everyone has gone to the beach.
Boynton recently bought Boswell's London Journal at the op shop.
"He advised me to keep a journal of my life, fair and undisguised. He said it would be a very good exercise, and would yield me infinite satisfaction when the ideas were faded from my rememberance...I told Mr Johnson that I put down all sorts of little incidents in it. "Sir," said he,"there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great knowledge of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible" 16 July 1763
Famous Diarists as proto-bloggers has been explored (by blog - where else) - but Interconnected points to a new project that puts Pepys on line as blog.

Another light Summer link is this Guardian quiz. (via Plep)
This is the level of Trivia Boynton would like to see happening at the local tournament... There's a darker tale of pub trivia at bluejoh

Through the gap...bit under the weather today. It's that Boxing-Boxing Day feeling. Boynton has long believed that Boxing Day runs well into three days. Longer than the average Australia-England Test match. Such a beautiful day in Melbourne, she's half tempted to stroll down the road to catch the cricket gratis, through the gap. According to the Age , yesterday
By early afternoon, about 50 people had gathered on the footbridge between the MCG and Melbourne Park to watch the game through a gap in the ground where a stand once stood, complete with binoculars and transistor radios.
"It's the best seat in the house," said Darren Bond, of East St Kilda. "You can see absolutely clearly, and you get the video replay and the scoreboard as well."
This is not the first time cricketers and patrons will experience a large gap in the stadium's structure More gap info for patrons here

All the small pine trees next to the trailors and gas cylinders for hire had gone, but waiting in the car by the bowsers at the caltex on Christmas night, Boynton spotted santa. Behind the counter. Jolly. Smiling to himself between transactions. At ten pm after a long day, this generous-girthed geniality made weary punters smile and do a double take. Maybe he was like this bloke whose life turned around when he let his beard grow out white and wavy. In fact, after he started looking like Santa Claus, John said, his whole personality began to change. He became friendlier, more outgoing. Life became full of small, amusing incidents...Or maybe it was just the nearness of the coke machine

Like trotting out last year's xmas decorations, here is some perennial advice from 2001 about a natural treatment for Christmas depression. Of course, Organs.
Before Boynton moves into serious antidote mode, she should remember:
"Listeners experienced significant reductions in tension, depression, anger and fatigue," Professor Marley says. "However, we didn't find any significant changes in listeners' levels of vigour, or confusion."
Looks like pretty good therapy to me.

Decorating for Christmas 1950's style (via PopCulture Junk Mail via Quiddity) Also featuring on David Claudon's site is the excellent Decorating 40's style, "a visual source-book of ideas...". Quiddity links to 1950's childrens' records, one in the Christmas genre, and one general -some records of which Boynton recognised from the storehouses of memory or imagination.

Boynton went to the Boulevard Christmas lights last night – this is a (grand) street in Ivanhoe that was the original themed street in what has now become a rather overheated market. Even Boynton’s own flat street has houses with hose lights and the odd reindeer. But the big old Ivanhoe houses on the hill are better suited to the sport. The road is generous in its contours and dimensions and socio-eco profile, and can handle the throng of the thousand strong pilgrimage even if the nature-strips are worn bare by soles and strollers. On the low side you get the city skyline framed by lemon-scented gums, on the high side you get the sweeping vistas of grand old decorated Deco houses. Last night was a perfect warm evening, with a big yellow moon that looked exactly like the classic art nouveau sheet-music variety.
To best view the lights, you should really borrow a child. Boynton volunteered, and her inner child gasped and whooped and jumped up and down excitedly, and stood awe-struck at some mystery in the electricity invisible to adults. Not as good as one little girl who went into joyous overdrive at the sight of a plastic elf. Children were adorned with pink and green “glow lights’ that were being hocked by scouts on corners, the most desirable being the round collars, that glowed on in the back seat of dark wagons driving slowly past. One hapless toddler put in a request. His mother snapped. “We can’t always get what we want…If I were you I’d be very worried because Santa can hear everything you’re saying, and he’d be disgusted. And he’d be going into his workshop and taking all the toys out of your sack and putting them into some other child’s sack!…”.
There was the usual mixed iconography of Jesus and Santa, desert and snow. One house had the trinity of Santas, next door had the snowman under a palm tree. There were asbseiling santas, creepy miniature-doll santas, a nativity group in a gazebo moving at tai-chi speed, and a Joseph who looked like more like Josephine, in his mock Tudor style frock. On the low side of the street, Boynton was interested in the shadow play of hapless owners caught inside their homes, moving around like un-lit figures in the annual Christmas fish bowl.
No link found to Ivanhoe, but here is a South Australian page. And a thread from a US forum indicates some of the pressures involved.

