The House(s) of Fran_mart

Books Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to British Birds: An excellent volume in which Bill discusses a number of British Birds.  The presentation of the book is 'different' as it's set up to look like a tatty used version (coffee rings on one page, text appears to be typed, photos reveal the durex holding them in place).  It is very amusing and while humour is the thrust does have a lot on interesting information.   Recommended  Blake Charlton Spellwright etc.  The etc refers to this book being the first in a trilogy of fantasy books.  I read the 3rd volume first and it was comprehensible but would have been a lot easier if I had read them in the order written!  In part this is because the story is about casting of spells and knowing how they are created etc is rather useful.  To some extent the process reflects the authors life where he had severe dyslexia, but has overcome it such that he is currently a cardiology Fellow at UC San Francisco...

We have decided that we'll go to the movies once a month this year (2017).  Today was declared an honorary member of 2017 as we made our first visit to a cinema for about 20 years. We gave Palace Electric our custom.  This is next door to Hotel Hotel in Acton, which had some interesting architecture.  The cinema is interesting with about 8 screens and each theatre holding about 100 punters.  It was very comfortable although I was initially worried about the albedo factor of the guy in front. The movie of choice was La La Land: apparently a reference to the dreamlike nature of life in LA.  Its interesting that in Kiswahili "lala" means "sleep". Our overall rating of the movie was quite interesting.   Not a 10, but well above 5 - perhaps 7?  Without giving away the plot, I was expecting a musical with lots of dancing and singing, which is certainly where it starts off and continues for about 30 minutes.  Plot and character development t...

As Denis has noted in his post the Swift Moths were out and about in Carwoola as well as Robertson.  In a straight line Google Earth reckons these metropoli are 145km apart (another comment about distances is at the end of this post). We became aware of this phenomenon about 8:30 when the rustling of them crawling on the window and the tapping as they hit hard slightly disturbed our watching of a DVD movie.  The disturbance was brief as the movie ( Collateral ) was rather gripping at that point.  Once the film had finished I went out to take some photographs (efforts to take shots from inside failed miserably).  The first two images show a mass of the moths on the decking at the base of the windows.  We have got a row of pelargoniums and a few other plants in pots there.  This is not the greatest bit of photo-composition ever produced but does show the chestnut abdomen.  A couple more close shots. Since they all appeared reasonably ...

NOTE:  Tammie ((B&W Dog) is OK! Following on with our hire of DVDs we have just watched Red Dog.  This is described on the sleeve notes as being based on the true legend of Red Dog .  Whatever: the movie is a total hoot and was given 4.5+ stars by us.  Lots of humour and not to much development of the human characters. Koko the kelpie who plays Red Dog is brilliant. Many of the other actors, playing larger than life 'Australian' characters seemed familiar to me but I didn't recognise their names from the credits.  Then it struck me: they are people one sees in adverts for alcohol on TV - notably the Bundy Bear series.  (Since I have now mentioned this company twice in a week, I should point out to the nice people from Bundaberg that if they should happen to sling a bottle of UP my way, I would be able to fit some quality control into my schedule.) The somewhat smaller Black and White DOG, resident in these premises, did prick up her ears a fair b...

This is a bit off the usual topics covered in this blog but man doesn't live by nature study alone, so please bear with me! Movies As part of my Christmas presents from our daughter I was given a  2 month subscription to the Quickflix service.  In essence one selects movies over the 'net and they ship DVDs out to you.  We had been to the movies about twice in the last 20 years so this seemed a bit strange but we have now watched about 15 movies in 7 weeks. Before getting to a few comments about some of the films I will deal out a large bouquet to Quickflix.  I suspect that we - living a little remote from postal; services - could probably get 2- 3 films a week (perhaps 10 per month) which for 2 viewers at $23 a month works out to about $1 per seat.  One of the discs they sent was buggered which I reported on line and within 2 minutes had a return email saying another copy was on the way which I see as very good service. Review time I wont go through al...