Showing all posts tagged: Australia
Australian high school drama Heartbreak High returns for third series
13 November 2024
The third — and it seems, final — series of Heartbreak High, in the second inception of the gritty Australian high-school TV drama, is on the way. Set at the fictional Hartley High, in Sydney, Heartbreak High originally screened between 1994 and 1999.
A rebooted version of the show debuted in 2022. Series one of the reboot was well received all around, and garnered a one-hundred percent Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer rating. Series two, while popular with audiences, did not however do so well critically.
The original nineties show was considered ground-breaking (read: in your face), and as I wrote before, Heartbreak High made my high-school days seem like a non-event…
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Australia, entertainment, television
Mr Big police stings: true crime that reads like crime fiction
30 October 2024
A police method of prosecuting people suspected of being responsible for committing a serious crime, almost reads like something from a crime novel:
Police manufacture a chance meeting with the suspect, then offer them paid work of a non-criminal nature before introducing jobs that appear to break the law. Through a series of interactions over several months, the sting makes the suspect believe they are being adopted into an organised crime gang with powerful connections to corrupt police, government officials and even judges.
Long story short, police — undercover officers — go about extracting a confession, or admission of guilt, from a suspect they believe committed a crime, but do not have sufficient evidence to place charges. The so-called “Mr Big” technique, which originated in Canada, has resulted in numerous convictions. Legal experts however are concerned some people may be wrongly convicted, as a certain pressure is put on would-be suspects to confess.
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Australia, Canada, law, trends
The top twenty cafes in Sydney 2024
24 October 2024
Good Food have published their list of the twenty best cafes in Sydney, Australia.
We eat at restaurants, but we live in cafes.
Yes, but we don’t work in cafes. Or we shouldn’t. If we do though, then only for short periods of time, right? And for a minute I thought one place I occasionally go to, had made the cut. But there’s a slight variation in the spelling of their names. Besides, I’m doubt I’m in Sydney enough to be ending up at any of the Good Food top twenty cafes.
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Do mullets make for great Australian Football League teams?
1 October 2024
I’m not very sporty as regular readers will have gathered. Of the approximate sixteen-hundred posts here at present, less than half a dozen are sport related. Of these, the majority relate to the Matildas, the Australian women’s football/soccer team, which I wrote during last year’s World Cup tournament. To think it’s been over a year now since that happened.
Last weekend though, was the grand final of the 2024 Men’s AFL (sometimes called Aussie rules) competition. The Sydney Swans, who I would regard as my local team — since geographically speaking they are the nearest club to me, and one of only two AFL teams in NSW — faced off against a team called the Brisbane Lions. Long story short, it didn’t end well for the Swans.
Then yesterday, I spot this infographic at FlowingData, illustrating how many players in each of the competition’s teams sport mullets. Interestingly, just four Swans players style their hair accordingly, one of the lowest counts in the league. On the other hand, nine Brisbane Lions players are mullet-ed.
My question: did this mullet imbalance have anything to do with the result of the grand final?
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Add new Australian volcanic activity to the list of worries…
6 September 2024
As if climate change, and the increasingly unstable weather it will bring, isn’t enough to worry about, parts of Australia may see an increase in volcanic activity. Not in the immediate future, thankfully, but at some point nonetheless:
It is much less likely that a volcano that has already erupted will start again. It is a lot more likely a new volcano will form somewhere else. That is almost a given. It is going to happen. The follow-up question is when is this going to happen? It may be in 100 years, or 5,000 years. We don’t know. We need to have more information to answer that question.
I’m unsettled by this lack of certainty here… one-hundred years isn’t really much. Nor, for that matter, is five-thousand years, speaking in geological terms. Let’s hope these new volcanoes appear later rather than sooner, or ideally, not at all.
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Coffee happy hour, discount prices for early bird customers
31 July 2024
Coffee happy hours at cafes? This is the first I’ve heard of the idea, but I like it. A growing number of Australian cafes are offering coffees priced at about three dollars a cup, for a couple of hours daily. This compared to the current average cost of about five dollars.
Cafe owners concede happy-hour prices are not making them a whole lot of money, but are hoping the deal will bring in a few new customers.
It’s a smart move, given coffee shop owners are not only competing with numerous other operators, but cheaply priced machine brewed coffee, priced at about two dollars a cup. Coffee making machines are common at service/petrol stations, and convenience stores, and the resulting brew is sometimes not bad. All the more so when there are no cafes to be found.
Their coffee and donut combination deals can also be hard to look passed as well…
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Should right to disconnect laws be scrapped because of lazy workers?
15 July 2024
Melbourne based Workplace Relations lawyer Paul O’Halloran, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, on Australian “right to disconnect” workplace laws that come into effect on Monday 26 August 2024:
Well, laziness is an increasing trend in the cases I defend for employers. Putting aside pandemic lockdowns where all sorts of things other than work were going on in people’s homes during virtual business hours, more recently I have been involved in matters where employees were surreptitiously sleeping on the job; forging time sheets with fabricated work hours; using fake medical certificates to take sickies; or watching Netflix while claiming to be working from home.
There’s still this perception that people working from home are bludging. Doing stuff-all. Watching Netflix all day (or some of the day). No doubt “all sorts of things other than work” take place in a work from home environment, child care duties among them. But is productivity not measured by, you know, productivity? If the required work is being turned in, why begrudge a busy parent for doing a load of washing in the gaps in-between workplace duties? It’s called work-life balance for a reason.
The solution though to this apparent reluctance to work at home, is to get everyone back into the workplace, where an eye can kept on them to ensure they do their “full eight-hour” day. The problem with the full eight-hour day though, is that it doesn’t exist. An American study found workers putting in an eight-hour day, actually did closer to three hours actual work a day.
Three hours? Say what? Much of the eight hour day is lost to web browsing and social media, making food and snacks, calling family, cigarette/vape breaks, and, last but by no means least: looking for another job. All under the watchful eye of workplace handlers. It seems to me then, if you’re putting in a minimum of three hours work, you’re doing well. Bonus points if it’s so-called deep work.
Certainly, there are lazy workers. Those being paid to do eight (would-be) hours work, but sitting in the break-room all day. Or “meetings”. But they’re in the minority, and are eventually weeded out. But leave the work-from-home people alone. Leave them to get on with their work. If it’s at least three hours per day, then there’s nothing to complain about.
If you’ve noticed posting here as slowed down at tad lately, it’s because work (from home) has been flat out. No Netflix and chill here (during work hours). I’m freelance, so the disconnect laws may not quite apply to me (but I do have do-not-disturb). Nonetheless, I am looking forward to some disconnect, and doing a little bit more here soon.
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Six dead in knife attack at Westfield Bondi Junction
13 April 2024
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):
A shopping centre in Sydney’s east has been evacuated amid reports of multiple stabbings and potentially a number of deaths. An eyewitnesses told the ABC shots were fired. NSW Police said emergency services were called to Westfield Bondi Junction just before 4pm after reports of multiple people being stabbed.
This is shocking. The centre would have been packed with weekend shoppers and young families.
I hotdesk there during the week when in Sydney. I’m trying to find out if the people I know who work there are OK, but ping me if you see this.
Update: sadly several people have died, and others were injured, as a result of the attack. The alleged perpetrator meanwhile was shot by a police officer, who was at the scene.
Update II: police are certain the attack was not terror related, nor motivated by any political or religious ideology.
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Australia, Bondi Junction, current affairs, Sydney
Third best coffee on Earth? Sydney. Tenth best? Melbourne…
11 April 2024
Espresso, brewed by Crepe & Coffee Co, photo by John Lampard.
Sydney has been adjudged the third best city in the world for coffee, this according to American magazine, Food & Wine. Copenhagen, perhaps unsurprisingly, comes in at number one, followed by Tokyo in second place. But here’s where things may get contentious: Melbourne — perhaps surprisingly — ranks at number ten on the list.
Number ten? How can that be? Did not Melbourne birth McCafe, the McDonald’s hamburger restaurant coffee-shop off-shoot? Isn’t Melbourne where the rest of Australia supposedly draws all ideas and inspiration coffee related from? Not that I’m trying to stoke up any Melbourne versus Sydney antagonism, or rivalry, here.
Not me. After all, I’m officially based almost two-hours drive north of Sydney. But when it comes to coffee consumption elsewhere, I’ve had more Sydney coffee than I have Melbourne. And besides, I like both cities. But they’re different places, they’re not cookie-cutter replicas of each other.
Objectively, how then could one possibly be better than the other? Let me illustrate, while keeping the theme victual. Years ago, a chef (whose name escapes me), described the differences between the two cities, thusly. When you go out for dinner in Sydney, it’s for a quick bite, because you’re on the way somewhere else.
That’s true. Sydney never stands still.
On the other hand, when you go out for dinner in Melbourne, it’s an occasion. People dress up, and stay seated at the table for hours. And sometimes we like doing both. But let’s avoid any further Melbourne versus Sydney discord, and take solace in the fact Australia is a country that embraces independent coffee brewers, and has little time for multinational coffeehouse chains.
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Australia, coffee, Melbourne, Sydney, trends
An alternative to a Voice: an Indigenous Australian state?
26 September 2023
In a few weeks Australians will vote in a referendum to decide whether the Australian constitution should be amended to include a Voice, an advisory body, for the nation’s Indigenous people. It’s an idea some people are not in favour of though, including a number of First Nations Australians.
Some Indigenous Australians are concerned a Voice may be tantamount to ceding sovereignty. Some would prefer a treaty. Others, the idea of a set number of Indigenous seats in the Australian parliament, along, for instance, the lines of the Māori electorates in New Zealand.
Misha Saul however suggests the interests of Aboriginal people would be better served by the formation of an Indigenous state, rather than ideas such as a Voice, treaties, and even Native title.
Isn’t this the most ambitious and satisfying of objectives? Indigenous Australians could have a state of their own, far larger than the miraculous successes of the twentieth century like Israel of Singapore of South Korea.
This is the first time I’ve heard of such a proposal.
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