Grey Butcherbird

Grey Butcherbird (Cracticus torquatus)
- photo by me.

The book (Jim Flegg & N. Longmore, Reader's Digest Photographic Field Guide: Birds of Australia, 1994) says there should be a "conspicuous white crescentic patch behind ear", but I can't see one. And I've never thought about a bird's ear before. I knew they could hear, but never wondered how.

Sun 29th - 1

Still persevering with Moby Dick (the start was back here). The man hasn't even left shore yet.

I love this part - Ishmael visits Whaleman's Chapel, a favourite of sailors and supporters:

Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.

- installment 18 of 260, Moby Dick by Hermann Melville

Sat 28th - 2

My mother is a good woman--a very good woman--and I am, I think, not quite all criminality, but we do not pull together. I am a piece of machinery which, not understanding, my mother winds up the wrong way, setting all the wheels of my composition going in creaking discord.

She wondered why I did not cry and beg forgiveness, and thereby give evidence of being human. I was too wrought up for tears. Ah, that tears might have come to relieve my overburdened heart! I took up the home-made tallow candle in its tin stick and looked at my pretty sleeping sister Gertie (she and I shared the one bed). It was as mother had said. If Gertie was scolded for any of her shortcomings, she immediately took refuge in tears, said she was sorry, obtained forgiveness, and straightaway forgot the whole matter. She came within the range of mother's understanding, I did not; she had feelings, mother thought, I had none. Did my mother understand me, she would know that I am capable of more depths of agony and more exquisite heights of joy in one day than Gertie will experience in her whole life.

- the narrator, Sybylla, in My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

Sat 28th - 1

Saw a man lift a lawnmower over his head and angrily throw it over a fence to the curb. Looked like a crime of passion.

- phillygirl, Twitter

Fri 27th - 5

I wrote to Miles Franklin, and she confessed that she was a girl.

- Henry Lawson, 1901, preface, My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

Fri 27th - 4

Poachers just been found on Narok side of river. Rangers currently in pursuit.

- maratriangle (Joseph Kimojino), Twitter

Wow! Live action! Twitter's great when people use it like this.

I'm wondering how the rangers are doing the pursuing - on foot? by vehicle? How well-equipped are the poachers? (They might have guns. A ranger was recently shot by cattle rustlers).

Fri 27th - 3

This is what I love about the Web: from LibraryThing's blog, Thingology:

If you're at ALA in Anaheim, have nothing to do Sunday morning and are interested in the future of cataloging—and who isn't?—you might be interested in [...]

I'm not interested in the future of cataloguing and I don't know anybody who is. But I can see there's a whole world of people who are, and that makes my world bigger and better too.

...Actually, maybe it makes my world smaller, or it puts it into larger context, with the effect of making it smaller. But what's not in dispute: it makes it better.

I'm thinking of the place my grandparents lived: physically similar to where I live now (they both grew up within 5 kilometres of where I'm writing) but so different in other ways. The people they knew and the things those people did dictated what could and should be done, and what could and should be hoped for. It was a small world with few options, but the people in it saw it as the whole universe.

Now we have so many options it's bewildering, and each person's world is so small in comparison to things going on beyond it, that... I've lost the plot of this post. That's a shame.
:)

But go those cataloguers. Rock on.

Fri 27th - 2

Fairly sure the news just announced we can expect a chance of morning clowns.

- phillygirl, Twitter

Fri 27th - 1

Man just came in to the gallery and asked me if I thought someone was controlling everything. Me and the whale mate, me and the whale.

- munki (Sarah Wedde), Twitter

Pied Butcherbird

Pied Butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis)
- photo by me.

Wed 25th - 2

54°F. A cranefly clings to my elbow, landing gear spread wide as its clear wings flutter in the breeze, flags for the kingdom of water.

- Morning_Porch (Dave Bonta), Twitter

..."flags for the kingdom of water."
I love that part.

Wed 25th - 1

If God wants me to stop blaspheming, he should stop being such an asshole.

- gknauss (Greg Knauss), Twitter

Tue 24th - 4

[Hercule Poirot] "Yes, [the murderer] is intelligent. But we must be more intelligent. We must be so intelligent that he does not suspect us of being intelligent at all."

[The somewhat dopey narrator, Mr Hastings] I acquiesced.

"There, mon ami, you will be of great assistance to me."

