heliopausa

Oh, wonderful!  I thought, around about mid-morning Saturday.  The people (who are very pleasant people, I haste to say; it's just that I'm a lazy beast) who were invited for lunch on Sunday can't come!  And thus the weekend suddenly opened to reveal ... what is it?  somethings of vast eternity.  Or a day and a half of free time, anyway.  :) I was cockahoop.

So...  I plucked those cumquats which were ready to fall from the New Year's cumquat tree, and made spiced cumquat chutney - and I made muesli bars, too, to use up some over-ripe bananas.  Went marketing, of course, and accidentally brought home a mountain of lettuce, and much green herbage (because it was past ten, and the market-seller wanted to pack up and go home).  Also triumphantly tracked down cinnamon bark, for the chutney, down a market side-street, and generally had a good time.  :)

And then on Sunday I went to visit an aged friend - that was absolutely great!  She is recovering from a stroke, and it was wonderful to see her so much better, so much stronger.  We just sat together for three-quarters of an hour, and drank water, and talked of nothing much - of planting trees recently, and looking at photos . Not a long visit, because I didn't want to wear her out, but a very, very happy one - it was so good to see her, and to see her so strong.  :)

And I took in various media throughout the weekend:

- watched the 27th episode of Nirvana in Fire, which means I'm exactly half-way through;

- read some of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, which is about very exciting things, but so far is not very well or engagingly written;

- and read some newspapers online, of course, which yielded this lovely story (with picture) of a desert turtle.
  What an amazing creature!  And how beautiful it seems in the picture - to me, at least - gold and emerald.  :) 
  Also, I chortled at a word attributed (wrongly, I'm sure - possibly autotranscription from a recording?) to the herpetologist, which suggested that the turtles are excavating underground - making  a second pleasing picture, of a different, totally imaginary, sort! (But now I've been back and they've fixed it up - good to see journalistic diligence at the ABC.  Unless it was the mortified herpetologist who set them straight.)

Lovely to read of so much exhilaration and hope on the many marches.  I'd been anxious - about communications systems, amongst other things - and it was so good to find that it wasn't necessary at all, in the event!  :)    (But it was interesting to see it confirmed by some people involved, that mobile phone/cell phone coverage does indeed falter in large crowds - something to be aware of, going forward.)

In more local news:

The Tet goldfish have all been released into waterways, to become celestial dragons for the three kitchen gods to ride back to heaven.  I mentioned last year that student groups and other young volunteers were asking people not to toss their fish-carrying plastic bags in when they released their fish - this year that's become a campaign, with posters and more volunteers and council workers, stationed at the likely places (where there are steps down into the water, mostly).  



The poster says: Let loose the fish, hold onto the plastic bag!  

I have new glasses, and the world is crystal-clear.  (Or as close to it as my eyes allow, anyway.)   I am being amazingly conscientious about putting them back in their case, but I expect it won't be terribly long before they're being slung around casually, and ending up as battered as all previous pairs of glasses have been.

Yesterday I made crumpets from scratch!   I used this recipe, which weirdly doesn't reveal that the crumpet so made should be toasted later - i.e. that it's not intended to be eaten in its flabby original first-cooked state.  The dough/batter was really strange - very gloopy and gluey - but the result on cooking was instantly recognisable as crumpets, though not exactly round due to my not having the poaching rings to make them in.  They toasted up well this morning, but were regrettably doughy inside.  :(  If I do it again, I'll cook them longer at lower heat, in the first cooking.

Thanks to a tip from puddleshark, I've been looking at and enjoying Nirvana in Fire, a 54-part series (I'm up to part 9) set in eighth-century China.  ( Read more, if you like... )

It's been a long week, for one reason and another, including personally.

In Australia, the election is still not quite settled. ( Read more... )

Thursday night a couple of us sat up, following with fear and horror #whereisLavishReynolds. ( Read more... )

Oh, heavens. Something by way of relief. It's NAIDOC week in australia - i.e. celebrating indigenous people, culture, heritage. Here's an article from the abc about the billabongs of the Top End, and the people who know them and love them and keep them best. (Comes with a lovely picture of Cherry Daniels with waterlilies. :) Recommended for the picture alone, let alone the rest. and there's lots of other articles linkable from there.)

Well. Saturday morning, and I'd better start the day.

There's so much stinking, stinking sad news out there. :(

Well... to some better news, or cheerful things, if not exactly news:

Scotland has achieved its emissions reduction target six years early! :) Go, Scotland!

The 50,000 hectares of Yarralin Cattle Station (which had been held under leasehold from the Crown, most recently by the Hooker Corporation) has been formally handed back to its traditional Aboriginal owners.

