boynton has moved to here





please update your links:
http://boynton.ubersportingpundit.com



cheers and thanks for the memories.
so long and thanks for all the fish

Strangely, if we ever make the almost mandatory migratory move over the waters to MT, we may need to have a whole category devoted to Croquet. Following the postings on her family's early croaky history, beer and croquet, the possible hidden subtext of the sport, and a link to an early Championess, boynton happened upon yet another strange take. Once again there is something reminiscent here of the croquet etiquette observed by the boynton family. (via Planetary Delights - by way of bells and whistles)

boynton's been having just your average psycho arvo with the old cryptic coding mysteries. The oblique will be straightened out anon. The pieces put together
(Hitchcock mosaics via the amazing Fiendish is the word)

It was probably only ever me who considered Richmond Hill Cellars the key to Richmond's soul. Interesting angle on inner-city gentrification in today's Age.
(Although a long term resident of nearly Richmond, boynton wouldn't know which class of regular she falls into here: We stocked cheap sherry for the daytime lushes and diabetic beer for the sick. Bargain wine drew local intellectuals, failed novelists, alcoholics, students, people tottering home from a long afternoon at the TAB, workers off to cook dinner. )
While one can possibly audit the soul of a suburb by the drunks and tipplers, these relics and regulars, it is sobering to note "we would regularly lose folk to cirrhosis" Boynton remembers reading Janet McCalman's Struggletown - an oral history of a working class Melbourne suburb. The effect of alcohol was looked at historically, first hand, without sentiment, and the dreaded temperance movement was seen as progressive for some in breaking the poverty cycle and vastly improving the quality of life for born and bred old time Richmond residents. But boynton generally concurs with the observations of the suburb's transformation. In her own street, which borders struggletown, only one or two old timers are left now. (Maybe boynton herself is regarded as an old timer by proxy) Most have either died or moved out to the suburbs, but like the residents of this house in Sydney, they often used to stand in their front gardens, watching the street, ready to engage in passing conversation. This is one of the cultural differences boynton has noted in the temporary move up the road to fenced, quiet detached houses.( And to confess, boynton is still enjoying the novel sense of privacy and anonymity to be had behind a big wooden fence)

boynton was feeling unusually lighthearted today as she stepped out with her pack, who chorus their crazy excitement half way down the echo chamber of this sedate street. In the close ethological observation of domestic dog school, boynton endorses the theory of emotion travelling down the leash. The leash is the link between you and your dog. Dogs can feel the vibrations you send through the leash. They did seem to pick up on the joy of boynton, adding an extra gleam in their running eye, an extra lilt in their team-building song. Good Vibrations.

boynton loves this description of a themed treasure hunt, both for the content and the form - hypertext complements the spatial event. When she first started playing pub trivia, she suspected there could some theatrical hybrid of the genre waiting in the wings. Perhaps this sort of promenade puzzling is a clue to other forms. Both for travellin' trivia and narrative/themed hyperdrama?

somewhere deep within boroondara last night boynton ran into an old theatre friend. She asked after boynton's writing, but alas. Boynton could not take herself seriously in this regard as she was still wearing her parka. Even though she was trying to recover this inner state, she was really only projecting this.And instead of wearing these sort of shoes, she was caught wearing these. Somewhere along the line, dog walking style seems to have merged with house style. So she launched into a strange monologue about boroondara and blogging. As you do in a parka.

Poetry and the Politics of Self-Expression (via The Writing Life)
With the advent of the Internet and inexpensive publishing programs, writing poetry has been thoroughly democratized…In short, anyone who wants to be published can. Still, many fail to muster the minimal effort this requires. One should, I suppose, never underestimate the power of indolence.

"Can literature change the world? Or should it be above the concerns of society? Philip Pullman argues that while writers have wider duties, they must be faithful servants of their stories" (via Interconnected)
How to Become A Writer (via Pop Culture Junk Mail)

A gallery of parkas

If this sink the bachelor game seems too bittery twistery, you can always play this old game. (via Pop Culture Junk Mail)

Because this word game is very close to this game, boynton wonders if this what the blogosphere looks like?

From an amazing collection of word game images via Incoming Signals.

As an update to the last- that is impossible to post within... All this talk of ponds may have cursed us, or lent a tragic-comedic twist to things. Boynton is stationed away from her domestic keyboard and is captive to the Big Pond word limit restrictions. All these glaring errors and minor improvements to be dealt with last night, but there they were floating unhappily on the network problems pool, out of reach. Given the predictable crimes and misdemeanours of the usual suspects, this almost tipped boynton over the edge.

don't what the edge is of course. Or where it be.

Ambling around Wood's lot, Boynton notes that it is indeed the birthday of Thomas Hardy. Less than 3 hours left. Can boynton assemble something suitable in the time? All things being equal, timing inevitably comes into play. But now this is compounded by the intervention of our old friend with the oddly divine sounding name, Mr HaloScan, who has again acted capriciously and cruelly taken us out, rendered us mute. Ironically (or not) it is the very day when Mr H announces he is once again taking new orders. A fatalist by nature and circumstance, boynton has almost capitulated in grave sorrow and given up the blog. But something more closely wessex in her ancestry, rises to the somerset here and prevails for the time being. Time to contemplate the wideneing social divide between the blogspotter-furze cutters and the MT hegemony.

A broken appointment
The Dorset Ooser The grotesque horned mask of a folklore figure known as the "Ooser" or "Oozer" Thanks to Thomas Hardy, the word ‘ooser’ has had a huge audience over the past century. The number of homes that contain a book that contains that word is incalculable. And very few readers know what it means
Thomas hardy - a photographic tour
A map of the story of Return of The Native Wessex maps
Follow the green path along the edge of the woodland and through some overgrown rhododendrons to meet a minor road. This leads to Puddletown and is called Rhododendron Drive...With instructions like these, boynton wishes she could take the Return of the NativeWalk
Turn right along the green path opposite bearing a little right (public right of way). Where five tracks meet, take second left.
In fact the instructions were so full of such green hedge stile that boynton ran the page through the old supernatural poem generator:

Egdon Heath, a thread of
wild heaths in these sounds
Follow path
until the heath became symbolic
of silver and
deep wide hollow to descend
into a road are intended
to practise
taking her As chance might rule; or engaged
themselves in
noisy flirtations under the great
deal of the Puddle

Follow this pond on
your feet

Profile of Ronald So protective is McDonald's of the character's mystique that men who play Ronald are never to admit that they do. Ronalds in costume aren't to say who they are in civilian life... (via Arts and Letters Daily)
To preserve the illusion that there is only one Ronald, the chain forbids two Ronalds from ever appearing together except at a secret biennial convention McDonald's holds -- but won't talk about -- in which Ronalds brush up on their skills....
In the beginning, Ronald was so tightly controlled that McDonald's wouldn't even let him take the costume home with him. He had to change clothes at an advertising agency...
boynton wonders what Maccas would think if they 'd seen what she saw one day last year driving round the Boulevard in Kew. Suddenly around a corner she caught a glimpse of one substandard ronald loafing on top of a car roof. "There's Ronald!" she announced, so they hung a u-ey for the benefit of her four-year-old nephew, who was rather unimpressed. He certainly looked rather ordinary. Probably tired and emotional after a booroondara birthday bash.

