Posts by Gabor Toth
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I'd say go see the Dali - except that it has just finished (I managed to see it about three weeks ago and it was fab). The current Pompeii exhibition at the Melbourne museum is also meant to be very good , but it's hardly "local".
My advice is to orientate yourself (and drink) on Friday night, spend Saturday shopping and exploring the CBD. The "little lanes" are wonderful (Central Place is my favourite). Include a visit to the Queen Victoria Market during the morning. It's at the top of the CBD - an easy walk if you are based in the central city.
A Saturday night stroll along the Southbank of the Yarra (bottom of the CBD) is worth doing. Don't miss the Crown Casino's spectacular contribution to global warming and energy wastage with a display of huge gas fireballs which explode out from a series of monoliths dotted along Southbank (on the hour after about 9pm – weather permitting). Touristy as hell, but so what...
Leave any museums for the Sunday when most of the shops are closed. Though the Yarra Valley is lovely, I don't think a 48 hour visit will leave you enough time to get out there and do it justice (especially if you want to avoid any risk of missing a Sunday evening flight).
If you want a quick overview beyond the CBD, buy a Zone 1 train card (only $6.80 for the day) and travel out from Flinders Street Station (the main central railway station) to the end of a Zone 1 rail line, have a coffee somewhere and come back in. The Alamein Line offers a nice mix of industry, working-class Victorian housing, and leafy middle-class suburbia. The shopping at Camberwell (along that line) is quite good, but even better is Prahan / Chappel Street. -
That Avis ad in turn reminds me of the awful sexist Hertz ad from the '80s. It used "To know him is to love him", but with "To know Hertz is to love Hertz" and ghastly soft-focus footage of female counter staff pouting at the camera.
To Hertz's credit, they did stick with the same brunette in their ads for the best part of a decade rather than upgrading her for a new model every year. Of course being a lad at the time when ten years seemed like an eternity, this probably meant she was probably about 19 when she started and in her mid-late 20's when they ended her contract (like..you know... really old....
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Be prepared for how small Dali paintings are. Most of the reproductions are blown up.
True... sometimes...
I remember as a young lad (can't have been older than 11 or so) when I saw Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee... at the Thyssen-Bornemisza exhibition which toured NZ in 1980. I think was one of the first times (the first?) that such a collection of modern masters had ever come to NZ. Picasso's, Pollock's, Jasper John's - you name it...they were there.
Anyway - Dream Caused by a... was used for a lot of the PR of the exhibition and I really took to it (I had a copy from the front cover of the Listener in my bedroom, thus managing to get a picture of a naked woman on my wall without any disapproval from my parents). When I finally saw the original it was disappointingly small.
However he could go both ways and at the same exhibition there was crucifixion depiction by Dali and when I first saw that - BAM! - it was awesomely huge. A lot of his works in the 1950s started to get bigger and bigger (sometimes reaching enormous proportions) as that's what his clients / patrons wanted and he began to use assistants in their execution.
Anyway - I'm off to Melbourne next month and I'm almost wetting myself about seeing the Dali exhibition. -
with some chillax time in Melbourne. (Anyone have any recommendations for cheap and cheerful eateries....?)
Pelligrini's. I never visit Melbourne without dropping into the place for lunch - a true local institution which is very centrally located. The menu consists of whatever they happen to be cooking that day (they make some of the best pasta sauces I've had outside of Europe).
On one visit they had run out of seats so we ended up sitting around a beaten-up old table in the kitchen while the owners argued with each other in Italian while cooking. Classic!p.s. Don't miss the Dali exhibition at National Gallery of Victoria
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Was it just me or did Geoffrey Palmer sound like a grumpy old grandpa who had no idea what the kids were up to? I suppose he does live within a cocoon of privilege, but really, is the drunkeness on our streets that surprising if you['ve had your eyes open for the last few decades?
This did seem rather odd. Sir Geoffrey lives in a pleasant but not extravagant house in Mt Victoria which is well known to medium - long term locals. However it is so close to Courtenay Place that you could almost hurl a stubby from his elevated deck into the drunken throng that gathers every Friday night (well - not quite. It's probably around 250 metres away but the noise of crowds, clubs, boy racers and police sirens extends into Mt Vic). Does he have a large rock in his bedroom which he lives under?
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....rotten TV reception?
If you get an OK UHF signal (e.g. you can pick up Prime TV reasonably well) , AND you are in a terrestrial Freeview zone then yes - just plug in a FV UHF decoder and your reception problems for all the major free-to-air channels are over.
If not your options are to (a) if you are in the UHF zone, stick up a decent UHF aerial which is not to difficult for the average D.I.Y inclined kiwi to do OR (b) put up a satellite dish (the same as a sky dish) which is harder to D.I.Y and may require professional installation BUT the satellite decoder is cheaper than the UHF decoder.
If like me you are not too fussed about HD quality and are more concerned with decent things to watch then something to keep in mind is that the satellite version of Freeview actually carries some stuff which is absent from the UHF version - particulary Stratos which carries a lot of reaally good stuff from the English-language services of Al Jareera and Deutsche Welle.
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Cannot see the appeal. You all need to get out more... life is actually 3D you know.
Most of what I've seen is a bit meh but where the format has really clicked for me has been documentaries. "Real life" but not the sort of thing one normally gets to see. Seeing Space Station 3D for instance with its associated shuttle and Soyuz launches was simply jaw-dropping.
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I guess the palm oil is the only contentious ingredient ?
Heh! Check out the record of the sandalwood industry.
Like Isabel said... -
It shouldn't be this hard to be green and vegetarian and non-stinky.
What you want to track down is a pure Castile or Marseille soap. These are green coloured soaps sometimes sold in large cubes and are made from 100% olive oil. More likely to be found in a fancy-pants French goods / gift shop than a chemist or supermarket. Note there is also a white coloured Marseille soap which is palm + coconut based. The only problem is that pure olive-based soaps tend to go mushy very quickly when wet.
Despite its name, "Knight's Castile" is not a true Castile soap and is actually beef tallow based. However as long as you don't have any issues with animal products, it is also probably the easiest to obtain palm-free tallow soap there is.
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Do you happen to know which suppliers of soap use beef fat?
There are a few which are primarily beef tallow based such as the "Simple" brand of soap, but even this still puts in a good slug of palm oil - just not as much.
There are others - and some are quite surprising. Neutrogena for instance do a very good transparent hypoallergenic soap which they call a "Transparent Facial Bar". It is palm-free with a base of beef tallow though not surprisingly their marketing department don't exactly make a big fuss about this to their target market of middle-class women (though incidentally it also makes a brilliant shaving soap).
This and many other soaps will also use stearic acid which is a saturated fatty-acid normally derived from animal fat.
Essentially all you need to do next time you are at the supermarket is to check the list of ingredients on the soap wrapper and learn how to interpret them keeping in mind that they are listed in order of quantity used. Sodium or potassium tallowate means animal tallow, Sodium stearate (from stearic acid) is also (normally) tallow derived.
-Palmate or -palm kernelate is from palm oil, -cocoate is coconut oil, -ricinoleate or -castorate is from castor oil, -olivate is from olive oil. Glycerin / glycerol (another common ingredient in some fancier soaps) is a carbohydrate rather than a fatty-acid but is also often derived from animal fat.