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.