City Beach gloaming

A decent sunset over city beach a few weeks ago.

Dingo Rainbow

On the way to Freo a week ago, a magic rainbow emanated from the Dingo Flour mill. Please send me a postcard explaining the meaning of this.

Mobile Garden Bed

Although I normally commute by car, I'm still a committed environmentalist. After all, why else would my car have seedlings growing on the roof? Surely there's no other explanation.

Old Timey Keyboards

How could it have taken me so long to discover the joys of mechanical keyboards? The last few work keyboards I've had the misfortune to suffer with have had a squelchy non-responsive feel. They don't work well with my primitive form of touch typing, and the lack of a clicky noise when hitting the keys makes typing sadly unrewarding. My error rate has increased as my joy has declined. So it was exciting to discover that old-fashioned clicky mechanical keyboards are making a comeback.

And for those lacking desk space, why not ditch the rarely used numeric keypad? It is a sacrifice to ditch the media keys, but it's still possible to reprogram a key combo to perform the same functions.

This is the sort of keyboard you can end up with... a Ducky One 2. I've ordered one and am counting down the days till I can hook it up to my pc.

One Week of Autumn Colours

Autumn foliage colours don't last long in Perth's climate. I never react in time, and only ever remember to stop and take a photo at the tail end of the season, by which time the rich colours have already faded. This avenue is on my route to work each day...

My Cat's Favourite Streaming Shows

My cat spends countless hours on the sofa watching the latest shows from Netflix et al. Here are his top recommendations from the last couple of years.

• The Walking Dead  (zombies)
• Masters of Sex  (50s and 60s sociology)
• Halt and Catch Fire (the nascent tech industry of the 80s and 90s)
• Twin Peaks (2017)
• Game of Thrones (you've probably heard of this one)
• The Terror (the ill-fated Franklin arctic expedition of 1845)
• Veep (political humour, though not as biting as The Thick of It)
• The Man in the High Castle (the Axis powers triumphed and rule a divided US)
• Tom and Jerry

Field of Light: Albany

At dusk on Mt Clarence above Albany a week ago, the commemorative lights twinkled.

Albany Bottlebrush

The scarlet of this bottlebrush is so vivid against the green. It was beside the road in Mt Lindesay National Park, near Mt Barker.

Albany's Gap

We arrived at Albany's Gap and Natural Bridge nigh on sunset last Sunday.

Denmark Eden

Staying in Denmark last weekend, this was the view of paradise on waking up Sunday morning.

My Cat's Favourite Films for 2018

As is traditional, my cats also have strong opinions on movies and have compiled their list of favourites this year. Their preferred genres are Aussie dramas, war films, science fiction, and anything involving vengeance (e.g. Liam Neeson on a rampage).

1. The Darkest Hour

2. Death of Stalin

3. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri

4. Molly’s Game

5. Ghost Stories

6. Chappaquidick

7. Gringo

8. Ophelia

9. Overlord

10. Foxtrot

11. Swinging safari

12. Bad Times at the El Royale

13. Solo 

Films of 2018

So far I've seen 99 films at the cinema this year, well behind most years. And it hasn't been a particularly memorable year. No science fiction or fantasy films left their mark, and there weren't many successful comedies. But I've still managed to scrape together a list of my top ten.

I should mention that Paddington 2 missed out on last year's list due to its very late in the year release date, but it deserved to be there.

10. First Man - the story of the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong

9. Bad Times at the El Royale - who'll survive a night at this motel?

8. Juliet Naked - Rose Byrne, Chris O'Dowd & Ethan Hawke. That's all you need to know.

7. Journey's End - in the trenches of the Great War, waiting for orders to advance

6. Crooked House - a country house whodunnit

5. Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - WW2

4. The Darkest Hour - the third and best Churchill movie of 2018

3. Mission Impossible Fallout - kinetic and non-stop thrills

2. Death of Stalin - the funniest film of the year

1. On Chesil Beach - tragic drama set in the 1950s 

Clearly I like English period dramas. They make up half of the ten.

Honourable mentions go to Overlord, Solo, and Ophelia.

All-Year Christmas

My dream of never-ending Christmas is now reality. Last year, I stockpiled so much festive food (Christmas cakes, mince pies, Christmas puddings), that I've been able to eke out the supplies till now. I finished the final Christmas cake last week, and one pudding remains. But now that mince pies are in the shops, and Floreat Forum has Christmas decorations up, I can proclaim victory. The desolate non-Noel period of January to September has been survived and conquered, and I can replenish my survives as we count down the remaining months until the number one day of the year.

Happy Christmas !

Information Science

Spending my lunchtimes in UWA's Reid Library, it's amusing reading old copies of the Times Literary Supplement. Particularly interesting are the positions vacant ads. Here are a couple from 1975.

