A feast of Proustian treats — alas, creamy chocolate, raspberry fruit cream, cherry ripe, we clearly did not remember or love you enough. Long live the delta cream! #nomnom
Bibliophibian. Dilettante. Free-range nerd. She/her. Living on unceded Wadawurrung country.
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A feast of Proustian treats — alas, creamy chocolate, raspberry fruit cream, cherry ripe, we clearly did not remember or love you enough. Long live the delta cream! #nomnom
Am slowly weeding and reflubbishing my library/writing space, and it’s a similar vibe* 😏 PS: your studio looks fab 😍 * though obviously a different field of interest
Oh, I just assumed somewhere around 90% 🫠
Woman at the next table is telling her friend about her new career: it starts with setting up an online platform for delivering trauma-informed Pilates classes. (And physical therapy.) #CafeLife
Trish the postie beetled up on the scooter this morning to deliver this parcel and shout jauntily, 'Living the dream!' from the footpath. Unimprovable. #Freepotatoes #Spring #seeds #Delivery
Professional communicators and editors make this kind of writing look easy and straightforward. In fact, it’s an example of mastery acquired via extensive training and practice.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner 😎
If we’re going to have a long weekend between June and December, I’d rather it be for the footy than for a horse race 🤷🏼♀️
Escaping into new possibilities…
😍 Love the ambiguity of this one: drifting apart, falling into place.
PS: Michaelangelo learned reading & writing late in life. How did he learn all that Biblical and mythological imagery he put into his art? Dining informally at Medici’s table with merchants, scholars, engineers, artists etc. A conversational ideas incubator.
My car is slowly training me to not think aloud, argue with the radio presenter, or sing while driving. Which is silly, ‘cos the thingo displays an animated dog 🐶 as it responds to my voice and who doesn’t want that? 🫠
Mum strolled past with her two young children on little bikes. She did a double-take at the clump of freesias blooming on my nature strip, kept walking several steps, returned, bent to touch and smell, then plucked one of the stems and continued on her merry way, holding the flowers to her nose.
On misery and finding contentment (thread 👇🏻). Thank you, Ennie: this is a bit of clarity I didn’t know I needed.
You bring joy because your heart is just as big and warm as Kerry’s is 💚 (there should be a purple heart next to that green one, but for some reason I’ve lost the ability to use that emoji on BlueSky so you’ll just have to imagine it)
Hang on, authors are supposed to write about what *they* know, not what I know 🫣
Oh my goodness, what a thoughtful and generous gift! You’re definitely among friends at that garage 🫠
“…cultural historian Stephen Muecke's imagined settler/stranger saying: ‘I come from a place where the word is sovereign', to which an Indigenous person might respond: 'That is not a place, it is a story; stories without places will pass, like your time passes... My place is sovereign'.”
😳
Yep, #FoundThatLizard — much smaller than I expected, so it took a while 🫠 Thanks, Earyn, a fun start to my Monday morning.
Learned last week that a #CafeLife acquaintance has an expert friend who will (for a fee) sort your buttons and identify valuable/sellable ones. My inherited buttons came to me in Quality Street tins.
The ‘silk’ might not actually be silk, but referring to the light weight and smoothness of the material. During the two World Wars, escape and evasion maps were commonly called ‘silk maps’ regardless of actual fabric: eg USA and Japan used synthetics such as rayon acetate.
In crime fiction the Cliff Hardy novels by Peter Corris and Jon Cleary’s Scobie Malone series can be read as love letters to Sydney. Lorin Clarke’s radio/podcast series, The Fitzroy Diaries, is more affectionate than ironic in its portrait of inner-suburbs Melbourne.
Well, the 2025 GF will be a 🦁😺 catfight, so…
Ingredients list is disturbingly lacking in violets …which I suppose bodes well for the scouts population in Ararat.
aaw :-) Now I’m feeling nostalgic for the joy of regularly cycling from Belconnen to Braddon and back - in the 1980s there was a fab bike path through the bush and past the AIS and stadium. Delightful in all seasons.
Anyway, what I was trying to illustrate in that story is the ease with which a technology can move from “that’s unethical” to “we need it for operational efficiency / security / some other excuse”. Meanwhile policy and org culture struggle or fail to keep up with changing demands and capabilities.
Yes, indeed. Almost all of our universities are publicly owned and funded: we’re currently witnessing the results of years (decades) of poor govt policy decisions and dwindling public investment in post-secondary education of all kinds. Ditto university research. 💔
Hah! Thank you, much appreciated :-) It’s a lovely call, quite zen in its mood and rhythm.
Low-key hoping @ecosystemunraveller.com or some other knowledgeable person might be willing/able to identify this (👆🏻) elusive feathered weirdo with the deep voice.
