Ken Boddie Blog

It was the last weekend in October already. If that's not scary enough (what with the mid-year sales seemingly having passed by only five minutes ago) then the end of October heralds its customary programme of: · pumpkin hollowing and carving into grotesque and scary shapes (with ...

So let's look at the derivation of the word ‘idiom’, as set out in Ref 1. · An idiom is a type of phrase or expression that has a meaning that can’t be deciphered by defining the individual words. Appropriately, the word “idiom” is derived from the ancient Greek word “idioma,” wh ...

Well let's clear the air (pun intended) in relation to a few of these statements, shall we? · First of all, methane is colourless and odourless, and so it should come as no surprise that the natural gases emanating from the rear end of bovines is relatively low in methane, with t ...

As many of you may know, my wife and I have recently returned from yet another trip to Indonesia, where we caught up with family and friends from ‘way back’, and did an extensive road tour of places, spaces and bases that either: · we hadn't seen since Adam was a lad; or · of whi ...

I've recently returned from a trip to Indonesia, aimed at: · exploring parts of Java which I'd either not before visited, or not seen for many, many years; · catching up with my extended family and friends; and · viewing for myself how this most highly populated island in the wor ...

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 ...