This will hurt me...

Be warned, this cartoon has a touch of 'blue' language. That said, I heartily endorse this message. If you like the 'toons, check out The Rut . It's packed full of them!

Here we have the homes of the some of the Hobartian elite [which must be pronounced AY -leet in order to convey the full effect that I'm aiming for]. As with many cities the world over, the former docklands of Hobart – once home to the worst sort of filth, disease and moral depravity that one expects among the lowest rungs of society – has now been transformed into la-de-da apartments, and once grimy and slummy terrace-housing have become “semi-detached town houses” fit for the sort of urban living now desirable to the privileged upper-classes. For over half a century, the Hobart silos were used for storing grain destined for export. As the utility of Hobart as a working port declined, and the global competitiveness of Tasmanian grain dwindled, the future of the silos looked bleak. Cue urban regeneration, and today they house thirty luxury residential apartments , and have become amongst the most lusted-after addresses in Hobart. The powerful and famous can be spotted each morning...

As a lover of reading, and a regular user of the Tasmanian public library system , I have been fascinated by this post “ Do Pakistanis Read? (and the missing libraries of Pakistan) ” on the excellent All Things Pakistan website. It got me thinking, what is the state of public libraries in other countries? I really don’t know. Similarly, I am not really aware of the varieties of cultural attitudes to reading. So I decided to ask anyone visiting this blog to let me know, do you personally use libraries? Do you think that there is an easily defined attitude towards reading in your particular country? I would love to know.

I thought that today would be little more than a mundane companion piece to yesterday’s photograph . Walking through Parliament Lawns as I usually do of a weekday morning, I noted the two council workers clearing off all of the leaves that I posted yesterday. Naively, I had assumed that this would be achieved with huge rakes and good old-fashioned muscle. Alas, I was wrong. I should have known that bulky (and extremely noisy) leaf blowers are all the rage these days. They were corralling the poor frightened leaves into the centre of the park, where a truck was waiting to haul them off to oblivion. That was that (I thought), 'a slice of Hobartian life for the world to peruse at their leisure'. As noted, I thought that this was the end of the story, I would post the photo and be done, but in the act of resizing it to make it more user-friendly, I noted something odd in the background. Like David Hemmings in the classic film Blowup , there was a strange character lurking in the ba...

Today's post is in response to a (potentially) tricky question that the Political Umpire threw me in the comments section of yesterday's photo. The Ump was after my view on a story that has had national focus here in Australia over the past few days, titled: " No room for gay developer in Penguin's property parade " There are two parts to this question that in my mind should easily be separated. However, it is worth noting that anti-development sensibilities and homophobic tendencies both have a lengthy history in Tasmania. On the question of development on the North West Coast, I am broadly supportive. Anyone willing to invest (potentially) millions of dollars that stands to create new jobs, attract new people, and help offer viable pathways for residents is welcome in my book. Context (as ever), is vital. When I left the coast in early 1996, spirits could not have been much lower. Global economic circumstances and the subsequent shift away from heavy industry ...

I was looking at this photo essay from Foreign Policy magazine this morning, and one photo struck me in particular. It essentially was someone packing a briefcase full of cash. As I mentioned yesterday , with inflation running at over 100,000 percent, Zimbabwe's rate of inflation is currently the highest in the world. Now, like most I suspect, I'm struggling to get my head around what that means, and its broader implications for people. Using a couple of different online currency convertors, ZWD$1 million fetches roughly: AUS $37 or US $34 or Euro €21. Now this is achieved using flat currency transaction on market rate. In the real world, Zimbabweans would have to take whatever the black marketers are offering. The scantest of research reveals that the best that they might hope for out of that same ZWD $1 million is somewhere between US $3 to US $5. To be totally honest with you, I still can't get my head around it. Surely wages cannot keep up with that sort of inflation....

The topic for today's first post came to me while preparing Henry’s breakfast this morning (and helping him eat it), I got to thinking about a topic that has crossed my mind on other accessions in the past, and has yet to be satisfactorily resolved. What do people feed their kiddies for breakfast in other cultures? Now, Henry probably has the stereotypical Australian breakfast: Two Weet-bix (albeit with rice milk); Toast liberally smeared with Vegemite; Water; A little bit of the raspberry cake that I made yesterday. This was a reward for being a good boy this morning, and not standard practice. I might be wrong, but I have in my mind convoluted ideas about French kiddies gnawing croissants and fancy pastries; Sami kiddies tearing at dried reindeer; Mexican kiddies scoffing breakfast burritos; German kiddies nibbling on cold meats and boiled eggs; Inuit kiddies gulping down seal; Indian kiddies eating daal and naan; Kenyan kiddies chowing down on some sort of maize porridge; Swed...