Sometimes you stumble across some odd stuff on the internet. This was one of those times.

It was 2:17 a.m. and I was, unfortunately, wide awake. I climbed out of bed, pulled on my pants, walked out to the living room, sat down in my favorite easy chair, opened up my iPad, and started surfing the web. (Is that still current terminology?) Eventually, I ended up on Zillow.com where just for fun I typed in the address of our home in Texas. Photos of our home were stacked up along the left side of the page. The second image said “Street View.” I wondered what it might show, so I clicked on it.

Street View is a Google product and this is how the company describes it: “Street View stitches together billions of panoramic images to provide a virtual representation of our surroundings on Google Maps. Street View’s content comes from two sources – Google and contributors. Through our collective efforts, we enable people everywhere to virtually explore the world.”

You can use it for something as simple as looking up your own home and neighborhood to exploring far more exotic locations. For example, you can use it to take a walking tour of the Louvre in Paris, or to explore the ancient temples of Manchu Picchu, or to scale Yosemite’s El Capitan with a professional rock climber. You can even go back in time to see what any given location looked like in the past. It’s an amazing tool.

But as I said, I used it to look up our home.

Instead of showing the front of our home, which sits at the corner of our address street and an alley, Street View showed it from the alley. The view from that direction consists primarily of an 8-foot tall wooden fence and the tops of three trees that hide all but a merest glimpse of our home. (Photo above)

See the arrows in the middle of the fence? If you’re on an iPad as I am, Google Streetview allows you to take in a 360 degree view by dragging the arrows with your finger.

I decided to drag the Streetview arrow to the right just to take a look at our carport. I wondered if we were home when the GoogleMobile drove by? Would either our cars be in the carport? Both of them? Neither of them?

What I did not expect to see was Jamie and me standing in the alley. Here’s that photo.

In the words of Gomer Pyle, “Surprise, surprise, surprise.”

I don’t remember the incident but Jamie does. She reminded me that we were out there talking to a contractor about a drainage issue at the rear of our house. She said we both noticed the Google Streetview car drive by while we were standing in the alley, but neither of us had any idea that it was actually shooting footage as it rolled past.

Have you ever seen the Google Streetview team driving around your neighborhood? Just for future reference, here’s what the Streetview cars look like.

UPDATE: It suddenly occurred to me that Street View must have taken a shot of our neighbor’s house as the same time it took a photo of ours. So I looked up her address to find out what Street View looked like from that vantage point. Turns out that the GoogleMobile came down the alley right past us and we turned to wave. Pretty funny. You can even see the contractor in this shot.

We were far from being the first people to be caught by Google’s cameras. In fact, they have snapped photos of lots of unusual things as they cover the world’s highways and byways. Here are a just a few of the odd things caught by Google’s cameras:

A male sitting on a mail box.

Not exactly father of the year: A man shooting an apple off his son’s head.

Look closely just to the left of the tall grass: That’s a gator waiting for dinner.

A Norwegian reindeer racing down a road right in front of the GoogleMobile.

Perfect timing: A motorcyclist popped a wheelie just as the Google Street View car drove past.

A boy who appears to be running for his life and another boy on a horse in hot pursuit.

I’d love to know the story behind this one: A man on an old-fashioned bicycle towing a baby carriage that appears to contain a monkey.

A rabbit setting the world record for the lapin high jump.

Wouldn’t you love to know why a naked man is crawling around in the trunk of his car?

It’s an overall fun commercial, but it’s the rockin’ Chinese granny at the end who makes me laugh.

One of the things I love about being here is seeing great commercials in a foreign country. Australia has far fewer people than America so they don’t have the unlimited production budgets a lot of our commercials have. But that makes the great ones stand out even more.

McDonald’s had a wonderful, heartwarming commercial last time we were here, and this time they have a great, fun, feel-good commercial cut to Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Here’s the :30 version.

Here’s the sixty second version, which includes a great moment that is just about as Australian as you can get. It would never get on the air in America.

