This will hurt me...

Men in a boat. The Derwent Estuary, as seen from Shot Tower, Taroona. May 2013. Theme Thursday already an the theme is 'LETTER'. Today's letter is... V .

Hungry? Bellerive Wharf, Bellerive. September 2010. Book Club Friday again already. I finished two books this week, one Vietnamese and the other Swedish (although very much Finnish is tone and content). The first was Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War . Apparently quite popular in Vietnam enough to be banned – this one is a mediation through the Vietnamese War (the second one) from the perspective of a North Vietnamese volunteer. Think of it as a shorter, more disjointed Vietnamese version of The Thin Red Line . Now, I am not sure if it is a poor translation, or if the Vietnamese lyrical style simply doesn’t translate well into English, but this one was a little disappointing for me. The overarching story was remarkable, and many of the vignettes themselves were compelling and nicely drawn, but the stilted, exaggerated and overly florid description does wear you down after a while. I am not sure that the overly elaborate and shifting narrative also helped. While I appreciate an unreliable ...

Here is one from a little while back of Ezra doing some logistical calculations with regards to spear fishing from the Geilston Bay Jetty. I keep telling him that he must allow for optical refraction, but do you think he listens?

These fish have undoubtedly seen better days. The orange fellow in particular seems surprised at his predicament. Henry and I took this snap at the fish mongers at Mures Lower Deck . There is a cruel beauty in the fact that I live in a place that has the world's greatest seafood , and I'm not much of a fan of fish. That said, a nice bit of squid, octopus and the odd John Dorey, and I'll be right!

Ummmm. Theme Thursday you say? A tricky one. As ever, I have chosen the photo before making myself aware of the theme. It keeps the challenge up. This one is not too tricky though... The theme today is FLIGHT, and when you say flight, the word that immediately comes to me does not evoke birds, wind or airports; it is the cold, hard truth of reality . Here, two typical Tasmanian CSIRO-employed nerds hunks are taking a well earned lunch break from their daily humdrum reality of, I dunno, measuring seagull farts. Re-creating Hemingway’s allegorical commentary on his philosophy of Manhood – The Old Man and the Sea – these two epitomes of manhood are locked in a desperate battle of wills with nature’s greatest beast: fish the ego . For the most part, reality is a bummer. Back when Generation X hadn’t been superseded by the vacuous, self-absorbed nitwits of Generation Y (why indeed), the kids used to say reality bites . It bites especially hard when you’re stuck at work. So dudes like th...

I keep telling him that bluefin tuna don't hang around bays. Does he listen? BAH!

Like The Old Man and the Sea , it is prize game fish for me. You can keep your mullets, flatheads, blob fish, gropers, grey nurses, box jellyfish and the like. It's Great White Sharks, Toothy Babies or nothing for me!

The best that I can say about this French advertisement for tampons is that it is, err, very French . The tagline reads: "I am like a fish in water" , but I am not sure that this really helps all that much in getting the gist of the piece. Now, you must believe me when I say that I’ve thought long and hard [oohh err missus!] about this particular product promotion, but admit that I am no closer at answering the riddle that might unlock this particular enigma than when I began, and figure that I shan’t locate that answer any time soon. The most obvious answer harks back to grubby schoolboy locker room jokes, but to my knowledge – and I say this as someone who remains a grubby schoolboy at heart – grubby schoolboys do not represent a significant proportion of the market share of feminine hygiene products . No, I figure that is women who buy tampons (see, all of that taxpayers’ money wasn’t wasted on my education). As it is women that buy the tampons, it must be women that t...