To boldly read. Because I'm bored.

To boldly read. Because I'm bored.

I wish I could tell you I was reading Proust. Shaw. Hemingway … Azimov, Clark, Anderson. But the fact is, I've plowed my way through just about everything from Robert Graves to Greg Bear, Islands in the Stream to The Caves of Steel. And I'm still so bored, I'm ready to read “My Trip to Mars by Flash Gordon (age 5)”, which was written in crayons of various colors.

I've read every single page of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. And the entire Inkheart trilogy (and most of you probably didn't even know it was a trilogy, right? Just a movie with Brandan Fraser and Paul Bettany. Well, you're not wrong there, either). I read Ken Follett's World Without End. And Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. And Poul Anderson's entire Technic Civilization series, The Van Rijn Method – David Falkayn: Star Trader – Rise of the Terran Empire.

And it was reading The Van Rijn Method, and remembering how Harry Mudd was based on the utterly inimitable Nicholas van Rijn, made me turn to the shelves of Star Trek paperbacks I haven't opened in more years than I care to even think about. The last time the cover was lifted on one of those books, I think Bill Clinton was still unpacking his bags on the way into the White House. Ouch.

Well now … spoiled for choice … where would one begin? I decided to zero-in on books I'd never even read, and wound up bouncing from classic Trek to Next Gen, reading one here, one there. They're mostly quick reads and, reading with perhaps a more critical eye since I've drifted apart from my rosy-spectacled youth, I'm … more than a little surprised. I honestly don't remember some of these novels being quite poorly written -- being careful not to tar them all with the same brush, because others of these novels are beautifully done.

But if you bounce all over the shelf, reading with a blissful paucity of discrimination, you eventually have to scratch your head in perplexity, because these books range from one end of the spectrum to the other, without warning.

Prime Directive was the best classic Trek I read, and I'd readily recommend it, with 4.5 stars. It has an intriguing plot, the authors got the characters pretty close to “true,” and aside from some reservations I have about the story, and a few nits to pick regarding narrative line, the book flies. 

It's quite the page-turner, and if your house was burning down and you could only save 10 of your favorite Trek books on your dive out the door, you'd very likely grab this one. Gotta love the way the book begins: Jim and crew have “Kirked” another planet, and this time Starfleet has busted them for it -- right back to civilian. Hell of a neat gambit.

Reading this one early in the proceedings probably spoiled me... 

The next I picked up was Mudd in Your Eye, a Harry Mudd-centric comedy thriller which I'd expected to be fluff, and which turned out to be very fluffy indeed. Flyaway entertainment. The plot is okay; the writing is okay; the characterizations are okay. 

What can you say? A solid 3 stars, I guess; not quite “meh”, but not the kind of rolling on the floor, breaking ribs laughing one might have hoped for. The plot was certainly bulked out here and there to squeeze more mileage out of it, and at times it did seem the joke had either worn thin -- or I was missing it. It's not often a miss a joke, but it has happened. Anyway, it's always enjoyable to return to Harry Mudd, so -- what the hell? 3 stars it is.

Next came Sanctuary. And here, I really did scratch my head. It's the oddest mismatch of material: an adult plot (the storyline isn't at fault -- it's a good “driver” for a novel) paired with a sometimes painfully juvenile narrative line. As if the book were crafted for very young readers, though its thematic material is mature. The characterizations are frequently also miles off-beam, with a thoroughly wishy-washy Kirk, who far too frequently asks other people what they think his group ought to be doing. He spends most of the book just going with the flow. 

Hmm. For me -- two stars on this one; though to be conscientious as a reviewer I did go look at the reviews it scores on Goodreads and was extremely surprised to see four and five stars and glowing referrals. Other readers either don't see the problems I perceive, or don't care. Go figure: live and let live.

Here, I switched gears to Next Gen, and returned to a book I'd liked a great deal many years ago: 

Immortal Coil. Phew. It's not me, losing what little remains of my mind. This one is a very good book indeed. It doesn't hurt that it focuses on Data, who was always my favorite character; and you have to love the way it reaches into every nook and cranny of Trek lore, weaving together a story spanning centuries and a technology spanning the whole arm of the galaxy.  If it has one fault, it's that there's so much plot it must race along, at times barely touching down on story elements that might have been explored in much greater depth. 

