Sunday chicken

The geese join my sister's horse Shadow for a graze in the top paddock:


Sunday morning we shivered through breakfast then set off for church.

I liked the story that our minister used this week...

"We're told that God made everything," said a Professor. "If God made everything, then God made evil, and if we can only create from within ourselves, then God is evil."

One student raised his hand and said "Sir, is there such thing as cold?"

"Of course there is, what kind of a question is that? Haven't you ever been cold?"

The young man replied, "Actually, sir, cold does not exist. What we consider to be cold is really only the absence of heat. Absolute zero is when there is absolutely no heat, but cold does not really exist. We have only created that term to describe how we feel when heat is not there."

The young man continued, "Sir, is there such thing as dark?"

Once again, the professor responded, "Of course there is."

And once again, the student replied, "Actually, sir, darkness does not exist. Darkness is really only the absence of light. Darkness is only a term man developed to describe what happens when there is no light present."

Finally, the young man asked, "Sir, is there such thing as evil?"

The professor responded, "Of course. We have rapes, and murders and violence everywhere in the world, those things are evil."

The student replied, "Actually, sir, evil does not exist. Evil is simply the absence of God. Evil is a term man developed to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. It isn't like truth, or love, which exist as virtues like heat and light. Evil is simply the state where God is not present, like cold without heat or darkness without light."

The professor had nothing to say.

"Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" asks 1 Corinthians 1:20.

---

Monday we were out and managed to do one or two things on that long list of stuff that needs doing.

We loaded up with some sacks of feed for my sister's animals, paid my electricity bill, bought the latest issue of The New Yorker and stopped at Café 73 in Moonah for a Caesar Salad.

Tonight we plan to scruff one of the roosters from outside my back door and take him back to Julie's property. Having four roosters at my place is a dangerous situation; as soon as one gets the impulse to crow, all the others join in. Not a good thing in the modern world.

There is traffic in the opposite direction though. Julie brought over a hen from her place on Sunday that was faring badly in the barnyard. "I think she might just be old," said Julie but at the moment she's resting comfortably in what I call the ICU [Intensive Chicken-care Unit].




Old Time Radio:

CLOAK AND DAGGER

O.S.S. agent in Italy is meat in the sandwich between a fascist with valuable information and partisans who want to hang him. "I don't have a problem with executions; it's lynchings I don't like."

GUNSMOKE 'Poor, poor Pearl'

Adult western, meaning there are no happy endings for some of the people involved in a romantic triangle on the prairie.

THE CHASE 520504 "Harry Troll's Diamond"

Somewhat in the line of SUSPENSE or ESCAPE, this story will keep you guessing, though veteran listeners may guess one of the surprise twists.

X MINUS ONE 560201 "The Cave of Night"

Docu-drama about the plight of the first man in space – and this was aired a year before Sputnik went up. Effective script based on the same story by James Gunn that was aired on television as "Man in Orbit" [Desilu Playhouse 1959 starring Lee Marvin].

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that **** photocopier

Is there anybody who hasn't got a story about a recalcitrant photocopier? After all these years in the church office I can usually nurse them along, but every so often things grind to a halt.

Thursday was one of those days. We started out with it jamming every few minutes, then every couple of pages, then finally every page.

Twenty four hours passed without a sign of the repairman; I even got up early in the morning in case he phoned during breakfast. So Friday night I ended up at one of the local office-equipment warehouses shelling out $35 to have the weekend printing done. A series of small delays and inconveniences made for a trying afternoon.

As I drove home that night I kept feeling there was a small insect on my left eyebrow. That wasn't encouraging. It's been a long time since I had that nervous twitch in my left eye and I hoped that it wasn't coming back.

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Having some of my sister's poultry living at my house isn't usually that much of an imposition, but this month things have been a bit difficult. The roosters she's keeping outside my back door have grown up enough to start crowing, so we're worried about disturbing the people next door. The problem is that it only takes one of them to start and all the others join in.

This is even more concerning than it might have been, since the Hobart City Council is talking about introducing new regulations to control barking dogs (three minutes of barking at night or six minutes during the day would be the maximum allowed).

If dogs are in the bureaucracy's cross-hairs, can crowing roosters be far away?

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Rod Quinn has been standing in for Tony Delroy for a fortnight while he's on holiday from the late show on ABC radio. It's always interesting to see how the fill-in presenters do – the acid test is how they handle the midnight quiz segment The Challenge.

Some of them are a bit clumsy but pick it up quickly. At least one was an unmitigated disaster. Rod Quinn of course had an advantage since he used to be a regular guest on the early days of the show; he had his own segment The Trivia Challenge each Friday night.

But for some reason the going was a lot harder this week. I can only think that someone else was setting the questions – there was a palpable difference in how demanding they were. Even the compere admitted they seemed a lot more difficult.

Fortunately I got in early and phoned in on the Monday. I was heartened to find that Rod remembered my voice and recalled our days on the Trivia Challenge all those years ago. Mind you, I wouldn't have won if my sister hadn't prompted me on the question "What animal has the collective noun of a 'sleuth'?" [It turned out to be bears.]

Later in the week the wheels seemed to fall off. Answers were hard to come by and took a long time to extract. One night the segment went on past the 1 o'clock news, finally ending at 1:26.

"I've always wanted to set a world record," sighed Rod. It seems this was the latest that The Challenge has finished in its 16 years on the air.

Tony is back next week. Let's hope he brings some easier questions with him.

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to Moonah

Killing two birds with one stone, I set off for Moonah on foot. I had to go to the bank and I needed to get more exercise, so the fact that Julie had borrowed my car wasn't a deterrent.