One man's "convoluted trek from Burger Guru to aspiring bhakti yogi"
Ronald McDonald as asource of childhood trauma

This man is not a larrikin, but Google Images thinks he is.
boynton was out doing a quick scout about for images on behalf of esnet who expressed some interest in the word. As larrikins "were as much recognisable by their get-up as by their behaviour..." she was trying to find some representative jpegs. Perhaps another Google suggestion was closer to the mark, or even the same bloke in a cloth doll version. But not Sir Douglas Mawson. The odds would be about 100 to one against.

boynton likes the look of these souped-up commodore PC's. (via b3ta) Although the toaster remains her favourite model. But if we're talking serious retro appliance convergence, she wonders if someone can work in her favourite: the classic Sunbeam Mixmaster? And if in the future her telephone is going to be web-aware, she hopes it can still look something like this (via Scrubbles)

boynton's feeling a bit under the weather today -( which is quite really sunny). Not quite as bad as tourette syndrome barbie, but NQR enough to go and seek out some quality vitamin D for company. (via Lindsay Marshall)

boynton has spent some of the morning simply soaking up the sun. She has many years of sun deprivation to make up for, and perhaps a bout of SADness to fend off.
She recalled reading an article about writers and their chosen work-places, with solitude listed as the key ingredient. But boynton sides with Shaw (who constructed a revolving hut to follow the sunlight) and votes for the sun as number one, or at least lots of natural light. This is an article that goes into even greater detail about GBS's writing equipment: Shaw does not seem to have been faithful to one particular brand of fountain pen. In lieu of sun, and to foretsall SAD, perhaps boynton could work at this desk, or wear these glasses. If you have reading glasses, why not writing glasses, although she can't go past these literary shades for style.

Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories (via Fiendish is the word 5/25)
How to write sex scenes - the 12 step guide(via Plep)
latest in the war between Artists and Critics (via The Writing Life)

A time of general displacement? Boynton's trivia team has moved on and is now "between venues". The other night we travelled eastwards and found ourselves in a foreign land; a themed pub pub, a cavernous trestled tavern, of unknown faces, stupid global questions instead of our preferred local, personalised and folk-loric quiz. Indeed it was so loud and so dense that boynton watched it with the dumb detachment of a dreamer, or a child, a spectator at the silly sport that had all the soul but none of the wit of ten pin bowling. Then a strange thing happened. In the midst of this smoky exie quiz angst, boynton started talking ephemera ( as opposed to trivia) with a fellow (albeit serious) collector, who assured her that a wonderful shopful of old packaging etc was a mere 200 metres away from the very pool table where they were perched. Miss know-it-all boynton was skeptical, so at the end of the round they wandered down the road in search of proof, boynton growing more doubtful by the metre "are we heading to Doncaster?" she even asked...when suddenly there it was! And it was! And it had a name that may as well have been" O ye of liitle faith boynton" or "Hey Presto". Because it was full of tins and toys and football things, old names like Juicy Fruit and Flash, old household names that no longer roll off the tongue, if they ever did, but whose oddness and quaintness make them sound almost like incantations themselves, spells to conjure up memories, nostalgia, folk-lore. So boynton was momentarily enchanted - the child gazing in wonderment at the toy store as her guide said See! See!..."Bet you'll be back with your cheque-book tomorrow" he said, as we walked back into the smoky loud hall of trivia...
Alas - boynton has returned by day, but she bears the boynton inability to buy such treasures at full price, preferring instead to hunt them down in the wild of op shop or garage sale. She treated her visit there like a visit to any other museum, real or otherwise, browsing not buying. She called into St Vincents instead and bought some sheet music: I'm Crazy 'Bout My Baby (And My Baby's Crazy 'Bout Me) Novelty Song ( and aint that the truth) for an outlay of 50 cents

This is what boynton would probably have to say for herself. (via J walk)
(nb you may have to reload (we say refresh here) to hear it.)

Haunted ...walking through this suburbe, non-descripte, of popular moderne mid-century houses, Boynton saw a real estate sign that said. Central locality...life, but the street tells another story. Only the early morning carolling of mowers and hedge-trimmers would indicate a pulse . Perhaps all inhabitants have taken a vow of silence, allowing only their dogs to speak, their Labradors to leave paw prints in the footpath. A few houses along there is a large Canary Palm tree still in its early century suburban context. Boynton imagines that this horticultural trend had something to do with nouveau or deco, either way these trees- even those officially designated significant- are, alas, probably the last stands of the wrong exotic. They are ok for heritage cemeteries though, where they can preserve their old precedence over the indigenous, eucalyptus species that can nonetheless form an appropriate backdrop. And that cultural standoff , the cringe of leaves, ought to be preserved. On the same site see also Suggested Gravestone terminology and the Tabulated guide to the Conservation of monuments, which explains in a rather creepy way, movement among the monuments in perfectly rational terms including inscriptions fretting, soil creep and soil slump, rabbit burrows, and cattle leaning: Much damage can be done by cattle and horses leaning on monuments to scratch themselves

and a walking tour of the conventionally haunted melbourne

Is it shaped like a hot dog? Boynton has passed a quiet Sunday playing parlour games like 20 questions.(via Incoming Signals)
This has often seemed just as uncanny to play IRL as it does on-line, and just as open to dispute once one strays outside the binary lines. Thinking of her dearest companion she was stumped by “Does it have a pointy snout” Depends what you mean by pointy surely. And it is disconcerting to see where we did not agree.
Is it tall? You said No, I say Yes.
Is it smart? You said Yes, I say Doubtful.
No. No way Jose. On this point Douglas absoloutely begs to differ

A recent commenter - (our only one of late in fact) - cast nasturtiums on the works of the great Jane Austen: Soapies with ivy. Like Blogger itself, this caused boynton temporary pause, as she could not at first recall which of JA's novels featured a heroine of that name. A bit of googling and searching her own shelves however soon
cleared the matter up.