However, the author would certainly have working to length constraints, and I can imagine the job involved in covering “this” much story in “that” many pages. A writer can't always write what she or he wants and needs to; he writes to the publisher's specifications. Highly recommended: five stars.

Many years after Immortal Coil was written, another writer picked up the ideas it had touched on, and ran with them to produce The Persistence of Memory, and this one … is gobsmacking. It really is something very special indeed, not merely well written but also intricately plotted and with a rather courageous twist: decentralizing the series characters to frame the story through, and around, others for much of the book's running length. 

The experiment could have killed the book at market, and in fact if you look at the reviews on Goodreads, not everyone likes it: many of those who don't cite this departure as their main reason for being dissatisfied. There are as many opinions as there are readers, and for me it worked, so -- five stars here, and a strong recommendation.

The Persistence of Memory kicked off a threesome of books which were marketed as a trilogy and shouldn't have been. In fact, they're three loosely connected stories that have little in common and certainly don't tell a contiguous story. These tales are wildly different; you'll either like them or you won't. All are uniformly well written, but Silent Weapons and The Body Electric...

...took off in directions which were, alas, directions I hadn't actually wanted to go. I went along for the ride, and it was never boring; but I do wish these novels hadn't been marketed as a trilogy: they're not. It would be mean spirited to mark them down to three stars for this reason: not fair to the writer or to the books, because each one, in and of itself, is fine … save that (to my mind) author David Mack missed some utterly platinum opportunities. A direction existed in which this story could have gone, that (for me) would have been as gobsmacking as the first book. He didn't go there -- and that's fair enough too. I'm just the reader, sighing over where I'd have gone instead.

Possibly inspired by The Persistence of Memory, the original author of Immortal Coil came back many years later to continue the story along his own lines, with The Light Fantastic. Hmm. Well, it was interesting; well written; the plot is airtight; but … 

The truth is, bratty teenagers are not my favorite reading, and this story could have been (one cringes to fall back on the threadbare cliché but here we go) "so much more" if it hadn't focused on the bratty teen aspect of Lal. It's … okay; but it's like Part Two of a trilogy, and there's no next bit that I know of. Like most books, you'll either like it ... or you won't. 

It would be true to say, perhaps because I liked Immortal Coil so much, The Light Fantastic didn't go in the directions I'd wanted it to go … like buying a ticket for Melbourne and being taken to Canberra instead. Both interesting places, but if you wanted to go to Melbourne you'd be made keenly aware of the gentle art of compromise.

So, what am I reading next? After a rather odd book, The Songlines, which I'll talk about later, I went right back to classic SF with Halcyon Drift. Might even go back further and read A Princess of Mars again. I'm fascinated by Mars. 

Fortunately, we own a lot of books...

Happy Birthday, Dave! (Want a Band-Aid with that chocolate cake?)

Happy Birthday to my One and Only...

Relaxing at The Vintage Bean in McLaren Vale, contemplating a Very Large Cappuccino and a slice of the most amazing chocolate cake, into which our hosts put a birthday candle in honor of the occasion --

Chocolate on top of chocolate today. Before we headed out to the Bean, we'd swung by the local Cheesecake Shop (not to be confused with Cheesecake Factory. At the Shop, they bake and sell cheesecakes and gateaux; it's not a restaurant) and picked up Dave's actual birthday cake...

...which appears here still in the box. Yee-ouch. He'll be about a week eating this! This is their Enchanted Forest cake, the most outrageous cake in the store. Then it was over to the Vintage Bean for coffee --

-- portrait of the photographer, looking a trifle less gargoyle-like than usual. Gak. I hate pictures of myself, which is why you seldom see them. And then, back home...

...Zolie checked out Dave's birthday card. Tried to get a shot of her with her nose inside it, but she wouldn't stay put long enough for me to get a good one, so ... here, she's captivated by a bird outside the window. Good enough.

Full marks to Dave for making the best of a birthday that started under a bit of a cloud. He hit the deck yesterday during a bike ride in treacherous terrain, and will be healing up for the week while he works on all that chocolate. He swears up and down that the wounds aren't as bad as they look, and the backache is worse...

