I am trying to decide which is the best part of the day. Dawn has its bird chorus, starting with grey-headed robins and spotted catbirds and building to a massed choir of scrubwrens, doves and fantails. Midday is quieter, but just as lively. As the sun moves overhead, it stirs up the butterflies — blue triangles, jezebels and birdwings, ringlets and rustics and bush-browns. In the late afternoon, bridled honeyeaters chase each other through the trees. The honeyeaters and catbirds try to outsing each other with musical compositions that are part Stockhausen, part Philip Glass. Evening is heralded by a wrap up from the tooth-billed bowerbird, by the cicada glee club and the clatter and whirr of brush turkey wings as the birds fly up to roost. And night is for possums and owls and maniacally-cackling scrubfowl.
I can’t decide. Maybe there is no need to choose.
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No progress on my plans for a remotely-operated stinging tree removal device. I think I first have to get hold of an army bomb disposal robot. In order to do this, I must devise an elaborate Dr Horrible type plan. (Hmmm...that sort of worked out for him okay in the end. He did join the Evil League of Evil and that was what he wanted, right?)
Or I could just pull on protective gear and dig up the little bu...seedlings before they get too big.
- o O o -
I’ve been watching the Leveson Inquiry. Many of the witnesses appear to have been rounded up from the seedier bars of Mos Eisley and rendered temporarily amnesiac by a series of Jedi mind tricks. It’s the only plausible explanation.
- o O o -
And while I’m on the topic of people I don’t know, here’s a public service announcement.
Dear religious proselytisers
I’d like to make a deal with you. I’m sure you’ll find the conditions acceptable. Next time I trespass on your private property and insist that you pay attention when I inform you that you’re going to end up as food for insects, fungi and bacteria, then you can come to my place, sit outside watching the house until I return, park your very large 4WD across my driveway and tell me that I’m going to Hell for not believing in exactly the same things as you. Not before.
Seems a very reasonable deal to me. I believe it’s called quid pro quo. Sorry about the Latin. Blame it on the Leveson Inquiry. Anyway, what say you to this offer?
Now, the number of times I’ve done all that is...let me tally them up here...precisely none. I don’t know how adept you are at maths, but you might be familiar with the problem of dividing a number by zero. By my reckoning, I should now be able to annoy you in your homes for...ooh...ever. You might as well make up a room for me. I like a cup of tea first thing in the morning. Oh, and don’t talk to me before I’ve finished it. I take a while to wake up.
As I said, it sounds fair. So are we agreed?
PS I don't want to be impolite. Feel free to continue to address me in the street. It's a public place, after all. And it's not as if you're representing a telecommunications company or trying to sign me up to cable television.
- o O o -
And — as an antidote to the above — here’s a video of baby sloths having a bath and a feed of hibiscus flowers.
