2003 10:44 PM

For all the brutalities and inequities particular to the times, one does get an inkling of a long-dead sense of time (like Joseph Banks, Stephen Maturin was always whinging about the navy's penchant for tearing past points of interest at eight knots) - and, more importantly still, a proper respect for elaborately wrought iron balconies.
Posted by Rob Schaap at November 15, 2003 03:33 PM

The British seaside always looks so tame to my eyes. None of the latent power of the sea that is so evident on the Australian coast. That photo of Klive is a case in point.
Posted by Scott Wickstein at November 15, 2003 05:03 PM

Get some Daphne DuMaurier into you, Scott. Or have a pint on Whitby pier. Or try to get the Mary Rose out of the Solent on a windy day ...
Posted by Rob Schaap at November 15, 2003 10:17 PM

Rob, you can still catch inklings here and there
(not very often in this medium) of near stillness'
Maybe a sub-8 knots movement could join forces with the 3 mph (walking/thinking) push to foster the lost art of slowness? And I once came across a link linking balconies to langour:
http://www.idler.co.uk/html/pleasures/pleasures19bal.htm
I must find a cast iron variety quick smart to (slowly) read some Maturin.
Posted by boynton at November 15, 2003 11:32 PM

and yeah Scott! I was thinking Cornwall too.
But then I had also been thinking that Kilve resembles some of the Bayside beaches round these here parts. Particularly round Flinders and Shoreham. Not the sand though.
(And I endorse all those bracing activities that Rob prescribes btw)
Posted by b at November 15, 2003 11:40 PM

"I must find a cast iron variety quick smart to (slowly) read some Maturin."

erm...of course, Rob, I have since been informed by an O'Brian expert that I was in fact referring to M's "Thoughts on the Prevention of the Diseases most usual among Seamen" or "Some remarks on Peruvian cirripedes" or even "A paper on boobies" etc etc... apparently.

http://www.hmssurprise.org/Resources/char_index/maturin.html
Posted by boynton at November 18, 2003 09:02 AM

warming

Currently 27 ° Forecast top 32 °



Miss Lillian Louisa Pitts on a cliff edge. There is a cave behind her. She is reading a copy of "The Bulletin" Point Lonsdale 1914
Image from Museum Victoria Collection - The Biggest Family Album

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Comments: warming

the hat... the hat.. whats with the hat?

the shoes are interesting too..
Posted by David at November 14, 2003 03:37 PM

The shoes are casually sensible.

But I love Miss Pitts' hat.

Were it not for the petit point I might conclude it was fashioned with a spare Bulletin in the espicopal style.

http://celebrate.faithweb.com/thanx/bishop.htm
Posted by boynton at November 14, 2003 03:59 PM

Thanks for the instructions, B. Something to wear on my next visit to the beach.
Posted by wen at November 14, 2003 08:23 PM

She's sleeping not reading.
Posted by Scott Wickstein at November 15, 2003 05:00 PM

Is this a Dunlop Volley which I see before me,

The air-cushioned heel toward my hand?

Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A Volley of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;

And such an icon I was to use.
Posted by Sedgwick at November 15, 2003 08:20 PM

The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Dunlop
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of sensible haberdashery.


and Scott - the left hand just looks too rigid to be resting? Miss Pitts is on the verge of sleep?
The Bulletin and the Sun will do that to you.
Posted by boynton at November 15, 2003 11:00 PM

lay it err - literary

Is a Sperm Like a Whale? by William Shakespeare
from The Modern Humorist's Holy Tango of Poetry
If Poets wrote poems whose titles were anagrams of their names (via Incoming signals)

Literary Weblogs - An Overview (via Cup of Chicha)

Update: err...had to sneak this one in here too:
McSweeney's Words and expressions commonly misused by insipid brothers-in-law
By Dennis Diclaudio
"I can't even deal with "LAY" and "LIE" right now. I'll smash something. I know it..."
(via Twists and Turns)

our drowned town

Recently things featured some haunting photos of the Welsh village of Capel Celyn (Tryweryn), 1957 -65 - before it was drowned. Stark b/w images of stone cottages and old trees, marks of centuries caught in that condemned eerie emptiness, a temporary ghost town where even ghosts are soon be submerged.

Years ago on a school camp I remember our teacher (once a local) bitterly lamenting the fate of old Tallangatta - in North Eastern Victoria, which was moved before the site was drowned for the Hume Reservoir. I searched for some similar photos but could could only find the tourist info sites. Then by chance looking for old cafes, I found this Interior, Hume Cafe, Ogarivitch, Tallangatta a condemned cafe known by many names including Riverina In fact the State Library Picture Collection includes over 150 images of a photographic survey by the State Rivers and water Supply Commission mostly in 1954.

Houses
Business premises
Menswear
Hairdressing salon

These Commission photos survey the exterior and interior details of buildings leaving the sadness as subtext, in abandoned tennis courts or the last stand of mature Palm trees before their watery fate, last chapter in a strange exotic journey

Perhaps this graffiti is one record of dissent - and some of the suits at the official celebrations might have had a bit of the old soviet style about them.

Something of a town is always hidden within the survey of premises and hardware and inventory of goods.

dodgy

Follow Me Here links to Doggy Cool sunglasses for dogs
"The chrome and blue is aimed mainly at dogs who are driven around by their owners in an open-top Jaguar or something similar," he said.

(even with a leap of faith and an open top Jag, boynton could never be tempted to fork out $$$ for such shades for her pampered pack while she sports sunnies that set her back a cool $4.99.)

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Comments: dodgy

I was quite happy with a pair of sunnies which I knew were daggy but were utterly unloseable (certainly no chance of them ever being nicked). Then the daughter arrived this past weekend from Syddie for a week's visit with grand daughter (aka "The Princess of Balmain").

I now have new sunnies which are not an embarrassment to daughter, but which I know I will lose within a week.

I have lost so many sunnies that neither Lady Bracknell's "misfortune" nor "carelessness" goes anywhere near covering the situation.
Posted by Sedgwick at November 12, 2003 07:09 PM

Me too. I've lost countless pairs of good ones, indifferent ones, retro wonders, one-offs, retro wobblies (arms repaired to sit at 90 degree angles or one-armed walking wounded) and generic anti-cancer sun-smart models with side triangles etc. All gone with the handbag. So I'm quite happy with my $5 pair - ('costume rayban' variety)- which of course have been quite unloseable. But alas I have recently been told that they may look a tad unstylish - so who knows.
Back to the op-shop for me quick 'smart'.

Posted by boynton at November 12, 2003 07:23 PM

I AM THE STYLE GOD. FOLLOW MY PATH.

