This will hurt me...

Winter in Hobart. Mount Wellington, as seen from Davey Street, Hobart. July 2013. Baby, it's COLD outside! The Chimney Sweeper: A little black thing among the snow , William Blake A little black thing among the snow, Crying "weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe! "Where are thy father and mother? say?" "They are both gone up to the church to pray. Because I was happy upon the heath, And smil'd among the winter's snow, They clothed me in the clothes of death, And taught me to sing the notes of woe. And because I am happy and dance and sing, They think they have done me no injury, And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King, Who make up a heaven of our misery."

The walls have ears eyes. Warwick Street, North Hobart. July 2013. As you know, the Internet is a wonderful place filled with the rich and varied treasures of the world holds (and RSS feeds.) The following are some things that I've had a look at in the last week. I call this: a Compendium of Click-throughs for Monday Morning... What happens when melting snow on the Mutnovsky volcano in Kamchatka, Russia, meets lava? Big bang theory: how did dinosaurs have sex? How to give money away... In praise of cynicism. Why is Australia the happiest place on Earth? Bright Nights, Big Problems: Why we should turn off the lights and appreciate the dark . The Frankfurt School at War: The Marxists Who Explained the Nazis to Washington. A Malcolm Turnbull comeback would not be good news for the left. Competition, “autonomy” and schools. Australians seem to be getting dumber – but does it matter?

I'm not certain that it's still on the market. Macquarie Street, South Hobart. January 2013. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , Robert Louis Stevenson: Madness! A nice exploration of Victorian social hypocrisy with the dichotomy of outward respectability and inward lust. I also enjoy the fact that I am reading a book by the same author as Henry. B . The Glass Key , Dashiell Hammett: An enjoyable romp with convoluted set up and a sufficiently colourful cast of rapscallions, brigands and ne'er-do-wells. Not Hammett's finest writing though. Really, any time a character says something "carelessly" "cautiously" or "callously" nine times on a page, time to get a new editor! B .

What's the collective noun for 'bureaucrats'? Davey Street, Hobart. October 2012. Sunday Top Five ? Already?!? Okay then. My Top Five Collective Nouns! A congregation of alligators. An array of hedgehogs. A fluther of jellyfish. A deceit of lapwings. An ostentation of peacocks.

I see the light! Davey Street, Hobart. August 2012. Sunday Stealing: The 88 Meme 1. What type questions do you hate on a meme? Anything that involves ‘celebrities’ or ‘dating’ or ‘dating celebrities’. 2. If you married the last person you texted, what would your last name be? What a profoundly stupid question. 3. Were you happy when you woke up today? No. I still felt sick. 4. When were you on the phone last? And with who? I rang Henry’s school to let them know that, like me and work, he was too sick to go in. 5. Who are you excited for? I am excited for Henry, who hopefully will receive some recognition for reading the most books of any Lindisfarne North Primary School student during the Premier’s Reading Challenge. 7. Honestly, who was the last person to tell you they love you? Ezra. He had just been told off, mind you. 8. What's the last thing you put in your mouth? A toothbrush. 9. Have a best friend? I married her. 10. Were you ever or are ...

UTas. Sandy Bay. August 2012. As you know, the Internet is a wonderful place filled with the rich and varied treasures of the world holds (and stuff.) The following are some things that I've had a look at in the last week. I call this: a Compendium of Click-throughs for Monday Morning... Unfortunately, this morning the Internet appears to be broken...

I climbed up there once. Telephone tower, as seen from Sandy Bay Road. June 2012. The Internet is a wonderful place filled with the rich and varied treasures of the world holds (is it possible to have a mid-life crisis at 35?) The following are some things that I've had a look at in the last week. I call this: a Compendium of Click-throughs for Monday Morning.. Zadie Smith in favour of libraries . "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." Mythbusting! Food additives do not cause childhood behavioural disorders . Some ideas on how to save $$$ in healthcare ... An enjoyable, brief discussion on feminism . Also, I love the first line. A niche interest:  ladies swimsuits of the 1940s ...