Ivy Bonnet is the heroine of Jane Austen's obscure and unfinished manuscript Class and Class-mobility recently adapted for TV by the BBC. It tells the story of the progressively impoverished Bonnet clan who have been forced to relocate first from the gatehouse of their former Estate, to the gamekeeper’s cottage, making way for a succession of distant male heirs. Now the pending arrival of their curate cousin- obscurely-removed means that unless either Ivy or her sister Pedestal can quickly secure his hand in marriage they will have to once again move, this time from the Gamekeeper's Cottage to the Stables. There are no out-buildings left.
Meanwhile the village is abuzz with the sudden return of Admiral FitzSeizure to his country Estate, as he is somehow strangely single. In the televised version of C&C
The ball at Mantlepiece Park forms the central motif, as Ivy adeptly turns down proposals from a dozen suitors while maintaining the strict regulated form of the
Dance. Her bosom, already described a “generous” is upgraded by the flattering line of the Regency Gown to “promiscuous”. It is here too that Pedestal makes the famous observation:
“Do you not wish, Ivy, that we could be born 200 years hence, so our fortunes did not rely so heavily on securing the first available curate?”
“Indeed,” (Ivy replies) " for then I could be an aviatrix or perhaps a forensic psychiatrist…But what fun we should also have to forego – like making endless sport of our suitors.” This banter has secured C&C a place in academia as critics puzzle over the irony or not inherent in the proto-feminist lament.
Miraculously for the Bonnets, the curate cousin is single with a GSOH and after she dispatches a Sonata adequately on the zither at a soiree, it's apparent that an understanding is forming between Pedestal and her cousin. But calamity strikes as the party daringly walk into the village, and Pedestal (in a display lacking sufficient class and mobility) suddenly breaks into a skip and trips on a pebble, falling to the ground. It is Ivy's cool and pointing ways in this emergency that finally seduces the Admiral into desiring a dependable first-aid companion of his own, and he proposes to her in the front cupboard of the Gamekeeper's cottage.
Radically for Jane Austen, Ivy turns him down:
“I’m afraid Sir, through long-term disappointment I seem to have acquired the chronic condition of declining happiness when it is finally offered, and it is now my deepest wish to be nothing more or less than a congenial companion to my ageing whatnot…”
Readers and critics alike have long speculated on what may have transpired in the final unwritten chapters.

Because The Pause that Refreshes keeps Pausing.

These Rules for Writers (via J Walk) make boynton feel very nervous in a fine china sort of way. She's sure she's broken them all, possibly in the same sentence. Just tote up the damage for us thank you, and put it on the slate.

Like the beatles, Jane Austen always charts well in the top of the pops polls. Of course we would always vote for Jane, as would these fellow admirers...On the same site, an excellent gathering of detractors, or women "clueless on the matter of JA." Fortunately we know Jane will have the last laugh. And for laughter, boynton may have also nominated Stevie Smith's The Holiday ( one of the op-shop Bulky Space killers she bought last year) for its funny pathos, and poetic mirth.

You are not very reliable but people like you anyway because you are so easygoing and fun to be with. And cute, too. You just don't have a lot of guts up hills. And you seem to have stalled on us Which Blogging Tool/ VW Are You?

If you are reading this you must be keen or lucky or know your way around blogger well enough to know to hit refresh three times before giving up. Thanks to Tony T, who connected the two disparate elements, of the People's car and the People's blog, or Bug and Blogger ( a curse well known in the blogosphere) It seems that Blogger has snuck the Bug in for a service, perhaps the whole engine needs replacing. Who knows. Luckily boynton is rather automotively illiterate so will not be able to go all metaphorical here and link to various puns in lieu of content, which is just as well really as she suspects that any link would be a one way ticket. So don't go here to see the sort of sign that Vdub drivers used to reluctantly heed on highways past, even if there may be some greater politcal analogy to be drawn. And don't go here either to see the sort of sign that would be preferable to the great white void. Bloggage may have to go linkless or show much more prudent use of the basic currency of the web than before. Expect some long posts about labradors.

Most VW owners who know anything about Beetles understand that something was different about 1967 Beetles
Like Feature number 6. Rear apron and deck lid - one year only.
More gratuitous pun fun with the beetles. Or is it so coincidental? Perhaps like Paul Carter’s place names, there is method in the madness of puns and namesakes, even if it’s just irony or poetry. Two cultural artefacts, icons of the twentieth century, whose respective mutations reflect societal (gear) shifts? In fact the VW beetle has been described as the car of the 20th century: a lens through which the whole cultural and political history of the century came into focus, from Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, the Cold War, to today’s global manufacturing (more).
Perhaps everyone has a beetle story, from the days when there was more flower than power.
But a confession: were Boynton to ever get car clucky (in an ideal utopian world) she would opt for the new beetle, which probably shows that the nostalgic spin worked (as opposed to the internet interactive? Marketing involved) She was around when they were universal and proud of it, the great anti-car statement. The Boyntons had an old grey “volksie” that could quite happily (or unhappily) accommodate many boyntons and their labradors and luggage, although maybe all 8 boyntons together would be pushing it even with us younger kids taking up our underling position in the “well” (where we often used to hide). It was the beloved car that used to herald its arrival a mile away, and shame those beatle-loving sisters with its motor-mower engine putt-putting up to the school gates in the presence of quieter vehicles, with their hush of posh. It was the car that ran over boynton’s young foot, when she greeted her mother along the running board one day, and the car where doors would fly open in mid-street. The car which passed in turn to the three eldest boynton girls on their P plates, before settling under a Kilsyth cyprus tree with the bones of dogs and ducks and dolls resting underneath. A Beetle gathering moss. Perhaps it was also the marvellous maroon VW toy car that her brother was given one Christmas. And then of course boynton’s first boyfriend drove a white volksie, that he had substantially re-fitted and whose name was (content edited to protect the innocent) – so again that familiar sound winding its way down our driveway, an obscure object indeed. Nostalgia gains momentum.

A teaser for tomorrow...




and your also a lennon beatle

The social cost of blogging? (via Anil Dash)The proliferation of personal bloggers has led to a new social anxiety: the fear of getting blogged...
Luckily boynton doesn't overly stray into the dreaded confessional, (or even the journal) - pseudonyms or not.
Jonathan Van Gieson, a 29-year-old theatrical producer from Brooklyn who sometimes writes about friends on his site... said he gave his friends pseudonyms "to toe the line between simple harmless betrayal of trust and nasty actionable libel"...."My close friends are used to having their lives plundered," he said.. Boynton is used to having friends and family both make the disclaimer that this bit of dialogue or that scene is not for public use, and then at other times virtuallly pitch a scenario or tag line as good dramatic fodder. Luckily for all, lifting stuff "as is" rarely works. And we won't go down that perilous path in blogging either. Boynton would like to say though that both her neighbours do in fact sing well - that when she said they sounded "off key" she meant "deliberately atonal". Lullabies and nursery rhymes sound remarkably good at full punk.

From Lullaby to Gonorrhea... Apologies for obscurity here, but like playing charades, boynton is trying to subtly point at this word-trivia collection...(via J walk) for the sake of her own pub trivia team, so as not to give the game away .To invoke another most-beautiful-word contender: ... Hush...

A new album of lost Beatles songs...Well actually just those ‘other’ Lennon-McCartney songs divvied out by Brian to lesser mortals. (via Pop Culture Junk Mail)

More newly discovered beetles here (via the Solipsistic Gazette)
"We live in the age of beetles," claims a group of scientists devoted to the study of this diverse and abundant insect family. (Boynton wonders if we now live in an age where insects indeed dominate, and when people hear beetles they again think insects before four motley lads from Liverpool or even V-dubs. You say you want a revolution?...) But which Beatle would be the Winged Ant the Slime Mold, or even the Pleasing Fungus Beetle?