Get very short sighted. Then get photochromic lenses. Hey, bwana, hitech...
Posted by David Tiley at November 12, 2003 09:08 PM

the path to the salvos is littered with broken sunglasses, bwana.
Posted by boynton at November 13, 2003 11:27 AM

oh and I think I am getting more and more short-sighted every bloggin' day, so photochromic style may not be too far away.
Posted by boynton at November 13, 2003 01:52 PM

the bot

boynton was just taking her brain out for a bit of a stroll last night round midnight having been confined to bed in the evening with this lingering lurgie when she ran into some comments from Gary (here) that characteristically provoked thought (always appreciated btw), and she was forced to sit up straight and sneeze and shift gears and coldly articulate a sort of number 42 take-away equation in defence of some throwaway words that may signify the decline of boynton's civilisation AWKI.
Before the big editor in head could say: Pens down I realised I was writing too much for correct comment style, so chopped this sentence:
I used to compare the experience of browsing at the Dewey ordered library and wandering through the random muddle of the tables of books at the Salvos. The latter is more like the web. Indiscriminate, time-consuming but with the lure of the chance find. Even there you develop ways to scan more effectively to filter the pulp non-fiction, snake-oil and gardening books...

Funnily enough before I penned this latest in the ode to serendipity files I had just encountered another of those sort of beloved apps that produce random stuff. These spiders almost make it reflexive - as well as demonstrating visually or in this case aurally the algorithmic workings of the web, they can reflect the browsing experience (just in case we need our existential bearings writ random)
theBot
As something of a reverse search engine, theBot provides a look (and listen) into the narrative of the web - or at least into the stream of consciousness of a web Bot
(via things)
also around: 4 random captcha words from AOL sign up screens rearranged as 'serendipitous poetry' (via J walk)

perhaps it's all just one big soup - (the presurfer)

one of the best analogies for the processs remains psychoflubber (originally via Gianna) but when I tried revisiting I got a 404.

Don't know if this means anything or not.

---

Comments: the bot

Love the "Insults by Shakespeare index". Disappointed there's no Christmas hamper deal - an assortment of threatening, debasing, dark and obtuse quotes from TheBard Inc. $30 or $25 by mail order.
Posted by Jim at November 12, 2003 03:16 PM

Yes it is rathergood isn't it. Good to take into the theatre of the foyer.

Laughest thou, wretch? Thy mirth shall turn to moan.
http://www.allgreatquotes.com/shakespeareinsults330.shtml
Posted by boynton at November 12, 2003 03:31 PM

This whole post is rathergood IMO (why not IYAM?).

With you on this one Boynton-bot. They've been expecting us to morph into some other species since the beginning of the industrial revolution (and before that too, no doubt) - but I reckon we'll still be recognisable, still contain the same essential elements that make us human, a thousand years hence.

(BTW I'm an optimist)
Posted by wen at November 12, 2003 08:27 PM

OMG - I had to ask Google about that last acronymn, w.
btw: Is IYAG a new one for the post-human era?
At least IYAG you have a good chance of getting answers in 0.17 secs. ;)
Posted by boynton at November 13, 2003 11:22 AM

dining

Would you prefer skis with that?
Did a bit of a search and found a post war sophisticated restaurant in Melbourne sans skis but with some striking wall sculpture happening for mood. I'm sure that photos exist to show that Melbourne (in pockets) can out-hick the best of them - but they rest unscanned on shelves somewhere. And lest you detect a sneer, boynton would actually jump to dine now at any restaurant so unpretentiously elegant, as long as it wasn't themed retro.

Wen's query on Chinese restaurants got us thinking. We agree with David - in Victoria they probably date from the Gold Rush, and one restaurant in Bendigo is said to have been operating for over a hundred years .
Most rural and regional towns have got one. No it is not public toilets we are talking about...or Mechanics Halls.
But like NZ I suspect that it was only Post-War that the switch in middle class dining habits from home cooking to chinese dining in or out became common. It's hard to track down this sort of info and you rely a bit on family lore. I supect the answers are to be found in Michael Symons' One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia.
While searching for an extract I found Research Centre For The History of Food and Drink at the University of Adelaide, South Australia - with many excellent links.
I don't think we have anything like this US Smithsonian exhibition Key Ingredients America By Food, or on a smaller scale the NZ site of yesterday.

In the meantime some images from Museum Victoria's The Biggest Family Album
collection (search for 'restaurants. Vic.'):
A group of waitresses at the Wattle restaurant 1916
Inside the Wattle restaurant with waitresses standing by the tables.
A group of men, including soldiers, dining at Russo's cafe, Bairnsdale circa 1920
and from SLV: Staff and premises of S.P.Q.R. Tea Rooms, Bairnsdale. 1937

---

Comments: dining

good on you. yes!

I think Michael Symons is actually connected to the Adelaide research centre.

I've heard stories from the fifties of people going to the local Chinese restaurant for takeaway which was carted out in lidded billies. When I was a child in the same era, I can remember going to the dairy with a billy to get the family milk. But that was (briefly) in a country town.
Posted by David Tiley at November 11, 2003 04:13 PM

Thought MS may have been connected. A good thing - very Adelaide.
When I was a child, we used to take away Chinese in our saucepans. And that wasn't all that long ago ;)
Much better idea all round - one area where environmental thinking should outweigh Health/litigation concerns/paranoia, IMHO.
Posted by boynton at November 11, 2003 05:30 PM

When I was a child (a rural kiddy I was) our takeaways were sugar bags full of produce as the result of visits to the local Chinese market garden run by descendants of some Ararat gold miners.

Interesting aside. (Well, I think it so.) Ararat's goldfields were actually opened up by Chinese miners who were not, as general history would usually have it, mere scroungers of the tailings.
Posted by Sedgwick at November 12, 2003 06:51 PM

Thanks Boynton - nice to have suspicions confirmed. Vastly superior to NZ.

A leventyleventh generation (1850s) Aus Chinese friend - her recently born niece is the first in her family who's not entirely ancestrally chinese - is reading a masters thesis on the topic of Chinese food in country NSW. Will have to get hold of it, let you know what happened here.
Posted by wen at November 12, 2003 08:36 PM

Meant to say thanks for the restaurant pics too - my heroine was a waitress/domestic in a Melbourne Pub ( in Preston) at turn of last century. Perhaps she had to wear one of those hideous bonnets. There's an extra paragraph in it, anyway.
Posted by wen at November 12, 2003 08:39 PM

Very interesting aside Mr Sedgwick, IYAM
I hadn't known that about Ararat - and had to do some googling. Seems it was partly because of the walk from Robe factor? I must go back to Geoffrey Serle.

Wen: I think I saw a reference to your friend's thesis - sounds really interesting. Would love to hear more - hope it gets wider publication.

Nice coincidence about your heroine - and again sounds intriguing.
My mother's extended family were deep in the heart of Preston at this time - many stories.
Posted by boynton at November 13, 2003 11:37 AM

r & r

500 most influential Rock and Roll songs. (via pop culture junk mail)

100 greatest shocking moments in rock and roll (via the presurfer)

No correspondence will be entered into.
Take it up with Bile
"I despise you and I hate your taste in Music"

aunt daisy

Post-war sophistication in New Zealand

from No Pavlova Please: Images of Food and Drink in Twentieth-Century New Zealand.
The sound files page has some great samples from these distant lands.
The Fast Lunches extracts were good, but Aunt Daisy is the star.
Listen to the scrapbook piece 'Married Life' before the recipe for Beetroot Chutney new from England, or this before the cornflower blancmange:

Coming together is the beginning
Keeping together is progress
Thinking together is unity
Working togther is success

and then someone wanted to know…she said she can never make a cornflower blancmange properly she said she generally makes them too stiff and what do you do about them and how much should you put in

Aunty Daisy took boynton straight back to some of the scary ancients who presided over her early education, and her tone produces a reflex squirm in either homily or recipe mode.

