halloween

Woy Woy a couple of weeks ago. 

the monetisation experiment

 

The impact on my blog of the adsense ads is just so ugly that I am blown away by it. I am 99% certain that I will end the experiment in a few days (so far I have earned around 1c from it, and that is not an exaggeration). Even if the rewards were, you know, a dollar a day I don't think I could hack it. (If the rewards were ten dollars a day, well, I'd leave this blog to its own devices for a couple of years to just earn money for itself and write a novel or something instead). 

more ryan - episode 21, first aired 13 october 1973

 

No huge anything to say here just wanted to celebrate once again the great supporting cast that the Crawfords shows drew together in the 60s and 70s such as the redoubtable Syd Conabere who shows up repeatedly in different shows and is here playing... god, I am not even sure, some man called Jacob Jones who faked his own death to protect his daughter from the 'syndicate' - ? I wasn't paying enough attention but I was pleased to see him. The daughter in question ('Anastasia') was played by Sally Conabere. Some relation? Well, I don't know for certain.* 

SC was born in 1918 so was 55 here. He died in 2008. His wife Betty was in eight Crawfords episodes in the early 70s. 

* Don't write in and complain, of course I do. 

the great australian bite

So I don't think I've mentioned that lately I've been watching Ryan, the Rod Mullinar private detective show which also has Pamela Stephenson in it. I'll tell you more about it sometime. But right now I just want to fill you in on an episode (Episode 21) I've been looking at in which a lot of the action centres around a locale about two minutes' walk from where I live, notably at a restaurant called The Great Australian Bite. It was on the corner of Molesworth St and, I guess, Harker St (though that corner seems to be exactly the spot where Harker becomes Curzon). 

Molesworth, looking south. 

Looking down Curzon. 

I think this is the interior of the Great Australian Bite, but maybe not. It's surely not a set. 

The actual establishment. Sometime soon I'll show you what it looks like today. 

Cornelia Frances in Harker st

And the flats across the street. So that's about it. Oh, except here's an ad. 

monetising

So I decided I would open an adsense account for this blog and see what happened. A few thoughts were had over this. But the bottom line is I get ads all the time when I read things online (eg newspapers I subscribe to, magazines ditto) and while I don't love it, nor do I despise it. The other things is that while I don't expect to make any big $$ - I'm sure if anything it'll be a pittance - I was intrigued when I saw that, when I was in Finland two months ago, my Finnish readership really picked up. Not people reading about Finnish things but surely people in Finland being recommended things by the algorithm because I was nearby. Well, maybe the algorithm will be inspired by $$ to push my product more widely. In the unlikely event I make any money I will give it to charity (probably international wildlife fund) but writers need to be read and I want eyes on my little pearls of wisdom. You understand that, don't you?* 

Now, here's the first of a few pictures from our Sydney/Woy Woy trip on the weekend. 

*OK so I now see what it looks like and I don't necessarily like it very much. I'll give it a couple of weeks just as an experiment but at first glance I feel I am demeaning us all. 

 

discord and rhyme and court and spark and ollie olsen

 

I don't have a lot of time tonight and I only want to say a couple of things, one is trivial and the other is not trivial, so it seems trivialising of one to put it with the other, but also, a blog is just a diary of things that happen, isn't it. 

So for the last few days I have been listening to this podcast Discord and Rhyme's long discussion of Court and Spark. It's not necessarily my favourite JM album (possibly Hejira is or maybe, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter - but tbh I could listen to any one of those three with no wincing at any time, so....). The weird thing about listening to people prognosticate about Court and Spark for me is that that album is so ubiquitous - I reckon I first heard it 45 years ago if not more and I know it very, very intimately, to the degree that I can't really critically judge it - if anything, it shaped me. There are lines in there that taught me about ways of thinking (no, I'm not going to quote anything, that would look soft) every bit as much as anything I read in a book by George Orwell. Who I was probably also reading voraciously when I was ten, how ridiculous. 

The D&R peeps are a bit hard to get a handle on but there are a lot of them and they come together in different configurations to discuss LPs. They generally have a ridiculous affection for prog particularly, get this, the Moody Blues (!!!) and other trash like Yes or, I don't know, Pink Floyd. But they do have some insights. In this case though the most amazing bit for me was the naysayer of the gang, who clearly did not like the album at all, was very new to it, and kept saying that he couldn't retain any of the songs in his head after he heard them. I mean, I'm able to summon this music up in my head any moment of the day, so that is of course bizarre to me, but of course it's not wrong, it's just hard to imagine. So, I suppose the weird part for me is to try and think of there being people who never heard C&S from a young age and then all through their lives, and yet who otherwise present as rational souls with an understanding of the human world (ok, ok I'm overstating it). (The real revelation for me is how much C&S has meant to me most of my life). 

The other thing, which the above potentially trivialises though not intentionally, is that Ollie Olsen died today. It's a real shame, not unexpected though, he was apparently in a bad way for some time. I had a great fondness for Ollie though I only met him once. That was a pleasant interaction though. He was a very important figure in my life in many ways and, of course, produced some incredible music. Not much more to say. 

flook 16 october 1954

 

...and, rather bizarrely, this is the point at which Flook stopped running in US / Canadian newspapers. I wonder if there's any way to find out why the run ended. I mean of course there's no point in making a big announcement about a cancellation - it'll only get people upset - but this is a really strange place to end... 

flook 15 october 1954

 

Flook 14 October 1954

 

warming up

Yesterday was prelude to hot

Flook 13 October 1954

 

Flook 12 October 1954

 

Flook 11 October 1954

 

Flook 9 October 1954

 

Flook 8 October 1954

 

Flook 7 October 1954

 

fishermans bend

The weather on my phone said it was not going to rain this morning (also the Bureau of Meteorology's website showed precisely not any rainclouds at all) so Perry and I went to Fishermans Bend mainly with the intention of visiting Westgate Park but it rained heavily on the way there and when it stopped we were just passing Salmon St so I thought whatever let's have a little moment here and we walked around not just Salmon St but by accident we found ourselves in a massive open space.

It's funny to think all this is just existing there, isn't it. When I was born this terrain was easternmost point of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation runways - the western half of which is now Westgate Park. But between when I was born and now it has also been the site of a cluster of large buildings, I am not sure what they were. 

Anyway so, Perry and I were heading back to the car (along the way I insisted he have his photo taken) when it started raining heavily again, and I just thought, fuck it, we'll cut our losses so we came back. That's my/our story. 

In the car I was listening to a podcast in the Discord and Rhyme series, about the Wire album Pink Flag. As you know, podcasts are just distractions for me and I tend not to want to learn anything from them though in this case I sort of did. Nothing I needed much less wanted to know - mainly the ways in which Pink Flag tracks sound a bit like REM (who of course completely postdate it) or the Minutemen (ditto). Anyway, I was fine with it.  

Flook 6 October 1954

 

melbourne royal show