Finally got to see this film on the weekend.  My husband has been dying to see it for a while as he is really interested in Genghis Khan.   The movie is actually the first in a planned trilogy but given that it took 10 years to make, we probably won't see the second and third instalments any time soon.  While it did contain quite a few gorey battlescenes, it was actually a really beautiful film.  The cinematography was magnificent (really worth viewing on the big screen) and the story of Temudjin's relationship with his wife, Boorte, and his 'blood brother', Jamukha, really moving and interesting.  Fantastic acting as well.  Looking forward to seeing the second film; this will be when things really get nasty! 

What has been your favorite mistake?
Submitted by Runnergirl

Not a mistake, just a few years earlier than originally planned.  Turned out really well though.  I can't imagine having my children too much later than I did. 

100_1697

3 comments

Beware gap when boarding

Minding the gap

The idea of photographing my feet for this week's self portrait partly inspired by my neighbour Sarah's portrait of her feet from last week.  Also finding it hard to take interesting photos on Thursday mornings when I always follow the same route to work.  As you can see from the second picture, the gap between train platform and train door is quite pronounced.  It is the same on most Sydney train stations. 

I nearly lost my son down this gap once (at Circular Quay station) but fortunately I was holding onto his hand pretty tightly and managed to catch him in time and hoik him up again. 

Have heard of other people not being so fortunate though.

I've been awake over 37 hours. I'm frazzled and exhausted, yet still unable to sleep. I thought surely I'd come in from work and collapse into a temporary coma, but thirty minutes of stillness yielded no result. Surely they wouldn't let wild animals suffer this fate...they'd shoot them with a tranquilizer dart.

I can almost see an image of myself in the corner beside the bookshelf rummaging through a stack of boxes hunting for those pesky tranquilizer darts...surely I could shoot myself in the foot with a blowgun at this range. Let's see...safety pins, guitar picks, seashells, binding brackets, mardi gras beads, allen wrenches, mojo bags, loose glitter...no darts.

I do, however, have chocolate. But chocolate can only take one so far before the possibility of complete physical and mental breakdown becomes very real...then imminent...then you find yourself in a fog of noxious breath as the leviathan itself bears down upon your skull...

Hmm. It seems that extended insomnia with the absence of drowsiness produces effects not unlike those of lysergic acid diethylamide.

Of course, I've faced far worse. I recall--albeit, rather hazily--staying awake over 60 hours in an attempt to complete an extensive paper on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

The Horror. The Horror.

Mr FD phoned last night. He did not phone the night before - he was too busy having cocktails dahling with the Governor of Tasmania and getting a tour of Government House.

He is certainly going to feel as though he is slumming it when he gets home!

I suspect that the poor Tasmanian Governor is so bored and perhaps has so little to do, that he meets and greets and takes drinkie poos with every conference in town! I do not think a group of agronomists and seeds men/women would have lightened his existence all that much.

I was already jealous that he was in Tasmania (land of the beautiful) and now getting a tour of Government House has tipped my scales into jealousy! He can have the cocktail circuit, not my thing, at any time.

Oh the life of an ordinary plebe!

Often, when I'm looking for something to read and don't have the time or inclination to hit up the bookstore, I just raid my mother's spare room. It is home to a gazillion books she's collected over the years.

The last time I was there, I came across a hardback copy of Black House, the sequel to Stephen King's/Peter Straub's jointly written novel The Talisman. I finished rereading The Talisman earlier this summer, so I figured this was a good time to start in on the sequel.

Last night, as I was reading, I realized that this book wasn't one of my mother's after all. It was one that had been given to me a few years ago.

You run into some wonderfully interesting people at The Pub. Several years back, I reconnected with a guy I knew vaguely from high school, Wes. He'd become something of a regular on Ye Olde Barstool. It seemed for a while that he was there just about every time I stopped by (which made sense, since he was always there).

Although just a few years older than me, his life had taken him down a much rougher road. He had medical issues, addiction issues, and financial issues, all stacked one on top of the other like a haphazard Lego concoction. But in spite of all the crazy crap he'd gotten himself into over the years, he was an avid reader and something of an aspiring writer.