update...beware Beetle damage (via Plep)

boynton has been staying in one of the spare empty rooms at Nora's, some six k away but may as well be the country for its quiet calm. No street noise, no nocturnal car revving, no sirens, no neighbourly warble ( both of boynton's neighbours indulge in regular bursts of maternal singing to young offspring, off-key, loudly). This morning she woke to the best sound in the world? - rain on a tin roof (although this sound file Extremely Heavy Rain Pound Tin Roof, Overflow In Gutter Hits Part Of Tin Roof, Mic'd at Open Window sounds more like a war zone).
Yesterday she was priviliged to be in the company of a couple of bona fide house-for-sale inspectors, so glimpsed inside some of the nearby facades. She alone fell in love with a classic 50's house, with original wooden fittings, pedestal basins, lino and lights, but whose large block condemns it - whose very depth is now regarded as wasted space. "Use your imagination" is the standard multiple dwelling sales pitch, a mercantile imagination - STCA (subject to council approval). Boynton uses hers and sees the room restored with some heritage artifacts - it would never look as hip as this - since most of her stuff falls into the eclectic/shabby chic/whimsical genre and unlike a few of the purists she knows, she never shies away from the chipped, the Non-tested or the "As Is" opportune find. (in fact most of her collection - like life itself - is "As Is")
This is a wonderful small pocket of cream brick and clinker post-war suburban villas that Robin Boyd may have condemned for their common old shows of featurism. Out walking last night it certainly seemed to boynton that every second house screamed squiggles - and she was perfectly under .02. Whether it's the lure of nostalgia or the pure suburban-recidivist instinct, boynton has lately renewed her affection (in a Howard Arkley kind of way) for these non-descript, non-architect designed, non-cosmopolitan squiggly streets

Various takes on blogging - the laudatory (via Brain Graze) and the derogatory (via Anil Dash) the practical , and the theoretical in a great series of archived posts on the oral discourse of blogging at This Public Address.

Thought Nora and other music teachers and or Latin jazz fans might enjoy this hep cat keyboard. It's got Bronte in, and number 8 is a fairly good rendition of doug's lounge voice (via the Presurfer)

Elsewhere indirectly boynton has been honoured with the slur: tree hugger. While she has never actually committed this arboreal act in public, she embraces the concept. Indeed she has often come close to hugging one of the many beautiful specimens of gums that line the river or reside in other people’s gardens. It's a fondness firmly rooted in the family tree – thick with gardeners, landscapers, nurserymen, (and axe-men). Her lovely nurseryman uncle loved (and lived) that well-known quotation And it was he with boynton’s father who one afternoon knocked up a small tree house in a Cyprus for boynton in her childhood. Best house boynton’s ever known. Living under the spell of The Magic Faraway Tree, Grandfather Gumtree, in Frank Dalby Davidson’s Children Of The Dark People or that wonderful Gum Tree house in The Magic Pudding.Maybe it's merely the Arcadian dream, or the folk memory of a primate, but she can understand that primal call of tree watching, tree climbing, and tree-top living. (via J walk)

When she was hunting down images of trees in the State Library of Victoria Pictures catalogue, she found this sobering list of titles, another kind of poem-generator

Tree feller’s feet in stirrups of safety harness
Timber! Tree falling after felling
Two men preparing to fell a tree
Man in harness preparing to fell a tree
Man up tree preparing to fell it
Four koalas on a tree branch
Koala and young in a tree
Three koalas on a tree branch
Man on horse watching axe-man felling tree
Axe making bottom mark on tree

A photo of Women playing hockey 1890 (that's ice to us in oz) (via Portage)

boynton saw that shot shortly after rediscovering this wonderful (ripping yarn) history of an English Croquet Championess Lily Gower. who sometimes was observed to make a meaningless shot into a corner of the ground. In point of fact, she was busy learning the game...we like the description of Lily's husband and fellow player Reginald Beaton (Was she then always Beaton?)
D.M.C. Prichard describes him as follows:- "Of slight build with a black Mephistophelian beard, bowing a little from the shoulders with an oddly loping walk, Beaton was not an exciting player, but he had a machinelike accuracy..." In September 1905, when he was asking for the hand of Lily in marriage, he wrote "I don't know that I have much to recommend me - beyond playing croquet and music, I am not much good."

The photographs are good too. ("Miss Insole" is a perfect- rather pinchable- name.)

Lately croquet's trollin' the blog like Pillikin, but as long as boynton stumbles across a link like this, she'll keep an anthropological eye out.

Ok Bart: Some lines written to reform bad behaviour, thanks again Mr J. (here)

More or less along the same lines is this Fido mind-reader...boynton's pure lack of maths-brain makes her believe such mysterious things are magic (via The Presurfer)

Also thanks to the marvellous Solpsistic Gazette, another great found photo site Time Tales to browse slowly at leisure. What started as a webpage of novelties became a collection of lost lives . And while it may be that a picture needs memories to be an image boynton thinks they also need time. So she’s only briefly glimpsed the Fifties so far, but what treasures are there, reminiscent of one of mon favourite films, mon oncle.

Curiouser and curiouser as someone might say, re the secret life of croquet. Or perhaps boynton is now reading double and triple entendres into innocuous Xbourgeoisie lawn games. (thanks in part to a recent commenter) For when she saw Mallet Mischief over at The Solipsistic Gazette - alas she wasn't thinking Percussion . Is there something she never knew here? Of course she had read about the legendary "sextuple experience" ...
The funny thing was that the person sitting next to me trying to cheer me up and willing me to get a turn at least while I was being the victim of a Bamford Sextuple was Lionel Tibble, the victim of my own Sextuple some three months later
and heard the songs serenading the virtues of the nocturnal variety, but it's probably just as well boynton has an acute allergy to anything sold as Xtreme.

"For the loneliness and strangeness of your ways. Be greeted!" Boynton found this passage at Whiskey River affirming.

Another shot of the poem generator spawned this:

boynton has fallen in The op
shops held out
over the metaphysics of
the therapeutic
goal of storage

which is almost entering that hocus-pocus horoscope territory, that strange effectiveness in divination. Boynton has been out scouting op-shops in this subdued suburb: it is the way to get your boynton bearings. Alas, St Vincents was jam-packed . It was recommended by a lovely neighbour who has lived here for 37 years and talked to boynton tete a tete over the fence, like that standard routine of early TV, that primal puppet show.As she fled the madding crowd empty handed, she heard “Monday!” muttered like a curse by the otherwise chirpy sales team. Ideally you seek a bit of solace in an op shop, communing with old goods and the “flubber” of bric a brac. She found this in the smaller one up the street and could gaze at the ramekins and Strauss Waltzes until a telephone appeared, and she bought it "untested". As she walked back along the sleepy street she wondered if the overly shorn nature-strips would ever shame her into subscribing.
Later returning from a run in the park, Flo jumping over the low cream brick fences like a toddler.
Yesterday up in the country, boynton's sister took her out to view the block of land where she plans to build. As they discussed family and envisaged living rooms in the dusk, they were watched closely by a kangaroo.

boynton has been helping Nora unpack and arrange furniture - testing boynton's bad spatial concepts. The new house is very generous with a surfeit of storage (there is no such thing), but boynton comes to the task after years of cupboard deprivation, so is still overly cautious with breaking out the crockery and spreading the condiments and cannisters far and wide. Nora wanted to place a speaker against a small cupboard, but boynton could not allow such a spatial transgression. "I can never say no to a cupboard" she observed soberly "I will never ever reject a cupboard again". A symbolic portrait of the scene could be seen here, (boynton is not quite this old) with this detail capturing symbolically poor old Abby's senile gnashing of teeth when the arthritis strikes or the blue heeler interloper nips her heels or things jump off the shelf onto her. Last defence against life's little indignities.
The pictures above were found hunting down (on a tangent) Old Mother Hubbard. This is a wonderful early (1819) illustration of the verse which makes more and more sense in ethological terms as boynton turns hubbard. Flo the blue heeler interloper - who still looks to boynton (used to the dome head and pendulant ears of a labrador) like a dog wearing a super hero mask, has already drawn first verse.
from old boynton hubbard

She picked up The Age
to give her a scare
And when she made eye contact
Flo was laughing with that c’mon hit me hit me bravado because her active brain would rather latch onto any game even one wrapped up with a baddog reprimand than quietly contemplate her existance

She went to the park
to give them a run
and when she got there
Flo rushed a walking group of elderly citizens who fortunately found her amusing I think because it was such a sparkling morning full of philanthropy.

