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.

Six months up today for boynton. A mere blink in the blogosphere. Six months of writing in the third person - of minding the sneaky first person pronoun creep! Not even on MT yet - although mindful, watchful of the great to MT or not to MT debate.Biding time on Blogspot with its banner and google connections. Boynton could follow others and reflect on blogging like Fred did so well after a year, or Virulent Memes after four. But for now she'll just quote Patsy:"You can't have too many handbags, er, shoes, and, um, hats and, er, gloves".

Writerly... J walk recently featured two sites for stumped writers needing plot ideas Hatch’s plot bank features over 2000 scenarios to spark ideas. But boynton is not sure how dramatically sustainable some are for playwrighting purposes:
64 stupid cow clock with swinging tail has to go
128 ideal mate wears inappropriate clothes to mountains –(yes - there’s a treatment in that)
while readers will know that this idea is right up boynton’s alley
354 link to website promises the wrong thing
Some merely reflect boynton’s life:
257 mistakes a phrase for a sign of love
262 starts collecting stray pets
338 plays the piano quite badly
198 throws a big party - only three come (isn’t three a big party)
some seem to have more promise as a couplet:
97 finds childhood goals now within grasp
98 drives off the road for no apparent reason
or work better as an inversion:
376 college stories are too frank for spouse
boynton prefers the spin off: college stories are too spouse for frank.

As well as offering 36 + 1 dramatic situations the other link goes down the randomizer path with its oblique strategies.
There are random (form style) characters here, while the more surreal shuffle about here. This site features the cut-up technique while a poem (or prompt?) is created by stopping the random flow here
Yesterday Meredith pointed to a great site Is it a book, one of whose links is to the Surrealist game “Exquisite corpse” There are written and pictoral forms of this game, but both involve the same principle: that the players each make a contribution to the whole without having knowledge of any of the other players' contributions. A great gallery of these can be seen here.
Sometimes it seems that blogging itself is a form of this game, a variation of "consequences" - an unfolding collective collage of links, trackback and comments. Cross currents of countless cut up conversations.

boynton found she had some Twain up in the higher reaches of the stacks, (the toppling piles that is) and was reading from his Australian travels “on the rail again”
It has actually taken nine hours to come from Ballarat to Bendigo. We could have saved seven by walking. However, there was no hurry.
Hunting down Horsham links the other day, boynton herself did a virtual tour of Victoria with the excellent regional galleries trail. Starting with Horsham, she got stuck in Warrnambool, and actually forgot to close down Sale. So when she hopped off line there it was, the small window of the gallery interior, spinning away like some giddy screensaver or compulsive culture vulture. Virtual Museum fatigue.

Flying Puppet's Bosch (via The Presurfer. Shockwave)

Just when boynton was getting almost weighed down by various aspects of virtuality - reading about various cyber charades, the fake flirting personae of romance, and the attendant paranoia of new communication, of reading too much into the lines, or of reading (and disclosing) too little – of a project that tries to build a portrait from the known on-line self and filling in the guesses of the unknown, she herself missed a real visitor at her door. She of course was blogging and didn’t hear the knock.
“I was in your suburb, so I came around t say hello.”
Of course her deaf old dog didn’t hear him either and her neighbours were engaged in very loud acts of renovation at the time. But it was sobering to see his handwritten note on the door.
"I know how much fun it is to get a letter on your door from a real person.”

Of course if we'd been living in the nineteenth century he may have left his CDV - carte de visite - (of course that's literally not figuratively). And some splendid tintypes here.

Still on TV – we’re up for the last episode of Ken Burns' Mark Twain tonight.
It was amusing – albeit in the usual our-place-in-the-world reality check way – that the only mention of oz- that us – in MT's Australian travels was his appearance in Horsham, a small town in the Victorian Wimmera. A fitting sidelight to a footnote?
If you have a spare 20 mins a good interview with Ken Burns here from ABC Sydney.
Mistakes in the Twain documentary
A parody of Jazz.
Official PBS site

It was rather bizarre seeing Michael Parkinson interview Michael Aspel last night on Parkinson. Two silver haired seventy year old gentleman-talk show hosts, of the "relaxed, well-groomed, and attentive to his guests' feelings" school (vintage?) chatting about chatting. At times it was a mirror image, revived after the oblivion of parody. (Boynton knows she's seen at least one sketch where the host interviews himself). There seemed to be a levelling from age, a candour of spent rivalry and ambition, admissions of limitations, an alliance of survival. Aspel confessed to blandness as an asset, because in the industry blandness can (eventually) mean versatility.
When Aspel and Co hit our screens a few years back we thought we were getting dumbed down Parky. We remembered the glory days - the classic Parkinson moments when the talk broke free of the contrived format and meandered into revelation. But the revived show seemed to suffer in comparison to the memory. More guests, less time, more spin, more cues. No room for conversation, just a skim through a standard chronology like any on-line quiz, or bad eulogy. There often seems to be a sense of disappointment from the participants who are primed for ritualistic confession, but get the on-line quiz instead. And from the audience who don't buy the alleged shorter attention span, dumbed down demographic push, but who still seek something serious in the circus. A moment or two of rough truth.

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

Commenting is temporarily online

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.

