Monthly Archives: October 2008

Fund My Facial Hair!

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A thoroughly disreputable GIMP cookup. Don’t ask.This year, for (N/M)ovember, I’m using charity as an excuse to make a terrible facial mistake, and growing a Moustache. To this end, I will be posting updated farcicalfacial pictures of the experiment as it gains mass and conquers steadily greater expanses of the universe.

What follows is the standard Movember explanatory blurb:

The money raised by Movember is used to raise awareness of men’s health issues and donated to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue – the national depression initiative. The PCFA and beyondblue will use the funds to fund research and increase support networks for those men who suffer from prostate cancer and depression.

Did you know:

Depression affects 1 in 6 men….most don’t seek help. Untreated depression is a leading risk factor for suicide.
Last year in Australia 18,700 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and more than 2,900 died of prostate cancer – equivalent to the number of women who will die from breast cancer annually.
For those that have supported Movember in previous years you can be very proud of the impact it has had and can check out the details at: http://au.movember.com/outcomes/content/Fundraising-Outcomes/.

To donate to my Mo you can either:

Click this link and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account, or write a cheque payable to ‘Movember Foundation’, referencing my Registration Number 1546281 and mailing it to:

Movember Foundation
PO Box 292
Prahran VIC 3181

All donations over $2 are tax deductible.

Legs Of Steel

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This year, E may well have given me the coolest birthday present of all time: New legs.

Me in my moonjumper bootsHeath in my moonjumper boots

Once mastered, they enable you to jump higher and run faster than ought to be physically possible. Still working on the whole mastery thing. 🙂

These shots show myself and my brother taking turns at teetering around the back yard.

These are cool enough to warrant a lengthy article, but they are also very simple… once I point out how cool they are, I’m not sure there’s much left to say.

Imitation

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This somewhat ugly chandelier adorns the ceiling of our lounge room. Before you ask, we rent, we didn’t choose it that way.

Our Chandelier

I only just realised: there’s a very long and perverse story in this banal light fitting:

It’s meant to imitate a crystal chandelier, but it’s mostly glass.

Parts of it (the arms) are meant to imitate glass, but are in fact plastic.

It’s meant to imitate an array of candles, but it is electric.

Because it emulates candles, it has non-functional cups around the simulated-candle light globe sockets to catch non-existent candle wax.

It’s decorated with shapings which imitate flowers, grapes or tears, and bunchings of fabric, all in glass or plastic.

Its globe sockets are deliberately tiny, both hearkening to an older standard and attempting to enforce a reduced total wattage.

The globe sockets deliver 50Hz 240volt AC power to what is expected to be five incandescent filament bulbs in the range of 15 to 40watts each, but each globe now contains its own tiny regulated transformer which provides power suited to a cold fluorescent coil, bunched and spiraled to imitate the shape of an incandescent globe.

The globes are in turn a specialized variety of fluorescent imitation-incandescent globe, tailored to fit this obscure size and shape of socket. They consume less wattage than was ever intended for the light fitting, but produce more light…

Every part of this light is trying to imitate at least one other thing, if not several things, recursively, some of them thousands of years old. I wonder what else I’ve missed…?

Boinga Bob

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A number of people will have heard me make mention of a legendary figure named Boinga Bob (Bob Prudhoe), a man of brilliance, eccentricity and several really cool houses.

For those of you who have not believed, or have only partly believed, I just hit upon an answer which may or may not convince you somewhat. If one googles “Boinga Bob”, the second hit, at time of writing, is this YouTube video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X34HiAq5_s

(The first hit is to a TV show site called “World’s Most Extreme Homes” where an episode covers some other, presumably even cooler house of Bob’s which I have never seen).

To add to this, I did a little google-mapping, in search of the remarkable tower from which I had the good fortune to watch the tall ships sail into Port Phillip Bay for the beginning of the 1988 Bicentennial celebrations. This too, is (or was) a house of the elusive Bob:

BB House 1987 GoogleMaps

A strange and legendary guy. If others have had encounters with the Bob more recent than my own (i.e. in the last fifteen years), let me know in the comments.