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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Paul's LiveJournal:
| Friday, May 9th, 2008 | |||
| 7:46 am | It's been a "sailors ahoy" week This week has been a bit nautical at Fremantle with the visit of USS Tarawa and other things. Not long after after the Americans slipped away another spectacular ship tied up at the wharf to disgorge tourists and take on some new ones. The vessel was a luxury cruise liner called the Sun Princess. It will be a regular caller here for a few months. There are plenty of cashed up Western Australians who like nothing better than a tropical ocean cruise in winter. The ship looked a pretty good place to spend a decadent few weeks. Here's a cheapskate's picture taken from the platform of Fremantle railway station. Sigh!  One of the last things all ship passengers see when they leave Fremantle are the lighthouses at the end of the North and South Moles. (Breakwaters.) These cast-iron structures were first switched on at the beginning of the twentieth century and have remained solidly in place doing their nautical duty ever since. The southern one is painted green and the northern one red. As every boat person should know, this is the world standard for channel marker colour schemes when heading upstream. Get them mixed up and you'll be in trouble. From the decks of huge ships like Tarawa and Sun Princess the lighthouses look puny, and well they might be, but they're much easier to fit into the camera frame for closeups. Here's a picture taken this week of the South Mole lighthouse. Our cocker spaniel pup Milly is posing in front of it. You can tell I clicked the shutter just in time. She decided enough posing was enough and wanted to check out what I was doing. To end this interesting week, here's something pretty cool from NASA in the USA. They're getting ready to put a robot lander thingo on the Moon and anyone, even opinionated Australians, can enter their name on a data base which will be aboard the device when it lands or crashes. (NASA still seem to used metric measurements for some things and feet and inches for others.) Over the past decade our family members' names have been somewhere on a variety of space probes via similar offers. It's sort of like doing space graffiti. Maybe one day some alien life form will discover them and we'll all become famous. Anyway the URL is http://lro.jhuapl.edu/NameToMoon/in © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Thursday, May 8th, 2008 | |||
| 8:25 am | The Fremantle railway yard Living within sight of the crane-tops on the Fremantle wharves we are frequent visitors to the port and have seen a lot of changes over the years. Sadly the place has lost a lot of its former dynamism. It used to be known for its large working class population - the thousands of men who kept the wharves, railway and any number of other tasks which where essential to a fully operational port. A port which was in essence the gateway to Western Australia. Nowadays this intensive human activity is absent. Cargo-containerisation ensured that the word 'lumper' has slipped from common usage. There are no more gangs of lumpers working in Fremantle. Just a few lonely individuals driving cranes and forklifts. The place has become akin to an occupational desert as far as the traditional working class is concerned.  Similarly with the railways. I'm old enough to have experienced the end of the age of steam. Fremantle used to be a steam-engine lovers' paradise. The central area in my panorama above was packed with branching railway lines leading onto the wharf, plus steam locos, goods wagons of every description and all the necessary infrastructure to keep everything going. There was plenty of noise too. I can particularly remember the rattling of an old coal elevator where the steam engines stopped to have their coal tenders refilled.  There was a place adjacent to the coal elevator where the engines had their boiler innards cleaned. The large circular fronts of the locos swung open on hinges to allow access. I've since learned the unfortunate workers probably also received unhealthy lungfulls of asbestos fibres. Across the way, the Fremantle railway station used to be much larger than the single platform affair now. Below is another historical image I found online. Both were taken in the early nineteenth century before I was born and are from the impoverished State Archive collection.  The same area looks pretty different in the picture I took a few days ago. All electric and only one platform beneath an uninspiring shed. If you click to enlarge the image you'll discover a single railway employee lurking behind a pole with his hands in his pockets.  © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 | |||
| 8:57 am | Thinking about the war - five years on and counting It's been five years since President Bush and his cohorts engineered the current war in Iraq. The multi-trillion dollar exercise hasn't gone well for the families of America. More than 4,000 of their sons and daughters have been killed and many more thousands have been physically and mentally incapacitated. From time to time I've commented in these pages about the war. One of my essays, "Thinking about the war" was posted on October 25 2004. I mentioned that the US casualty figure had reached 1,200. There's certainly a lot of American, Iraqi and Afghan blood which has flowed beneath the proverbial bridge since then. This week an American warship USS Tarawa called into Fremantle after a four month deployment in the Persian Gulf. I put some images of it online and to my surprise I received some grateful comments from family members of some of those sons and daughters who were aboard. I could tell from the few words that these anonymous folk sent that they will be very pleased to get their offspring back home safely. My parents were the same with me and my Vietnam tour with the Australian Army. (1966-67) I posted another large panorama of the ship for these US parents to my Picasa site last night. Click the link at the end of this entry. This is not to say I approve of what has happened with US foreign policy over the past five years. I'm appalled at the loss of life on all sides since the beginning of this ill-conceived war. I'm also appalled at the manner in which the US administration attacked the integrity of the Geneva Conventions and manipulated a proportion of the US citizenry to accept that systematic torture and murder was a legitimate strategy. The war has gone so badly for the US that a serious suggestion has emerged it could go for another hundred years. That's pretty appalling too. I watched a long documentary on SBS last night titled, Taxi to the dark side. I now have it copied to a DVD. The film won an Academy Award earlier this year. It focussed of the systematic beating to death of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawa by American soldiers and the abandonment of ethical behaviour and human rights by senior military officers and the Bush administration. According to its Wikipedia entry there was a significant effort to prevent the documentary reaching the eyes and minds of the American public. Many of the American soldiers who participated frankly admitted their involvement in atrocities. Today comes disturbing news from the US National Security Archive that a significant number (millions) of White House emails covering the early stages of the Iraq War which by law were supposed to have been preserved, but have apparently been destroyed. Obviously there are many Americans who have been outraged by these sort of matters. They would like to see certain members of the Bush administration prosecuted as criminals, but I don't suppose it will happen. Anyway, here's the new panorama of USS Tarawa. Give it a click.  © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 | |||
