seandc

First off, I'd like to send a big "thank you" out to justace - your package arrived today! :D For the curious, this is a tape of The Rocky Horror Show, the original Australian cast of 1975. This was the tape from the library that started it all for me, but haven't seen it there for years. It's got such a different energy and sound from the other soundtracks. :D

Anyway, it's been a few days since my last update (almost two weeks, eep) so let's rewind back to a week last Thursday *Wayne's World style fadeout*

The day started bright and earlysorry, tell a lie, sunrise is far after wakeup time these days, even if I slept in a little bit (but only a little so I could get in early).

I was a little bit early into town (it was a little before 8.30am), so I took myself on a little searching trip. As part of the city/colony's 150th anniversary celebrations 27 years ago St Georges Terrace had a series of commemorative plaques set into the pavement, with a prominent Westralian for each of those years. My trip took me up to the QV1 Tower (the third tallest building in the city), and back to 1915 in the scheme of these plaques, for this was Hugo Throssell's year to shine. I don't often get to that corner (often a street away), while finding the plaque I spotted a few of the public art pieces of the city all at this same intersection, and if not for a construction fence even the ground level would have a pretty good view of The Narrows.

The plaque seen, I set off back in the direction of the city centre (and paid phone bill on the way) to a little place I'd been told would be opening that day. In the street levels of St Martin's Tower between Hay Street Mall (that's streets reserved for pedestrians around here) and The Terrace. Borders. I'm not even sure they were properly open yet, but hey the doors were open, and there were people browsing, even if it wasn't quite 9am yet.

So, in I went (and got caught by photographer, can't you see I'm trying to get out of shot mate?) - a lot of people with important badges were milling around the coffeeshop (well, none of our other bookstores have been large enough for a coffeeshop), but nothing to stop anyone from browsing (and not being part of the opening ceremony meant I didn't have to stick close and pay attention).

The walls are lined with shelving bays - all taller than me which I consider a Good Use Of Space, in nice dark wood. There's about a bay of graphic novels, and around the corner three of manga -
although I should've checked the other side, but was avoiding photographers at the time. Oh and Natasha, the bay facing that one were the horror bays. And if you want to browse a bit, there's a bench *right there*.

A little further along was the science fiction section (despite the general fiction literature section intruding at the walls) - I spoke to one of the workers in charge of the section, and he said (when I failed to find a specific author) that they still have lots of science fiction stored, they just didn't have the shelf-space on the floor, and that they're hoping to expand and get some more tables soon (how's that for opening day ambitions?). And I noticed in browsing a few of the Justice League books you mentioned Rachel.

Nonfiction is downstairs, connecting to St Martin's Arcade again after so many years. Funny that the children's section should be near that corner, I think it was Dorrington's Books used to be there many years ago (they were a well-established, and PACKED children's bookstore).

I didn't have a good look at the business and psych, but we might not need to order from interstate anymore, these sections are much huger than normal. Film and tv could be bigger though. I was lucky enough to see that they had a copy of Finding Serenity there, since I was hoping the new store would have the BenBella SmartPop series and I wouldn't have to order those through Amazon anymore. I'll have to ask sometime if this is going to be a regular thing, or if they can at least get them in.

I ran out of time in the cd/dvd section, but I did grab a small trade paperback on my way out, and since it was the first day, was given a large hardcover for free! With new books in hand, I hoofed it over to Cinema City for the first showing of the day, for the aforementioned $9 - pity they don't have this daylight deal at Southlands cinema! After waiting for the place to open, the concessions to get their act together (ok, I can understand waiting for cups to be stacked if you're going to use the machine they're sitting on - if you're going to spend that time stuffing about then use a machine that's been free all the time... gah!), and the rest of that you saw in my last entry bar one.

Roughly noon, I stagger out into the daylight and make my way down to the train station. Destination - Karrakatta Cemetery, to take photos of the graves of relatives I'd found in my research. It has its own railway station (well, the suburb of Karrakatta is pretty much cemetery on one side of the tracks, and the Irwin Army Barracks on the other.

