about the place — 2 comments
05
Dec 09
Shakespeare’s plays have been performed for over 400 years. Think about that for a moment. It stands to reason there is a diminishing number of ways to breathe new life into these productions. Ian McKellan’s Richard III and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet are just a couple of examples of the lengths one needs to go in order to do anything new with the plays. Tom Stoppard wrote a version of MacBeth specifically for staging in the living room of homes within totalitarian states. Hamlet has been translated into Klingon. You get the picture.
I’m not sure if anyone has thought about the possibilities of non-humanoid Shakespeare. Which plays lend themselves to animal performance? I believe Shakespeare foresaw the problem and with his typically cryptic genius sketched out the solution for the generations that would follow. The key lies in the titles. Here are six of the immortal bard’s plays that would be suitable for barnyard production:
1. Hamlet (duh!)
2. Much Amoo About Nothing
3. Hen-ry V
4. Rameo and Mooliet
5. A Winter’s Tail
6. The Merchant of Venison
I could go on, but I believe I’ve made my point.
Farm animal adaptations of the Great Works could see novelty introduced to productions for decades to come. Add in a little kid-friendly retooling of the basic plots and run the whole shebang through the CGI filters that have already done so much to improve Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and the works of Dr. Seuss and you’ve got box-office GOLD.
about the place — No comments
04
Dec 09
A moratorium on distilling spirits (legally) in Tasmania was in place from 1830 until 1990, but Bill Lark managed to get the ban overturned in 1992 and he and his partner Liz started a single malt whiskey operation with a boutique bar located by Sullivan’s Pier on the Hobart Waterfront.
The bottles aren’t cheap but they’ll let you taste all four varieties on offer for $10. It’s worth it for the whiskey alone, even if it is a little sharp for my taste, but add in the novelty factor of drinking Tasmanian whiskey and the character of the bar itself and you’ve got yourself a memorable tipple.
sabbatical — No comments
01
Dec 09
In Canberra Robin and Joel (pictured here with dp) took us to dinner at the Kingston Hotel, or the “Kingo” as it’s called by the locals.
It’s a little special in that you buy your meat or fish raw and cook it yourself at a big, central charcoal barbeque. The Kingo supplies various sides like salad and chips, but the self-serve barbie is the main attraction.
We (dp and I) thought this was a fantastic business model for an eatery but unimaginable by fussy Canadian standards of food safety — even before you realize diners are able to carry their pints or glasses of wine with them while they sear their T-bones to perfection over the sizzling grill.
sabbatical — No comments
01
Dec 09
Thanks to Vonage and the wonders of VOIP we can continue to use our (604) number in Tasmania. In fact, it’s the closest we have to a home phone number as dp and I opted to limit ourselves to iphones and local vodafone cellular service. There are a bunch of obvious advantages to this arrangement, but one significant DISadvantage is the time zone challenge. Those annoying telemarketing calls that come through on the answering machine at 11 AM? Here they ring our phone at 5 in the morning. This has happened two out of the last three mornings and today I couldn’t get back to sleep after the call.
Every cloud has a silver lining (as — if I do say so myself — the following photo demonstrates most eloquently). I decided to catch the rising sun from our living room window. It was shaping up to be a perfect spring morning and the water off Sandy Bay was as calm as I’ve seen it since we’ve been here.
I noodled around on the computer until 7 when dp got up, and then we went off to swim in the community pool that’s just around the corner from the apartment. Another infrequent reminder for me of how great the world must be for early risers. It’s a habit (rising early) I might try to cultivate while I’m here, though I have little confidence it will survive our return to FF.
sabbatical — No comments
30
Nov 09
Much of the time it seems Hobart could be a suburb of Vancouver (albeit one where everyone has gone crazy and drives on the wrong side of the road). Sunday in particular, with a cold, driving wind and hard little raindrops stinging your face whenever you were unlucky enough to be outside, felt like a regular, shitty day near the end of November in Vancouver.
But of course we’re in another country on another continent. A little difference struck me on Sunday while dp and I were swimming at the Hobart Aquatic Centre (we chose this indoor activity because of the hard little etc., etc.). There’s a magnificent 50 m pool with a large number of lanes for swimming laps. As is normally the case there are signs at one end to let you know which is for fast swimmers, moderate swimmers, and slowpokes. What is interesting is the protocol requires you to swim along the left-hand lane guides, not the right side as you’d do in a North American pool. This makes total sense given the road rules, but it’s still an odd sight at first. The protocol even applies to walking down the street. On the sidewalk people keep left, and if you’re on an escalator you stand against the left-hand side so the people in a hurry can stride up the steps along the right-hand side.
In one of our first stops at a grocery store in Hobart dp noticed they have a wide variety of raw dog food for sale in the meat aisle, and usually right next to the raw dog food packages you’ll find fresh cuts of Kangaroo and Wallaby meat.
This close proximity to the dog food products doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, but we decided to try a pound of Wallaby mince instead of ground beef in a spaghetti sauce. The result was pretty tasty. In dp’s opinion Wallaby meat has even less flavour than beef, but I could detect a distant gaminess that made it clear the animal that gave its life for our dinner never uttered a moo. Certainly not venison, but definitely not beef.
It does feel strange buying cuts of meat from Australia’s national symbol in the grocery store. It’s like finding premade beaver-burger patties in the frozen food aisle in a Kitsilano Safeway, but not only is Kangaroo easy to find, it’s considerably cheaper than pork or beef. We will have to sample Kangaroo sausages (“Kanga Bangas”) and a Kangaroo roast too before we’re done here.
about the place — No comments
07
Nov 09
…when the gales of November come early?
