This way to Antarctica!

A shot from the south coast of Tasmania, where there is no more land to the south until you hit the Antarctic.

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.