Glasses
And now for something completely different. Glasses.
I’ve got a few different types of glasses in my kitchen, many of them remnants from previous collections.
From left to right:
(1) These used to come as IXL jam jars. You’d use up the jam, dispose of the label and the lid, and get to keep the jar as a glass. Given that was a good 11-12 years ago, I’m amazed they’ve lasted this long, though I only have a couple of them left.
(2) When I first moved out on my own in 2000, I bought a pack of The Price Brand (eg the cheapie brand) glasses at K-Mart. This is the very last of them that has survived.
(3) This one is tall and fat in the middle, and is one of a pair left behind by Iris when she went home to Israel back in early 2001. (A colander, a dish rack, some mugs and some plates were also part of that collection. She chose well; they’re all still in use.) These glasses have got a heavy base, which means they’re quite top-heavy when placed into the dishwasher upside-down.
(4) I’ve got a bunch of these ones. This glass shape is my preference for new purchases, because it’s tall (but not too tall) and narrow, it makes the best use of space in the dishwasher. Like my strategic purchase of more cutlery, this helps ensure I don’t have to run it more than every 2-3 days.
Tags: glasses, kitchen
13 comments
Stuff white Melburnians like
Love a bit of cultural satire.
Via Nathan I found the article Stuff Melbourne white people like. Some funny stuff, and since I’m a bit light-on for writing my own blog content this week, here are some excerpts:
The Monthly:
Buying a subscription to The Monthly for the object of your affections is tantamount to expressing your undying love for them and saying that you intend to spend the rest of your life with this person. In no time at all, you will both have bought and renovated a federation period house in North Fitzroy and will spend your weekends reading The Monthly sipping a juice infused with wheatgrass and spirulina at a cafe with polished concrete walls and minimialist furniture.
(Several people I know read and love The Monthly, and I’ve been known to flick through their copies, and read some great articles in there.)
Stephanie:
If invited to dinner by a Melbourne white person, it is a certainty that the recipe will come from Stephanie. If you go to a lot of parties thrown by Melbourne white people, you might form the impression that everyone in Melbourne has a kindly neighbour called Stephanie who hands out recipes over the back fence.
(I don’t own a copy, and don’t really invite people over to dinner because I’m not much of a cook, but I certainly know a few people who do both.)
Dining Out:
When selecting a place to dine in Melbourne you have a choice between Vue de Monde, MoVida, or a small dumpling house located in a hard-to-find laneway in Chinatown. The harder the dumpling house is to find, the better.
(A bunch of my colleagues, as well as my old mate Josh and a bunch of his colleagues used to regularly dine at what we called “the hole in the wall”, which was indeed a place in a hard-to-find laneway in Chinatown. It wasn’t actually a dumpling house, but it was so hard to find that once when I tried to describe how to get there to someone, I simply couldn’t.)
A comment there led me to a whole blog on the topic (written by someone else):
Because it’s fiscally impractical to keep travelling, white Melburnians need other ways to convey how worldly and cultured they are. The easiest way to do this is to have ethnic friends. Now, you might think everyone who has friends has ethnic friends by default because everybody has an ethnicity. But you would be wrong. To Melbourne white people, ethnic pretty much means black and/or Muslim. If, for example, you are Serbian, Polish, Vietnamese, Maltese, Israeli, Greek, Russian, Italian, Chinese, Macedonian or Hungarian, you aren’t ethnic because you’re not exotic enough.
(Oh so true. Most of those nationalities aren’t exotic — they’re just the people you encounter every day.)
Northcote does not make sense. Positioned in the heartland of suburbia, a whopping nine stops away from the city (comparable to North Brighton, Ormond and Murrumbeena) it has somehow managed to defy geography and pass itself off as a gritty inner city urban wonderland. The brilliance of this suburb is only magnified when you go there and discover it’s mostly just a few kebab joints and a massive indoor shopping centre with Kmart, two Coles, Donut King and a f—ing Bakers Delight. This is stuff the wrong white Melburnians like! I don’t know how, but Northcote has brainwashed Melbourne white people. Go there to experience genius.
(I took the kids to Northcote recently as part of Jeremy’s systematic exploration of the old video games collections of all the branches of Cash Converters. I couldn’t work out what was so special about it either.)