Hmm. That can happen, when you land on your lumbar, on the curb. In fact, he's starting to recover already, which is nothing short of astonishing. If it were me falling off the bike, I'd be in a full body cast for at least six months, and then in physio and chiropractic for a year. Dave ought to be up and at 'em by the end of the week, and then ... well, back on the bike. Fingers crossed. Fortunately, in all the many years he's been riding downunder, this is only the third time he's hit the deck, and if he stays on the average, he's not due to for the next chute sans gravity (that's one thing I learned from Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin...) till around 2022.

Here's hoping. And praying.

Happy Birthday, Dave!

Folded, spindled AND mutilated, goshdangit!

We've had an exceptionally good run with mail order items in the last few years, so I guess it had to happen sooner or later. But ... sigh. I mean!

Take a gorgeous art print. Roll it on the OUTSIDE of a super-flexible foam-rubber baton. Apply one extremely loose layer of bubble-wrap to the outside of this. Add an address label, fling it into the void, in the tender clutches of the post office, and -- is there any surprise when this happens:

What can you do? International shipping to return it to sender inside a stout tube that'd get it home in a way that precludes some certifiable nincompoop alleging, "You did the damage yourself!" would cost more than just buying a new one ... yet, if I did just buy another, the same lunatic would package it the same way for shipping, and we'll have a repeat performance. Waste of time; "throwing good money after bad," as my grandma used to say.

Well, phooey. Some people's children shouldn't be left alone in a room with scissors, tape, bubble-wrap and an object to to mail.

Also, the post office seems to find an obscene glee in identifying a badly-packaged item and wreaking the maximum amount of havoc on it ... as if it's the recipient at fault: because it's the poor old recipient who's going to reap all the disappointment and inconvenience.

Well, phooey. Hang on, I said that already.

Yes ... but is it poetry?

Dave ... just being Dave, in a selfie taken on today's bike ride. Somewhere in McLaren Vale, 2016...

There was a young lady of Niger

Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;

They returned from the ride

With the lady inside,

And the smile on the face of the tiger.

I couldn't help thinking of the above when Dave put on his cycling kit this morning, to go out for an early ride on a chilly morning (or what we call chilly ... it isn't really. If I told you what we call cold in South Australia you'd only laugh).

In fact, I was giggling at this scrap of verse when I was six years old, and always assumed it was by the legendary poet Anon, like most limericks. Imagine my surprise to find it's been attributed to William Cosmo Monkhouse ... more likely Bob Monkhouse, I should think. Having read some of William Cosmo's verses, I just can't see this limerick issuing from the same pen as the author of The Dream of the World Without Death, just to mention one.

Anyway, the verse remains just as funny -- and hilariously apropos as Dave heads out on one of his chilly morning rides, kitted out as dragon or wolf or tiger. Yes, he gets a lot of "likes" from other cyclists and pedestrians. And you can't buy this kind of cycling kit in the stores, which makes it doubly cool.

Hey, we're famous! (Just not for a good reason...)

Old Reynella is famous -- we must be, we were on the homepage at twitter.com with this:

This silly-looking object has been parked off one side of South Road for weeks now, advertising -- yep. You can see what it's advertising: the circus is coming to town. A year or so ago it was the Moscow State Circus, playing the same ground which is right now being prepared for Loritz. So someone's made off with a gigantic yellow eyesore. 

The question is, what the [expletive deleted] would anyone do with a giant yellow Bozo the Clown?!

Unless of course the folks nearby were just fed up of looking at Bozo here, so ... in the still, chilly watches of the night he was quietly deflated by the subtle expedient of a blowtorch and dropped discreetly into a skip at the OTR station. I wonder if the Police have looked there for the remains?! The eyesore is gone, and even the SA Police Department is tongue-on-cheek about this one! 

But there's the living proof Old Reynella actually exists: front page at twitter.com, albeit for the silliest of reasons.

And what was I doing at twitter.com to begin with, in order to glimpse this immortal event...?

I was just looking: window shopping. To tweet or not to tweet? That is the question. 

