As a child boynton fell for Burt Ward big time. (It's alright apparently because Customers also bought a poster of James Dean).
So it was exciting, but disturbing to hear him sing on this amazing site (via Bluejoh)
Cause the ceiling fell in and the bottom fell out
I went into a spin…
Oh!…I didn’t know what kind of trip I was in
Orange Colored Sky.

As a follow up to the subterranean shopping centre blues post of 9/4, Mall–aise (one of several photo essays by Herman Krieger.(via Plep)

Boynton was reading Tom Milner’s latest (10/4) on Paul Fussell’s study in Class in America and saw the Baseball caps indicator:
"Or the wearing of baseball caps, especially when the plastic fastener faces front. If the cap is also "legible," the lower the class."
Yesterday on the way to the city Boynton was caught hatless, cap-less in the warm April sun. (Her dark house never gives any real indication of the climate). So she ducked into her shop – (Salvo’s – luckily they flourish in this locality) to invest some pence in head covering. Lucky day – a bargain bin in a bargain store full of the old promotional caps of single-use campaigns and events. It was a matter of sorting through which brand was the least offensive, ( she would never wear a “crazy John’s” unless of course she had just been scorned by him), or which golf tournament or wine-tasting was the most obscure to recast the label as mysterious text. But after 10 minutes of rifling through these discarded corporate caps she gave up and chose a black one that sported “Pert Angus”. (Is that a variation of “Stupid Cow”?) It set her back 50 cents and 15 minutes.


The semiotics of t-shirts
Excellent archive of a Victoria and Albert Exhibition Brand New.

boynton followed the link to the google "biggest in Southern Hemisphere" and got to page 30. This is a selection:
(Update: for non-Australians, this seems to be a popular national unit of comparison/compensation. A hemispherical cringe.)

The Biggest Field Day and Hamfest in the Southern Hemisphere
the biggest Telescope, biggest dairy show and sale, richest rodeo
Leading public works show, the biggest data centre
second biggest processing works
the biggest biotechnology business conference in the Southern Hemisphere
the biggest sailing regatta, the largest supercomputing facility
this stretch of sand is the biggest in the southern hemisphere
one of the biggest producers of table cherries in the Southern Hemisphere
the biggest Metal event, the biggest Horse Fair
the most impressive man I met in the Southern Hemisphere
the Biggest Amateur Country Music Talent Quest in the Southern Hemisphere.
the biggest indoor sports complex
the southern hemisphere’s biggest pilot training organization
biggest space frame structure, the largest container port
the largest dry storage in the Southern Hemisphere
the biggest bloodstock sale. the biggest photovoltaic cell solar farm
the biggest club, the biggest aerodrome
some of the largest clear span venues, some of the best fishing spots
we believe its the biggest map shop in the southern hemisphere
biggest motor-home showroom, Microsoft's biggest customer,
one of the biggest property developments the biggest Christmas pageant
the largest international airport lounge in the southern hemisphere
the biggest carpark, narrowest pub, largest equestrian parade, the biggest blueberry producer
one of the biggest, largely self-insured catastrophes that has occurred in the Southern Hemisphere
the biggest crowd to attend a trotting meeting
one of the most prominent advertising signs
the biggest parachute dryer
biggest egg-shaped sludge digester
biggest flourmill, biggest morning tea, biggest picnic race meeting,
longest pipeline
the biggest family owned locksmith company
the biggest financial entity, one of the biggest Nephrology departments
the biggest British gathering
the first crossbelt sorter in the Southern Hemisphere
the largest public collection of mature conifers
The biggest folk festival, the biggest dog show, biggest domed roof
The biggest fundraising day
the biggest annual mobile computing user conference,
it was the biggest dam, it’s the biggest ram,
biggest marlin, the biggest gathering of Tiger Moths
biggest concrete silo
biggest ever meet of antique Ferguson tractors
the biggest theme park, biggest Children’s party
the tallest flagpole in the Southern Hemisphere

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just when you think your Jack Russell Terrier is brainy, bronte goes and rushes at two small concrete ugly garden ornaments, dog and duck, obviously inanimate, not even to scale. She jumped onto the wobbly table to sniff them out. “Are you embarrassed? You should be.” boynton remarked.

Went to a supermarket for diversion last night. Of course it may be the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. This is part of the dreaded Victoria Gardens complex with its apartments cinemas and Swedish furniture store. For most of last century the site was occupied by the massive Vickers Ruwolt factory. Travelling into the city from the east as you crossed the river and the cutting you drove through a vast industrial tunnel of manufacturing heritage, the neon signs of The Skipping Girl and Coppertone flashing away mutely on the opposite side. (Alas: no links, no photos to this old “landmark”) Then for years it was a bomb site, with the promises from developers inflating like the giant branded balloons that now point you to Coles or Kmart along the rooftop.
So last night Nora and boynton decided to run down the street and get some milk, (it being located almost midway between our two houses) and drove up into to the empty concrete colossus of carpark. There was an immediate feel of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, (one of boynton’s favourite films) with its prematurely opened restaurant sequence. All a bit Not Quite Ready, unsteady. The carpark was all scattered witches hats and orange netting, stairs with gaps, empty lift shafts. There was a pyramid of loose signs that said “shops” with an arrow, presumably to be installed, (or maybe it was an installation). Inside was much the same – did we miss the grand opening? Workers were busy adding the preliminary touches. Nora saw a caulking gun at work along the surfaces of the already functioning fish shop. There was a kind of brand new litter floating about the non-place of mall as we walked through to the supermarket (discover an amazing array of smallgoods), and bought a light globe and milk respectively. As we found our way back to the yellow carpark, boynton noted that the roof would be a good place to view the New Year’s fireworks over the city skyline, if it has not yet been marked off for some corporate fest, on top of the ghost of Melbourne manufacturing past.

boynton was delighted to learn that her recent Google Poem has been included in the (ongoing) anthology. Leevi Lehto's Google Poem engine is such a wonderful, metaphoric thing.

the way small country towns of 200 people could field a brass band, or stage a cricket match almost from scratch.
In the photographs of reclining gents you can substitute bats for trumpets, cornets for stumps
Nineteenth century lower case community.

cricket and poetry at cordite (via Invisible Shoebox - comments)

Smoke in the air from a controlled burn gone wrong. Boynton saw the fire last night as she travelled home from Castlemaine. It was the last day of the biennial Festival and she did a few exhibitions, unlike previous years when she was able to see more shows over the ten days. One of the highlights was seeing Julie Millowick's A Year in Our Lives - a narrative in photograms. (This can now be seen at Span in Melbourne). Boynton loves the way text and (personal) narrative are woven into the imagery.
Anil Dash recently linked to a new application for annotating photos - personal home image mapping?
A great Found Photo Collection here (via Speckled Paint)
(and this is why the found appeals.)
And an idle search for Castlemaine turned up this great site of photos of Australian Brass Bands. (Boynton could almost put together an "image map" herself of favourite Victorian places depicted by their old brass bands.)

Yesterday’s Blue Skies midi file was found on this excellent children’s site by the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Boynton immediately went to the”favourites” menu and found this old fave song. But as is often the way on the web, she “can't take her eyes off” the hyperlink, and it seems that one of the purposes of the web site is to embed health information in the content. This is a novel idea, and Boynton has attempted her own medical hyperlinking for the second verse:

Pardon the way that I stare,
There's nothing else to compare,
The sight of you leaves me weak;
There are no words left to speak.
But if you feel like I feel,
Please let me know that it's real.
You're just too good to be true,
Can't take my eyes off of you.