TheBanyanTree: Travelling well

[Peter Macinnis]

Hello, my head's up.  The jacarandas are out, the cicadas sing at night 
and pedestrians cross busy streets to gain the benefit of shade on the 
other side.

It's summer here in Australia, I have put the socks into storage, save 
for one pair to wear on formal occasions where shoes are non-optional. 
The windows are open, save when the builders down the street have too 
many howling machines.  Life is good.

I am up and down between the top-floor study where I write and the 
dungeon two floors down where the microscopes are and the garage is 
located where I fashion new gadgets and photograph them.  The Backyard 
Naturalist book that I am working on progresses nicely, and the bucket 
of grass and leaves at the front door has become a small zoo as I drop 
each dish of examined and searched vegetation in there.

Much of what I am writing is about the small stuff that you can find on 
any suburban block, because I have the old-fashioned view that we are 
losing touch with nature, because kids don't know where to look.  At the 
very least, I hope to inform a new generation of children's TV 
presenters, but that's another issue.

Two days back, I was passing the front door (on the middle floor of our 
town house), and I saw a bluetongue lizard trying to work its way in 
through the glass panel beside the door.  It was between the iron 
security screen and the glass, and normally, I would have run for the 
camera, but I assumed it was seeking refuge from a cat, so I went out to 
save it.

There was no cat (or dog), but the lizard's tail had been attacked a 
month or so back, and was now healing.  No antibiotic cream needed. 
They are about a foot long (this one was less, but would have been more 
if the tail had been intact).

Bluetongues are large skinks, up to 40 cm (16 inches) long.  They have 
strong crushing jaws but tiny teeth and are both harmless and safe to 
pick up when gripped between the fore and hind legs, with the cloaca 
pointed away.  They have the neat trick of voiding wastes when picked 
up, so dogs get a surprise mouthful that makes them go blech! and 
releasing the lizard.  They also make a deadly-sounding hiss and they 
flick out a bright blue tongue.

Anyhow, I picked mine up safely, checked him for ticks (he was clean), 
and then released him into the undergrowth.  I wonder if he's the one I 
released there a couple of months back, after the youngster next door 
and I tried to feed him strawberries?  One thing, he wasn't trying to 
get at the zoo in the bucket: snails and fruit, that's what they like.

Which was not at all what I set out to say.  I was listening to Julian 
Yu, a Chinese-born Australian composer the other day, in a chat with a 
fairly prim-sounding interviewer (she's my age, and I know from 
experience that she's not *that* prim, but that's what the 10 am ABC 
audience wants).

Anyhow, he told us of a composition master class with one L. Bernstein, 
and how Lenny called him "a f---ing genius" (to avoid setting off alarms 
and filters, I have censored the comment, but he said it in full).  This 
on the very middle-class ABC.

That was allowed to pass, and he went on to describe the comment of a 
German fellow master-classer.  In a good imitation of a stage-German 
accent, he said: "What a pity you can never put that on your CV."

"You just did," said the interviewer, and he agreed.  You could hear him 
grinning, I swear it.

That wasn't where I was going either.  I have long wanted a part of the 
promenade from 'Pictures at an Exhibition' as my ring-tone.  Just to 
annoy people whose phones play pop music.

I was going to use a piano version, but I somehow heard that Yu had done 
a rather different transcription, and went looking.  I found the details 
here: http://www.move.com.au/disc.cfm/3312 and I discovered that there 
was a free download of the promenade.  Have a listen: it's quite amazing.

I saved it, trimmed out a 13-second excerpt, converted it to a wav, so I 
can flick it to the MacBook and Bluetooth it to the phone.  There's 
probably an easier way, but that will do.  The same file now sounds when 
new email arrives.

That wasn't what I set out to say, either.

Oh yes, the 2009 Sydney Sculpture by the Sea shots.  See them at 
http://community.webshots.com/album/575485145UVVYlA

OK, that's my warm fuzzy bits sharing done for the month.  Recluse mode ON.

peter


-- 
  _--|\   Peter Macinnis, feral word herder, & science gossip.
/     \  Inexplicable events coordinator and former designer
\.--._*  of medium & large-scale mistaken identity matrixes.
      v   http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm