The Mount Kembla Chronicle

Shintaro and the pinnacle of technology

This post may be found here.

Postcard from Mt Kembla

This post may be found here.

Postcard from Chicago

Pauline has just concluded a visit to the American Educational Research Association Conference in The Windy City of Chicago. Following are some impressions of this trip.

Never work with children or Scottish Folds

The comedian W C Fields is famously reported to have advised up-and-coming performers to never work with children or animals.

I shall now break this rule by presenting the following item, stumbled upon accidentally on YouTube.

(This will take several minutes to download on a slower internet link. Some institutional servers automatically block YouTube.)

Yomigaeru-ga-ii, Iron Chefs! (I summon the Iron Chefs!): Potato

Tonight's Featured Ingredient on Iron Chef (Ryōri no tetsujin - 料理の鉄人, "Ironmen of Cooking") on SBS Television is...

Potato

I hope Dan Quayle was watching - after the former Vice President of the USA achieved infamy bytelling a schoolboy that "potato" has an e on the end.

And this from the political party that brought us the "No Child Left Behind" literacy education law.

The picture at the top of this post refer to Paul Mickle's 1992: gaffe with an "e" at the end published in The Capital Century .

Great moments in journalism

A minor Great Moment occurred this week as the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the oldest driver in the State of New South Wales - a gentleman rising 102 or so - had voluntarily handed in his driver's licence.

Why, wondered the reporter, did the gentleman wait until he was in his late 20s before seeking the OK to drive a car. Why not at age 17 or 18, like most young men?

Because, the gentleman replied, motor cars were not yet around when he was 17 or 18.

The picture at the top of this post is from the website of the North Yorkshire County Council.

Thoroughly Modern Sydney

Yesterday we visited the "Thoroughly Modern Sydney" exhibition at the Museum of Sydney.

This exhibition illustrates a Sydney that is now largely extinct, with a gracious bygone city now well and truly bulldozed by the onslaught of property development.

The exhibition particularly documents the influence of art deco as an architectural style. This was used widely in bringing a post-World-War-I Sydney from a position of neo-colonial outpost to an early version of a cosmopolitan city.

The Museum also provided a copy of a walking tour of surviving art deco buildings in downtown Sydney, copied here.

The image of Harold Casneaux's A study in profile [picture] : [portrait of Margaret Vyner] (1931) is reproduced here for purposes of study and research from the website of the National Library of Australia.

This exhibition has now closed.

Pissarro in the City of Shadows

We spent a pleasant weekend enjoying the hospitality of our friend John in Sydney.

On Saturday night we walked down to the centre of the inner western suburb of Croydon to enjoy the warm summer evening, admire the federation architecture of the houses, and have tea in the high street.

The Croydon high street has the reputation, according to John, of having the most unaltered Edwardian-looking surviving high street architecture in suburban Sydney. and it certainly looks that way, too (alas, no photographic evidence to present here - sorry).

On Sunday we played tourist in downtown Sydney, visiting 2 notable exhibitions:

The Pissarro Exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

The City of Shadows exhibition at the Justice and Police Museum.