---

Comments: aunt daisy

Aunt Daisy has one of those jolly fierce voices. Who would dare not be in her "daisy chain"? I can still hear those scary ancients to whom you alude...
"Hey you!(pointing vaguely in your direction) Yes YOU!! Are you listening?? Didn't think so...GET OUT!!!"
Posted by nora at November 10, 2003 04:37 PM

Just listened to another of her recipes...That voice...I'm feeling the need for recovered memory therapy...
Posted by nora at November 10, 2003 04:43 PM

They mentioned the opening of Chinese restaurants in the 60s as being important & I immediately thought - all those country town Chinese restaurants in Aus - we're obviously culinarily far superior (well as far superior as MSG & cornflour glug can make you).... but I can't come up with any proof (just googling) that this was so. Were Chinese restaurants around earlier than this?? Does anyone know? I just can't remember back that far. ( & the country town I lived in in the 70s didn't even have proper hamburger buns - we had to go to Dubbo - the big smoke - for such sophistocation)
Posted by wen at November 10, 2003 08:57 PM

i sent the url for the ski photo restaurant to my friend shiralee who comes from new zealand. this is what she sent back:

"Hey that's the first restuarant I ever went to that you're making fun of!"

i think she is too scared to play the audio grabs.
Posted by David Tiley at November 10, 2003 11:09 PM

and wen..

i think chinese restaurants in country victoria go back as far as the goldfields. it was either cook or get your pigtail chopped off by some mean mean goldminers..

and while we are on the general subject of grub, riverbend has started posting recipes at Is Something Burning?.

the goil has a sense of humour too..
Posted by David Tiley at November 10, 2003 11:15 PM

thorry....

http://iraqrecipes.blogspot.com/

now i will thend
Posted by David Tiley at November 10, 2003 11:16 PM

Nora: I know the exact ancient you mean.
Wen: interesting point re chinese restaurants. Had me googling - stand-by. Maybe country Vic was superior to country NSW in the quality of Hamburger Buns? Best hamburgers I ever had were from rural locations: San Remo and Moe.
David: I'm sure I would have thought skis created a sophisticated ambience too. And equally sure that there are comparable photos on line to show that Aus was just as sophisticated. I've got a few books of the era that demonstrate this, but it seems that NZ's digital history is more advanced than ours?
Posted by boynton at November 11, 2003 12:16 PM

signal

"Isn’t it ironic that weblogs, which at their inception, were designed to extract signal from noise, have become so numerous that we are now drowning in them..." Rebecca Blood on the info explosion

Noisy as charged, still here's a nice bit of Sunday signal:

Kurt Vonnegut Knowing What's Nice
Author’s note: I’m working on a novel, If God Were Alive Today, about a fictitious man, Gil Berman, 36 years my junior, who cracks jokes or whatever in front of college audiences from time to time, something I myself have done. Here are excerpts from some of what I myself said onstage at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on the evening of September 22, 2003, as we touch off the last chunks and drops and whiffs of fossil fuels.
K.V.
September 24, 2003
(via wood s lot)

---

Comments: signal


Is the world so much worse ? Did KV ever think it was good/better? or is it the effect of being 81?

BTW i use semi-colons (tho much prefer dashes) & haven't read Ambrose Bierce or DeTocqueville. Must be a twerp!
Posted by wen at November 9, 2003 07:43 PM

weblogs designed to 'extract signal from noise'.

Not really.

Signals need interpretation by human beings if we are to understand what they are signifying.

So it's about cultural meaning.

And it is not just us humans. Dogs attribute meaning to signals. They are continually interpreting

Let's dump the behavourism implied in the above quote in the radioactive dump.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 9, 2003 09:53 PM

Wen: I think it's always seemed pretty grim to KV, but it's grimmer and the stand-up gets more desperate?
Somehow I've read those 2 but am very much a twerp (who could never parrallel park). And on a lighter note - I do endorse the Uncle Alex philosophy: tonight's sunset here was a most beautiful soft pink. I said something like: "If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is"

Gary - the strict utilitarian 'signal' or 'filter' role of the weblog was in the context of the rather sobering study about the explosion in noisy data.
It was a bit confronting to see one of the gurus/champions of the blog issue a (commonsense) warning about the increasing need to discriminate or even cut back. (Switch off? - that's just too scary to contemplate!)
In the future a handful of info filterblogs may be quite efficient, but even in such customised efficiency we may lose the joy of surprise, chance, serendipity.
I can't see myself just wanting pure 'signal' without some junk or whimsy along the noisy way , but one has to cap the the data flow somehow I guess.
An interesting area - and I agree with Rebecca Blood that it is one that will become more and more important.
Posted by boynton at November 9, 2003 10:44 PM

being a pollyanna type I have to confess that I think uncle Alex is absolutely spot-on!
Posted by wen at November 10, 2003 02:33 PM

focusing on the meanings of an x--eg., an image---is a way to filter noisy data flows. You select the bit that is signifianct from a particular perspective and let the rest float by.

The very language being used--'information' 'filtering' 'data' etc -- pressupposes that it is the computers or technology doing the filtering and we are but the extentions of the keyboard.

It implies that are enframed by the technology as a way of being, or a virtual world. So we become what the virtual technology makes us----data trash downloaded into storage systems that are connected to data flows.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 11, 2003 11:13 PM

I know when I studied this area quite briefly a couple of years ago that certain academics show an academic enthusiasm for this trend - or at least its apparent inevitability. That is: the eventual embedding of the bot into the bod of the cyborg. I find it disturbing but just this side of futurist-absurdist to be too worried by. I guess you would argue that such dystopian visions divert from the less extreme effects, eg the way I have apparently 'mindlessely' adopted the techno speak.
Perhaps one could argue that by co-opting the language of IT, or even MS, corrupting it into blogging short-hand currency we humanize it?
And on your second point - don't such words imply that a human mind is absoloutely neccessary to choose/focus/read/select (codex era words) which bit of text and image from the shifting screen of electronic trash and treasure to 'note'?
Perhaps the impulse towards order or some system however subjective is only human?
Also: I am not (quite yet) the sum of my downloaded bytes. The floating parade of dismebodied, decontextuatlised 'data' or meaning is just surplus material to the super-filtered years of old mundane reality.
Posted by boynton at November 12, 2003 12:15 AM

B,
I agree about the futurist absurd utopia conception of cyberspace.

However it is the more everyday usage that I have in mind.

We no longer have relationships anymore. We network instead. We form networks not relationships. I heard it on the radio this morning linked to a styory about using palm pilots(as tags) that help us to recognize others with similar interests. That makes networking (and dating) quick and efficient.

You would your own examples.

