Blog

Posted on

Daft ad campaign is on the sauce

Photo of billboard:

This is a pretty stupid campaign, if you ask me. “Momma’s sauce” is usually thought of as being rich and flavourful, made with love. “Just like mama used to make.” Plus I don’t recall Australians ever spelling it “momma”, and neither does the Macquarie Dictionary.

So apart from telling your customers that your factory-made canned stuff isn’t made with care, you’re also telling them it’s shipped in from New Zealand — hardly the home of Italian culinary skills.

Or are they trying to turn canned spaghetti into an international symbol of youth rebellion?

Posted on

After the hunt

Photograph of the remains of a noisy miner (bird) after being eaten by Artemis the cat

I decided not to publish a high-resolution version of this photograph. This morning one of our cats, Artemis, proudly brought us a Noisy Miner chick which she’d just hunted. After she’d played with it a while I decided to grab my phone to photograph her victory. But by the time I’d done that, this is all that remained.

Good heavens, I’m blogging about the pets!

I think I’d better migrate to Cincinnati immediately.

That said, it’s interesting that she left the claws. I don’t like eating chicken’s feet either.

Posted on

Tax-deductible pub crawl

Designer Paul Kelly says that before creating the new interiors for the Oxford Hotel on Oxford Street he visited between 400 and 500 bars, including a week-long crawl though 97 venues in Manhattan, “in search of inspiration”. Yeah, Paul, I’ve searched the bars “in search of inspiration” too, but perhaps I can’t make mine tax-deductible.

Posted on

Dive right in!

Like all sensible and rational people, I base my entire life on mass-market Astrology:

So you feel like you’re in over your head? Good! Believe it or not, this is how you’ll learn to swim — longer, faster and farther than you’ve ever done before — metaphorically speaking, that is. Dive in.

Today’s advice seems, in the clear light of a Tuesday morning, strangely compelling. My desk is piled with work, but there’s a certain clarity of focus about what’s important and what’s not. I’m diving in… I’ll report back at day’s end.

Posted on

Nice art, shame about the winner

Photograph from Pyrmont Art Prize

On Saturday ’Pong and I popped past the inaugural Pyrmont Art Festival. With the theme “Small is Beautiful”, some 200 paintings and other images were entered, all about a foot square.

Sadly we didn’t get a good look, and we didn’t taste any of the wine or beer. We arrived at 3.45pm and the organizers were already packing things away. Note for next time: on a sunny autumn afternoon, people might not be prompt. 10am to 4pm community events? How quaint! Not everyone’s a soccer mum.

However from what was still hanging, there seemed to be a good range of interesting pieces — plus the usual dross you get in community art competitions. Unfortunately I think one of the dross pieces won — that bland streetscape with the blue ribbon in the photo above. Yes, the dun-coloured walls do say Pyrmont, but it’s hardly unique and it’s hardly Jeffrey Smart.

If we’d had time, I’d have checked out the runners-up and the People Choice awards and named names. But I figure someone official will have done that.