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)