I honestly can not think of anyone who likes the asthetics of the Sirius Tower. As Australia is almost always late to the party, the tower designed by Tao Gofers in a decidedly Brutalist style, was only commissioned pretty well much after the rest of the world had abandoned the movement. I think that the NSW Heritage Minister, Mark Speakman, quite rightly rejected the application to have this monstrosity heritage listed and although I defnitiely feel sorry for the people who have been displaced, having this awful and unsightly building on Sydney Harbour is a disgrace.
I think that this building looks like a nuclear bunker, which instead of being built underground, was mistakenly allowed to be placed above ground.
On the appeal to the Land and Environment Court, the new Minister for Heritage, Gabrielle Upton wrote that:
"My role is to decide whether the building has aesthetic value and, if so, whether that value is such as to satisfy heritage value at a state level; while the Sirius building is distinctive, in my view, it is not a landmark worthy of state heritage protection."
I couldn't have said it any better myself.
DS-1 - The DS-1 Workshop Manual
I was in Kinokuniya looking for a copy of the Master Tax Guide for the beginning of 2019 when just a couple of shelves along; in the technical section I saw one of these:
The first thing that struck me was that this wasn't included in the humour section of the book shop; which means that whoever filed this either didn't know what it was and put it with the other manuals, or else they did know what it was and played this straight and deadpan.
What I find worrying is that there IS a Haynes manual for a DS-1 Orbital Battle Station. It is never completely explained in the films but you'd think that with a thing of that size and magnitude that someone, somewhere, must've seen what was going on. How exactly do you hide something of this magnitude.
With something as big as this, there must be technical manuals for every single system on board; and if that's the case then how come the Rebels didn't just buy one of these in the films? The whole point of Rogue One is therefore pointless. You don't need some clandestine mission to steal secret plans when you can just go to some bookshop in Kettering and ask for a copy.
Also, considering that this is a Haynes manual, there is a good chance that the Defense-Sphere 1 had Lucas electrics throughout; in which case one needn't have gone to the effort of blowing it up - just sending it through the drive-through car wash would have been enough.
PKMN - Where Are The Fast Food Joints in Pokemon?
My experience with the entire world of Pokemon isn't quite as large as other people and admittedly I am something of a Genwunner because 151 of the things is already beyond my ability to remember; rather than having some weird kind of hatred for Vanillite which is an ice-cream cone and Trubbish and Garbodor which are garbage bags. It's a weird game. Get over it.
I do not remember there being anything in the towns by way of restaurants or fast food places. There are Poke Centres and Shops and there's even department stores but there seems to be a distinct lack of pubs, taverns, coffee shops, or other places that in other games you might recruit adventurers. The premise of "everyone meets in an inn" is so old that Chaucer started out The Canterbury Tales with his merry band of pilgrims meeting in an inn.
I suspect the reason that there are no pubs, taverns, coffee shops, or restaurants, is that that means that there has to be food and drink at these places. You probably can not have places selling alcohol in a children's game, which is fair enough, but as soon as you introduce restaurants to the world then that means that people are going to want to eat meat.
How do you tell all the Miltanks, Tauros, and Flaffys that they are now on the menu? This is rather the same dilemma that the makers of Star Wars Episode VIII have when Chewbacca suddenly develops a conscience and shudders at the thought of eating Porgs. In universe though, the Pokemon have no problems being right royal jerks to each other. They already fight each other and presumably if the people weren't around, they'd just fight and eat each other anyway.
This is why you need Charizard. Charizard is one of that rare class of Pokemon who couldn't give a hoot about anyone else. Charizard will burn your house down for fun. If you could somehow tame that rage for good, he might be useful.
Would Charizard or do well at a Burger King? It's the home of the flame-grilled Whopper. He could be out the back cooking the burgers to flame grilled perfection. Then again, Charizard would probably get tired of working for a spotty teenager boss and just as easily burn down the whole Burger King.
Maybe you want Charizard for a tailgate. He could be there with sausages and hot dogs; just sort of burning them. No. Check that. You don't want Charizard for a tailgate.
ZB-11 - ZB Commodore Is Absent
I went on an excursion on my last day of holidays to look for a guitar amp and some strings. Having acquired the necessary equipment to make my fingers hurt (I haven't yet acquired sufficient skill to make cool licks happen), I dropped in at two car yards because I think that that is fun. I sat in a Mazda CX-3 and came to the conclusion that there is virtually no difference at all inside the cabin to the Mazda 2 which I own, and I reached the same conclusion about the Mazda MX-5. Basically, get the Mazda 2. I then headed north on my journey home and walked through the Holden dealership wherein I saw precisely zero ZB Commodores.
