Bohemian Rhapsody

This is the closest I've come to learning to play Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. I tried once before, last holidays. It gives me the jeebies. I still can't read treble and bass clef, so right in the middle of a bar, there I am, counting up the notes, every good boy deserves... F! F!
(Which is stupid because I used to play viola and I had no problems with alto clef. Maybe that has something to do with, you know, the visual correlation between the lines of a staff and the strings of a viola. Hum.)

Last night I dreamt...

...I went to Manderley again.

That's the first line of Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier. I saw the Hitchcock film recently. It was pretty good, once I got the hang of the 1940s cinematography. Not the black-and-white thing, that's fine. But it seemed to me to have been filmed much longer and more complete, and Hitchcock took the important bits and strung them together, like beads on a string.

Anyway.

We went to a Mandalay Beach on our roadtrip, named for the Norweigan ship wrecked there. Definitely want to go back. The sand shifts such that you can see various bits and pieces of the ship, and there's a (replica?) of the figurehead at the top of the steps leading down there. Pretty cool stuff.






...oh, and it's part of the Bibbulum Track. Of course. You can't go five ks along the south coast without running crossing the track somewhere. I'm gonna hike that track. You know. One day.

Where's Wally?

I took this photo of the scoreboard in the midst of the English excitement. It's all there: Kevin 'Da Man' Pietersen's 70, Harmison-and-Panesar ripping it up, England reaching a lousy double century, of which we were so, so proud.

Went to see my dear boys get butt-kicked at the WACA on Friday. Soigh. But it was funtimes. After lunch the guys were going for it like they had nothing to lose (which they hadn't). So after carefully and patiently reaching his half century, the Kevsta was thwacking the ball all over the ground, playing fiery stupid cricket, which was so awesome to watch. Out on 70. Considering the next highest run total was Strauss on 42, I'm mighty proud of Kev. Then everyone got right behind Harmison, if he hit the ball we cheered, if he didn't get hit by the ball, we cheered too. And Monty Panesar!!! who 'can not bat', well he was batting on Friday quite excellently.


And then! And then! The first ball of the second innings, out it comes from Hoggard's beautifully opposable-thumbed hand, down the pitch, up, up, up
*crack*
Stumped!
Except it didn't happen in slow motion, it was really, really quick, and we're on our feet and screaming, we can't believe the magic, is this for real? Langer's gone! Huzzah!

It all went down hill from there and the next two hours or so were pure boredom, watching skilled batsmen play good cricket for the winning side. Boo! Hiss! What we want is the crappy bowlers playing scary awful cricket on the losing team, now that is fun to watch. I was surrounded by English fans and they were loving it. Commiserations, dudes.

blah blah

I keep my old lecture notebooks, same way some people deliberately create scrapbooks, I guess. When there is absolutely nothing else to do, I can flick through them, and out fall these streams of consciousness.

Ahh... anthropology. Yes, those are anthrop notes. See? "Globalisation: precariousness and knowledged based economies" something something. Then I drew a circle, and it kinda got out of hand.

Anthrop. annoyed me and amused me equally. For a while , 'anthropologist' was the punchline to any joke. Then a friend went out with this guy who, much like anthropology, was pretentious and hilarious, and 'Kevin Da Man' became my new sidesplitting punchline.

I think it was all too PC for me; I especially did not enjoy using the gender neutral he/she in essays. Ooh! Excruciating! It's not like gender neutral pronouns are equality enforcing. I mean, come on. We're big tough girls. Are you saying we can't handle people using 'he', 'his', 'man'... seriously. Okay, it's not like I cared. I just thought it was stupid.

The freaky looking guy I sketched inconsiderately was one of my second year stats lecturers. It's not a particularly good likeness. He didn't have cool eyebrows like that, for one. But he had that strange knack of being simultaneously dull and boring and cute and endearing. He said 'Oopsy-daisy' a lot.

The other stats lecturer, the Scottish bogan, would say stuff like "You'll fall in love with Z-scores."

Oh, I know, I know. We had a teacher like that in high school. He talked about that "warm, fuzzy feeling you get inside when you simplify an equation." Exactly. That's what I'm talking about.

Maths is beautiful and elegant. Much like multi-linear phonology, we get to describe these crazy, diverse, seemingly messy phenomena with just a few simple formulae and rules. I think a lot of linguists have maths envy.



Moomintroll madness! I copied these drawings straight from the original Tove Jannson books. The guy with the harmonica, Snufkin, he was my favourite from the series.

---

"You could write a poem about this. What about:

Floating on this eerie water
Far away from bricks and mortar"

"Saw a mermaid-- didn't caught her," suggested Sniff, blowing his nose.

"That's not true, not grammar, and it doesn't even rhyme properly," said Snufkin, and the subject dropped.

---

Picasa y'all

I can't afford Photoshop, so I use Picasa. It's Google, it's free, and it does image altering stuff, which is nice. Okay, so you can't attach one animal's head to another animal's body, should that so be your desire. But you can:


...turn pictures into crappy 70s greeting card watercolours


...become a dead-serious feminist journalist researching women's rights in the middle of commu-nazi regimes


...and do unoriginal stuff with Trinity Uniting Church in Perth

No more geekness for today.

baldhead

I'd rather be here. There. Under that red arrow. It's the tip of the peninsula thing that makes Princess Royal Harbour in Albany, and one day I will walk there. One day. On three sides it drops to the swelling ocean. Not crappy boring swimming beaches. Ocean. Love love.

Pelican Skeleton

We found this pelican skeleton (plus feathers, entrails, 'n all) on our walk to Possession Point in Albany. A little further down the beach we saw another dead bird lying on its back with its claws grasping the air. And back at the car we suddenly noticed, tucked up under the bumper, the bird we thought we had road-killed some three hundred kilometres ago. Yuk! I had to lever it out with a stick.

Three dead birds in one day. That's gotta be bad luck in some superstition.

Yay! Opposable Thumbs

Nanowrimo's over. I have too many daylight hours to fill. And I like blogging. Solution: a celebrative conglomeration blog of the cool and not-so-cool stuff that makes me glad to have opposable thumbs. Like photography. Scribbles. Will I take up cross-stitch? Piano! For sure this is the summer I learn to play Bohemian Rhaposody. Come to think of it, these thumbs are good at hitting spacebars and holding a pen when handwriting, too...