Back out of the shell

I've been out of mobile phone range for the past few days (first in the rainforest, then in the limestone), so I haven't been able to upload anything to the blog. Boo! But it also means that I haven't been able to check my work e-mail. Hooray!

We spent three days at Tarzali (between Millaa Millaa and Malanda) on the Atherton Tablelands, where much of the fauna came to us.(including a juvenile cassowary but not snails.) We walked around just about every crater lake on the southern Tablelands, spotting birds of all types, the occasional mammal and many tourists. (Well, strictly speaking, the tourists are also mammals but I didn't want to inflate the species list.)

After three days of cool and wet rainforest, we went to Chillagoe, which was hot and dry. Many more birds, including bustards and red-tailed black cockatoos, and wallaroos and agile wallabies.

I'll post the photos over the next few days.

Bowen

It rained in Bowen today. This is an unusual combination of words. I know it rained (briefly) because I was clambering over rocks at King's Beach, trying to find some nerites to photograph, when the skies opened and I got soaked.

The outcrop at the end of King's Beach is a good site for Nerita plicata and N. costata. They prefer the wave-lashed rock faces at the mid- to low-tide level. Not the best place to be clambering about when it's raining, the tide is on its way in and there's a lively onshore wind. But I did find a solitary (and probably lost) N. costata. There were also the usual run of planaxids, nodilittorinids and oyster-eating whelks.






And if the molluscs aren't exciting enough, Bowen has recently been turned into a film set. Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman had been in town to make a movie about ... something. (I really should pay more attention.) They've gone now and Bowen has returned to its relaxed self. Apart from the odd pretension.

Shute Harbour

I arrived in Shute Harbour (Whitsunday Coast) after dark last night. I was trailing a truck so closely that I almost followed it onto the barge. But I realised in time and drove to my motel instead.

The view from the balcony. All this and Brahminy kites too. (You'll have to picture those because they're not easy to photograph.)

Mangrove walk at Cape Hillsborough

The tide was a long way out, so there wasn't much moving about on the forest floor. Except for this brush turkey, which, displaying most un-turkey-like behaviour, almost completely ignored me. I was hoping to see some of the mangrove snails that are usually abundant — mud whelks (Terebralia, Telescopium), mangrove nerites (Nerita balteata and periwinkles (Littoraria) — but the forest was pretty dry. You really have to get muddy to find snails but I didn't have the right gear for that. I found dead nerites on the strand line but it's not the same.

The forests at Cape Hillsborough have a good diversity of mangrove species, including cannonball trees (Xylocarpa), blind-your-eye, Rhizophora and Avicennia. All have root systems adapted to potentially unstable, anoxic, salt-laden substrates. (The stilt roots of Rhizophora are particularly popular resting and grazing places for nerites. The big mangrove bivalve Batissa also occurs at the bases of these trees.)





Although not in the intertidal zone, other plant species are common on the landward edge of the forest, including swamp lilies (Crinum).



And then there are these ...

Apologies if I'm a bit brief in my responses to your comments but I'm uploading through my mobile phone and I'm sure it's costing me the equivalent of the GNP of Venezuela every second. Because of this, I'm spending as little time on-line as possible. My posts are hit and run.

Cape Hillsborough

I detoured off the highway just north of Mackay to visit Cape Hillsborough National Park. Because it was late in the day, I didn't spend much time there, but I did go on the mangrove boardwalk. I'll write about it soon. In the meantime, here are a couple of photos to whet your interest.

You can park but only if you drive a Morris.

I'd forgotten that not only is Queensland the 'Sunshine State' and the 'Smart State', it is also the 'State of Insanely Suicidal Overtaking'. Double white lines? Blind corner? Crest? All three? No problem. But if you try to overtake a slow-moving vehicle in a designated overtaking lane, you're in trouble. What was travelling at 70km/hr in a 100km/hr zone will speed up to 120, just to prevent you getting past.

Otherwise the traffic has been an endless source of entertainment. I got stuck behind a couple of vintage vehicles between Biloela and Rockhampton. One was a 1930 Ford (the information was on a plate on the back) but I don't know about the other one. I can't imagine how uncomfortable those narrow tyres must have made the ride.

Oversized vehicles also frequented that same stretch of road. The first one of the day was heralded by a lead car with flashing ambers and headlights. That was followed by a police car with its lights on. So we all dutifully pulled over to let ... a semi go past carrying a bulldozer. Call that oversized? Pffft! I thought. Men and their estimates.

