Unusual sights in Footscray Park
The chair has no seat. I’m uncertain as to why anybody wishing to dispose of a broken chair would carry it into the middle of a park.
A traditional milk jug country mailbox, but found in pile of earth in an inner-city park. I didn’t check to see if there was any mail in it.
Tags: Footscray Park
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Every suburb needs…
Every suburb needs a combined noodle shop and bus stop.
Another view from Google Streetview
Tags: Bentleigh, buses, Centre Road
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The stolen car dream, and Neighbourhood Watch
The stolen car dream
I was going to visit my old uni mate Brian (who actually lives in Florida, though I saw him a few weeks ago when he recently visited Melbourne again). In the dream, he was staying at my mum’s house in Hampton. I parked in the usual spot when visiting her, and dropped something off to him, then went back to the car to find it had been stolen.
I also noticed my key remote appeared to unlock a nearby dumped white Mercedes, which had been left blocking half the driveway.
Brian then appeared, with a very heavy bag full of gym equipment. I told him about the car having gone missing, and wondered which number you ring the police on (not the emergency 000 number, I guessed).
I walked with him up the road towards the station. He said he was going to the gym — I remarked it’s the same one my mum and her partner use.
Probable influences: Brian’s recent visit; my mum joining the gym; arrival of a letter from AAMI, probably the car insurance renewal; a Neighbourhood Watch newsletter arriving the other day noting the emergency number.
Neighbourhood Watch
Neighbourhood Watch seems to be on the decline, which is kind of a shame. While I’ve never been to a meeting (they usually clash with other things), I think they do good work.
But every so often there’ll be some clanger in their newsletter. Our local one has faithfully printed the # 9 0 urban myth, as well as claimed that a mobile phone left with an uncharged battery could somehow call emergency numbers (confused I think with the fact that a mobile phone without a SIM card can do so).
They also claimed that dialling the emergency number could get through even where there’s no signal from any carrier, as if that magically convert your phone into a super-powered satellite phone (in truth, dialling emergency will hook into any phone company’s signal, not necessarily your own).
This week it suggested that people program the emergency 000 number into their mobile phones.
Uhh… I don’t think that’s a good idea. On almost every phone I’ve seen, it takes way more keypresses to retrieve a programmed number and then dial it than to simply press 0 0 0 [dial].
It is possible on my phone to program in a single key shortcut (eg hold down 1 to get voicemail), but I don’t think that’s a good idea either; you’d be in danger of pressing it down accidentally.
Mr Nice Guy
Years ago I got Mr Nice Guy on DVD. It’s the Jackie Chan movie that has a lot of scenes filmed around central Melbourne.
Given that apart from Jackie himself, I only recognised one actor (Barry Otto), that most of the acting is pretty bad, and the movie is basically all fight scenes, my conclusion was that they hired mostly stuntmen for all the characters. Why would you bother getting real actors?
The plot is wafer-thin, seemingly designed primarily to link together the fight scenes. As a reviewer on IMDB said “‘Mr Nice Guy’ might be a contender for the thinnest plot in the universe prize”.
In this first clip you’ll see Jackie (in this movie playing a chef, also called Jackie, who meets a journalist who has a tape incriminating a gang of suited drug pushers) running around Melbourne Central shopping centre. It was filmed in 1995 (there’s a clue in the second clip), and you get to see him slide down what was the main escalator entrance to the station from Swanston Street until it was removed in 2004.
In this scene straight afterwards, our hero, having just left Melbourne Central, somehow finds himself on Swanston Street near Collins Street, and hijacks a horse and carriage. A few familiar sights are in there, including Melbourne Sports Depot (now EB Games), the Town Hall, the Manchester Unity Building, quite a few trams in the Met colours and the old Batman Records, Off Ya Tree, and Academic & General bookshop. The geography goes screwy again, with a turn into Lonsdale Street becoming Little Bourke Street near Hardware Lane, and then becoming Flinders Lane at the back of St Paul’s and next to the City Square.
Quite entertaining, though mostly for the familiar sights.
Note: In both cases you can improve the picture quality by choosing 480p when playing. Also check out an earlier scene filmed at the Showgrounds.
Tags: Jackie Chan
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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.
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.
Lonsdale House
Lonsdale House, pictured in early February.
Check the tower. Isn’t that great?
Here’s how the site looks now it’s gone.
Okay, it wasn’t real art deco, it was just an art deco facade on a Victorian building. See comments
But it does seem a shame that at least the facade couldn’t have been kept with the new development — which is to be a shrine to Steve Jobs. That’s right, it’s being replaced by an Apple store and yet more shops.