| 8:41 am | Tarawa tourists acquire unforgettable memory of visit to hoonville I was annoyed to read in this morning's newspaper that three sailors from USS Tarawa were mugged by a gang of youths in one of the shopping malls in central Perth. Fortunately the victims escaped with bruising and the loss of their wallets and cigarettes. Not only is smoking bad for the health, but it has long been an excuse in these parts of the world for ratbags to cadge for a cigarettte and then take the innocent target by surprise. Too often victims get knifed, killed, or suffer brain damage. When/if the perpetrators are caught, the punishment handed out by the courts is usually feeble. The criminals never have to make restitution, they seem to have have more rights than their victims. In this case, two youths aged 13 and 14 were arrested with the help of closed circuit TV. Two more of them are lying low. They 'll probably all have several previous convictions, and be back on the streets in a few months. Doing time is a rite of passage. Their identities will be kept secret because of their age. It's Law Week this week. In his opening address the Chief Justice reportedly said he was concerned about the state's growing culture of violence - assaults were increasing at a faster rate than any other crime. Well how about that? The WA public have known about it for a long time. I had to go into Fremantle yesterday and saw USS Tarawa was still alongside. The timing of ship departures are never made public any more in case some imaginary terrorist takes advantage. It's a stupid rule because the information will be common knowledge amongst thousands of people engaged in the service industries - taxi drivers, hoteliers and the like. However, my business was at Valentine's camera shop in Market Street. In March I bought a Hoya UV filter for one of my lenses. When I was cleaning it on the weekend I noticed a small flake of glass was missing from the edge. It had to have been done by pressure from the spring clip which holds the glass against the rim of the screw mount. The man behind the counter agreed and replaced it without any quibbling. They always give good, cheerful service in that shop. Then it was a trip out of the port to visit Spotlight. This is a large shop specialising in secret womens' business. - in this case coloured sewing threads to match the badges which need to be attached to the shirts of our recently invested scouts. While my wife attended to this assignment, I entered the nearby premises of JB HI-FI. They have more DVD titles than it would be possible for a single human to watch in a lifetime, and they are usually one or two dollars cheaper than anywhere else. On the five dollar table I found a copy of The Four Feathers. Not the recent Heath Ledger version which I enjoyed watching on TV last month, but the 1939 version starring Ralph Richardson. The blurb says, "The film is a handsome tribute to the glories of early Technicolor." I just had a quick peep and it looks like the glories have been spoiled somewhat by a transfer from a salvaged cinema print. Maybe I should have shelled out another five bucks and gone for the Heath Ledger version.  © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Monday, May 5th, 2008 | |||
| 7:46 am | The bad, the good and the just plain ugly Alas, it was another bad day for the Fremantle Football Club yesterday. They played against Melbourne at the MCG. Early in the third quarter Freo were leading by 51 points. Such a lead is usually the stuff of great victories, however in this case it wasn't. Melbourne won the game by six points. Arghhhh! Luckily I didn't see the game on TV. We had a commitment to watch the closing ceremony of the Sea Scout Master Mariners' competition at Pelican Point. Our youngest son was in a team from 1st Fremantle Sea Scouts. There were 11 groups from around the state in the two day event. One of the groups was from Kalgoorlie-Boulder which is a long way inland in semi-desert country. I think they must have some land yachts. Competition is fierce for the perpetual trophies. This time 1st Fremantle guys and gals didn't come first, but their forbears have in past years. Here's a pic of the concluding presentations. Bear in mind that these are only the competing teams and leaders, there are plenty more Sea Scouts who had other business elesewhere  At the opposite end of the moral spectrum there is much turmoil in our state's politics. Last week it was revealed the the Liberal leader of the opposition had in the past distinguished himself by sniffing the vacated seat of a female staffer. Prior to that he'd interfered with the bra strap of another woman by giving it a snap. When confronted with the allegations there was obfuscation, but eventually he confessed. Today his party are to vote if they still want him as leader. It appears he has many supporters who feel such sexist behaviour is a mere storm in a teacup. However, now it's also the turn of the Labor state premier to be in the hot seat. He just returned from a trade-trip to Russia. I always pegged him to be a pretty well behaved moral person, but he's been caught up in an alleged scandal involving buxom women at a ribald celebration a few years ago. He's denied that there is any substance in the allegations, but there's some juicy quotes from a female MP in this morning's local newspaper must make the readership wonder otherwise. On page three there's a more disturbing story that the Australian Catholic Church has not gotten the Pope's message that child molesters have no place in church activities. Furthermore, it mentions some intriguing family links to a local senior politician. There's a moral decline in Australia. That makes me sound like an old codger. I get a dozen or so spam emails a day offering to improve my sex life. But now in Fremantle there's a brazen and very large sex-spam advertisement gone up in Queen Victoria Street, one of the main thoroughfares into the port. I think it does little to enhance the somewhat seedy image of Fremantle.  © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Sunday, May 4th, 2008 | |||
| 7:06 am | The Yanks are in town After we dropped our Scout son off at the Master Mariners' competition yesterday we went for a walk to check out the nature study prospects at Pelican Point. Unfortunately for humans the area is almost totally fenced off. A case of look but don't touch. The area outside the fence is a bit of a mess. The Nedlands Council have used parts of it as a dumping ground for street tree prunings and lawn clippings. It may be a good thing because it could be an added deterrent to inquisitive people - but not us. We had a good look. It's amazing what can sometimes be found in long grass, as can be seen from the following image:  Thus enriched we departed for Fremantle. There was an American aircraft carrier in the harbour and I wanted to take a few photos. Flushed with some new found cash, my wife and daughters had their minds set on a hair dressing salon, so we parted company on arrival at the port. The aircraft carrier was the USS Tarawa. Apparently its purpose is to transport US Marines back and forth between zones of activity. It's just finished a four month deployment in the Persian Gulf and called in to Fremantle to allow those on board some R&R. Next stop is Hawaii. I spoke to a group of three cheerful clean-cut young men with jarhead haircuts. They were drinking cokes at Captain Munchies burger bar. All three had come from one of the central states which never make the international news headlines. They'd signed up for five years as Marines and gotten lucky. They been trained to service aircraft on board USS Tarawa. They said they were glad to be somewhere they felt safe. I advised them to keep out of Freo's dark allys at night. Like all the American carriers which have visited Fremantle over the years, this one had a flight deck packed with grey-painted aircraft. Its specialty seemed to be twin rotor Chinook helicopters and Harrier vertical-takeoff fighters. A portion of the wharf was fenced off to keep terrorists at a distance, but there were still some pretty good photo opportunities to keep an average happy snapper like me happy. One of the best views was from a pedestrian bridge which crosses the Fremantle to Perth railway line to the wharf area. The somewhat ramshackle Captain Munchies facility at the southern end of the bridge has provided countess cokes and burgers to homesick American sailors over decades. I did some panoramic sequences from the bridge and I've put one online. I waited about twenty minutes for the train to be in the right place: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/9870958 I've notice that not as many people are looking at my panoramas compared to the still photos. I presume this is because of their size. The largest image I can put up is five megabytes, but the 180 degree ones like this tend to be about 3.5 meg. With broadband they only take a few seconds to download, but if you are only on dial-up then it becomes a pain. Been there, done that. So if you are so restricted, I've put a couple of 'ordinary' pictures from yesterday into my "Fremantle views" folder on the Picasa site. Click the image below.
© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 | |||
| 7:07 am | Sea Scouts - The Master Mariners' Competition 2008 Another of our children was reinvested at 1st Fremantle Sea Scouts last night. This time its been our teenage daughter number two. She's now a fully fledged Venturer. This is not her first time with Scouts. At one stage she was a Cub Scout, but the group she was with ran out of steam. There's no chance of that with this latest lot. The Venturers do plenty of adventurous stuff like rock climbing, orienteering, kayaking and sloshing in mud. It's all go. Another good thing for us parents is that our second eldest son went through all the Scouting levels to Rovers and then became too old for becoming anything except taking out his warrant to become a group leader. So he become one of the Venturers leaders. That also translates as chief transporter for our daughter. Perfect. She's always been one for an adventure. Here's a picture of her taken after sloshing in some mud in 1993:  Even though older kids do the occasional chauffeuring we parents still have to do a bit of running about. This weekend is set aside for the annual Master Mariners' competition. It's a two day event overseen by a group of real master mariners and our youngest son who is a Sea Scout is a competitor. It's a two day competition against other groups to determine which is the most skilled in nautical arts like boat handling, chart reading, navigation, knot tying and so on. It's conducted at the Pelican Point Sea Scout facility which is located on the northern side of the Swan River. We have to drop our son off by 8am, and then collect him again this evening. Then someone has to repeat the process again tomorrow. In the weeks leading up to the event there's some pretty serious training goes on. During the last school holidays the East Fremantle group where our kids hang out conducted a week long intensive training camp during which our son slept under canvas on the river side. These are his halcyon days. Here's photo flashback to 1992, our eldest boys halcyon days when they were practising on the Swan River for the Master Mariners' Competition. Looking at our old photos makes me realise how worthwhile the effort has been  © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Friday, May 2nd, 2008 | |||
| 8:00 am | Point Walter - then and now Golly gosh, it's Friday already. I was thinking it was about Wednesday, but it can't be so. It was Wednesday that my wife and I parked the car near the Attadale shore of the Swan River and took Milly the Pup for a long walk to Point Walter. Our minds must have been in old codgerland then as well, because we now realise that we must have walked past at least a half dozen "Dogs prohibited" signs. If a ranger had turned up we might have been slapped with a hundred dollar fine. Point Walter has been a favourite river haunt of mine since I was a kid. It's changed a lot since the 1950s. It's been "developed." There's sealed roads, and alfresco cafe and a huge, ugly car and trailer park for stinkboat owners. There are two main touristic focal-points for visitors. One is a long sandbar which extends westward into the river for about a kilometre. It's called the Point Walter Spit and is a sort of no-mans-land of drifting sand. It changes shape every season. At the moment much of it is submerged, so only the very adventurous folk walk out to the end. In fact I don't recall ever having seen so much of it submerged in the past as it was on Wednesday. In the picture you can see from the previous tideline that the water had been much higher in the previous 24 hours.  When I was a kid both sides of the spit were guarded by extensive beds of weed which was a haven for small fish such as cobblers (catfish) and schools of mullet. We kids would try to catch the mullet by throwing steel kylies amongst them. Kylie is a regional word for boomerang. We made them from steel strapping purloined from building sites. They were simply bits of metal about an inch wide and a foot long,, then folded in the middle. Mullet were usually smarter than we were, plus kylies were quite easy to lose in the weed. These days the water is crystal clear. There is no weed to be seen on either side of the spit, and no fish. The clear water has equated to aquatic sterility. Perhaps the lack of weed has also allowed the sand of the spit to move much more than in the past? Adjacent to the start of the spit is the T shaped Point Walter Jetty. It used to be a very popular destination for daytripping ferries from Perth. It was a great place for swimming and I spent many summer afternoons there with my mates after school. There's a low landing with steps into the water on the shoreward side. The jetty structure has undergone a few renovations since I was a kid, but is still fundamentally the same shape and size. In the fifties it hosted a great deal of fishing activity. In summers from dusk onwards fishermen and women occupied every possie and often had no problem in catching a feed of tailor, herring, garfish or crabs. (There were off times too.) The crabs were caught with baited dropnets which were flung twenty feet or so out to where the big'uns were supposed to be. There were few sights more anticipatory than watching a baited drop net being hauled back in every ten minutes or so. The other thing I remember I used to do on the long section of the jetty was lean beneath the railing to catch cobblers with a gidgie as they swam into the dim light of a kerosene pressure lamp. Gidgie was another regional Aboriginal word, meaning fish spear. Along the shoreline on summer nights one could see dozens of lamps belonging to prawning parties. A couple of men from each party would drag a prawn net back and forth on the sand banks. On return, the waiting women and children would sort the prawns from the jellyfish and weed, being ever careful not to be spiked by small cobblers in the process. The best prawn parties were when people actual caught some prawns and boiled them over an open fire. Fresh bread and butter and a few beers to accompany the prawns was essential for a successful beach party. But now those sort of events no longer happen, like with dogs, beach fires are banned, and anyway there are no more prawns to catch. Nor are the waters teaming with any other types of fish. Here is the link to a 180 degree panoramic image I made on Wednesday. http://www.panoramio.com/photo/9788241 As is usual with my panoramas, this one is best viewed when it's clicked to the maximum size. You never know what surprises you might find. © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Thursday, May 1st, 2008 | |||
