We kind of just stumbled on this Historic Houses Trust open house when we were driving around yesterday. The house is Rose Seidler House and is described as:
One of the finest examples of mid-century modern domestic architecture, the house contains a collection of original furniture by important post-war designers Eames, Saarinen and Hardoy.
Awarded the Sulman Medal in 1952, it has been a highly influential house, stimulating much social comment and intellectual debate. The house, contents and grounds have been carefully restored to the controversial 1950 scheme.
Here are some of the photos I took:
Unlike a lot of historic houses, this place had a really warm, welcoming feel to it. We just wanted to move right in! It was in a beautiful setting too - right on the edge of a national park. The reason my son has no shoes on in the last picture was that he had been running around in the bush with a Bush Turkey. He also confessed later to having used one of the toilets!
Here are some pictures from our day (more to follow):
I used to love this song in the late 80s and still do. It reminds me of seeing the Go Betweens live at the Old Greek Theatre in Melbourne and makes today's awful weather in Sydney more bearable. I think the setting of the clip is Brisbane city and suburbs. Does anyone else recognise any of it? Brisbane is not a city I know very well.
Yesterday was a very strange day at work. Dramatic events in state politics meant we spent most of the day watching press conferences on the Internet in someone's office. I even bought a packet of Jaffas in the afternoon for one of the press conferences.
Amidst all this drama, another drama was enfolding in our building which I will call The Great Toner Cartridge Swindle. Apparently these bogus toner cartridge collectors were doing the rounds of offices around the city stealing toner cartridges. Their MO was simply to knock on the door of an office and say they were here to collect and replace the used cartridges. They would then fill up their box with brand new cartridges and off they would go. They must have been pretty brazen as they hit our office once earlier in the week and then, despite numerous warning emails from building security, someone (and I am so glad I wasn't that someone!) let them in again yesterday. This resulted in the following sign being plastered all over the office (which I actually found kind of amusing):
The weather has also been fairly dramatic too, ie, the rain just bucketing down non-stop. I think the drought has well and truly broken in this part of Australia. This has been very fortuitous for the very junior member of state parliament who was given the water portfolio to cut his ministerial teeth on and is now, as a result of yesterday's parliamentary bloodshed, the Premier of the entire state!
He is obviously being set up by his party colleagues so had better take this warning to heart:
I think this picture really symbolises where the state Labor government is headed at the moment. It is an interesting truism of Australian politics that you can never have all the state governments the same political persuasion as the Federal Government (except during the interim stage after a change in the Federal government). I think the writing is well and truly on the wall for this lot even without Federal Labor in power.
As someone who has had a fair bit of involvement with this government, I actually felt kind of sad to see Iemma go yesterday (and I am sure I will get flamed for saying this!). I genuinely think he was sincere about trying to push reforms through but the party machine just too strong for him in the end. I think he always saw himself as a short term Premier and was just trying and do what he could in terms of reforms before the party machine caught up to him. Having resisted these reforms, there is no doubt where the current government is headed now.
(This is actually Museum train station, not the Museum itself - some of you may recognise it from one of the Coke ads).
This video (not mine) is of some trains at the station and is pretty much the sight I see every night going home from work. The station is pretty cavernous but not as hellish as other city stations like Town Hall where you can barely move due to the crowds and where I always worry that someone is going to be jostled onto the tracks one day.
Which TV chef would you want to have prepare a meal for you?
I probably wouldn't eat his cooking but at least I would get a laugh. Todd is actually the handyman who doubles as the 'gourmet chef' on the now defunct, SBS TV show 'Life Support'. Brendan Cowell who plays Todd has since gone onto bigger and better things such as the lead role in the fantastic Australian film Noise and is currently playing Hamlet in Bell Shakespeare's production (which I unfortunately missed when it was on in Sydney).
Here is Todd, I mean Brendan, talking about his botched audition for Noise:
He is such a talented guy. He can come and cook for me any day!
Here is where I was lurking for this week's portrait:
Here is the photo I took (not quite the effect I was hoping for):
This is my son's portrait contribution for this week (I am in the middle):
Following on from my alternative Vox hunt posts, I have set up a group called World Holiday Photo and Post Challenge, the purpose of which is to learn and post about different holidays that may be occurring in different parts of the world. Please consider yourself invited to come and join if you haven't already. The group is also kind of a reaction to the North America focus of so many of the Vox questions. In the group description, I have also included a link to a calendar to see what holidays are coming up. One that caught my attention this week was the Hindu festival of Ganesh Chaturthi. I have long been interested in the story of Ganesh, the elephant headed boy. This account of the story is from Wikipedia:
The Origin of the festival lies in the Holy Hindu scriptures which tell the story of Lord Ganesha. Lord Ganesha (or Ganapati) (the names mean "Lord [isha] or [pati] of Shiva's hosts [gana]") was created by goddess Parvati, consort of Lord Shiva.
