Welcoming our new feline overlords

Because everyone knows you've got a right

A British backpacker has "defended" himself against the breach-of-privacy charges laid against him for covertly filming a young woman in a 'uni-sex bathroom' at a Queensland resort by saying 'I just wanted to see her naked.'

Spot the weasel word here. Yes, that's right: 'just'.

'Just' as distinct from what? The unavoidable implication here seems to be 'I only wanted to see her naked, which is my perfect right as a man and anyway what's the harm, I didn't rape her or anything so what are you all going on about?'

His lawyer calls his actions 'a lapse in judgement.'

Me, I'm off to the bottle shop to see what Scotland has to offer. Somehow a glass of wine just isn't going to cut it, after that.

Nature notes: it's that time of year again

Would you say it was good or bad feng shui that I have redbacks busily spinning and weaving around the hinges of both the front and the back security doors? (This house has only two external doors.)

I mean, on the one hand they are living creatures. And on the other hand they are, well, you know.

In other news, on my way out to the supermarket I saw a sleepy lizard calmly poised at the edge of the footpath, waiting to cross the road. Which means I've left it too late to get the back yard mowed again, and the poor yard-mowing dude will probably end up with a mangled sleepy or bluetongue in his mower again. It's a jungle out there.

Blog post of the week

Go and have a look at this lovely piece by Tim Dunlop for the ABC's The Drum on the achievements of Tony Abbott, including discussion of the Budgie's 'unconventional approach to policy' and his 'malleable approach to straightforwardness'.

The comments thread, featuring character analyses of Kevin 'Mugabe' Rudd and Tim 'Red to the Core' Dunlop himself, is also good for a laugh, but is not for the faint-hearted.

Normal people just keep cars in the garage

but some of us are running breeding programs.

Spider love

It's been nearly eleven years since I moved into this house and over those years I have found redback spiders in a number of places: tucked into grooves in door frames, peeping coyly out from drainpipes, neatly hidden in the inside-underside moulding of plastic garden chairs. (!)

So you'd think, given what a haven my place seems to be for them and given the way that their amazing beauty and elegance lures me close enough often enough to make it very likely that one day I will get bitten on the nose and die a horrible death, that I would know a bit more about their habits, personalities and tastes. But no. None of the following, which I have just found at a perfectly respectable news site, has ever been visible from where I was standing:

It's long been known that the female redback who is roughly twice the size of her male counterpart, regularly eats a number of her male courtiers, although exactly what determines who gets eaten has been unclear.

New Canadian research suggests that it depends on whether the female has been satisfied by the duration of the stimulatory courtship, which entails the male vibrating the female's web for approximately 100 minutes.

I'm not sayin' nothin'.

Worry and the alleviation of worry

You just keep looking for your glasses until you find them.

You finish the novel, and then you finish the next one.

You go to the chemist and get Strepsils and Betadine throat gargle and tickly cough medicine and two kinds of analgesics, and take/use them all one after the other.

And you ring up the little man with the chainsaw and he comes and cuts down most of the overgrown bottle-brush one of whose main branches is split from the fork and rapidly splitting further and further down the trunk as the foliage is tossed about in the wild weather, with half the tree about to come crashing down any minute on the shed and the other half on the precious fancy-pants irises, the fence, and three or four of the bloke next door's chooks.

After a consultation during which we prowl around muttering, looking at the tree from various angles, the little man with the chainsaw cuts off everything but the main trunk, which supports the branch where the orb weaver lives. In August. I ask you. Surely it can't be the same spider, though it is certainly living in the same tree.




This is what these spiders look like when holed up in the daytime, their legs all swooshed forwards to protect their heads, a bit like the crash position on those aircraft safety cards, or maybe they're just pretending to look like a chunk of tree. Are they related to squid, does anybody know?

Perspective, restoration of

I spent an hour today with a dear friend drinking sparkling wine and bemoaning the state of our peer group -- almost all of whom including both of us seem to be in some sort of trouble or state of crisis -- and whingeing and moaning about the next few weeks, which one way and another are going to be difficult and demanding. When I got home I decided to tackle a couple of long-neglected tasks before settling down to the current work novel, and started with the very cobwebby outside of the front door hinge side.

Brush jab sweep tug, I went, thinking gee this is a strong web and look at those off-white bobbly things, I know they don't bode well: little arachnid labour wards. As I stood imagining the horror of lots of little spiders bursting out of them, a movement caught my eye: a very large redback, its scarlet stripe blazing, charging up the broom handle towards my right hand.

I would have taken a photo, but let's just say there wasn't time. And a shot of sludgy redback puree on the front verandah really doesn't convey the drama of the moment.

But there will be no more whingeing before lights out, and possibly not for the rest of the week.