She went to the car
To take them all home
And when she looked up
Doug was fast wandering off up the middle of the road ga ga and deaf and cringed dreadfully when boynton hauled him back by his collar at a mad trotting pace.

boynton will keep working on the metre.

An archive of found themed photos by Joachim Schmid (via Brad Zellar) Planes and girls and prams.

Some info of his ongoing project Pictures from the Street here
the more photographs l've been finding the more my way of perception changed: now I don't find photographs any more, I look for them - just like a truffle pig

Perhaps this mirrors boynton's own experience of browsing:blogging has made it more purposeful, though there's always so much to be found. It's a Pound of found...Looking for some bio info on Joachim Schmid, boynton's first link was that flubbery pidgin of the Google translation page. Joachim Schmid é a thief and mentireiro...and different escolmas dun fluxo incessant from photos produced globally is seguen to conform to base two fascinating proxectos of Schmid.

From the latest Carnival of the Vanities ( via The Talking Dog) Electric Venom on Blogging thoughts and philosophies Written in response to some delinking wars - the politics of blogging - Venomous Kate analyses the "metaphysics" of various styles of linkers and thinkers and whingers . Of course the snark tone makes boynton nervous, perhaps to link here is already a terrible faux pas, who knows. We merely blunder along with little aspiration, and an abiding fondness for the solace of the cul de sac when the noise of the highway with its traffic-chasing rush gets too much

Venus Hand Trap (via Sublimate)

In a wonderful Duoblog post Fred at Fragments from Floyd and Lisa Thompson write on the downside of Cultural tourism continuing the theme of our increasing disconnection from the natural world.
Cultural Tourism in the Southern Mountains: What's For Sale?
I am generally resistant to the idea of being 'marketed'. Call me a 'reluctant tourist'. And I'm especially vigilant when it comes to buying into advertising that sells the places where things make their homes -- people, plants and animals. In much of the marketing of mere mountain aesthetics, things portrayed are not as they seem...

Like the Melbourne sky this inauspicious bright blogosphere morn turned grey. It may be a kind of Stop the Clocks cut off the telephone sort of day. We're staying tuned.

Researchers propose a mathematical model of marriage (via Rebecca's Pocket)
In The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models (MIT Press), which he wrote in collaboration with four mathematicians, Mr. Gottman uses the tools of calculus to describe the interactions of couples with the therapeutic goal of breaking the downward cycle of difficult conversations.
Innumerate boynton wonders whether she could read dramatic scenes between distressed characters mathematically, watching out for the influence functions, the homeostatic emotional set point, the thresholds and the sudden twist of the tipping point. In terms of writing by numbers, we are of course familiar with the famous Syd Field paradigm, where you have to get the turning point in by page 27 etc, but reading a play in this way could be quite diverting. After that she could then try applying mathematics to home decorating.

When the mathematician says that such and such a proposition is true of one thing, it may be interesting, and it is surely safe. But when he tries to extend his proposition to everything, though it is much more interesting, it is also much more dangerous. In the transition from one to all, from the specific to the general, mathematics has made its greatest progress, and suffered its most serious setbacks, of which the logical paradoxes constitute the most important part. For, if mathematics is to advance securely and confidently it must first set its affairs in order at home.
Mathematics and the Imagination, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940. (source)

Update The attraction equation. (via Algebra Comics via J walk)

boynton has never really associated croquet and beer before (via Quiddity) which is just as well really, given the mallet-wielding tendencies of her siblings. Not even a shandy would have been advisable, otherwise a spectator adopting the perilous "silly point" position seen in the illustration may have lost his head or parts thereof.

Even when treated to this series of glorious Autumn days, guess there's always a bit of the Birmingham lurking somewhere in Melbourne. (via b3ta)

A recent comment by Richard Kahn of the excellent Vegan Blog – the (eco)logical weblog pointed to more research on Arctic Drilling .

Shallow wildlife documentaries and sentimental nature writing reflect a growing malaise, writes Richard Mabey. Unless we radically transform our attitude to other species, we face a dismal future. The technical wizardry, standard sensationalist motifs and distorted camera speeds are servicing a latter day Barnum Peep show
Zoology is two-dimensional nonsense if it is divorced from ecology.It is through feelings and imagination that we experience kinship and connectedness, the pain of separation and extinction, the renewal of spring and birth, not through the detachment of scientific accounts. And it is through myth, story-telling, art, metaphor and play that we make overall sense of our place in the world
This link via Fragments from Floyd - whose wonderful close observations of place are definitely biophilic. ...(just as boynton was writing of biophilia she had a decidedly biophobic moment when the house mouse ran past her foot. A natural scream .)
Mabey's call for feelings and imagination to balance scientic objectivity reminded boynton of the work of Jane Goodall, a profile of whom recently featured in The Age.
Goodall is very big on positivity, and unrelenting on the theme of "hope", but the truth, as she knows, is that the future for the chimps at Gombe is perilous...
Gombe's chimpanzee community now numbers only 150 or so individuals, leaving the long-term genetic sustainability of the group in doubt. Across Africa, the chimp population has fallen in a century from 2million to 150,000.

boynton originally messed with words
here are these weird signs

Some lines courtesy of Rob's Amazing Poem generator, which makes poems based on the content of your url (Via Speckled Paint and bluejoh). Seems to have summed up boynton pretty well:

...a heap
of those fleeting conversations between hotmailers
and even creative enterprise need some
music. They cause pause. Break the
discussion of old
tobacco
tins . And wherever

Belatedly chasing up an image of the wonderfully named Dolly Dye boynton found this local collection of grocery ephermera at the (aptly named for virtual window shoppers) Midnight Grocer.
Products of everyday life, through time, become interesting objects for future generations to appreciate. Some of the objects within The Midnight Grocer exhibition are familiar to many while other items have long since been forgotten. The items shown here are typical of general store merchandise sold from the corner store
Another product that is very familiar to boynton is Lucky Hit tobacco - (as a non smoker she owns several of these old tobacco tins). And of course Every Farmer and Lumberman needs this wonderful improved Saw Machine

