flat(iron)

Any serious travel is looking like it’s some time away at the moment – I’m thinking of New York (and looking through old photos) and wishing I was over…

vegas underground

Having recently been to (and hated) Las Vegas, I found it fascinating to read this article about a hidden city of homeless living in a network of tunnels beneath the city, including right under the strip.  The scenes…

currently reading: on the road

Shamefully, I have never read this before.

Needless to say, it’s a fascinating insight into a strange American era.  The book is filled with tension between the sudden possibilities of life in the postwar United States – the trajectory hinted…

Arizona/Nevada Border

We were stuck in traffic going through the Hoover Dam for nearly two hours – the Nevada police were operating some sort of mysterious checkpoint on the way into the state which slowed traffic to…

american food i have known & (mostly) loved, part 1

As a foreigner, one could be forgiven for having very low expectations of American food.  Mysteriously, what has been selected for export as representative of the USA tends to be fairly vile combinations of grease, beef, sugary bread and fake…

unscheduled delays

Please excuse the recent dearth of posts – I have had some non-swine related health issues.

Normal service to resume shortly, if all goes well, including the fabulous tale of travellers from a far flung outpost voyaging to the New…

urban decay photography

Following a link from this post at Skepticlawyer, via TIME to the photographer’s website, I came across these excellent galleries of urban decay: Detroit in decline; East-German industrial wastelands; and abandoned theatres.  It’s certainly…

harry nicolaides to be pardoned

An update on Harry Nicolaides – he’s set to receive a royal pardon.  Which is great for Harry, but just goes to show that the current Thai legal regime is one in which arbitrary decisions of…

perspective refresher

Pictures like these seem like a good enough reason to continue exploring space – it’s an excellent tool for reflecting the utter triviality of the apparently significant matters with which we fill our days.

Now if only we could find…

the strange case of harry nicolaides

This is disgraceful: a Melbourne man, Harry Nicolaides, has been jailed in Thailand for three years for insulting the Thai royal family in a novel he has apparently written.  The conviction is a result of Thailand’s anachronistic…

kidnapping, bounty hunting completely fine by U.S.

Confirming that the United States still regards the phrase “war on terror” to mean “license for continuing and willful insanity”, a lawyer representing the U.S. in a high profile case in England has indicated that the U.S. view is that…

we’re in the dark/spin (random travel photograph)

Bazooka Circus is what the whole world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.

- Hunter S Thompson

Typical Sydney-centric attitude

Limited/no updates this week, as your author is stuck in Sydney, home of the homeless.

Well, I’m stranded in the city that never sleeps
Some of these women they just give me the creeps
I’m avoidin’

…

how now, brown bureaucrat?

The lack of updates has been caused by your author’s temporary secondment to the home of closed supermarkets, icy wind and poorly dressed civil servants, Canberra.

We live in a political…

hypnotic photography website

Flickrvision is a strangely addictive website. It consists of photographs from the photo-sharing website flickr superimposed over a map of the world as they are uploaded. In other words, as you watch, you see an endless series of photos, with…