The old human language has been replaced by the new computer language on a very mundane level.

In accepting this, and speaking this way, we are working within, and are shaped by, the cyber-technology world or techological mode of being.

Language discloses a world. It is a new world we now live in.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 13, 2003 01:17 PM

Gary - It's a fascinating area.
Luckily I'm too poor to be an effective customer in the cyber-tech world and palm pilots and all the trappings of the semantic web/ambient enviromnment will have to wait. I guess the time when they are cheap and affordable/disposable is not too far off though.

I still hope that one can be mindful in using such language - not to 'humanize' it in a coercive way, but to subvert it. It may be able to mutate from the market to the mundane old style mode of being?
Well I certainly hope I never blindly accept the language and thus 'mind-set'(mother-board) of the new world.
Posted by boynton at November 13, 2003 01:45 PM

We need to subvert it by disclosing alternative ways of being to the technological one.

Designer sun glasses for dogs riding in Jaguar sports cars is not it.

Maybe marginalized practices such as walking with dogs along the Yarra River, sniffing the flowwers and delighting in play.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 14, 2003 09:11 PM

string

something about the way the Scribbler weaves like a sped up spider made me think of A big Ball of String. Or it may have been that one of the old lines that I recall is unthreading its way here from childhood: Stay in Bed! Stay in Bed with That cold in your head In the story the lure of the stringful of possibilities - the web -is too great for the invalid of course. This may or may not have not been the first book I read but the first book I remember borrowing from a library (while on holiday at Cowes no less) was Are You My Mother? a tale which boynton found quite disturbing. Perhaps this is why earth moving equipment has always seemed rather other or unearthly ever since.

and in a similar retro vein to Scribbler is the online Spirograph ...the way things come spiralling back...(via twists and turns)

---

Comments: string

Are you my mother is one of my three year old's current favourites. I have to say that sometimes I really wish I was a steamshovel....
Posted by wen at November 9, 2003 07:26 PM

How bizarre, Boynton. I was just showing my niece and nephew our old 'Spirograph' this afternoon - having not seen it for years! Must show them the on-line version now.
Posted by Nora at November 9, 2003 10:13 PM

Heh heh -that's a classic, Wen.
maybe the book is ripe for a 'de-construction'?

and Nora - I haven't seen the RL Spirograph in years myself. My sister W had it - and used to produce lovely neat spirals. I had a younger version - 'spiro tot?' that was less fussy (sans pins) and I suspect more fun to use. Who knows where all those pieces ended up?
I think the On Line version will do for a while.
Posted by boynton at November 9, 2003 10:50 PM

scribbler

The Scribbler - a generative illustration toy has been quite diverting on a day when one has been stricken with the common cold. (via J walk)

nibblies

'How about some boccincini'? asked Mr Colby, leaning over his turntable?
It was challenging but not entirely impossible to imagine an 18th century drawing room in his small suburban cream brick cottage, although the wall of cuckoo clocks did suggest a slight Swiss influence, augmented by several large holes in the plaster.
'I prefer Mozart'.
Mr Colby looked puzzled
'You mean of course Pizza Cheese?'
Oh dear. I had not realised until then that Mr Colby was a purist in these things. (Although I had noticed he had inisisted on saying 'sparkling wine?’ instead of champagne each time he refilled my flute). He thought less of me now.
'Actually I love Mozart.' I said taking extra care with the pronunciation.
'In fact a few years ago I almost developed something of a feta for Mozart...'
Mr Colby scratched the record..
Mr Colby lost it and started cursing in a very blue vein.
'But Boccincini is fine…really.' I said helping myself to some small nibblies to go on with while I waited for the mood to recover.
It never quite did.

---

Comments: nibblies

very krafty - the way you've processed this, B.
Posted by wen at November 8, 2003 08:03 PM

Anyway he wasn't your type - uncultured, not sharp enough. He grated somehow....
Posted by wen at November 8, 2003 08:07 PM

thank you wen - tho' now I regret missing such gimmes as 'grating' and 'cultured'.
And re-reading I see there may be a few holes in the logic , but guess I just have to let it stand. It's only Lite.
btw - to confess: this tale was based on my RL confusion of a composer and a kind of tiny mozzarella so I think a Mr C type is prob more cultured than me.
Posted by b at November 8, 2003 08:32 PM

cultured maybe, but much too stiltoned to boot.

thats an ugly one. just brioche it off and keep moving..
Posted by David Tiley at November 9, 2003 02:07 AM

the said verbal confusion was the only thing drawn from RL I hasten to add ;)
All characters are naturally fictitious and any resemblance to cheeses living or dead is entirely emmental.
Posted by boynton at November 9, 2003 06:09 PM

that last is just AWFUL.. I warn you, a friend of mine with ths devilish skill was forced to flee the country... (to a fabulous job in Chicago - ha ha the laugh is on us..)
Posted by David Tiley at November 10, 2003 11:01 PM

early flight

Portage has some great links to celebrate the upcoming 100th anniversary of the first flight by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, South Carolina.

This is an image from the LOC American Memory Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers Photography Collection.

Almost by coincidence we chanced upon another Wright image here .
This was found through a wonderful Australian site: Hargrave: Saluting 150 years of Australian Aviation .
The Wright image was suggested as a comparison to the Glider 1909 of John and Reginald Duigan

I know there is that way too much blue thing happening in this post for the time-challenged, but this next blue link to the Aviation in Colour -" a selection of images from the earliest days of aviation, using the then still experimental colour photographic processes " is worth the click.

via barista

---

Comments: early flight

The colour stuff is particularly wonderful. The pink and silver in the Eindecker-Rumpler is lovely.

I wonder whether this pilot, or the moustachiod masher with his Nieuport made it through the war?

Or whether they would say of their aircraft what Hedley Kerr wrote in his last diary entry as his boat approached Gallipoli beach and he was handed a pair of wire cutters: "I fear I am being given the keys to the Gates of Heaven."

Sorry. As the cliche says, they were a doomed generation.
Posted by David Tiley at November 7, 2003 06:28 PM

Yes there's always that foreboding within photos of the era. Not sure whether colour enhances it - as with the Romantic feel to the pose in 'Nieuport IIN, 1912' - or helps make it more real and less consigned to a b/w past.
I know when I saw the colour films of D Day on TV it was quite confronting. Colour spliced the eras.

The Hurley image is great too.
Posted by boynton at November 8, 2003 07:29 PM

An interesting point about Hurley - with the Western Front stuff, particularly on film, there are questions being asked about confusion in cataloguing. Some historians (my fanatical but fabulous friend Quentin mostly) say that the non Light Horse stuff is mostly Sir Hubert Wilkins. He is worth a google.
Posted by David Tiley at November 10, 2003 11:05 PM

a 'confusion in cataloguing' angle will always get me googling.
Posted by boynton at November 11, 2003 12:19 PM

blue flu

no amount of vitamin c munched like lollies prevented the cold from catching me.
Last night I was speaking in typos. Was heard to say:
"I cut and possted it" and "chess cloth"
Sad to be fluey when the sky is so blue.

