Self-portraiture

Inspired by Sophie's image, which I can attest does in fact look very like her within the limitations of the application and without really doing her justice, I went over there to make my own dolly.

Although it allows you to put lines on your face, unfortunately it only allows one set of lines at a time, so the possible variants go pretty much straight from fresh-faced 25-year-old to dessicated crone. While I am undeniably nearer the latter than the former, I wasn't quite ready for the crone set of lines, so ended up with this:




It was only then that I remembered that I've played this game before, with an application called 'Simpsonize Me!' that you can use to turn yourself into a Simpsons character, who by happy chance is wearing my exact reading glasses:




Those who know me will be aware that this second one is a great deal closer to the truth. I bet you're all laughing yourselves stupid. And rightly so.

UPDATE -- found a few extra options manga-wise. The first one was just an idealised decades-younger "self" but this one is just starting to move into the realms of the very slightly uncanny:

Raising the dead on the intertubes

Idly searching out online (as you do) a variety of names from the past, I made the mistake of looking up some first cousins I've not seen in many years. No estrangement or anything, just distance and lack of common ground. But I typed one name into a search engine and up came a Facebook photo, and there were my mother's huge hooded blue eyes (which I, annoyingly, did not inherit), disconcertingly set in someone else's face and gazing at me out of the screen.

After I got over the ontological disquiet, the eeriness of the dead brought back to life, and the shock of being gazed upon once more after nine and a half years by the eyes I know best in the world, there was also an infinitely more banal yet equally important issue to consider: the internet is going to put private detectives out of business, and crime fiction will die a nasty, lingering death.

Texture and perspective 101: Pav's back yard

The Show with No Horses

This year's Royal Adelaide Show was hamstrung by the enforced ban on horses in the wake of the equine-influenza outbreak. No blacksmithery and farrier displays; no horses in the Grand Parade; none of the obsessive, cult-like manifestations of the subculture that is show jumping.

Show jumping is something I knew a great deal about when I was a little kid and devoured all available pony-club and show-jumping books (I was never allowed to have a pony on the farm, partly because my father had and still occasionally does have nightmares about being expected to lead his uncle Ross's prizewinning Clydesdales


around backwards when he was a very small child and has stayed well away from horses ever since).

Even my own adoration of these beautiful, powerful, graceful and intelligent animals took a bit of a beating in 1988 when one particularly unprepossessing specimen executed a tricky simultaneous gait-changing and direction-changing manoeuvre at a canter through a steep creek bed somewhere hilly north of Melbourne and dumped me on some rocks, but I'm still very sad there weren't any at the Show. The alpacas nearly made up for them, but not quite.


This little black alpaca was knackered.

Other animals I would have liked photos of: the gigantic bulls, peacefully lying in the straw with their hooves tucked under their chests like cats and the farmer's little kids climbing all over them. (Camera out of batteries by then.) The racing and diving pigs (didn't have enough energy left to wait, much less walk, around for another 20 minutes till the next race). The strange-looking people trotting their dogs around the dog-showing ring, straight out of Best in Show (batteries again).



This was supposed to be a photo of the upside-down roaring tigers, but it seems to have turned into one of those pictures of festively primary colours that look like children's doona designs.



Again with the violent colours. I liked all this raffish sideshow dazzle and noise with the soft colours and contours and the stillness of the Adelaide Hills in the distance.



This hi-tech ferris wheel is definitely not the same one I remember breaking down in 1963 with me and my sisters and my Scottish grandma up at the very top of the ride.



Meanwhile, in the handcraft hall and bakery section, someone named Susan Rabbitt had won first prize for these fabulous-looking passionfruit and lemon butters.



Shrek wedding cake, considerably more tasteful than some of the wedding cakes I've seen.



Fascinators are back, if they ever went away.



Young Elyse (this is the Primary School division) definitely deserved this blue ribbon: these are the best Chocolate Crackles on display by a very long way. No icing, coloured sprinkles or cutesy printed paper patty case thingies, just lots of chocolate and no mucking about.

And the thing I'm saddest I didn't get a photo of? Legendary Adelaide broadcaster and columnist Peter Goers, whose OTT-quirky gift for radio I have never heard equalled, striding along the path to the ABC tent clutching a gigantic Dagwood Dog dripping in sauce.

If that is the case then I am clearly neither

One 'J_P_Z', a regular commenter at Larvatus Prodeo, has opined in the course of a bit of incomprehensible sledging of the great Leonard Cohen -- J_P_Z is clearly deluded -- that:

Leonard Cohen writes lines that belong on the intellectual’s equivalent of a refrigerator magnet, or a poster with a cute kitten on it (though I suppose in LC’s case, they would be brooding, inconsolable kittens). The funny part to me is that so many intellectuals think that only dim people own refrigerator magnets.

To which I answer:




I am disappointed in this photo, though; you can hardly see anything. The small square magnet reflecting the camera flash is actually an excellent reproduction of Klimt's The Kiss, and the boring-looking triangle near the freezer handle is a beautiful chunk of amethyst crystals wth a magnet on the back.

My favourites among these exhibits include the one that says 'BEWARE OF THE DOG: The Cat is Not Trustworthy Either', and the chimp saying 'I would like to use one of my lifelines.' In the yellowing Judy Horacek cartoon, the woman at the counter is saying 'I'd like a new lease on life, please' and the young man is replying 'I'm sorry, Madam, you're not allowed to break the old one.'

The cutting along the top edge of the fridge and over to the right, held in place by a flower magnet, says 'Kerryn queen of world drivers' and only the people who have driven with me know how funny this is. The other cutting, further over to the left, is one I have had on my last three fridges and saved through four moves, which is how much I love it: it says 'Sometimes the devil comes and helps women.'

There are three cute kittens and one terrifying cat, the one in the mise-en-abîme cat-and-fridge photo.