Ken Boddie Blog

Question No 1: Where can you find Roller Coasters, Hollywood Stunt Driving, The Batmobile, Speedy Gonzales' Tijuana Taxis, Yosemite Sam's Railroad and the Batwing Spaceshot, all in less than one hour's drive from Brisbane? No, the answer's not “every day travelling southward on t ...

I've been busier than a mozzie (mosquito) at a nudist beach lately, so I haven't made time to write many blogs in recent months. You see, back in March I pulled the shutters down on my engineering career and threw in the towel. This wasn't a sudden decision, as I'd been working u ...

I didn't realise that being a pedestrian on a busy street or shopping mall these days was so potentially hazardous to my health, until I was recently forced to swerve several times in the space of less than a minute, to avoid being trampled by one or other tactless taciturn texti ...

The Japanese are seemingly working on a ‘ground-breaking’ solution to prevent earthquake damage to dwellings. Basically, the shaking triggers a sensor that starts a powerful air compressor that elevates the house above its footings. Details appear scant, at least readily availabl ...

The day started by driving into town and parking by the river, where we took a ferry downstream, skirting alongside the Central Business District of Brisbane, with its sky-rise cloud-punching buildings and its various river crossing bridge structures, some impressive, some less s ...

Kia ora, nau mai ki Aotearoa (Hello and welcome to the Land of the Long White Cloud). · It had been over 34 years since we left the first home we had in married life in New Zealand. · We had lived there for five years; long enough to start our family. · But opportunity had knoc ...

Come to New Zealand, they said! Go bungy jumping, they said! Watch Maori warriors do the Haka, they said! Catch a whiff of rotten eggs gas as you bathe in hot mud and see the geysers bubble and hiss, they said! Visit a Hobbit hole, they said! · Wait a minute! Hobbit holes? · Well ...

It was hot … bloody hot! … yet here we were in the middle of the 'high dune' country, in the south of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), on the edge of Saudi Arabia's 'Empty Quarter'. · We were drilling site investigation holes down to 20m or 30m depth and logging the soil recovere ...

Introductory Geographic Lesson · I was tidying up some photographic files from a couple of years back, when I came across these two landscape pics. · I took them from two lookout spots, both on the flat plateau which is Mt Tamborine, just south of Brisbane in South-East Queenslan ...

There's a part of Australia I've seen now and then, · Where the folks are resilient, both women and men, · Where drought is the norm, and the rains rarely come, · Where life can be cruel, way too hard for some. · It's not for the faint-hearted, meek or the weak, · Or those who ha ...

It was just after 5am on an April morning (2019), it was cold, and the sun was struggling to penetrate a band of cloud across the eastern horizon. We could already see from our crowded vantage point, however, that the landscape beneath was going to reveal a special treat, as a re ...

At last I was off to dinosaur country, that part of outback Queensland renowned in recent decades for its uniquely Australian, Cretaceous aged, fossilised dinosaur bones. It is also famous for being the only place, worldwide, where a dinosaur stampede has been recorded, but more ...

Perhaps Scotty, the 7m high equine wonder, at this year's Boonah ‘Clydesdale Spectacular’ June show, will give you a clue to my blog title. · And why's he blue, do you ask? Well, June is winter ‘down-under’, and even in sunny Queensland, the mornings can get cold enough to hear ...

I've been sleep deprived lately, so I thought I'd run around the bed several times to catch up on my sleep. · I asked the doctor if he could send me to a sleep specialist and so he gave me an address at the zoo. · When I got there it turned out he'd made an appointment with the ...

Is ‘Class’, in the social sense, an outdated assessment of our position in life? Does the feudal concept of the rich and the poor, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ still exist in the ‘developed’ world? Certainly, here in Australia, we take some degree of pride in telling visitors ...

Today is, believe it or not, ‘National Let’s Laugh Day’ in the USA? But why shouldn't we all take a day now and again to concentrate on laughter and fun? · Why should the Americans have all the fun? · There I was, looking for a distraction from the many sad and stressful storie ...

In order to distract you from your focus on Ukraine and COVID-19, spare a thought for many of us in Australia's South-East Queensland, where we are in the middle of a prolonged rain event, which has been described as a ‘Rain Bomb’. The image below, captured from local news feeds, ...

When I looked at this month's “New Civil Engineer” magazine on-line, I was immediately drawn to an article on the construction of 70 stone arch bridges. · I thought my eyes were deceiving me (a not uncommon thing these days, as old age often distorts reason), until I actually re ...

Call me unromantic. · Call me boringly down-to-earth. Call me cold, indifferent or dull, but will someone please tell me what's Cupid with a bow and arrow, or a semi-automatic pistol (if we want to update him to the modern day efficient equivalent of the dart in the heart, as ab ...