---

Comments: blue flu

I'm somewhere in between a cold and a flu. Too.
Posted by Tony.T at November 7, 2003 01:46 PM

Is this some kind of weird bloggers disease spread by sympathetic typing?
I've been down for a week. Rasping, blowing, honking, sneezing.
Posted by David Tiley at November 7, 2003 02:06 PM

I've just had good old fashioned hay fever. Five sneezes in a row just before, now trying to beat that.
Posted by mcb at November 7, 2003 02:18 PM

Tony: still hoping I used the term loosely and I can stay in that same place

David: something in that. It would be good to trace the flu meme all the way to Daypop.
Someone sneezes @blogspot and a week later it's blogdexed.

mcb: was hoping it was the hay -bad as it is. Though five in a row is pretty bad.
Posted by boynton at November 7, 2003 02:27 PM

One half of household down with various combinations of complaints - colds, coughs, aching elbows? (that's a weird one), and now - hoorah! -vomiting!

But it's okay - the weather's dreary too....
Posted by wen at November 7, 2003 02:44 PM

ad I hobe you ged bedda soon, Boyndon.
Posted by wen at November 7, 2003 02:45 PM

wen, dad is eggsadly right..
Posted by David Tiley at November 7, 2003 03:14 PM

haven't reached de derrible stage yed wen.
Just scrambling my words from pre-flu fuzziness or maybe just your standard dumbness. Meanwhile chewing apsros hope I may be able to fend this one off yet. Doesn't compare with (the sound of) aching elbow though.
Posted by boynton at November 7, 2003 05:47 PM

personalized action

At first I thought this might be another gallery of bloggers...

but actually it's the heads part of the personalized action figure turning YOU into
"the Action Figure of your choice, wearing whatever you want from casual clothes to formal wear"

Further examples of the form.

(via fiendish is the word)

mosaic

Thanks to Rod for alerting us to the updated Alfred Hitchcock mosaics at Leytonstone tube station London - now a full set.

The old number 17 eh? This one leapt out as illustrative of boynton's bold betting slip of Tuesday. This is how she reacted to her slip, alas there was no one else at the wheel to blame but boynton.

whole brain

Dictionaraoke
"Audio clips from online dictionaries sing the hits of yesterday and today. The fun of karaoke meets the word power of the diction"
(via ultimate insult)

Karaoke dictionary
glossary of terms for k fiends
(and we'd been thinking Bohemia Nervosa was a synonym for boynton)

What has happened recently feline?
By: Thomas Johnson is one example in Song Title Thesaurusizing (via J walk)

Given the link between memory and song, 'songs promote whole brain learning' boynton did a quick search for other examples of the karaoke scholastic genre, hoping to find the sing-a-long Complete works of Shakespeare or an EZ Pi jingle to join Tom Lehrer's The Elements

No whole brain Milton or Chaucer or list of Melbourne Cup Winners yet to belt out in the lounge, but there is the Volcano song from Sing-along Science to investigate

---

Comments: whole brain

I like the song thesaurusizing. Similarly amusing effects (I first read about this game in Galactic Pot Healer by Phillip K Dick) can be obtained with minimal effort by serial computer translation of song-titles and lyrics. This is the result of a Google English-German-French-English sequence:

"love us raise yourself, where we,
where the eagles cry,
belong on a mountain, the loves high raise,
where we belong far the world we know in top,
where the free crane roasts"
Posted by Gummo Trotsky at November 6, 2003 02:46 PM

running with the devil, according to the thesuruausuusied thingummy is

"Accompanied by the supreme spirit of evil and unrighteousness in both the Jewish and Christian theology, while moving at a fast bounding gait during which both feet are off the ground simultaneously in the course of each step..."

o yes.

what a find.
Posted by David Tiley at November 6, 2003 02:54 PM

cheers, Gummo - played the game with 2 fab four hits:

It is been the night hard day and has me as a dog worked which it is been the night hard day, me as a dog to sleep would have...

Of Hey do not form Jewish, bad to take Song and sad remember to better leave leave it then you them in your heart, which you can begin for better forming it him

and then a song from Paint Your Wagon

I speak with the trees, but they do not hear on me that I speak with stars, but they never hear that I do not have the Breeze time to stop me and that to hear, which I say myself, with them all in futile speech it.

may try again with a Spanish Italian variation.

(nothing quite beats 'where the free crane roasts' yet.)
Posted by boynton at November 6, 2003 11:17 PM

Here's one from the late seventies:

on us Wiley windig returns would roll
and to fall green into firmly.
They had reheated like my jealousy:
Too much warmly, too gierig.
How could you leave me, when I were to have you?
I hated you. I also loved you.
Posted by Gummo Trotsky at November 7, 2003 02:32 PM

I think I prefer the results of the EFGE sequence:

usserhalb on wiley windy us makes
firmly roll and fall in green.
They have had to soak as my jealousy:
Hotter, too more greedily too much.
How could you leave me when I had to possess itself? I abhorred you. I liked you therefore.
Posted by Gummo Trotsky at November 7, 2003 02:36 PM

juvenile titles

every so often boynton checks the www state of play with Schoolgirl's Fiction hoping (valiantly) for the digitised versions of School Friend or Girls' Crystal - secretly scheming to one day chance upon an on-line Dilly Dreem - a Heroine by Mistake, Secret Friends of the Speed Girl or even Cousin Percy's Surprise Pullover. While the beloved stories she pored over once upon a time ( now idly gathering dust on shelves elsewhere) are yet to apppear here, I noticed this site the other night that has indexed many papers in the exhaustive juvenile canon.
Following the links you get an idea of the beloved genre from the titles:

Miss Nameless of the Holiday Camp
Maureen and the Boy Who Didn’t Care
Her Bandit Friend of the Pampas

or here

Rivals of the Swimming Pool
Film-Struck Fay
The Tennis Girl with a Secret

boynton might just have to knuckle down and save some shillings for this CD .

---

Comments: juvenile titles

"Babs & Co at the Manor of Menace" - a 'must read' title if ever I saw one!
Posted by Nora at November 6, 2003 11:51 PM

personally I find this title jolly intriguing:

"A Hero to All but Joyce"

Joyce may have issues methinks.
Posted by boynton at November 6, 2003 11:59 PM

If we're quick maybe Sally could be an umbrella stand - beats elephants legs, anyway.
Posted by wen at November 7, 2003 02:48 PM

career move

sally decides not to become a veterinarian after all

from Bert Christensen’s Weird art collection.

just one of the many wonderful book links to explore at Obliterated (via things)

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Comments: career move

Coincidentally this one http://www.bertc.com/inflatable.htm#x is based on a work by one of Oz's great glass craftsmen, Nick Mount.

