Considering my age

I had a phone conversation yesterday and it's still bothering me.
I won't go into gory detail, but a nutritionist called me regarding blood tests I had coming up. She wanted me to remind my doctor to include a certain test, for blood fats or lipids, I think. Either that or she said limpets. I don't think there are blood limpets, though.
I did love Don Knotts in The Incredible Mr Limpet:

But I digress – wantonly, deliberately – because what she said, after I asked why they needed this particular test, made me want to beg her pardon:
"Well, considering your age, I think it's a good idea."
She used this phrase three times! I'm 39, for fuck's sake!

Since when did people in their thirties become subject to this polite condemnation?

Fast food

Well that was a first.
As I was updating BiscuitWatch, Mick called me to the living room window. He'd heard some unfamiliar bird racket and saw what can only be described as a feeding frenzy in one of the palm trees in the yard.

Presumably once a year, the tree unfurls those big yellow seed pods, on which a bunch of rainbow lorikeets were having a feast:

They're gorgeous and, quite literally, chirpy. They always sound so excited to be wherever they are. This is the first time they've visited us though and I was thrilled but within half an hour they were gone.
It was an avian hit-and-run.

Now, spookily, the pod is swarming with bees instead:

I never thought I'd say it, but this is better than daytime television.

They don't give a hoot

Old MacDonald's farm taught countless children that cows moo, pigs oink, sheep baa, and so on.
Well, I don't recall him having any owls but I grew up assuming they all hoot, that is until a family of owls set up home in a silky oak beside the house:

As I discovered, they're barking owls, which don't hoot. They don't really bark, either – they make unpleasant squawks and throat-clearing noises, neither of which lends itself to a catchy moniker.
They're scientific name? Ninnox Connivens, which sounds like a Bond villainess. We just called the first one we saw Oscar and have come to refer to them collectively as the Oscars.
There's a mother, father and two children, who vary in size and colour but have common traits. They're not as nocturnal as most owls and seem happy to spend their days either napping or engaging in staring competitions.
They're very good at this:

They always seem to have a stern look about them, but sometimes they look unimpressed to the point of disdain:

It's been a while since we've seen them in the tree and I guess the two young ones have flown off somewhere else. At night, though, I still hear the flapping of wings every now and then as one of them swoops on some unspeakable delicacy from the backyard.
It's kind of comforting to know they're somewhere nearby.

BiscuitWatch 3: Free Biscuit

When we last saw Biscuit, she was happily grazing in the lush pastures of the empty lot behind the house. Little did she know, that was a rare event, and now it seems the memory haunts her because she's been spending her afternoons standing by the fence, gazing wistfully at what she cannot have:

The neighbour who looks after the lot is a very nice bloke but he suffers from an affliction common to men in suburbia and regional centres – he loves to mow. It's quite clear that he considers it a pleasure rather than a chore. He mows this particular block far more often than is necessary – especially considering there are four horses next door desperate to come in for a good grass-binge – but it seems he can't help himself.
He doesn't use some fancy ride-on affair, mind you. He pushes his old deafening, fume-belching machine, starting at a corner and making his way in an anti-clockwise direction to the jacaranda tree in the middle. Very slow and methodical.
And with poor little Biscuit watching on.

I've entertained notions of rescuing her from of her dirt-pit and setting her free to roam and chew to her heart's content, but there's a big padlock on the gate. Besides, there's hardly any grass anyway now that it's just been shorn. Still, whenever Biscuit looks at me, I can't help but sense reproach in her eyes, as if I'm part of some conspiracy to deny her a treat:

I may be going a little insane, but I gave her a mini-donut this morning as a goodwill gesture.
She seemed to take it well.

Tradie Gaga

My first encounter with a coolie hat was at a very young age. So young, in fact, I had no idea who or what a coolie was. And not once do I recall it ever being mentioned that the term might be considered offensive.
I don't know which year it was (let's just say it was the late '70s), but I do remember our primary school class was re-enacting the dance of the mushrooms in Fantasia. It's performed to a movement in Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite and I vaguely remember it involved a lot of shuffling around in circles with our heads down and palms together. Much like this!