According to the legend, Lord Shiva, the Hindu God of resolution, was away at a war. His wife Pavarti, wanted to bathe and having no-one to guard the door to her house, conceived of the idea of creating a son who could guard her. Parvati created Ganesha out of the sandalwood paste that she used for her bath and breathed life into the figure. She then set him to stand guard at her door and instructed him not to let anyone enter.
In the meantime, Lord Shiva returned from the battle but as Ganesha did not know him, stopped Shiva from entering Parvati's chamber. Shiva, enraged by Ganesh’s impudence, drew his trident and cut off Ganesha's head. Pavarti emerged to find Ganesha decapitated and flew into a rage. She took on the form of the Goddess Kali and threatened destruction to the three worlds of Heaven, Earth and the subterranean earth.
Seeing her in this mood, the other Gods were afraid and Shiva, in an attempt to pacify Parvati, sent out his ganas, or hordes, to bring the head of the first living being with his head towards the north (the auspicious direction associated with wisdom). The first living thing they came across was an elephant. So they brought the head of this elephant and Shiva placed it on the trunk of Parvati's son and breathed life into him. Parvati was overjoyed and embraced her son, the elephant-headed boy whom Shiva named Ganesha, the lord of his ganas.
These days:
Ganesha, the elephant-headed son of Shiva and Parvati, is widely worshipped as the supreme god of wisdom, prosperity and good fortune.
I have seen lots of representations of Ganesha in art or sculpture. This one resides in the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta and provides a reminder of Java's Hindu past:
I don't know if the holiday of Ganesh Chartuti is still celebrated in any of the Hindu parts of Indonesia, such as the island of Bali.
My yoga teacher, who is very interested in Hindu philosophy and beliefs, has a small statue of Ganesh in the room where we do our yoga, so expect she will have something to say about this holiday at this week's yoga class.
Would you ever consider having your life taped for a reality show?
Only if it was something like Renovation Rescue and we got to have all our renovations done for free. Even then, my husband would object as he is such an 'artiste' when it comes to that type of thing and he certainly wouldn't want any pesky tv people messing around with his grand vision.
Thought this was kind of amusing:
But it was the 2006 decision to open it up to the general public that drew howls from its original audience - and opened the door for the parental invasion.
In protest, several 'abolish parent' groups have sprung up on the site.
Yeamans and a few of his friends started "What Happens in College Stays in College: Keep Parents Off Facebook!" in 2007. They meant it partly as a joke but were stunned when more than 500 people signed on, each with a tale of parental intrusion.
Lily Goldberg, 17, a junior at Gaithersburg High School in Montgomery County, Md., said having parents on Facebook just seems weird.
"It's like having them walk into my room," she said.
Today, the fastest-growing segment of Facebook's estimated 66 million users are people 25 and older. More than half of the site's users are out of college. Whether that will have an impact on Facebook's coolness remains to be seen.
For a generation accustomed to sharing everything online, it might seem odd that two more pairs of eye would raise such concern. But Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied digital culture extensively, said there's a difference between the world and your parents. "What they want to keep most private is not something they wish to keep from strangers, it's the things they want to keep from people that know them," he said. "It's 'I don't care what someone who doesn't know me finds out. But I do care about what someone I know intimately (does).' "
My kids too young for facebook accounts but I did get a friend request from my aunty recently. I had a look at her profile and her 'friends' are her kids and me. She was always the kind of mother who tried very hard to be hip like her kids and boasted that she was more like a friend than a mother (not sure how her kids felt about this but one did rebel by throwing in her music studies and becoming a born-again Christian of the speaking in tongues variety). I decided against sending friend requests to teenagers I know (for example, the girl I tutored last year who also babysits for me) as I figured they probably wouldn't want an old fogey like me on their Facebook! 
In fact, they would probably prefer it if anyone over the age of 30 restricted their on-line networking to this site:
It is just after 3pm in Sydney and my body is telling me it is:
Is there some physiological reason why this occurs? I know it is not just me as whenever I am selling fundraising chocolates at work for the kids school or whatever, there is always a stampede of people coming to my desk at 3pm. Even if I am not feeling the cravings myself, this tells me that it must be chocolate 'o'clock.