I walked along the bike track.. er, the intercity cycleway I mean. It was quiet enough so I could listen to my MP3 player as I strode along, and I got through half an episode of a BBC World Service arts programme that I'd recorded last month.

Elmore Leonard was being interviewed. He said that he always tried to make his novels come out around the 300-page mark. If he was just under, he'd often suggest to his publisher that they change the typeface just a little so it would hit the magic number!

After I'd been to the bank, I called in at the Moonah Arts Centre to see their current exhibition "Eastern Light", a collection of new oil paintings by Romany Best and Sarah Weaver.

There was a certain sameness, since this was a theme exhibition – a visual portrayal of life in Tasmania. Best's pictures included both rural scenes and pictures of urban streets. A couple of the pictures featured brooding skies with titles like "Melancholy" and "If Only I'd Known," but the picture "Feeling Blue" was a visual pun depicting blue skies and blue seas with blue hills in the background.

Weaver's oils included landscapes of places like Adventure Bay, Maria Island and the Huon Valley. I particularly appreciated these since I'd recently visited all of them and it brought back pleasant memories.

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I've chanced on yet another web-site that lets you listen to old radio programmes. This one comes from Wisconsin Public Radio and lets you listen to their three-hour Sunday night show in three one-hour chunks.


Another site for my favorites list, along with Those Were The Days and The Big Broadcast.

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Old Time Radio listening:

DARK FANTASY 420327 "Convoy to Atlantis"
In a sort of forerunner to all those stories about the Bermuda Triangle, two men find their ship has been hijacked and is heading for the sea bottom where it will be used to re-roof the lost continent of Atlantis.

FIBBER McGEE AND MOLLY 400116 "Fibber's car is stolen"
Amusing comedy in which Fibber gets arrested for stealing his own car and is horrified at the idea he'll only be paroled into the custody of The Great Gildersleeve. Still fun even today.

CISCO KID 531008 "Planted Gold"
In this oater about trying to fake a gold strike, the dashing Cisco Kid encounters one of the few things he's afraid of - a little old lady with an eight-gauge shotgun.

AVENGER #3 "Rendezvous with Murder"
Sort of a poor cousin of The Shadow, with some rather nasty killers and some sonorous voiceovers - "The road to crime ends in a trap that justice sets. Crime does not pay!"

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The new series of 24 has started on local television. I hear that they've signed to keep making the show into 2008-2009. That boggles the mind.

I pity the poor writers having to come up with that amount of scripts for such an edge-of-the-seat drama. Another example of the tendency of television networks to work something to death so long as it seems to get the ratings.

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I was intrigued to read on a W.E. Johns website that Johns had once made a list of what he would want in a volume titled The Best of Biggles, the definitive selection of stories about his stalwart avaiation hero:

Part 1 Biggles the boy in India: two stories from THE BOY BIGGLES
Part 2 Schooldays: two stories from BIGGLES GOES TO SCHOOL
Part 3 World War 1. Foreword on Air Combat. Two stories from BIGGLES LEARNS TO FLY.
Part 4 Biggles Combat Pilot: novel BIGGLES FLIES EAST.
Part 5 Between the wars: Two stories from BIGGLES CHARTER PILOT or, full length book BIGGLES FLIES WEST
Part 6 World War II: two stories from SPITFIRE PARADE (or full length book. BIGGLES SWEEPS THE DESERT.)
Part 7 After the war: SGT. BIGGLESWORTH C.I.D. (part of) then enough detective stories to make up required length.

Interesting. I know two books that have been published with the title BEST OF BIGGLES but neither of them follow John's plan.

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stray hare

My sister's backyard :




My sister takes up a lot of my time, but she certainly keeps me in touch with the real world of animals and plants.

Take Sunday night for example. We'd been over to her place to feed her animals. She went out with the horse and the poultry while I looked after the cats, then she took the dog food out to them. Finally we were driving back to my house.

Just as we turned into my street, she suddenly said "Hold it. Stop the car." I saw something in the headlights, moving across the middle of the road. As I pulled up, I realised that it wasn't a kitten or a puppy but a small rabbit.

She got out of the car and approached carefully, but the rabbit wasn't interested in getting any closer and zig-zagged down the street a few feet at a time. "He doesn't look like a wild rabbit. He might be a pet. I'll see if I can catch him."

I pulled the car over to the side of the road, angling it so the lights lit up the footpath for her. She moved back and forth, following the rabbit's progress. In and out of the front yards of our neighbours – I hoped that none of them were suffering from insomnia and might happen to look out their front windows.

After about ten minutes in the crisp night air she gave up.

This isn't the first time that's happened to her. Once she was driving through the northern suburbs and saw a rabbit hanging around by the side of the road.

When she tried to catch it, it dashed down next to a house and into the backyard. Julie shut it in an outside toilet (maybe a shed) attached to the house, hoping that the householder either owned the rabbit or knew who did.

I couldn't help thinking that if they weren't the owners, they were going to be surprised when they went into the backyard in the morning.

Sunday

Sunday morning was a cold start, with snow down to 300 meters on Mount Wellington. We drove in to church using my sister’s car since I wasn’t sure mine would start easily and we had to be on time - I was reading the Bible at the morning service.




Julie (above) read the text last week, and owing to a sudden change in the roster I stepped in to fill a vacancy this week. I had been through the passage from Genesis a couple of times [the end of chapter 1 and the start of chapter 2] and it wasn’t too bad - some of the Old Testament can be quite challenging to read aloud. There were a couple of places where the authors had put in what we’d call sidebar pieces, meaning that you had to pace your breathing so you didn’t run out of breath before you got to the end of a long sentence.

