crystal dream

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



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

footbowl

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

And this photo.

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

entertaining

Don't do this
 

musicians

The Devil Went Down to Georgia

(farewell swapatorium)



garage band: unfamous musicians in everyday places

teen knits from letslookupandsmile

guitar hero from superbomba
 

sunny day

Has the large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?

via Dr Fish @ LP


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


what to wear

 

oz modernism

City of Sound: A collaborative map of modernism in Australia

via things
 

dominion

animal politics

Palin Shows No Love for Baby Wolves Huffington

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

Amazon Customer Reviews: Dominion via Animal Person
 

by seagirt

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


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

veep

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



Prodem at Zazzle


Aerial Wolf Gunning 101
 

gardeners

ABV 2 Cooks and gardeners

vale
 

powerful

Powerful Powerful Owl
- with brushtail possum

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

umbrellas

 

old news

via Genevieve

NLA Australian Newspapers beta Historic Australian Newspapers, 1803 to 1954

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

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


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

miss beanie

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



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

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

post modern

These cakes remind me of this tattoo


Cake Wrecks via Making Light
 

whiff

boynton has fielded many queries today re table tennis or


whiff




whaff


See also ping pong


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

soft drink

Dispensing Machine




  
Country Cordial Manufacturers' Conference

  
slightly less cordial
 

informal

Informal portrait
 

dog chair

Dog Chair via grow-a-brain

Horse table via bifurcated rivets
 

art v sport

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

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

every child

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

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

equestrian qotd

Re:Who is idiot Equestrian Commentator?

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

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

pageantry

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

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

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

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


see also: recent search request
 

fido friday 5

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

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

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




cattle dog in sulky



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

correct

the correct way to punch a football

 

wordle

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

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




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

misadventures

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

A party of passengers
 

unsuccessful

Character note:

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

(I think the parentheses got her)
 

unsharp

A Friday sort of search request:

how to unsharp the tooth of labrador

(Is puppy. Is sharp. Do not touch.)
 

east

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

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

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





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

dolittle

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

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

recommended by Self Styled Siren
 

barbie birds

The Birds Barbie Doll

via As Above
 

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

 

book care

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


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

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

mov 2 live

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

oranged

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

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

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

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

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

metres

 

hitching

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

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

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

blog wars

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

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

something good

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


and this is good too
 

outdo

comments policy update
 

sagas

well, we love the Aga Saga woman.

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

the searchers

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



(see also the Tugboat files)



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

football stories

Via Brownie, in a comment at AGB



"The Goal Umpire’s Assistant (Leitchville)


Football Stories from Country Victoria
21 Films by Malcolm McKinnon

mind map

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



(Click for better view)
 

qotd

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

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

green man

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



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



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

Feats of Clay

tv 9 to nought

Continuing my random tv countdown begun here

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

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

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

Funny how this review can get it so wrong:

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

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


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


6. Lines from my latest Google Poem compilation:

a retired Australian rules football
jock Sam Newman manhandled the doll

full version

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



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

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

4. Meanwhile newbiscuit has the dirt on Grand Designs

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

See also Sustainability Blog on Grand Designs Craziness

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

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

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

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

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

p123s5+

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

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

fang

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

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

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

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

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

cool

thinkers

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

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

baked

I purchased this heavy tome on Cakes:




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

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


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

ex jewelry

Ex-Boyfriend Jewelry via bifurcated rivets

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





(Or where semiotics is given the finger)

car 30

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


Update Nick Paumgarten on Late Night Live

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.

whistlin

When are they going to release Great Bicycling Songs on abc records?

A family favourite for riding our Malvern Stars around the garden was I love to Whistle as seen (on black and white tv saturdays) in Mad About Music

cousins

and only now have caught up with The Cousins

beach dogs

A blue heeler does not love the ocean



- well this blue heeler, anyway.
When I used to take my labrador to the beach, his joy was visible.
His joy was audible.
But Flo can take it or leave it.
She may look like she's enjoying the water, but she's merely doing a low-key scan of the horizon as always, on the lookout for something to herd.
She was more interested in the foreshore, walking on a leash.
She had a bit of a paddle, because it was there.
But she didn't leap, dig, swim, wag or cut loose.
A labrador belongs here.
A blue heeler turns her back on it.

holiday snap

power dressing

...an electric headlight to help her to find an honest man...


YouTube at cynical C: a 1930's futuristic look at fashions for 2000

quiz

Quiz Night
Esquire Napkin Fiction


via Grow a Brain

unmitigated

I like Unmitigated England A Country Lost and a Country Found
via I like.


(Not many blogs make me read through all the archives)

inspection

Did an Open for Inspection on Saturday, inspecting memories, a place I used to live in 20 years ago.
Naturally the house has been given (to quote Meredith) the Gut-n-Smeg.
All Victorian character gone, now generic townhouse in innercityville with decking and succulents and OSP.
Now worth a cool mil in this overheated market.

I used to love the view from the upstairs window looking east- sky, terraces, treelines. It was a good writing place.
Now you can't see out.
Smoked glass means you can't see through the privacy.