Is a comedy sketch art? If it is, then here's art protecting nature, in an ad made by two well-known comedians for an NGO in Vietnam, to campaign for tiger protection (youtube, one minute)

Where nature starts to look like art:
I really liked these eggs, all from the same species of bird - the tawny-flanked prinia, in Africa. So beautiful, like marbled silk!

The photo is by evolutionary ecologist Martin Stevens, and I found it and the info in this Guardian article.

Beautiful, and sneaky, too! The origin of these lovely patterns lies in the habit of the Zambian cuckoo finch, doing what cuckoo finches do, i.e. laying eggs which mimicked typical prinia eggs in prinia nests - but the tawny-flanked prinia has been - and still is - fighting back, by each individual hen now laying her own special signature style of egg! The egg-forging finches can't keep up! Go, wonderful tawny-flanked prinias!

Writing news: What with one thing and another, I haven't written a thing all year, apart from some three-sentence fiction, so I've been trying to kickstart my writing by launching back into a Narnia project I started last year. ( Read more... )

My life is at sixes and sevens again, but to at least be posting something here are three idle thoughts, and a question.

1. Trollope is hideously unfair to the Marchioness of Hartletop. ( Read more... )

2. I read a short piece in the Guardian about what is and isn't proper grammar - it was very scathing about the use of 'amongst', saying:
"How longeth wilt thou persist with “amongst” and “whilst”? Yea though thine prose doth ring fanciful, long hath the “st” lain banish’d ’pon the pebbl’d shore. (These days, it’s always “among” and “while”.)"

Bah, humbug! 'amongst' is a perfectly good word, and I will jolly well continue to use it any time I feel like it. (also, "How longeth" is simply silly.)

3. I think the science here is open to doubt, because the CSIRO say so, but it's interesting in itself, and also for a glimpse of a very country Greens Party pollie in australia: the Condamine river, famed in song and story, set on fire. (videolink, one minute.)

and the question:
Four years ago, just about, I posted my first ever fanfic to fanfiction.net. Is it worth overhauling it, smoothing off some of the rough edges, and reposting it on ao3 - or is that boring? (This is partly inspired by seeing someone asking for fics starring older characters, which this does.)

To amuse those of you who live where it really snows: the news story about snow falling in Hobart recently - even on the beach!  and some schools were closed, for a snow-day.  :) 

In delight that maybe only other Australians will follow: Bronwyn Bishop has resigned!  a blow against arrogance and corruption.  Just one blow - corruption is still around and corroding our political system, but still... this is good news.  It's also left our Prime Minister looking even more of a loose cannon - since he plainly didn't know how to handle the situation, at first making light of it, and then going to ground to avoid it. 
It wasn't giant corruption on a world scale - swanning around using taxpayers' money to bignote herself, and travel in luxury - but she's been riding for a fall with her blatant self-interest and partiality as Speaker, and I am very glad to see her go. 
There's other alarm bells in the story, too - why the Federal Police handed the matter over to the Department of Finance to investigate, and why the Department of Finance seem disposed to let her off the hook.  But for today, I'm glad she's gone as Speaker.

also in the category that this might only interest other Australians: I hope like mad that Adam Goodes returns next weekend and is met with sustained cheering.  I can't do a blinking thing about it, though, that I can think of.  Not all the opinions in the world (like this from the Age newspaper) can help unless the crowd themselves see themselves for what they are - racist and baying for blood.  Suggestions welcome.
(For non-Australians - Goode, a football player, has been booed incessantly whenever he takes the ground ever since he over-reacted badly to a young girl shouting abuse at him (she claims she didn't know it was racist, which I think is garbage, but irrelevant). The crowds have seized on this to boo him, allegedly because he was bullying to the girl, but... oh, come on!  They're not fooling anyone.)

Does this constitute a mass spoiler?  British academics come up with a formula to predict whodunnit in any Agatha Christie crime novel.

Great to see mangroves getting the attention they deserve!    They're the Puddleglums of the plant world - they don't look heroic, but they hang in there and achieve much, unsung.  (also: Sri Lanka has passed legislation preserving all of its remaining mangrove coasts.  Cheers!  \o/)

Les Miserables ground to a halt in last week's busyness, just as four young couples were spending a glorious holiday together around Paris -not just because of the busyness, but also because I could tell that this delicate happiness was not going to last - so I stopped to enjoy it before Hugo unleashes whatever mad dog/volcano/general depressing event he has planned.  The writing is amazing.  Here's one sentence about that idyllic holiday:
"That day was composed of dawn, from one end to the other."  

It's even more beautiful in French.  Not that I'm it reading in French! - just that that sentence was so stunning that I wanted to see how Hugo said it, which was:
"Cette journée-là était d'un bout à l'autre faite d'aurore."