Yesterday's post referred to the Sullivans, a faux family drama set in faux war time Melbourne, outdoor locations filmed in the dry time-warped suburb of Canterbury, in certain pockets a place of many (reclaimed) Cal Bungs and concrete roads. (Boynton lived there once just as Maling road was getting the heritage treatment, and the op shops held out over the virulent cafe creep.) Last night she followed one of Bifurcated Rivets' links to this talking UK map site, and coincidentally listened to Canterbury.We knew Canterbury spoke like that, even though we tend to pronounce it the way this is written. Listening to the other unknown towns is curious, place name performance poetry. Boynton loves listening to Thames Estuary talk, estuary being one of those wordy words where the pronunciation is essentially provisional.
(boynton originally messed with words here via J walk)

A wonderful treasure trove of old grocery items from an Estate Auction (via Speckled Paint). Like all such auctions, there is a bit of associated sadness within the accumlated heritage dispersing, but the eyes of ephemera enthusiasts glaze over at such visions as these. Boyntons's father once went to a similar auction at the site which was to become universally known as the Sullivan's general store. He brought home a trailer load of groceries - some archaic even then, packaging, and signs. Alas, at that unsophisticated age boynton was more interested in the confectionary items, like Metro Gums (the source of all humour), and Polly Waffles than the beautiful exhibits of ephemera, but somehow managed to gain possession of several packets of Dolly Dyes which happily form part of her own small packaging display.

J walk blog recently featured two signage related sites: Build your own Safety sign (in PDF) appeals to Boynton, who may one day import the results of her configuration, while these weird signs contain many gems. There are times when this sign pretty well sums up life as we know it, while this sign has a peculiar cultural resonance. Interesting to note that Noel Neill before playing Lois was an outstanding beach volleyball player even though she was less than five feet tall

The Jean-Luc Godard Drinking game (should be played with wine and ennui) (via Scrubbles)
Must try this after a stiff round of the Who's Afraid Of Virgina Woolf variation.

Before that diversionary exercise, boynton had been considering the whole blogging-writing thing (with a full set of vowels). Meredith recently linked to Jill's post which presents two different takes on the effects of blogging, while This Public Address has a great post about digital Style.

We've taken the Meredith E-challenge. (Very timely: we needed someone generating ideas!)
Ever since Easter we’ve been wondering whether every entry here deserves readership. Ever since the latest computer meltdown. We survived, however these events cause pause. Break the pattern. Perhaps the time’s arrived. Does ‘serious’ creative enterprise need space – other spaces? Even non-serious creative enterprise? Are these very non-private electrical spaces stealing time, stealing formative ideas, stealing the writerly process? We’ve been wondering whether everyone feels the same lately – the blogosphere itself seems less lively, even sleepy. Perhaps we’re merely projecting here, subjectively enduring the predictable periodic latency . Perhaps we merely need some breathing space? When these creative exercises take over the mind-set, they cause strange writerly voice changes, the voice often becomes exceptionally pretentious. Well definitely over E’d . We’d better revert dear readers. On-line chatter style resumes presently

Boynton was following an excellent link (among so many) at Eclogues to the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre and chanced upon this letter written by John Cawte Beaglehole to his mother in 1926.
I also (& return to Melbourne) tracked down [ unclear: Maie ] Ross successfully in the ghastly crockery department of a vast concern known as Myer's Emporium Limited, which covers about four blocks & is still building. The girl seemed very pleased to see me, in which you will agree she showed excellent taste,& invited me out to their joint for the evening meal & some music. They have a gramaphone with a few good records [ unclear: Melba ] etc; & a piano of the patent iron-foundry type; however I played my piece & she sang a bit & I moved off, in mortal fear of being stoushed on the head with a beer-bottle by one of the celebrated Melbourne pushers...

and later comes his excellent verdict:
Melbourne seems cleaner than Sydney; the trams are certainly more up to date; And it is a lot slower. They are having a citrous fruits week just now; so I must buy some
lemons to help on the good cause...

Further to the discussion of random and cut up writing techniques is a pictorial equivalent, (perhaps a visual psychoflubber - thanks Gianna)... Web collage - exterminate all rational thought (via J walk) which collects random web images and creates a shifting collage with the claim: This is what the Internet looks like...After 2 days of near cold turkey away from her station, or quarry ( in JR Terrier parlance) Boynton with a tad of detachment thinks that the whole blogosphere can be read as collage, flubber, bits of random text generated by links back and forth and wherever. Rather than exterminating the rational perhaps we seek to find the missing link that makes the random gatherings synthesise somehow. Three lemons.

After Boynton wrote that late last night she chanced upon this read at Whiskey River

Machine is back thanks to mr. computer restorer extraordinaire. Normal blogging shall commence shortly after the backlog of blog reading is attended to. In the eye of the computer crash storm, boynton was arrested by the sight of her calendar. It still said December 2002 with its generic calendar jack russell terrier.(Of course the two events may not have been related.) There was no calendar to take its place. She'd been holding out for the half price sales of February but had forgotton when February rolled around (unheralded by jack). Now it's almost May, maybe they're giving them away. The best calendar she had was 2001 featuring rockets for small spaces by Jimmy Descant. Boynton reads that there was no 2002, but perhpas she'll put in an order for 2004.

"My house is a dump," A local resident was telling boynton last night,"but I can eat anywhere in the world in 15 minutes" This is the dilemma of moving eastwards. Boynton can walk into the CBD in 30 mins (via the magnificent elms in the Fitzroy Gardens), walk anywhere, walk to a boathouse cafe via a farm and a waterfall and high vistas of basalt cliffs, walk to an Internet Cafe in 5, walk everywhere. "Hi boynton, welcome to another day in Paradise" said a neighbour out walking his dog as we met under a stand of River Gums that stretch along the river and back before white settlement. Boynton had been counting them back into consciousness, back from familiarity. There are six in this spot opposite the Breweries with the afternoon spell of Hops wafting across the river. Then up to the empty Oval, encircled by distant chimneys, city skyscrapers and the steeples of the convent. Earlier boynton had noticed a figure up on the boulevard above her brandishing a golf club, as if aiming at her or the River, like some Kramer character. She instinctively protected her temples from a possible eccentric assault. She later saw him engaged in a dispute with a pedestrian crossing the bridge, and noticed that the potential missile was not a golf ball afterall, but only a soft green tennis ball. She walked home via the gallery of "found furniture" of the generous op-shop, that updates its exhibits daily, (3 retro bar stools for $15 each today) and as she turned into her street overheard one of those fleeting conversations between strangers who happened to be talking dog: "She died in her sleep overnight. Broken heart", before passing 3 people shooting up behind a car metres from her doorstep.

No PC yet - so blogging where we can and not comprehensively. Just satellite dispatches from a substation that doesn't link, or even blink across the blogosphere. Blogging (the writing part) from a cyber cafe has indeed proved to be impossible. Yesterday boynton was sandwiched between hotmailers and game players - the latter yelling to each other across the consoles: @#%& Kill him...or @#%& I just got killed!...But it has more to do with the room-of-one's-own requirement boynton has (alas) for writing and even browsing. Surfing shoulder to shoulder or even with the sense of someone hovering over the shoulder is just not the same. It seems too purposeful, self-conscious, time-efficient. The sense of wandering about aimlessly with the grander plan of serendipity just can't happen.