Gone for good: the bad wiring, the 'Victerranean' aqua paint, the outside toilet.
(And the Rottie next door who'd leap against the fence barking whenever anyone went)
And gone for good is heritage, a sense of connection.

mon oncle

 
PCL: Theme from "Mon Oncle", by Latin Combo.


(meanwhile over at yootoob the trailer)

bernie

... in Street

in Footscray


(on behalf of Bwca)

wiki

...it just feels good to find something there—even, or especially, when the article you find is maybe a little clumsily written. Any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn't a commercial product. There are no banners for E*Trade or Classmates.com, no side sprinklings of AdSense.

The Charms of Wikipedia via things

- this was via mefi who saw parallels with mefi, as I did with blogging

...It worked and grew because it tapped into the heretofore unmarshaled energies of the uncredentialed...
...the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all out—and nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone's identity was hidden behind a jokey username.

floats

Images from the Moomba Parades from 1962 - 1965


(prompted by Tim's Sars post)

knees up

One's google referrers can be useful, or alerting and alarming. Yesterday as I was checking the hits for my two staples - pachabel's canon for bagpipes and doorbell rings by itself - I noticed a search for Let's Knock Knees

I blogged about this gloriously goofy number a few years ago, in pre-YouTube yore. I was even inspired to write some lines about it.

Prompted by that referrer, I checked to see if it had made the yt cut - et voila:



Loverly.

I don't think I'd write about that sequence in quite the same vein again, (a simple wtf might suffice) although I still like these lines ok:

and then the chorus of odd choreography
all patellar reflex and kneeing in groin
flirtation of bathing suits and cravat dudes
dancing dud sex

and I do like the cricket pads/who knows what it all means ...

xxxx

I was speaking to x, a neighbour I sometimes see when I walk xxx.
We got yxrning the other day, and she said that she had once lived in xxxxsx,
had lived there for xx years in fact, when she first arrived in Australia.

"I love xxxxsx", I said, "Well xxxxsxxxx in general, really. I'd love to live in xxxxsxxxx one day."
"It was a lovely community" she said, "I still get the xxixxxxxxx paper, so I can keep up to date with things."

Coincidentally, I had just being reading a book on the area, xaxx and xxxexxxx! by xxxsxxx xxxxe, which I mentioned.

"But I’d be reluctant to lend this to you, because the first half is filled with rather xxxxuxxxx language. It’s very ... xxxx "

"Oh I had to get used to that, living in xxxxsx! It’s a very xxoxx community."
 

teh blog

via The Man She Forgot To Google via Relevant History
 

fab blog

 
Hey Dullblog
People Who Think About The Beatles A Little Too Much

via Making Light - who linked to this post
 

internet

 
a huge internet following


via J-walk

rockets

R was for Rocket


I remember spending a couple of goggle.hours looking for an image similar to this once.
I was after the everyday rocket-ware that adorned Dickens or the playgrounds of chadstone past.
Part of a great Flickr set

14th

What a Difference A Day Made

Shirley Temple non-fans look away now.
(But you'll miss Alice Faye at 0.55-secs-in singing But Definitely)

and this version sports a splendid karaoke orchestral intro.

13th

yes, it was the best of speeches, followed by one of the worst.

barbie

more of yesterday's yore, for Genevieve*

barbie
on the barbie

2 Bedroom
Dwelling

al fresco

Welcome to the Australian barbecue, 2008. Not everyone grills in the shadow of an architect-designed mansion, of course, but today's typical barbie barely resembles the simple snags-and-chops affairs of yore...

Sgarbossa, a property developer, has also seen the change. "When clients give me the specifications, they now include the barbecue," he says. "They think nothing of spending 50 grand on an al fresco dining area. That wouldn't have happened a few years ago. A barbecue was something you just put on the veranda."
Toffs 'n' tongs. The Age

I'll take the yore, thanks.

yore
yore
yore
 

quoit

 




meanwhile, the township of Koroit
 

off line

And speaking of Crocs, I had one of those awkward I read it on the internet moments at a family gathering yesterday, that went like this

- I think I read somewhere that Crocs were banned for setting off electrical equipment...

(Pause. Faces look skeptical. Scientist neph. unimpressed)

...Yes ... I think they were banned for setting off electrical equipment...

But what I should have said is

Static electricity caused by the popular footwear has been implicated in the malfunctioning of electrical medical equipment at hospitals in Sweden

(I think I read this via As Above originally)

over et

recent googler arrived looking for

overcoat

ettiquette


(Sic. Apparently I'm at the top of the misspelt google tree for this nice ensemble)

au flo

croc-ery

Lone croc seen in local park while walking dog



Within cooee of popular children's playground.
Only metres from junior cricketers bowling in the nets.
Within a foot of free-running dogs.





Meanwhile, Bumper book snared at op-shop not so casual:

crockery

China update: I spotted Kontiki doing a turn in The Chatterley Affair last Sunday. That thrilling glimpse of crockery occurred just before I switched off.

"Is it a television drama that you would even wish your dinnerware to see?"


(Update: A bowl of K variant seen in Romulus my Father.
This crockery ain't shy.)

fl-ying

Flying high in Melbourne

(I think it's more Melbourne FL than Melbourne VIC though)


Ephemerally Yours via Ramage