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

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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.

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)