SiC – David Sidwell

Amazon.co.uk Review

“Elizabeth Peters’ unforgettable heroine Amelia Peabody makes her first appearance in this clever mystery. Amelia receives a rather large inheritance and decides to use it for travel. On her way through Rome to Egypt, she meets Evelyn Barton-Forbes, a young woman abandoned by her lover and left with no means of support. Amelia promptly takes Evelyn under her wing, insisting that the young lady accompany her to Egypt, where Amelia plans to indulge her passion for Egyptology. When Evelyn becomes the target of an aborted kidnapping and the focus of a series of suspicious accidents and mysterious visitations, Amelia becomes convinced of a plot to harm her young friend. Like any self-respecting sleuth, Amelia sets out to discover who is behind it all”

Am re-reading the classic 1991 Australian novel

“Cloudstreet a broken down house of former glories on the wrong side of the tracks, a place teeming with memories of its own, a place of shudders, shadows and spirits.

From separate catastrophes, two rural families flee to the city and find themselves sharing this great breathing, sighing, muttering structure and begin their lives again from scratch.

There are the industrious Lambs, who wait and wait on the God of Miracles who seems to have foresaken them, and the gambling Pickleses, who prefer to deal with the mysteries of Lady Luck and her henchmen. Both aghast at the fates which have delivered them to Cloudstreet, and the baffling realisation that they will always remain there.

Together they roister and rankle in a divided house that begins as a roof over their heads and becomes a home for their hearts.

In this fresh, funny novel, full of wonder and dreams, brilliant young Australian author, Tim Winton, weaves the threads of lifetimes, of 20 years of shouting and fighting, laughing and grafting, into a story about acceptance and belonging.”

Source

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Re-reading it for 3 reasons:

1. The TV show First Tuesday Book Club is discussing it early 2010
2. A new 6-hour mini TV series is about to be made
3. I wanted to (well, after I heard about the first 2)

I remember years ago wondering why there wasn’t a Melways (street directory) of the entire State of Victoria, including the bush areas.

And here’s one reason….

This is going to be just a rough calculation, so don’t get upset about decimal places and rounding off.

An A4 sheet of paper is 21×29 cm. Leave 1cm margin (each side) for bindings etc, so we’ve got 19×27cm of printable area.

A bushwalking map is usually in the scale of 1:25,000. Hence 1cm on the map is 25,000 cm in real life, or 250 m.  It follows that 4cm of map = 1 km etc.

So an A4 map of this scale would be about 5km x 7km, that is 35 km²

Right, so how big is Victoria? According to the government it’s about 227,400 km².  So do a simple division and you’ll need about 6,500 A4s. Printing double sided means ‘only’ 3,250 pages.

And if printed in the main Melway’s scale it would be worse. The majority of their maps are in a smaller scale, 1:20,000.  So even more that 3,250 pages would be needed.

Current book is the Vietnam War account that is

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The cover says: “The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time – John le Carre”

To quote from Amazon: “Michael Herr, who wrote about the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine, gathered his years of notes from his front-line reporting and turned them into what many people consider the best account of the war to date, when published in 1977. He captured the feel of the war and how it differed from any theater of combat ever fought, as well as the flavor of the time and the essence of the people who were there”

Purchased online from BetterWorld Books

Reading the WWII history book

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I understand this was one of the two main books used as the source for the excellent "Downfall" film. The other one, I have also recently read.

Purchased online from BetterWorld Books

Currently Reading the 1962 SciFi book

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Borrowed from the local library

Am fine and home now. But yesterday (Thursday November 5th) was a day of adventure.  A quick summary:

Forecast for Thurs and Fri was for lovely weather, so decided a quick trip to the Northern Grampians was the go. 280km each way, so should try and stay 2 nights at least.

Plan was to try Briggs Bluff again, a year after my ill-fated first attempt.  So decided on

• Two nights at Mt Zero Log Cabins (MZLC)
• Thurs: warm-up walk. Re-do Hollow Mountain, in preparation for…
• Friday: big walk: Briggs Bluff

But I didn’t get a chance to even start Briggs Bluff this time. (last time I got, err, umm, lost during the attempt).  So anyway:

• About halfway up Hollow Mountain I caught my leg on a tree or sharp rock. Didn’t hurt that much…
• … But a few mins later there’s red-stuff running down my leg.
• Cut was below the knee on the back of the leg
• I carry a small first-aid kit in the pack, so bandaged it up
• It wasn’t hurting, so I continued and got to the top
• Some photos now up at my Flickr page. Warning: some red-stuff shown, but not too bad.
• Got back down again and even did a bit of tourist things etc
• Back to MZLC about 4:30pm

Angela (the owner/manager there) was then kindly preparing some band-aids, new bandages and antiseptics, whilst I went off and washed my leg off.

When we both saw the cut we said “mmm, that’s gunna need stitches”.  Was ~3cm long and when I moved my leg it looked like a fishes mouth opening and closing!

How lucky is this: Angela said there was a major hospital at Horsham, only about 25 mins away. So I went off there and they put in 4 stitches plus gave me a tetanus shot, some antibiotics and strong pain-killers etc.  Back to MZLC about 9pm and very hungry!

No pain, slept okay. Didn’t touch pain-killers.  However doctor had said no more walks for at least a week, so decided to abandon the trip and come home today; barely 24 hours after leaving.

Stitches out in a week.   And I still haven’t got to Briggs Bluff.

Update:  a very warm Saturday 7th November.  I finally got to have a shower today.  And see my first ever stitches (sutures, they called them)  Please send congratulatory cards and telegrams  to me c/- ….

Finished this book

Was one of the books used in the creation of the brilliant movie Downfall. Book borrowed from the local library

It’s great we are getting a 3rd ABC TV channel, dedicated to kids. It starts “before Christmas [2009]” according to a report on their own web site.   The same page also notes it will  “broadcast from 6am-9pm daily”.   That’s good timing for the young market it is aiming at.

But how about using the ‘spare’ 9pm to (say) midnight capacity for educational shows for we grown ups?

They could show traditional documentaries, plus even the newer types of media, such as the equivalent to iTunes U ; that is free lectures from assorted educational institutions on a range of topics.  I’m sure that NASA et al would also be happy to give them free, or cheap, material.

Speaking of money, the documentaries don’t have to be first-run. Repeats would be fine. Wouldn’t that save money?

They could also have theme nights.  Perhaps:

• Monday: Science
• Tuesday: Science
• Wednesday: Science

Well perhaps I’m showing a tiny bit of bias there, maybe:

• Monday: Australian History
• Tuesday: World History
• Wednesday: Science
• Thursday: Technology
• Friday: etc etc

Could this work?

Currently reading the somewhat forgotten 1939 (!) masterpiece

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Borrowed from the local library. Thanks to Marieke et al on the First Tuesday Book Club for pointing out this wonderful book