| 9:02 am | A new Cub Scout in our family But first: Happy birthday to me Happy birthday to me In forty years time I'll be a hundred and three. I'm on the downhill run. I've got to be good today - no growling at the kids for leaving lights on, or for leaving the fridge door open, or for leaving DVDs on the floor out of their cases. Last night was investiture night for our nine year old Cub Scout daughter at the1st Fremantle Sea Scouts' Camp Waller. The investiture is when kids officially become part of the world wide Scouting movement. Amongst other things, they recite the Cub Scout promise: Cub Scouts are loyal and obedient Cub Scouts do not give in to themselves. Hmmmm, I like that. I must have recited that to old man Dagg when I was invested at the Melville Cubs the early 1950s. The other thing that invested Cubs are entitled is to receive their first badges for their mums to sew on their shirts. There are the formal badges of affiliation; and the badges earned by the completion of set tasks. There were a few of the latter handed out last night because the kids have been working on earning these while waiting for their investiture. Perhaps the most important ones for Sea Scouts are the swimming ones. Our daughter did hers from the jetty in front of the Scout Hall over a month ago. Scouting in Australia is undergoing a resurgence. There were twenty kids invested last night. Possibly an all-time record. I gather this is a widespread social trend. Possibly a reaction by concerned parents about the burgeoning drug, alcohol and violence problems in the wider community. The older Scouting divisions are also thriving. We've had a long affiliation with 1st Fremantle Sea Scouts. Last night I noticed several pictures of our older kids in former groups still pinned to the walls. There's an essay of mine about the historical origins of this group which I put online at Fremantlebiz 29 February 2006. Also a few Scouty pictures from last night and some taken a few weeks ago in a gallery at my the Picasa site. Click the image below:
© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 | |||
| 8:55 am | Men behaving badly I was looking at the camera and Apple computer magazines at the newsagent shop in Garden City yesterday while my wife was elsewhere paying some accounts. We'd arranged to meet later. While I was trying to glean what information I could from a free read I heard a young kid grizzling. It was a girl of about three with shadows under her eyes looking as if she had been kept awake until midnight for several weeks. She was sitting on the hip of a ratish looking bloke who was impatiently rifling through the magazines in the section I'd be loath to examine in public - the section which has magazines containing risque images of women. He knew what sort of literature he was looking for and pulled it out just as his size 18 wife turned up. He shoved the magazine at her and demandingly said. "Buy this!" then he turned and left the shop with the squawking kid still on his hip. The woman obediently went to the counter and paid for the latest edition of Zoo magazine. On the cover was a headline, "40 hottest cleavages in the world." I confirmed my memory of the headline by looking up the rag on the web.  Now call me old fashioned if you like, but I reckon if a bloke wants to read a magazine like this then he should have the guts to go to the counter and buy it himself. It seemed pretty insulting act to shove such a headline his wife. I suppose there are thousands of Australian families where this sort of thing happens. Zoo, an Australian production has a weekly circulation of more than 122,000 copies a week. There was some sensational sexist-news yesterday that the Liberal leader of the opposition in the state parliament distinguished himself in front of other members late last year by getting down and sniffing the recently vacated seat of a female staff member. It's true. He offered a teary confession at a televised press conference yesterday. The day before he'd said it was an unsubstantiated rumour. This is the same man who confessed a few months ago that he had "snapped" the bra strap of another female staff member in parliament as a joke. In response to the latest revelation/confession, his party colleagues have rallied round him and declared he is still the best person to lead the Liberal Party into the next election. What does that say about them? Are they all Zoo devotees too? Men who indulge in shameful behaviour towards women have a fundamental personality inadequacy. Doing such acts in front of other men is akin to assaulting the woman. It's nothing less than blatent victimisation. Gutlessness fits in somewhere. This sort of behaviour doesn't start overnight, and nor does does it easily conclude. Such men often acquire encouragement through the acquiescence of onlookers. Sometimes the behaviour by reputedly "good blokes" can be much worse. Both these incidents were apparently widely known in political and local media circles long before they were publicly disclosed. That it took so long is testament to the small town mentality which prevails here. © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 | |||
| 9:25 am | An Afghan review On the weekend an Australian soldier named Lance Corporal Jason Marks was killed in a firefight in Afghanistan. He's the fifth killed since the Australian Army deployed there in 2002. Reportedly there have been about thirty others wounded. Six years is a long time to be at war for Australia. Going by what the Australian PM Mr Rudd has said in the past 24 hours, there's plenty of conflict to come and a high likelihood of more Australian casualties. The number of killed and wounded on the other side is kept ambiguous. Apparently more than 1,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan this year. An estimation by Associated Press reckons about 8,000 died in 2007. As is usually the case in such figures, the innocents are lumped in with the militants. There was another incident in Afghanistan on the weekend. It was televised to the world. President Hamid Karzai, surrounded by a small stadium full of puffed up Afghan military officers was having a good old fashioned banana-republic style military parade in Kabul. There was even a military band wearing gold braided toy-soldier uniforms which looked like hand-me-downs from some other banana republic. Everyone had just gotten comfortable when a sneaky Taliban squad spoiled the party with some nearby gunfire and grenade explosions. Everyone jumped from their seats and ran, but not as fast as President Karzai. Outside the stadium there were amazing scenes as Afghan soldiers fled in all directions. It was a case of every man for himself. It appeared that a significant proportion of the Afghan Army was a rag-tag affair which was more interested in conducting grandiose parades rather than doing the sort of more aggressive things which Australians are doing elsewhere. As for the invasive Taliban squad, no one should be surprised that the survivors seemed to have melted away. Nevertheless, President Karzai's goons have been rounding up hundreds of people and disappearing them for some confessional interrogation. As for Karzai himself, he's got a curious tribal history with many twists and turns. The best place to read of these is his Wikipedia entry. Here's a piece of Afghan history from a nineteenth century book titled The races of mankind. I have an original copy on my bookshelf. It was published between 1873 and 1876, The woodcut is labelled, "A group of Afghans." In many areas of Afghanistan it wouldn't be difficult to find a similar scene today.  © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Monday, April 28th, 2008 | |||