And just for old time’s sake, here again is that tear-jerking Mickey D commercial we loved so much three years ago. I know the it says “Video Unavailable,” but do yourself a favor and click on “Watch on YouTube.” The commercial is cut to the BeeGee’s “To Love Somebody.” The payoff at the end makes me tear up every time I see it.

Good Lord Almighty. How big does a shark need to get to take a chunk that big out of a surf ski?

Here’s how the The Guardian described the local shark attack:

A teenager escaped unscathed after a “big shark” attacked his surf ski during a race at an Adelaide beach, tearing a hole in the vessel.

Nathaniel Drummond, 19, was competing in a surf ski race at Seacliff Beach in Adelaide’s south on Sunday when a shark, believed to be a great white, sent him flying into the water.

“The shark just came up and hit me from beneath,” Drummond said on Sunday.

“My ski just kind of lifted off the water and then next thing I knew I was in the air and I was in the water.

Just imagine the thoughts that must flash through your mind after you’ve been tossed in the air by a shark. The good news is that you’ve been thrown in the air. The bad news is that you know that in a split second you will be back in the water with that same monster.

Drummond was attacked about 30 seconds after the race started and was about 800 metres offshore at the time.

Nearby competitors were able to hoist him on to their skis until the rescue boat arrived.

Drummond was left unharmed by the attack, with a large bite instead taken out of his paddle ski.

Sharks are big, but no one ever said they were smart.

Daniel Willetts, emergency manager at Surf Life Saving SA, said “there’s no doubt he’s a lucky lad”.

Daniel is a master of understatement.

“We know these things happen sporadically all over the world … you can’t predict when it’s going to happen, so when you are undertaking some aquatic activities please do that in the company of other people.”

I beg to differ. You can predict with great certainty that shark attacks will not occur in the Barossa Valley because it’s about forty miles inland.

I forgot to post this a few weeks ago when I was putting up a series of “Top Ten” posts. So here are Jamie’s all-time favorite photos of me. None of them are particularly great photos, but each of them comes with a great story. In no particular order:

Number One: Click here to see the story of Jim kissing what’s left of a tuna. (NOTE: Look at that hair cascading out of my hat and down my back. For those of you old enough to understand the reference, I looked like a damn Breck girl.)

Number two: Click here to see the story of Jim and Jamie and the hotpot girls.

Number three: Click here to see the story of Jim and Jamie monkeying around on Bali.

Number four: Click here to see the story of Jim and Jamie and Wave Rock.

Number five: Click here to see the story of Jim and Jamie and the $3.54 haircut

Number six: Click here to see the story of Jim trying his hand at diplomacy.

Number seven: Click here to see the story of Jim and Jamie at the Blue Lagoon

Number eight: Click here to see the story of Jim and Jamie and the Devil’s Marbles

Number nine: Click here to see the story of Jim stalking the wild emus.

Number ten: Click here to see the story of Jim and the International Penis Museum

Number eleven: Click here to see the story of Jim, the sexy bitch

Number twelve: Click here to see the story of Jim and his childhood hero.

Number thirteen: Click here to see the story of Jim and Jamie and Harry’s Pies

Number fourteen: Click here to see the story of Jim and Jamie and the over-commercialized outback town.

Number fifteen: Click here to see the story of Jim’s new girlfriend

Number sixteen: Click here to see the story of “The three amigos and the Crimean cognac.”

File this under “Signs you’ve never seen before.” It was our last night in Broome, so we made our way down to Cable Beach as we do most other nights, but this sign was flashing right at the entrance to the parking lot.

The entrance to the beach was blocked, so instead of driving our car onto the beach as we do most nights, we had to leave it in the parking lot and walk down to the sand. We were hoping to see the beach covered with egg-laying momma turtles, but no such luck. Seems like I’ve seen video of them coming ashore in the dark, so maybe we should have arrived a few hours later.

The first pet I ever owned was a California desert tortoise. Four year old little Jimmy didn’t know the difference between a turtle and a tortoise, so this particular tortoise was dubbed Myrtle the Turtle.

