Walking West

Saturday, March 31, 2001

Every time I listen to Neil Finn's 'Wherever You Are' I think my modem connection has just gone, because he slips a disconnected phone-line tone in at the end...

You can tell what I'm listening to at the moment.

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Miss your MacPlus? Relive it in all its glory with the vMac emulator for Mac or PC, and fire up good ol' System 1.1. You won't even have to do the floppy shuffle. [Via Grouse, which is.]

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Friday, March 30, 2001

All Your Base fans (yes, yes, last week's meme and all that, but still), take a look at this. It's just too perfect. [Via billyjoebob at Six-Layer Kate.]

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It's Shauny's last day at work. Go and send her a cheery email or something, and read her tale of Dickson Woolies, where yours truly once walked around the entire supermarket wearing slippers on a dare. (Grosbies. Not those pink fluffy ones or the ones shaped like Tyrannosaurus feet. Not that daring, really.)

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Neil Finn's new album One Nil hasn't quite seeped through my pores yet, although 'Wherever You Are' is certainly right up there with his loveliest songs. I'm sure the whole thing will come together with a few more listens.

Saw his brother Tim playing in Prahran a few weekends ago. Looking a bit more grey than on the Woodface tour—well, it was nine years ago—and his voice is cracking a little on some of the high notes these days, but for a long-time fan it was a real treat. He started out with acoustic versions of a few solo favourites ('Persuasion', 'Not Even Close'), and then was joined onstage by the support act, Even, who doubled as his backing band. It didn't quite gel at times, but they performed creditable versions of a slew of Enz classics—'I See Red', 'Six Months in a Leaky Boat'—reaching right back to his earliest days, even to 1973 ('Matinee Idyll'). That stuff sounded bizarre alongside the new works from Say It Is So, but it was impressive to hear a fair sampling of nearly thirty years of work.

Thirty years! If I had to show thirty years of my work I'd be scanning pictures of Mother as Orange Sphere (1971; 65cm x 33cm; felt-tip marker on white butcher paper).

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If you're a standards-conscious web designer who hasn't checked out the bookmarklets plugged by JZ a few days ago, do so now; they greatly simplify the task of checking a large site after a redesign. dave@gazingus's offerings are good for the basics of HTML and CSS validation, and Tantek Çelik adds a couple more useful items, like links-checking. My IE toolbar is getting so full of bookmarklets that there's no room for actual links...

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Owen has done an impressive job with his latest Box Lesson—as well as being a fine practical resource, it's a nice piece of design in its own right. With all those issues to take care of for PCs alone, I shudder to think what a 'safe' set of templates will look like once Mac and Linux are added into the mix.

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Every news page wants to ask me something today: The Next Napster? (No.) Who is spying on your downloads? (Everybody, it seems.) Is this the face of Christ? (If you see this man, call Judea's Most Wanted on 555-1455.)

And speaking of JC, I have to note this Landover Baptist classic, unearthed by my friend Scoot.

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Thursday, March 29, 2001

Now they tell me:

Wasps defending a nest will sting in response to movement. If you encounter or disturb a nest, stay still and make a slow and careful retreat when the wasps' activity has subsided.

Actually, we were pretty sure they weren't European wasps, which have tiger stripes and don't seem to be as aggressive. On a visit to the Tas Museum on Sunday, Mum saw one of our ones displayed as a 'flower wasp', although I haven't been able to find out anything about them online.

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I've just been down to Tasmania for a few days with Jane to see my folks. Unlike a disturbingly large number of my friends I actually get along with my parents, and miss being able to see them as often as I'd like. It's the curse of the age, this business of families and friends being scattered to the four corners of the earth. (Handy when you're travelling, though.)

The four of us spent Saturday going on a bushwalk, one of the things Tassie does best. We thought we'd try out a newish track to Adamson's Falls in one of the state forests down near Hastings Caves.

