#53 LitLovers

Litlovers is an online community dedicated to books and book clubs. You can: Find a book. Find a review. Find a discussion guide. Take a course. Whip up a recipe.

There's even a section for childrens' book clubs LitKids - 'for tots to teens', which is an added bonus as most others target the adult market.

For the Exercise you had to find a suitable book to discuss for a book club.

I chose to search for Kate Grenville's The Secret River, as it is an Australian book and author, and it is our book for the Three Horshams Read. I found LitLovers had quite a range of info from the burb, author details (from her website), reviews and 19 discussion questions.

I'm going to add LitLovers to the Resource List I have to give out to our patrons who are interested in starting a book club.

Abandoned towns

I've attempted to do direct posts from Clipmarks but haven't managed to get it to work - yet, so here's an old-fashioned cut-&-paste of a couple of Abandoments I found via Clipmarks.


Kolmanskop is a ghost town in southern Namibia, a few kilometres inland from the port of Lüderitz. In 1908 people fuelled by diamond fever rushed into the Namib desert hoping to make an easy fortune. Within two years, a town - complete with a casino, school, hospital and exclusive residential buildings - was established in the barren sandy desert. During the 1950's the town was deserted and the dunes began to reclaim the town.

It is reminiscent of the Eucla Telegraph Station on the W.A./S.A. border.


Gunkanjima This island is one among 505 uninhabited islands in the Nagasaki Prefecture of Japan. It is also known as 'Gunkan-jima' or 'Battleship Island' due to its high sea walls. It began in 1890 when Mitsubishi bought the island and began a project to retrieve coal from the bottom of the sea. In 1959, population had swelled, and boasted a density of 835 people per hectare for the whole island (1,391 per hectare for the residential district) - one of the highest population densities ever recorded. By the 1960s, as petroleum replaced coal in Japan, coal mines began shutting down. In 1974 Mitsubishi officially announced the closing of the mine, and today it is empty and bare, with travel currently prohibited. The island was the location for the 2003 film ‘Battle Royale II’ and inspired the final level of popular Asian videogame 'Killer7'.

Again, the silhouette of this island is reminiscent of Eten island in Truk, which looks like an over-sized aircraft carrier.

Eten Island in 1944

#52 Clip the highlights

Ever wished you could just stash away, in an organised and retrievable manner, various bits and pieces that you had been scanning or reading? With Clipmarks you can save the actual article or the clips you want. You can then send the clip to your blog, email it, or print it and save it into one of your ClipCasts (aka subject folders). You can save the clips for public or private viewing. You can also set up Clipmarks so that your clips are accessible through your Facebook profile, MySpace, Blogger and others.
I get the usual mental block when checking out these new sites - what to put in the Search box.
Short of inspiration I typed in "lighthouses", and am fascinated the first was a link to the Lost at sea - 7 beautiful abandoned lighthouses I blogged about last month, and the next interesting one was "Lighthouses in stormy weather" (again I hadn't considered the potential of YouTube combined with lighthouses) which are YouTube video-clips of French lighthouses:Ar-Men, Tevennec and La Vielle.
Discovery exercise: Set up an account and clip and save a couple of clips from blogs or websites making some clips private and some public. Blog about the experience.
I've clipped several casts, you can see my public casts by searching on "Underwater locomotives" and then clicking on the R-P-R.
I believe this is great for saving parts of website articles instead of having to search/remember how you found them the first time. I found the 1,000 character limit a bit restrictive. And would still use Bloglines as it offers different functionality to Clipmarks.

#51 Libraries & the social web

Starting with Learning 2.0, libraries and librarians have been investigating ways they could use the "new" Internet - the social web. The subject has had a good deal of thought and attention, with information and ideas that bear thinking about eg:

• The Library of Congress decided to find out how people would react to their historical photos on Flickr
• a list of 25 social networking tools libraries should think about (found - aNobii: a site for book lovers is a place to share reviews and recommendations.). (Bit worried about
  lib.rario.us: another social cataloguing site, you can put media such as books, CDs, and journals on display for easy access and tracking though).

Exercise:
To look at the latest developments concerning libraries and the social web, and any practical experience either interacting with library patrons through social media or helping them use other components of Web 2.0.

I've just had the philosophical discussion of what is a library but a place to read, and what differentiates them from a book or video shop etc. so we still have a way to go in introducing Web 2.0 and 2.1.
I'm still confounded by YouTube it can be a boon for all types of uses and it can be a huge waste of time, space and energy.
LC's photostream - wow - check out the photochroms (richly colored images look like photographs but are actually ink-based photolithographs), this one is from Norway.

#50 YouTube for cooks

Wow! I've hit 50!
I'm cooked is the You-Tube for cooks, a site for all you chef's, aspiring cooks, and food burners. Imcooked.com is a web community for sharing your favourite recipes. You can record yourself preparing food and upload it to the site for users to see and follow. Want to see how people prepare a particular food or drink? Imcooked.com also has celebrities preparing their favourite foods. I watched Sir Paul McCartney make mashed 'taters wasn't sure about some of his techniques, but liked his style.

The Discovery Exercise was to do a search on your favourite dish/drink, explore the Top Favourites and Blog about what you thought about the site.