Why would I want to, in the first place? Well ... the thought's been in the back of my mind for some time: I'd like to write. I'd like to show my stories around, and to make this work people have to know those stories are out there. Twitter is renowned as a fantastic social media system which informs people by the stadiumful of ... well, of anything, really. Is it a smart idea to tweet, if you actually have something to twitter about (as distinct from the twittering that seems to go on regarding what's for dinner and last night's episode of Facepalmed). Would anyone want to read the tweets? Or --

To facebook or not to facebook? This is an equally insightful question, as facebook is just as bursting with politicians competing to make Adolf Eichman look like Mahatma Gandhi, and cats riding around on the Roomba. Hmm. Social media. Never having done this before, and being absolutely on the outside looking in, it's a daunting prospect. Must give it some more thought.

The Paperback Time Machine

The book itself is a piece of history; a glimpse into the mindset of a bygone age which was flexing its muscles through the exercise of looking forward into the starship era. The novel is as much a time machine, or time capsule, as any film about 1940 made in 1940 (rather than a film set in that era made by people from a different world. Us).

I first read Starman Jones in the early 1970s. It was a good read then, and it's a good read now. Robert Heinlein wrote it in 1953 for a largely YA readership, but the narrative is rich enough to be rewarding to adult readers at the same time as not being too heavy for younger chilluns. A well-written story often stands the test of time, even if not quite in the way the author might have imagined...

Heinlein might possibly have written the ultimate Steampunk without ever knowing it.

Think about this: in a world where electro-mechanical “computers” were the cutting edge of technology, he had to figure a way to navigate a starship. 

Not to power the ship, mind you, because there was nothing to be done, way back when, other than call the engines “the so-and-so drive,” and then get on with the story. Faster than light travel is still a mystery 60 years later; it'll probably remain a mystery in another 60 years. But –

How to navigate a starship from planet to planet via a series of natural space-warps caused by the gravity fields of nearby stars … and how to do this without recourse to computers as we understand them. Now, that's the question. And a very pretty pickle it is. Arthur C. Clark managed to get a spacecraft home from the Saturn (or was it Jupiter??) system with abacus calculation, but piloting a ship between stars, at optic velocity is a whole 'nother beast. 

Ten years after Heinlein devised a system of calculus performed by a team of mathematicians using telescopic sightings of doppler-shifted stars, from the astrodome of a ship moving almost at the speed of light, the best computer in the world was the size of a house and had to be “programmed” by a team of people who literally set innumerable dipswitches before the “Go!” button was pushed. The “computer” made the calculation all of a piece, in an instant; the answer to the calculation flashed up in binary (light on, light off) which was translated back into numbers.

So Heinlein devised a system of calculus using the living brains of a team of humans who are fed data by technicians manning telescopes and stereo cameras. It's actually brilliant. The fact it's utterly redundant now, in the age of computers, is irrelevant. By 1965, just 12 years after Heinlein nutted out a computerless solution, Star Trek had already left behind the whole problem and driven on. Today, many phones have the processor power to handle the math for these calculations; but that's not the point.

The point is, Heinlein devised a way to navigate a starship in 1953 … and it would probably have worked just fine.

Here's how Wikipedia defines Steampunk:

“Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction or science fantasy that incorporates technology and aesthetic designs inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery.”

The tech, such as it is, in Starman Jones was almost certainly inspired by the electro-mechanical genius behind battleship gun sighting “computers” in the 1940s. It's very, very close to the spirit of Steampunk, though the starship Asgard surely isn't powered by steam!

As for the story itself: young boy runs away from home to see if he can follow his uncle into the Astrogators Guild, winds up having to join the service under false pretenses and, after disaster strikes the ship, quite literally saves the day due to his eidetic memory. It's a good, tight plot and once I'd have said it was ideally suited to younger readers and especially boys around ten … so long as today's lads can set aside their pooh-poohing of computerless astrogation, when they know for a fact how the Enterprise is navigated. Or the Nostromo. Can ten-year-olds do that? Well … probably not.

Pop over to Goodreads and you'll see many readers/reviewers giving the novel three stars; not for being a poor book, but for using outdated tech. This is actually a weak reason to mark down a book so old, it's a piece of history itself. A better reason would be to point up the seeming sexism with which the female characters are written … but then you must remind yourself that in a 1953 YA book aimed at boys, it's a wonder there were any female characters at all, much less a properly developed one who's a social rebel and turns out to have (!) a brain --

And one point made me, in 2016, curiously uncomfortable: the utter revulsion with which the central characters view alien species. Today, post-Avatar and so on, we relish the difference between species. The Ood leap to mind: so ugly and so heart-wrenchingly beautiful, at one time. It was quite astonishing to read of characters being revolted by alien forms, as recently as 1954; but … it's sixty years. People change; the zeitgeist changes; it should; it must.

So who'll get the most from Starman Jones today? Kids, for whom it was written? Unlikely. Try fans of Steampunk who're fascinated by the meld of outdated, outmoded tech and the age of starships.

For myself, I enjoyed it a lot, at the same time remembering to make the allowances one must, and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it; unless you think your kid will line the budgie cage with it in disgust when he reaches the Steampunk navigation part. Or perhaps you worry he'll get hopelessly confused and wonder if it's somehow impossible to use computers on starships. But just a second, Mister Spock said …!  

Anyone for coffee?

My can of Raja's Cup, with the shaker
of cinnamon and the carton of rice milk
that makes all this go...

Coffee. I do love coffee ... especially the cappuccino variety from any cafe serving La Crema (like the Golden Fleece in Willunga, and the Old Courthouse in Wellington). The only coffee I don't actually like is Lavazza, which doesn't have a lot of flavor -- frankly, you can make better at home.

There's only one problem with coffee and me: my heart won't let me drink it more than once a week, because the caffeine gives me all kinds of problems. Ever heard of ectopic heartbeat? Google it. It ain't fun,

Meanwhile, Dave is a coffee connoisseur who can drink it by the bucketful any day, all day, leaving me in the position of sighing, "Don't worry about me, I'll just make a cup of tea." Not that I don't like tea; I do.

So I've been looking around for things that'll substitute for coffee, and in fact I'm found two, both of them so flavorful, you'll actually drink them for the pleasure of drinking them. I've had ersatz, long, long ago -- something called Nature's Cuppa, a coffee substitute based on grains, I believe, and shipped out of eastern Europe. Their coffee supply stopped utterly during WWII (what a shock), and they experimented until they found something that'd do till they could get a supply going. I wasn't terribly impressed with the ersatz, so I investigated decaf.

Well, decaf is all right insofar as it tastes like coffee; the problem there is the process by which they rip out the caffeine. Suffice to say, decaf is not something you want to be drinking, if you care about your health in the future. It's ... toxic. So, what else? There had to be something.

Last year we discovered Wild Siberian Chaga, which is actually a wild-harvested mushroom (known in Siberia as "Mushroom of Immortality" because of its antioxidant properties.

At first we were drinking chaga as tea, and the taste is, without one iota of exaggeration, awful. You choke it down because it's so goooood for you. Just hold your breath and swallow, and remind yourself why you're doing this...

Health. Oh, yeah. Right. Ugh.

Then it dawned on me ... chaga isn't a tea, it's a coffee. So I made a chagaccino -- yep, treated the chaga like the coffee component in a full-on cappuccino, and ... whaddayaknow? Fantastic. Chaga coffee is an extremely pleasing beverage, and if you know how to make cappuccino froth at home -- the real deal, stands up for itself, an inch thick on top of the cup -- without requirement for a two thousand dollar barista machine, you're home free.

Like this, below ... cappuccino so good, Dave had to take a phone pic and send it to facebook. I give myself a small pat on the back for this...

Any guesses on how to get stand-up froth an inch
thick, without a frothing machine? Hehehe...

Dave's phone pic...

But wait, there's more. Dave and I were at the Espressoholic Cafe in Aldgate a couple of weeks ago; they not only serve coffee, they SELL coffee -- so many varieties on a great shelf on your right as you walk through the door into a heavenly aroma...

Dave chose a dark Dutch chocolate coffee, which is his "special coffee," a reward after a long bike ride -- such as today. In fact, he's still drinking it as I write this. I just sighed and browsed the shelves, not expecting to find anything I could even think about drinking. And then ... aha.