Not long after the same thing happened. Lead car. Police car. Flashing lights all over the place. Once again, we all pulled over. There was I, expecting a lawn mower and a couple of bales of hay, but this really was oversized. Some huge steel frame that overhung the tray by about five metres either side. I think it would have passed over my car but I'd have enjoyed seeing a caravan having its roof peeled off like the lid of a sardine can.

Today I swore for the first time. Those of you who know me may doubt this but you'll just have to take my word for it. Sure, the caravans have been annoying. (Today I encountered a caravan of caravans, which was a bit exciting for a while.) But I hadn't actually sworn at anybody until I got to Mackay. And in Mackay, a dump truck driver received a description of his failings. In detail. With gestures just in case he missed the point. He didn't.

Tomorrow to Cairns. Almost there.

Callide

The Callide B Power Station dominates the view from the road into Biloela. Having seen it as I came into town from the west, I drove out east along the Gladstone road to check it out. It generates electricity from coal mined at the adjacent Callide open cut. There are guided tours in the afternoons but I won't be around to take one, unfortunately. In lieu of a tour of the power station, I ambled around the dam.



Among the trees along the banks of the dam are a couple of species of Brachychiton. I'd seen isolated bottle trees (Brachychiton rupestris) in paddocks along the northern stretch of the Leichhardt Highway but this was the first one up close.





(BTW, I am disappointed that no one has asked me why I'm taking photos of a power station. No one has ever been in the slightest bit interested when I've snapped pictures of bridges, either. See, those fridge magnets were a complete waste of money.)

Signs and portents

Signs I've spotted on the way but haven't stopped to photograph.

New South Wales needs a decent publicist. These signs just don't make the grade:

• Shire of Bland
• Poison Waterhole Creek
• Dead Bird Lead Creek

Queensland, on the other hand, deserves its moniker 'the Sunshine State'.

• Welcome to Banana, the shire of opportunity
• Banana Holding Road

(The town and shire of Banana are named after a prize bull, which was bright yellow, apparently. There's a statue in the centre of town. I must photograph it on the way back.)

Prickly pear

Caterpillars of the Cactoblastis moth have been effective in reducing the populations of introduced prickly pear but they haven't eradicated the pest. The road sides between Goondiwindi and Miles are infested with cactuses, both well-established and newly-growing. Neighbouring farm land is largely free of prickly pear. Not through Cactoblastis, I suspect, but in the same way that farm land is largely free of anything over half a metre tall

I arrived in Queensland yesterday evening. Now I'm almost at the Tropic of Capricorn with just under 2,000 km on the odometer. Only two more days and I'll be in Cairns.

The CD player worked all the way from Goondiwindi to Biloela. Surely some mistake. Not only that, but there were no caravans on the Leichhardt Highway. Not heading north, anyway.

Once again, nothing terribly rivetting but a few firsts for the trip:

• The first live wallaby on the road just south of Miles
• The first road train just north of Miles
• The first Livistona palms (on the Dawson River at Theodore)
• The first Brahman cattle
• The first large gangs of apostle birds (feeding on the plentiful road kill)

A short drive in the Warrumbungles

I took the scenic route to Coonabarabran. Although much longer and slower than the Newell Highway, it winds through the spectacular landscape of the Warrumbungles.




Beloungery Split Rock, a dome formed about 16 million years ago when lava pushed through the Pillaga sandstone.



The view from Whitegum Lookout. The peaks are solidified magma, which have been exposed by erosion of the surrounding rock. Crater Bluff (far left) and Belougery Spire (left) are volcanic plugs. The Breadknife (centre) is thought to be a magma intrusion into a fault in the sandstone. (The outcrops on the right are Bluff Pyramid (top) and Balor Peak (below).)



Cypress pine (Callitris endlicheri), a native pine abundant in the Warrambungles and the nearby Pillaga Scrub.

The Dish

About 20 km north of Parkes is the first of a string of radio telescopes and observatories that stretches all the way to Narrabri. CSIRO's radio telescope at Parkes is used for all sorts of fantastic deep space projects but is probably more widely known as the star of The Dish. (Oh, there were some humans in the movie too.)

The telescope was commissioned in 1961. It was used to provide the images of the Apollo 11 moon landing because they were of higher quality that those from NASA's two stations at Honeysuckle Creek (near Canberra) and Goldstone (in California).