Which minor school spectacular this was for I have no idea, but I presume everyone's parents were there, given the work required of them.
In order for us to achieve the full theatrical effect, parents had to turn their darling children into even more adorable little Chinamen. In a feat worthy of MacGyver, my mother accomplished this with only a piece of red cardboard and a pair of black pantyhose. The former became a coolie hat, the latter was plaited and attached to the back – instant ponytail! The transformation was miraculous.

Mercifully, there is no photographic evidence of this charming slice of casual racism. By the way, there were no Asian students in my school at the time.

I was thrown back into this memory earlier today as Mick and I were leaving Woolies. Across the road is St Someguy's Anglican church, which is having its sandstone façade cleaned. It's going to look lovely!

Then I noticed something unusual – the hat on one of the workers:

It seems to have a label on it, maybe an advertisement for the company he works for, and I wonder if this has become a new uniform.
Is it a reinforced coolie hard-hat? Can you imagine these on every building site? I know it's effective for shade and might allow falling heavy objects to simply slide right off but this just feels wrong. It also looks a bit ridiculous with a discomfortingly camp, almost high-fashion edge. Very Tradie Gaga.
(Here's a fun game: tell a burly tradie wearing one of these things you "love the hat" and see what happens.)

If this is indeed a turning point in Australian working mens' headwear then they can't very well call it a coolie hat, can they? They'll have to come up with new, preferably virile, name for it...

Good luck with that!

The mobile gourmet

I meant to post this a while ago.
It was taken on the High Street mall on that raft race day, but it could have been at any community event. Indeed, a variation on this fat-and-sugarmobile seems to appear at every fair/sporting meet/gathering that involves small children in every town in the country:

I love how it covers all the food groups – hot chips, dagwood dogs, waffles and fairy floss. And it's fairly riddled with upbeat qualifications. The drinks are never less than "icy cold", the dagwood dogs always reassuringly "hot". And the fairy floss? Nothing but the finest.

They are always aggressively carnivalesque in appearance and you half expect a clown, or perhaps a mime, to emerge from behind the little serving window.
For the full effect, though, you need a surly proprietor like the one in the above photo, who was busy closing up shop when I took it and gave me a truly filthy look.

Perhaps he thought I was a health inspector.

Bath time

I had a doctor's appointment in Newcastle yesterday so Mick took the opportunity to go for a swim at the Newcastle Ocean Baths. I love the very idea of ocean baths and this is a particularly fab Art Deco affair that has recently had a facelift, or at least a fresh coat of paint:

The baths themselves are lovely to swim in and wisely divided into a lap pool and large, square, do-what-you-want pool. Given the generally older crowd, the latter is usually sedate.

It's advisable, however, to know when they're being cleaned, otherwise you're greeted by this:

Beside the baths on the northern end is a strange little structure, which I presume is a sort of pump-house but almost looks like a downsized nuclear bunker. Cute but sinister:

It's a ridiculous notion, but then I found this online:
On the night of 7 June 1942, a shell from a Japanese submarine shattered against the sea wall just north of the Newcastle Ocean Baths, apparently in an attempt to put a search light there out of action. Within 15 minutes, the submarine fired eight star shells and 26 high explosive shells before breaking off and submerging under fire from Fort Scratchley. No-one was killed.

Goodness!
One disquieting thing about swimming in Newcastle – at the baths or any of the beaches – is the ever-present queue of tankers on the horizon. It's a maritime traffic jam that seemingly has no end.
This was a close as my camera could zoom in (if you click to enlarge the baths photos above and then squint you can just barely see them in the background):

They're presumably all waiting to be filled to the brim with lots of shiny new coal, or perhaps to unload more consignments of "authentic" boomerangs from China – who can say?
On this last visit, I counted 23.

Nature's added extras

We planted a passionfruit vine for two reasons.
1) We like passionfruit.
2) We needed something to grow over the ugly stumps that once supported a privet tree (considered a pest) that Mick chopped down because it was attracting Indian myna birds (also a pest).

