The House(s) of Fran_mart

I was sent a link to the Wikipedia entry for the World Happiness Report 2017.  This is published by the UN  Sustainable Development Solutions Network which is referred for understandable reasons as SDSN!   The wiki summary of the Report makes for interesting reading, although I focused mainly on the table at the end thereof. I was very surprised to find that Tanzania rated 153rd of 155 ranked countries.  It only beat Burundi and the Central African Republic, and was rated 1 place below Syria!  Now, having lived there for 2 years I am not going to say Tanzanians should feel they are living in "the best of all possible worlds" but for goodness sake they should be (and on my observation were) happier than the few folk ekeing out a survival in the rubble of Syria or places such as Afghanistan (rank 141) and Yemen (rank 146). I have found it difficult to get a handle on the methodology underlying the Report so have sent an email to the UNSDSN asking for ...

Last time we visited Mallacoota there was a line problem somewhere so power was no longer available.  I was reminded of Tanzania's National Motto "Hakuna umeme" (We have no electricity. )  Today Frances tried to toast her bread and found the toaster didn't function.  Neither did any other appliances.  On visiting a shop in town it turned out the power was off from 9am to 5pm today and tomorrow for "line maintenance". I was trying to think of an antonym for "utility" and realised that simply adding an 'f' did what was needed!  Sort of like 'effing useless'. Anyhow, let us get back to the last two days.  Our plan was to pack the car and drive to Queanbeyan where Frances would do a Pilates class and I'd take Tammie for a walk.  That got a trifle amended as we noticed air-conditioning was not available as we drove in.  So I took myself to the Mitsubishi dealer where a helpful guy found the drive belt to the air-conditioner was n...

There has recently been a bit of chat on birding-aus about the tickability of Helmeted Guinea-fowl (I'm sure I will have annoyed the hyphen-and-capitalisation police somewhere in that) in Australia.  As I understand it there are a few self-sustaining populations around (eg on Bass Strait Islands) that are considered "real" Australian birds as it is several generations since they escaped. More recently the COG chatline has been made aware of the terms 'keets' being used to refer to young Guinea-fowl.  This seems to be a new use of the term apparently defined by the  Australian National Dictionary Centre which has entries for 'keets' as a short form for 'lorikeets'. In use from the 19thC until the mid-20thC. All of that caused me to reflect on my dealing with Helmeted Guinea Fowl (ibid) while we were in Tanzania.  They were definitely a wild bird there.  I think this specimen was in the Serengeti NP Frie nds of friends wanted some wild 'F...

A recent post by Ian Fraser covered some of the animals of Murchison National Park in Uganda.  That started me thinking about the animal photographs I have from our 2 years living in Tanzania and the stories attached to many of them.  So here we go. I will offer a caveat to begin with.  Quite a few of the images were taken to print film which was developed in Tanzania.  The copy to CD function was available in Dar es Salaam but the quality wasn't great.  So some of these are pretty grungy images. I will begin with Buffalo.  The first image is of a solitary male - they are the grumpy, and thus dangerous, ones. Next we have the big herd in Mikumi National Park.  There are at least 200 in this mob. I took this shot from our car after driving through a tunnel of 5m high elephant grass.  The story of them is that a Swedish family (including year old twins) got stuck in mud one Christmas and after over-nighting in the Park the husband decide...