Legends of the Fall
The Pentagon was attacked on the same day, and a fourth airliner was hijacked and crashed at the same time, but it was the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre which dominated the television and print media. It’s what we were looking at on CNN, and the other two planes were [...]
The dark side of the road
Sydney cabbie Adrian Neylan’s Cablog is always worth reading. Sometimes his experiences parallel my own, sometimes he just makes me extraglad I’m driving in Canberra, rather than Sydney. But he’s always readable. He talks about cyclists ignoring the road rules and he struck a chord with me. After kangaroos, cyclists are what I fear most [...]
O. M. G.
You remember, a few months back, I narrowly missed attending an Amanda Palmer ninja concert at the Carillon in the middle of a savage thunderstorm? Well, I guess if the same thing happened now, I’d happily go get soaked. It was somewhere in Illinois when the subject came up. “Oh, hang on,” said Discoverylover, “I’ve [...]
Killing your own
What a pinup boy this fellow is. The elite special forces hunter. The kind of guy you want your government to have on hand to deal with the terrorists. The recruiter’s wet dream. And yet. This fellow slaughtered a hundred of his own people, sending a peaceful nation into shock and millions around the world [...]
Witness Number Five?
The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly I love a good legal thriller, and Michael Connelly has produced a ripper with this one. We meet Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, again as he ploughs through a new world of legal practice, the humdrum but topical world of mortgage foreclosures. Happily we don’t spend the book rummaging [...]
A Route 66 icon
We cruised our way out of Oklahoma, through museums and hokey little towns, capturing a border sign at Texola and the leaning water tower in Groom, but we were really aiming for Amarillo. In fact, we were aiming for Albuquerque, but we were doing so much lollygagging and having so much fun just poking our [...]
Amis
The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship by Jeffrey Zaslow Ames is in Iowa, just north of Des Moines. I remember Des Moines. Discoverylover and I had been debating where the accent was and whether it was pronounced in the French fashion or what we imagined Iowans might say. I [...]
Flight of the jumbo
I love flying out of Sydney. I get to use the awesome Qantas First lounge. Even if it’s only a cup of coffee, sitting away up there with the huge windows, the smiling staff, and the art on the froth of my latte sets me off on the right foot. I glide down the hall [...]
Ripperpotamus!
Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry I wasn’t sure what to make of this to begin with, but I found it increasingly brilliant as I went along. Stephen Fry has wickedly rewritten the country house detective mystery. Brought it into the modern age, along with associated bad language and cultural references. But realistically, it could have been [...]
Into the desert
We woke up in Paris. Paris, Las Vegas. But that’s another story. We paused for photos at the town sign – it has its own car park and Elvis impersonators – but that was only a minute or two. Henderson was a longer pause, for Starbucks and an emergency shop for a camera battery charger. [...]