mango education

Last night, while the brown rice was on, and before reheating the night before's sweet potato curry, I read a deal of the latest Australian Poetry Anthology (volume 8), which arrived in the mail the day before. There are many mangoes in this book, I thought, that and Ernest Hemingway references. Those would be John Donne references I later realised. Flicking through again to confirm, I only found four mangoes, two of which are mango trees. But the poems with "mango" in them are placed close together.

On Radio National this morning, Fran Kelly interviewed a mango farmer representative from the Northern Territory (Leo Skirlos) about FIFO Pacific fruit pickers. As soon as the Vanautuans get off the plane they're heading straight to the quarantine camps, said Leo. There is no lurgy in Vanautu, there are other diseases, but no lurgy. How will you keep the workers safe, asks Fran. Oh, if a family gets it they'll be staying in the same hut. Fly in the workers, pick the fruit so it doesn't fall to the ground, give them the disease to take home. Ship the mangoes to Victoria. Keep the mangoes safe.

Screenshot taken while undertaking training
via the Australian Government Department of Health Covid-19 Learner Portal, April 2020

Joan Aiken

Whenever I see a Joan Aiken book in an op shop I buy it.
There is always a sentence in a Joan Aiken story that shows something from the world I never knew.
I wish I collected the examples I see.
The first time I noticed this was reading Five Children and It,
which isn't by Joan Aiken, it's by Eleanor Nesbit.
Whenever I see an Eleanor Nesbit book I haven't read I buy it.
If I did collect these examples, where would I store them?
In a card file, on this post? 'This post is a collection of examples of things from stories I've read about the world that were totally new.'
If I write it down I don't have to remember it, but I have to remember the feeling
or know where to look to find it again.
I have tried collecting things before. I came to the conclusion you only need two of something for it to be a collection. This is called desultory.
I promised to myself not to write in Google anymore.

- August 2019

to the tune of

To the tune of Saturday night by Cold Chisel: Covid 19.

To the tune of Shutdown by Australian Crawl: Lock down.

To the tune of Summer Breeze by Seals & Croft or Stylus, I don't know which version is in my head, the one that's had more airtime I guess, Seals & Croft have a toy piano intro, Stylus a flexatone, and it's jasmine blowing through my mind not echoes - Geraldine (but only when I hear Ms Doogue on the radio) and: Quarantine.

The introduction of the wikipedia entry on flexatone reads like a flexatone sounds...

Though it's cited as appearing, I can't hear the flexatone in this youtube version of Funkadelic's One Nation Under Groove that LaToya Jackson commented on:

A Norton ad appeared before the video, parodying Banksy's efforts of One Nation Under CCTV.

What do I mean by efforts?

Soft Rock. Last night I watched the last half of Escape from Alcatraz which has many scenes of Clint Eastwood picking away at rotting concrete.

Back to homeschooling today.

I own a flexatone.

Quiet Corner galeolaria neap tide 7 July 2020

Quiet Corner wet black rocks neap tide 7 July 2020

Quiet Corner sea grass neap tide 7 July 2020

mental fitness

I turned on the telly at ten this morning. Wayne Carey was on sunrise talking up his hair therapy treatment and how hard it was for himself as a local celebrity to go see a psychologist. He'd always been physically fit, Wayne said, but never mentally fit.

Over on SBS world movies was a film from Fiji about a woman living with a man with dwarfism who might not have been her husband. There was a scene where her family comes into her house and tries to talk her back home. She says I'm not going. Later there was a scene where the man scrubbed the woman's shoulders with a large green leaf.

This afternoon I checked the St Kilda website for videos on the weekend's win, and an ad supporting mental fitness came up, spruiking Lynx deodorant. I took a screenshot but didn't save it. I searched "lynx mental fitness" for the ad, and there it was. Another result was a website selling four day "adventures" pretending to be a sniper in a Slovenian forest.

I didn't go outside at all today. There were sunshowers, and someone cut down a tree with a chainsaw nearby. In the evening a currawong did some singing

It's the evening now, and we are each on our individual screens.