Corners of buildings. Collins Street, as seen from Wellington Plaze, Hobart. April 2012. Two great reads this week from two exceptional authors. First up is a sequel that I never knew existed, Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck. Following on from Cannery Row , it is set in the years following World War II. We reunite with those characters who made it through the war. There is a little more plot and less vignette in this one, and ultimately it amounts to a love story of sorts. Love, duty, happiness and loneliness are the central themes here and the story progresses at great speed to a satisfying conclusion. Although I enjoyed the book very much, and would strongly recommend reading it in companion to Cannery Row , I can't help but feel that it was somewhat slighter in tone. But maybe that was just the more upbeat ending! Highly recommended. Second up is Julian Barnes' prize-winning The Sense of an Ending . A tightly focused novel that relies heavily on a single narrative voice, i...

Die stahlhartes Gehäuse. State Library of Tasmania, Hobart. March 2012. Another Thursday another Q and A stolen from Sunday Stealing! This week: The Her Head Is Part Missing Meme . 1. What is your most annoying habit? Being always right seems to annoy a lot of people! 2. What habit would you change of your partners? (come on no-one is perfect!) [Editor's note: Not only does it assume you have A partner, but it is written as though you have multiple ones. If you do not currently have a partner or many partners, simply tell us about your last one. BW] The tendency towards self-flagellation in the area of parenting is something that I would like to see altered. 3. Horrors or Chick Flicks? Erm… Philosophically maudlin Eastern European mediations on the nature of being. 4. What is the most outrageous thing you have done in the back row of the movies? Throwing sticky Jaffas . 5. When have you lied to get a job? I’ve never lied to get a job. What would be the point? Some way or another y...

Luxury hotel. St George's Terrace, Battery Point. January 2012. Tuesday Q and A and I continue to steal questions from Sunday Stealing. This week I am stealing The 99'er Meme: Part 1 1) Put your iTunes on shuffle. Give me the first 6 songs that pop up. Wilco’s Outta Mind (Outta Sight) , Allo Darlin's My Heart is a Drummer , Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls , The Be Good Tanyas’ The Littlest Birds , Eric B. & Rakim’s Paid In Full , and The Hives’ Hate To Say I Told You So . 2) If you could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be? Someone with some answers! 3) Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 23, give me line 17. ‘“Cornelia Ruiz cut up the black Mexican,” he said.’ 4) What do you think about most? My wife’s thighs. 5) What does your latest text message from someone else say? “Excellent. See you soon.” 6) Do you sleep with or without clothes on? I sleep as naked as the day I was born. 7) What's your strangest talent? Bad impressions of white South Africans. 8) W...

Two buildings side by side. The corner of Macquarie and Harrington Streets, Hobart. January 2012. Tuesday Q and A and I continue to steal questions from Sunday Stealing. This week I am stealing The Never Ending Meme, Part Two . 21. Did you go to your high school prom? I went to my year 10 school ball. I wore a suit. Does that count? 22. Perfect time to wake up? Around 5:30 am is good. 23. Perfect time to go to bed? When it gets dark. 24. Do you use your queen right away in chess? No, I stick to the prawns early on. 25. Ever been in a car accident? Just the odd car through a fence. No broken windscreens of anything like that. 26. Closer to mum or dad… or neither? I moved to the other end of the island. 27. What age is this exciting life over for you? I’m not sure I understand the question. I think that I will say ‘29’. 28. What decade during the 20th century would you have chosen to be a teenager? The 1990s was probably as good as any. 29. Favourite shoes you have EVER owned? There has...

On the way to work. Kirksway Place, as seen from Sandy Bay Road. December 2011. The Internet is a wonderful place filled with the rich and varied treasures of the world holds (and photos of awkward families looking awkward). The following are some things that I've had a look at in the last week. I call this: a Compendium of Click-throughs for Monday Morning... The world is an amazing place. Need Proof? Awkward Family Pet Photos . Here is something that I bet you didn't know: Infants prefer a nasty moose if it punishes an unhelpful elephant . Follow the toads! New research may well help establish how animals predict earthquakes ... A good example of public policy gone bad over in Hungary. A late nomination for headline of the year (and further proof that ornithologists love to 'do it' in the bushes): Great Tits give insight into personality. On more serious matters, Tyler Cowen offers a really good exploration of the European debt crisis . Well worth five minutes of you...

