Summer.

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steve shearer
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Re: Summer.

Post by steve shearer » Mon Jan 30, 2017 8:23 pm

that is true, the old bitch needs to be taken down the back paddock. she's no good.
I want Nightclub Dwight dead in his grave I want the nice-nice up in blazes

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Re: Summer.

Post by Cranked » Mon Jan 30, 2017 9:25 pm

Thats the power of poetry Braithy, it can be for good, or for evil
“I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say ”— Marshall McLuhan

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Re: Summer.

Post by Beanpole » Thu Feb 02, 2017 8:37 pm

Funny....apart from Nick I seem to be about the only one who has had a pleasant surfing summer.
How was Ankor Cranky?........say watt?
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Re: Summer.

Post by Cranked » Thu Feb 02, 2017 11:31 pm

Most excellent mr bean.

Siem Reap turns out to be one of the best little towns in se asia imo. Gotta hand it to the French, they leave a legacy of good food, architecture and public places.

The temples are exceptional, tuk tuks a perfect way to get around, the natives are friendly and we've eaten ourselves into a stupor.

Thank god we leave for Chiang Mai tomorrow.
“I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say ”— Marshall McLuhan

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Re: Summer.

Post by ctd » Fri Feb 03, 2017 9:18 am

Is Siem Reap crowded? I went in 2001 or thereabouts and it was sort of crowded but ok - particularly as the tour buses only turned up at 1030. There was only one 5 star hotel (the Raffles) but about 5 big new places being built and I gather a heap more since then. Back then you either had a 2 star very basic hotel stay, a backpackers or coughed up a fortune for the Raffles. And the road to Phnom Penh was terrible so you had to go by ferry

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Re: Summer.

Post by Cranked » Fri Feb 03, 2017 10:00 am

Something like 2 million people come to see Ankor Wat and the surrounding temples. The crowds are unpleasant at best.

In the town itself though this vo!ume of tourists has served to create a really wonderfull enclave of guest houses, cafes, restaurants, and market stalls that fit perfectly into the streets and alleys.

This has made it one of the most pleasant human scale enclaves to hang out in in se asia (imo). The crowds are not a problem here at all, they just serve to create a vibrant feel to those streets and lane ways.

The weather is very seasonal, I wouldn't go there outside of mid December to mid February. Same for Chiang Mai

Food is sensational (think of the best cafe fare in Sydney) and really cheap, $3-6 for a generous helping. Fierce competion means a beer is usually 50 cents. And the surroundings in which to enjoy it are perfect. It is nothing like the Kuta, Legian Seminyak urban planning abject failure
“I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say ”— Marshall McLuhan

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Re: Summer.

Post by ctd » Fri Feb 03, 2017 11:33 am

that sounds like a great outcome - obviously the temples are crowded but the town itself has done very well out of it. It was mostly potholes and just dirt tracks back then and I was worried it had turned into Kuta or perhaps a Nusa Dua style enclave of 5 stars.

I went there one Easter (I was living in HK so we had easter holidays but obviously no where else in Asia did, so was a good time to travel). Generally we hired a guide and left quite early (8am?) until about midday, then back to the hotel until 4pm then a few more hours then dinner at one of the 2 restaurants. It was cheap back then as well. Was pretty hot though - but dry.

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Re: Summer.

Post by Nick Carroll » Sun Feb 05, 2017 10:50 am

ALL out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off;—and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.

- Robert Frost

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Re: Summer.

Post by Nick Carroll » Sun Feb 05, 2017 10:55 am

The Exposed Nest
Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

just 'cause I am on a Robert Frost bender, the wonderful "The Exposed Nest"

You were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,
I went to show you how to make it stay,
If that was your idea, against the breeze,
And, if you asked me, even help pretend
To make it root again and grow afresh.
But ‘twas no make-believe with you to-day,
Nor was the grass itself your real concern,
Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,
Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clover.
‘Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground
The cutter-bar had just gone champing over
(Miraculously without tasting flesh)
And left defenseless to the heat and light.
You wanted to restore them to their right
Of something interposed between their sight
And too much world at once—could means be found.
The way the nest-full every time we stirred
Stood up to us as to a mother-bird
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,
Made me ask would the mother-bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might our meddling make her more afraid.
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen
You had begun, and gave them back their shade.
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven’t any memory—have you?—
Of ever coming to the place again
To see if the birds lived the first night through,
And so at last to learn to use their wings.

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Re: Summer.

Post by Drailed » Mon Feb 06, 2017 2:35 pm

Are you ok Nick?
Trev wrote:I have always had a lot of time for Dick
smnmntll wrote:Got one in the mouth once, that was pretty memorable

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Re: Summer.

Post by Yuke Hunt » Mon Feb 06, 2017 5:59 pm

He's suffering from frost bite ... poor bugger.
The moving finger writes and having writ moves on ... now all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel even half a line ... nor all thy tears wash out a single word of it.

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Re: Summer.

Post by Beanpole » Mon Feb 06, 2017 8:08 pm

Re: Ankor Watt.....I went last year in the middle of summer and it was pretty much like Sydney has been for the last couple of weeks...constant 38-40 degrees. The less than major temples weren't that crowded and repair ranged from rebuilds with stairs and ramps to complete ruins and dodgy rock climbing in the heat over hot rocks. Saw a young German Couple when I first got there and saw them later at one of the outer temples. They had been cycling between the temples....they were absolutely stuffed. Tuk tuk is the way to go.