I think that General Motors have more or less reached the conclusion that they are a spent force in Australia. Both the Astra and Cruze sedan which is sold as an Astra are massively underrepresented on the roads, the Barina is sort of there but the dealers don't like to sell them because there's hardly any profit in it for them, the Colorado is outclassed by the Ranger and the Hilux and the BT-50 and the Amarok and the Triton and even Great Wall's V240, and despite wanting to promote the ZB Commodore in the Supercars, demand for them has fallen off a cliff to such an extent worldwide, that Opel keeps on suspending production. There is of course no replacement plan for the Chevrolet Impala and so Holden is completely helpless in this respect when the contract with Opel ends in 2021.
Not that it matters much because if there are literally zero on the lot, they can not sell what they do not have.
PH-10 - Dark Dark Local History
What exactly was going on in this part of the world in the early 1800s?
The main drag of the suburb that I live in is named after a guy who made a small fortune in the early days of the colony of New South Wales by collecting bounty payments for the heads of dead Aboriginal people. The myth that before 1967 that the first peoples of this land were considered to be fauna is indeed erroneous but the truth is even crueler, as they were actually treated like vermin with an extermination price on their heads.
In addition to that, a suburb four stations down the railway line is called Pendle Hill. It is named after the Pendle Hill in Lancashire and is perhaps most famous for the series of witch trials and exterminations during the 17th century. I suspect that most witches were probably just old ladies who had no means of support and had to live by foraging from the land. Through experience they learned which things were edible and I bet that a bunch of so called witch's potions and remedies were actually just ad hoc medicine which had to be invented so that they wouldn't starve to death.
In the other direction, there is a suburb called Quakers Hill; so in between native people genocide and rounding them up into a place called Blacktown, and religious zealotry and a place named for where they killed witches, it must be said that I live in a pretty macabrely named kind of place.
BRx-19 - Brexit Means Brexit. Cameron Means Bad Man.
Of course the one who is standing out of the limelight and laughing his wee ickle head off into the history books is David Cameron. After having won an election and then announcing the referendum on Brexit to appease the more idiotic and racist parts of the Tory Party (and the walking punchline to a joke that gets progressively less funny the more times it is told, Nigel Farage) he then resigned after the Leave vote won and instead of staying in the parliament to help guide some semblance of sanity in the way that John Major did, he resigned to the Chiltern Hundreds and disappeared on a pedalo made of smoke; into the ether and never to be heard from again. He then assigned all of the 'miserable ghost at the feast' powers to Teresa May, who it must be said has the hardest job in the world of politics today. That job has been given an extra degree of difficulty with the barking insanity of Jacob Rees-Mogg (Minister for the 1920s) and Boris Johnson (Minister for Wiff-Waff), acting as Opposition Leaders from within and Jeremy Corbyn (as Shadow Secretary for Corduroy) as Opposition Leader from without.
Having successfully made it to January with nothing to give to Brussels (for them to reject out of hand regardless), and kind of holding on to the premiership but occasionally losing control of the House Of Commons, instead of a hardboiled or soft boiled Brexit, or even a half-baked Brexit with a soggy bottom and a soft border, Britain will be taking back control with a no deal, unbaked Brexit. If you have a no deal and it is unbaked, then when it is time to open the golden suitcase and see what you've won, then all you get is a mess of cracked eggs, flour, milk dribbling all over the place, and a giant mess on the floor of both the House Of Commons and the Euro Bureau. That's what you get when you try to bake a democracy cake in a suitcase. It was always a terrible idea and David Cameron doesn't have to clean any of the mess up.
BT - 12 - Twelve Buck Sandwiches?
Unlike the business world before the 1990s which I imagine was either fuelled by booze, cocaine, and tobacco, the modern business world is increasingly powered by caffeine and smug. Granted that it was caffeine that powered the first golden age of journalism and probably most of the enlightenment, it was tea that lubricated the British Empire, and coffee and sleeplessness that sent the Americans to the moon but I just don't see what this world of caffeine and smug is going to do except build more smug.
There is a café in the city which I whizz by every day while on the top deck of a bus, which sells a super fancy version of the classic BLT which they call a BRAT - Bacon, Roquette (sic.), Avocado and Tomato sandwich - price $12. To be honest I am horrified at the thought of paying as much for a single sandwich as I would in a week of making my own.
The first time that I noticed this dozenal dollar item on the shop's board out front, I immediately thought of Bernard Salt's now infamous column talking about Smashed Avocado sandwiches which cost $22. In that column which is probably a work of satire that he prefaces the whole thing by vaingloriously proclaiming the virtue of his generation for comedic effect, he talks about young people not being able to afford a house because they're all loading up on Smashed Avocado sandwiches. My experience of working in Mosman for a decade and a half, coupled with being sent into the city on multiple occasions, as well as observation of looking to see who is in these cafés leads me to believe that there are no young people in there because they like me, baulk at the idea of paying more for a sandwich than an hourly wage.
I told Mrs Rollo about this and she jubilantly suggested that if you replaced the Bacon with Prosciutto for even greater fanciness, then this sandwich would be called a PRAT.
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