It went off all right and we settled down to listen to Robert’s sermon on the importance of human life. Christians, he said, can have nothing to do with the modern idea that some lives are worth less than others; anyone who believes this cannot believe in the teachings of the Bible.

Sunday afternoon we usually eat lunch and rest for a while, but that wasn’t the case this week. While we were still feeding Julie’s animals we received a phone call from her friend Helene - “don’t forget that you’re helping me photograph a wedding at the Town Hall today.” Whoops!

No time for Julie to rest her aching back that afternoon. There was just time for lunch and she had to head back into the city for her second visit to the Town Hall in 24 hours.

There’s no doubt it’s a lovely old building - just look at the photo Julie took at the concert - but you don’t necessarily want to spend Sunday afternoon trailing around it with camera equipment in the middle of winter.



If you’re interested in church architecture, Sunday on ABC-TV was the day for you. In the morning Songs of Praise looked at the reconstructed Spittalfield church in London. Then in the evening we saw Westminster Abbey briefly in The Queen at 80, a programme about 20th Century eccentric English priest John Cyril Hawes who designed and built scores of beautiful churches in Western Australia The Sacred Architect and finished off with Alain de Botton's quizzing the owners of a modern church in The Perfect Home about whether it really felt like a church.

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King Features website last year cannily realised that there were people out there who’d actually pay to read comic strips and started a paid site called Daily Ink. After some muttering I signed up for it and have been quite pleased with the service.

Not only do you get all the current comic strips, you’re able to choose to see them at an enlarged size which is a bonus in this age of ever-shrinking newspaper strips. (Our local paper unveiled its “new look” this week and you guessed it, the comic strips are slightly smaller than they used to be!)

That would be worth the annual fee, but there’s also what the DVD makers like to call bonus features. This includes a “Vintage” section which gives you the option of seeing a small selection of old comic strips in addition to the current ones.

The daily and Sunday versions of The Phantom are probably great for people who don’t live in Australia where a local publisher has reprinted all the Phantom stories ever published, and it’s interesting to see the early days of Popeye from the old Thimble Theater strip.

But as the site went into its second year, without any fanfare they doubled the number of Vintage strips and there were some pleasant surprises. There’s the World War II fighting-the-Zeroes strip Buzz Sawyer, the original Beetle Bailey (before he joined the army!), the detective strip Rip Kirby (one of my childhood favourites) and best of all, the daily Flash Gordon strip starting from its first day in 1951.

I’ve only ever seen one of the daily Flash Gordon strips and, yes, it was this one. But I look forward to being able to follow it every day - this is from the period after the heyday of Alex Raymond’s legendary Sunday strip and reworks the characters into a more realistic type of space explorers, more in the mode of its rival Buck Rogers strip rather than Raymond’s extravagant swashbuckling adventures.

I’d better not wax too enthusiastic. If the Daily Ink proprietors read this they might decide to increase the membership fee!

Coward! Chicken!

A clash between matters cultural and agricultural – was there a way of resolving it?

Saturday afternoon was the poultry show out at the Royal Hobart Showgrounds. Saturday evening was a concert at the Town Hall. Could we see both and still fit in the Spit Roast at the showgrounds? Well, yes, but it was a close thing.




The noise was fairly overwhelming. All those clucking, quacking and crowing birds in one place. To a layman like me, a chicken is a chicken, but walking around the cages one saw an incredible diversity of breeds, sizes and markings. There were plenty of birds I'd never even heard of before.


Julie of course had an even more pressing motivation than usual to inspect the birds in the "For Sale" row. Both the Wyandottes that she'd bought at the last sale had died, apparently victims of the cold weather, and she wanted to find replacements.



We took the chickens home and returned for the Spit Roast, which offered beef, pork, venison and (um) chicken. I think it would take a more determined diner than me to tuck into a plate of roast chicken while surrounded on all sides by poultry looking over my shoulder.

The meal made us a bit late, but we almost made it on time for the Tasmanian Song Company's concert at the Town Hall.



Where better than the ornately decorated concert room at the Town Hall [built in 1864 with an organ that was once played by Albert Schweitzer] for a concert entitled "Flanders & Swann meet Noel Coward".

Musical director Christopher Waterhouse has been wanting to put on such a concert for some time, ever since he heard an early 1970s album of the music by the vocal group the King's Singers. It was a difficult job to gather the necessary choral arrangements, since most of these works are seldom heard on modern concert stages. But here they were.

Entering late, we were seated at the back of the hall, but my knowledge of the lyrics made up for my imperfect hearing and it was a delight to hear all the old songs performed with such gusto.

Many of Flanders & Swann's songs involve animals and we were treated to renditions of "The Hippopotamus", "The Sloth", "The Warthog", "The Rhinoceros" and "The Ostrich" as well as everyone's favourite "Mud, glorious mud".

I've known these songs most of my life since I had a teacher who wisely decided there was no use trying to get boys to work during the last week of the school year. Instead, he brought in a gramophone and played us some of his favourite records – always including at least one album of Flanders & Swann. Even at that age I could appreciate the vocal dexterity and clever lyrics.

Allan Bacon and Darren Sangwell performed most of these, while Robert Jarman breezed in every few minutes to portray Noel Coward and offer us a convincing re-creation of Coward performing such songs as "Nina", "I've been to a marvellous party" and "Let's do it."

The evening came to a close with the audience joining in to sing "White Cliffs of Dover" and "We'll Meet Again."