| 7:57 am | Photographic memories We had a few gentle rumbles of thunder in the distance last night. Apparently April has been wetter than usual. The weather boffins reckon that if Perth gets another 3mm of rain this month it will be the wettest April on record. I spent a bit of time skulking on eBay yesterday. I was looking at Nikon camera stuff - lenses and filters that I don't really need, and am not likely to acquire anyway because for the most part there are a lot of other Australians doing he same thing and the prices go way too high. Even for items which have descriptions like, "Quite a bit of fungus can be seen inside the lens." There is a lot of stuff appearing on the Australian eBay by sellers who turn out to be based in Kong Kong. I paid for a Hoya Pro1D polarising filter last week. It was a third of the price being asked in Australia, even including the postage. Honkers used to be a paradise for camera buffs before it was handed back to China. I went there on a week's R&R from Vietnam in 1966 and can still see in my mind's eye the camera shop where I bought my first Pentax Spotmatic SLR and a stack of superb Pentax accessories. I still have most of the items. They are in excellent condition, but are totally obsolete. The lenses have 49mm screw mounts which were abandoned by Pentax decades ago. So now they sit in a draw where I periodically give them a nostalgic fondle. The curious object with the extension bellows was a very expensive Pentax assemblage. It was used for ultra close up work and copying slides.  As for the Spotmatic itself, well that worked well in warm climates, but froze up in cold Arctic when I went there. I worked my way through a couple of them, then about fifteen years ago on a Good Friday the second one's strap came away and the camera crashed to a concrete floor. That was the end of my Pentax SLR era and the start of the Nikon. Spotmatics seem to have vanished completely now. I don't look for them on eBay because - well because they needed 35mm film and my film days are over. It's all digital for me now. There are several digital cameras amongst our family members. We started with a Pentax compact a few years back. Paid about seven hundred dollars for it. Wow! So much! It's still giving service, but the prices have dropped substantially on compacts. A couple of weeks ago we bought a Nikon L10 for $99 from the local Harvey Norman store. It does most of the things the older Pentax compact does. We bought it as a camera which our kids could take with them on school camps and such. It was cheap enough not to cause an apoplexy if something disastrous happened. However we also have had a Nikon D80 SLR for about a year. They cost a lot more than $99, but are the ant's pants for a bumbling amateur like me. I'm still figuring out everything it can do. Yesterday I upgraded it's firmware. That's the computer program which makes it work properly. The upgrade is supposed to make it work even better, not that I noticed anything wrong with the old firmware. Nevertheless, I downloaded it for free from the Nikon website and followed the install instructions - easy. I bought a 2 Gig SD memory card for this camera a few weeks ago. The same type of card can be used in the Nikon and Pentax compacts. It cost just under twenty bucks and can contain over 452 high definition images which can be easily and quickly transferred to a computer or CD. That's the equivalent of about 19 rolls of 24 exposure film, plus the cards can be used over and over. I've seen 16 Gig SD cards on eBay for less than a hundred dollars. It sure is a luxury compared to the days when I'd by a roll of film and later have pay to have it developed and printed. The overall cost was about the same as for the 2 Gig card. Not only that, but the results were always a bit of a lottery. Some pictures were good and some were very disappointing. As most people know, with the digital cameras the results are instantly viewable on the built in screen. There are still film fanatics about. I met one a couple of weeks ago. He swore there was no substitute for being locked away in a darkroom for hours to produce a dozen or so prints the old fashioned way. A few weeks ago there was a small item in the press that Polaroid instant photos are no more. The company has thrown in the towel on them. I was surprised they'd lasted this long. The announcement has caused a panic amongst devotees. There were two packs of film which went for over fifty bucks on eBay Australia last week. © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Sunday, April 27th, 2008 | |||
| 8:01 am | Why are we here? I noticed that Google's Picasa changed the format of their page layout yesterday without any notice. There was no longer the option of leaving additional comments against the images which have been placed online. This was a bit annoying for me because it was very convenient to leave a hyperlink back the Fremantlebiz page where the picture was first discussed. Now there's a lesson in this and it's that any material placed in an online archive is actually not very safe as far as its longevity is concerned. It could vanish at anytime because some anonymous person in charge of the data base presses a button. The term "being Googled" need not only apply to the function of the search engine. Ever since I started Fremantlebiz four years ago I realised this risk . I've routinely generated a PDF and paper copy of each day's entry as soon as it goes on line. I also keep the draft version which is done on a word processor before being transferred to the client uploader. The entire set of digital versions are regularly transferred to a CD, and copies of the PDF files lodged on other computers in the house. I'm even happy to provide a set of PDF copies on disk to anyone who is interested in the interest of data survival. Just ask. I don't understand the true purpose of free services like Picasa and LiveJournal. There are hundreds of others like them. I suspect it's not altruistic. The I think the data being gathered has to have some other undisclosed purpose. The data facilities would have to be enormous, and very expensive to handle the huge quantity of material being stored by millions of bloggers and photographers each day. While I've written over a million and a quarter words in four years, they only take up the memory allocation for a single medium sized photo. I've been a bit conservative with my online images. For the most part they are there to illustrate my writings. In comparison, many people have thousands of images thousands stored online and any written explanations for them seem rare. When I was attempting to figure out what had happened with the removal of the Picasa comments option yesterday I did an image search on London. Can you believe it came back with a a list of over 17.6 million images. 17,669,205 to be precise. Paris came back with far more, 204, 442, 261. It's true, check them yourself. Paris is obviously more popular than London. In comparison, Fremantle returned a paltry 92,691. Perhaps now you might understand the paradox. In a world driven by greed, why is so much data storage space being made available for free? If I go down to the local Officeworks store and by a 2 gigabyte memory card for my camera it'll cost me twenty dollars. How many gigabytes of memory would be required for so many images on Picasa? Plus there are obviously far more images than for the three places I've just cited. Who is really paying for it, and why? Frankly, I don't go for any explanation about them being part of a scheme for generating advertising revenue. Can someone "please explain?" I'm going to put up a small picture of a place which returned a zero result in a search - Cosmo Newbery. It was an remote Aboriginal community my wife and I managed in 1986. My face had been blacked up with charcoal and I'd arrived for my Santa duties on a bicycle from out of the desert. My wife made the Santa suit from flour bags, which she dyed. There was much amusement amongst the adults, and the younger kids thought I was the real deal.  When I just put the image into Picasa, I saw that the comment option had been restored, so all is well again, until the next time. Maybe someone will actually leave a comment? © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Saturday, April 26th, 2008 | |||
