Perth, Melbourne and Los Angeles: A Photo Set
Posted on April 21, 2015 Posted by John Scalzi 11 Comments
I’ve spent most of April away, in Australia and Los Angeles, for conventions and for book festivals. Along the way I took a fair amount of pictures, including some lovely shots of the King’s Park Botanical Gardens in Perth and of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. If you’d like to see them — and you would! You would! — they’re here. Enjoy!
See, if you posed next to the kanga, you would be demonstrating that during your time in Oz, you were *lowers sunglasses* out of pocket. ;)
YEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH
Love the SF Flowers
In some alternate world, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the private entity that adminstrates it (Caltech) are as well known as Hogwarts, or Tatooine
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tatooine
The SF flowers are a Grevillea. They’re lovely plants, attract a lot of nectar-eating birds and insects to the garden (about their only disadvantage is that they grow like crazy, and the bushy ones can need to be hacked back on a regular basis, otherwise they take over the garden).
(Oh, and the cenotaph started as the WW1 memorial, but is now an overall memorial for all of the wars Australia has managed to follow our colonial masters into over the years. One of the things about King’s Park is that all those lovely white-barked gum trees along the sides of the roads there are memorials – each one has a small sign at the base commemorating a fallen soldier).
Reblogged this on Beechdey’s Weblog.
Very nice shots. Australia is on my bucket list.
That Kangaroo looks a bit jumpy……………
…………….I’m here all week.
Wow, am I the only one who had a flashback to the movie “Tank Girl”?
JPL is actually in La Cañada Flintridge, just northwest of Pasadena (where Caltech, which runs JPL under contract from NASA, is located). They put it out there (back when there was an “out there” in the San Gabriel Valley) to keep those bright young rocket scientists from blowing up the Institute (pace the shade of Jack Parsons).
If you haven’t been there, I recommend taking a public tour if you get a chance – it’s a compact campus with a lot of history and a wide variety of architecture, plant life, and artillery to look over.
If you’re in the SoCal area in October, I highly recommend the JPL Open House. Sure, there are thousands of people there over the course of a weekend, but there are also all sorts of awesome exhibits that you can’t see the rest of the year.
Or just become friends with someone who works at JPL and get a private tour, like John did. I’d recommend me, but I’m a horrible tour guide. “Oh, look at that cool rocket. Ooh, there’s a cool machine. This was the first building I worked in here. Did you see the cool bust of Von Karman? Deer – squee!”
Yeah, there’s a reason I’m an administrative assistant.