The last was appropriate, since it was announced that the Song Company plans another concert in November focusing on Gershwin and Rogers & Hammerstein.

We shall be there.

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c/attic

We had three days under 2º this week – a sudden blast of winter to make us sit up and take notice. That's about 35º in the old measurements. The cat was glued to the electric heater every morning.

There was fog some evenings, and one morning frost lingered on the back lawn until after 9:30. It was quite a wake-up call after the mild winter we had last year.

This of course meant that I should take some precautions to prevent damage to my book collection. I hadn't worried much last year, but weather like this meant I had to start running the heaters in the attic for at least part of the night.

I hadn't been up to the attic for a while, mostly because I was afraid of what I might find. Last time I was up there I discovered one of Julie's cat had started using it as a toilet; that wasn't so terrible but in the tidy way of cats she'd tried to cover it up using any books or magazines she could grab.

I had to throw out half a dozen books (including a nice copy of The Saturday Evening Post Book of Sea Stories). I know some people who are adept at book restoration but there's not much you can do with a volume that's been soaking in cat urine.

But this time it wasn't so bad. To my relief, there was just a bit of cleaning up to do on the floor, with no damage to the books. I was particularly glad to see that some boxes in front of the far bookcases had protected my collection of P.G. Wodehouse and Edgar Wallace. (I have everything arranged in roughly alphabetical order, starting with A near the rear window and going clockwise around the attic.)

I ran a long extension cord from the electric heater to the off-peak power-point so I could heat the place economically. Just a few hours a day is usually enough to stop problems with dampness and mould.

---

Sarah Key, a physiotherapist who's written a book titled The Body In Action, was interviewed on morning radio this week. She had some discouraging things to say about how the body handles aging and the loss of elasticity and flexibility. I guess I should do something about an exercise programme, something that will stop these twinges and occasional back spasms.

http://www.allenandunwin.com/shopping/ProductDetails.aspx?ISBN=1741141184

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The BBC7 website have been running a 3-part serial based on John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos [a.k.a. Village of the Damned]. I can't work out if I've heard it before or whether the serial is so faithful to the book that I feel as though I've already heard it.

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powerless

The sound of silence. That's what I heard when the clock radio cut off in the middle of a song on Saturday morning. I knew what that meant. The electricity people had been right about when the power would go off.

I got up and wandered out to the kitchen. Nowadays nearly everything you use plugs into something. I looked around. Refrigerator. Microwave. Kettle. Computer. Toaster. Video. All so much useless metal without the vital spark to power them.

They'd advised us to heat some water the night before and keep it hot in a thermos. We tried that but our old thermos wasn't up to keeping water hot all night. Managed to make a cup of luke-warm tea that was better than nothing, but we ended up going out for brunch across at the little coffee shop at the Coles shopping centre.

They actually took two hours less than scheduled to fit the new power-lines. It was positively exhilarating when I opened the refrigerator door and the light came on!

What's the old song lyric - "You don't know what you've got till it's gone"?

---

This really is the 21st century! Last night Julie's friend Jan sent her a text message on her mobile phone to say that she'd arrived safely in Dover, England. She then asked if we could look up on the Internet the address of the hotel she was going to stay at!

So you had her sitting in a coffee shop on the coast of England while two people in Australia used various search engines to locate the website of the hotel she was seeking. And then sent the information to her phone by SMS.

Talk about your global village...

"How much is it to text to Britain?" wondered Julie. "I'll find out."

"One way or the other," I commented.

---

Kay and Chris were here on Saturday afternoon. Kay was vexed by one of the television stations and waxed eloquently on the subject till I had to blow my referee's whistle to quiet things down.

Without meaning to, I annoyed her more than somewhat just before she left. She had asked if she could borrow one of my Stargate DVDs and I shrugged. "As long as you remember to return it and in good condition," I said guardedly.

"Of course it would be in good condition," she replied. "When did I ever do otherwise?"

I should have thought before speaking, but given a direct question the answer popped into my mind and I heard myself saying "Well, there was that paperback Thunderbirds and the Ring of Fire you borrowed in 1973..."

"What about it?"

"It looked like someone had taken to it with an electric carving knife."

She recoiled as though I'd slapped her across the face. "There are two things that I've never been guilty of," she moaned. "Cruelty to animals and mistreating books! Anybody who knows me will tell you that." She shook her head. "I don't remember the book, but I'm sure that never happened."

"Well, that's the way I remember it," I said in a neutral voice, but she was still muttering about it as she left.

I think I really upset her this time.

---

Nice to see that the Nine Network has such confidence in the Star Trek franchise
Enterprise. They've finally stirred themselves to show the first episode of the 2004 season ["Storm Front" part 1] but they don't seem too fussed about it - they're running it at 1 a.m.

Not a great time-slot for a first-run programme. Typical of the way that the networks treat anything that doesn't have instant mass-market appeal nowadays.

If this was the way things always worked, the original Star Trek series would have been cancelled in its first month. They would probably have replaced it with Big Brother's Amazing Survivor Wife Swap Idol.

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I'm so dizzy...

This is the sight that greeted us when we parked in Moonah to visit Leah at Café 73. Julie was transfixed – an immaculately restored 2CV containing a Dalmatian and a German Shepherd. I can think of nothing more calculated to have her reaching for her camera.

I wasn't feeling the best on Friday. I was late getting to bed but I thought I'd had enough sleep, yet I felt worse and worse as the morning went on. The Blood Glucose test was a startlingly high reading of 8.7 before breakfast – yow!