Jack Russell Terriers (and look alikes) from the Antique Postcards of Dogs site (via Speckled Paint)
I'm fairly obsessed with Jacks altough I have never owned one. These photos are from my postcard collection. Most of the images date from the turn of the century through the 1920s.
As a look –alike this a pretty good likeness of bronte (on the right) although this is more representative of her life-philosophy. The later pages here featuring jacks and people are wonderful.
One of boynton’s sisters has dreamed of owning a jack lookalike – the wired fox terrier. She is inspired in part by Asta the famous star of the Screwball, and also because such a dog complements her Art Deco furnishings. Sadly at the moment she has to content herself with the ornamental variety. They don’t shed. (more terriers and more at Deco Dogs)

You know when you're a blogging addict when...your PC dies and the fisrt thing you think of is Where can I blog?....Boynton's other back-up - blogging over at Nora's is also an impossibilty as in a wave of regional harware failuire, Nora's notbook also clunked away to a horrible death overnight apparently. So here she is sitting in a Vietnamese Internet cafe, with a Vietnamese techno soundtrack playing and special short-cut characters built into the keyboard (just accidentally discovered) and kids playing strange games next to boynton on a drizzly Sunday afternoon. Boynton's trusted PC doctor listened to the symptoms over the phone and said it sounds as if we're up for a new hard drive. That was an hour ago. So blogging and blog-reading will be fairly thin for the next few days. ( If nothing appears to change then it will have got to the stage where boynton is really far gone and is paying $5 an hour for this strange public experience) My name is Boynton and I'm a blogaholic

Disappearing Victoria - photographs by Warren Kirk.
I see something and I instantly know that I love it and want to take its photo...
My photographs are personal documents of ordinary, everyday objects and places that are survivors of a past within my memory - and that are of interest because of their impending extinction.
It is possible that in the four and a half years since the exhibition, some of these places have now disappeared

The red rattler of childhood. Boynton once wrote that line in a poem. It was about the old suburban “Tait” trains that used to rattle down the single Lilydale line home. When she found this page the other night it was the red rattler of nostalgia. The Nostalgia trip seemed to be the current internet destination. Tonight she had another flashback – of that oldtime Victorian religion, football. As recently disclosed here in the first person in the comments section of boynton, she was born into a family who barracked for South Melbourne – a team that had tasted victory briefly in the thirties and from then on languished on the bottom of the ladder with one or two seasonal aberrations. Whenever these occurred there was much rejoicing throughout the old Boynton household, led by boynton’s father, who was known to jump up and down in front of the old B&W television in the special jig of the long barracking for the bottom team redemption reel. The South Melbourne story then takes the tragic corporatization of sport turn when the team was sent to Sydney (no worse fate for a dyed in the wool Melburnian) and changed into a strange promotional sideshow to try to win over a national market. Old South supporters were in that nihilistic no man’s land of no team and the reflex impossibility of barracking against the red and the white. Tonight boynton happened to switch on to the telecast of the game from Sydney and for the last quarter performed that ghost dance of her childhood, yelling the dogs out of the complacent lounge as the Swans came from behind in the final term to beat an inferior side by 24 points.The (hybrid) club song never sounded sweeter. It was certainly good to be wearing a red jumper.

There's a slouch hat over the second O in Google. Anzac Day. Boynton just browsed through some epitaphs from the Gallipoli Peninsula. Among the many Their Glory Shall Not Be Blotted Out, Greater Love... and None is the occasional personal memorial. A Life Of Promise Closed... Loved By All Who Knew Him... Our Sid...Sisters Florrie, Alice, Rosie Miss You Dearly, Miss You 'Will'...
BARCLAY
Private John Edward, 1710, 8th Battalion, AIF.
Killed in action 21 June 1915 , aged 22.
I've No Darling Now
I'm Weeping
Baby & I You Left Alone
ANGUS
Private Robert Laurence, 530, 14th Battalion, AIF.
Killed in action at Courtney's Post, central Anzac, 19 May 1915 , aged 21.
Shrapnel Valley Cemetery IV.A.4.
Epitaph:
My Well Loved Laddie
Waiting For Mother
GIBBS
Gunner Perry Lennie, 282, 1 Brigade Field Artillery, AIF.
Killed in action 2 June 1915 , aged 20.
Skew Bridge Cemetery I.E.7.
Epitaph:
No Sorrowful Speech
Nor Silent Stone Can Tell
Our Loss, O Hero Son

Perhaps sometimes "None" is the only word.

Excellent environmental blog.The recent earth day special includes a link to a Wilderness Society slide show of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, coveted by oil producers. (Ron Bailey recently alerted boynton to this issue.)

HaloScan says there are 2,281,300 comments out there.

As an update to the signs and signalling issue, there must be some way to embed some Fudebakudo Semaphore Kata into the blog. Boynton of course went straight for the egosemaphoring to see how boynton looks both in the karate and taekwondo form.(via bluejoh)

In some circles there has been much debate on truth and disclosure in blogging. (See for instance In a Dark Time and Jill/txt for excellent summaries and threads).
In terms of style, boynton thinks pure link bloggage can’t be beat. Any relevant personal information can be gleaned around the links, dot-to-dotage. She wishes she’d gone down this track, or at least had kept the commentary brief. Unfortunately boynton breaks into the anecdotal personal (her Labrador), but doesn’t ever want to go down the full disclosure path (what he ate) However on the fraught issue of fact v fiction in blogging we find ourselves (by mere preference not philosophy) on the side of sticking to the facts. Verisimilitude. Luckily though even were there to be a universal standard code of practice for absolute veracity in blogging it would last about a nano before it was creatively violated, kid-napstered by the universe of individual voices. As we know, Blogs mutate at the speed of google.
It has occurred to boynton that there could be a market for emoticon like signage to assist discreet bloggers in signalling a subtext obliquely. Life has been a bit of a boynton for boynton lately. Because this is not a confessional blog she will let the sequence of signs speak for themselves on the subject of whether it is finally time to break the pattern and make the move out of small dark inner city solitude into a spacious share house way out where with a studio and a doorbell in a non-cosmopolitan suburb with a built-in putdown in its name...
Decision time

The first image on television (via City of Tomorrow). (Boynton was idly wondering what will be the last?)
Audit sounds warning for native species"Past generations may have sleepwalked through extinctions like that of the Tasmanian Tiger. We are about to do it with our eyes wide open."
The famous footage of the doomed Tasmanian Tiger pacing round his/her enclosure. (Long colonised by Art as a symbol of colonisation)

In Retro we know all about sex and styling in cars
sculptured grille-work featuring twin jet pods on each side set in chrome-plated nacelles. Hooded, recessed head lamps add to the forward thrusting look
But here is a Repro sales thrust: Sexy furniture ads (via Quiddity)
We're used to revealing underwear ads and suggestive shampoo commercials. But sexy bookshelves?
Robert Thompson, professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University, asks, "Why not?"