I was pleased with the compliment.

- The mysterious affair at Styles, Agatha Christie

:)

Tue 24th - 3

What have I always told you? Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory - let the theory go.

- Hercule Poirot in The mysterious affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

Tue 24th - 2

Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

- Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective, in The mysterious affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

Tue 24th - 1

Just noticed on a bottle of Jif household cleaner:

Jif has the power to solve really tough cleaning problems [...blah blah blah...]

I love this "everything is a problem" approach very much. Currently I'm trying to solve a tough hunger problem by administering food.

Mon 23rd - 3

Just took the dogs out into the cold starry night for a toilet break, and for the second night in a row the younger dog, Lucy, went off exploring instead of coming back into the house. Trying to nip this in the bud (because I don't want to stand at the door waiting for her), when she ran back inside I ignored her and praised Abbie: "Good dog, Abbie!

Abbie's reaction was so amusing - a big smirk, and she was almost strutting: "Oh, yeah! I'm G-O-O-D!"

Mon 23rd - 2

On e-books: it's only recently occurred to me to copy and paste plain-text e-books (from Project Gutenberg, say) into Word** files for more comfortable reading. Now I can choose the font and font size, and centre the text on the page. And it's no longer necessary to make a note of the right place to resume reading later; now I just highlight it.

Easy-peasy and obvious. It only took me 500 years to think of it.

**Or equivalent. I use Open Office now, but don't know what to call it. OO?

UPDATE

On bookmarking a place in the ebook: I've abandoned the highlight-as-bookmark idea. It's quicker to search instead. I copy+paste text from the relevant place into the top of the file, then when I come back later to restart reading, cut+paste it into the search field of ctrl+f.

Mon 23rd - 1

Strange things are happening in my DailyLit consumption. Last week I hated Melville's Moby Dick (specifically: "Moby Dick is a pain") and loved Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground. Since then the situation has reversed. Now I like Moby Dick and CAN'T STAND Notes... (specifically: "It's just some man going on and on and on about nothing!").

Rethinking my "if I don't like it in the first 50 pages, quit" rule.

Harvey 1 - 1

Harvey 1 died yesterday. He was a little bull, only the size of a big calf, and years ago (5, 6, 7, 10? I can't remember) I raised him from birth after his mother died, feeding him with a bottle every day, and then later, when he was older and wouldn't take to feed right away, he got to eat nice neat little squares of cold solid rolled oats (which he loved).

He'd been looking a bit listless over the last week, but not enough to worry about. But then yesterday morning he was lying on his side, all four legs stuck straight out along the ground, and he couldn't get up. Cutting to the chase, he got worse during the day and I called a vet and Harvey got a needle of something (anaesthetic, I think?) into his neck and was dead in seconds.

It's not that I'm trying to understand it - there's nothing to understand: he was sick, now he's dead. And I'm not upset - the decision to kill him was not hard: he was suffering, now he's not. It was his suffering that was hard, not his death; or, it was watching his suffering and being unable to do anything about it that was hard, and as soon as he died that was over.

Needless to say, all of it was hard for Harvey. I keep forgetting it was actually about him, not me. If only cattle had blogs.

Anyway, I might write about this in instalments. There are so many big things in it and I don't want to struggle over trying to turn them into something that all fits together. I don't know though; I can't decide whether I want to write about anything at all. Maybe just saying this much will have been enough. It feels like I've had too much to eat and can't digest things, if you know what I mean, and this has been an attempt to chew more thoroughly.

Fri 20th - 1

Got a "letter" from the Commonwealth Bank today, inviting me to increase my credit card limit. I've got two whinges about it:

(a) They address me as Miss. What am I, 12?! If they're going to preface names with references to marital status (and why are they?), I'd rather be called Master.

(b) They're offering to increase my credit card limit, but they have absolutely no idea about my present financial situation. They don't ask about income or ability to handle debt, and instead say:

Simply sign and date the request form below and return it by 16 July 2008. We'll then send you a letter confirming your new limit.

There is a caution, though:

Please note: if your personal circumstances have changed or are likely to (due to, for example a loss of employment or an increase in your expenses, such as a new loan), please do not accept this invitation.

I think they're being irresponsible.

