the yellow pages book on my doorstep – what’s the point?

i came home this evening and found this sitting on my doorstep – the 2012 sydney yellow pages.

what am i supposed to do with that?

it’s too large for a paperweight, i’m a bit too old to be using it to stagger milk-crate furniture contraptions and i am certainly never going to use it.

the way that i see it is this: receiving delivery of ONE yellow pages book equals my junk mail pamphlet quota for 5-10 years running.

i never asked to recieve this. can i visit yellowpages.com.au to opt-out of delivery of this rubbish to my house?

i don’t want the resources wasted on me. i can and do waste well over my quota of resources all by myself, i don’t need un-asked help to bump that up.

you know what i did after i took this photo? i picked up the book and threw it in the recycling bin. what a waste of  our precious resources. shame on you yellow pages. can you now kindly fuck off and stop dumping your shit on my door.

a-k used to be bigger than the book in this photo, and then there was l-z – equally as large. now a-z is smaller than both put together. soon enough, the yellow pages will be indistinguishable from a local pizza-shop flyer.

face it. you have no relavence anymore, now leave me alone.

Edited: January 22nd, 2012

a strange morning at manly beach

ok, first up, my apologies for putting up such a crappy shot.

i was busy and had no time to set it up or think about it. it happens when you are doing a daily photo blog and work at the same time.

there were some fun little waves on the go at about 8.30 am, but come 10am, it all seemed to drop off pretty rapidly.

what a bizarre day. with those angry looking black clouds, i thought it would piss down with rain. not a drop.

anyway, i hope i find something more interesting to shoot for you guys tomoz.

if you want to see some nice daily manly beach photos, check out sprout daily. they have it going on.

humidity, haze and temperatre made me feel as if i was in hong kong or something.

Edited: January 19th, 2012

tradesmen, eh?!

ahh, australian tradesmen. it seems a national pass-time to love to hate them.

when they are not in the surf paddling in the waves, you may fing them laying on their backs in precarious situations.

got to love it.

i feel like i am in india or something.

Edited: January 18th, 2012

dragonfly in the backyard

i spotted this little visitor to my inner city backyard. great to have.

i’ve really noticed that dragonflys love to hover like helicopter above still watere. why did this one come and rest in my backyard?

i hope it tells its friends to stop by as well. drogonflies are always welcome in my home, they are awesome.

Edited: November 16th, 2011

my dinner tonight – not for the vegetarians!

i went to a bbq tonight in celebration of a local football tournament win. the team was a mixed bag of nationalities, but hungarians dominated the team – which is suprising, i have never met so many hungarians in one place here in sydney.

anyway, this was the centrepiece of the bbq – spit roasted sucking pig.

the guys went to a haberfield butcher and ordered a suckling pig. the butcher spit roasted it, chopped it up into pieces and pretty much just dumped all the pieces into an aluminium foil-lined box for them to take home.

it doesn’t look pretty, but god it was good.

Edited: October 8th, 2011

the photo a day guy

self portrait.

Edited: September 9th, 2011

fuck the instamatic iphone plugin

who needs instamatic, when you have a phone that takes photos and a great picture to shoot?

well, i like this photo of moore park golf course at 7am. lots of crap on my windscreen and a few raindrops.

i think ineed to change my wipers.

Edited: August 15th, 2011

does that say ‘booby’?

i took this from the 6th floor of a surry hills warehouse looking down towards central starion. i am guessing this is put up on the 4th floor level. whoever did this would have had to scramble across a few rooftops to reach the wall.

3 pairs of tits and two cocks? why not….. like heiroglyphs, throw in a scarab or two and you’re away!

i wonder if it is the same person with the same tit fascination as the one who did: boobies in petersham

Edited: June 5th, 2011

zap – a worried king

i came across this one in a strange little back alley behind the amex building on oxford street (opposite hyde park).

Edited: April 24th, 2011

oprah winfrey in sydney and a railway platform with a bloody good view

not so bad if your train is late and you have a view like this

i think that this has got to be one of the best views from any train station i have ever been to in my life. i’d love to hear if anyone out there can match or better it.

this is clearly before the oprah winfrey madness kicked in and the sydney opera house. was renamed the ‘oprah house’ and the sydney harbour bridge (the one in this pic if you didn’t already know) got affectionately monikered the ‘harpo bridge’ after being illuminated by a gigantic letter ‘O’ in her honour.

Oh dear, i just fear how many people in the future will believe that these are the official and original names for these landmarks. time will tell….

Edited: December 12th, 2010

a class piece of guerrilla art/graf – call it what you will

this is an oldie, but a goodie.

i hope this one stays on the wall for years to come – a great example of clever tongue in cheek creativity. this piece rocks in my opioion.

i’d love to meet whoever did this and i hope you are still at work!

awesome. thanks!