It's a popular urban myth that having a flu shot causes you to get the flu. I'm beginning to see why people believe it. I spent all morning coughing – "You're sickening for something," said my sister and she may be right.

In the evening I had just finished watching West Wing on television when I suddenly felt dizzy. If it wasn't for my eyes being open, I might have thought my chair was spinning slowly round and round. It didn't last long, but then you wouldn't want it to.

To add insult to injury they're cutting the electricity tomorrow morning to work on the power in our street, so I can't even say "I'm sick, I'm going to stay in bed and ignore the world."

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My sister spends a lot of time on the Internet nowadays doing research on our family tree. This week she extended the genealogy one more step back and discovered that Madeleine, one of her oldest friends, is actually a distant relation. Madeleine was so excited at this news that she phoned her mother interstate to tell her the exciting news.

I hope this doesn't mean they'll be coming round wanting to borrow our lawnmower or something similar.

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Recent live entertainment in town includes:

Tarantara! Tarantara! is sort of a potted history of Gilbert & Sullivan including all their greatest hits. If you know little or nothing about G&S this is the show to educate you. A lively presentation from (of course) the Gilbert & Sullivan Society.
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie was the May attraction at the Playhouse. I think everyone knows the plot of this one by now, but it was well staged and it was interesting to see whether or not the director had decided to follow the lead of the London production and follow the original novel rather than the 1943 stage version. (I'll never tell!).
Ten Bears is an eclectic folk-rock trio fronted by former Hobart performer Josh Wilkinson. Listening to him at the Moonah Arts Centre was pleasant, though I hardly understood a word of what he was singing. Two demerits to the PR person who described the act as "a gentle, ethnic influenced journey into mysterious waters, melded with a more modern sounding rock element, intended to invoke a subtle whisper of ancient wisdom"(!)

Coming up next: Pride and Prejudice the stage play.

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Ephah

Had to go into the city to go to the bank, so Julie and I had a snack at the Ephah café in the Bank Arcade. The coffee is always good there, which is more than you can say about a lot of the eating places around town.

Then browsed through the Spice World shop across the arcade. They had some organic mandarins which were so brightly coloured they looked like they'd been dipped in orange dye. They were dearer than the ones in the supermarket but so sweet and juicy.

We strolled around the shop, which is an Aladdin's Cave of foodstuffs. Not to mention the extra items, like the shelf of Indian DVD movies. I've always been mildly interested in Bollywood but not to the point of actually buying a movie.

David and Nicky Williams have a nice little operation there at the junction of Bank Arcade and Wellington Court – her coffee shop and his Spice World store.

For dinner a plate of lamb and cheese croquettes on a bed of baby spinach with a sauce of mushrooms, chickpeas and grapes, accompanied by soy-and-linseed bread and washed down with green tea. A simple meal but enough to keep body and soul together.

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A card in the mailbox from the power company. They're working on the powerlines in our street on Saturday morning and warn us that the electricity may be cut off. This is going to make breakfast difficult – a cold drink isn't my favourite way to start the day in winter.

Last night the temperature went down to 1° [34°in the old scale]. I hope that Saturday morning isn't a repeat of that or it could be awfully chilly in an all-electric house.

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I really miss the Blackmask web site. It's been one of my most-visited web sites for years – the sheer range of free books they offer is breath-taking. Unfortunately they got into a legal battle with Conde Naste, who own the copyright on The Shadow and Doc Savage, and they've been off the air all this month.

Every so often my finger strays to their entry on my browser's favorites list, but there's never any response. *Sigh*

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Old Time Radio revisited:

Gunsmoke [1955] "Chester's Hanging"

Brisk if brutal western drama – even Matt Dillon has to deal with paperwork and go through the wanted posters if he wants to nab fugitives. His sidekick Chester almost comes to a bad end here.

Jack Benny [1946] "Fred Allen"

Celebrated comedian Allen makes a guest appearance. "Now that we've finished ad-libbing can we get back to the script?"

Life with Luigi [1948] "The Little Immigrant"

Probably not politically correct, but an engaging sitcom about an amiable little Italian in Chicago (J. Carroll Naish). A highlight is Luigi's attempt to explain the American banking system.

Whitehall 1212 [1952] "Weed Eradicator"

Measured police procedural about poisoning in a small town in Wales. Script ed by the legendary Wyllis Cooper, better known for his Quiet Please series.

Rocky Jordan [1948] "The Bartered Bridegroom"

A clone of Casablanca – adventures of the owner of a Cairo nightclub. Full of the usual ambience of Hollywood's mystic East with all its danger, intrigue and sinister characters. Not to be confused with Frank Sinatra's Rocky Fortune series.

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chickens run

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Just after I'd left home on Tuesday morning I got a SMS message from my sister Julie. The neighbour's new dog had wandered down our driveway and discovered we were keeping chickens there...

In the resulting commotion, two of the chickens got out of their coop. One was recaptured easily enough, but the other sought refuge in the backyard and had to be scooped up with the butterfly net we keep handy for just such an emergency.

The dog fortunately wasn't able to follow the hen into the backyard. Had he come face to face with our goose Zelda the ensuing kerfuffle would have had the whole neighbourhood in an uproar.

We got everybody settled down and moved the cages to safer spots, just in case – though I notice the neighbours had their dog on the chain by then.

I got back in the car and set off for the office again.

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I've finally succumbed and bought myself a fairly rudimentary portable MP3 player. After some initial fumbling, I have worked out how to play back stuff. Last thing at night I sit propped up in bed, the cat oblivious to my button-pushing, and listen to a half-hour radio programme - sometimes one I've recorded myself this week or perhaps one from a past decade that I've downloaded from the Internet.