First stops - the Crematorium Rose Gardens. Three of Mum's grandparents have memorial plaques here (her father's father died when he was visiting his aunts in South Australia, and is buried there). Once I got past there I saw that I'd been a bit spoilt by TV - I was kind of expecting the entire place to be green lawns and trees and all. But Karrakatta Cemetery itself is the
size of a pretty decent suburb - impossible to keep the whole suburb permanently green for over a hundred years. A lot of it is open, with tightly packed sand between the rows of graves.

I made my way around the various sites I'd marked on my map (A3 printers are so very useful, I was lucky to have that printout with me). I only missed one I hadn't realised exactly where his memorial was, and by the time I realised I was already nearly out of the gates, and the plaque was a long way away the way I'd come. It was lucky I decided to come now, from the looks of it the section with my great-great-grandparents will likely be renewed in the next year or so (they had the signs announcing future renewal, and the next section had signs at each grave to contact the Board ASAP), so while they would've still had a picture of the headstone, it wouldn't seem the same. So, Mum says that she'll contact the rest of her family (that we know of), so they'll know at least.

So, left Karrakatta, did some food shopping (and cheap ex-rentals yay), and came home and life returned to its normal patterns. Work, home, figure out what to do next, fill in, be increasingly disgusted by the level of vitriol the news can whip up, get distracted by new discoveries (some good, some shocking) and adding one more link in.

I've got next week off, and I've made an appointment with the Archivist at Wesley College - I figure if anywhere has information on Grandpa, it'd be them! So I'll go there on Monday to see what they have in records, artefacts (possibly some of Grandma's works, and the website mentions Hugo Throssell's dress sword) and memorials, and if I've got time I can go to the South Perth local history collection and see if there's anything useful there.

It'll be a bit hard getting up for that though - or any time for the foreseeable future. Something's gone wrong with a pipe somewhere, and there's no hot water in the house! The heater's still working fine (in fact, I lit it second try, which is amazing in itself), but nothing from the hot taps. So, cold showers (with what the kettle can provide) for now. Pity it isn't summer now (who'd've ever thought I'd say that?!), cold showers would be welcome even.

The most recent episode of The Amazing Race to air down here saw the remaining racers fly from Oman to Perth! So, I thought I'd keep track of where they went and put in a few notes...

( Cut just in case some are still waiting... )

So, I've been meaning to post this up for a little while, but haven't felt very communicative recently. This is quite possibly the most prominent billboard in the city, being next to the main train station, and the bridge on one of the main roads to the most well-established suburbs. So, quite attention getting. Of course, the tower-of-billboards on the other side of the station might be slightly more prominent, but the individual posters aren't as large, and it would've lost a fair few of the audience what with all the roadworks/construction there for the new station.

( X-Men 3 advertisement here )

You'll have to forgive the lightness of the pic, this was taken in the late afternoon, so the poster's reflecting the sun. Plus I didn't know about the proper half-shutter-focus thing yet - I'd only just bought the camera and not read that part in the manual yet. I'd been thinking about it for some researching - I'm thinking of visiting Karrakatta Cemetery and maybe Wesley College at some point. But hey, not bad for someone who didn't even recognise the shutter-button a week before! One of my co-workers brought in her camera for a photo of the "front-desk girls" last week, and asked me to take the picture (tis better than being in the picture). So, they all group up, I try lining up the shot, press the button and... yes, it was the power switch. :P

In other news, I ordered some books from Amazon on Sunday night, and they arrived yesterday! Of course, this was the highest-priority shipping, but at least I got them by the end of the week! :D These were the X-Men and Stargate entries in the SmartPop series of essaybooks, and a similar style of book (although not in the series) on superheroes in general. I'm hoping that when Borders opens their Perth store they'll be specialising in importing their American range, so we can get various books/authors who we can't buy around here (these Smart Pop books being an example of such). Plus, what'd be the point of having this big new store if they're only going to have exactly the same as Dymocks and Angus & Robertson anyway?