It is some vast number of times more sensitive to radio signals now that it was then. It's so sensitive that the remote-controlled model of the telescope in the visitor's centre has been switched off because it interferes with the operation of the real instrument. For the same reason, visitors have to switch off mobile phones and other electronic equipment and turn off car engines and soon as possible. (I wasn't sure if this included digital cameras, so I took this shot from the car park, just as I was driving out.)

I don't know anything about astrophysics but I was impressed by the brains that can design machines like this to investigate deep space and then interpret the signals received from distant galaxies.

The visitor's centre provides information on the history and use of the telescope. One of the projects:

A survey to find galaxies that have been obscured by the Milky Way, which is the stars and dust of our own Galaxy. To optical telescopes, the Milky Way hides about 15% of the sky beyond our Galaxy, like a band of grime on a window. However, radio waves travel easily through the gas and dust. The Parkes Survey has, in effect, cleaned the window, revealing may hundreds of previously hidden galaxies.

I repacked the car boot this evening, shifting around the bag of glass screw-topped vials and the quadrats fabricated from plastic pipe. I can't help feeling that it would be much more fun to play with a 1,000-tonne, 64 m radio telescope ...

On the road

I was a bit surprised when the roadhouse coffee arrived in a tea pot, but nowhere near as surprised as I was when the woman who delivered it to the table said, 'I brought a mug. Is that all right? It's just that some ladies don't like to drink out of a mug. They prefer a cup.'

At this stage I would have been happy with a bucket. Which was just as well, because the tea pot held two mugs-worth of coffee. Just what I needed.

And that's about as wild as the trip has been so far. Oh, there was a spot of excitement when the B-double in front of me started weaving about the road. But the driver pulled over at the next rest stop. (The Newell Highway is well-served with these.)

And a mob of kangaroos bounded across the road in the early afternoon*, requiring some imaginative braking and steering to avoid them sliding up the launch-pad bonnet and into my face. Not sure that air bags are effective at preventing the driver being smacked in the head by a roo. I hope I don't find out.

But over 1,400 km, that's really not a big deal.

Unfortunately, my CD player is only working intermittently and the radio isn't much chop out here**. So I've had to keep myself awake on the boring bits by designing the ultimate road trip car. No, it doesn't have a high-powered engine or an in-built back massager, but it does have a roof-mounted RPG launcher for encouraging slow vehicles to get out of the way. I thought about putting the launcher on the bonnet, but that would reduce visibility, obviously. Mounting it on the doors would also pose a problem. Get out of the car too quickly and you might blow up your own engine. No, it has to be the roof.

Should the threat of a car-mounted RPG not be sufficient and you have to fire it (via a heads up display, of course, safety is important here), then you'll be left with a pile of smouldering caravan fragments in the lane ahead. This is why you'll also need a cow-catcher to scoop the debris out of the way. I was thinking that titanium might be a good material for this — light-weight but tough. Perhaps I should have asked the physics boffins at Parkes what they could recommend? Maybe on the way back.

I was also pondering on the caravan axle, which might survive the RPG attack. Then I saw a sign on the outskirts of Moree that offered 'lasers for every purpose' ... Perfect.

I hope the CD player works properly tomorrow.

_______


* Not the usual peak time for marsupials

** I have been trying to gather data for my study of country music on rural radio stations. I want to plot the proportion of country music played against the distance from a major urban centre. The hypothesis is that it increases steadily up to a point and then leaps to 100%. I want to identify that tipping point.

North to AlaskaParkes, New South Wales

I had intended to leave early but best laid plans and all that. It wasn't helped by a bingle between a couple of cars at the base of the freeway on-ramp. (Still, it's always childishly satisfying to see a brand new Volvo being loaded onto the tray of a tow truck.) I finally got out of Melbourne a little after 10 am.

The first stop was meant to be Shepparton, but I kept going to make up time lost in faffing about this morning. I might stop there on the way back because it has some interesting public art. Australia may have ridden to prosperity on the sheep's back but our artists prefer cattle. Mooving Art is a collection (herd?) of brightly-coloured fibreglass cows distributed throughout town. They look as though they'd be worth the effort.

The cows are periodically relocated. Not so the giant Murray cod at Tocumwal on the NSW side of the Murray. The main street of Tocumwal, which is a rather lovely little town, was lined with caravans and their grey nomad owners, eating sandwiches and drinking tea from plastic thermos cups. They were all on the street side of the levee. Had they walked a few feet, they could have had sandwiches and tea overlooking the river. But it was a pleasant view either way.