More coincidentally, yesterday we were drinking bubbly (we ended up drinking G.I. Lime spritzers thanks to the voracious Moet appetite of the Hilton lasses) from a set of his champagne flutes. (Have to sneak them back before he notices them missing ... along with the candelabras from St. Valjeans in the Fields.)
Posted by Sedgwick at November 5, 2003 03:16 PM

Yes I had half thought of linking that one in with the current yartz debate...
(and 'Nick Mount' also sounds like a whisper from the track involving the jockeying of jockeys, steward's enquiries and hard luck stories leading up to the big race). A good choice for flutes on Cup Day.
Posted by boynton at November 5, 2003 03:55 PM

she's dumb

yes we were indeed quite off yesterday. boynton placed most of her money on number 9 - neither distinctly (same as last year) nor secret (see below). But a nod to her old system of backing the birthday numbers had her placing a large amount on number 17 (barrier 9 no less) for a place. At least that is what she thought she had done, and was whooping as She's Archie made a dash down the straight and almost took on the winner. Brandishing her ticket that was now worth $27.40 her joy was short-lived as she was quietly told the awful truth. It was not a place bet afterall.

She had — the wrong ♦

How dumb. (And then almost how lucky.)
You can see the sort of serious money we're talking.
17 stands as pretty good system.

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Comments: she's dumb

This is one of the reasons why I love Melbourne. I at least keep thinking this madness about a horse race can be kept at bay (and no, thats not a pun.. see how deep it goes?) and it just keeps faithfully following the evolution of our society and technology.

If you are the sort of nerd who never ever leaves the building and posts about 101 things to do with a man-high pile of Jolt cola cans, you would say that the Melbourne Cup is one sticky meme.

Then neigh with delight. STOP IT. Where else would a thoughtful blogger post a betting slip? I have to gallop off and do some work..
Posted by David Tiley at November 5, 2003 01:34 PM

Alas - I confess: I was urged on to post this slip against my better judgement. Design-wise of course, and not content-wise or even punter-wise (punter-mug). Looks rather garish as well as foolish. But I'm afraid I'm just constitutionally composed to get caught up in the carnival flutter of cup day and can't join in the bah humbug or the (prrobably quite valid) socio-politico analysis of the event. Which are probably the stronger memes in the field. At this time of the year, if I see 'Diatribe' I think horse:
http://www.stallions.com.au/list/diatribe.asp
Posted by boynton at November 5, 2003 01:49 PM

Our Lady of Perpetual Optimism and Canny Judgment (aka the better 'arf) duly selected She's Archie and wisely took it E/W. (Luck with the neddies is in her genes, her late grandfather "Silver Bill" was the town barber ... and we all know what that means.)

Moi, on the other hand, selected unwisely. The chicken's entrails were ambiguous and impossibly cryptic this year. Consequently I will not have to visit the TAB until the nation stops again next year. (Well, apart from a spot of emuing when things get tough.)

Good to see that those rich Dubainian interlopers didn't steal the Gup. As befits the fairytale, it was won by a bunch of battlers syndicate headed by an embattled tuna fisherman what owns 18,000 race horses and lays out $100,000+ bets at the Call of the Card. That our Johnny's kinda battler!
Posted by Sedgwick at November 5, 2003 02:53 PM

garish is good. a distinctive culture is great.

when i was very young and used to read schoolboy fiction - boarding schools with fags and rugger and latin quotes - i was sick with fear that i might end up in a place like that.

fortunately my parents were too broke.
Posted by David Tiley at November 5, 2003 07:00 PM

I hope not too broke to give you lots of ham rolls, egg sandwiches, chocolate cake, ginger beer and lemonade (the preferred diet of the Famous Five) when you were good and a sound thrashing (as preferred in Tom Brown's Schooldays) when you were bad.

When I wasn't under the spreading Faraway Tree chewing the fat about early 20th century existentialism with Moonface, Silky and the Saucepan Man I spent a lot of time helping Algy, Ginger and Squadron-Leader Bigglesworth giving the Hun a run for their deutschmarks.
Posted by Sedgwick at November 5, 2003 07:59 PM

Think that the above comment should be up there under "JUVENILE TITLES". (The better 'arf, the librarian and part-time legendary punter will be along soon to catelogue and shelve it correctly.)
Posted by Sedgwick at November 5, 2003 08:07 PM

it all flows together. i wonder what they called Marks in the Weimar republic?

Now that is sick, plain sick obsessiveness.. okay, did the 1916 Pfalz have 12 or 16 cylinders in the rotary engine?

there's a mad person behind this monash uni site would know - http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/duigan_bio.html
Posted by David Tiley at November 5, 2003 08:52 PM

Since 'boynton' could well carry the subheading 'juvenile titles' I like the cross threading here too.
I did notice that CD featured air adventures and I must confess to never having read Biggles - or any old time boy's adventure stories for that matter. There are a few stories about Girl Aviators in the few circa 1930 books in my collection. Hope they get a 'show'
Notice that in the CD "Girl’s Own Paper (will nestle with) with Bad Boy’s Paper..." That sounds like pretty good po-mo reading to me.
- and David - that link to Duigan is fabulous. Hmmm... might just have to do something with that ...
Posted by boynton at November 6, 2003 09:46 AM

the cup

(fairfax photos )

Cup Day. Public holiday. Perfect Blue Sky. Mummify scratched. Frightening firming. My tip is again distinctly secret. We're off.

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Comments: the cup

11.30. Backyard BBQ in full swing. The supply of Moet is looking a little shock and awed. Boy, the Hilton girlies can knock the bubbly back. I think I actually heard one of them let fly with a polysyllable ... think it's the drink talking.

Frightening, my tip from a fortnight ago still stands. Don't like the cramped odds though. Millstreet, Big Pat and Yakama juicily over the odds.

Must go Paris and Nicki need refills. (At this rate we'll be necking bottles of Black Tulip and Marsarla by mid afternoon.)
Posted by Sedgwick at November 4, 2003 11:48 AM

I went down to the office around 2pm, picked up my named horse in the sweepstake, and watched the big race on a TV that snowed.

My horse was mentioned once in the middle, or so it seemed. All I could think about was gambling fraud on a day when everyone becomes a punter.

Serious money (into the six figures) went on an overseas horse with Arab conections that ran last or there abouts.

Was that Mamool?

I drove home worrying about the interest rate rise and considering the role of ASIO safeguarding our national security.

I suddenly felt relaxed and comfortable.

I understood from the commentators that everyone who was anyone was anyone was there all pretending that they were as Aussie as a pie and sauce.

