Stencil art spotted in Mary Street, Newtown, on Sunday afternoon. Gotta love anyone who can use the word dirigible. See more stencil art.
Captains of Industry
Here’s a nice little out-of-touch conversation, between three private schoolboys on a Sydney North Shore train.
Schoolboy 1: I feel sorry for the suckers in state schools.
Schoolboy 2: Their parents have no idea.
Schoolboy 3: How do they expect their kids to become captains of industry?
This was overhead by Sydney Morning Herald reader John, from Umina Beach (not published online). Three things strike me:
Polite!
The food is laid out, ready to eat, but everyone’s waiting for someone else to make the first move.
This photo was taken at the close of the Marrickville Contemporary Art Prize exhibition on Sunday. Eventually the woman in the blue top sliced into the cheese — and suddenly the spell was broken!
’Pong tells me that in Thai, the very last piece on a plate is called “the polite piece” — the piece everyone is too polite to take.
’Pong in the mosh pit
I used to stir ’Pong because he never had people in his photographs. So I was amazed to see this image from Earthdance the other weekend. He was lifted bodily above the mosh pit by eager partiers — just check their faces! ’Pong took plenty of other photos, before sunset and after dusk, all of them well worth consideration.
Feeling flat? Blame Sydney!
Are you feeling as uninspired today as I am? Been like that all week? Perhaps it’s what I’m going to start calling “The Sydney Effect”.
OK, if you’re not in Sydney this won’t work for you. But today it’s not just me feeling flat. So is my office manager. So is The Other Andrew. So are most people I’ve spoken with on the phone — and email volume is definitely down today.
A few years back I was talking with a psychiatrist who’d practised all over the world, including Sydney, London, the US, Europe. He’d noticed that in every city, each day his clients would be in different moods depending on what’d been happening in their life. Every city, that is, except Sydney.
In Sydney, if his first client was depressed, then everyone else that day would be depressed too. If that first client was angry, so was everyone else.
He didn’t know why, he just knew that it happened.
Maybe I should run a test each morning. Phone someone at random, see what mood they’re in, and plan the rest of the day accordingly.
Hyacinth’s Open Day
Not a bad view, eh? You can see why Janette Howard wouldn’t want to leave Kirribilli House!
Yesterday was the one day each spring when the doors are open to the punters. For $15 ($10 senior concession, with card) we can roam the gardens and take snapshots of each other admiring the views. And the fit men and women of the Australian Federal Police and the now-merged AFP Protective Service chat politely instead of shooting us.
Kirribilli House is a relatively modest twin-gabled residence in the Gothic picturesque style, dating from 1855. “It’s pretty crap,” complained one teenage lad. “The White House is better. But it’s the location I guess.”
In theory, the Prime Minister’s official residence is The Lodge in Canberra, not here. When, almost inevitably, Kevin Rudd is elected PM, will his family live here, or The Lodge?
[I also wrote about Kirribilli House for Crikey. It covers different material, and there’s a photo of the rude chap who dared wear a “Kevin 07” t-shirt.]