It's not easy spotting birds at 110km/hr but I recorded some notables.

• Lots of kookaburras and black-faced cuckoo-shrikes on the overhead wires.
• An emu in a sheep paddock.
• A huge mob of sulphur-crested cockatoos on the banks of the Murrumbidgee at Narrandera.
• A wedge-tailed eagle feeding on a carcass about ten metres off the road
• Red-rumped parrots and eastern rosellas
• Black-shouldered and fork-tailed kites and nankeen kestrels in abundance
• Bronzewing pigeons
• Straw-necked ibis
• Gangs of white-winged choughs refusing to get off the road, so forcing vehicles to slow down
• A couple of apostle birds (not sure why there were only two)
• And galahs, of course. Hundreds of galahs.

Tonight I'm staying in Parkes. I want to visit the radio telescope tomorrow. (It starred in The Dish.) But my plans don't always work out ...

Almost gone ...

Have been running around like a headless chook today. That's if a headless chook can drive, shop and do the laundry.

My living room, kitchen and hall floors are strewn with items that I might or might not need on my trip. When I prepare to travel, I always start off with the kitchen sink then work down to a small bowl as the sheer tedium of packing gets to me. I've been known to stuff a week's worth of clothes into a very small bag. When I hit my stride, I can pack in a way that defies the laws of physics. One day, my suitcase will collapse in on itself and take the universe with it.

The GPS still hasn't turned up — I suppose when it does finally arrive, I'll know where it's been — so I've had to borrow one. Yesterday, I was complaining about it to people, who were politely pretending to give a shit. At the end of my tirade, one asked me about the FN GPS. I had to admit that FN wasn't the brand name. I should speak more clearly when I swear.

In between cursing the GPS people, the courier company and Australia Post, I went off with a couple of colleagues to collect bivalves in the Bay. The air temperature was about 6C and the water was ... well ... even cooler. FN freezing, in fact.

We were looking for bivalves that live at the interface of the oxic and anoxic zones. We started off with a shovel and sieve, but they were too unwieldy, so we used our hands. There we were — the three of us, dressed in gumboots and rugged up against the cold, squatting in the shallows, picking through the sediment like raccoons.

The kids from the private school came out to watch. I'm sure their teacher warned them that this was what would happen if they didn't get good grades.

No more bivalve hunting. I head off first thing in the morning.

More tomorrow night.

This is a post of even less consequence than usual. I'm testing out the mobile 'phone link. (Apparently I can upload through my phone, which is what I'll be doing on the road. If it works.)

And here's a picture from last year's trip to Lake Eacham. I expect there'll be more pandanus next week.

(BACK TO BROADBAND: That was amazing! It worked. Bet it just cost me an arm and a leg, but it's nice to see the technology functioning as it should.)

The garden is underway. Three Dargon Hill Monarchs, a Callistemon 'White Anzac' and an Alyogyne 'West Coast Gem'. Both the everlastings and Alyogyne are in bud. No doubt they'll come into their own the day after I leave for Queensland.

They've been watered in by steady rain at the end of last week. Today they received lots of sunshine. The neighbour's cats haven't decided to lie on them. Yet. However, they have to face the paper boy, who now appears to be using them as targets for the Age. Luckily, he's a rubbish shot.

I've located a potential source of vesicular basalt. It's just a matter of finding time to get to the site with all the other stuff going on. Still, a garden is something that develops slowly.

Now for the next section ... the red and green.

I and the Bird #53

Happy second anniversary to I and the Bird. It's returned to its roots at 10,000 Birds. Read the bumper birthday edition.

Sorry I haven't been around much lately. I'm trying to get ready for both the field trip and the start of semester. They overlap, which makes it just that little bit more difficult. I leave this Thursday, return on a Sunday night two weeks hence and have my first lecture the next day. At least it isn't at 9 am.

I've been spending the weekend updating notes, replacing the stuff that doesn't work, making up hand outs and reorganising the lab classes. I always forget how much time it takes. (Our workload allows two hours preparation for every hour of lecture. Someone should tell 'em they're dreamin'.)

There's still a pile of admin to work through over the next four days. Management have finally given us instructions on how many sessional staff we may employ this semester. (Not as many as we need.) This means there's still a lot of negotiation going on about work loads. And it's not Management that has to tell people that, although they've done a bloody good job for us over the past X years, we won't be needing them this year. Sorry. Now bugger off.

