Roses

I've become besotted with the roses in our garden: they're flourishing! Which you may or may not gather from the pictures above. Their perfumes are also exquisite; I'm told it's because they are old-school.

One 'lady' that has really won my heart is Madame DuPont, who, at about 1.5 metres high by 1.5 metres across, is a grand dame. Although, she is dwarfed by her pink cousin next door, Lady Damask. At 2 metres by 2 metres -- I lie not -- LD is a queen.

Chance meeting

Today I met Perth musician, Nathan Gaunt.

I was walking past a cafe and saw him sitting out the front. So ...

I said: "Are you Nathan Gaunt? I am Chris Walker and you don't know me from a bar of soap."

After this we had a great chat -- for about 7 minutes.

From what I've heard of Nathan's music it is great (I've seen 3 gigs, at one of which, me, his parents and a few friends were the entire audience) . Plus, he's local, which is always a bonus.

Egg Art

Eating eggs every morning makes me and my wife smile :).

Sobering

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all about AIDS in Africa. But, really, what can I do?"

Until recently, these, or something like them, were my thoughts on the 'AIDS-in-Africa' epidemic. The documentary Seven Days, which premiered in Perth two weeks ago, got me examining my attitude.

It was shot and directed in a Zambian village by Perth filmmaker Russell Brown; the shooting all took place over seven days (hence the name). The 'star' of the show is a thirty-something single female, a plumber from Port Lincoln, South Australia. To my mind she was a female version of Kenny -- impossible not to like.

Check out the preview on youtube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOKr0N1FZVg) and / or buy the DVD from Heritage Distributors.

Our new eighty-odd-year-old house

Model supplied by Speers Modelling Agency

The view from our all-terrain driveway

Backyard mid-gardening

Barry bougainvillea after a haircut; this is the back entrance.

Exhibition

A new gallery has opened in Cottesloe. It's not one of those galleries, in which us mere mortals splutter when we see the price labels -- it's what you might call a second-tier gallery.

This Friday an exhibition by Steve Logan, a young Perth artist, opens. I don't know Steve from a bar of soap, but yesterday his Warholesque images looked great on the walls (several use far brighter colours than the image above).

Get to the exhibition if you can -- it's on for the next few weeks -- if for no other reason than to support the gallery owner, who is doing a great job fostering local talent.

Conquering the Carbon Footprint

Well, Rupert Murdoch isn't a climate change skeptic, as his speech at the Global Energy Initiative made clear.

Two things in the Oz's eight-paragraph "Cut & paste" excerpt caught my attention:

First, Murdoch's PR people have obviously been in his ear: "Our audiences - hundreds of millions of people on five continents - care about this issue. Three-quarters of the American public believes climate change is a serious problem."

And, second, as Murdoch, the shrewdest of shrewd businessmen knows, good PR equals good business. Twice in the Oz's summary he stated that being green-friendly was good business: "And as many companies have already learned, acting on this issue is simply good business. Reducing our use of energy reduces costs." And again: "when so many of the solutions make sense for us as a business, it is clear that we should take action, not only as a matter of public responsibility but because we stand to benefit."

Of course, overwhelming popular opinion and business profitability don't make a scientific case for global warming -- no matter how slick the rhetoric.

What did others make of Rupert's speech?

Microcosms

I used to think gardening was about old biddies pottering around, but having spent the past weekend with my mum (aka Trojan horse aka The Rose Doctor) I now know better: it is an endurance sport for neither the faint-hearted nor those, like me, who spend their weeks tapping a keyboard.

I also learnt that beneath overgrown garden beds lay vast microcosms. Some of the gems we dug up were:

- 38 hippeastrums (which we re-planted)
- 4 witchetty-grubs (we think they were)
- about 50 legless lizards
- a brown, headless plastic minature giraffe
- part of the femur of a large animal
- a yellow piece of lego
- a black ashtray
- a rust-encrusted bottle-top
- the corner joint of a water-pipe

Another skeptic?

Janet Albrechtsen's writing is always vigorous and usually entertaining.

Her article, "Force-fed warming hysteria", in today's Australian, teased out one, possibly very scary, implication of swallowing the global warming position feathers and all -- i.e. the way children are taught about this issue.

I appreciate the call in her final paragraph for a more critical approach.