watching the cocoanuts with finnish subtitles

I suppose if I was really embarrassed about it I wouldn't tell you, but basically, I buy (secondhand) DVDs with Finnish subtitles and watch them with the subtitles. On Saturday when we went to Boronia I bought a copy of The Cocoanuts for a dollar. It's odd that the whole 'why a duck'/viaduct routine they translate 'viaduct' as 'silta' which means 'bridge'. 'Duck' in Finnish is 'ankka'. I assume that a lot of the time Finnish people watching things like this just use the captions to help them over the tough bits. 

'This suit has received an official demolition order' (actually a correct translation). 

'Around we go'

'He will be sad until he gets his shirt' (this is also exactly what is said in the song)

'I got my shirt back. Thank god I got my shirt.'

'I got rid of one. And one such is equivalent to three ordinary ones.' 

day four

I am not sure that even now, almost a full 24 hours later after getting back, I'm in a fit state to write a thing about anything after that extremely full-on drive from Albury back to Melbourne, which shouldn't have been so hard (it's meant to be only 3 and a half hours) but I think cumulatively all the driving and the slightly temperamental/wonky steering wheel on the car and the driving in pouring rain on a Friday night, did kind of get me down in the end. It's good to know that's how tough I am though. 

Overall, to Perry top marks for being a good companion who only needed 95% of my attention 98% of the time, and to all the nice random people I met along the way who always asked me if I was local and what breed Perry was. I will treasure those rando convos. 

Beagles met in Thurgoona. 

I asked Perry if he wanted to review Belvoir Park Dog Park, Wodonga and he looked at me as if to say 'let's not and say we did'.

And finally - three pictures summing up the zany madness that is Benalla:

I can't tell you how relieved I am to be back. We got our deposit back on the car, too. 

perry's guide to the dog parks of regional nsw - #2 kefford st off-lead dog park, bathurst

Perry says: great park, there is a black dog called Midnight here who will totally chase you and be chased, and also, will drink water from the water bucket so thoroughly she will put her front legs in it too and completely muddy it up. Plus, there's this amazing bridge that's so efficient you are in exactly the same place when you get to the other side. 

That concludes my review of the dog parks of regional NSW. Hope you enjoyed it!!! 

road trip day three (a week ago)

Slightly frustrating morning getting good material in Orange hampered by my own knowledge that my skills as a cameraperson are lacking, and always having a narrative running in the back of my head about how things can be used, though I am probably going to forget most of that when it comes to looking at the ‘raw footage’. 

I am presently at the Goldfields Beekeeper’s Inn in Vittoria which was the site of a major ‘new city’ of the 1970s as far as I know never even planned, the land merely purchased, then sold off again in the 1980s when it was realised/decided that it wasn’t going to happen. 

 

I had a coffee and some scones. Perry likes scones.

 

This afternoon the plan is to go to Bathurst for a couple of hours then to hot foot it to Albury (a five hour drive) leaving as early as possible so as to not have to drive that long in the dark. However we do have to visit a dog park in Bathurst so who knows how long we’ll be.

 

There is no internet/phone coverage in Vittoria, or is that just a Vodaphone thing. 

 

road trip day two (a week ago)

17 May: So I don't know how much driving time/kms we've clocked up yesterday and today, only that it is a lot. We were in Leeton last night and we are near (but not entirely in) Orange tonight. In both cases Perry has been a little freaked out by the unfamiliar surroundings but he eventually adapts. He has been a good traveller, sleeping most of the time. Lucky. 

Coleambally rice apologists

Backs of shops Colleambally. I wanted to photograph their fronts but there is major renovation going on. 

Some bird we saw in Whitton

The famous Griffin water towers. Only one is original. 

For a lot of the journey I listened to a book called Palm Beach, Finland which is a comedy crime thriller by Antti Tuomainen from 2017. For some reason the person reading it has decided that the less sophisticated, criminal types in the book (they are all Finns, ostensibly speaking Finnish) must talk in West Country tones. The characters in the book are constantly looking at each other, it's a nervous tic / punctuation for Tuomainen ('he looked at her. "Well," she said...').

