Sunday, November 8, 2009

November is Orchid time

















Yep orchids from my garden to my table has this lady dancing! Sorry, folks, you'll just have to imagine their delicate melon-y perfume. Enjoy!

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

The Secret Gardener

Yippee! With Spring truly sprung and the first rains bringing out the snails, it's good to have seen this beautiful creature a few times and know that I have back-up in the garden.





















Can't see it yet? What you're looking for is the Blue-tongued Skink. Its scientific name is Tiliqua scincoides. This 25cm lizard likes to wander round gardens in the daytime finding many different things to eat, including fruit, flowers, eggs and snails.

Here it is in a more assertive moment ...


Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Happy Spring!








Printemps - Marc Chagall

Yes, it's Spring in the Southern hemisphere.

All over Brisbane, dogs with short memories are being startled by bluetongue lizards, viruses are raising their tiny heads and soon, all kinds of large black and white birds will begin to swoop on human beings who will respond by drawing eyeballs on their hats in a vain attempt to deter them.

Make of it all what you will.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Ecological Crochet: No. 6 in an occasional series entitled 'Harmless Hobbies for Mad Old Bags'.




















Photos © The IFF by Alyssa Gorelick
.
This and other similar mathematical and ecological humdingers of handcraft at the wonderfully-named Institute for Figuring .

Go there! Prepare to be amazed!

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Crazy like a baboon




Women in red drive men crazy, says study

Tuesday, 28 October 2008 Will Dunham, Reuters

Men find women in red more sexually attractive, say US psychologists, confirming it really is the colour of romance.

Professor Andrew Elliot and Dr Daniela Niesta of the University of Rochester, New York report their findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Men rated a woman shown in photographs as more sexually attractive if she was wearing red clothing or if she was shown in an image framed by a red border rather than some other colour, says Elliot.

He says although this "red alert" may be a product of human society associating red with love for eons, it also may arise from more primitive biological roots.

Noting the genetic similarity of humans to higher primates, he says scientists have shown that certain male primates are especially attracted to females of their species displaying red.

For example, female baboons and chimpanzees show red colouring when nearing ovulation, sending a sexual signal that the males apparently find irresistible.

"It could be this very deep, biologically based automatic tendency to respond to red as an attraction cue given our evolutionary heritage," says Elliot.

The study involved more than 100 men, mostly college undergraduates, who were shown pictures of women and asked to rate how pretty they were, how much the men would like to kiss them and how much the men would like to have sex with them.

Men were shown a woman, with some of the pictures bordered in red and some bordered in white, grey or green.

Even though it was the same picture of the same woman, when she was framed in red the men rated her as more attractive than when she was bordered by another colour.

Men were then shown photographs of a woman that were identical except that the researchers digitally made her shirt red in some versions or blue in others. And once again, the men strongly favoured the woman in red.

The men also were asked, "Imagine that you are going on a date with this person and have $100 in your wallet. How much money would you be willing to spend on your date?" When she was clad in red, the men said they would spend more money on her.

The researchers noted that the colour red did not alter how men rated the women in the photographs in terms of likability, intelligence or kindness - only attractiveness.

The researchers then had a group of young women rate whether the pictured woman was pretty. Red had no impact on whether women rated other women as pretty, they found.

Gay men and colour-blind men were excluded from the study.

Source http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/?site=science

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Looking, looking

I would have included 'dress-ups' in my 'Harmless Hobby' series, but I didn't like the look of those asps!

Yep, tell Theda Bara she can stop looking, she's in Fanny the Flying Housewife & other stories too!

Her poem's in the previous post.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Shameless Self-Promotion

WHO WAS

FANNY the FLYING

HOUSEWIFE ?

*



A sample can be found in an earlier post about Josephine Baker, & here are another couple to tempt you ... but that's all, now you'll just have to borrow a copy from a Brisbane Library or request your own for the paltry sum of $AUD20 by posting a suitably grovelling message!


'Kiss me, My Fool'

Theda Bara, silent film actress, 1885 — 1955

she spoke not one word

in a dozen years on the screen

this all-new 1914 model

for a Hollywood tired

of sweet innocence

the original vamp

woman as bloodsucker

eyes like smudgepots

let her studio bosses

promote a Cincinnati girl

as a Middle Eastern Beauty

and hint that her name was

an anagram of 'arab death'

instead of short for

Theodosia (God's gift)

this clever girl

knew just what to reveal

and what to veil

always let the text

do the talking





Persistence of vision

Olive Cotton, Photographer, 1911 — 2003

no snapshot for the life

of a woman who never stopped

framing images in her mind's eye

in twenty years away from the darkroom

a tent her first chosen home

with laughing children playing

in a dry creek bed

deep in the backlit bush

a woman with suitcases

filled with negatives

watching for the moment

when the sky was just right

who never thought to see the day

she'd step out of the shadow

set galleries aglow

indirect light still eloquent under her hands

and focus deep enough

to illuminate a soul