All in all, very funny stuff, and I look forward to reading more as it gets posted.
Myki touch-off on trams scrapped
EXCLUSIVE: THOUSANDS of city commuters will be hit with big fare increases to pave the way for the myki smartcard.
…
The decision to dump city saver fares will mean most myki tram users only have to swipe the card once – when they enter a tram.
Hallelujah!
Touch-off on trams was never going to work.
At busy stops dozens of people could be getting on and off all at once, leading to chaos and long delays if they all had to touch-on and touch-off.
This change makes sense — though if you were a regular user of City Saver fares, you’d be understandably miffed.
There are about 35,000 city saver trips taken each week
So there aren’t that many. A little bird says 6000 per day, which in the grand scheme of things is a drop in the ocean.
City saver fares stretch to Richmond, South Yarra, Carlton, North Melbourne and Docklands.
Not South Yarra — the closest it gets is Domain Interchange. And only some parts of North Melbourne and Richmond. See the map.
Overall this is a good move, and hopefully means we’re getting closer to seeing the long-running Myki implementation finally nearing completion.
PS 8:10am. How it will work — the zone 1/2 overlap will be extended to the end of the three routes that currently go into zone 2. So the default fare (that is, if you touch-on but don’t touch-off) will normally be a zone 1 fare. If you travel entirely in zone 2 and want the cheaper zone 2 fare, you’ll still need to touch-on and touch-off.
PS: PTUA: Myki change welcome, but City Saver users pay the price
Tags: Myki, public transport, trams
36 comments
Retro trains
Melbourne’s Comeng trains date back to the early 1980s, about the same time us Gen-Xers were cutting our video game teeth with Donkey Kong and Space Invaders.
There’s certainly other things of the 80s around the place on the train network, for instance this sign on a now unused gate at Caulfield Station. (Since then we’ve had a new Met logo, then Bayside Trains, then M>Train, Connex, now Metro.)
Something else Retro Metro have done that harks back to days of yore is to put staff back on busy platforms. While I was surprised to see Sydney rail staff waving a flag a few years ago, here they’ve been given high-tech looking paddle devices (the other side has LEDs that stand out to the train driver).
Tags: Metro, retro games, trains, transport
9 comments
Solar Equation
Solar Equation, by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, part of Federation Square’s The Light In Winter, is a simulation of the sun, “100 million times smaller than the real thing”.
Here’s how it looks in daytime, when inactive:
At dusk it fires up:
The Mail Exchange
I don’t know who or what “Whitehouse” is, but they’ve done a splendid job of restoring the Mail Exchange building — somehow I’ve never noticed it before, possibly because most of the time I walk down Bourke Street near Spencer Street, I’m facing the other way.
Baked beans on toast FTW!
One of the things the nurse said at the workplace health check a couple of weeks ago was about including a variety of fruit and vegetable in my diet.
And she said “Even beans on toast.”
You beauty! That there is an official recommendation to cook one of the laziest, least effort meals known to man.
I had it tonight. Heinz’s finest on wholemeal bread. The can notes that it is the equivalent of four serves of vegies, though it also says in very small writing that eating a variety is important. And of course there’s a fair bit of salt in one can, so you wouldn’t want to eat them morning noon and night.
But those reservations aside, what’s not to like?
Tasty
Supremely easy to cook
Healthy
Excellent.
(PS. Thanks to those who commented on the health check post. As always some good ideas. I love youse all.)
Tags: baked beans, cooking, Heinz
17 comments
Cinderella and the ghost station
I did a double-take last night when a Cranbourne train was announced as running “express from Dandenong to Merinda Park”, not just on the automatic announcement, but also on the screen.
There is no station between Dandenong and Merinda Park.
There eventually will be, at Lynbrook, but construction hasn’t even begun yet. In fact tenders for it close this week (if anybody wants to have a bid).
I’d guess it won’t actually open for a couple of years, so it seems a bit premature to put it into the system, especially as it may cause confusion. I’m assuming it was a stuff-up.
Perhaps this is like Platform nine and three-quarters?
By the way, apparently Cinderella uses the Northern Line
(via the London Underground Tube Diary)
Tags: London, Metro, public transport, trains
22 comments
