Stilgherrian » urinal

My life according to Twitter

Stilgherrian — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 23:55:39 +0000

Once again, my Twitter stream reveals much of interest. This week’s highlights:

No matter how many times I say “Wynyard is a railway station” it still looks like a poorly-maintained pub urinal. It’s the colour.
If you have a beard, you’re allowed to be fat and incoherent.
“I hate it when you’re pulling off a buttoned shirt and the buttons get caught on ur nostrils.” Agreed.
I really should write more serious essays or news stories soon lest people think I’m only about odd drinking games and ranting on camera.
Hotel Cremorne: Friday. Semi-bearded ad agency geekbois and Lesser Office Wendys with overly-tall heels, overly-tight skirts, nasty accents.
The Duke Hotel in Enmore has barred me from drinking any Wirra Wirra wines from McLaren Vale until I try every other decent red on their new wine list.
Once I’m appointed Tsar, all jazz musicians will go to Nauru concentration camps, paid for by a levy on jazz enthusiasts.
“Apple has 3 basic moves”? No, just ONE. “We’re sooooo fuckin’ cool, iz pretty, buy our stuffz kthxbai.” [Chorus: "Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Steve Much Loves."]
“Dear Fat Bloke, nothing says ‘yobbo slav’ more than a pair of (fake) Bvlgari sunglasses kthxbye.”
“Dear Bus Driver, if having to change a $50 is your day’s worst then you and Mr 9mm need to chat.”
I now understand why the law prevents me from bringing firearms to conferences.
Platypuses don’t actually have antlers.

And at that point Twitter tells me it’s over-capacity, which is probably a good thing.

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

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Secret Men’s Business 3: Chat Thai, Sydney

Stilgherrian — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 07:04:57 +0000

At some point my series of toilet and urinal images needs to move away from pubs and Thai restaurants. But not tonight.

Here’s the toilet at the Chat Thai restaurant in Campbell Street, Sydney. A great modern Thai eatery, all in yellow and black. Including this Dalek trying to disguise itself with a potted plant.

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Secret Men’s Business 2: Renaissance Thai

Stilgherrian — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 14:01:55 +0000

Continuing my photographic series on Secret Men’s Business, we visit the men’s toilet in the Suan I-San Thai Restaurant in King Street, Newtown.

I’m reliably informed that it’s incredibly inappropriate to hang a temple gong in the bathroom. I doubt that a renaissance painting makes up for that.

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Secret Men’s Business

Stilgherrian — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:43:07 +0000

This urinal in a suburban office at St Ives is completely different from the boldly-patterned tiles of the Lansdowne Hotel men’s toilet floor. Starkly simple, almost bleak.

And, I should add, slightly claustrophobic.

As I mentioned in the comments, I think I will turn this into an art project. A colleague now works for Flickr and upgraded me to a “pro” account — even though I’ve published only one single image so I could comment on ’Pong’s photos.

To save you looking them up, here are the images on toilets I’ve published so far.

Toilets are rarely seen. I think it might be interesting to document them.

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Unreliable Bangkok 3: Bureaucracy

Stilgherrian — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 09:53:46 +0000

I’ve mentioned before that our time in Bangkok wasn’t your typical tourist experience. One day, for example, we spent six hours in the Don Mueang district government offices. Here’s a photo of the men’s toilet.

Thailand has a general election on 23 December. It’s important. Well, all elections are important, but this one is the first under the new constitution, and the first since last year’s military coup. ’Pong needed to register to vote from Australia. But there were complications…

’Pong’s government ID card expired 5 years ago, but you need an ID card to register to vote.
Your government ID needs a “home” address in Thailand, but ’Pong doesn’t have one. That meant giving brother Khong’s address.
When you sign onto a household, the head of the household has to be there in person to counter-sign.

And so, on a sunny Thursday morning, we took the Bangkok Skytrain to its northernmost station, Mo Chit, and then a cab to Don Mueang to meet Khong who, sensibly as it turned out, had taken the entire day off work to deal with this.

The district government offices are a grey marble building at the side of the highway north and, apart from minor Thai design elements, much like government buildings everywhere — apart from being draped in yellow for the King’s Birthday.

Inside, the staff were your typical public servants doing the usual public servant thing: slowly processing paperwork as people waited for their number to be called. With the election fast approaching, they were busy with voter enrolments.

It was quaint to hear the sound of a dot-matrix printer, though, and to watch one chubby girl with glasses, a clerical assistant, dividing up the output from a continuous-feed 132-column line printer. A young child ran from desk to desk — obviously a family-friendly workplace!

We explained our mission, and a further complication was revealed. As ’Pong was moving his registration to a new district, it would have to be processed by the Investigations Officer — a longer queue. And then the Investigations Officer told us it needed to be approved by the district manager, but she was at a meeting. No-one knew when she was due back.

We were advised that we should go and have lunch.

Being Thailand, there were food stalls across the road. We chose the one with the most public servants. I wondered why the walls had photos of old aircraft — Ford Trimotors, DC-3s and so on — as well as a huge model of a Lockheed Tristar. It turns out the head of this family business is a retired aircraft maintenance supervisor from the nearby airport with 40 years service. They’re “his” planes. We exchange aviation gossip.

After lunch, a walk through the suburbs and some high-quality waiting around in the office getting bored, we were finally graced with the presence of the district manager and we soon had the requisite signature (pictured). Just one more short queue for a photo and a new ID card — and paying the crippling 20 baht fine for letting the old card expire (about 70 cents) — ’Pong’s identity was restored.

We caught the train back to central Bangkok. I’ve already posted one photo from that journey, but I’ll have more to say about trains soon.

Why the photo of the toilet? Well, I was the only farang in the entire building, and was already attracting attention. I seem to recall some Australian government travel warning about taking photos in foreign government buildings — and I believe everything our government tells us.

[P.S. I've decided that these memoirs are unreliable not only because I didn't take notes but also because they're failing to appear every day as promised. If this disturbs you, I'll give you your money back.]

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Abstracts in the Urinal

Stilgherrian — Mon, 14 May 2007 13:21:29 +0000

Even if it’s your local pub, there’s a limit to the kind of photographs you can take in the urinal and still use the excuse that it’s for “Art”.