| 9:53 am | An Anzac flashback - lite I'm just about all Anzac Dayed out after watching yesterday so many televised prayers, hymns and commemorations for the long-ago departed. I feel a little nervous too that the heads of our modern defence forces are still so heavily into prayers and solicitations intended to appeal to an intangible deity. Will they be the same if the balloon goes up? And how about all the Australian politicians who traipsed off to Gallipoli and Villers-Bretonneux to demonstrate that they are au fait with their expense accounts and a vote-winning love of military history. I'm sure they'll be relaxing with their travelling companions somewhere nice today. Should I mention the pod of bagpipe players at Villers-Bretonneux? Yes, perhaps I should. They were playing in a new disharmonic style which surely would have enhanced the reputation of the instrument amongst its admirers, and detractors. I guess they were nervous. A couple of years ago I compiled a series of educational notes for a group Australian Army Cadets who were heading for Villers-Bretonneux. My eldest daughter was amongst them. That was the year I was briefly back on the Army payroll as a second class lieutenant (AAC). I probably would have been third class if they'd had that rank available. I was a bit of a slouch when it came to saluting. (Some old habits die hard.) This is what I looked like at 61.  The Australians' arrival in France Following the bitter lessons at Gallipoli which concluded in December 1915, the deployment of the AIF in France occurred from March 1916. Disembarkation took place at the Mediterranean port of Marseilles on the south coast, and at Le Havre, which faces the English Channel from Normandy, northern France. Watching their arrival, a reporter from Britain's Daily Chronicle wrote: There was no mistaking them. Their slouch hats told me at a glance, but without them I should have known. They have a distinctive type of their own which marks them out from all other soldiers of ours along these roads of war. General Birdwood was in command of the Australians. He gave some of the troops a pep talk about the need for good behaviour, concluding with the words, "And, lads, there is one thing more – drink. As long as you keep from that I know you will be all right." Some of the Australians were to discover the pleasures of champagne in later adventures - which caused a bit of a stir. Going by the attached photograph, General Birdwood didn't say anything about chocolate, which is what the Aussies were negotiating for.  © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Friday, April 25th, 2008 | |||
| 8:47 am | Lest we forget - my Dad Being Anzac Day today, I'm going to write about my father Alfred George Weaver. His 111th birthday was on April 8 a few weeks ago, but unfortunately he couldn't make it. He died aged 88 at Hollywood hospital in 1985, having been admitted the previous evening with a touch of pneumonia. He'd been in good spirits and with every intention of surviving. I was with him when he died. It remains a puzzle for me as to why he went down so suddenly after one night. My father had been a veteran of WW1 and WW2. In September 1915 aged 18, he enlisted in the Australian Army and became a 'driver' with the 6th Australian Field Artillery. (Service No. 8602) A driver in his case meaning one of the men who sat astride a team of horses hauling an artillery piece. In one of his stories he said he had managed to drive a team of horses off a pontoon bridge into the Suez canal. Being part of the Australian Imperial Expeditionary Force (AIF) my Dad had quiet a few grim adventures, and some amazing luck. For example, surviving the second Battle of the Somme. Throughout the war his nickname was "Tango" because he won a dance hall prize in Perth prior to his overseas sojourn. Below is a photo of him taken shortly after he enlisted in 1915.  The next photo was taken in Egypt. He'd managed to meet up with his father Gilbert and brother Ern. Another brother Walter who also enlisted with the AIF is absent from the photo. He'd been destined for Gallipoli and was wounded there. All of the men survived their war experiences and eventually returned to Australia.  The following image is of my father doing just that - returning to Australia. The photo was taken aboard a British troop ship named the Kaiser Hind. My father is in the front row on the far left. On his right sleeve are chevrons denoting the years of overseas service. In his final months of WW1 he'd been posted to an Australian Army flying squadron as a rigger. He said when there had been a call for volunteer riggers, but he didn't know it meant aeroplanes. One of the obligations of riggers was to go on occasional test flights with a pilot. He related to me how on one occasion he'd been taken so close to the spire of Coventry Cathedral in a tight circle he'd thought they were going to hit it. I offered a free copy of this photo to the Australian War Memorial last year, but there was no interest.  With the war over, my Dad was discharged from the Army, but in 1921 he reenlisted at Fremantle and stayed with the Royal Australian Artillery Corps until 1950, retiring as a WO II (Service No. WP946). In all he notched up 8 years and 278 days active service for Australia in two wars and served with Artillery for a total of 33 years, 48 days. I remember him as a gentle, kind man, with a strong sense of humour. He was never effected adversely by any of his many extraordinary wartime experiences. He was a wonderful father, and I miss him. © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Thursday, April 24th, 2008 | |||
| 6:50 am | A wartime secret 'revealed' Tomorrow is Anzac Day, the sacred event when tribute is paid to the dead of some of Australia's wars. I say some, because several of the military actions involving the sons of this country in the 19th century pre-federation era tend to be overlooked. For example those against the natives of Sudan, South Africa, New Zealand and China. This evening young people from organisations such as Scouts and Cadets will maintain an all night vigil at the Fremantle and Perth War Memorials. Then tomorrow morning, irrespective of the weather, there will be hundreds of people gathered in the dark for the dawn service at both places. The 1st Fremantle Sea Scouts has long provided members to participate in both the vigils and the daybreak service at Fremantle. Most of our children have participated as Sea Scouts over the years, and tomorrow it will be the turn of out youngest son. The actual service doesn't last long, maybe ten minutes. Then everyone goes somewhere else for breakfast. The Sea Scouts will return to their riverside lair at East Fremantle for bacon and sausages. The Fremantle War Memorial has a splendid view over the port. We can just see the sandstone edifice from the back verandah of our house. I'm a little sorry that green laser pointers have just been outlawed in this country because I've long had a hankering to buy one and see if I could illuminate it from here. Too late now. I'd be thrown in prison. Below is a picture I took of the memorial in 2004. Click on it for a larger version.  