Edited: November 11th, 2010

cheap eats in sydney

ah yes, back to one of my favourite sydney foodhalls for the prawn and scallap wonton egg-noodle soup with a side of spring rolls and a shit-load of chilli.

i alway have a hard time of choosing between conbination/chicken laksa, the abovementioned soup, or the roast duck egg noodle soup.

Edited: November 10th, 2010

boring airport behind the scenes

Edited: November 8th, 2010

ticket booths at train station

martin place during a lull.

Edited: November 1st, 2010

macquarie bank sydney airport parking behemoth

ahhh, macquarie bank – don’t you just love to hate them?

first they bough sydney airport, then they wanted to make airport drive a toll road, then they jacked up car parking prices. the new rail link they helped build was a great idea and one long in the making, but when it costs $15 one way from the city for a train ticket, it makes more sense to catch a cab for two people than to pay these crooks their exorbitant prices.

a few months ago, because they were copping flak about their astronomical parking fees, they promoted a ‘terrific’ new ‘deal’ – 15 minutes free parking!!!! UNREAL!

just tell me mac bank, how can i drive in, park my car, pick up my arrival, help them with luggage back to the car and get out the boom gates within 15 minutes? if it takes me 16 mins, bang! – nice knowing you 7 bucks!

utter bastards.

Edited: October 27th, 2010

sydney central station

late night, not many about. it a scene waiting for ‘our russ’ to pop up in romper stomper. it was a school night obviously. see the clip below to get the russel crowe/ romper stopmer reference, if you didnt’ get it already:

Edited: July 29th, 2010

the brutal poodles chariot

wtf? seems to be something around lately with vehicles with pink highlights.

the pink is a bit crazy, but the little cherub bolted (well i hope it is) onto the bonnet takes the cake for me.

the brutal poodles are a sydney band, well duo, who are pretty keen to get noticed. nothing like a bloke pulling out some falsetto. prince did it so well, but took himself too seriously. i’d give you a link, but he pulled the prince official website off in 2006, when he became a born again christian.

we can thank flight of the conchords to make the man falsetto thing fun again, i think.

you can check out the brutal poodles music on their myspace page. below i’ve posted one of their clips – a song called ‘star’. check it out, i think they could be good fun to see live.

good luck boys, oh and maybe wash your car, the birdshit eats the duco.

TAGS: art, brutal poodles, cars, music, Sydney

Edited: July 12th, 2010

when the buses go to sleep

the waverley bus depot at night.

i have a lot of respect for bus drivers, i really do.

think about it for a moment. they need to navigate the horrendous sydney traffic all shift, as well as deal with some pretty crappy, demeaning and abusive characters day in, day out. they are also responsible for, literally, a busload of people.

i have had my own fair share of grumpy, rude, even psycho bus drivers, but i tell you, almost every time, i will get off the bus at the front door so i can say to them ‘thank you’.

you should do it too.

Edited: July 11th, 2010

redfern suicide flats revisited

ah the redfern public housing estate, lovingly known locally as the ‘redfern suicide towers’. i feel drawn to this place – you can see it for miles around. you could even say that they stick out like dogs balls.

they sort of remind me of those post-war apartment blocks with paper-thin walls that popped up all over the eastern bloc.

here is the pic from my last visit to the redfern suicide apartments

Edited: June 25th, 2010

amazing, just released pic of fidel castro in hospital on his deathbed.

well, kind of….

this is an awesome work by artist Shen Shaomin showing on cockatoo island as part of the 2010 sydney bienalle.

fidel is prone in hospital here, mechanics providing a rising and sinking chest as he is making his death rattles. he is positioned as a point of a pentagram, the other points are life-sized and equally freakish models of lenin, great leader chaiman mao, uncle ho, and great leader kim il-sung.

he’s in great company. very tongue in cheek, the work is called ‘summit’(2010). i like.

another photo from the amazing series.

Edited: June 20th, 2010

very bad marketing and PR example care of bodum

what’s going on here?

see the white thing in front of the bus? it’s a buggy/people carrier/chariot/ pedal-powered tuk-tuk type thing, put on the road by bodum and pedalling UP the hill on oxford street, darlinghurst on the tail end of peak hour.

it could be a great idea, (perhaps in a city which is flat and doesn’t have massive congestion issues like sydney) but…… whoever came up with this idea deserves a good slap at least, or lose their job at worst.

whoever at bodum signed off on this and paid for it definitively needs a reality check and a good kick in the ass.

so the brief is that there is some funky looking pedal-powered people-mover trawling up oxford st, offering free rides to all the girls. yaay! that sounds great. it looks different and that means it will attract the attention of cashed up professionals and gay guys walking the strip. how wrong.

