The Newer Breed

BAD is sailing the Panama Canal.

I mentioned about the great classic British actors not so long ago when I saw the movie Tea with the Dames. Speaking of great actors, if you never seen Laurence Olivier in A Voyage Round my Father,  you must find it and watch it.

But there is a whole new breed of good actors in the movies and on our tv screens and they are terrific.

I have seen Stephen Tompkinson in countless tv shows and like all great British actors, he plays himself terribly well. The Split from the BBC is now being shown here.

Nicola Walker is just brilliant too and she has also being in so many things. She was looking older. Maybe she has had some work done on her face as she appears more youthful in this tv show. That would be against what most female British actors do, age as they do. I best remember her for her role in Spooks, but also in Last Tango in Halifax. She now has blonde hair and scary blue eyes. Photo from Entertainment Daily.

But before the aforesaid actors was Meera Syal, first noticed by me in My Beautiful Laundrette and subsequently in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (which must have been in the 80s), Absolutely Fabulous, Drop the Dead Donkey, Beautiful Thing and the brilliant young gay themed Beautiful People, where she played the blind lodger just so on spot. Here she is in The Telegraph with another great English actor, Sanjeev Bhaskar.

While Britain has a huge population, so many of the same actors keep relentlessly turning up on tv shows and it may just be because they are such good actors and box office/ratings pulls. Perhaps there won't be the likes of Dame Joan Plowright, Dame Judi Dench etc again, but there are many fine younger actors to take their honoured places.

Frivolous Friday

BAD is in Costa Rica.

This is an clip from a movie. Shirley Temple was just so talented; tap dancing and singing but just the way she moves is amazing. I would have loved to see her 'Doing the Lambeth Walk'.

Penury and the new tablet

BAD is in Key West. Plenty of boys there for her to kiss. (Is that Key as in Quay?)

Penury is how I feel after last weekend. I had decided to buy a new Lenovo tablet. It was in stock at the big blue office supply shop in Elsternwick. I had done my research, I thought. It was not on display and we couldn't actually see it until we bought it. Not happy. But wait. What is this other one? A Samsung tablet for the same price. I was familiar with the specs for the Lenovo and I had a look at those for the Samsung. I liked it. I asked the salesperson about it. Why could I not see this for sale on your website or come across it elsewhere? The reply was that it is the entry level model and not promoted. Well, by not promoting it, Samsung almost lost a sale to Lenovo. For better or worse I decided to go for the Samsung, $299.

I was edging towards the exit door after paying and R grabbed me and steered me back inside. I never got around to following Maribeth's excellent idea of cutting a cork in half and gluing the halves to the bottom of the keyboard to make feet for our desktop computer keyboard after one of the fold out legs broke. Lest of all because we rarely see corks on wine bottles now. Let's look at keyboards, said R.

So, yes, we chose one. C'mon said R, it is only $20 each. $19 to be precise. So we have a new keyboard and it connected up easily. This must be about our fourth or fifth cordless keyboard and mouse and boy, did the early ones give trouble. It's all quite seamless now. But there is something quite different about the key positioning, especially the Caps Lock button. In the first five minutes of typing, I HIT THE CAPS BUTTON HALF A DOZEN TIMES. Annoying, but I am getting used to it.

I taped the mouse and the little usb sender unit to the underside of the old keyboard along with a sticky note, "Works" and I removed the batteries. I am sure it quickly disappeared after I placed it in the recycling room. There was Contessa electric sewing machine in the recycling room, complete with operating pedal, also with a note, "Working, but lift only underneath, not by the handle".

But R had not finished with my wallet just yet. Finally out of the store, there was  phone repair, phone case shop next door. You need a new case for your new tablet, R said. Yours is old and shabby which is quite true and I didn't know if it would fit the new tablet. The case protects it when travelling, and I can sit up in bed and prop it on my legs. Another $40 gone.

As for the new tablet, I did not realise how slow and clunky mine had become. The new one has a much newer operating system that is almost identical to my phone. The only thing where it is less is the brilliance of the screen. This one is just a screen whereas my old one had a Super Amoled screen and there is just not the brilliance with the new one. I can live with that.

Gays getting antsy

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/02/british-airways-criticised-by-lgbt-groups-over-asylum-removals

Hmm, not sure about that one.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/business/companies/airline-apologises-to-gay-couple-asked-to-move-for-straight-couple-20180802-p4zuzi.html

This one is a ripper story. A gay couple were seated in their booked seats when one was requested to give up his seat so seats could be rearranged for a straight married couple to sit together. In spite of the gay couple's protests, they were told one either moves from their seat in premium economy to economy or gets off the plane. They both left the plane. The airline later explained that the seat had been double booked by a mistake on its part, and a decision had to be made. Simple I would have thought. Both couples had booked and the gay couple was there first. First in, best dressed with appropriate compensation for the disadvantaged.