The sign at the start of the track was new, but the track certainly wasn't; it showed every sign of being a fifty-year-old logger's trail brought out of retirement. There'd been a bit of rain recently, and the short logs set into the earth to form the path had grown slippery, so it was hairy going—until we resigned ourselves to getting our feet wet and walked alongside them through the ankle-deep puddles and razor-sharp sword-grass.

Soon we started picking up leeches brought out by the recent rain, and were having to stop and check our shoes and cuffs every few minutes for signs of the little bleeders inching up our legs and waving their free ends around in search of a patch of skin. No doubt we'd miss some and end up with bloody socks.

The track started out in light bush dominated by tall eucalypts, but headed into darker and colder rainforest as we followed it uphill. In a couple of places there were creeks running the length of it, and at another a wide pond had formed where the shallow roots of an old gum had ripped out of the ground as it fell; the base stood at least five metres high, and the trunk stretched away into the bush.

In the thick of the rainforest the leeches disappeared and gave way to a fairyland of tangled branches, colourful mushrooms and emerald-green liverwort. I had no idea what liverwort was until I visited New Zealand, which has more species of it than anywhere else; David Bellamy extolled its virtues in a book I read there ('Liverworts! Lovely'). It's a mossy plant that carpets the ground and soaks up water like a Chux SupaWipe, turning everything a glistening green. I hadn't known its name, but I'd known the plant since childhood, because Tasmania's forests are full of it—as are all of the temperate rainforests of the south, I expect.

Growing amongst the liverwort were some incredible fungi: bright red toadstools, white brackets growing from trunks, lichen looking like cooled-down drops of lead, and a species that grew out of the soil in patches of orange plasticine hair. We tried not to squash them as we stepped carefully through the tangled tree-roots lining the path.

It was near the orange-hair fungi that the leeches slipped to the rank of second-worst fauna encountered on our walk. Just as we rounded a corner, Mum suddenly shrieked and started pulling at her t-shirt while swatting furiously at a buzzing insect. No surprise there: Tassie is full of fat black sandflies that leave an annoying bite. But these were no sandflies: these were yellow. These were wasps.

A more selfless son, daughter-in-law and husband would have stayed to assist, but before that worthy thought had crossed our minds we had all bolted, with Mum and wasps in hot pursuit. We had no time to worry about twisting our ankles in all those tangled roots; instead we were vaulting over logs and picking out the safe spots to land with a laser-guided precision worthy of a marine wearing night-goggles.

The wasps fell back after a while, leaving Mum to rub at the two stings on her hand and waist and proclaim how very sore they were. We believed her.

We'd run in the direction of the falls, so there was nothing to do but carry on. It was the steepest part of the track, right up the side of Adamson's Peak, a Fuji-shaped mountain near the town of Dover. All of us got thoroughly muddy as we clambered up it.

Two hours into our '3 hour return' walk we still hadn't seen any falls, although we'd heard running water a few times. When we finally reached them we found the track had brought us to a point halfway up the side of the steep gully carved out by them. Which was fine, except we couldn't see a damn thing; the trees obscured any view.

At this point the track took a sharp turn towards the vertical as it headed for the top of the falls. Jane and I followed it for a while until reaching a spot where by leaning dangerously close to the edge I could see a few snatches of furious white—along with the trees that would catch my fall far below if I slipped. It wasn't what we'd hoped, but it would have to do. The only way we'd be climbing further up was if the wasps suddenly reappeared.

We rejoined Mum and Dad at a small alcove a short way back, where we all paused a while and ate an apple or two. As we rested, a wet lump of bark the size of a grapefruit fell on Mum.

Heading back downhill was a faster affair, given the lubricating properties of mud and the descending properties of gravity. After three quarters of an hour we were past the worst of the slope and wondering when we'd see the wasps again. Dad and Jane were marching ahead and I was back with Mum when I first saw the orange hair and then felt someone fire a nail-gun into my wrist.

