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!

The Big Sneeze

'Tis the season to be sneezin' --

Is it mimosa or is it golden wattle? I don't (kershoo) even care any(kerchoo!)more.
South Australia in August ... okay. Ker-CHOO! At Woorabinda last week.

Mimosa and golden wattle. The air is full of pollen, the trees are raining it in yellow snow-like drifts. My eyes are red and itchy and my sinuses --! What can you say? It's just part of the landscape, always has been.Talk to indigenous Australians; they'll probably tell you legendary stories of the Great Sneezing of 20,000 years ago.

(Oddly enough, we were watching a couple of episodes of Luke's Kingdom just the other week, and you couldn't fail to notice, in the background, the woodland was golden. "Ah," says I, "this was filmed in August or September." The year? Oh, probably 1974, since the show went to air in 1975. What's really weird is, I have clear memories of it being on TV that year. Ouch!)

Right now the golden woodland looks like the "enchanted forest" you see in Alaska, all too briefly, but it's the other end of the scale: Alaska turns golden as the birch races through fall (or autumn, if you prefer), whereas these flowers riot as we head up out of winter and into spring.  See here for "enchanted forest" pictures from my Alaskan days. See here for some enchanted forest pics from Jupiter Creek just last year...

But one doesn't sneeze when the birch turns golden. Golly, I wonder why not, LOL. Wellll... the golden wattle was here before humans arrived ... but it reminds you, the dinosaurs died out around the time the first flowers appeared, which once prompted some paleontologists to hypothesize that the dinosaurs died of hayfever. I can surely empathize with them.

But the good thing is, spring is breaking out all over the place. About time. Winter always tends to outstay its welcome.

Kerchoo.

Just a walk in the park

Okay, I surrender: Pandora is determined to be a "princess," and heaven only knows how long it'll take before I have a functional laptop of my own. So --

Have switched to Dave's eMachine, which is a rebadged Acer with a nice big 16" screen; and the hardest decision was, which word processor to put on? I didn't want to overload this system with an office suite, because I really don't seen six or eight progs all rolled into one.

A quick squizz at Google was in order. "Best free word processor for Windows 7" ... and what a choice we have these days. Spoiled for choice. Open Office is too top-heavy -- a full-in office suite; Lotus Symphony is a "productivity package," and so forth. All I want is a word processor!

The pick of the bunch, after looking at a few reviews, seems to be AbiWord, so it's been installed already and I'm about to take it for a test drive. The first thing I like about it is the itsby-bitsy installer. At around 8MB, it's a quick download even on a connection as slow as ours. (We're scheduled to get the NBN next month.) The next thing I like is the interface: pleasantly familiar to anyone accustomed to the older versions of Microsquash. It's also a small footprint on the harddrive, and it starts up fast. All good points. All it has to do now is just be a competent word processor, do the job, save files to formats that can be read by other programs on other machines. Shouldn't be a problem ... and I'll let you know how it goes.

If anyone is interested, the link to get this open source gem is: http://www.abisource.com/.

Meanwhile, the impression of "early spring and hot summer ahead" was reinforced in the last few days, when the shade temperature rose into the 70s ... in what's technically still winter! Dave and I took a few hours away from the usual work and duty of care-giver activities...

Jen uses the Fuji HS50 to photograph Dave ...
who's using a smartphone to photograph a sequoia.

...and we revisited a little park we had utterly forgotten until something jogged my memory just the day before. This hidden gem is on  the skirts of Aldgate: a lake, a trail around it, some glorious trees, a bird hide, some small trails heading off to pockets off bushland you can hike. Gorgeous! The sun angle shows you it's winter, because this was close to midday --

Dave uses the smartphone to photograph Jen
and some truly amazing lens flare.

Right above is a phone picture, just slightly tweaked in the computer. Dang, these phones do such good photos, it makes you wonder why I carry a big camera! Dave decided yonks ago to put the camera away and just run with the phone. Then again ... I got some very good shots with the aforementioned big camera (my Fuji HS50), and rather than loading up this little personal blog with them, I'll put them them into the travel blog, come back and link to that post from here. Neat.