I'm known as someone who doesn't really follow the nags. It's the Reserve Bank I'm keeping my eye on.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 4, 2003 06:07 PM

Wish I'd seen the perfect blue sky before the skywriting idiot got to it.
Posted by Gummo Trotsky at November 4, 2003 09:09 PM

I used to punt on the US Federal Reserve Nags at that notorious gambling den known as the Chigago Board of Trade. (www.cbot.com)

A very exciting form of life which could also be described as 'how to get a stomach ulcer in six weeks'.
Posted by Scott Wickstein at November 5, 2003 12:45 AM

It was all over before we woke up!
Posted by Averil at November 5, 2003 08:42 AM

Sedgwick - a glass of Moet and I'm a poet.
Ysterday's tips look distinctly frightening now, don't they. ;)
Gary - I confess I love the Cup. Always have. Even when I'm a mug punter.
Gummo - yep - I turned and looked to the east.
Scott - wondered why Ubersporting wasn't covering the nags? How about Ulcersportingpundit?
Averil - lots of Melburnians could probably say the same! To see the perfect day on TV may have made you homesick anyway. One out of the box!
Posted by boynton at November 5, 2003 10:40 AM

advanced startle

The poor mice used in the study linked to in the previous post were bred over 30 generations to be addicted to the runnng wheel
Some of these superachievers ran for more than 20 kilometers every night over a seven-day period
boynton was idly browsing for an illustrative image when she found this site that
provides some grim scientific equipment:
Simultaneous activity monitoring
Modular Maze Auto Guillotine
Learned Helplessness Test Chamber
Foam-lined Acoustic Startle Cubicle with Viewing Port
force lickometer
Animal Holders

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Comments: advanced startle

Oooh, aaah! Can't wait for the next scientific Tupperware party!

I was idly browsing for an illustrative image for my superachieving exercise regime which knocks those sluggardly rodents into a cocked beanbag when I found this in the family album. http://home.iprimus.com.au/theferaleye/about/abouttis7.JPG

What did my old melancholic personal trainer once say?

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."
Posted by Sedgwick at November 3, 2003 06:26 PM

...Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darken'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits...

'Melancholic Personal Trainer' - sounds like a business idea with legs.
Alas - I am overqualified.


Posted by boynton at November 3, 2003 07:20 PM

boynton, that is very very fine. i nicked it with respec'. how could i not?
Posted by David Tiley at November 3, 2003 07:21 PM

Thank you kindly.
I actually find it all quite chilling, the language as much as the imagery.
btw - I'm hoping to refer to your in-house legal
lessons if they come after me ;)
Posted by boynton at November 3, 2003 07:31 PM

oh now I'm laughing again. you know I got into this to be serious? Some demon waited decade after decade for this moment..

chilling - exactly.
Posted by David Tiley at November 3, 2003 11:06 PM

hippocampus

A recent article found via Rebecca's Pocket was encouraging:
Age, exercise may boost memory
Recent studies indicate that a simple exercise routine helps put the brakes on memory loss
boynton was just about to hop off and start power walking on behalf of her hippocampus when she scrolled down and read this article.
Mouse Study Suggests Too Much Running Can Dull the Brain

flipped

was casually reading this Sunday Age article about Warne's new blow when this sentence leapt out with its seemingly mystery logic.
"He has been banned from using official cricket facilities and we had dramas with him earlier in the year when he turned up at training for Victoria. At the time we took legal advice and that is the decision we came to."
Warne, who has told teammates recently he is planning to grow a ponytail, has been banned from appearing because the players and former players involved will be paid for their appearances...
Que? Perhaps the phrase snuck in there as shorthand for 'forget any other (alleged) misdemeanour, now he's really becoming seriously unhinged'?

meanwhile some coaching advice from Steve-O

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Comments: flipped

Ponytail?! Warney, don't do it!

If ever a bloke was born to be Ambassador at Large for the Mullet it's got to be our Shane.
Posted by Sedgwick at November 3, 2003 05:57 PM

seem to remember he sported that Ambassadorial style when he made his Test debut?
Suspect the mullet wasn't conducive to flippers and googlies - when he returned he'd slimmed down and shed the hair-don't- and the rest is astheysay history
However now is proably the right time to revive the mullet - retro wrong-un.
The Ponytail is just wrong.
Posted by boynton at November 3, 2003 06:13 PM

Jason Gillespie is closer to the mark. He had a pony-tail when he started out in 1996, but shed it soon after. And at the start of this year, he's revived the mullet.

A pony tail would be very wrong on Mr Warne.
Posted by Scott Wickstein at November 4, 2003 12:59 AM

APOLOGY.

Following correspondence from the soliciting firm Shyster, Tallywacker and Lickspittle, I unreservedly withdraw comments associating Mr. Warne with mullets.

This was tasteless, hurtful and careless. The fish I should have referred to was in fact the groper.

I again apologise for pain and suffering this may have caused to any school of mullets or any individual mullet.

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Posted by Sedgwick at November 4, 2003 07:55 AM

barb

watched Stage Door - the last in the Katharine Hepburn festival on ABC TV last night, waiting for the line that many years ago had been adopted as a catch phrase in a distant shared household past. boynton was becoming anxious as she heard the litany of wise cracks and one liners, and was beginning to think she had the wrong film in mind. Until right at the end Ginger delivers:
The best line in the film, though, is Rogers' marvelous barb to a friend over the phone when Gail Patrick enters the scene: 'Hold on, gangrene just set in.'

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Comments: barb

I cannot watch those "films" myself---its all about wisecracks, one liners and delivery(Bob Hope style).
The visual language is shockingly bad. It's little more than theatre masquerading as film.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 3, 2003 11:10 AM

It's funny isn't it how people's pleasure in movies can be so different. I just love the sheer performance brio of these flicks, and the timing, and the wit and the guts of the characters. A lot of the shooting was mechanical, but that also sometimes had to do with the clumsiness of early sound stages, and the basic decision of many directors to simply shoot it so they stayed out of the way of the comedy. Watch any Marx Bros film..

For me, one of the intriguing ideas about the whole space is that they are so theatrical, and yet they rely so completely on a cinematic and not theatrical relationship with the audience.
Posted by David Tiley at November 3, 2003 11:42 AM

Yes I forgive Stage Door its limited regard for cinematic language for its many charms.
First non-musical film to have that strong female ensemble - the men are quite secondary. And such an ensemble! In the historical socio-eco context that is quite remarkable. Apparently much of the dialogue was improvised - and some of it seems to work and get a spontaneity feel even within that wall of wise-crack chatter. I did find it hard to catch all the words, so it's interesting about the sound quality issue. Like the Marx bros - (connection with Kaufmann and screen-writer Ryskind)- you just have to run with it - and then there seems to be an over-arching rhythm or sense to the verbiage city/theatricality.
And Rogers and Hepburn are just wonderful.
And of course it's the right vintage - I'll watch anything made before say 1952.

& while there are certain times and moods however when such verbally 'dense' film can be irritating, I found it rather pleasant on saturday night.
Posted by boynton at November 3, 2003 01:08 PM

"its all about wisecracks, one liners and delivery"...

just like alot of Shakespearian comedy really - much ado about nothing, taming of the shrew come to mind. The one's where the girls really get to answer back.
Posted by wen at November 3, 2003 02:26 PM

Yes "its all about wisecracks, one liners and delivery"...
funny it reminded me of the blogosphere at times-
this cacophony of chat and throwaway one-liners.(disturbing development in blog addiction: starting to read world as blog)
Also it's been a while since I saw "The Women" - that more celebrated example of the women's ensemble genre, but I didn't like it as much as SD.
Posted by boynton at November 3, 2003 05:27 PM

Gary, you've gotta stop watching Ingmar Bergman for the slapstick.

Boynty, just looking at your first comment above and I noticed a proloferation on hyphens. Don't read it, just look at it and see if you don't agree.