When Melbourne turns on a beautiful Saturday like this, it's no time for bloggin. This cloud bursting game (via b3ta) reflects the spirit of the blue skies bounty. So Boynton was out walking with a friend, soaking up the sunshine, before Doug - that's Derg - bounded down into the river and couldn't climb out. So Boynton managed eventually to haul him out and roll him back up the cliff, muddying clothes and mood temporarily. She would now gratuitously link to the song "My Brown Yarra" were such a link to be found.

a little bit of seabiscuit searching/dunking resulted in finding this Shirley Temple Concentration. Boynton confesses she found it difficult - perhaps it was her recent scrambled state of mind. Which is why she didn't even go near the Scramble or Solve Puzzle. The disintegration of the happy picture was just too resonant with something to handle, or even attempt to restore

Boynton has been gratified by the support shown in regard to the strange mirror/clone/class clown/blogger bug incident of April 1st. Thank you.
(She's thinking of adding a new damsel-in-distress line to the range, with the one word plaintive appeal to the blogosphere). Next step would appear to be to email Blogger - although that has a touch of the email-the-big-chief-in-the-sky-and-expect-a-reply about it. Another disturbing incident: a recent visitor from Greece came to boynton via the google search: tiger lillies download Over you...As if the blog is generating her fate!...Of course a French aol search for Cat woman also directs vistors here first... Mais oui, bien sur - we can run with that!

HaloScan and Sitemeter both being down (and lost) and slowing us up impossibly, a bit of non-linkage canine tale is possibly our best bet today anyway.
Yesterday, on the impulse, over at Nora’s, boynton decided to walk down to the small sleepy shopping strip and do the hair deed there in the semi-cool salon that sits on the corner. So having the procedure formerly known as “trim” and now spoken of as a “clean it up” and with no one in the salon or indeed the streets outside, boynton endowed hairdresser as confessor. But instead of recent tribulations, we talked dog. Such salon small talk is boynton’s ideal. He told of how his red heeler has only now, after x many years, accepted his wife without undue jealousy. Boytnon replied that luckily she had never had this problem with her gentleman callers (or perhaps this is unluckily) There were however, certain men he was “funny” with. “They always know” he said. Possible new method, Doug as heart divining-dog or “canary”… He also told me a wonderful thing. Not long ago while walking dogs, boynton had seen two stray dogs, but heading towards main roads she had to yell at them to stay (she acted aggressive). They appealed desperately, pathetically but there was nothing to do...Turns out the hairdresser found them, put them in the pound, found a bottle of wine on his doorstep the next day from the overjoyed owner who lived a fair way (and high way) away. That’s the sort of man you want to “clean up” your hair.
After this took Doug to vet for his annual booster. Approaching 14 everything now is assessed as practical or not in terms of mortality. Is it worth getting his booster, his new registration etc. The vet gave him a “clean bill of health” (let clean = $84)
I’d be expecting at least another year out of him. Boynton laughs casually and puts on this pragmatic detached hat as the only possible one to wear in the circumstances.
This was followed by a late emergency run to another vet last night. Delicacy etc prevents her from going into details here, suffice to say a tablet was put into his eye to induce vomiting. It seems to have half worked, and we’re standing by. (possibly literally over the next few days!) Of course on top of the refuse pile was his freshly administered expensive worm tablet from earlier vet visit… The vet was English and called him “Derg” and recommended “courgettes" for another disgusting habit of his.
“Oh Derg, Derg” she said as she stroked him “You’re a silly lump” “Yes he is” boynton replied, “A stupid stupid lump”… (which is why of course she lervs him)

(American) Races on the radio (via The Writing Life - with links and personal context)
Fascinating to hear the cultural differences in race-calling., although perhaps this has as much to do with the vintage as the nationality.
Boynton tried to find a local equivalent, and while this site seems to have audio files, it may be for connections faster than boynton’s. (The one to hear is Bill Collins’ call of the 1986 Cox Plate.)
Of course, you say Seabiscuit we say Phar Lap.
The greatest-horse-ever race stakes discussed here and here
Shirely Temple in The story of Seabiscuit 1949. (" Pretty average film, but Temple is good...(and) has a mysteriously inconsistent brogue)

Help! What do you do when someone pinches your blog? And your blogroll? And your comments? Not an april one joke we fear.

Top April fool's Day hoaxes (via J Walk)

The wonderful Kodak girl site - photos, ads, posters ephemera. (via Quiddity 29/3)
Boynton particularly loves the extensive snapshot collection, leading through to the “annotated snapshots” group…In a few cases, someone has jotted down a tantalizing tidbit on the back, piquing our imagination Not wishing to jump the frame here and link directly, this is an example of one such caption: I think this one looks just like you

Boynton has often seen the British film The Way We Live screening in the wee ABC hours, and was delighted to find this illustrated summary amongst many wonders on Steve Johnson’s cyber-heritage site. (via Speckled Paint). One of the stills is boynton’s own favourite, that she once planned to employ on a web site ( her own futuristic plan). It is from the film’s triumphal march of the banner-carrying Plymouth youth. Less Monotony Please. Good motto for a blog.

obs on snobs. Gummo Trotsky's first Snob of the Week, and a review of Snobbery the American Version at A Sunny Place For Shady People.

Readers of this blog and others that use Haloscan may have noticed the wipe out yesterday. The white screen of Mute. Boynton's head sort of matched so it didn't worry her excessively. A blogging sabbath was enforced. The word from Haloscan is High Traffic because of a couple war and politics-related weblogs that use our commenting system that have skyrocketed in traffic because of the war. This is slightly less unsettling than the previous explanation of last month: we started getting massive packet loss suddenly. (If we don't buy it, guess it's because we don't buy it)
For those of us who have yet to assimilate that techno speak into ordinary jargon, a sudden massive packet loss sounds intriguing. (If it has taken minutes for this page to load, boynton suggests you visit the following links prudently) Technically, packet loss may be indeed be this, but boynton still expects to read about a maritime disaster. And as for Ping - this is only reading of Ping that is imprinted on boynton's brain. And finally this graph is supposed to illustrate human perception of packet loss, but this response seems much more realistic.