That took forever but once it was over I listened to podcasts for the rest of today's driving. 

perry's guide to the dog parks of regional nsw #1: cooinda park, wyalong

There were no dogs here when we visited on the late afternoon of 17 May 2023. I'm going to suggest it smelt of plenty of them. It is a swanky set up too. Not pleasant surrounds though (unless you like constant truck traffic).

 

road trip (last week)

So this is a week ago but right now when I wrote it...

Perry and I are gearing up to go on a big fat road trip for the next three days - staying in Leeton tonight, Bathurst tomorrow night and um I forget where on Thursday night - probably Albury. I hope I booked that... ha ha. I have been mainly concentrating on the Bathurst-Orange (and Vittoria) leg of the journey and the practicalities of disrupting our week and getting out of the house for three and a half days. 

So this afternoon after finishing my staff meeting I am going to hot foot it to Coburg where Perry will be spending a couple of active hours with his cousin Lenny (Lennie?)* then we will make our way to Leeton first stop Seymour. This is all field work - filming work, photographing places with a view to writing up a conference paper etc. My main concern at this point is how Perry will behave out of his comfort zone and whether it will be possible to give him enough exercise etc when a big part of every day will be driving (he sleeps in the car, so that's great, but I will have to sleep at night...). 

Stay tuned for what happened... 

*Lenni

vale pete brown

Pete's teeth were probably not better than Jack's but he knew to cover them up

As usual a range of feelings and opinions wash over me when I hear about the death of someone who impacted on me from an early age but who was very old and had a good life as far as I can tell (albeit one which apparently ended with a patchwork of different varieties of cancer). Pete Brown was an interesting man to me and while his lyrics for Cream weren't so important as far as I was concerned the lyrical content of the first two Jack Bruce albums (or at least the first two with singing on them) was top notch.* Apparently the high opinion of PB's lyrics is one of the probably many opinions I share with Martin Scorsese, or so I gather from PB's obituary. 

I am also just plain appreciative of a man who was happy to be depicted in this manner on the cover of his own record. (He made a few. I have only ever heard this compilation of various releases 1969-1970something. I like a lot of it, but it would have been better with someone who can sing singing on it - this is something I almost never say, so I guess I really don't like PB's singing style). 

And then, I got this off the shelf and flicked through it and wow, it's actually pretty terrible, mostly. Sort of arrogant horny 'chicks eh' tossed off nonsense. And when I say 'sort of', I really say it only as two words that would redundantly start a sentence tempering the reality of the situation. I see that in Washington State there is a bookshop that will sell you this book for almost US$400. If it's signed or has been dipped in gold or something they don't mention that in the description. My recommendation is that if you are walking down the street really bored and you're like me, terribly short attention span, and you see this book lying on the ground, you should pick it up, flick through it for as long as it takes your mind off stuff, then put it somewhere convenient for the next person like us. 

But anyway, I think he was on balance actually pretty good. 

* To save you looking it up I'll tell you that JB recorded an instrumental jazz album, Things We Like, in 1968 but it wasn't released until after his first post-Cream recording, Songs for a Tailor, in 1970. The subsequent LP, Harmony Row, was in the Songs for a Tailor vein. 

perry's guide to the dog parks of melbourne #3: martin reserve fenced dog park, west footscray

The one thing to be said for this place: the locals don't gibber and retreat at the sign of a bit (or a lot) of rain. There is an extensive dirt patch and a lot of birds who fly away when you chase at them. There is also a black dog called Millie who likes to chase and be chased. 

perplexed by blogger

I was just wandering through my old gmail address (I had been suggested a random strange address by gmail when I signed up and my real name wasn't available, I used it for 3-4 years and then decided I could actually do better using my full name as my gmail address, don't know whether I regret that or not but now I have a number of things attached to that gmail address, such as this blog, and occasionally check it) and I found a notification from blogger that, a la the problem I noted in my previous post, a post of mine had been removed a few months ago (I think) as unsuitable and not conforming to blogger's standards.