More house-hunting with Nora. Boynton loves going along for the Open For Inspection ride with friends, as it's a rare glimpse inside sleeping suburban exteriors. Unfortunately most of the houses inspected are teetering on the brink of the dive range, secretly biding time before demolition. Alas, the house behind the etched glass palms did not live up to its entrance. Despite the coiled fifties fluoro. Sometimes retro can indeed be weird or badly wired or plain grotty. An original dinette sounds enviable in principle (in books or on line) but despite boynton trying her best to get comfortable in the high hipness of it all, a meal there would be a very sad and stiffed back affair. Like an old caravan. You don't want to linger hemmed in eating at funny angles.
On the other hand, in another universe, this is the retro dream. (Jetset Modern - via City of Tomorrow, a wonderful portal site found via Speckled Paint)
This incredible home is near Chicago, built in 1955. It's owned by a couple with a great collection of 1950s interior decorative objects and furniture.
Even if the dream is demanding:
After living in the house for a few months, the owners realized that all their old furniture had to go. This house demanded something special, and original to the house the search was on for mid-century modern furniture and objects to complete the interior.
(Unfortunately a lot of the mid century objects sit level with the exact height of a wagging labrador tail).

Animal Animator (via Sublimate... indirectly via Speckled Paint)

Also on Sublimate - and furthering the pastiche theme - a Polythene Pastiche

Beatles Discography A splendid time is guaranteed for all (via Incoming Signals).
(There is of course a logical albeit oblique link here to the Pastiche material)

The Official Site of Rupert Bear (via Plep)
See the essay on the Rupert's appeal via the Nutwood Newsletter. " the joy of a fully self-consistent alternative reality"
Are Australian readers on a mass migration back to their childhood?
Why do adults like Harry Potter? (boynton hasn't read HP yet - despite having been given TPS by her young nephew who theorised: You've just got a block about it)
One of the first things boynton ever looked up on the Internet was info on Milly-Molly-Mandy. As you do. There was this site that"is not a hagiographic tribute". Some pages of the non satiric ilk here, from a site which also provides info on MMM's author Joyce Lankaster Brisley.

more found letters from litter. Today Boynton found a crushed Black Douglas can, a heart shaped stone, and a piece of packing crate with the word Corinthian. Do
Letters from the bitumen.

Yesterday a hot air balloon landed on a suburban Melbourne rooftop
House owner Catherine Rose said she heard a loud thump.
"I thought it was our washing machine spinning off, and then - boom - it wasn't the washing machine," she said.
"Like a bubble of detergent, balloons are carried by the wind"
If this balloon landed on boynton’s house, it’d be the boom of nostalgia when all the kids kicked footies indiscriminately in back yards – kick-to-roof.
There is a magical aspect of ballooning, is it the essential lightness of being, the story book associations - or the circus appeal?
As in Europe, ballooning in the United States became a regular form of entertainment at fairs and celebrations. The foremost American aeronauts were Durant, John Wise, Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, John LaMountain, and Rufus Wells. The public referred to them as "professors." Wise often dropped cats or dogs in parachutes from his balloons. Sometimes, Wise permitted his balloon to burst and serve as a parachute to lower him to the ground. He also invented the ripping panel on the balloon
The first balloon flight with passengers -a cock, a duck, and a sheep
John Wise's niece Lizzie Ihling was also an aeronaut, and a lyrical observer of the lofty appeal.
No! No! I will not down to earth --
I'd rather stay up here
Around the scenes of Joy and Mirth
They greet my eye and ear.

The non literalist Easter: Existentialist theologian Paul Tillich on the meaning of ressurection
"...The word `resurrection' has for many people the connotation of dead bodies leaving their graves or other fanciful images. But resurrection means the victory of the new state of things, the New Being born out of the death of the Old. Resurrection is not an event that might happen in some remote future, but it is the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and tomorrow...Out of disintegration and death something is born of eternal significance... Resurrection happens NOW, or it does not happen at all. It happens in us and around us...in nature and (in the) universe." (THE BOUNDARIES OF OUR BEING, Paul Tillich, pp. 169, 170) (via an easter message Rev. Don Beaudreault)
Easter faith for Spong is essentially about personal experience - the revival of hope and the overcoming of despair
A bit of the literalist - a reworking/revival of the Keith Green/Annie Herring classic "the Easter Song" (source)
Was Jesus Mexican? (via The Presurfer)

Palms and psalms. Nora has taken temporary care of a rogue dog, the definitive farm dog, a blue heeler. Boynton – who grew up in a house full of dogs and siblings - whose very pram was tended by an old border collie cross – still baulks when Flo enters the room. Something about the pointy ears or the yellow eyes causes a flight trigger. But she is actually quite benign, and waddles about anxiously with her fat egg-fed belly- possibly in a state of confusion about her exile and adoptive pack. Yesterday we took her for a run at a large free-running park and of course she ran off. She made a beeline for a bicycle in the distance, before idly falling in again with her strange captors.The park was the setting for a Passion Play, and our pack stumbled across three wooden crosses lying in wait on the ground near the Bunya Pine. The dogs inspected them religiously. On Good Friday – or Karfreitag – Boynton always likes to play “On the Willows” from Godspell– even if the theology is NQR – its mournful poignancy seems to go with the Kar
Nora has officially been given notice of impending demolition and is house-hunting. Hunting out obscure pockets of overlooked houses. Boynton hopes she will go for one with etched glass doors. Such is the power of featurism, or the poverty of diversion, that a retro etched palm tree is all it would take for boynton’s heart to gladden every time she calls in to visit. Meanwhile the old apple trees of peel street, and the resident possums are probably enjoying their last season.

Seeing this automobile furniture site (via the Presurfer) reminded boynton of a few of those car-centric plots featured on the Hatch's plot bank. They may have wheels afterall.
970 decides to rent lavish furnishings and car to impress old friend
44 tries to make expensive new car into art
816 tries to fix their own car
900 friend in danger - wrecks car on the way

A review of Lucinda Williams World Without Tears (via eclectica)
The problem is, Williams' work has always been defined by that struggle, by reaching so deeply within herself to prove her naysayers wrong, that her newfound success seemed something of a Pyrrhic victory. Artistic and material success is wonderful, but who wants to hear songs about how great things are going?

If The Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me
All time best of the worst country song titles (via scrubbles)
I'm Just an Old Chunk of Coal (But I'm Gonna be a Diamond Someday)

We’ve been thinking about doorbells and visitors lately since Scott of the eye alerted boynton to the possible slippery slope down to virtual hermitville. Once upon a time boynton bought an excellent electronic type, that she swiftly had to exchange. She had managed to buy one with the same frequency channel as her neighbours They were alerted to this fact instantly as a friend of boynton's, who shall remain nameless Nora, had been delighting in testing out the sonic range of the new toy, a hundred times in a minute. Ever since that poor model died, she has relied on the kindness of her labrador’s ears. But these are steadily diminishing in keenness. A simple doorbell with an appropriate chime may indeed be a good thing. Or perhaps a full on strobe effect with a menagerie of sound effects to choose from. (The ubersportingpundit crowd would no doubt go for “crickets at night”)
But what about when the doorbell rings by itself? Of course there may well be a rational answer to this. Perhaps the new Hypersonic Sound technology may provide the answer. (via Ron Bailey, but alas, the fascinating NYTimes article is now archived)
What excuse then for the hermit when a stray visitor shoots a sonic bullet into her distant head, blogging or not.