Well, now. Raja's Cup. It sounds Indian, and the label says it's rich with Ayurvedic herbs which are as loaded with antioxidants as real coffee. Then again, it also says it tastes like coffee, and it doesn't. But I couldn't resist taking a can home for experimental purposes.

Yes, it's Indian ... from Fairfield IA, USA (!), the town where the Maharishi fetched up at last about forty years ago, and built a college. It's a center of Ayurvedic medicine and transcendental meditation, so it makes sense that when they figured out a coffee substitute, it would be based around Indian herbs.

Now, I won't say it tastes like coffee; I won't even say it tastes good ... in fact, it doesn't, until you add a good dash of cinnamon and a generous splash of rice milk. And then ... synergy. The result is fantastic. Very close in texture to coffee, with a flavor you just have to experience. Perfect coffee substitute, and loaded with as many antioxidants as coffee, if not more!

My work here is done.

Struck by Lightning

No, I haven't been struck by lightning -- nor has Dave -- though I did just go for a walk and get caught in a shower of micro-hail the size of tapioca pearls. (My coat is still drying.) But we just saw history being made, which I'd like to journal here, if only to jog my own memory in a year's time --

...yep, that kinda lightning. And one feels rather privileged to see it.

(Last time I was consciously aware of being so privileged was seeing a legend called Black Caviar win her 25th out of 25 before retiring undefeated -- another one-of-a-kind. Happens once in a lifetime.)

Personally, I hope Usain Bolt decides to play cricket professionally next ... because he does play cricket, batting and bowling and he's a big draw in any game ... and if he plays cricket for the West Indies, he'll be down here in Australia playing ODI or T/20 very soon. What a blast that would be! Whoot.

Take a look at this, and cross fingers. Seriously, cross fingers.

One more opportunity to see the lightning bolt (tomorrow morning, Adelaide time), and then watch out for a souvenir DVD. There's gotta be a souvenir DVD.

UPDATE: next day ... yep, lightning struck a third time. Or perhaps a ninth time! So wonderful to see this live, as it happened. There's a memory to squirrel away.

And a completely OT footnote: one of the things I find myself enjoying is having a personal blog in which I can blog about whatever-the-hell interests me on any day. Let's see you do that on a travel blog, or an art blog, LOL. I have those too, and although they're pretty, they're not nearly as much fun.

You never notice it till it's not there. Or, thank gods laptops have batteries!

Electricity. Love it or hate it, you can't live without it. You might think you can, but the truth will jump up and bite you. We're heading out on another fascinating trip ... to the local hardware store. For a couple or three new powerstrips.

I could wish houses built in the early/mid 1990s had been designed with gadgets in mind, but the truth is, when this house was built, the most you had to think about was a TV, (with a cathode ray tube burning hot and bright in he middle of huge box), a single computer in the home (probably cost as much as the car parked on the drive), and a microwave and blender having a fight over the powerpoint in the kitchen.

These days, it's at least ten gadgets per room, including the bedroom, and every house Dave and I ever lived in was literally rewired on the fly with extension cables and four- or six-socket powerboards to accommodate every conceivably gizmo. Uh huh. Problem is, they don't last forever, and when you get a duff board, you start to blow breakers.

Brill, Utterly brill. So here we go on the yearly pilgrimage to Mitre 10 for a new one or two. Dave asks, "How many of these are we going to replace?" I'm thinking, at least two. How about getting a spare, for the next time we start popping breakers?

Such excitement!

Still, we had a marvelous Saturday. Grabbing the chance to get away from care-giver duties for an afternoon, we headed south to Second Valley and Cape Jervis. The spring-like weather continues ... technically we're still two weeks off the beginning of Spring, but you'd never believe it was winter ... and we took a walk from Leonard's Mill to the old port of Second Valley and back before driving on south to the point where the Sealink car ferry takes on passengers and vehicles for Kangaroo Island. So --

Here's Dave at Leonard's Mill with the just-delivered coffee -- the deliberate wide shot shows you we're on a mezzanine, with the foyer of the cafe-restaurant down below:

And here's Jen at the Cape Jervis lighthouse, a few hours later ... neat lens flare:

Getting away from carer duties even for short sprints into the fresh air and sunshine is not important; it's vital. Chore by chore, hour by hour, caring is usually dead easy. It's just stuff you do. But it goes on and on, it never stops. The routine is mind-numbing, the work is mostly only one step above sheer drudgery; and if you're not careful, the care-giver's whole life (and brain) will slow down to the pace of the patient. You can find yourself literally crawling along at the speed of the disabled 86-year-old. If you happen to harbor any secret dream of "getting your life back afterwards,"  it's a killer.