And then there's the unsatisfactory progress hearings, in which I'm supposed to counsel the students who haven't done quite as well as they should. It's a long list. A very long list. I'm not so much worried that I have to chat to them about their performance (although it's not a barrel of laughs for either party and it can be very upsetting) but I am concerned that the timing is so tight that I won't be able to do it myself. I'll have to land it on someone else. And that ain't fair on the poor sod who gets the job.

So I'm having a bit of a panic. And my BP continues to be a worry (for the GP, anyway), so I'm now on anti-hypertensives.

I did suggest to my boss that he persuade the Dean to offer voluntary departure packages but he (correctly) believes that it would be a slippery slope. Oh, well, another 666 days to go. (I miscalculated it the last time.)

The morning stroll along the Williamstown waterfront is always eventful. Admittedly, the events aren't all that momentous — a group of grebes, a cluster of cormorants, the odd snake bird or spoonbill — but today was a little bit different. Not that the events were any more momentous, they were just ... strange.

The fog was thick this morning. So thick that it cloaked the container ship coming into port, although the vessel was only a few hundred metres away. The fog horn blared but the ship was invisible. Terribly atmospheric.

A film crew had picked the wrong day to shoot exteriors. They were lined up on the pavement stamping their feet and clapping hands to keep blood circulating. (It was only 7C.) Williamstown's streets have featured in the TV series Blue Heelers and in the re-make of Neville Shute's On the beach. (And Charlotte's Web apparently.) But this was Daddy, come with me to Australia II. At least, that's what it said on the piece of paper stuck in the window of the Budget minibus. (Well, it might have said Daddy came with me to Australia II. It was too cold to hang around deciphering handwriting.)

How did the film crewing amuse themselves while they waited for the fog to lift? They watched a boat go for a run about on the bay. But this was no ordinary vessel. 'Sealegs' motored up to the boat ramp and kept going. It had wheels. Wheels with chunky, all terrain tyres. I loved it!

The gardening gets serious

It's rained every weekend since the front garden was cleared. But that hasn't stopped me planning it. I'm going to divide it into sections and plant them one at a time. Adopting suggestions from Lynsey and Chuckie, I'm aiming for all-year-round colour with native species and a rocky serpentine motif.

I'm going to work on this section first. I was thinking of a combination of purple and yellow: Alyogyne huegelii 'West Coast Gem' and Xerochrysum (formerly Bracteantha) 'Dargon Hill Monarch'. The Alyogyne blooms from October to March and the daisy holds its flowers forever. Maybe I'll put in a low-growing white-flowered Grevillea to make the birds and insects even happier.

Now for the motif. Lynsey suggested a Rainbow Serpent winding its way through the garden, with clusters of flowers nestling in the curves. As the whole area is on the edge of the volcanic plain, I'll use basalt rocks to form the serpent. Maybe add a few quartz pebbles to give it more colour.

The tail will curl around the base of a bird bath. Something low-key — a terracotta bowl on a tree stump, perhaps. What do you think?

I'll be off to buy the first lot of plants this week ...

New Holland honeyeaters

The car park at work is a surprisingly good place to watch birds, especially now that the students aren't around to disturb them. The eucalypts that border it are good for honeyeaters and musk lorikeets, magpies and the occasional eastern rosella. Masked lapwings and crested pigeons patrol the lawns on either side. But I hadn't really paid much attention to the low thickets of correas between the parking bays. They flower most of the year but are absolutely stunning right now. They're also irresistible to New Holland honeyeaters.



New Holland honeyeaters are common in the temperate SE (including Tasmania) and SW. Although generally unperturbed by human activity (take heed, cormorants), they aren't all that fond of posing. Once I got out the camera, an otherwise brazen trio turned into the terrestrial equivalent of grebes. The correas shook and shuddered as the birds made their way through the vegetation, feeding on the nectar. I pointed and clicked and got lots of pictures of where the honeyeaters had been half a second before. Then one few into a tree and started preening. I guess there was a lot of pollen to dust off.





Trevor of Trevor's Birding has photos of a party of New Holland honeyeaters frolicking in a bird bath. Duncan at Ben Cruachan blog has a portrait of a lone bird looking a little more dignified. The New Holland honeyeater featured on Birds in Tasmania shows the characteristic colour pattern perfectly.