New gadgets are always difficult for me to get the hang of. I thought it was just me, but a recent news report suggests that it may be more widespread a problem than I realised.

It seems more and more people own gadgets that sit idle because they have to relearn how it works each time they want to use it.

A recent study by a Dutch university notes that half the products returned to stores are in working order - the customer just can't figure out how they work. On average, consumers will spend just 20 minutes trying to get it to run before giving up.

"Products that are technologically advanced should also be simple to use," said a spokesman for Philips but critics mutter that so-called "feature bloat" is becoming common as engineers realise they can now add more functions at virtually no extra cost.

Whether the consumer can understand how to use all these extra features is another matter.

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The Nine Network has a new TV show called What's Good for You, hosted by Sigrid Thornton.

Each week the team of reporters will examine a common myth or misconception and conduct their own experiments to expose the truth of the matter. (In the first episode one poor soul was stung five times by a bluebottle to test varying cures - ouch!)

Sounds a bit like Mythbusters without the explosions, doesn't it?

So guess where they scheduled it. Yes, that's right, directly opposite Mythbusters on Monday nights.

Those programming directors are so predictable, aren't they?

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Old Time Radio noted:

Escape "Ancient Sorceries" [1948]
Paul Frees stars as the lead in this adaptation of an Algernon Blackwood short story about a small town with a secret in Wales. Blackwood's stories are eminently suitable for radio, and before he died Blackwood became something of a media star in the early days of television. The same story was adapted for CBS Radio Mystery Theatre in 1975 as "The Velvet Claws" but I prefer this half-hour version.

X Minus One "Mr Costello, Hero" [1956]
The title is ironic, since Mr Costello is anything but a hero in this Theodore Sturgeon story. In fact from this viewpoint the plot about a manipulative social engineer looks like an oblique attack on the hysteria of the McCarthy era. The interplanetary angle is incidental, but as Gene Rodenberry once observed you can get away with a lot of things if it's done in a science-fiction setting.

X Minus One "Saucer of Loneliness" [1957]
Here's another story by Sturgeon. It's about 30 years since I read it, but I don't notice any major changes to the plot. A young woman is hounded because she encounters a flying saucer but refuses to reveal the message it conveyed to her. As often happens in Sturgeon's fiction the ending is unexpected and bittersweet.







Phil Harris "Cadilac in the swimming pool" [1949]
Here's one from the popular 1940s comedy series in which Phil Harris and his wife Alice Faye played themselves. In this one, Phil's pal Remley manages to destroy not one but two of their employer's cars. "Remley, I meant release the hand-brake after you got in the car!"

Suspense "The Lunch Kit" [1949]
John Lund stars as the nervous narrator in this story that has become unfortunately very relevant again today. A man sets out to smuggle a bomb into a factory hidden in his lunchbox. The obstacles in his path make for an entertaining half hour.

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Speaking of radio, Alan Braid the radio-collecting farmer who was featured on the TV show Collectors this month was featured in the Sunday Examiner this week. He owns 400 fully-functional radio sets, not counting the ones he has in the barn for the cows.

The newspaper went on to report that a study at the University of Leicester (UK) had tested the old theory that sweet music produces more milk from dairy cows.

Music of different tempos was played to herds of friesian cattle. Milk yield went up to the strains of "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" or (appropriately) Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. But rock music from Jamiroquai or Mud had the opposite effect.

I'm not surprised. I remember a similar experiment just a couple of years ago that had similar results - classical music was good, heavy metal was bad and speech or the music of Britney Spears had no effect either way.

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Quote of the week:
All the troubles of man come from his not knowing how to sit still -- Pascal

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Ducks Don't Roost

What do you do with a duck while you're on holiday? Jan roped in my sister Julie to look after some of her poultry while she is interstate. We drove up into the hills under Mount Wellington on Sunday afternoon where she fed us scones and we played with my brand-new mobile phone – which I used to take the photographs on this page.

Sunday afternoons I'm usually so tired that I nap for a while, but after two cups of percolated coffee at Jan's table I felt wide awake. Still, I was content to stand back and let Julie, Jan and her little boy chase the ducks and chickens around the coop.

The ducks took a bit of chasing down, since they don't roost at dusk like the chickens usually do.

We put the chickens into a black bag in the back of the car, while I held on to a sack containing three ducks. They weren't too bad on the drive down to Julie's place – I eased the top of the sack open a little so they could get some air but I kept my hand over the opening since the idea of three ducks suddenly loose in a moving vehicle doesn't bear thinking about.

Everything went off all right and it wasn't as difficult as I had feared it might be.

If anybody has a difficult job, it was our preacher at the morning service today. In the space of a 20-minute sermon "In The Beginning" he had to summarise the creation of the universe, explaining who, what, why and how with reference to Genesis chapter 1 and John chapter 1. Whew! I didn't envy him the job.




Old Time Radio slot:

X Minus One "The Cave of Night" [1956] this is so topical it's rather eerie: an American astronaut is trapped in space after a rocket launch goes wrong and the whole world is agog; there's a sort of war-of-the-worlds feel in that the story is seen from the viewpoint of the journalists reporting the drama. Comparisons with the Australian mine rescue this month seem unavoidable.

Weird Circle "Fall of the House of Usher" [1943] first in a little-remembered series of thrillers that drew heavily on classic literature. For their premiere, they hark back to Poe and give the story of Roderick Usher the radio-drama treatment, opening the story out, exploring motivations and bringing in new supporting characters. Now usually that sort of thing is anathema to me, but this actually works better than some attempts to do a faithful dramatisation I've heard.