I haven't chucked the towel in yet; not 100%, anyway. I do want to have a life after caring, and one of the things I desperately need to do now is CHALLENGE MY BRAIN. Wake it up, Get it into gear. Make it work properly again. Lately, I've been wondering seriously about (don't laugh) writing. I used to write a lot, but it's been years. How's about if I just put the hands on the keyboard and started to write stories? See what it'll do for this old brain, which is -- seriously -- idling along in neutral with infrequent, brief, difficult kicks-up into bottom gear!

Writing, then. O...kay. Actually, blogging helps. Makes me focus on a thought for long enough to finish it and get something "down on paper." Is it just me, or is blogging become something of a lost art lately, since facebook ran away with everyone?

Film Noir, and not so noir...

You have GOT to see this:

Imagine if Blade Runner had been made in 1942...


Wowser. This project is from Chet Desmond, and you can obviously chase it to YouTube, but also to a site called Live For Film. So cool.

The only film that's had something of this classic look about it in recent years is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow -- Jude Law, "Ms. Paltrow," whose first name has utterly vamoosed from my brain at this moment (I just know for sure it's not Pepper), and Angelina Jolie in the small but charismatically pivotal role I wish she'd reprised in another movie...


That one's a lot of fun, and while it's not B&W, it was processed digitally to look as if it was colorized from a B&M master print. Brilliant.

It's cool to know I'm not the only one left in the world who likes classic movies! (Then again, I even like radio...)

And on that note, let's go out with Freddie Mercury paying homage to Metropolis...

It's "Welcome Home Zolie" Day

When you're six months old, everything's an adventure...

...and nap times come frequently...

...and you discover laptops are warm!

Two weeks after Bagheera passed away on July 29, 2014, we found the house too quiet and too empty. Couldn't stand it any longer, so we went back to the RSPCA shelter at Lonsdale, where we met Bagheera in 2000, and we met "Zoltar, Empress of the Galaxy." Zolie for short.

Just a few months after Zolie came to her "forever home" it was time to time to get the Christmas tree boxes down out of the loft. Oh ... boy. Kittens do love a Christmas tree, and at nine months old by now she was big and heavy enough to wreak havoc. "Ooooh, look, shiny, dangly things!" Or, "Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree, your ornaments are history." Or to put it another way, "Timberrrrrr!" We were too busy laughing to be cross.

Come out and play --

There's honey eaters to stalk out here!

And fences to climb --

-- and you can see the whole world from up here! Wowzer!

Some places in the house are designated no-go-zones for puddytats. I wonder why?! Doesn't stop a kitten trying, and you'd be amazed what you can do, when you try. Above: Zolie discovers the box room and climbs right to the ceiling ... helps Dave put away the Christmas tree ... and investigates the camera. At the time, the top of the stepladder looked such a great place to be.

All cats love to help with the dusting. Crash!!!

Didn't want to roost on the cat tree while she was small enough to fit.
Now she's two sizes too big, it's purrrfect.

 Being Scottish by adoption, she looks great in tartan.

With everything to explore, it didn't take her long to call this domain her own and put her stamp on it, in the form of demolished Christmas trees, "twanged" insect screens and "pulls" in various rugs. Ah, it's a cat's life. Two years on -- August 12, 2016 -- shes grown up and mellowed out at least a little. We have high hopes she'll decide the Christmas tree is borrrrring this year ... better things to do. 

Can't see me behind these flowers. I'm totally hidden.

Look -- somebody put a bench in the jungle for me, how thoughtful.

My, what amazing white whiskers.

That's more than enough photos. I'm outta here.

Happy "welcome home Zolie" day, 2016!