He told me one night that reading was what he liked most about being in jail, a place I think he'd spent way more than his share of time. He said this with the casual offhandedness that I'd describe how I spent a free Saturday morning.

"When I have to go in, I just use the time to hit up the library and clear out my head," he explained. He made his semi-regular jaunts to jail sound like going off to college. But in spite of his strangely skewed version of life and the things he always seemed to get himself into, there was just something kind and hopeful about Wes. I know that sounds strange, but there it was.

It was more than just his view on time in jail that made Wes .... different. Another thing was his aversion to shoes. He just flat-out hated them. He was always coming into the bar barefoot, and it didn't matter whether it was August or January. 

"Don't your feet get cold?" I asked him one bitter night, and got a "oh, hell no, honey." So I asked him if he'd ever thought about the fact that he was trekking those bare feet into the men's room every hour or so, and we knew damn well that drunk men don't exactly have the best aim. 

"Never thought of that," he said, after a moment's consideration. But he still wouldn't wear shoes.    

One night we got to talking about Lord of the Rings, and the next time I stopped by the pub I brought him in my finished copy of the trilogy and gave it to him, joking that now he wouldn't have to go to jail to get something to read anymore.

Shortly after that night, he left town. We'd talked about his plan a bit. He was moving to the Eastern Shore, to try to get away from our city and the people and habits that kept landing him in all sorts of holes. He was hoping to start over in a quiet, rural area and find some peace. Do some reading on a back porch instead of in a jail cell, maybe.

But before he left, he brought his copy of Black House up to the pub, and since I wasn't there he asked my mom to make sure I got it. Mom said he was so excited about giving it to me - I don't think Wes had many "book exchange" types of friends.

My own life turned upside down for a while not too long after that. Nothing like his, but my own version of falling on my face and floundering around for a bit. I wasn't doing a whole lot of reading during that time period. By the time I got back into the swing of my more normal habits, I had forgotten about the book. So it has sat at my parents' house all this time, just waiting for me to remember it and the friend who gave it to me.

I hope he found his back porch, complete with leaves rustling in the trees and crickets chirping in the background. I hope he kept it together and has a lawn to trek through barefoot. And I hope he's still reading.

Thanks, Wes.

... without falling, you do not know how pain it is to climb up from it and with the experience, you'll become stronger and braver to face whatever obstacles you have.

So dear friends, don't be afraid to fall and cry cause I can be the one who dry your tears. :)

-- "I've the Sweetest Sweet in This Earth" by Deechan

Madonna turned 50 and apparently amongst her gifts was a vege patch. Is this a turning 50 gift for everyone now. As we all know, moi turned 50 a couple months ago and moi is promised a new bigger and much improved vege patch. A few other friends turning 50 this year are also receiving the vege patch gift. Are we all stereotypes?  Is the present to give the woman with everything, or to give to the woman that you can’t afford to give anything too? I am actually excited about mine, as we all know I love to garden. If you don’t know – PAY MORE ATTENTION! No doubt my vege patch wont compare to Lady Madonna’s, but then again I will actually work in mine and she probably wont!

 She Who is Going to Kill me with Kindness has remembered the trick of using the remote control to turn off her air conditioner and pointing it towards mine at the same time and therefore by some quirk of science turning my air conditioner on! I am sitting quietly and then next thing the air conditioner blows into action. It scares my little thought away – and I work hard to gather those little thoughts together in the first place. I tell myself that leaving her may be one up side to taking a redundancy payout! If I was honest I would admit that I will probably miss her – I lie, I wont miss her. She may miss me.

What is that noise I hear – is it my ego blowing out?

We have a small tree outside our family s room window. My mother visited her sister and she came back with some cuttings for me when I was first establishing my garden. Mother is a real plants woman. Her garden is a one of everything garden . Or it was until age caught up with her and my Dad died. Anyway, she couldn’t  remember what the plant was, not could aunt who is older than Mother, but I planted it and away it grew. It is just lovely and one of my favourite things in the garden. Last year it must have set seed and a number of little seedlings sprouted in the area of the mother plant. I took one and planted it out in the front garden. However I could not find anyone who could play name that plant with me. Well, leafing through a magazine today I found it – described to a T! It leaks a milky sap when it is cut and has purple leaves. It is a Euphorbia cotinifolia , common names are Mexican shrubby spurge or Caribbean copper plant. It grows to 2-3 m and is frost tender which is not an issue in Brisbane. Happy Day my beautiful baby has a name!

Euphorbia cotinifolia

 University of Queensland archaeologist Dr Sean Ulm was one of a team of researchers who explored the chicken genome to help understand the spread of chickens and people across the globe.  In a recent article Dr Ulm said “It was known European chickens were introduced into the American continents by the Spanish after their arrival in the 15th Century, but there was ongoing debate about the presence of pre-Columbian chickens in South America.

"This is a crucial issue for archaeology, because if chickens were in South America before the Spanish arrived it means people must have brought them there, across the breadth of the Pacific Ocean," Dr Ulm said.

"We know there was at least some contact between pre-European Polynesians and Americans because the South American sweet potato occurs in Polynesia and the bottle gourd from Asia, and ultimately Africa, occurs in South America. (http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.html?article=15598)

Their study found no evidence of a Polynesian introduction of chickens to South America but they did find chicken sequences from two archaeological sites on Easter Island that group with sequences from Indonesia, Japan, and Philippines and may represent a genetic signature of an early Polynesian colonisation of the Pacific, opening up new avenues for research for archaeologists in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

I find the whole question of how chickens shaped the world intriguing. Same goes for all sorts of things – cod, potatoes, tulips, chocolate. How things that we just accept as so everyday now, actually altered history. Amazing. Chickens, who knew they could be so interesting. Shaping culture.  It wasn’t just KFC after all! Bet the colonel would be miffed to know that!

Poultry of the World

I have the lyrics “zippity doo dah, , zip-a-dee-ay” running through my head. My oh my is it a wonderful day? Maybe for someone, somewhere? Over the rainbow? No bluebirds that is for sure. The bush turkey would bury it! ENOUGH already. Damn those choirs in my head. Do you ever do that? Someone says quite innocently some phrase in general conversation and next thing you have some 1930s show tune or bad 1980s pop song in your head. So far today I have had Phil Collins “In the Air tonight” a number of ELO songs, zippity do dah, and “If I catch a falling star” The worst thing is that even the voice in my head can’t sing a melody in tune. Out, out, damn tune.

Speaking of Phil Collins I read that he has just divorced wife number 3 and given her $35 million. Wife no 2 got $17 million. When are you going to wise up to the fact that you are not husband material, Phil? Perhaps stop thinking with the zipper? Take up wood work , or some other hobby, instead of skirt chasing. Macramé? Very popular in the 70s – about the time you were. I wonder if Heather Mills is upset that Phil's ex got more money than she did?

Someone, SOMEONE, gave my assistant one of those counter bells – like you see in cafes and restaurants. Ding, food for table 48! She has it on her desk today and every time she finishes a task she is dinging the damn thing. She says it gives her a sense of achievement. I told her it is giving her a short life span.  It will be gone tomorrow – play time over.

This is an update on the Mt Isa story I posted the other day and explains the real reason so many of the men of Mt Isa are still single.  Not only are the odds quoted in the previous story quite inaccurate but there seems to a "quality control" problem with the men in town. 

'Beauty-disadvantaged' singles outcry

And in a twist, some of the town's single women hit back saying that, while Cr Molony believed the town had many eligible bachelors, few were up to scratch.

"There are lots of lovely women here, but the men just aren't up to the game," said Catherine Willett, a single 26-year-old podiatrist who has been in the city for 10 months.

"To be honest, there just aren't top-quality men here.

"They are too busy drinking XXXX to notice the women and all they do is whistle or yell or beep as you go past - those sorts of communication skills which I just love."

She said the good men were "snatched up" immediately and rarely made it back onto the singles market.

Anna Warrick, 27, a single occupational therapist who moved from Sydney to Mount Isa last year, agreed.

"We've got a saying up here that the odds are good, but the goods are odd," she said.

"The guys don't make much of an effort with the girls - there isn't much wining and dining going on.

"I don't think the guys are terribly romantic from what I've seen."