The House(s) of Fran_mart

I posted a couple of days ago about the poor quality weather we have been having.  After a reasonable day on Friday yesterday returned to ordinary with 11.8mm of rain and strong winds.  Today has delivered less rain (2.6mm so far) still strong winds and the temperature has thus far (13:30) only staggered up to 4.9C.  ( That was nearly the maximum: it got to 5.2 at 14:20!) This made my decision to go to Mt Ainslie for the ACT Veterans Athletics Handicap somewhat difficult, but participating would maintain my stagger towards 100 handicaps completed and maintain my eligibility for awards. When I arrived I was struck by the number of people wearing down parkas and vests.  Some of them maintained this attire for their run/walk. The second striking thing was the low number of cars in the parking area.  My estimate was about 50% less than usual for this event. The starters were dressed for the occasion.  I have never before noticed their clocks being in waterproof covers, but can s

When I was studying agriculture at Uni (in the UK) one of the big issues was the way the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union led to massive surpluses of some products.  The most problematic was huge stocks of butter attributed to subsidies permitting a French peasant with 2 cows and a goat to make a living from those stock.  This stockpile was referred to in the British Press as the "Butterberg" with 'berg',  the German word for mountain, being used to display the erudition of such rags as the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express . A couple of years back I decided to adopt the term for our strawberry patches which were - even without the guiding hands of Rupert Murdoch and Lord Beaverbook - producing massive crops.  However I went a step further and used the Deutsche for strawberry as a prefix.  Seeking to be a bit more erudite than Pommie tabloids is a pretty modest ambition! Last year it seemed that one of the patches was getting invaded by und

In colloquial Australian the word "average" implies that something is far from the mean of expected (or at least hoped_for) values.  It means something that is inherently undesirable.  When 'your' football team is beaten by a team wearing black and white (surprisingly this phenomenon crosses code boundaries as well as State borders) it would be described as a "pretty average result". In the same way 'ordinary' implies something out of the usual in a negative direction.  When some thug (I don't have to describe their guernsey, do I) king-hits your best player that would be a "fairly ordinary bit of play". The use of the terms in this way is not restricted to sport.  Tuesday 24 June was an excellent specimen of the circumstances in which they might be applied to the weather. The minimum temperature for the day was 1.5C early in the morning.  About 3pm I emailed a friend to say the temperature hadn't got about 4C.  (It had stagge

As a change of pace from the long rants of recent times, this is a brief post to show off a photo of a spider. It arrived indoors in a bucket we use to hold string for gardening purposes. I have attempted to identify it using Find-a Spider . I think the eye pattern is correct for Isopedella sp.  However, looking at that site and Brisbane insects spider pages suggests to me that the taxonomy of spiders is developing in the same way as a web in a high wind, and thus it could well be a different Genus, but I would be surprised if it wasn't in the family Sparassidae (which contains 80 species according to Wikipedia)!

One of the bright stars in the sky of Australian public service is the Parliamentary Library.  The helpful staff .... of the Library do not spend their time pursuing Mad Monks .... .. even if they have a preference for red garments. Rather, amongst their other duties they put out interesting research papers addressing topics of public policy.  While these are properly aimed at the elected denizens of the House on the Hill .. the rest of us do get to see them through Flagpost. A recent posting to that site addressed the extent to which Concession Card holders use the bulk billing facilities of Medicare .  This is against a background of the Government introducing a co-payment of $7 for visits to a GP.  The post concludes: " There is evidence that concessional patients are high users of health services, but that appears to reflect their poorer health status." A first comment I will make is that nothing I stumbled across in compiling  my babble which follows lead

We have been contemplating another lap of the West Basin of Lake Burley Griffin  (the area between Commonwealth Avenue and Scrivener Dam) for a couple of weeks.  The weather forecast seemed good so we (2 humans and a small dog) set off from Black Mountain Peninsula on 22 June. The first interesting site was the rowing club which was as busy as a stepped-on meat-ants nest. Some of the rowers (possibly from other clubs) were still out on the water,  .. and taking advice from their coach (who was unusually quiet for thatspecies). A fisherman was very quiet, and also unsuccessful as far as we could see.  I have obfuscated his face as I didn't get permission to depict him and he may have told the boss that he was going to Mass, rather than angling. I don't know if this Darter was successful in its fish hunting or not but it was doing a good low profile explanation of why the species is known as 'snake bird'. Getting to the small cork-oak plantation a few Fa

When a group of plant-persons visited us recently one of the members was interested in the sculpture garden we have created and offered us a windmill head as a further installation. So we headed off to Old Cooma Rd to pick it up.  As the donor was a welder by trade he had built a crane for use in handling large rocks around the property.  This was also very useful for elevating art-in-the-making. Getting it out of the trailer was quite simple, merely involving some quick footwork as it slid a little more quickly than I expected.  Obviously arranging it in a vertical position required some props.  Fortunately three old bulldozed blades were available and placed.  The equilateral position of the supports was a little too simplistic so a few adjustments were made. The old windmill blades have been put aside for other uses.  This will involve paint I suspects. Here we have the new sculpture with the "TV sink" and "breaking wave" works.  As the addition h