Thu 19th - 2

I love it when people in other parts of the world post pictures of the moon photographed on the same day I noticed it: "Oh! I saw that too!" It's one of the good things about us all living on the same planet - looking out (if you can do) and seeing the same moon.

Moon rising into the clouds by Joseph Kimojino in Kenya, Flickr**

And here's a lovely daytime view which is even better if you click on the "all sizes" link above it to see the larger version:

Elephants and the cloud

If you're not a regular there already, check Joseph's blog, Mara Triangle. In the latest update, poachers have been killing hippos.

**Just noticed these photos are all-rights-reserved, so I'd better stop pinching them.

Thu 19th - 1

I can neither confirm nor deny that the Fail Whale has formed an exploratory committee or that he will make a run for US President in 2008.

- failwhale (Fail Whale Cares), Twitter

A typical error page featuring the mighty Fail Whale and hangers-on:

(click on the image for a slightly larger version - 23kB)
Text: "Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again."

UPDATE

The artist who created the Fail Whale is Yiying Lu and the Fail Whale illustration is called Lifting a Dreamer.
Via Fail Whale Cares update 1 and update 2.

Wed 18th - 2

Winston Churchill's response to the suggestion by an editor of The Times that he should retire:

Mr Editor, I leave when the pub closes.

- Quotes and stories, The Churchill Centre (the direct link doesn't work, sorry, or at least not as I'm trying it; you'll need to scroll down the page).

Wed 18th - 1

This photo is from the Mara Triangle blog and a post by Joseph Kimojino about the frustrations of building road blocks which are then ignored: Will Mara drivers ever be responsible?

It sure is beautiful country, hey? Look at that sky. And all that space. Lovely.

Tue 17th - 1

[1] - - - - -

I've decided to describe my day in haiku form.

[2] - - - - -

10:30 a.m.: "No, she don't live here," / Sighed the trailer's occupant. / "Stole my husband, though."

- tweet 1 and tweet 2, Malekovic (Lucas Malekovic), Twitter

Be sure to see his website, dontpoke.com, keeping in mind that "poke" means "click on that cute little yellow thing".

Mon 16th - 2

Just saw a little girl (about 3 years old) kick off her pink flowered shoes and try to outrun the babysitter.

- phillygirl, Twitter

Mon 16th - 1

The family ring on this guy in the airport lounge is so big I want to hand him a treaty so that he can afix the seal.

- John Dickerson, Twitter

Sun 15th - 3

I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows.

- the narrator in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, instalment 2 of 51 from DailyLit.

True enough.
;)

Sun 15th - 2

You know you're getting older when you have to look the "hot" items up to see what they are.

- mrfixit64857, Twitter

Sun 15th - 1

Oh, man. Moby Dick is a pain. I get to the end of a sentence and can't remember (and don't care) what he was talking about. Look at this:

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

Bloody hell. Today was instalment #3. I'm now wondering how many to make myself read before quitting.

I signed up for Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground yesterday, too. First instalment was great. After the intro, this is the first paragraph:

I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!

Sat 14th - 3

I keep trying to make pastry! And this is what happens!

(UPDATE: I just realised you need to know this first: what follows is an empty pastry case, not a pie with a lid. There's no filling in the thing, it's just pastry in a baking dish which should be filled later when cold.)


IT LOOKED JUST FINE WHEN I PUT IT IN THE OVEN!

I hoped the spoon would help show the dimensions a little better, but it doesn't. I fear you'll miss the fact that on one side of the dish the pastry is 3cm thick, leaving space for a filling of just 1cm.

In retrospect, using a recipe for rough puff instead of shortcrust was not sensible, particularly in light of the fact that I couldn't be bothered baking it blind (ie. covered with baking paper weighed down to mimic the dampening effect of a filling).

And this post has taken exactly 1 hour 3 minutes to write because I can't think of a way to finish it. So let's just do it like this:

Sat 14th - 2

I've been trying to reduce the page-loading time for this blog but so far haven't had much success. Some site somewhere said that ideally page-size should be under 200K, but this page is over that and presumably for anyone with a slower connection it will take ages to load. I tried reducing the number of widgets, reducing the number of posts, reducing the size of images, and all of that helped a bit - but not enough to make much difference, so I put them all back again.

The biggest size-hogs are not images but JavaScript files. Here is a list of my pages ranked in size (K) from largest to smallest, total size first and JavaScript size second.

