As mentioned in yesterday's PAD, the lens hood of my workhorse 12-40 lens done got itself broked through some kind of as yet unexplained mystical phenomenon. Of course I can shoot without it, but the other thing is that the heat has made a comeback this week and has brought humidity by the bucketload with it. On the one hand I want to get out at lunch time to do some walking exercise and get a PAD, but on the other I don't want to turn into a walking melanoma. Accordingly aside from a brief head-clearing stroll I opted to stay indoors at lunch time and restrict my exercise to walking to the office in the relative cool of morning. (We had a thunderstorm this afternoon. That was great; it doubled the humidity without reducing the heat. Oh how I love summer.)

Aside from which, it gave me a chance to give some other lenses some work. In this case, the new BCL-0980 9mm Fisheye body cap lens. My original idea was to get down low roughly at the centreline of the concourse. But initially there were too many people there; you wouldn't have been able to see the concourse. (Many of them had just disembarked from the "Elvis Express" XPT train, which had just returned from Parkes where there has been a "Fun In Acapulco" party since last Thursday to celebrate what would have been Elvis' 80th birthday, uh-huh-huh, baby, thang you verreh much. Why Parkes? An inland country town best known for wheat, wool and a radio telescope is not so very similar to a coastal resort city in Mexico which is over 50 times Parkes' size. I have no idea; maybe that's the McDonalds that The King is working at these days.)

I ended up deciding that an off-kilter approach with the lights forming off-centre leading lines may be more interesting anyway, and hunkered down in the corner.

The only down side of course is that I ended up with the Hungry Jacks sign, though this particular Hungry Jacks serves the best food in the entire chain.

Which is to say that the place caught fire a couple of months ago and burnt the living crud out of the entire café area; the coffee shop, Hungry Jacks, the donut place and the bar have all been closed since then, with signs up saying that the closure was due to "technical difficulties" (meaning a cr@p hamburger place caught fire) and that they would re-open for business "shortly". ("Shortly" if you happen to measure time the way those thousand year oak trees do; I've yet to see anyone do any work in there.) Frankly I'd rather go dumpster diving than eat anything from Hungry Jacks again. (Actually the quality of the food would be equivalent, just cheaper.)

Though I do grant you that when I was in Seattle many years ago, in what I now know to be one of the less fashionable areas of town but didn't then, its sibling company Burger King provided me with sustenance for a lot of my stay. And I got on quite well with the guy who usually served me; Elvis, I think his name was. Asked me what I thought about Parkes as a place to live, he did. But that was back in the '90's and they, and I, did things different then.