POTD: Sherbrooke Forest

From 2018 03 15 Melbourne

Today's photo-of-the-day is from Sherbrooke Forest, a nature preserve in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne, Australia, and home to the Eucalyptus Regnans, also known as mountain ash, the tallest flowering plant in the world, and one of the tallest trees, second only to the Sequoia, or California redwood. It's one of the reasons the Dandenongs are one of my favorite spots in Australia.

Ekaterina (TV)

IMDB

Ekaterina (TV): 2014 Russian TV series on rise of Catherine the Great. Straightforward melodrama. Easy introduction to Ivan VI, Elizabeth, and Catherine and Peter III, St Petersburg's palaces and 18th century palace intrigues. Perfect preparation for a Russian vacation. C+

POTD: William Ricketts Sanctuary

From 2018 03 15 Melbourne

Today's photo-of-the-day is from the William Ricketts Sanctuary in the Victorian Dandenong Ranges in Australia. There, on a peaceful hillside nestled among towering mountain ash, from 1934 until his death in 1993, sculptor William Ricketts fashioned 92 ceramic sculptures of native fauna and flora, Aborigines and himself. Ricketts was an eccentric and a narcissist. He was an environmentalist with a New-Age spiritual attitude towards nature. He often shows himself as an Aborigine in his sculptures and in one case shows his own torso growing out of a kangaroo's hindquarters. In the 1930s, his was one of the few voices celebrating Aboriginal culture in Australia. He was ahead of his time, but today, his treatment of Aboriginal culture as primitive and childlike is considered as much condescending as ennobling. In any case, his heart was in the right place and his sanctuary remains a treasured retreat from the hustle and bustle of nearby Melbourne.

Review: Embassytown

Amazon

From Embassytown, by China Miéville:

Hosts, the indigenes, in whose city we had been graciously allowed to build Embassytown, were cool, incomprehensible presences. Powers like subaltern gods, which sometimes watched us as if we were interesting, curious dust; which provided our biorigging; and to which the Ambassadors alone spoke."

Embassytown is classic science fiction with something to say about Earth by imagining what language, consciousness, communication and colonization might be like at the edge of the universe.

POTD: Sculling on the Yarra

From 2018 03 15 Melbourne

Today's photo-of-the-day is from the Yarra River in the central business district of Melbourne, Australia, where they have been sculling for at least 100 years.