Flickr .... 1058 .... 533
Twitter .... 341 .... 248
Blogger .... 248 .... 158
CiteULike .... 245 .... 146
LibraryThing .... 191 .... 133
del.icio.us .... 143 .... 63

If you're interested in page size/load time and you use the Firefox browser, two add-ons are useful:

Firebug

YSlow

YSlow does the size checking but it's an extension of Firebug and won't work on its own, so you need to have Firebug installed too.

Sat 14th - 1

So the first update for Moby Dick didn't arrive this morning. Scheduled for 0700 AEST, the time is now 1000+, and it's not here. I just checked the subscription details and am now wondering who the idiot was who clicked "on weekdays" instead of "daily" when I signed up.

Fri 13th - 2

I'm now also reading L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz via RSS from DailyLit. There are 51 instalments, and the first starts with the author's introduction - he says the book "aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out".

The story's first paragraph:

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cookstove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar--except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.

Fri 13th - 1

Yesterday while mowing I had the sudden thought that by now I should have read Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Ages ago I downloaded the ebook from Project Gutenberg, but my enthusiasm dropped off after about 20 minutes and later I just forgot to go back and start reading again.

In other words, I still haven't read Moby Dick.

This isn't a huge problem as far as world problems go. And anyway, I decided this year that if I don't like a book in the first 50 pages I'll just stop reading it. Life's too short.

And in fact life is too short for me to keep dithering about how to write this blog post, too. (I've been floundering around here for half an hour.) Does it matter why I've decided to read Moby Dick through DailyLit? No.

In summary: DailyLit - allows you to read books by instalment via RSS (feed reader) or email. Each instalment takes an average reader less than 5 minutes to read, and if you want more instalments, you can get them. It looks like many or most of the books are free, and there's a large range of categories.

I'm trying it. Moby Dick in 260 parts, starting like this:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Serenity prayer

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

- Reinhold Niebuhr (1892 - 1971)

Mon 9th - 1

Today I saw these wedge-tailed eagles:



And they saw this (and presumably everything else, with their - yes - eagle eyes):

Sun 8th - 4

Haha! Look how relaxed this lion is:


- Lion enjoying the humid heat by Joseph Kimojino, Flickr

More: Lions create a roadblock

Sun 8th - 3

J.K. Rowling, delivering a commencement address, The fringe benefits of failure, and the importance of imagination, to the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association:

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

That's the amusing start, but the whole thing is quite deep and wonderful.

Via LibraryThing's Thingology Blog.

Sun 8th - 2

- Cheetah cub by Stood in the Congo, Flickr

Another view of a similar animal and vehicle: Cheetah uses Serena vehicle as a vantage point by Joseph Kimojino, head of tourism and anti-animal harassment for the Mara Conservancy in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. Joseph has a blog which is well worth a read: Mara Triangle.

Sun 8th - 1

My old creative writing teacher used to tell me that a poet 'thinks in images' and a fiction writer thinks in terms of 'character and plot'.

- Poems = Word Comics, Austin Kleon

Sat 7th - 2

Almost everyone is convinced they are not like other people.

- 4 ways we fail to choose happiness, PsyBlog

Sat 7th - 1

This is the first time I've been able to get a photo showing the relative size of a wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax).




The cow in the left-hand bottom corner of the large photo is about as far away from the camera as the eagle sitting on the post (framed by the black square), so she makes a good comparison size-wise. And you can't see the base of the fence post the eagle is sitting on, but there's not much of it hiding behind the grass there. These birds are BIG.

Thu 5th - 1

Click on the image if you want a larger version (99 KB; opens in the same window):


Comic by Lynda Barry in her new book, What It Is. Image snipped from page 2 of the PDF available from Drawn and Quarterly (1.4 MB, 13 pages, free. Go to Artists >> Lynda Barry >> Previews).

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My online things:

Identi.ca
Delicious
Flickr
Vi.sualize.us
LibraryThing
Friendfeed (combines updates from those four accounts listed above, but I'm thinking about deleting it)
CiteULike (hasn't been updated in centuries)
Blogger (the blog you're looking at; I haven't really written anything here for... - well, ever, yet, but I'm telling myself that's because I've been diverted by all these other newish things and trying to find an aggregator and my feeble brain baulks at handling more than one thing at a time.)