I tracked down the post and examined it. It was a short, very ill-formed musing on the old revival cinemas such as the Ritz, the Valhalla, the Longford etc which I used to go to in the 70s. Blogger might have wanted to remove it for being stunningly pedestrian but I don't think that's covered in their community standards. I actually would not give a loose root if that post was deleted forever as it had no particular value and was probably written just as a prelude to possibly going forth and visiting a new Valhalla-themed event that was being publicised at the time. The raunchiest and most controversial element was the mentioning of the name of film advertised in the poster illustrated above. I would love to know what the bloggerbot objected to in that post - I've asked for it to be reviewed after I changed the s-word to an s-asterisk-x word, we'll see what happens, but then again as I check that email address about once a year, maybe we won't. 

mark lewisohn and tune in

So ten years after it was published I am taking the deep dive (cliché, sorry) into Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, the (audiobook version of the) 1000 page history of the Beatles up to I guess they record 'Love Me Do' or something. TBH I was less interested in the story as I was in Lewisohn's famed comprehensiveness and claims to have uncovered unknown material, though actually I don't know enough to really know what this is (he doesn't flag it). (Similarly, and I appreciate this more, he doesn't constantly point out what the future held for them, which keeps the reader mindful of the extraordinary unlikeliness of them ever doing anything with their lives, let alone becoming megastars). One thing that strikes me about this narrative (I'm up to about mid-1960; the book goes to 1962) is that they are convinced they are extraordinary, but that there isn't a huge amount of evidence at this point that it's true - the only really interesting thing about them is that they write their own songs, although when they perform live they don't play a lot of their own songs, and their meagre triumphs/attractions/celebrated talents are the ability to mimic others. Other players come and go and are generally only barely tolerated. 

Lewisohn is a good writer* and I like his bolshie pro-research, pro-history arrogance. Does this make me want to read his biography of Benny Hill? Yeah, actually it does. 

Note: curiously I originally chose to illustrate this tiny thought with an image purloined off eBay of some child's drawing of the Beatles from eBay. I didn't credit it because there was no name attached, just captioned it as that - a child's drawing from eBay. Blogger refused to publish it, issuing me with a ban notice and instructing me to read all about what was prohibited from Blogger, suggesting I knew very well what I'd done. I suppose I'm still not entirely sure that it was the drawing or its caption which upset the bot - I guess I never will know (posting the drawing again below, sans caption). The above image by the way is AI, the prompt being 'The Beatles as schoolchildren cats'. 

* A good mainstream writer able to write for broad appeal. 

i should be embarrassed but nah

So the fact is that I have recently - without even actually noticing the moment - achieved half a million silver fish in Neko Atsume. I think I have been 'playing' this 'game' (I don't really think it is a game - it's unbelievably meaningless and has no competitive aspect to it, though I gather there is an option - ffs - to actually buy more stuff with your real money to put into the game). (I am similarly bothered by the fact that it is possible to buy 'time extensions' in Duolingo so you can, effectively, skew your time-sensitive tests and move up the competitive ladder... but... why would you and how do you think it helps you learn anything???). 

Anyway, I've been nervous-habitly filling two virtual cat bowls for seven years now, and it brings the cats to my yard. Kudos to the creators of this game for the sense of peace it brings. 
 

 

homicide 18 feb 1975 'the animal that had to be fed'

 

This is not a terrible episode but I don't have much to say about it, except to note that the character above (who I think is played by Alexandra Hines - I might have got mixed up) is referred to at some point as a 'known lesbian' which I think is funny. Unless I'm wrong that's Nina Bodarenko behind her in the picture above, and in the picture above that, she's menacing Robyn Taylor played by Clare Bamford. I might have got all of this wrong. 

I am most intrigued by the location in the picture at top - might be Kensington. 

homicide 4 feb 1975, 'mr spence'

This episode is more interesting for the way the story is told, than for the story itself, which is pretty pedestrian (ok so the man didn't kill his wife so he could have a relationship with a co-worker precisely - it seems he killed her kind of in self-defence - but he still killed her and it's credit to the talents of Homicide cast and crew that they were able to spin this out to an hour). 

So here's Keith Eden, in the 13th of his 14th roles in Homicide, as Mr Spence, waiting outside Flinders St station for Helen Taylor - played by Patsy King who oddly enough was also appearing in the 13th of her 14 Homicide roles. 

Surprisingly this episode - well, this scene at least - was shot almost a year before it was shown, on 27 February 1974. Here's the front page of the Age for that day:

Btw Whitlam was using 'fantastic' in the old sense, of pertaining to fantasy. 

I suppose it was semi-nice to see the old Princes Bridge Station roof (?) area looking out towards Flinders St, I went up there a few times, it was always stupid.