Which leads us to the photo below. This is Georgie, our former California desert tortoise.

About forty years ago one of Jamie’s cousins found Georgie crawling down the street in Westminster, California. California desert tortoises are not native to Orange County, so it was assumed that he had crawled away from someone’s back yard.

Jamie’s cousin scooped up Georgie and took him home. He happily patrolled Aunt Wanda and Uncle Terry’s backyard for thirty years or so, until Jamie’s cousins started having babies. Uncle Terry realized that the babies would also begin crawling around the back yard and concluded that George had to go because toddlers and tortoise poop were not compatible.

Jamie had always liked Georgie, so when she heard that he might need a new home, she volunteered us to become his new caretakers. Georgie was chauffeured 200 miles north to San Luis Obispo and immediately took up residence in our front yard. Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. Contractors were just putting the finishing touches on our new home, so Jamie did some research to find out what kind of grass might be the healthiest for Georgie. That’s what was planted in our front yard.

Georgie kept an eye on our yard for nearly ten springs, summers and autumns. But each winter he hibernated in a cardboard box that was placed in a corner of our closet. Come springtime, Georgie and his special grass emerged in unison.

One year Georgie got sick. So sick that the exotic animal vet told us he should be taken into the house that winter, kept warm and awake, well fed, and occasionally soaked. One of our bathrooms was turned into his winter spa.

The following Spring, he once again began standing sentinel in our front yard. But Spring and even summer nights can be very cool in San Luis Obispo, so we had strict orders to bring him in each night to keep him toasty.

Georgie clearly disagreed with the doctor’s orders. We could tell that he wanted to stay out at night because he changed his behavior and began hiding himself as the sun went down each evening. Instead of finding him out in the open, we’d have to search the yard, sometimes spending a considerable amount of time poking behind every bush and under every shrub. When we finally found him, we’d take him back to his half bath hideaway inside the house.

Eventually, time caught up with Georgie. He gradually stopped grazing so we began hand-cutting his special grass and soaking it in water. We’d put it in a small pile of the grass right in front of his face in an attempt to keep him hydrated and fed. Sometimes he’d eat, sometimes he wouldn’t. He began losing weight (it’s not easy to tell when a shelled animal is losing weight).

Georgie hung in there and we kept hoping he would recover, but he eventually passed away while at the vet’s office.

You wouldn’t think you could get attached to a cold-blooded reptile, but Jamie sobbed.

The vet told us that he thought Georgie might have been 75 years old. Maybe even older. It takes 15-20 years for a California desert tortoise to reach adulthood, and he was full-grown when Jamie’s cousin found him wandering down the street so he had to have been at least that old. Aunt Wanda and Uncle Terry kept him in their backyard for another 30 years and we kept him for nearly ten more. Counting backwards tell us he might have been 30-40 years old when he first joined the Robinson clan.

Georgie had a long, full life. He was loved and cared for and that probably helped him live a longer, fuller life than he would have had had he been wandering the desert, always searching for food and experiencing the extremes of hot and cold that go with that environment.

So to bring this full circle, we were really excited about the possibility of seeing some of Georgie’s second cousins crawling across the sands of Cable Beach in order to lay their eggs.

Sadly, it was not meant to be. None of them showed up on the first night of their egg-laying season, and we left Broome very early the next morning.

Our loss.

This is a photo of Sydney on December 15. It’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere and should be scorching hot across the continent by now, but these people are still dressed like it’s the middle of winter.

Our friend Tim Blair has at one time or another been editor, reporter, political commentator, satirist and blogger for The Sydney Daily Telegram. He could also list “Australia’s Unofficial Smart Ass Laureate” to his lengthy list of titles (I mean that as a compliment and I’m confident he will take it as one.)

On his blog, the most popular political blog in Australia, Tim recently pointed out that the whole damn country is freezing ass cold. Right now. You know, right in the middle of what should be a scorching Aussie summer.

