RobotBlogger

Our cats are finally home. The very last leg of the journey ended yesterday. Brie and i drove to Sydney to get them from quarantine and bring them back home. Picture 11 hours in a car with three crying cats in the back, over a windy road, 1000 km long. I don't recommend such things.


We took 2.5 days to drive down, stopping in Byron Bay and Port MacQuarie. Both are beautiful places, but Byron Bay was the most interesting due to it's very relaxed and debaucheriously charged atmosphere. One could get lost here for months, surfing, drinking beer and learning the accordion. Maybe not the accordion, it's too tense instrument for here. Has anyone done a ballad with an accordion?

Sydney is a grand city. It seems to beat Vancouver every year in the 'Best city in the world' competition, done by whoever does those kinds of things and believed by everyone. Geneva is in there too, all three jockeying and having a shuffle each year.

I can see why Sydney is up there. Big, cosmopolitan, beautiful, relaxed, wonderful. I'll be trite and try to describe it: Something like San Fransisco meets Oxford with a bit of Edinburgh and some Italian city mixed in. Oh, and add more palm trees and parrots. I guess Sydney isn't really like anywhere, and that's what makes it great.

We'd turn a corner and go 'Hey, this is just like.... wait, well it would be like England, but there's a palm tree... yeah, and there's a decent restaurant.. no, can't be England.' (i know, i know, THAT joke is getting OLD)

Here's a link to all the photos. We were only there for a day and a bit.


Someone was asking a while back for a picture of a crazy old lady feeding sulfur crested cockatoos. I managed to find this occurring in Sydney while i was there and got a shot of it going down, for whoever wanted that.


It seems when the Pom's were colonizing OZ, they didn't really feel like making up any new names for cities, so they just reused existing places from memory. In Sydney and its outskirts, there's a Newcastle, Kings Cross, Liverpool, Windsor, the list goes on. I bet parrots don't perch on the signs in any of those cities in England though....

I was shocked there wasn't a 'New London' - i mean, why should Connecticut have all the fun? What the hell, why not a New New York? (Newest York?) It's not like the latest York is even remotely like the original anyways.

This is a praying mantis. It might not be. I have no idea what kind of bug it is, but it was HUGE and it looked at you. A rather noble creature actually. It let me put the camera lens close to it, all the while it's little black dot eyes were watching what i was up to. Did i mention huge? It was the size of a toothbrush, and i'm not kidding.

Sometimes you just write things to fill spaces due to vertically oriented photos. Sometimes Aussies say 'orientated' instead of 'oriented' Next time it happens, i'm going to say: 'The Tate is a gallery in London, and not a syllable in the word 'orient''. How's that for being obnoxious?


I got to meet my cousin Nick and his wife Lynn, who the last time i saw was in England, 18-ish years ago. We had a great evening at their new house which was absolutely stunning. It backs onto the forest with this fantastic deck where you can watch all the wildlife basically fall in your lap.



Right, ok, this is the end of this entry and i have to somehow tie it all together. The cats were barely spoken of, despite the fact they spent a month in kitty jail.

I'm not ashamed to say i spent almost 10 minutes trying to end this thing with an infinitely nested acronym. Hopes started out high, but soon after fell, as i found myself searching for words that described this roadtrip starting with the letter 'U', and dumb crap like that. Goodnight. Checkout the rest of the shots.

So, the recording studio in our attic is almost complete...






Pictures here

So yeah, cockroaches. Big ones. We found this guy in the hallway outside. Every time i see one, i say out loud: 'Cuuuuute!' hoping that i can displace my dislike of large insects. I guess it's working a little bit.

These guys run fast. I don't really mind them that much if they're dead or just standing there, but they get pretty creepy when they move. VERY fast runners, and quite 'aware', zipping down pathways and turning corners appropriately. Blech.

So, here's the rundown on cockroaches, because you all know i love stats:
- 3,500 different species of cockroach. That's a lot. 6 main classes.
- Fossil records of them going back over 350 million years - that's before the dinosaurs.
- The largest cockroach in the world is called the 'Rhinoceros Cockroach' and only lives in, you guessed it, Queensland Australia. Honestly, i just found this out right now, after i started writing this entry.
- The largest ever cockroach was the Apthoroblattina, long gone and a good thing too: it was 50cm (20 inches) long. Crikey.
- Cocky-rochas can live a month without food and hold it's breath for 45 minutes
- Radiation tolerance: Yes cockroaches are pretty radiation tolerant. Here's why: Radiation effects cells when they divide, thus chemotherapy for cancer - nuke the dividing cells. Since cockroaches only molt every week or so, their cells are mostly radiation resistant between these times. This makes them able to handle radiation 6-15 times higher than a human ex-KGB informant can. They've got nothing on some wasps though, which can handle 150 times the human lethal limit.

Some early middle eastern writings suggested using ground up cockroaches for "gynaecological disorders". That sounds really fun.

Here's one for the "Well, that's freaking crazy" category: Cockroaches make group decisions. That's right, they actually have a democratic 'society', each roach counting as a single vote in the group's decision-making process.

Here's a quote:
"Some Belgian scientists took 50 of the humble Blattella germanica and put them in a tank that had three little cockroach huts, each of which could hold 40 cockroaches. The roaches divided themselves up perfectly into two groups of 25 each, and left the third hut vacant. When the researchers repeated the experiment so that it had three huts with a capacity of 50 each, all the cockroaches assembled in a single hut, and left the other two vacant."
More info

Commie cockroaches, i like it. You know, it seems like every week there's another interesting study on animal intelligence/'intelligence'

Stay tuned for a blog on Alex and Griffin, the African Grey parrots who you can have a conversation with, and the cheeky Kea mountain parrot of New Zealand - which is probably the smartest bird on the planet. African Greys and the alpine Kea are as smart as a human 3 year old, possibly even smarter than chimps.