I felt it was missing something.
There, fixed.
I felt it was missing something.
There, fixed.
A big hat tip, or a doff rather, with a big Victorian-era hat – something tall and full of mercury— to Nabs, who has sent me a link to the most wonderful thing on the entire Internets.
No, not the guy who can catch a laptop in his buttocks, although that is definitely up there. I mean the Lovelace and Babbage graphic novel / blog.
Lovelace and Babbage is a steampunk cartoon blog started by the wonderful Sydney Padua, who describes herself as “an animator, story artist, and tiresome bore [yeah, right] working mostly in visual effects in London.” She’s a friend of Suw Charman, the originator of Ada Lovelace Day, which led to “Wouldn’t it be hee-larious if there was a comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage fighting crime? Thanks, I’ll be here all week!”
Start here, with Lovelace: The Origin.
Follow the links at the top bloggy-style, and enjoy.
Via a comment by Nabs at Still Life with Cat.
Hauschka – Morgenrot from Jeff Desom on Vimeo.
Morgenrot is an animation made from old photos of New York from the Library of Congress. That haunting music is from Hauschka (Volker Bertlemann), a modern composer from Dusseldorf.
More about it here.
He who must not be named came home from school complaining that poetry was stupid.
He mentioned that he’d had a poem set in class by someone called “Ogden Nash” and that was the quintessence of stupid.
Reader, I did what anyone would have done in my place (i.e. obsessive Ogden Nash reader when young.) I ran to the bookcase and searched until I’d found the aged brown copy of Good Intentions, rescued from the last big cull of family books, bought by my mum, who died in the Summer of Love, 1968. I wanted to show HWMNBN that Ogden Nash wrote wacky and offbeat poetry which ought to be right up his alley.
My parents were of a generation that wrote their names and dates of purchase on book flyleaves, so I looked inside the dessicated brown cover and I found this. See over the fold: My mum must have bought this from a second hand bookshop.
(more…)
This was the most terrible, horrible, really bad day. (Warning: Swear alert.)
I jumped off the train in the city and rode up the escalator… with… my shoulders strangely light. Uh oh. My backpack with my wallet in it, with my car keys in it, my cheque book in it, my life in it.
That morning I get a call at work from girlchild who’s been rung by someone called Emily with a mobile number. Apparently she has my backpack. But I call and call all day and every time it goes to voice mail. Why? Why would she do that? Anyway, my workmates gave me lunch and hugs and a travelcard. I love them.
And as usual, Connex excelled themselves in not giving a fuck. Note to the Attorney-General if you’re reading this, as I know you do of a Friday evening: If any disaffected youngsters are thinking of going the abandoned backpack-bomb route, I can tell you Connex don’t give a royal shit about ownerless backpacks reaching Flinders street. Just saying.
I still don’t know what’s going to happen. All I want is to crawl under the doona and cry, but girlchild’s friends are all coming to have a birthday sleepover and I have to make with the fucking Mrs-coping-Mum.
I definitely am going to need some chocolate tonight (and girlchild has a Brunetti’s cheesecake.)
I only heard the term “site-specific” for the first time last week, and I saw it again today, like a make of car you’ve just come to notice.
I love decaying, secret urban and industrial sites. Love. them. When Barista put up a post on the Japanese ghost island Gunkanjima, I was happily googling it for days on end. Same with the motorcycle rider of Chernobyl and the wonderful secret tunnels under the city of London. I’m too chicken to go where the Cave Clan used to go in Melbourne, but if they ever decided to do guided tours, well.
We saw Collapse last weekend – a site-specific installation/play, which uses the heavily patina’d wharf area between the boat clubs and the shipbuilding factories at Williamstown.
In November 2008, Melbourne based company Red Cabbage will be installing a large-scale site-specific performance which will transform a secret historical location in Williamstown.
The Melbourne premiere of Collapse is a tale of human survival within a society in crisis. Audiences will embark on a journey by boat to discover a post-apocalyptic community seeking grace in the midst of adversity.
We had to assemble at Spotswood Scienceworks jetty (Scienceworks is another collection of cool old industrial archaeology, and that whole precinct is a great hangout for the industrial landscape lover, although it’s not what it used to be.) A boat took us to the wharf where the Red Cabbage collective used the old buildings (the same ones used for the Tall Ships project, I think) where I got to enjoy some vintage decay plus interesting weirdness. We weren’t really expecting a plot and suspected it might be quite installation-y, so we weren’t disappointed.
They also take you into the old morgue, which is a bluestone building smaller than the average school portable, with hefty shelves all around the perimeter. Not many ghostly vibrations there, though, with so many people crowding in.
We finished up at the Pirate’s Tavern, which is the hidden hideout of the game fishing club. It’s got a great scruffy personality. They hire the place out for parties– it’s worth a look, the fact that it’s all so hidden is the best part of the fun.
…for foiling diabolical masterminds, of course, goes to Tigtog.
It’s a bit embarassing because I always fix these things myself, but I simply could_not_find where the diabolical masterminds spotty socially-challenged wankers had placed the links that were causing the Balcony to look like a very low-class establishment when searched for in Google. Many thanks to Tigtog.
When I am old I shall wear purple play God Save the Queen (the Sex Pistols version) at the Sydney Biennale.
H/T to Malcolm. (No, not that Malcolm.)
…that when Boychild did his ukulele number in the school music concert last night, the kid immediately before him (guitar*) would belong to a well-known Melbourne blogger (and a regular read of mine?)
I tell you, *waving arms*, what are the odds, people!
*Epiphone, cherry red vintage style copy. Guitar playing bloggers- Shaun? Jack? eat your hearts out.
11A
Nick Possum
Uncensor