The quick promo line for one of his recent blog items says, ”Today’s noticeboard is brought to you by global warming’s gift of a freezing summer.”

It’s 7:00 p.m. as I write this. We just got home from a visit with The Doctors three doors up French Street. They asked if we’d like to come in and warm up before a roaring fire. Seriously. A roaring fire in the middle of an Australian summer.

By now we should be wearing shorts and slathering ourselves with sunscreen whenever we venture outside. Our air conditioning should be running full speed twenty-four hours a day.

Jamie just walked through the room while searching for her sweatshirt.

This is not normal.

My apologies. I know the blog has been woefully silent in the last few weeks. I’ve been working day and night on another big project and have allowed JimandJamie.com to sit on a shelf gathering digital dust. I promise to do better.

We were dining at Aarli’s (clearly the finest restaurant this small beach town has to offer) when Jamie suddenly ducked. A huge fruit bat had swooped directly over our heads.

It was a sign of things to come. We looked up. Moments later the sky was filled with thousands of the web-winged wonders.

We don’t know where they came from nor where they were going, but other than a few stragglers who enjoyed swooping low over the heads of the unsuspecting diners, they all seemed to be heading toward Cable Beach. But we’ve been out there for dozens of sunsets and have never seen huge swarms of bats, so your guess is as good as ours.

The swarm of flying rodents continued for fifteen minutes or so. Thousands of them flew overhead. Maybe tens of thousands.

I was getting ready to make an additional comment about bats being rodents, but stopped because I wasn’t sure that was correct. I think you’ll be as surprised as I was to read what Britannica.com called the bat’s closest relatives:

“If bats aren’t related to rodents, what are they related to? Bat classification is complicated because bats’ tiny delicate bones make for poor fossils. It used to be thought that bats were actually closely related to primates—including humans—but recent genome analysis has classified them in a superorder that includes animals such as pangolins and whales.”

Just think. If millions of years ago the arc of evolution had bent just a wee bit differently, tonight’s evening sky might have been filled with thousands of flying whales.

Now that would have been spectacular.

I guess I shouldn’t wax poetic about the sunsets on Cable Beach without actually showing one.

As they say, this is an actual unretouched photo. No color levels have been pumped up. No Photoshop has been used. This is just the kind of color you get with your average, ordinary Broome sunset. Night after night after night.

Last time we were in Broome, back in 2019, it was the outback that was on fire.

Here’s a photo we took on Cable Beach in 2019. The local community was so nonchalant about the fires that the camel caravan didn’t even alter its nightly schedule as a bush fire raged just beyond the berm.

You may well remember that the whole damn country was on fire and everyone around the world was contributing money to firefighting and recovery charities. Hundreds, maybe thousands of bush fires did horrible damage, killing hundreds of Aussies and millions of animals wild and domestic.

This year it’s been the opposite problem — torrential rains all across eastern Australia. So much rain that flood waters are causing terrible damage across huge swaths of the country.

And if nature works here anything like it does in California, the torrential rains will lead to more lush growth in the bush, which will then lead to more fires when the heat of summer finally arrives.

It’s a never ending cycle. Kind of like the sunsets in Broome, but not nearly as pretty.

Sure, the sunsets in Broome are spectacular, but the nightly show goes far beyond the wild colors that get painted across the sky.

Tourists and locals alike drive their cars right out onto Cable Beach’s hard-packed sands. The cars get parked facing away from the ocean, then tailgates and trunks that face the ocean are thrown open and a hundred different parties begin. Sausages get tossed on the barbies, bottles of beverages get popped open, frisbees and balls get thrown, kids and dogs begin frolicking. A cricket game pops up here, a footy game there.

Our time on the beach is usually bookended by the departure and return of the nightly camel caravan. We time our arrival to catch the caravan just as it begins its nightly trek northward. And we stay long enough to see these stately ships of the desert sway past our parked car on their way back south.

Of course, the caravans are timed so that the end of the round-trip coincides with another spectacular sunset.

Sunset on Cable Beach in Broome. There’s nothing else like it in the world.