The second advertises a salary starting at 

£2,395. That works out to a healthy £46 per week. 

And I'm surprised that the profession of Information Scientist existed 43 years ago. Perhaps it's a fancy term for a librarian who can operate a microfiche? Reading wikipedia, it was regarded as quite distinct from the role of librarian, and provided focused information to technical and research staff. much like Google does today. This might explain why you no longer encounter information scientists.

My Top Podcasts of 2018

My ears are never bored. Back in the 80s and 90s, local radio was so tedious that I spent long hours listening to the world through my Russian shortwave radio. But with the explosion in niche and fiction podcasts, my life is now spent thinking of ways to cram more podcasts into my day. Here are my current favourites:

1. Kermode and Mayo's Film Review
2. The Talking Dead - a podcast dedicated to the Walking Dead tv show
3. Sword and Laser - Science fiction and fantasy bookclub
4. Welcome to Night Vale - the one and only 
5. Pod Save America - US politics. Plenty of Trump idiocy to talk about
6. MonsterTalk
7. Beef and Dairy Network - cow news 
8. The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast - board gamers with heaps of personality
9. The Slash Filmcast - geeky US film reviews
10. The Black Tapes - creepy fiction set in the Pacific Northwest
11. Geek's Guide to the Galaxy  - a science fiction podcast covering science and fiction
12. SAYER - horror set on a space station
13. Skeptoid - scientific debunking
14. The Folklore Podcast - a quaint UK show with the best theme

In the mountains

Although much of my time in the New Zealand alps was under clouds, when they did lift, the scene was breathtaking. Staying in Mt Cook Village, I was right amongst the towering pinnacles.

.. and the prettiest town in NZ is Arrowtown

I've rarely seem a more beautiful town anywhere in the world than Arrowtown. Although it's a tourist trap during daylight, with busloads of sightseers wandering around licking icecreams and taking selfies, later in the day, it's quieter and more relaxed.

Autumn Colours in New Zealand

Autumn must surely be when New Zealand is at its prettiest. Although their native trees are mostly evergreen, the introduced maples and beeches and other deciduous trees are gorgeous when the leaves start to fade and drop.

The maples in Queenstown were aflame

Super-Duper Blue Blood Mega-Moon

From the mosquito-ridden shore of Lake Monger, your intrepid photographer set up his camera and tripod to capture the moon last Wednesday.

Nedlands Apocalypse

Last Sunday, before the cyclone hit, the smoke from a bushfire shrouded Perth. This was the scene as I entered the Windsor Cinema.

A Little Wetness

Here are yesterday's rainfall figures for Perth metro sites.

Cyclone Joyce

For fans of extreme weather, recent summers in Perth have been wonderful. After last year's wettest summer in history, plus our coldest ever summer day (17 degrees in Perth, 13 degrees in Bickley), we have ex-tropical Cyclone Joyce to look forward to. If there's a direct hit, we could get over 100mm of rain by Tuesday. Here is the latest forecast.

My Top Ten Novels of 2017

I wasn't able to read as much as I hoped last year, getting through 201 novels, 19 less than in 2016. But there was plenty of quality among them. Here are my most enjoyable reads. These include fiction published any year, not just last year.

1. The Witchwood Crown (The Last King of Osten Ard, #1) by Tad Williams (FANTASY)
 

2. The Shuddering by Ania Ahlborn (HORROR)

3. The Ritual by Adam Nevill (HORROR)

4. The Mime Order (The Bone Season #2) by Samantha Shannon (FANTASY)

5. Mostly Void, Partially Stars (Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, #1) by Joseph Fink  (FANTASY)

6. Breakfast with the Borgias by D.B.C. Pierre (WEIRD)

7. A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith (THRILLER)

8. Willful Child: Wrath of Betty by Steven Erikson (SCI FI)

9. Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgard (DRAMA)

10. The Barrow by Mark Smylie (FANTASY)

My Cats' Favourite Flicks of 2017

As is traditional, my two cats have been debating furiously which films should appear in their joint top ten list. And finally they've come up with the following, in no particular order:

Miss Sloane - (I must mention that I fell asleep in this movie twice, the first time in the cinema, the second time on a plane).

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 - I'm proud of my cats that they only listed one comic book movie. Any more would be an embarrassment.

Dunkirk

Wind River

The Hitman's Bodyguard

Blade Runner 2049

The Death of Stalin

Neruda

Gold

Hidden Figures

It's rather impressive that cats can count to ten.

And honourable mentions go to:

Alone in Berlin

Life

The Dinner

Daddy's Home 2

Only the Brave

Why Him?

US Snow Cover

It's not yet winter, but look how much of the US is covered by snow. It even stretches over the border from Texas into Mexico.