What I didn't expect (yet more Belated Discovery Channel) were the flowers.
They just have so much going on:

In fashion terms (and I was a chiffon technician for a few years), I'd have to say they're a lotta look for the money.

Critters of The Bend #3

Pity the poor little Bronze Orange Bug nymph.
Not only does its scientific name, Musgraveia Sulciventris, sound like the evil headmistress of an all-girls' school, it's commonly known as the stink bug.
After some Googling I discovered the ones that had been all over our citrus tree were 4th instar nymphs. Instar is a developmental stage and, as it so happens, it's their most attractive:

Still, they're dirty little sapsuckers and I should have destroyed them rather than take their portraits. By all accounts they squirt an "evil-smelling" chemical at perceived attackers. I never had any problem.
Indeed, the two below seemed oblivious to my presence. I just wonder – were they gossiping about the other bugs or having sex?

Big fat homage

Via Joe.My.God I discovered the amazing Hard Ton, self-proclaimed disco queen. Indescribable.
Well, not really. He's an Italian gay bear who dresses like Edith Massey in Female Trouble and sounds like an acid-house flashback.

Best of all is the cover of his EP:

And the original Grace Jones:

Fabulous.

In praise of evil robots

They played the umpteenth repeat of that 138th episode special of The Simpsons tonight, the one with the early incarnations of the characters and deleted scenes. I instinctively grabbed my camera.

My favourite deleted scene remains the one in which Mr Burns, instead of releasing the hounds, instructs Smithers to "release the robotic Richard Simmons!"
The terror soon mounts as 'Richard' launches into an aerobics routine to Shake Your Booty:

As if that weren't evil enough, in a nod to Westworld, he suddenly snaps, forcing Smithers to take matters into his own hands (a nice closet-queen-showdown subtext). He produces a shotgun and blasts the now manically booty-shaking robot in the head, only to discover, to his horror, he's like the Terminator:

The scene ends in spectacularly explosive fashion with the immortal line, "His ass is gonna blow!"

Funnily enough, I only just watched Westworld the other week on TV. A couple of things struck me.
Firstly, Michael Crichton wrote both it and Jurassic Park and, well, they're basically the same story. Simply replace "robot" with "dinosaur" and you pretty much have it. Nice work if you can get away with it.
Secondly, Yul Brynner made a damn sexy robot:

In terms of special effects, Jurassic Park was groundbreaking, sure, but Westworld, which came out in 1973, had some cool pixellated robot-vision.
Here's human prey on horseback!

Creepy robot lab!

It's actually very effective and quite contemporary-looking.
Sadly, like poor Richard, Yul suffers a fiery demise.

As for the original Terminator, I always thought the most exciting thing about evil Arnie was his bare arse.
That, I've yet to capture.

Strange fruit

Okay, so we have a citrus tree in the backyard. I say "citrus" because we're not exactly sure whether it's going to produce lemons, limes, oranges or mandarins.
When we moved in it had obviously been neglected and was covered in sooty mould (we found this out after taking a cutting to the Bunnings nursery). Anyway, it clearly had no intention of bearing any fruit so Mick decided to give it a bit of a pruning:

Personally, I thought he went a little overboard, but before long it was sprouting everywhere:

It's now far healthier-looking than it ever was and a while ago the flowers starting appearing, followed by their attendant bees. It's all so Gardening Australia!

Naturally enough, dozens of small fruit have since appeared, although it's still difficult to ascertain what type of fruit they are (this is all completely new to me):

I mean really, they could be anything, right?
Well! Mick spotted something high in the tree on the weekend and now I'm baffled. Either we have one of those grafted "fruit salad" trees that produce two types of citrus fruit, or we have a mutant on our hands:

While every other fruit has only reached the dimensions of a large marble, this thing is the size, shape and texture of a mature orange.
It's kind of making me uneasy. Why is it so big? Why is it the only one? Is it an orange or is it the world's largest lime? Did the tree somehow mate with the pumpkin plant (which is still on the march, by the way)?
And while I'm at it, what's a term to describe the opposite of "runt of the litter"?