Hancock's Half Hour "First Night Party" [1954] ties in with the sort of self-referencing that used to be a staple of radio comedians. This is the first episode of Hancock's own radio show, and it concerns his attempt to wine and dine the critics to drum up publicity for its broadcast. Needless to say things go spectacularly wrong. All the familiar ingredients are there, though they haven't been fine-tuned yet as they would be in later years - Moira Lister is the female lead, for example, and quite different to Hattie Jacques. Bill Kerr and Sid James are their unchangable selves though.

Strange Doctor Weird "The House Where Death Lived" [1944] Another first episode. In this one the eponymous narrator (gilding the lily a bit to make him both strange and weird surely?) tells us the story of two ruthless killers who are victims on a father's search for vengeance. Fifteen minutes of fairly unsubtle stuff - par for the course for radio horror of the time.

Sherlock Holmes "The Greek Interpreter" - couldn't miss out the Great Detective since it was Conan Doyle's birthday this week.

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According to Britain's librarians, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird is the book that everyone should read.

The Pulitzer prize-winning classic has topped a World Book Day poll conducted by the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), in which librarians around Britain were asked the question, "Which book should every adult read before they die?"



According to Diana Ashcroft, one of the librarians who voted for the book, it "has all the factors of a great read. It is touching and funny but has a serious message about prejudice, fighting for justice and coming of age."

Harper Lee is also likely to receive a renewed flush of publicity with the opening this week of the Hollywood film Capote, in which she is a key character.

To Kill a Mocking Bird heads an odd triumvirate at the top of the librarians' list: it is followed by the Bible and, in third place, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Further down the rankings, a mixture of classics and popular contemporary titles feature.

Mark Wood, chairman of the MLA, commented, "This goes to show that if you are stuck for something to read, you should ask a librarian."

The list in full:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quite on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D'urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

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go east

Monday saw us set off on a "mystery bus trip" with a group from our church. I was up before sunrise so we could feed my sister's animals before meeting up with the bus group.



We set off for the east coast of Tasmania and a few words in the driver's ear meant we made a special stop at the Woodsdale cemetery. This is where our great-grandmother is buried and after a minute or two we located the grave marker.



We have been here before, but not for about 25 years.

Julie would like to organise a special trip down to Woodsdale, which does have some tourist attractions in spite of it being so small there isn't even a sign to let you know you've arrived.



Lunch at the Blue Waters Hotel in Orford was a pleasant affair, then we took a stroll along the foreshore to admire the seascape.

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Old Time Radio spot:

Listened to a 1944 episode of Suspense titled "One Way Ride to Nowhere". Alan Ladd stars as a man who takes a roller coaster ride and finds that at the other end there's an extra passenger - a dead psychiatrist. Intrigue and deceit on the midway unfold in typical film noir style.

Dark Fantasy was a minor 1940s series originating in Oklahoma City, but the episode "Pennsylvania Turnpike" does a nice job of slowly building the atmosphere in this tale of a hitch-hiker who doesn't seem sure what century he's living in. The climax, as often is the case, doesn't match the Twilight-Zone-style build-up but overall it's not bad.

Less subtle is the 1945 Sealed Book episode "Hands of Death", which is the radio equivalent of one of those old black-and-white B-movie thrillers. A mad strangler, his manipulative brother, the greedy butler... all that's lacking is Boris Karloff. (Notable is the amount of padding, including rambling introductions and excessively long musical interludes.)

And to finish off, listened to a 1940 newscast with Edward R. Murrow in London. We tour the darkened city during an air raid, ending up in Whitehall where the novelist J.B. Priestley muses on the future that lies ahead. Stirring stuff from CBS.





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angst

I'm perfectly in control of my day right up till the time I finish breakfast. After that, I feel increasingly powerless and anxious.

The fact that I recently started in on the second half of my fifth decade just makes things worse; before I know where I am, I'll be 60 and after that I'll pick up speed the further along the path of life I get.

Friday things just seemed to get more gloomy the further the day progressed. I felt as though there was a black cloud hanging over my head as the afternoon dragged on. I tried to stay impassive, in keeping with the tradition of the stoic Australian male, but I felt bloody awful.

Julie's friend Jan asked me if I was coming to the fireworks display tomorrow night.

"No." "Why not?" "I think I'm having an anxiety attack."

I was happy to keep it to myself, but faced with a direct question I lacked the patience to make up a polite excuse.

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Some caregivers think their stress will drop once an elderly relative is placed in a long term facility, but they actually suffer more emotional trauma. A University of Pittsburgh study is the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of the emotional turmoil caregivers experience in placing a loved one with dementia in a long-term care facility.

"Caregivers have to face new challenges such as frequent trips to the long-term care facility, reduced control over the care pro- vided to their relative, and taking on responsibilities such as coordinating and monitoring care," says study leader Richard Schulz. "This study shows that we need to help care- givers who place their relatives." The findings appear in Journal of the American Medical Association.

I can believe that. Being a carer is a stressful job and the emotional connection doesn't end just because the person in question is physically out of the house. It never did for me. Cutting down on the angst factor is difficult.

And by the way, thanks to Wikipedia for their informative article that told me Angst is used in English to describe an intense feeling of emotional strife – a different but related meaning is attributed to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard .

Kierkegaard used the word angst (Danish, meaning "dread") to describe a profound and deep-seated spiritual condition of insecurity and despair in the free human being. Where the animal is a slave to its God-given instincts but always confident in its own actions, Kierkegaard believed that the freedom given to mankind leaves the human in a constant fear of failing its responsibilities to God.

