today's Mad Marsupial piece

Farmer Chris Rickard received extensive injuries when he was attacked while trying to rescue his blue heeler cattle dog, which was being drowned by an angry kangaroo in a dam at Arthur’s Creek, northeast of Melbourne on Monday morning.

Mr Rickard suffered deep cuts and scratches to his upper body and wounds to his face when the rogue kangaroo turned on him as he tried to pull his blue heeler cattle dog out from the clutches of the 5ft-tall eastern grey kangaroo.

Mr Rickard had been walking his dog, named Rocky, at the back of his property when they disturbed the kangaroo, which had been sleeping in grass nearby.

Mr Rickard said Rocky had chased the kangaroo into the dam when the marsupial turned, grabbed the dog with its front paws and held Rocky underwater for about 20 seconds.

Mr Rickard told the Herald Sun newspaper he then jumped in and grabbed the dog, but the kangaroo then turned on him.

Paramedic Michael Vasopressin said Mr Rickard had suffered a 20cm wound across his abdomen that was so deep “it cut through a couple of layers of flesh into the fat”, as well as a deep cut across his face and eye and a number of scratches to his chest, face and arms.

Times online

Will

Christo wrap
Jeanne-Claude
when he lays
her to rest?

Sometimes

I look at words & they don't seem right, even though I've spelt them correctly. One that has always caused me to pause is uncle. Today I spent a couple of minutes trying to work out if anything was wrong with spring.

Hate crime, a Freudian slip, or a new Law & Order spinoff?

HOMOCIDE detectives are investigating the death of a man.....
news.com.au

& never did

                                             As any fashionista
                    worth her weight in
               Jimmy Choos
                         can tell you, the
                              obligatory visions—a
                         close-up of a yellow
                              ice lolly starting
               to melt at the bottom
                                   or the new CFDA
                         Design Edition khakis
               at the GAP—never
                                   cease. Her recent
                                             foray into crochet
               caused snow storms
                              everywhere. Great
to accessorize with the
                         everyday ensemble;
                                             since, as everybody
                              except for Leonard
               Cohen knows, wearing
                                             white only during the
                              summer is just passé.

what one meant to do

Please
send a picture &
indicate your
geographical
location. I think
I've just strained
my left arm but
would like to
know more.

The barrier

between those that don't | & those that do

apatheid

plaint

One of the problems with short-term memory loss is that you forget that your short-term memory loss has made you forget that you went up to the local supermarket last Friday & discovered it full of elderly folk, many of whom were doing their obligatory filial duty & taking their even more elderly sole surviving parent—almost always female—for their weekly shopping trip. The aisles full of walking frames & skin complaints & canes & great-grandmas in trolleys, the checkouts clogged by the elderly whose short-term memory loss means they've forgotten how to swipe their cards & what numbers to key in.

& you've forgotten all that, & go up to the supermarket this afternoon, & all the imprecations you'd forgotten you'd uttered last week come flooding back.

&, afterwards, you go & get petrol & have to wait for half an hour because the elderly have forgotten how to queue & park across two bowsers so no one can get by them, & you, being courteous, see a clear space to park & slot into that, only to find that the elderly person two cars ahead of you who's just filled their car has forgotten where they've put their keys & that the only station you can get on the car radio is one playing non-stop Phil Collins songs for half an hour....

& one of the things that short-term memory doesn't do is let you forget that you don't like Phil Collins. So, in penance for your intolerance, you force yourself to listen to him.& hope you forget who you're listening to.

The
ball was,
in yore, caught.

& if one remembers

The water-
pockets in the
canyons over-
flow with ticker
tape & 1000
year old
Anasazi
writings. Wild-
flowers bloom
along one
arm of the Y
chromosome.

I'm finally

getting around to doing the print editions of the last few issues of Otoliths. Have more or less finished #13, will probably start on #14 tomorrow, &, since I'm in the zone, will try & follow up & get #15 ready.

Plus, I've got six or so books in various stages of preparation. I know I said I wasn't going to do any more, but it looks like I spoke too soon.

& issue #16 is already becoming quite substantial, even though its go-live date is still two-&-a-half months away.

The temperature today is 37° Celsius, just under 100° Fahrenheit, & there's an even hotter day forecast tomorrow. It's not even summer yet, which is a reciprocal of the many emails I'm getting from the States which mention that it's an early winter. How can people be sceptical about climate change?

& I'm off to watch a repeat episode of Buffy on cable. I'm too embarrassed to let on how many times I've watched what is one of my favorite shows.

Past is past

Ribbons coalesce
into focal
conics & cause
environmental damage
in Ecuador & Nigeria
by flying through the
air in a V-formation. It's
one of a conglomerate
of events, part of the
unique problems of
migration. Elsewhere
reciprocal work groups
cease to function, rich
farmers rely on
greatest hits & rare
classic albums to
enrich their peripheral
vision, the upland forest
in Finland is under
no obligation to
lay down a tough &
pumping dance floor
monster played on
an eccentric mix
of instruments.

Exotica

In the course of my first cigaret of the day, I saw, in the immediate neighborhood, an ibis, a pair of double-barred finches, several magpie larks, a wagtail, three varieties of honeyeater of various sizes, a pheasant coucal, a couple of raptors, probably kites, circling over the lagoon down the street, heard sulphur-crested cockatoos, koels, & crows.

It's a fairly standard list for these parts. The pheasant coucal is not as regular a visitor as the others, but because it doesn't fly much, preferring to hop/bop its way along low branches or fences, black body but with mottled wings & tail, the latter longer than its body, it tends to stay around for a greater period of time. & the list, depending on the time of day, is supplemented by kingfishers, kookaburras, parrots, other varieties of honeyeater, olive-backed orioles, swallows, pigeons & doves, black cockatoos, kurrawongs. But they're all natives.

Which is why I was surprised to see, when I went up the road to get the Sunday papers, some sparrows on the carpark fence. An exotic sight, x 2. Firstly, they're an imported species, an exotic, brought here by the early European settlers along with rabbits & foxes which have multiplied to become scourges of arable land—rabbits—& of native fauna—foxes. Secondly, unlike every other place I've lived in, they're reasonably rare up here, &, rather than the friendly birds I remember that were happy to live on crumbs of bread, they tend to be quite feral.