Monday, July 17, 2006

A wet dreary weekend resulted in not much activity from anyone. I spent a lot of time trawling real estate ads to no great result. I plied the 2 bobbins of grey wool from the Brown Sheep mill ends and finished a second bobbin of English Leicester. I managed to generate a bit more enthusiasm for the cardigan and knit solidly on it one evening. I also knit about an inch and a half on the second sock (the mate to the blue/purple Trekking one).

Quite a bit of furor this week in the Swans due to Nick Davis publicly objecting to being dropped from the side, which is something you are not supposed to do.Only idiots like Jason Akermanis do that. He seems to have calmed down now. He hasn't been playing all that wonderfully and we need him to kick goals and he hasn't been. The boys lost again to West Coast Saturday night. They did seem to play more as a team than they have in a while but still couldn't kick straight. The umpiring was appalling and even the commentators noticed that our dear friend McLaren
in one quarter gave 9 free kicks to the Weagles and none to the Swans. The Swans were leading by 36 points about midway but the Eagles woke up in the third quarter while the Swans couldn't get a thing to go their way. The mid-field was trying hard but the ball wasn't going across the goal line. In the end they lost by 2 points in the dying seconds.

Book report: finished White Mughals by William Dalrymple.
It was an interesting story but not the one I was expecting. Instead of being a summary of how some group of British in India adopted the native lifestyle, it was the story of a particular cross-cultural love affair, in sometimes excuriating detail. While the detail was impressive in its scholarship and was useful in painting a picture of the cultures in contact, it didn't make for gripping reading. Instead of a survey we were told of one story as an example, and a particularly sad one. What was interesting to me who has read a fair bit about the Raj was that this all occurred in the early days of the British in India, when the kingdoms were still theoretically independent. After the 1820's this changed and after the Mutiny in 1857 everything changed completely. The kingdom in detail was Hyderabad and I did learn that my favourite Indian dish (biryani) originates there. I'd love to eat may way through India if I though my delicate digestion could handle it. I have no problems with Indian restaurant food but the real thing might be different. My new BBBB (Big boring bedtime book) is Voyages of Delusion ; the quest for the northwest passage by Glyn Williams.

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