What most Fremantle visitors don't see, and probably nor do a lot of Fremantle residents for that matter, is what lies behind the south eastern side of the War Memorial hill. The facility is well hidden because it was supposed to be. I speak of four very large oil tanks which bunkered countless ships at the port in times of peace and war. Amongst the ships would have been HMAS Sydney II, the recently located light-cruiser which will be commemorated at many Anzac ceremonies around Australia tomorrow. The vessel had been home-ported at Fremantle when it and its entire 645 crew were terminated in a battle with a German warship off the WA coast in November 1941. The four tanks are located below the eastern crest of the ridge and are invisible from the ocean. All are now decommissioned, and I suppose it won't be too long before they are cut up for scrap and sent to the smelters of China. The area they occupied is to be used for housing. The Fremantle War Memorial is on the ridge, behind the tank on the right. Beyond that is the port.  Above the tanks, along the ridge itself, are some very large underground, concrete-lined water cisterns. They're also invisible, but from all directions. Engineering marvels for their time in a way, I reckon they could have filled a couple of Olympic sized pools. Now the cisterns have been drained. Their roofs, once supported by the remnant brick piers are gone. Modern graffiti 'artists' have arrived and made their cultish marks.  Beneath the tanks are very large concrete lined catchments built to accommodate the ultimate disaster - an oil spill. When I was looking at the abandoned facility a couple of weeks ago I found a convenient hole in the fence which seemed to be saying, "Come in and make a photographic record." So I did. There's possibly a subterranean plume of contamination beneath the tanks, so don't drink the groundwater. I created a 360 degree panorama which I think came out pretty well. On my computer screen I can view these 360 degree panoramas continuously in either direction, but on the Panoramio site they have to be loaded as a strip. Nonetheless, I think it's a pretty interesting sort of historical document. As with all my panorama experiments, just keep clicking to enlarge them to the max, then scroll about. There's also a single shot, high definition version of the four tanks image for Panoramio here. Similarly, there's a high definition one of the water cisterns here. © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 | |||
| 7:04 am | A Europa report, and a beach visit There's been more rain during the night. A heavy shower woke me at five. From the online radar it looks like there'll be more H2O coming in from the northwest for a while yet. The daily temperatures have dropped to the extent I've started wearing a track suit in the mornings, but I'm still bare footed. When I reach for the socks and beanie you'll know it will be really cold - like about 20 degrees C. My number two son has just returned from a European spring holiday, taking in Holland, Ireland and Sicily. He reckons he'd never experienced such coldness, even in Sicily he managed a snowball battle near the top of Mount Etna. Being an award winning plumber he'd noticed a few things during his travels. His impression was that standards and workmanship in all three countries are well below par with here. Furthermore, the rumours he'd heard before he left about Europe being very expensive for innocent travellers were true. On the way back home he stopped over at Kuala Lumpur for a couple of days and enjoyed it very much. The shopping was reasonable, the food delicious and reasonably priced, and the people were friendly enough to make him want to return. We had a welcome home barbecue lunch for him on Sunday - surf and turf:  Otherwise it's been a bit quiet this week, our eldest teenage daughter is house-sitting for a neighbour and our youngest son is away on a camp with the sea scouts. Both tended to complain about the cuisine in this house. Personally, I don't mind gruel. Now both are cooking for themselves. Yesterday afternoon my wife and I took our youngest daughter and Milly the cocker spaniel pup to the beach. It was Milly's first sighting of the ocean and she handled it very well. She showed no inclination to stray away from us. But she's a dog who follows her nose and the nose was very busy yesterday exploring the salty smells of seaweed and a dead seagull.  The beach was between Cottesloe and Fremantle - the coastal fringe of a crumbling suburb named Mosman Park. It's a designated dog beach, and is reputed to in the vicinity of where the the Dutch navigator Willem de Vlamingh and his motley crew briefly came ashore in 1697. It's not a good swimming beach. The littoral is marked by a shallow, sharp, limestone reef which extends well out into the water. However, it's okay for marine-desert snorkelling, and with luck, a few fish might be sighted. The richness of marine life in this area has significantly diminished over the past half century. There are no longer lots of empty sea shells for kids to discover on this beach. In years past when I've been to this area, it's not had a lot of sand. The annual winter storms take it away for rinsing, and then it's returned. This time there was plenty of the stuff. For most of the time we were their the beach was totally empty in both directions and I created a panoramic picture to prove it. See it on my Panoramio site. The best way to appreciate these experimental panoramic images is to keep clicking them up to maximum size. Can you find the hang glider? © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 | |||
| 7:20 am | New growth at Wireless Hill We've had some heavy showers of rain during the night which augers well for nearby Wireless Hill. Twenty six days have passed since a firebug set the northern slope alight. Rain is just what is needed to wash the ash in and stimulate the process of recovery. There have been a couple of other days of rain since the fire as well. We went back yesterday to check the progress. The road within the park was also an excellent place on a quiet Monday for our number two teenage daughter to have a driving lesson. As expected the blackboy/balga grass trees Xanthorrhea preissii have taken the fire in their stride. They had a flush of new growth about a foot high on their topknots. The overall scene yesterday was starting to look much better than the one I described with a selection of photos on 28 March 2008. Noticeably the rains had washed the ash from the remnant vegetation and the blackboys were no longer a ghostly shade of grey. Some of the casuarina trees had started to shed their layer of charred bark to reveal an orange newness beneath. Similarly, I noticed that a few eucalypts had green clumps at the very top of their scorched canopies and they were loaded with developing flower buds. The trees appeared to have swung into seed production overdrive in order to try to take advantage of the still semi-desolate ground beneath. The squat zamia 'palms' were showing significant flushes of growth as well. They have a very large tuber beneath the ground and recovery from a bushfire is never a problem, even for very small specimens. Also visible here and there were the first shoots of some catspaw clumps, Anigozanthos humilis, which are low form of kangaroo paw - they'll produce masses of low orangeish flowers when spring arrives in a few months. They sprout from a rhizome beneath the sand, but can also grow from seed. Last spring there were some spectacular displays of these plants on the opposite south eastern side of the hill, which has been recovering from a fire a few years ago. There were not a lot of signs of animal activity. I saw one bird track and a few small ant nests towards the edge of the fire line. Nothing else. The park rangers have been busy installing bio-degradable hemp? rolls and mats along the edge of an old access road which led to the original Telefunken radio tower facility. The intent of this effort is to control water runoff and prevent gullies forming. Unfortunately some of the most serious damage to the slope further downhill, which was caused by firefighters' vehicles, still remains. It wouldn't have been difficult to have given these areas a rake over by hand to restore the areas, but now the wheel tracks are filling with the leaf droppings from scorched trees. One of the other rapid recoveries in the fire zone has been the South African veldt grass Ehrharta calycina. I saw several clumps making fresh growth yesterday. There'll be an excellent opportunity to initiate an eradication program with some carefully applied systemic spot-spraying over the next month or so. So then, here's the folio of new Wireless Hill images on my Picasa site. (Click the pic.) Also, don't forget to compare them to the earlier ones on 28 March 2008. There's also a high definition picture from yesterday on my Panoramio site at http://www.panoramio.com/photo/9559826
© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Monday, April 21st, 2008 | |||
| 8:15 am | Fremantle football - don't panic 'Twas not a good weekend for either the Fremantle Dockers or the West Coast Eagles. Indeed it's not been good season so far with either of our state's major AFL football teams. Neither can muster what it takes to climb out of the doldrums. I have a theory about the reason for the Dockers' failings. It's the wussy nearly all-white rig they now seem to wear in most matches. It makes me feel like barracking for the other side whenever I see it. Take a look for yourself.  The tricolour guernsey on the left is the one everyone usually recognises for Fremantle. It became traditionally recognisable. Not so with the other insipid job. Excuse me, I think I need a chunder just from looking at it. Next weekend Fremantle are playing Geelong. They're the bunch of brutes who won last year's grand final. For Freo the prospects don't look good. But we've got our lucky Fremantle Dockers flag flying at the front of the house so that might do the trick. Fremantle players should study the design of the Geelong guernsey reproduced below. During next weekend's game if they see any player wearing these colours, then they shouldn't kick the ball to them. They won't kick it back in a hurry.  This might be a problem for some Fremantle blokes because the Geelong colours are the same as East Fremantle in the state league, and quite a few Docker's players have had an association with Old Easts, or the Sharks as modern spin doctors would like them called. Horizontal stripes use to be all the go in the olden days. The only way you could tell the difference between Geelong and Old Easts was that one team had blue and white stripes and the other had white and blue. But they played on different sides of the continent so it didn't matter. Nevertheless this gives me the opportunity to include a picture of Old Easts from my personal collection. The club started about 1898. The postcard is pre-1910. Some of the family names such as Doig played for East Fremantle over several generations. The Fremantle Dockers proudly associate part of their heritage to the club. Check out the unfortunate name of the umpire in the picture - Ivor Crapp.  © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
| Sunday, April 20th, 2008 | |||
| 7:26 am | Australia 2020 - talkfest or 'Thinking big' This weekend a thousand gullible individuals have been seduced by the Prime Minister Rudd into believing they are the "best and brightest" people in the nation. They have flocked to Canberra to participate in a happening designated as the Australia 2020 Summit. What shape should Australia be in 12 years time?  Anyone not invited can be reassured they didn't meet the Prime Minister's criteria. They were not amongst 'the chosen ones.' Too dumb. Democracy ground to a halt when their names appeared on the list. Yes there is a big list and you too can have a PDF copy. I think the undemocratic reality is that many of these people will push their own personal agendas irrespective of wider public opinion. The first thing this should tell us is that the Rudd government is into profiling Australians. Not because they are intellectually superior specimens in the population, but because of their, wealth, racialist affiliation, and their susceptibility to political manipulation. Actually I suppose governments have always done this. It's nothing new. Often tame academics are used in the watching process. I suppose what gauls me is that it has been billed as a democratic process. It smacks more of backroom cronyism - a means by which the Rudd government can explore the future political dependability of select individuals by stroking their egos with an invitation to a supposedly elitist gabfest. The official spin is that the delegates ' altruistically paid their own way' to attend. The immediately proves that some of them were not very bright at all - that's the ones who actually did pay their own way. Of course there will be plenty of people who didn't pay their own way. University academics, for example are always being covered to attend seminars, and I'd wager that the hundred or so Aborigines from around the nation also found some way to dip into their organisations' grant-funded coffers as well. Looking at the list in that area there's a lot of the same old names which have failed in the past to achieve very much of substance. There was a fair sprinkling of business entrepreneurs in attendance - their intellectualism was measured by their accumulation of wealth, and I'd dare to say that few of the names I've seen on the big list are hardly noted for their social or environmental consciousness. More they are noted for their greed and manipulative strategies to further their own aspirations. This is not say that there won't be some good ideas. There will. I liked the one put up by a lawyer yesterday that there must be severe penalties for politicians who lie, but apparently that didn't strike much of a chord with the politicians in attendance. There were the celebrities too. Sports and film stars are always political winners. Actress Cate Blanchett and her newborn baby have been at the central focus of the political photo opportunities this weekend. Everyone likes Cate. If Heath Ledger hadn't wiped himself out with an overdose earlier this year he might have been in attendance too. Ms Blanchett was on the main steering committee. That will look good on her CV. But if you have a look at the official website it can be seen that all members of that elite sub-list had plenty of backup help. Nothing like the under-resourced committees I've been on in the past. The fact is that the Rudd government set the conference agenda beforehand by establishing ten streams of interest for discussion this weekend. There are background papers written by departmental experts for each of these published on the official website. So I think it unlikely there will be any real "eureka moments" from eager delegates. Mr Rudd has indicated that whatever the outcome of this weekend, he will take his time with mulling it all over, and will not bound by anything suggested. So the excitement of many of the 1000 delegates may soon evaporate when they realise it was indeed only a talkfest. According to the official website, thirty two people declined to accept their invitation and were immediately replaced with people further down the list. © MMVIII Paul R. Weaver. Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website. Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them. About the writer Click here to see our backyard. Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz! | ||