Stay tuned – this could turn delicious.

The early worm

I got up before seven this morning and was rewarded with this:

Normally I would have missed it but Mick had seen an ad for a garage sale at the old rectory in Morpeth, a pretty little town east of Maitland on the river. You always have to get in early for these things and even though we arrived at the advertised 7.30 start-time it was already busy with professional scavengers. These people are serious.
Given the venue, we were hoping for some old church fittings or something of similar interest but it was just the regular crap, although it did include, bizarrely, a very heavy, realistic-looking toy handgun. As usual, Mick managed to ferret out something good, this time a couple of Two Ronnies videos. (Can't wait to watch 'The Worm That Turned' again.) This of course prompted a bout of purchase envy and I ended up spending $2 on a set of six small bowls for which I have absolutely no use whatsoever. 
Nuts? Condiments? Japanese tea ceremony?
It was worth getting up to see that sunrise though, plus my favourite building in the area, something of a local landmark. I took this photo a few years back:

The pills were first sold in the 1850s and were recommended as being an aid "for biliousness, dyspepsia, constipation, sick headache, scofula, kidney disease, liver complaint, jaundice, piles, dysentery, colds, boils, malarial fever, flatulency, foul breath, eczema, gravel, worms, female complaints, rheumatism, neuralgia, la grippe, palitation, and nervousness". 

All rather impressive, but "gravel"? 

Twas brillig

We saw Alice in Wonderland – not in 3-D, unfortunately, but it still looked amazing in typical Tim Burton fashion.
I loved Helena Bonham-Carter and her enormous angry head, as well as Matt Lucas as Tweedles Dum and Dee, but I couldn't shake the image of both Edward Scissorhands and Willy Wonka whenever Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter had a close-up. I think I blame it on the make-up.
The one thing that disappointed me was that there wasn't more of Stephen Fry's Cheshire Cat. The CG design was brilliant but best of all was his voice – so silkily menacing. Just perfect.

I would have been happy with a whole movie based on that character.

When good phrases go bad

To "carry coals to Newcastle" is to waste one's time and effort. Or, as Thomas Fuller put it in 1661, "To carry Coals to Newcastle, that is to do what was done before; or to busy one's self in a needless imployment."

The Newcastle in question is in England, but it applies to the Newcastle 40 minutes away from us, although in this case it's not so much pointless as disturbing. While our Newcastle was so-named in 1804 (having previously been known as King's Town) for its main attribute – coaliness – it seems the carrying of coal is only just gearing up.
Lately there have been a few news reports about increased mining activity in the Hunter Valley and I was taken aback by some of the stats. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the amount of coal taken by train – through Maitland – will nearly double by 2020. It's mostly coming from Singleton and surrounding areas, about half an hour's drive west. Mick and I have driven past these open-cut mines and frankly they were too ugly and depressing to photograph. Huge, irreparable scars. And then there are all the underground mines currently in operation or being proposed, which gives me the willies just thinking that beneath a scene like this is a massive hole, getting bigger:

What truly boggles my mind is the sheer volume. These trains are constant – 50 a day, reportedly, although it's feels like more – and they seem to go on forever (up to 100 carriages):

Then they return, empty but still lumbering:

Eventually they'll run out of coal, of course, but I shudder to think of what will be left. You can't say this too loudly around here – a lot of people are employed in one way or another by the industry – but I'm relieved that among the landowners who could thwart further destruction are some fairly powerful people, including the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, no less, who owns a large stud farm in the area.
Now there's a showdown I'd like to see, preferably with him in full regalia:

In any case, I'm just extremely grateful Mick didn't buy a house closer to the railway line.

Harvest time

A proud moment – Mick harvested the first pumpkin today.
It weighs five kilos. Not exactly Best In Show but pretty impressive for something we grew by accident. And there are many others almost ready to pick.
Fortunately, when we cut it open it looked perfect. Taste TBA.
(The cutlery is not so much a serving suggestion as a provider of scale.)