Mindless violence. King Street, Sandy Bay. November 2011. Just the two books this week, but what books they were! The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark ventures into a genre that I am more familiar with in film than print: the Western. A brief plot synopsis might lead you to think that this novel is little more than a cliché: two drifters are drawn into a lynch mob to find and the rustlers presumed to be the killers of a local man. It is in fact much more than that. Written in 1940, the novel is a somber, unsympathetic examination of the ease with which men slip into violence and resist the urge to ‘justice’. It explores starkly ‘masculinity’ and the tendency of the fear of exposure in terms of physical cowardice to trump moral courage when it comes to groups of men. It is a fantastic collection of set pieces that affords Van Tilburg Clark the opportunity to explore these themes and remain able to keep the pace cracking along and tense narrative to the (inevitable) ugly conc...

Things happen here. Macquarie Street, Hobart. November 2011. Another day, another [two] birthday parties... Meeting in a Lift , Vladimir Holan We stepped into the lift. The two of us, alone We looked at each other and that was all. Two lives, a moment, fullness, bliss. At the fifth floor she got out and I went on up knowing I would never see her again, that it was a meeting once and for all, that if I followed her I would be like a dead man in her tracks and that if she came back to me it would only be from the other world.

The closest we'll come to having a dog... The living room, Geilston Bay. June 2011. A pretty pound puppy living in a Duplo duplex being fed bricks with a plastic pitchfork? Very much the only dog I will be letting in our house! Even that one was a loaner from Henry's kindergarten... I'm more a cat man than a dog person. Dogs are always whining and begging. I've already got enough of that around the joint thank you very much.

Babel Two? The Living Room, Geilston Bay. June 2011. Another day, another job. By the time this post appears I shall be ensconced down in main street Sandy Bay, not far from my humble abode of a good four or five years. That shall no doubt prompt some interesting moments of deja vu . Nonetheless, a whole new adventure with a whole new set of potential photographs on the way to and from work (not to mention lunch breaks)!

Temperance & General Mutual Life Assurance Society building, the corner of Murray and Collins Streets, Hobart. June 2011. So loud . So very, very LOUD... [The bread has become moldy] , Charles Reznikoff The bread has become mouldy and the dates blown down by the wind; the iron has slipped from the helve. The wool was to by dyed red but the dyer dyed it black. The dead woman has forgotten her comb and tube of eye-paint; the dead cobbler has forgotten his knife, the dead butcher his chopper, and the dead carpenter his adze. A goat can be driven off with a shout. But where is the man to shout? The bricks pile up, the laths are trimmed, and the beams are ready. Where is the builder? To be buried in a linen shroud or in a matting of reeds— but where are the dead of the Flood and where the dead of Nebuchadnezzar?

This used to be an orphanage. Poor orphans! St Johns Park, New Town. March 2011. The King's Orphan School , later, the Queen's Orphan School , was built in 1833 to provide for people who weren’t quite orphans; that is, the children of convict women, orphans those whose parent were unable to support them and abandoned children. It seems that the ‘school’ was a bleak and over-crowded establishment, with headmasters who were more interested in their own profits than they were the wellbeing of the children in their care. The minutes of one of the Board of Management meetings makes for grim reading. … Children had never been furnished with Porridge, but merely a very thin Gruel -- that the Oatmeal provided for making a thick porridge could not have been used, & that what had been used was never weighed or measured. -- that the Childrens Tea was made in a Boiler contg about 6 Galls of water, a handful of Tea with some Sugar & Milk being thrown into the Boiler, wit...

A building set amongst other buildings. St Johns Park, New Town. February 2011. Area based and area focused autonomous baselines act as a beacon of benchmarking best practice. A bit of blue sky thinking from the bottom-up can contribute to capacity building. Of course, we cautiously welcome collaboration on the contextual core developments; any dialogue downstream is an early win. If we can facilitate a fast-track going forward – in a holistic sense – while incentivising income streams across our key indicators – measurements, our interdepartmental interface initiatives will be met.

We have elevator shafts, but no building. Problem? Developments on Argyle Street, Hobart. January 2011. Sunday, you say? Sunday means Sunday Top Five ! How about a Top Five Excuses For Not Getting A Blog Post Up As Per The Accustomed Time ? A saltwater crocodile named ‘Bitey’ (inspired by his annoying habit of nibbling on other people’s belongings) ate my notes. Henry [and/or] Ezra . I’m having an epistemological break. The Internet was broken. What? Late? I’m not sure I understand you…