Because it came up in a conversation, I thought I would read The Ragged-trousered Philanthropist -- and now I'm three chapters in, but I don't think I can keep going. (This is pretty unusual for me - I've read to the end of all sorts of rubbish, let alone to the end of books which are known, and referred to in conversations - books whose titles people know, even if they haven't read the book.)
Well, but....
I had vaguely thought it would be a sort of barefoot philosopher book, with a side-serve of one-man revolution, showing people ways forward to rebuild things nearer to the heart's desire - something with hope in it, but it's not. It's a furiously angry, unremittingly miserable, slice-of-working-class-life book. (and the hero/author-insert's going to die, I can tell -- which isn't a spoiler because in the very first chapter it says "his complexion was ominously clear, and an unnatural colour flushed the thin cheeks" and you don't need to have read many pre-penicillin books to know what that means.) I don't think I can take so much aint-it-awful being ladelled into me without pause for breath.
It's interesting as being slice-of-life, of course, in showing all sorts of incidental details of the life of house-renovators' work-gangs in the early twentieth century - I liked finding them using a pump-action blow-torch to get the old paint off, for example, and the discussion of what's the bare minimum of furniture to have in a lodger's room (bedstand and mattress, cupboard and wash-stand; chest of drawers desirable but not absolutely essential). Dunno. I might struggle on with it.


NFE... once again, I am totally flummoxed by the sign-up form, let alone writing a Dear Writer letter. I haven't signed up yet. I've got till the end of the week, I think. (Encouragement welcome.)

On the more cheerful side, I saw a most beautiful near-conjunction of Venus and Jupiter last Thursday night, with a crescent moon on the other side of the sky. Very lovely in itself, and also great that the sky was clear to see it - of smog, I mean, not of cloud. The sky is definitely clearer here than it was some years back. Surprise - regulation of industrial chimneys has effect! (Yes, I know London discovered this years ago. :) Who's next?)

From Gutenberg:   an 1860s book, listing and discussing then-current and earlier slang.    Which I thought was terrifically interesting in itself, but also useful as a language resource for historical fiction.
(And I was also interested to see how many words which feel very Australian to me were in there.)

A notional board game to illustrate the dangerous game we're playing in real life with the monetisation of ecosystem services.  :( 

I like what I read about Jose Mujica.

And from one of Robert Louis Stevenson's earliest (1878) published works, concerning the wildly romantic adventures of Prince Florizel of Bohemia. The Prince, accompanied by his loyal underling Colonel Geraldine, often explores Low Life, heavily disguised:
One evening in March they were driven by a sharp fall of sleet into an Oyster Bar in the immediate neighbourhood of Leicester Square. Colonel Geraldine was dressed and painted to represent a person connected with the Press in reduced circumstances; while the Prince had, as usual, travestied his appearance by the addition of false whiskers and a pair of large adhesive eyebrows. These lent him a shaggy and weather-beaten air, which, for one of his urbanity, formed the most impenetrable disguise. Thus equipped, the commander and his satellite sipped their brandy and soda in security.
  - from 'The Suicide Club', later published as Chapter One,'The Adventure of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts, in New Arabian Nights

I especially like the idea of painting to represent a person connected with the Press in reduced circumstances.  Is it dark circles under the eyes, do you think?  Or a bibulous nose?

Okay, I guess everyone but me already knew this story, but I have only just found out about this man, born in England, but reinventing himself when he was about twenty, creating a whole new identity as an Ojibwa man, Grey Owl (and it's all in wikipedia).  I find the whole business of people deciding they want to be, or are, someone totally other -- Princess Caraboo, Lobsang Rampa -- fascinating, and morally complex.  (Obviously not all that complex where it's just a way to to get money or fame, the lost inheritance or whatever.  I'm meaning the people who really want to be someone totally different, and just declare that they are.)

He made a living trapping animals for furs, but (quoting wikipedia) "In 1925, then 37-year-old Grey Owl met 19-year-old Gertrude Bernard (aka Anahareo, or Pony), a Mohawk Iroquois woman who was to be very influential in his life. She encouraged him to stop trapping and to publish his writing about the wilderness. They had a passionate eight-year affair, beginning with their Anishinaabe wedding ceremony. Through her influence, he began to think more deeply about conservation. Anahareo encouraged his writing and influenced him by saving and raising a pair of beaver kits."



And hence the photo (from www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com)  But apart from this being a beguiling photograph, I was taken with the idea that it was because of this man that Beavers got into Narnia.  Grey Owl ran a long and passionate campaign about the need to protect beavers against extinction through over-trapping, and toured England in the later 1930s, very successfully -- he was introduced to King George VI and family, and much feted, and his conservation message was very widely spread.  I'm guessing that it was because of that publicity that Lewis felt fond enough of beavers to put a Beaver couple so prominently in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and maybe even because of Grey Owl's urgent conservation message that he noted in Prince Caspian that they had died out.