Coincidentally, I watched Stage Door on Satdee night too. Doubtless an early chick flick, and good fun with it. A worthy companion to His Girl Friday or 42nd Street.
Posted by Tony.T at November 3, 2003 06:56 PM

- dash it all- I see nothing unusual-looking - or even remarkable - about my idiosyncratic -though perhaps Emily-Dickinson-esque- use of the hyphen.

- oh and btw Gold Diggers of 1933 is the movie cited as being a musical forerunner of this genre.
Posted by boynton at November 3, 2003 07:12 PM

I'm not convinced by the defence of Hollywood. I accept strong women characters, great ensemble acting,improvised dialogue and the relationship with a cinematic audience.

But the defence treats film as a secondary form of literature,not as cinema.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 3, 2003 08:33 PM

I agree, Gary. It is bad cinema.
As such, on its own inferior terms it can be nonetheless a rather enjoyable 'read'.
Posted by boynton at November 4, 2003 10:14 AM

well - we see all their faults (their inability to get the new medium quite right), but still read and enjoy the first 'novels'. Maybe they'll still be watching (& enjoying, but for ethno-historical reasons only) all the bad earlyish cinema 100 years hence.
Posted by wen at November 4, 2003 02:17 PM

clocking

This is indeed a beautiful clock. Maybe it will help boynton get her head around Daylight Saving which even after a week has failed to be convincing. (via The Presurfer)

doco vs drama

A comment by Sedgwick on the Seabiscuit doco:
Fear that the Hollywood version will be aimed at gratuitously ratcheting up the Kleenex usage many fold.
pre-empted today's post which was forming in brain inside car yesterday as we took our regular saturday sunday-drive through the sprawling suburbs.
boynton suspects that the new film will be pushing to match the pure drama of the documentary. By pure perhaps I mean authentic - even though such authencity is clearly and covertly manipulated by the assorted trickery of documentary. But like Quiz Show, boynton predicts that it will be the doco that will be more resonant, even more emotional. I really enjoyed the 94 movie and the shift into a dramatic reading, going with the non-likeness dissonance of casting into that other layer of complexity that fiction offers. But I have watched the documentary a number of times since and still find it (more) absorbing. Perhaps that story was perfectly suited to the form having originated and evolved in front of cameras in television studios. Likewise, any Hollywood film of Seabiscuit has to contend with the abundant newsreel footage (which is in much greater supply than that documenting Phar Lap, but then the stuffed racehorse encased in the Melbourne Museum is one mighty iconic relic to take on and mess about with dramatically for card carrying members of nit-pickers inc.)
This may indeed be an emerging preference which is rather confronting for someone who has traded on drama once upon a time. Maybe it's just that there are certain times when the appeal of non-fiction temporarily holds sway - even though there is always the tacit faith in the power of fiction and drama to transform reality.
The work of Bob Connolly and (the late) Robin Anderson is perhaps one local example of documentary doing drama better than the drama department, and the working methodology seems similar:

"What we do is, basically, we look for a really interesting character, and not a hero or a heroine or anything like that, just someone who is gutsy and sensitive and interesting. Dramatically interesting. And we look for a situation — usually involving potential conflict ... a complex one, and a sort of a threat of some sort of conflict, and then we just basically say, well, we think it's our hunch, and I think it's sort of half analysis and half intuition, that with this person and this situation, something is going to happen during the year," says Bob Connolly. (source)

And Ian David who writes both drama and doco-drama reflects:
... For me it's important to let the facts get in the way of a good story, because that's what gives the story its essential power

and in this absorbing Film Australia conversation Ken Burns acknowldeges the tricks and confesses to sometimes walking close to the line for that higher truth, while affirming:

the power in the individual image to convey complex information and the fact that there is so much more drama in what is and was, by extension, that anything that the human imagination dreams up, in essence as Shelby Foot later told me that God is the greatest dramatist...

Big Call. Probably should be the last word but boynton couldn't resist puting the issue to a digital diiviner. Drama wins.

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Comments: doco vs. drama

What with being up late last night agonising over which four-legged creature would be annointed by the contents of my wallet I happened to watch "The Making of Seabiscuit". Oh dear, oh drear.

I don't think I shall be shelling out for a ticket.(Assuming I have the wherewithal to so shell after something under 20/1 wins the Cup) Much like there are some poets shouldn't read their own poetry, some people behind the camera should stay there. Pathos to bathos in one fell sweeping hyperbolic statement after another.

Not sure whether in the course of this raft of "I've always wanted to act with ...", "This is a role ... was born to play ..." "Yes, the horse is from the Stanislavsky school of hard knocks" the term "feel good movie" was given an early morning track gallop or not, but come the big day I can see it bursting out of the starting gates at top speed when the critics hit the keyboards.
Posted by Sedgwick at November 4, 2003 07:01 AM

caught a half-head or a nose of the show myself before switching. Never one for the 'making of' genre. May just go to the film, stranger things have happened. Missed National Velvet at noon yesterday.
Posted by boynton at November 4, 2003 10:01 AM

seabiscuit

The PBS doco Seabiscuit screened here last night to coincide with the start of the Spring Racing Carnival. What a wonderful thing - a perfectly told story of the alchemy of chance and timing that brought the key players together, the human drama unfolding with the triumphant chronicle of the horse. It was so moving, boynton was rather teary.
Last time we heard references to Seabiscuit we did that reflex comparison to our own legendary horse Phar Lap. At first, boynton carried that mindset - certain comparisons are uncanny - but soon found the American version so involving that it transcended the need to compare or keep our bearings.
The author Laura Hillenbrand's Seabsicuit site has a link to Norah Pollard's site, daughter of jockey Red Pollard, with samples from her book of poetry Leaning In

Did you urge on your bay in tongues?

And finally boynton just heard a reporter on ABC radio give a hot tip for Derby Day: Wear Layers

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Comments: seabiscuit

What she said. Good doco. Hope for us all ... 50 races before first win. Fear that the Hollywood version will be aimed at gratuitously ratcheting up the Kleenex usage many fold.

"a hot tip for Derby Day: Wear Layers" ... on t'other hand my tip is "Lay Wearers".
Posted by Sedgwick at November 1, 2003 05:27 PM

Your tip happens on the tipsy lawns in the tipsy late afternoon of the first tipsy tuesday of november, don't it?
Posted by boynton at November 1, 2003 07:02 PM

I, too, was made wobbly of lip and glistening of eye., boynton. I knew Sea Biscuit was HUGE in US folklore, but, knowing nothing of his story (and that of his heroic hoop), I found myself barking proletarian solidarity at the telly as he took on that strutting boojie spooner War Admiral.
Posted by Rob Schaap at November 1, 2003 10:16 PM

and (to quote the hoop) 'made a Rear Admiral out of him'.
Yes that was one of the keys to the story's appeal. Puts the "great Aussie Battler' myth into a wider folkloric context, doesn't it.
I suppose (in 'equine immortatlity' terms ) Phar Lap (sadly) wears the Died Too Young saddle-cloth in comparison.
Posted by boynton at November 2, 2003 02:50 PM