Articles in “Random Photographs”

We’ve been a little worried lately, because we haven’t seen him for a while, and the little lizard’s been running around as though he never used to get beaten up for trying to sit on the lawn in the sun.

We thought the big lizard might have moved on to pastures greener.

But here he is, albeit looking rather grubby, actually.

He didn’t fancy having his picture taken this morning, though he’s usually mad for the attention (or just enjoys posing), so it’s not the best shot.

But I’m pleased to see him out and about today.

UPDATE: And then he settled on the barbeque (and is still there) and I ignored his apparent desire for privacy and went to take his photograph again:

The photograph I really love, though, is this last one. I didn’t think his English-language comprehension skills were that good, but I told him that I’d only take one more picture and then leave him alone, and I got this shot:

Aw, bless his sad little face.

(Neither of those last two shots are cropped at all, by the way. I think he recovered his desire for attention.)

I have no real update this evening, since I am entertaining my father-in-law to dinner, but I feel the need to share, from Wondering Willow’s blog, this absolutely hilarious photograph of my younger nephew.

His mother claims that there’s no caffeine in what he’s drinking, but who would actually believe that, given this photograph?

(Secretly, I believe. But only a little and through force of habit.)

I’ve spent the day writing “cliche,” “fatuous,” “vague transition,” and the like on my own article (I’m much harder on myself than on my students, if anyone’s worrying about that. I’ve written “cliche” on students’ work before, but never “fatuous.”) and it has, oddly, put me out of the mood for updating the blog, especially since I’m only on page sixteen and it’s already after 6 p.m.

So, in the interim, here are some photographs of my dogs:

Well, technically, General Montgomery—the Elvis-fancying terrier of an earlier post—isn’t mine: my brother got him after our old dog, Scampy the Hell Hound, died, long after I moved out of home.

Petey the poodle is an old dog now, at least sixteen, and Monty only a youngster, but they’re both good boys, and Terry Pratchett tells us that that’s the highest praise we can give a dog.

It worries me slightly that I don’t know whether he was just highly amenable to having his picture taken or was, in fact, too terrified to move.

He turned up on our clothesline at eleven o’clock tonight:

It’s not the best photograph, of course—it was pitch black (hence the flash and the red-eye, which I thought of reducing in iPhoto, but it just made him look weird); I didn’t want to spook him by getting too close, and had to essentially guess where he was.

So, actually, not such a bad photo under the circumstances.

And isn’t he beautiful?

(Nick tells me that I should mention that this beautiful boy is a Tawny Frogmouth (and I’m so pleased to see that they’re at low risk of extinction, the lovely things). I just assumed everyone would know that, which just goes to show that I shouldn’t be writing on the Internet.

Actually, I don’t know for certain that these are the same ducks who came visiting in August, but I found them wandering their way around the garden this morning after a brief but intense sun-shower.

And then, bless them, they came even closer:

Who doesn’t love ducks?

This evening brought many more parrots than usual flocking to the palm tree:

I know: still nothing to do with books. But, while the book I’ve been re-reading my way through today—Andrew King’s The London Journal, 1845-83: Periodicals, Production and Gender—is a fascinating and extremely important book, especially for anyone with any interest in serial publication in the Victorian period, in penny weeklies (it is the only full-length academic account of these journals yet published), in reader-response theory, or in theories of textual consumption, especially among those groups of readers (such as the working class) whose experiences used to be considered unrecoverable, it’s not the sort of book I normally blog about, especially on a day that hasn’t been as productive as it should have been.

So, instead, let’s all marvel at how cute birds are when they’re eating upside down, and wonder how they’re able to eat upside down, when I tend to choke just trying to drink on a slight incline.

Seriously—I don’t intend the blog to become an image blog, but neither do I want to get into the habit of skipping too many days: a picture of birds eating is a nice step on my current path towards finding a compromise between my blogging and my (unpaid, because I’m currently unemployed, but vital, if I ever want to be employed) academic writing.

I’ll make it up to people who want something a little more word-intensive by starting my real-time blogging of season one of Doctor Who this weekend.

But with a day divided between excavating the skeleton of my argument from a journal article that has been provisionally accepted (but needs to have its theoretical and methodological framework refined before the 31st of January) and being really, really annoyed that Australia won the Sydney test (even though it was a dead game with the series already won) when Graham Smith had gone through the effort of batting when he has both a severely damaged elbow and a broken hand—well, I’m a little tired.

So I’m wimping out on the update and loading some more photographs of my parents’ beautiful garden, which is largely the handiwork of my brother the horticulturalist.

See? Nice and soothing. Now I can go back to what I’m calling theoretical archaeology (why, yes: I am rather pretentious) to the calm, illusionary sound of a water garden that’s actually one thousand kilometres away.

I took these photographs in Minnamurra Rainforest, at the base of the Illawarra escarpment. It is—according to my brother, who knows these things—the most southernly sub-tropical rainforest in Australia: after this, it’s temperate rainforest.

What I like about Minnamurra is the opportunity to take shots that play with light and shade, as well as all the water.

Come the return to Brisbane, however, I will actually be writing on this blog again, rather than simply uploading photographs.

No, not me.

Well, he’s all right.

But I meant my brother’s dog, General Montgomery:

I particularly like the way that his tail goes nuts when Elvis is playing the guitar.

Of course, the blog itself isn’t a year old until February, but thank you all for your reading and assiduous commenting in 2008.

I don’t have any exciting plans for 2009 yet, but I will be live-blogging the most recent Doctor Who Christmas special when the ABC airs it in a month, and I’m thinking of live-blogging the previous three seasons of Doctor Who after that. Or at least starting on it before teaching starts.

What say you all? Fancy talking about the first three seasons of Doctor Who?

Of all the wildlife we see in the back garden, the one animal I haven’t immortalised on the blog is the possum.

This is partly to do with the fact that it only ever comes out late at night, when I am rarely carrying my camera, and partly to do with the fact that the little sod ate my chili plant, for which iniquitous act I shall never forgive it.

However, it did make its appearance during a boozy pre-Christmas drinks evening on the weekend, wandering casually up the stairs to see if it could scrounge any food:

Not the best picture of a possum, but who wants to get close to one, really?

This next photo is a lovely one, but I didn’t take it—a brave friend who was willing to get far closer to the possum than I was took this one:

Don’t think you’re going to be getting the same coverage as my water dragon, though, possum.