… the online home of a librarian in Perth, Western Australia
I checked the paper edition of the West Australian yesterday. Nothing on the closure of the train station. Nothing. Not a sentence, not a paragraph. As I was saying to Cherry, I started to feel a bit crazy - maybe I imagined it all?! Perhaps we in Perth are just so casual about these things - seeing as nothing happened, what’s to report, right?
*To date I have collected 183 lines of spam poetry.
Categories: Perth train station, Western Australia, bomb scare
It’s strange, there was a bomb scare at the Perth Train Station last night and I can’t seem to spot any news reports on the event. Perhaps the West Australian will mention it, but I think I will have to buy the paper edition to check.
M and I were in town last night on our regular weekly date. (We go on a pub bookshop crawl and eat junk food, it’s very romantic and I wouldn’t miss it for the world!) As our final stop, at a bit after 8pm, we went to Tim’s White Dwarf Books, which to our horror had closed at 6pm earlier that evening. Dejected, because our money spending plans were thwarted, we headed for the car which was parked at the Citiplace carpark (the one above the train station), only to find that the whole train station was cordoned off, and there were police officers everywhere telling people the station was closed, and to go to Barrack Street to get to our cars.
I saw the unsettling (to me) sight of police officers walking along the train tracks shining torches as if they were looking for something, and officers shining torches into the roofs of the platform shelters. M and I walked to the front of the train station, only to be told by a police man to “GET ACROSS the road, cause if anything happens you don’t want to be caught up in it!†I was already nervous, and having him say that made me more nervous. He wouldn’t say what the problem was, though.
On the Forrest Place side of Wellington Street, directly across from the train station (Perth people can probably visualise where I mean), a small crowd of people gathered, trying to work out what was happening. We made our way up to the Forrest Chase concourse, only to find that that too was blocked off - and the police officer there telling everyone who asked “Yes, there’s been a bomb threat.†When we finally got to Barrack Street there were crowds of people paying for their parking. You could see police officers everywhere as the platforms were all still closed. People didn’t seem unduly worried, though, and I felt like I was just being paranoid. By the time we drove past the station on Roe Street, the station was open again, with people packing the platforms, and Friday night revellers making their way through into Northbridge.
I was thinking about how casual many people seemed about the whole thing - the people standing across the road from the train station could have been injured if a bomb had gone off, but whereas M’s and my first impulse was to try and get away as quickly as we could, they all just stood and gawked. The train station must surely get bomb threats from time to time (I’m sure we have our share of nutcases in Perth), but this was the first time I know of that they actually closed the station. Maybe the authorities were just being careful after the recent events in London.
On a completely different note, the SuperNova shop is completely empty now, all the books gone, and a sign on the door saying that the shop has relocated to 8 Shafto Lane, and that it will be reopening in August 2005.
Categories: Perth train station, Western Australia, bomb scare, Supernova, Tim’s White Dwarf Books, bookshop, fantasy, science fiction
Yikes. I stumbled on my first porn blog this morning. Was going through my Bloglines feeds and opening lots of tabs in Firefox, following links from various blogs. Clicked on a tab, and lo and behold, waaaay too much pictorial information at 6am for this Little Black Duck! Because this is a family friendly blog, I am not going to link to it. Besides, I am still trying to get over the shock. And no, I am not a prude, it was just totally unexpected, and if I am going to see sexually explicit stuff, I like to expect to see it, not have it just appear in my face.
The funny thing is, I had been thinking about blogs and how much you can learn about other people, other countries, religions, political persuasions, professions, etc., from reading them. I think there’s a blog for everything - as this morning’s porno blog proves. I like the technology blogs as much as I like some personal blogs. I am continually amazed by the really really good writing you can find on people’s blogs too. I love reading about families I am unlikely to ever meet, and about people going through horrible times, and surviving. With the bombings in London two weeks ago, blogs were a really important source of information and reassurance for me. And as a librarian, other librarians‘ blogs have become a really useful source of information about The Profession and all the issues that we get into and which plague us.
When I started this blog, I thought it was going to be a shortlived exercise, like all my previous blogs. I was going to just experiment with all the blogging tools that are out there and Technorati and del.icio.us and so on. Who knew I was going to enjoy writing so much?
In my last post I mentioned that people seem to always mention blogs when they talk about RSS. Seeing as my last post was about RSS, this is my blog post.