Again the American-ness (and English-ness) was obvious, no-one had loaded chocolate crackles, pavlova or lamingtons recipes, but there's burgers, jerked chicken and pecan pies, and using non-Australian brands and ingredients. The speed or lack of it was problem, especially if I wanted to watch a segment of say 15 minutes! And no accompanying recipe (need to write down items as they're shown even if just "some vinegar"), so I guess it's more a 'how to' site eg - how to break an egg with one hand! (my brother was sure that technique helped him win his state award)

Lost men

Here is the other book on the Aurora's team
The lost men : the harrowing story of Shackleton’s Ross Sea party by Kelly Tyler-Lewis

While the story of Shackleton's crew of the “Endurance” is well known, the fate of his Ross Sea support party has been largely forgotten. Charged with laying supply depots every 60 miles for Shackleton's 1914–1916 Trans-Antarctic trek, the Ross Sea party became stranded with most of their clothing, food, and equipment gone, when its ship “Aurora” tore free of her moorings and disappeared in a gale.
This account of the 10-man party's plight relies on the men's journals, which are amazingly detailed, considering the physical (snow blindness, scurvy, frostbite) and mental (depression, paranoia) problems they faced. The men's decision to lay depots despite the obstacles demonstrates their courage.
The heart of the book lies in the dissection of the men's relationships with one another. As friends are made, alliances formed and resentment festers, humanity is never lost, even amid inhumane conditions. Given the collection of military, civilian, scientific and blue-collar personnel, it's compelling to see how each man deals with his fate. Add in the party sledding 1,300 miles in subzero temperatures with the sociological aspects of being stranded for nearly two years.
Tyler-Lewis, a historian, located the diaries of 16 survivors, found public records and private papers and interviewed the families of the Ross Sea party to build her story.
“The lost men” differs from the other Ross Sea party book – “Shackleton’s forgotten Argonauts”, this is a researched story while “Argonauts was story telling. Both are great reads.
And with these books which include the locations of the supply dumps as recorded by the team in 1915 & 1916, all we need to do is calculate the drift of the Ross Ice Shelf in the intervening years and find them!

Shackleton's Aurora

Further to my last post re Greg Mortimer finding Mawson's food dump, here is a review of one of the books exploring the fate of Shackleton's Ross Sea party.

Shackleton’s forgotten Argonauts by Lennard Bickel
A handful of starving, half frozen wretches, marooned on the ice, made the most horrendous sledge march in polar history in a cause of the highest nobility and the utmost futility. The story of these 10 men and their feats was overshadowed by the saga of the “Endurance”, and their self-sacrifice became a footnote in history.
A local footnote is that the youngest team member was Dick Richards, born at Bendigo he was a teacher at the Ballarat Technical School.
Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition planned to cross the entire Antarctic continent. To achieve this goal, he needed a second party on the other side of the continent to lay supply depots which would be used by his “Endurance” team.

The Minna Bluff Depot, the major supply depot left for Shackleton

This “Aurora” team were committed to laying food depots across the Ross Ice Shelf to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. Due to a blizzard, their supply ship “Aurora”, still with most of the provisions aboard, was swept out to sea and was unable to return. These castaway men had little more than the clothes they wore, were dependent on the discarded supplies from past expeditions, had faulty equipment and poor shelter. Yet they marched almost 2,000 miles and spent 10 months trekking, through 2 winters, on the ice laying supplies weighing thousands of pounds, which they badly needed for their own survival. They suffered the worst privations, and some suffered the ultimate fate.
The cruellest irony is that Shackleton’s team never arrived, so the precious supplies are still there today under the snow – waiting.

Antarctica- now and then

I came across a link to this article from the "Sydney Morning Herald", December 3, 2008, which relates to an interest I'd talked about in a couple of newspaper reviews I did a few years ago (will re-release them in a separate post)

Mawson food store found in Antarctic
A cache of food left by the 1911-14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition led by explorer Sir Douglas Mawson has been found after almost a century. The cache of flour and pemmican (a food mix favoured by the AAE on sledging runs)in calico bags and a tin was located at Madigan Nunatak, an exposed rocky peak surrounded by ice about 70km east-south-east of Cape Denison. The discovery was made by a small team of explorers led by Greg Mortimer. "We observed a cairn surmounted by a tin consistent in shape and construction with kerosene tins associated with the AAE. The tin contains at least three calico bags held in place by a rock.” The long bamboo pole which marked the spot for the AAE is still there but now lies on the rocks”. Mortimer left the food store at the site near Cape Denison which was the AAE's base for two years and is now being conserved by the Mawson's Huts Foundation.

Read more: http://news.smh.com.au/national/mawson-food-store-found-in-antarctic-20081231-77wp.html

There was also a reference (indeed it was the key to solving the mystery) to the expedition and Mawson's book "Home of the blizzard" in an episode of the ABC's "New Tricks" a couple of weeks ago.

#49 Soundsnap

Soundsnap is a free library (there are paying memberships too) of over 30,000 sounds, it allows you to download sound effects and loops in MP3 or upload your own sounds to the site.
I found - magical and celestial harp and windchimes in an ascending phrase, ideal for an animation of fairies,angels or casting spells, and a Rhyhmic and percussive klaxon I'm sure someone has for when a nuclear reactor melts down. I can't see a way to embed them in this post, but do have them saved for either a placid moment or a crisis.
How would you use these if you’re not an electronics geek? Often people want sound effects – slamming doors, footsteps, phone ringing, rain falling (even if its virtual rain). You could use my rhythmic and percussive spaceship alarm at closing time.

Wilderness landscape

Celebrating wilderness edited by Ian Brown
Is a coffee table style book which combines essays by some of the most eloquent wilderness writers and activists with stunning photographs from all over Australia. The content ranges across a wide landscape from the tropical north to the South Pole. It illuminates the place of wilderness in Australia and builds a passionate case for saving the last of Australia’s wild lands.
I've included a few of the wonderful colour plates from the book

Crosscut Saw in the Alpine National Park as seen in summer

Barrington Tops supports a rich mosaic of vegetation types from Antarctic beech forests to subtropical rainforest.


Noon in a sandstone canyon in the Wollemi National Park, the largest wilderness area in New South Wales and home to the dinosaur plant the Wollemi Pine.