Australian War Memorial

The grave of an unknown Australian soldier at the War Memorial in Canberra.

Two-Up at the Clovelly

On April 25th, my birthday and also Australia's ANZAC Day (a sibling of Rememberance Day, but different) I went to the Clovelly Hotel to watch and play two-up. Two-up is a betting game that's only legal on ANZAC Day, because it was played by the "diggers"--the Australian and Kiwi dudes in the trenches in WWI.

The "spinner," any volunteer member of the crowd, throws two coins up into the air using a little wooden paddle. The dude in the green hat, the judge (there's a word for him too, but I don't remember it at the moment) looks at the coins, and if they are both heads he'll touch his head--if they're both tails, he'll touch his tail. Meanwhile, before the spinner throws the coins, the whole crowd has been waving money around frantically, shouting out bets, and if they're for heads, tapping their heads with the money they're betting. Bets are made informally between any two individuals--the one betting heads holds the money, and either gives it all back or keeps it depending on who wins. People bet in all kinds of denominations, there were even a few hundred dollar bills being thrown around.

Personally, I stuck to five dollar bets. I won $25, and lost $20. Success!

I feel a book post coming on...

The end of the sixth month of the year has passed! Time for the quarterly reckoning of reading.

Since March 31 I have read:

1. Susan Kurosawa - Coronation Talkies
   
2. Rose Tremain - Sacred Country
   
3. David Mitchell - Number9Dream
   
4. Nada Awar Jarrar - Dreams of Water
   
5. Stephen Dando-Collins - Pasteur's Gambit (nonfiction)
   
6. Audrey Niffenegger - Three Incestuous Sisters (visual novel)
   
7. Audrey Niffenegger - The Adventuress (visual novel)
   
8. Annie Proulx - Brokeback Mountain
   
9. Mudrooroo - Wild Cat Falling (PFitG)
   
10. Jenny Newman - Life Class
    
11. Elizabeth Knox - The Vintner's Luck (PFitG)
    
12. Louise Erdrich - The Master Butchers Singing Club
    
13. Yoshimoto Banana - Kitchen (PFitG)
    
14. Eric Gerome Dickey - Chasing Destiny
    
15. Lev Grossman - Codex
    
16. Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner
    
17. Sandra Newman - The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done
    
18. Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn
    
19. Andrew Nicoll - The Good Mayor
    
20. Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife
    
21. Samrat Upadhyay - The Guru of Love
    
22. Jeanette Winterson - Sexing the Cherry
    
23. Martha Cooley - The Archivist
    
24. Haruki Murakami - Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (PFitG)
    

Voila! 24 books (although two were picture books). Of these, six were written by people of colour; I am still way way short of my goal to make that half. (For the whole year, I am running at 12/37; still a massive improvement over last year's 6/60 but Not Good Enough!) Four were on my list for Project Filling in the Gaps.

As I write this I am still working on both Sexing the Cherry and Hard Boiled Wonderland. Both should be finished by the end of the week, so I am leaving them in the second-quarter list.

Some statistical analysis! This quarter I had a definite peak, reading seven novels in two weeks! But there was also a trough, when I read zero novels in two weeks! Remarkable in both cases.

My favourites were Sacred Country, Number9Dream, Motherless Brooklyn, The Good Mayor, and American Wife.

Birds of Prey Show

Falconry is totally badass. While watching the (awesome) birds of prey show at Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane this April, I seriously considered a change in career path.

The three people handling birds were all women, and with their hardcore leather gloves, flipping these huge predatory birds around (the one in this picture EATS KANGAROOS, MAN!) they were sooooo cool! I was in awe.

Kangaroos at Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary

The free-ranging kangaroos at Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary were the highlight of my trip to Brisbane in April. I bought a $1 bag of kangaroo food and used it to bribe kangaroos into being photo subjects! The food was barely necessary, though--llike these ones, most of them were so relaxed around people that they didn't mind being approached by any fool with a camera, food or no food.

See flickr for many more photos. And if you're ever in Brisbane, I highly recommend Lone Pine!

Taking the "Travel" out of "Travel Blog"

I've been remiss again! You haven't heard from me in nearly a month--in fact, so much time has elapsed that you probably don't exist anymore. (Well, you do, but not as a reader of this ill-kept blog.)

But, as is often I think the case, it's the pleasant kind of busy life that really keeps one away from journaling efforts. I've had a good month, travelling to Tasmania and doing quite a few last minute tourist expeditions around Sydney. Expect photos of that, and also my not-yet-posted Brisbane pictures from April, in the next little while.

So there will still be some virtual travel going on, but officially I am now back in North America (specifically the hell known as LAX), soon to be back in Canada. I left Sydney at 13:10 on 14 June and arrived here at 13:20 the same day. Definitely the longest ten minutes of my life so far!

I'll arrive in Vancouver at 10pm this evening, and Victoria some time tomorrow; I'll be there for a week, travel back to Saskatchewan for a month, and then set up shop for the forseeable future in Victoria as of the end of July.

Now that I'm no longer travelling (or "on the prowl" as Revenue Canada would put it) I do intend to keep posting photos and the occasional rambling about reading here, so should you still be out there, dear reader, do come back some time.

On Sydney Harbour

Alas, I have not fulfilled my goal to date a cello-playing yacht owner while in Sydney.

However, I have taken some photos of boats.