I agree....Seim Reip is an easy place to like. Crazy cheap as well.
Put your big boy pants on
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Re: Summer.

Post by black duck » Mon Feb 06, 2017 11:45 pm

Memories of West Street and Lepke
Robert Lowell

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican."
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.

These are the tranquilized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.

Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a J.W."
He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections....
smnmntll wrote:
Wed Aug 01, 2018 3:20 pm
You foaming spangoloids need to chill before you all do wetties on the carpet

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Re: Summer.

Post by foamy » Mon Feb 06, 2017 11:55 pm

Coney Island, a spoken song by Van Morrison.
about a trip from Belfast to Coney Island in Northern Island.

Coney Island
Coming down from Downpatrick
Stopping off at St. John's Point
Out all day birdwatching
And the craic was good
Stopped off at Strangford Lough
Early in the morning
Drove through Shrigley taking pictures
And on to Killyleagh
Stopped off for Sunday papers at the Lecale District,
Just before Coney Island

On and on, over the hill to Ardglass
In the jam jar, autumn sunshine, magnificent
And all shining through

Stop off at Ardglass for a couple of jars of
mussels and some potted herrings in case
we get famished before dinner

On and on, over the hill and the craic is good
Heading towards Coney Island

I look at the side of your face as the sunlight comes
streaming through the window in the autumn sunshine
and all the time going to Coney Island I'm thinking,
Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eLHAYCxpyrI

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steve shearer
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Re: Summer.

Post by steve shearer » Tue Feb 07, 2017 6:57 am

"Hamnavoe" is a poem by the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown. It is one of his best-known works[1] and is learned off by heart by many Orkney children at school.

Hamnavoe is the Viking name for the town of Stromness, where Brown spent most of his life. He refers to it as such in many of his works, including Letters from Hamnavoe and "Hamnavoe Market". The poem is in part a memorial to his father, John Brown, a postman, and describes the postman's round in Stromness and the people he meets on his way.

My father passed with his penny letters
Through closes opening and shutting like legends
When barbarous with gulls
Hamnavoe's morning broke

On the salt and tar steps. Herring boats,
Puffing red sails, the tillers
Of cold horizons, leaned
Down the gull-gaunt tide

And threw dark nets on sudden silver harvests.
A stallion at the sweet fountain
Dredged water, and touched
Fire from steel-kissed cobbles.

Hard on noon four bearded merchants
Past the pipe-spitting pier-head strolled,
Holy with greed, chanting
Their slow grave jargon.

A tinker keen like a tartan gull
At cuithe-hung doors. A crofter lass
Trudged through the lavish dung
In a dream of corn-stalks and milk.

In the Arctic Whaler three blue elbows fell,
Regular as waves, from beards spumy with porter,
Till the amber day ebbed out
To its black dregs.

The boats drove furrows homeward, like ploughmen
In blizzards of gulls. Gaelic fisher-girls
Flashed knife and dirge
Over drifts of herring.

And boys with penny wands lured gleams
From tangled veins of the flood. Houses went blind
Up one steep close, for a
Grief by the shrouded nets.

The kirk, in a gale of psalms, went heaving through
A tumult of roofs, freighted for heaven. And lovers
Unblessed by steeples lay under
The buttered bannock of the moon.

He quenched his lantern, leaving the last door.
Because of his gay poverty that kept
my seapink innocence
From the worm and black wind;

And because, under equality's sun,
All things wear now to a common soiling,
In the fire of images
Gladly I put my hand
To save that day for him.






Christ Hamnavoe sounds appealing right now. Wonder if it is still as Brown describes it.
I want Nightclub Dwight dead in his grave I want the nice-nice up in blazes

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Re: Summer.

Post by Yuke Hunt » Tue Feb 07, 2017 7:42 am

angry goats in overcoats
are sailing boats in the dried up moats
of castles that stand testament to long lost dreams

the poor blind sheep refuse to sleep
lest they lose their place in the lines so deep
in the endless march down the crowded streets of silent screams

a little bird perched high above
looks down on this world devoid of love
and wonders why it inhabitants refuse to dream and fly away

The Big Womboski
The moving finger writes and having writ moves on ... now all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel even half a line ... nor all thy tears wash out a single word of it.

Beanpole
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Re: Summer.

Post by Beanpole » Tue Feb 07, 2017 5:29 pm

11. The Sea and the Skylark


ON ear and ear two noises too old to end
Trench—right, the tide that ramps against the shore;
With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,
Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.

Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend, 5
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none ’s to spill nor spend.

How these two shame this shallow and frail town!
How ring right out our sordid turbid time, 10
Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown,

Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime:
Our make and making break, are breaking, down
To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Put your big boy pants on
I mean, tastebuds? WGAF?

Beanpole
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Re: Summer.

Post by Beanpole » Tue Feb 07, 2017 5:31 pm

31. Spring and Fall


to a young child


MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older 5
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name: 10
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Put your big boy pants on
I mean, tastebuds? WGAF?

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