Delighted and Amazed (again)

Today, in an exceptionally desultory manner I looked at the Google book site. I did the task as a required exercise but, hey presto, I found a book that is an icon of our family life as well as a talisman. It represents the essence of our childhood. Growing up in a family of 5 children we received books as gifts every birthday and Christmas. The selection of each book for each child was left to our Aunt Monnie who was an expert and a professional in literature and education. That did not mean we were not allowed to read "Schoolfriend" or "Phantom" comics and we read Enid B with pleasure.
Back to Google books: I am so excited to discover information about this talisman book, which I had never thought to track down in the usual Google search way. I also retrieved information on "Ernest and Celestine", a series of children's books I adored and read to my children in the 70s. This series is now out of print. While other classics of the time - "Dogger", "Corduroy", "John Brown Rose and the Midnight Cat" are still available in bookshops, "Ernest and Celestine" has disappeared. Through Google books I have found where I can buy copies of the Ernest and Celestine books through Amazon, etc.
By the by, Aunty Monnie selected those books for my children and if she was still alive, I, along with my brother and sisters, would ask her to select books for our grand children.(She was 92 when she died and still able to play scrabble in Latin.)

I called my previous dog Celestine as I loved the character so much.
I have created a very esoteric group through an earlier 23 Things task called "people who call cats after places/owners, and dogs after literature". My dog names have been Siegfried Sassoon, Maddie after "Martha Quest" by Doris Lessing, Celestine as noted above, and Morticia (who was named by the breeders who used TV series for the litter). I chose two of my dog's pups names- Malvolio and Viola. My cats - 2 in 30 years - were Rankine from the owner and Chandler from the owner.I could be calling my new cat Burwood if I get one from the RSPCA.

I say Hey ho and hurrah to 23 Things

Amazing and very, very spooky

How easy is this to explore google maps? The program shows how WE ARE WATCHED, sooo comprehensively.

I started very simply with my address, my friend's address, then the way to my friend, then the satellite image of home. After that I was away, getting satellite images of a friend's home in West Palm Beach in Florida. I looked up the address of the library where my namesake in Halifax is doing the 23 things program.

I am simply overwhelmed and amazed at Google. As I reflected, I thought about the John Le Carre et al, books I read in the late 60s, early 70s and the spy/thriller films I have watched over the last 20 years. I took for granted the spying tools but now I see even I could do some spying a la Bourne Identity.

4 seconds max, and I am somewhere obscure in the world, another 2-3 seconds and I am looking at the actual residence: no need for myriad yellow stickers on pages of the street directories to mark the way to a place in an unknown suburb. Just a click, print and I have the journey mapped for me, here or in Siberia or West Palm Beach Florida.

I want to think about about how google can do this. It gives me a headache. I have read the story of the creation of google a few times. I can almost discern the logic the two "lads" used to work out how to create the search engine. Less than ten years later the search engine has all the places in the world tagged, and can show the way to a milk bar in Izmir (formerly Smyrna) in Turkey.

I often consult an atlas when I read, to show me the location of the book's setting. This was essential for my latest book - Louis de Berniere's "Birds without wings". With my new-found experience of google maps, I can hone in on all the places where the characters lived, or fought famine or their big and small wars and look at the spaces and travel routes used by them when travelling for business or more often, on forced marches to oblivion.


I have already lauded the google maps program to friends who have children and grandchildren in the US and UK. 23 things has expanded my knowledge, again.

Because

Because I learnt how to use RSS I have found a treasure trove of interesting and stimulating information through the sites and Blogs I have feeds for (or is it to?).
I have read items on finding treasure/information randomly. There are bloggers who believe that "randomness" could be under threat because of the ever increasing sophistication of research engines finding answers and information too efficiently. I read about this in an erudite article on the technological library. My new RSS-initiated, randomly-gained knowledge, is valuable enough for me to now follow some pertinent threads as well as prompting me to think differently about my own research methods.
I have been alerted to some oddball items as I set up an alert to annoyed librarian, but not to the site. So when Google finds news about annoyed and librarian I am sent a message. I have discovered a site that is for librarians who say f... and yes there are over a thousand members.
I have to navigate very intricate paths to refind some of the links, over hill and down dale, but if I am persisitent I can retrace my steps. Otherwise, if I think I may lose some article or an extraordinarily odd blog, I copy it and store somewhere safe. I do not know how to feed it to myself and I do not need to know.
I have found a namesake in Nova Scotia undertaking the 23 Things program and shall follow her blog with interest. Her links are very informative.
I ask myself what I would do without my new sources of information and I shrug my shoulders and say I could live without it. This is not to say I am not loving the new treasures unfolded
because of 23 Things.

Austral Pride - ode to our 85 year old stove

THE AUSTRAL PRIDE

I love my stove more than I love my pearls, TV, furniture, in fact nearly every object I own. Most of our things are replaceable, but my stove is not.

Here is a stove that has been cooking family roasts, cakes, casseroles- for over 80 years of Christmas, Easter, summer holidays, winter chill, spring bounce and autumn glow. There are knobs to turn on and off: finite tweaks can get the temperature to highest heat for fast boiling to a tiny flame to cook soup all day. The fingers do the controls: there is no automatic switch. The back of the hand gauges the oven temperature (ask your grandma).

I love the fact that in 1927 a mother cooked a roast for her family and, 80 years later and thousands of roasts later, in 2007 my husband cooks a roast for his family. When the Swinburne cookery classes were being conducted in 1922, the stoves used would have looked much like this, but not as decorative.

This lovely piece of history works and connects us to our forbears, in a "throw away" time. A good spirit is felt by all who come to visit, especially tradespeople who sigh to see such wonderful craftsmanship and manufacture.

My stove is going to be in my will along with my pearls.

Progress when I did something else?

For task 7, I did not want to simpsonise myself though I looked at the program. I created a ribbon of achievement, I am blues singer "Sleepy Baby Hawkins" (generated based on my name) , and I have used the generator site to create several logos which I blogged about.

See: http://gallery.webfetti.com/webfetti/favorites.jhtml

I love the internet

I listen to ABC FM when I drive. Today on my way to work, I heard a recommendation for a busker in NY's Central Park, who it appears is taking the world by storm through YouTube. The busker is a ukulele player, not my favourite instrument. The player is Jake Shimabukuro. While driving I memorised the spelling to find the video on YouTube as I was intrigued by the recommendation from this classical station.

I got the spelling wrong but nevertheless, Google corrected this and up came over 50,000 entries for Jake. Here is one of them:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:5pp31q_6LDgJ:galleyslaves.blogspot.com/2006/07/paganini-of-ukelele.html+%22Jake+Shimabukuro%22+%2B+youtube&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4

If I knew how to insert the video clip I would do this but this expertise is not mine...yet.

In previous times when I heard recommendations like this I would have gone to a record shop and tracked the player down and bought the record/CD/DVD. That sequence tells its own story - I still talk about records, but have only recently stopped talking about the wireless (radio) and radiogram (CD player).
Today I typed three words and pressed a button.

I am in: but not to play

I am in under an assumed name with a birthdate that will put me into Facebook's elderly membership list. The steps in are just brilliantly easy and lead to success which is instant and pure magic.
I have put two photographs in an album and the images are so good they look three dimensional.
Apart from that, I am too busy with my favourite blogs, so I shall not look for friends or join groups in Facebook.