How to be cool. Get out of the inner-city... Boynton's street has emptied, shifted to the coast I guess, leaving us non-holiday resort decampers walking down hot asphalt echo chambers of the idle-factory "neighbourhood" ( actually the big factory at the back has just been sold off - presumably for warehouse apartments). Both neighbours have gone, so Boynton can break out and warble soulful ballads into the wee hours. Meanwhile Nora found cool relief inside a church this morning, rehearsing with trumpet for the annual carol service. "Yes I'm the rhythm section in The Virgin Mary again" she reports, a tad wearily.
Which links quite nicely to this Sir Cliff game (via b3ta)

A 1959 pamphlet on how to decorate a " tree made mostly of non-tarnishing long-lasting aluminium foil" Proper decoration will make your aluminium tree more beautiful (via Anil's daily links)

"I just love what (the aluminum tree) represents, the hope and naiveté of the era," (says one collector). "It was the beginning of the atomic age..."

"The reality of my daily life is that I'm juggling lots of balls in the air" says a defensive Santa (via Plep)

Some Karaoke out-takes . A new machine that not only adjusts the pitch and tempo to suit the punter's voice, but will also "grade" the performance.The grading karaoke machine currently available only compares singers' performance against standardised tunes of the selected songs. But this new machine would recognise the singer's use of vibrato, tremolos and other techniques for grading singers."
And yesterday's Odd Spot reported that China's gridlocked drivers will be able to sing their blues away next year after the country's only privately owned car maker rolls out a car equipped with a karaoke machine.

The fact that kitsch kulture has become status quo is also a reason that karaoke is gaining younger, hipper, and even famous followers, but karaoke existed before the current retro wave and will certainly outlive the fickle fancies of ironic young people
Discussing Karaoke last night with a younger, hipper writer, Boynton let it slip that she too has secretly indulged in this vice.
And where else but a karaoke bar will you hear someone utter, "I'd like to do a Bread song someday, but I don't think I'm emotionally ready."
That strolling guitarist at a certain Kobe snack bar has a lot to answer for. Here is another fan who confesses: I sometimes get distracted by trying to make the words of the song last exactly as long as they take to change color on the video screen, and that means I'm not giving full voice..
More (serious 'scene') singing tips "Mastering fast songs" here.
and the more basic:"Enhancing Audience Appeal" Avoid sitting down while you sing, unless it really matches the song. But this is the tip that best resonates with Boynton:
If there’s a monitor in front of you, don’t hide behind it. Stand far back behind it (where you can still read it), or to the side

On the theme of random dog poetry, the Magnetic poetry on-line game - see "Dog Lover"

Of course, within the random scattering of the apples as described below, there may be deeper meaning. Some recent projects along these lines employ sheep...cows...and an earlier local grazing dairy herd. Also recommended is random sheep poetry

Balmy evenings. In the backyard over at Peel street , the Summer twilight pet-anque or elderly labrador crazy bowls pennant is about to begin again. The green shall be a rectangle, providing a level surface not injurious to bowls
On the edge of the green are two old apple trees, the windfall fruit of which shall be the bowls. Play begins as Douglas forages beneath the trees until he finds a bowl that he fancies. He then excitedly runs back to the mat, but will shortly spit out the invariably under-ripe specimen, thus delivering it to the green. It is now live. Abby (who is even more senile than Doug) will then slowly wander haphazardly across, swoop on the bowl, walk with it for a few metres before she in turn discards it. Tart. Doug then returns to trees, to find a second bowl and the process is repeated, until the green is filled with a free-form pattern of apples that are moved from time time during the evening. Bronte (Jack Russell) has neither the greed nor the neccessary degree of dementia to play, but she may inspect the bowls from time to time but not move them. She prefers skinks.

