• Strine

    The First Class First Nations Film Festival

    For a measly 1,000 yen I got to get a totally unexpected and delightfully amazing full day’s entertainment, a couple of souvenirs and an all-round wonderful time at the 2024 First Nations Film Festival held by the Australian Embassy in Tokyo at EUROSPACE. I’ve always been sympathetic to the cause of Indigenous Australians as I’ve understood it, but in recent years I’ve developed a bit of empathy fatigue, or even borderline antipathy, as the blame for society’s shortcomings are increasingly laid at the feet of all white men. So when Mrs. Kangaeroo expressed an interest in going to the festival…

  • Daily Life

    ‘Bitch-face’ Lovebird

    I’m the ‘proud'(?) parent of a rosy-faced lovebird, who I must admit brings an immense amount of joy into my life, but I also learned a new Japanese phrase over the weekend that perfectly sums up these tiny avian pterrors! Kozamesu, a contraction of the term kozakura inko mesu, literally a female rosy-faced lovebird, is a term used to describe the feisty nature of the birds. A loose translation of the word kozamesu could be something like bitch-face lovebird. And my experience suggests the term is spot-on! From the almost constant and often painful biting, aggressive defense of anything perceived…

  • Daily Life

    Gazing at Japanese Tit Birds

    Having put in the most demanding week of work I’ve done in years, then been woken early after a mostly sleepless night, I’ve kicked off this long-awaited weekend by sitting at the living room window and gazing for hours at Japanese tits. In a life increasingly marked by failure, it’s fair to say that one area in which I’ve excelled is in having a good eye for the birds. With a constant companion twittering away while nibbling on my ear, it’s hard to keep my mind of things like boobies and other types of tits, and before I come across…

  • Daily Life

    Banking On Banksia

    Having caught the propagating bug last year, I’ve decided to try my hand at growing my own plants again in 2024, this time turning to the difficult proposition of raising banksias, the flower that most symbolizes Australian flora in my eyes. So far, my luck with banksias hasn’t been great, mainly thanks to ignorance and ill preparation to be fair. And impatience, perhaps? Kangaeroo Corner has a banksia that has grown well since it’s initial planting almost two years ago, but it has yet to flower for us. I expect it will do so one day. But I still want…

  • Daily Life

    Fountain of Strewth Frozen Over!

    It’s a gloriously sunny morning today, but bloody freezing, as attested to by the Fountain of Strewth freezing over. Birds are coming to Kangaeroo Corner throughout the day every day at this time of year, largely to enjoy a drink or a bath from the Fountain of Strewth. I broke the ice so our avian mates would be able to imbibe if they wanted to, but couldn’t refill the bath as the hose has frozen over. My sports drink formed ice crystals during the morning ride. I’m not a great fan of the cold, but Tokyo has a pretty good…

  • Daily Life

    Devil Laughs

    Nobody else but me is gonna understand just how ironic this post is (provided it even makes it onto the site) as I type it out in an MS Word file rather than directly into the blog as I would usually do. With a couple of extra hours available to me this morning, I always had it in mind to write a post with the above title. What I hadn’t calculated was just how accurate that it would turn out to be. I was going to write about how 2024 has been nothing like how I had imagined it would…

  • Strine Songs

    Sounds to Trigger an Aussie

    Prompted by a Scottish mate’s post on Twitter about a tune that reminds him of his homeland, I got to thinking about the same kinds of songs that have an effect on me regarding Australia, my native country. While doing so, I realized there are probably a few shared by just about every Aussie on the planet. For Australians in their mid-60s and under, there is only one answer to the question posed by Doc Neeson and the Angels in their 1976 song, Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again? Ironically, the song was only a minor hit when…

  • Daily Life

    Prayers Gonna Pray

    I’ve been praying a lot lately, which is bloody hypocritical because I don’t really believe in having to rely on an imaginary friend. It’s been a rocky start to 2024 for Japan, beginning with the deadly New Year’s Day Noto Earthquake, a fatal crash at Haneda Airport the following day and general doom and gloom thereafter, despite the Nikkei index headed toward a record high, surpassing the lofty level it held when I first came here in the bubble era. Not much is going right personally or professionally, and that’s driving me to seek any sort of assistance that’s out…

  • Daily Life

    Take a Good Look at Yourself

    Navel-gazing is a dubious “talent” of which I have been adorned with for life, bar those couple of decades when I was too grossly obese to be able to even see my navel. That never stopped me from over-thinking: worse, actually, as taking any action has always been pretty close to a last resort even now when I am more nimbler physically than the mental agility I was blessed (or cursed) with in youth. My over-thinking now is about work. I caused a scandal a couple of decades ago, but Google makes sure it remains fresh in the mind of…

  • Daily Life

    Kangaeroo Corner’s Critters!

    Courtesy of a great act of kindness, this post is the result of receiving a gifted camera. An old mate read my previous post and generously passed on a camera he had not been using. I took the camera out in the garden this morning and got to snap away. I was very pleased with the results. I’ll need to study more on how to use the Sony NEX-7, having been an almost exclusively Nikon user for the past 35 years. It’s glorious weather today, which helped with taking photos. I turned the camera on some of the critters in…