In modern use, angst is broadened to include general frustration associated with the conflict between actual responsibilities to self, one's principles, and others (possibly including God).

That's more the sense that I would use it in.

240 pounds of trouble

Today's visit to my doctor has been preying on my mind for some time. To say I'd been dreading it would be too strong, but I was certainly uncomfortable.

Ever since I was diagnosed with diabetes, it's been instilled into me that I need to lose weight – watch your diet and take thirty minutes of exercise each day. It's that simple.

"I'd like you to lose about three kilogrammes by the next time I see you," my doctor said. That's about 6½ pounds.

Had I done it?

Of course not. After all, what was at stake except my life and my health?

I could have made a case to explain it away. Told him how I'd thrown my back out and taken a month to get over it. Explained that my sister keeps me up so late I'm more likely to take a 30-minute nap than a 30-minute walk. Even played the sympathy card and said that since my mother died I have trouble motivating myself to do anything at all.

But the truth, which is (mostly) what I went for, is that like many things in my life it was just a matter of procrastination.

I had managed to lose one kilo and my sugar was down a fraction, so it wasn't a total debacle. In fact I wasn't doing so badly considering that I was running out of my tablets and had had to take a reduced dose to make it through to this appointment.

What about all this publicity about flu shots and diabetics, I asked. "I recommend diabetics get a flu shot," he replied. "They're more susceptible to bacterial infections that accompany influenza." I got the impression that I was more likely to develop pneumonia if I got the flu.

I should call my GP and ask for that flu shot.

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And an adaptation of which famous novel was recently blurbed by the BBC7 website as "The world's most famous detective takes on the world's most famous dog"?
Yes, it was the Hound of the Baskevilles!

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Troy Holaday (a professor from Indiana) has been gratifying C.S. Forester fans by posting Horatio Hornblower adaptations on his website.

But these are big files. Today I downloaded a zip-file of 255MB containing a 52-episode Hornblower radio serial. This took me 2½ hours to download on my 25kb/sec ADSL broadband. I'd certainly never have tried this on my dial-up connection.

But while I may appreciate the ability to do this, not everyone is so happy about the broadband situation in Australia. The Financial Review newspaper even published a scathing article that dubbed it "Fraudband."

Some very unflattering comparisons were made with Canadian users of broadband, who are able to access the internet much faster and more cheaply. Although some of the cases were clearly chosen for effect (anybody who chooses some of the Bigpond deals they gave as typical examples of Australian broadband needs his head examined), it certainly puts Australian telcos and ISPs in a poor light.

goose out

While on a coffee break at the office, listened to a 1944 episode of the radio show Suspense - "Fugue in C Minor" by Lucille Fletcher (who also wrote "Sorry Wrong Number"). Ida Lupino is engaged to Vincent Price, a man who has built his house around his giant pipe organ. Price seems nice enough, but his two children are convinced the organ is haunted by the ghost of their mother.

If only that was all that it was...

Nice spooky stuff. I've been downloading a host of these Suspense shows from one of the radio fan websites; the trouble is that I'm scared to listen to them after dark, so I'm a bit behind with actually hearing them.

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Those miners have successfully been rescued from the bottom of the Tasmanian gold mine after 11 days. A happy ending for the men and their families.

Speaking of radio, I was musing how much of a radio event it was for my family. Others may have gleaned all the latest details from the television or the newspapers, but to me it was wireless all the way.

The first intimation that two of the miners were still alive came on Sunday night last week. The Coodabeen Champions comedy/chat show was on ABC radio and just before the 8 o'clock news they crossed to the Tasmanian newsroom for an update. It was a stirring moment.

Then for the rest of the week Tim Cox did his weekday morning show not from the Hobart studio but from the first aid room at the mine. This can't have been easy, but he did a great job. In the evenings, Tony Delroy's Nightlife show included a live cross to the mine every night around 1 a.m.

And when I woke up this morning, the first thing I heard was the good news coming over the clock radio.

God bless all who worked so hard to make this day happen.

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Waterfowl belong outside. I don't want to wake up and find a goose sitting on the end of my bed.

That's the sort of thing that was going through my head when the backdoor jammed in the open position last week. Not only was it going to be cold during the winter but it was going to be difficult keeping the poultry out of the house.

Fortunately my sister Julie is more mechanically minded than I am – she got out the hammer and the drill and soon had it back in order again. Thank goodness for that.

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Julie was off to a lunch the other day. I dropped her at Salamanca Place then went into the central city block to pay some bills, fill some prescriptions and pick up the magazines.

I had lunch at Euro in the mall, reading the Melbourne paper and doing some people-watching. It was interesting to see the sort of folk who drifted in and out after the lunch-time crowd had gone.

There were two or three students at the side table, exchanging comments about life and art on a fairly high level. By the front there was a couple, apparently tourists, who looked a little vexed about something and hurried off after their meal.

One guy came in and started giving (at length) his opinions about the sign on the front window. He discussed it in exquisite detail and just went on and on. If I'd been behind the counter, I would have told him to put a sock in it or clear off, but the staff must have been used to him.

He finally left but my relief was short-lived. Within five minutes he was back. He'd decided he'd have a coffee, but first he wanted to discuss in detail exactly what each sort of coffee consisted of....

It's a long time since I was in the retail business. Obviously I've lost the carefully-cultivated shield of patience that lets you put up with people like him.

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7% of people in Australia have it. Type 2 Diabetes is a virtual epidemic among people with poor life style and obesity.

"It's easy to do things. It's not easy to think what to do." Jamie in Mythbusters







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