apart from the fact that sydney-siders are pretty unaccustomed to this thing (making the bike guys come across as being a bit creepy), i managed to walk up the hill at the same speed as this guy pedaled.

now granted that i take a longer stride than most, i don’t slow down a bus which carries more than 20 people home.

see the guy on the bike wearing a high-vis vest? he is OVERTAKING the bus and will soon overtake the bodum-badly-thought-out-dickhead-mobile.

a hummer driver in sydney thinks that when people are trying to get a look at him through his tinted windows, they all want to know who he is and wants to roll with him. wrong. the majority wants to see what kind of a fuckwit with a tiny cheesedick drives that car.

same thing for the bodum chariot crew – the main reason that people stare, is that they want to know who is holding the 30 people on a bus from getting home in time. PR FAIL! big time.

my personal message to the people involved at bodum australia is this…. if you have cankles, i have the cure.

Edited: June 1st, 2010

pot of gold. in sydney?

after about a week of torrential downpours, i awoke this morning to a black sky.

over time, the morning darkness gave way to some light! sunlight!

yaaay!
on the drive to a job, i snapped this shot through the windscreeen (i was driving west along burton st, darlinghurst)  – the first strong rainbow i’ve seen since shooting a rainbow in the inner-west.

was the pot of gold coming from the sydney cbd, or was it coming from the now hot property market in sydney’s inner west, or even from the hot property developers in strathfield? i don’t know.

nice to see some sunshine and a rainbow too after all this time. good feeling all around.

Edited: May 27th, 2010

up the back alley in darlinghurst

sorry to all you hard core porn searchers, “up the back alley” is just a simple shot of that – in darlinghurst.

Edited: May 26th, 2010

tranquil afternoon along the banks of the scenic cooks river

jakarta, cairo, shanghai? no, it’s sydney.

the cooks ‘river’ is a 23 km long waterway that once was a freshwater river with abundant life.it flows into botany bay.

since the 1930′s, most of the banks were re-enforced with concrete and it served as a channel for industrial waste. it is one of the most toxic waterways in australia.

today, it serves as an outlet for some 100 sq km of sydney stormwater within its watershed.  some 400,000 people live in this area and i have to say that many of them appear to be pigs.

this is one photo of a 20m section on one bank. imagine what gets caught up up and down stream and what sinks to the bottom – the rest just washes out to sea. out of sight, out of mind, right?

many thanks to all the pigs who throw crap out the car window, to those who couldn’t be bothered to throw their rubbish in a bin, or take it with them, as well as those who are addicted to soft drinks, fast food and bottled water. thanks heaps. you know your children will only see plant and animal diversity in books and will die young from cancer because of you.

oh and btw, on the right of the image, no, it’s not mud that you can walk on. it’s a thick layer of oil and other crud floating on the surface of the water.

i actually saw people trying to fish here – man, how much do you hate your family to feed them your catch?

Edited: May 22nd, 2010

under an overpass

just that, in filthy weather

Edited: May 18th, 2010

the land downunder, sunny sydney, woolloomooloo and pies from harry’s cafe de wheels

another cloudless, crisp sydney autumn day. people enjoying lunchtime pies from harry’s cafe de wheels down at woolloomooloo.

though they do great pies, i’d have to say they’re not the best i’ve sampled. but they are an institution and should be supported.

it just makes me think of the easy ’80′s, when things were uncomplicated and we lived a simple yet full life. Here is a clip that takes that in, complete with kurnell sand dunes, wanda beach, the ‘blessed’  sutherland shire and men at work singing about coming from the land down under (before they got slammed with a ridiculous IP suit for ‘kookaburra sits in the old gum tree’.

enjoy the clip while i’m allowed to show it, think back to the early 80′s and, pie in hand, throw some cheap snags on the bbq to celebrate:

Edited: May 7th, 2010

sunny afternoon in sydney

glebe park – it’s a top spot. the area used to be a bit of an industrial wasteland, and there are a few pockets here and there which still are. parked across the bay are berthed mega multi million dollar floating toys for the rich.

a popular place to take your dog for a swim.

Edited: April 13th, 2010

qantas taxis for takeoff

another smashingly brilliant day here today in sydney. can any aviation nut tell me what kind of aircraft this is?

botany bay was still as a lake, great water skiing day today for sure. perfect light, great visibility. you can even see the ports of botany there in the background.

Edited: April 11th, 2010

welcome to sydney

qantas makes touchdown at mascot

Edited: March 30th, 2010

souless, personless

sydney cbd. no people, just buildings and blue sky.

Edited: March 26th, 2010

ikea trolleys

if you ever go to a store and you see a carpark full of trolleys like you see her, i think it;s a pretty good warning sign that you should avoid this place on weekends AT ALL COSTS!

Edited: March 23rd, 2010