Four and twenty black birds

The little black cormorants love the basalt boulders along the waterfront at Williamstown. It's difficult to get close to them, though, because they have a long flight distance. I've tried sneaking up on them by hiding behind the she oaks on the Strand. But it doesn't fool the canny cormorants. And it makes people look at me strangely.

Now I come to think of it, maybe that's why the birds flee.

For really strong stomachs

The top (bottom?) 100 worst covers of all time. Should you be a masochist, there are plenty of video clips and sound files on Retrocrush. Here are some of the most hideous.

You shook me all night long by Celine Dion (and Anastacia who does much better).

My generation by Hilary Duff. (On top of everything else wrong with the execution, she misses the point with 'Hope I don't die before I get old'.)

Do ya think I'm sexy? by Tiny Tim

In a metal mood by Pat Boone, an album that includes such winners as No more Mr Nice Guy, It's a long way to the top (if you want to rock and roll), Smoke on the water and The wind cries Mary. You really have to listen to these sound files.

Rocket Man by William Shatner.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

I and the Bird #52

Frodo, Yoda and Darth Maul (with his brothers Shopping and Rolling) take you on a tour of the latest in bird blogging at the Wandering Tattler. All will become clear in I and the Bird #52.

Use the fork, Luke.

Colbert saves the Universe

Not content with the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert has put the universe on notice. He's a co-creator Galactic Overlord co-creator of a comic book series called Stephen Colbert's Tek Jansen.

Author Jim Massey clarifies:

It's a fictional character based on a fictional Tek Jansen book, which is supposedly written by Stephen Colbert, who is actually Stephen Colbert playing a character named Stephen Colbert.

I hope that's clear now.

Eight random facts about me

Bioephemera tagged me with the Eight Random Facts meme.

Here are the rules:

• Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

And here are the eight random facts

1. Despite my hybrid RP – Australian accent, I was born in Melbourne. My father's side of the family arrived in Australia in 1801 (and not as convicts). My mother's side was born and bred around the Brecon Beacons in southern Wales. My parents met in Tasmania, when my mother came out for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics (as a spectator), spent all her money and had to get a job to pay for her passage back. She worked as a nurse in Tassie and Victoria. (And she didn't get to see the Olympics after all.)


2. I haven't read anything by Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling. (This is not a comment on the quality of their work, just a statement of fact.)


3. I was a few doors down from the Russell Street police HQ when the bomb exploded. Although I worked at the Museum of Victoria (which was diagonally opposite the building), I was having lunch with a colleague at an Indian restaurant across the road when the bomb went up. We thought that the boiler had exploded or something equally mundane. But things started clattering on the roof, so my colleague and I offered to go outside and investigate. We saw the blackened, mangled wreckage of a car outside police HQ, the shredded awning above our heads and material still raining down around us. So we returned to the restaurant and announced (perhaps a little too calmly) that it was a car bomb. Of course, no one believed us, so they all rushed to the door and then back again when they realised that we weren't making it up. The police told us to stay put, which was no problem, because we still had to finish lunch. Then they ushered us out of the back door. As we left, the restaurant owner handed out Minties. I'm not sure that the author of the sales slogan 'At moments like this you need Minties' really had this situation in mind.


4. I learnt French at primary school and German and Russian in secondary school. My ability to speak other languages has declined over the intervening years. I'm not even sure about English any more.


5. I have been known to offer advice to fictional characters (and their non-fictional television screen writers). For instance, in last night's episode of Dr Who, the good Doctor was faced with having to save humankind from an overloaded MRI in a hospital translocated to the moon. (No, really.) 'Pull out the plug,' I said. 'And hurry up about it.' He did and the earth was saved. On the other hand, I was roundly ignored by Robin Hood and his Merry Morons who, although rather well known for their skills with bows and arrows, decided to take on four sword-wielding assassins at close quarters. There's only so much disbelief I'm willing to suspend.


6. I am an appalling shot with a rifle but am appreciably better with a pistol. (This might be inherited from my mother, who shot my father in the foot.)


7. I collect field guides to animals from places I will probably never visit. I adore the plates. I am fascinated by the variations on a theme produced by evolution.


8. I love road trips. Give me a car, some CDs and the open road and I'm happy.

And here are the next round of tagees. (Apologies if you've been tagged already and I missed it.)

Snail's Tales, Brush and Baren, Blogaway, Books and Writing, Speculating about Fiction, David Nelson's Photo Blog, 10,000 Birds and Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted).