P123: 5 sentences

Because it’s easy, here’s my response to being
Tagged by Dean

Men in the Air – The last flight of the R-101 by John G Fuller

M. Maillet, manager of the Poix airfield, heard the engines and peered through the thick rain and mist to look for it. Finally he saw something – a strip of white lights in a row. He could barely make out the hull of the ship. She was moving slowly, along the railway line.

She appeared to be strugging hard against the wind.

The tragic end of the British “public” airship.

But I’m not tagging, sorry.

Seven things

1. I find it somehow depressing that the top 4 WordPress weblogs always seem to include LOLcats and lately LOLdogs. Call me curmudgeonly, but they just annoy me.
2. I am currently recovering from some bedbug bites. It’s a travel experience that just keeps on giving. Bedbugs are apparently very hard to get rid of and something your host will not want to talk about.
3. I just found out that Australia’s best selling motorcycle is the Honda CT110. Australia Post buys (and sells) thousands of them every year.
4. Did you know that ferrets must be kept cool when temperatures get above about 27 degrees C? I made a special “Ice Cave” which is a sleeping box with a compartment for an ice container above it. It seems to work.
5. Alister Coleman a.k.a Scaryduck and Robber Rabbit has started videoblogging. He’s even quacking scarier in person.
6. OK, Doug is videoblogging too. I am watching with interest the progress of his forehead scar, and await the actual appearance of Karen on, as opposed to off-camera.
7. My brothers live in Emerald, which has just been flooded. Fortunately, while one of them got water in his shed, his home wasn’t inundated. The other brother, (who’s the local Reverend) has been on national radio today talking about the flood.

Car Free ?

One of our VicHPV members, Jon, is participating in the Wizwheels Car Free Challenge and is looking for “partial” participants to help him out with some experiences. Here’s the rules of the Challenge:

The rules of the Car-Free Challenge are fairly simple. You go without your car as much as humanly possible from May 15th to June 15th. Once the month is up, you write up your experiences in essay form and e-mail them to bryan@bentrideronline.com. We’ll judge the essays and pick a winner on July 1st. That lucky winner gets a brand new 2007 Wizwheelz Cruiser.

and here’s what Jon would like you to do before June 15th:

• Try to go car free for a day and write him about how it went for you.
• Tell someone you know about the car free challenge and try it for a day.
• You ask them if they are willing to have ago at a car free day (preferably with a bike in it, but doesn’t have to be)
• They write something about it – as much or as little as they
  want. or they just say they did it and send him an e-mail.
• After they send it to him, he will publish it on his blog ( He will only use first names) and the circle is complete.
• On the 15th of June he will put the number of people who participated in the little experiment.

Here’s Jons Blog
and you can email him Here

I’d do it myself except of course, many of my days are car-free already!

Books three

Not sure I want to play this game but I’ve been Tagged by Walnut, for…

The Little-Known Favorites Meme. Rules: List and describe three of your favorite books that other people might not be familiar with. Then tag five people. See, easy!

Here they are:

Unknown title by Unknown Author

When I was a teenager I discovered some boys adventure books my Dad had as a kid. The one I remember best was about a British flying ship – literally an “armed merchant ship” of the 30’s and 40’s made of a miraculously light metal and able to be ballasted with an equally miraculous lighter-than-air gas. Its’ arch enemy was a copy of itself made from stolen plans by a middle-European power (of course). A marvelous, rollicking yarn. But I can’t remember the title or the author. How little-known can you get? Even I don’t know.

Earth by David Brin
Almost everything Brin does is pretty good, even if Kevin Costner screwed “the Postman” big time. Twenty years ago I had the opportunity to see Niven, Brin, Pohl and McCaffrey live in a panel discussion, and he impressed me mightily. Earth combines Nivenesque science fiction with cyberpunk – and makes Gibson look a little silly. An extraordinarily prophetic book in some ways.

The People: Pilgrimage by Zenna Henderson and The Bloody Sun by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Yes, I know, there are 2 books here, but I can’t choose. I read these as a teen in Ace pulp paperback, probably in one of those “back to back” editions, (so maybe they qualify as one book).

The People: Pilgrimage (no longer in print, but collected with The People: No Different Flesh as “Ingathering”, now) tells the poignant story of groups of scattered refugees from another world – with special abilities – and a high moral ethic. It moved me at the time; I’m afraid to revisit it. You can’t go back.

The Bloody Sun (1964) is an early Darkover novel. Maybe I liked it because it made me feel like perhaps having red hair wasn’t such a bad thing. Well, the story was pretty good too…

The chain stops here. I’m not taggin’ nobody.