The greenhouse is no more. We never used it much but had thought about putting it into service next Spring to get some of our plants started It was a homely thing but would have been functional enough once the various holes were covered over by tough, clear plastic.
On Thursday a wicked wind storm + lots of rain knocked out our power from about 4 PM to 4 AM on Friday. We sat near the warmth of the gas fireplace in the living room and listened to the wind howl all evening. At one point a few exceptionally-strong gusts shook the whole house I took a walk out to the new feed shed/dog house to make sure it was still intact. No problem there. But when the morning came I walked out the back door to give the dogs a morning run-around and noticed a…problem.
dp figures a blast of wind tore the structure off the rotten logs that had acted as a foundation, and then wrapped it around our fence. Given that nothing else on the property seems damaged it really does look like the Hand of God came down and made an example of our little greenhouse. Cripes.
With only a couple of days to go before we leave for Tasmania the challenge will be cutting the aluminum studs and beams into sections so we can hustle the wreckage off to the dump by Tuesday.
about the place — No comments
05
Sep 09
We’re lucky at the farcical farm to have a large animal that excretes a wheelbarrowful of poop every two days. The poop gets deposited in bins under a large pine tree near the back of the property where time, moisture and a quadrillion worms convert it to black, black soil. We built 8′ x 4′ planter boxes last summer and added composted manure to them in the fall; in May we topped up the boxes with more composted manure and then planted a range of vegetables. The results have exceeded our expectations. The tomato plants in particular seem to be possessed by supernatural forces. Six individual plants, none more than a foot high when they were planted, have spread to cover the box and a lot of the ground around the box and have produced hundreds of tomatoes already.
Returning from three weeks away I was amazed at the density of ripe fruit still on the vine, with an even greater number of green tomatoes in the pipeline. At the ends of a couple of the plants there are even fresh flowers, signaling still more growth to come.
On the phone with my father I learned that the plants won’t stop flowering and producing fruit until they run out of a) nutrients, b) water, c) heat or d) sunshine. The first two items aren’t hard to come by, and we’re probably safe from frost for another six weeks, but as the mornings start later and the evenings come earlier every day I guess the days of fresh tomatoes with breakfast, lunch and dinner are coming to a close.
holidays — No comments
17
Aug 09
I arrived in Madrid at 8 PM without any idea of the city layout or where, exactly, my hotel was. I had the address and sort of knew “southwest corner-ish” but that’s not really enough in a city this size. I strolled around for a little while thinking that if I could find a tourist shop that sold maps I would grab one — but I’m only here for two days and the only sightseeing I’ll do will be via the metro, so I was resistant to buying a map just to get to my hotel.
I decided that if I saw a payphone before a place that would sell me a map I’d call for directions. Instead I stumbled upon a fnac store. This is a European chain that might be the result if you tried to blend DNA from HMV, Best Buy and Chapters. On the top floor of the place I located the travel section, and in a Michelin guide found a city street map. But then I thought…why buy the book when all I need is the map? And why buy the map if all I need is the area around the pertinent metro stop? And why build a camera into an iPhone if not for this *exact* situation?
Twenty minutes later I was checking in at the Hotel Reyes Catolicos on Calle del Angels.
holidays — No comments
13
Aug 09
It’s 8 AM in Frankfurt and the plane to Barcelona is warming up for takeoff. For 20 blissful seconds I stood outside between the articulated bus that takes passengers to the flight on the tarmac and the stairs leading up to the aircraft doors and breathed mostly-fresh air — the first non-recycled air I’ve had since Monday night around 10 PM when dp left me at the Vancouver airport.
Not much to report on the subject of Frankfurt. We landed rignt on time at 7 AM, were led like ducklings through a warren of corridors (WTF are ducklings doing in a warren in the first place, you are right to ask?), were rescreened by security, taken through the most perfunctory passport checkpoint I’ve ever seen, and then loaded on big Mercedes-Benz buses and driven across the airport to the waiting flight. I suspect there are more buses servicing this airport than there are servicing metro Vancouver. It’s a pretty busy place.
Right on time an hour later and we’re almost ready to take our leave. Next stop, Catalunya. And maybe something to say that doesn’t involve air travel?
holidays — No comments
12
Aug 09
In order to get from Vancouver to Barcelona as cheaply as possible (i.e. using Aeroplan points) I discovered the trip would require a connection in Toronto. Since flights to Europe leave Toronto in the early evening (Toronto time) it would be necessary to leave from the airport in Vancouver on an early morning flight (Vancouver time). To make it to the airport for an early morning flight one would need to leave Deroche very early indeed — like, 4 in the morning early. That didn’t sound like much fun, especially since dp would need to get up at the same time to give me a lift to the airport and then drive back to Farcical Farm in early-morning traffic. Blech.
Another option would have been to crash with friends in town the night before, but after thinking about it I opted to book a late-night flight leaving Vancouver at midnight (PST) and arriving in Toronto at 7 AM (EST). I figured I could sleep on the flight and then use the Toronto airport as a gigantic and deeply impersonal office for the day before my flight to Barcelona (or actually, Frankfurt, where I’m supposed to race to a different plane for the final part of the journey).
The overnight flight was mostly uneventful, although it felt really weird to be served eggs and sausage at 3 AM Vancouver time. I have never confronted breakfast that early in the morning, not even when I was tree-planting, but I figured it would help coax my body into shifting to the new time zone so I dug in. In all I slept for three or four hours on the plane. I’ll probably be dreaming pretty hard over the Atlantic tonight as a result.
The early, early breakfast did mean I was awake to see the sun rise towards us as we approached Toronto. It’s a lovely thing to watch the darkness fade to reveal the world 40,000 feet below.