If I were gay, oh, apparently I am. It is so easy to forget at my age. Yes, well, I don't think I would be using Alaska Airlines if there was an alternative.

This is PNG calling

I don't expect I have to alert Diane and Bill to this programme. They will be watching as they both worked in PNG. Solely on memory, Sean Dorney was a reporter based in Papua New Guinea, an island to the north of Australia.

It was once full of local people who did local things, like tribal wars, spearing people, mothers' masturbating their sons at a young age to make them big and strong and Catholic missionaries who preached contraception and safe sex, explaining that oddness by saying they were so far away from the control of Rome.

They were a free people, but then owned by Germany, occupied by Japanese, later Britain and then Australia. Australia gave PNG independence, and it then rather fell all apart into a corrupt tin pot country, which is rather sad.

In the 1980s and 90s Sean Dorney reported for our ABC from PNG. He married a local person and they moved to a Pacific Island. I haven't heard any reporting from PNG of late. Does the ABC still have a correspondent there, or is is PNG covered by a South Pacific reporter.

Sean Dorney was a terrific reporter, showing the colour and movement, and troubles of PNG through his reporting. He now has motor neuron disease and will be shown revisiting PNG on Foreign Correspondent on ABC 1 on Tuesday night. 

Monday Mural

BAD is in Miami.

If Jayne was around, she would know these very well as they adorn the platform of Oakleigh Railway Station. They aren't exactly murals but contructions attached to the wall. Lads carrying boomboxes. How cute, and I remember the time well.

Skater fashion hasn't really changed a lot.

Bit blurry.

There are works on the other platform too.

Oh lookee, here comes an N Class diesel electric locomotive towing nothing, not a suburban electric train.

And there she goes.Umm, where am I now? Clearly not Oakleigh. It must be the new station at Carnegie, with many stairs and no lifts as yet. I took some lunch and called into our travel agent to tell her our Late Friend is dead and no more profits were to come to her from him. She had wondered as from his hospital bed in February, he had arranged a sponsorship deal between her travel company and Golden Days Radio, and then not heard back from him. Second baby happened yet, I asked our travel agent? No. Lovely to see her and have a chat and her about five year old son Hudson who is doing well. Just having local holidays, I lied to her. I did not tell we have are going to South Africa on a tour and booked it ourselves, along with the airfares. We will use her services next year when we plan to tour England, rather depending on how we cope with this year's overseas holiday.

See what Grace, Sami and Jackie have on offer for Monday Mural

I am American!

Remember a little while ago I discovered there were some Germans in my family tree but alas not blood relatives. Now I have another email from a genealogy site with some detail from my maternal grandmother's side, a Dickson. She was born in 1892 and died in 1984. So, she was in her 90s when she died. I must ask Mother about her. She is some kind of 3rd aunt to me.

But what is interesting to me is where she was born. It is a place called Advance, which is little more than a meeting of two major roads, in the county of Shawano in Wisconsin, USA. There is a church and a sprinkling of neat enough houses. It just twenty five minutes to the western shore of Lake Michigan in the north of the US. Isn't that exciting. Now I will have to concentrate to see if she is a blood relative or not.

When I was looking around Advance using the electric street camera website, this house rather appealed to me. It must have been halloween.

I just entered Dicksons of Advance into search and there seems to be quite a lot of them still in the area and they have their own cemetery. Can someone from the US tell me what it means to have your own cemetery in the American context? It sounds to me like they were not poor people. There are around 42 people in the cemetery and those not named Dickson I assume were married to or children of Dicksons.

Ok, there are two Dicksons with the same first name who are mother and daughter and the time frame fits for my relative be the daughter of the younger one in the cemetery, who has a slight variation on the same name. Why did my relative come to Australia, probably in the quite early 20th century. I'd love to get stuck in and do some research, but I know how it just eats in your time. I'll save it for retirement.

I couldn't resist checking a bit more. I have it right. Grandmother and mother of my relative are buried in the cemetery and her father is buried there too. I have forgotten how the Dicksons fit into my family. I am looking at my less than accurate family tree, and of course, it was Mother's maternal grandmother's maiden name. From what I can see,  she was the niece of my mother's grandmother. The Australian Dickson's have been in Australia back to the early 1800s but it looks like some of them were of US origin...........enough. Or maybe the family split when leaving England. One lot went to the US, which of course wasn't the US back then, and another lot went to Australia. All speculation. Anyway, I don't see why I should have to family research when I fairly sure it has been done by other people already. It is hard to share though with these genealogy companies.

Later: Mother knows nothing about any American connection. I opened the conversation with Mother, did you grandmother Rose speak with an American accent. She did give me two female names her grandmother Rose talked about as relatives, but neither have the name of or even close to the relative from the US. If professional genealogists charge by the hour, it would be a very expensive process. And, I just know the work has already been done by other people, but who?