I saw this advert on the back of a bus yesterday:
Can you see yourself driving this bus? If so call us... TODAY!
Is it bad that my first thought was:
Can you see yourself driving this bus? If so, please call the Department of Temporal Investigations!

Oh, and note to the newspapers - drawing Costello in a Superman costume is the biggest insult to that costume in years - and yes, I'm including Infinite Crisis / Superboy Prime in those years!

So, short week, after long weekend. My week was a bit shorter still, since I took off early on Tuesday to get some researching in at the Battye Library. I managed to find a little some info including a picture of my great-great-grandfather, and on a great-great-aunt who was awarded an MBE.

I also found an article about the end of the St Georges Hall Theatre for you, boywhocantsayno - most of what came under the subject wasn't readily available, being either in rare book archives or other places I have no idea where to access them. No pictures unfortunately.

( Silence of the lambs )

It's starting to get chilly in the mornings now (finally), sometimes the river's still enough to spot smaller fishes jumping out of the water (and probably doing the fishy equivalent of sticking their tongues out at the nearest birds). We have some of the warmer weather seekers on show at the moment though. Last week, the local shops had bunnies on display for Easter. This week, the first of the school holidays? They now have snakes! Interesting to watch, although they should've doubled the size of the viewing-boxes, especially for the larger pythons (I didn't get a good look at one side, couldn't get close enough). calliopes_pen, do I get the morbid and creepifying prize for noting that the side I did get to see close-up had mostly poisonous snakes, like tiger snakes, death adders and dugites? ;)

Ok, so last night calliopes_pen and I were talking and the subject of Choose Your Own Adventure books came up, as well as this site: http://www.gamebooks.org/cyoalist.htm I was as happy as a pig in a happy-pig-place to see this! I used to have a huge bundle of these as a kid - twice! (I got into them, got out, sold them, a year later got in again). The local second-hand bookstore was a most excellent source for these.

Loved the books, loved the cover design too (they were mainly the white-border-covers just starting the whole-block-colour editions back then). Just seeing the pictures again brought on so many memories - just scrolling down I was all "Survival at Sea! Underground Kingdom! Mystery of Chimney Rock! Inside UFO 54-40! I remember all these!"

And yes, I used to keep my fingers at key choice-pages just in case I chose the way that got me killed. :lol: Gosh, I can almost smell those old books now. I even had one with me one day when Dad took me along on his courier job one school holiday back in '89 - not that there was much reading available when there was a ute-load of bricks to unload! And I still remember I got a Peppermint Crisp bar from a deli at some point during that day.

I was watching the interviews at the end of the first season set of 21 Jump Street earlier, and Dustin Nguyen mentioned something in his interview about a cast appearance at a mall with these see-through elevators, and this got me thinking. City Arcade in the city used to have its own clear lift, it suddenly reminded me. It had a small pool around it, with waterfalls around the Murray Street Level (the lower level, in that part of town the different elevations of Murray and Hay Streets are quite noticable) running over clear glass walls on the non-door sides, with water plants with large leaves arranged on those glass walls and pool. The lift and pool were taken away about a decade ago, now the only sign that they were ever there is a small platform on the Hay Street Level walkway which used to be the egress-point (and of course the huge gap in the Hay Street Level floor with two walkways around, quite useless now without the focal point - in fact, a damn pain to walk along when crowded). Strange that something so obvious before is now almost forgotten about, and it takes an interview on a DVD with a man on the other side of the world to awaken that memory.

Another funny thing occurs to me about these DVDs - the advertising is all about how "Ooh, such-and-such star-of-the-90s appeared first in this season"... I'm not caring less here, and not recognising them anyway when they appear. Yet when someone from Sci-fi shows turn up, then I'm right on it! "Hey, the principal is General Hammond!" "That teacher's Cigarette Smoking Man!" and perhaps the most obscure observation "Agent Annorax!"

Just because it's been a while since any of these found their way into an entry:
( Tiger, Tiger... )