It's a worry The internet is bad for your hypochondriasis (via Rebecca Blood). As a mild sufferer of "transient hypochondriacal concerns", Boynton is always mindful that medical students (and doubtless, doctors) are not immune to the condition. Boynton read with interest "the phenomenon of hypochondriasis in trainee doctors may receive more attention from tutors and student doctors than the same phenomenon in, say, a history student." As a recovering history student, she often suffered from too close an identification with her subject matter here as well (After reading accounts of early life in the bush she agreed it was certainly No Place for a Nervous Lady.) Oh well, to determine whether we really have the condition or not (to prove it - as the transient hyperchondriac would no doubt say) there's an on line self-diagnosis quiz here.

Black Dog - a temporary return to the first person
Today Douglas is 13 and six months. He was born on a cold Bloomsday. He should have been called Leopold. I saw him when he was 3 days old, bald, one of those strange squeaking little forms that blindly bleat for the teat, and paddle in the muddle of the litter. Time is catching up. I find myself staring at his beautiful thick black otter tail, that will still wag at the slightest cue, as other faculties decline, so finely tuned, will still wag at the barest hint of a smile. And on days like this, wags on in pure hope, as the only trick left, to cheer me up, a benevolent nag, when all seems lost. And of course his faith pays off, and I return to the land of the living, because you simply can't refuse a Labrador or his consolation.

Update Monday monday Can't trust that day Blogger won't let me post...Please stand by...
POSTED BY BOYNTON 2:23 PM


But I do...I have two dogs (via The Presurfer) And they are both closing in on Boynton now as she writes, waiting for things to get activated.

digital trauma meets digital art bluejoh's post about crushed fingers pointed Boynton (somehow) to a page on Gamekeeper's thumb and from there to a wonderful rendition of White Christmas by The Three Tendons (via The Mr Handman site)
Other manualism (the art of manualism involves producing music by squeezing one's hands together) goodies there include personal favourites such as Green Acres... The Girl from Ipenama ...Danny Boy ... and The Good The Bad and The Ugly

Xmany days... A picture of Boynton's family Christmas from yesteryear ...
- from a yule-cool site Old Christmas Lights (via The Presurfer). This benign looking ad induces a mild electrical anxiety with memories of bad circuitry. Perhaps it's the ominously ambiguous last cartoon: sockets practically unbreakable...even when accidentally stepped on....
Part of the culture of Melbourne's Christmas is a visit to the Myer's Christmas windows . (Although Boynton lives 2 k away we may only get to glimpse them on-line - instead of in the line) This is a brief corporate chronicle that begins with Santa at the Olympics in 1956. I wonder if it was still Sputnik that spawned the "Santa in Space" window of 1962 . This is a darker space themed Santa take...And finally here is a smoking doctor - off to deliver a Christmas baby (by camel?). Is that only snow on his coat - or have some of the side-effects started to show up?

A good read on writing at this Public Address. There's a faulty link to an article that's worth perusing on the decline of reading , featuring confessions of non-readers like Eric a young publishing exec. who ... regrets he hasn't read the Bible, because it would help him with the crosswords he devours (via wood's lot)

A poignant animation featuring a chair (via b3ta)

Blind eyes. Last week Rebecca Blood linked
(we blinked) to An Animals Place outlining the issues and linking to humane (US) farming sites
The more I learn about them, the more strongly I feel that the factory farming practices widely practiced today are unconscionable- in fact I would go so far as to call them immoral.
The issue is vexed, the stories gruesome. Is humane farming an oxymoron? But going down the “lesser of two evils” path there are indeed options for (local) carnivores that would certainly appear more moral than the factory farm- Free range. Most organic farms include animal welfare/stewardship in their general principles, and consumer demand is slowly growing - Coles calling it a trend not a fad. Here are some sample local (Victorian) suppliers – Chicken and chooks, pigs and Pork, beef and clothing. If this is indeed a transition stage in a slow cultural shift, then Temple Grandin’s work on minimising stress at the slaughterhouse is part of the evolution.
But when you read the bare facts, sometimes glimpsed within the official codes of practice, or stories from the front, the vegetarian/vegan option seems more pressing.
How do I know that it is wrong to be cruel? No one has set the rules. I just know that it's wrong - that's all. Hell is the absence of god. As I looked out across that huge industrial landscape of the factory farm I knew that I was entering Hell. (Coral Hull)
Boynton once stayed in a house where cattle grazed within metres of the lounge-room. Time to observe the herd behaviour close-up, to look into their eyes, to look away as they were loaded into the truck…. This is a poetic tale about one herd that survived