The Weirdest Soup

Homemade celeriac and fennel soup. The perfect combination of obscure vegetables on a chilly winter evening.

Coruscating Raininess

An amazing sight as I drove home on Monday. As the sun was setting, a band of rainclouds was moving in from the coast. So there were shimmering sheets and ribbons of rain falling, illuminated by the orange glow of the low sun. I needed to find a high vantage point to take a photo but in peak hour traffic I couldn't travel too far. The rain was only moments from hitting me so I only managed to take this one shot, and it doesn't really convey the sight as I experienced it, but it's better than nothing. Within about 90 seconds the rain you can at the end of this street had reached me and any chance of decent photos was gone.

Weird marks are either reflections on my car windscreen or alien force-fields. Not sure which.

Another Look

An HDR version of the previous photo.

Auto Time Warp

Cruising around yesterday, I spotted this car straight out of the 1970s stopped at the lights in front of me.

Counteracting Text Explosion

With half the world's population now blogging, posting Facebook updates, or tweeting, there's a stream of text continuously being generated and then published online. The volume of new content is exploding by the second, and there's no end in sight.And I'm worried about how much space is being taken up. To counteract this, my idea is that we should be writing in smaller font, to take up less screen-space. And more importantly, my tiny text requires fewer electrons to be transmitted and manipulated through circuits, and fewer photons to be created, thus saving energy and counteracting global warming. 

It may be tricky to read my blog from now on, but at least the planet will be fractionally cooler. 

Winter Solstice

Tomorrow being the Winter Solstice, it's important to celebrate the event appropriately. So in keeping with my past experience of this chilly and sniffly time of year, I'll be spending most of the day sleeping in snug and warm and away from cold and flu viruses. Unfortunately it's a work day, but my observance of this culturally significant event has to take precedence. I'll also be setting a new personal record for hot chocolate consumption.

My house in midwinter.

On a related note, I'd like to promote a return to the pre-Industrial period when our days were governed by the timing of dawn and dusk. When our ancestors toiled in fields, they started at sunrise and ended at sunset. So in the shorter days of winter, the working day was much reduced, allowing more time for sleeping and bible-reading. However my modern workplace takes no account of the changing of the seasons, and so I am feeling terribly out of sync with the natural world.    

Textured Nut

Here's that oversized alien nut again, this time with a grungy texture overlaid courtest of the iPhone app called Kitcam.

Home of the Tigers

On a balmy 13 degree celcius afternoon, we watched the football. The sun was hidden behind clouds for all but 30 seconds, and there was a delightful cooling breeze from the south east.

Millipede Attack

Sitting quietly at a football match yesterday afternoon, I felt a wriggling crawling sensation on my hand. A deadly millipede had decided to climb me.

Non-Coincidences

There are many more literary conventions I will delight in ignoring in my first novel. Here are some:

1. Misleading foreshadowing. Good writers deliberately give hints about future plot developments but I'd rather include red herrings, to lead the reader astray. Imagine a crime thriller where a gang of robbers have an elaborate plan that relies on perfect timing to intercept an armoured car. The whole story is leading up to the heist, and there's an inevitability to the fact that it will go ahead. Well in my story, the getaway driver has forgotten to fill up his tank and runs out of petrol on the way to the heist. The crims will be stranded on the side of a country road and their mobile phone battery has died so they end up chatting about the football instead.

2. Genre switching. It's normal to stay within one genre, but I'll switch from one chapter to the next from sci fi to thriller to romance to satire to nursery rhyme.

3. Non-coincidences. An interesting plot is often built on coincidences. A romance will blossom after a chance encounter followed by another unplanned meet-up. Or a thriller might start with a mistaken identity and a coincidence of timing. My story will be devoid of synchronicity and fate.

Bolt from the Blue

Wandering around an unspecified western suburbs university today, I came across a giant-sized nut of the mechanical variety lying in a garden. What enormous piece of machinery has this fallen from? Is there an alien spacecraft whose wing is now loose?

Age Superiority

When you're a youngster, everyone you meet is older, wiser, more experienced at life, and you know nothing by comparison. You're at the bottom of the heap. As a schoolkid, progressing through the years, you're gradually increasing in status as you see new kids start each year and you have the advantage over them. You start a new job, and you're the most inexperienced, lowest of the low. Then gradually you gain some insights into what you're doing and you're moving up the rungs slowly. So how do you feel when you're getting old? Is there a relaxed sense of wisdom and calmness from having been around for a while and knowing how the world works? And when you're older than 99% of people you meet in everyday life, do you get a tiny feeling of superiority over them all?  I guess I'll have to wait a few decades to find out.

More from Churchlands

Processed with Kitcam.

Autumny Trees in Winter

Taken in Churchlands this morning after an early sprinkle of rain, leaving everything glistening.

Rokeby Rd Trees

Taken with my iPhone out the front window of my car on the way home. Every day I hope that this stretch of the street is clear of parked cars, but no, there's always something in the way, spoiling my perfect shot.

More Revolutionary Concepts in Literature

Another aspect of real life you'll see in my novel is forgetfulness. I often read a story in which one character is recounting an earlier conversation or describing an incident that happened to them. And the words and actions seem are remembered verbatim, 100% accurate, as if they had been recorded and transcribed. Well when I'm recalling a conversation, most of the words are lost to me and I can only remember the gist of it. I'll know that someone made a witty comment but the actual comment has completely gone from my memory. So I will dump the literary convention of perfect recall and my novel will feature an old dude sitting around a campfire telling stories from his youth. But he'll get muddled and not remember the endings, and people's names will change halfway through, and the chronology will be jumbled, and most of the dialogue will be forgotten. Because that's the way my brain works.

My First Novel

Being a voracious reader, it's appropriate for me to one day add my modest contribution to the world of writing. And the revolutionary idea for my first novel is to disregard the artificial conventions that have constrained literature for too long. My unfamiliarity with postmodernism probably means I'm reinventing the wheel, but nevertheless, here are my ideas so far:

1. Ditch conventional chapters. Is real-life divided neatly into chapters? No. 

2. Don't start at the start. In your life, how often do you encounter a narrative that's presented neatly in chronological order to you? Yes, if you're the centre of the story, but otherwise it doesn't happen that way. Normally you hear bits and pieces of the story out of sequence from different sources. 

3. Repeated names. Novels usually contain uniquely-named characters for ease of identification. My novel will contain Alan, Alain, another Alan and Alna. In real life, people have matching names and you need to rely on context to identify people. So my readers will be faced with the same challenge.

4. Ditch the ending. 

5. Add mumbles and malapropisms. In real-life, 30% of dialogue consists of undecipherable mumbling, and sentences that are abandoned halfway through as the speaker loses their train of thought. And there are mistakes in grammar every five seconds if you pay close attention to what people say. So I'll incorporate all these imperfections in my dialogue. Writing mumbling will be a challenge, but expect to read something like this "yeah, err the umm chrmstnfrmnnbmthsfl lf  ten, okay."

So now that everyone is looking forward to my book, I should probably get started.

Lingering Knell

How many more years do I need to wait until Facebook dies? I've been successfully abstaining from using it since it hit everyone's consciousness five years ago, hoping it will fade away before long, but it still lingers on and I get the little gnawing feeling I'm missing out on something. It's like rejecting an invitation to a party you're not interested in - there's a little regret at excluding yourself from the slim possibility of an awesome event. So it does perk me up every time I read another article on social media on its declining trendiness among teens. In only another decade or two, it could be gone !

King's Park Banksia

Walking through King's Park, I came across this pretty banksia.