I looked down to see a wasp hanging out of my right arm, arse-first—until suddenly he was up and buzzing around with his mates, looking for a second chance to sting me, and I got the hell out of there.

Mum was running ahead of me and a steady drone was coming up behind me. When it got too close to my head I dropped to the ground and cowered piteously, not wanting to cop a load of poison in the face. It may not be much of a face, but it's the only one I've got, and certainly wouldn't look better as a swollen red balloon.

Mum was crouching nearby as the wasps hovered around, coming within inches of my left ear. My wrist was throbbing.

We had to get away, but we were on the wrong side of the nest. 'We'll have to run for it,' I said, and when the buzzing moved just far enough away I sprang up and belted through the clearing. Mum was just behind me; I turned to make sure she wasn't about to trip on the path, just in time to watch her get stung twice more.

Dad and Jane had sensibly steered themselves in a non-wasperly direction. When we caught up to them Mum was being quite stoic about her four stings, but she looked sore. I knew just how sore, because my arm was aching mightily; I hadn't had a sting like this in twenty years. It was like being punched repeatedly by my favourite school bully. It came up in a fiery rash that night and was sore for days.

Leeches seemed a minor inconvenience after that, although we flicked off several more before we reached the car. The walk took four hours in total: four hours of mud, leeches, wasp attacks, falling bark, and no waterfall.

At the kiosk at nearby Hastings Caves the ranger said, 'Oh, the Forestry Commission doesn't maintain those paths anymore.' Great. But they still maintain the sign, bless 'em.

Still, it was a day to remember. Like the day in February when I spontaneously ejected myself out of a dinghy and got completely soaked in two feet of water. I'll save the explanations for that one, though, or we'll be here all night.

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The Melbourne Comedy Festival started today. For the last two years Jane and I have booked flights down to Melbourne in April and seen half a dozen shows each time, jammed into two action-packed evenings. This year we're actually here, and I haven't even looked at the programme properly yet. What a sign of how disorganised I am right now.

The Age's comedy festival pages are a useful source of news on it all. They've also announced the winner of their funny short story competition, which had 450 entries—including two from yours truly. I'll publish mine somewhere here eventually for those who enjoy reading the words of unfunny losers.

And speaking of comedy, congratulations to James and Mark for a successful first night. Definitely not unfunny losers, those two. If you're in London, go and see their show—I guarantee you won't regret it.*

*This guarantee not redeemable for cash. Good for one purchase only. Valid before 30 June 1992.

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Hang on, what's this doing here? Didn't I announce the death of Walking West just two short months ago, when I said:

Over the past couple of weeks I've felt it shift away from its long-standing purpose of documenting a personal journey towards a common-or-garden blogginess that doesn't quite fit with what went before. After I've posted a couple more things that I've been wanting to, it's history.

Go on, you knew it couldn't last.

The personal journey continues, because there's always a personal journey. And common-or-garden blogginess turns out to be more flexible than once-a-week punditry. The Week Link just wasn't covering all the bases I wanted (whether they Belong to Us or not). And I crave a space to spout off whenever the mood takes me, not just every Wednesday.

Hope you like the new design, which I like to call 'Homesick Australian'; a nice evolution from WW1 and WW2, I reckon. It's totally free of tables, in the spirit of the browser upgrade campaign; in fact it would be impossible to reproduce precisely without divs and CSS. Many thanks to Owen for being my PC testbed (I'm a Mac user) and all-round CSS guru. And remember Taylor's box-centering tip, kiddies.

There are a few Opera bugs—nothing that makes the page unreadable, just less than perfect—but it scrubs up fine in IE 5 and NS 6 for PC and Mac. And if you're looking at this with IE/NS 4.x or older, welcome to the 1995 Web, folks, and enjoy that white background, Times font, blue underlined links and full-width text. (Boring? Certainly. Inaccessible? Never.)

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