Friends, are the present-cupboard-y amongst you thinking about Xmas presents? Ahem! These books are the antidote to hard-sell celebrity & useless 'wellness' marketing, big lies & frightful dullness. I promise you fun as well as updated, evidence-based, independent honesty. Local bookshops & online.
Born in 1873 Maori scholar Mākereti Papakura is believed to be the first indigenous woman to matriculate at University of Oxford. She enrolled in 1922 to read Anthropology at Pitt Rivers Museum but tragically died just before graduating. She will be awarded a posthumous degree in Oxford next week.
Love to see it! 💪🏻 💚 (When she moved out of home, friend Katherine’s dad started giving her power (and other) tools for b’days, with lessons. Great parenting 😎)
Strolling through the McClelland Sculpture Park, we were intrigued by an unfamiliar hoot/hum/om: we counted at least four birds in different thickets, one with a slightly higher-pitched voice. Turn the video volume to max: it’s a very quiet call amongst the wind and traffic noise. #AwesomeBirds
Worrye not about 'being productive,' for thou art not a product. Thou art a star daunsinge yn a hopeful skye. A signal blinking across centuryes and worldes. Thou art a song performid just once and perfectlye.
* that first study looked at anonymised, aggregated data like lecture theatre occupancy/usage and the number of trips across a busy street — patterns that could help with timetabling and campus planning
Ethics, shmeffics 🙁 Friend/former colleague and I were reminiscing about the university developer who was sacked some years ago for using wi-fi network traffic to track people’s movements on campus. This year the uni deliberately used wi-fi data to track and identify anti-war protesters 😔
Note to self: at our next appointment, ask sleep specialist whether he knows of any good didj teachers who won’t care that I have almost zero musical talent.
So glad you’re both here in the world, Matt and Spike: you two and Dandy have become an awesome found family 💙💙🧡
This one crazy brick can transform a messy canvas into a finished artwork: attend the exhibition to find out how!
NEW on Wonkhe: This week’s card from Hugh Jones’ postbag brings an unlikely pairing of literary giants buff.ly/uAXe4AY
Fifty years later… www.autocar.co.nz/honda-announ...
www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-...
Old art, objects, places, can illuminate current ideas and events, if we have the courage to keep returning to those archives, re-examining them and creating new stories from them.
arrrrgggh VPN, me hearties #TalkLikeAPirateDay
🏴☠️
aarghh me hearties
I wish more people shared your awareness and grace. Dealing with nosy busybodies does not enhance the experience of grief or aid recovery.
A Guardian analysis of age assurance technology trial data, which will underpin the government’s teen social media ban, shows the impact of introducing age checks will fall hardest on already-marginalised groups www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...
Having survived an average of one restructure every 18 months in the period 2001-2018, I hear ya 😔
We did our best, but my experience of coordinating UF data collection at a large university in the 20teens involved a certain amount of handwavium🪄 OTOH it did serve as an annual prompt to update the org charts 😏
This is your captain speaking. www.kirstywebeck.com/shows
Trick I learned from watching the Stihl sales rep: hold the pull-cord steady and use your other hand (on the top of the rectangular handle) to shove the mower forward, away from you. Works a treat and puts much less strain on back, arms and shoulders.
Here's a #HigherEducationPostcard of @harvard.edu This little known college, rarely in the news, was founded in 1636, making it the oldest higher education institution in the USofA If you like this image, please retweet it - remember, BlueSky has #NoAlgorithm
Love that my well-mannered, reserved, ladylike mum had an orange Torana in the early 70s: pretty sure she was a secret revhead 🤭
Took me a long time to reconcile with the original version 😏
Thought for a mo she was holding a machete 😳 Lovely frock, though.
Did that today: 9th symphony, final movement, volume cranked up to 11 🥰 (still love it, despite the tune being repurposed for my high school’s motto song. Curse you, Brian Waters: you were a fine English teacher but those sticky lyrics have haunted me for 40-odd years 🙄)
By the way, you can in fact run a media business where people give you money for goods and services. 56k+ people give The Onion ~$100 and we give them a year of newspapers. This business didn’t exist last year in this way. People will pay for good shit. Now’s the time to break glass and go for it.
What do you see? 👀
He also spent years (while Labor were the Opposition) building relationships and developing policy, so that when the opportunity to win government arose he was fully prepared to set a bold agenda and lead its implementation.
You might enjoy this profile of Des O’Toole. I’ve been buying his honey since the late 1990s: it’s always worth a day trip to Daylesford to taste the samples, make a selection and stuff some cash into the steel box on his roadside stall. www.lostmagazine.com.au/content/2017...
After the deaths of three women in Ballarat, the townspeople came together to combat gender-based violence, by starting multiple programs, campaigns, education and support services to shift the attitudes and behaviours that drive violence. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...
When a stranger, on the basis of a brief chat, invites you to join their monthly ‘conversation group.’
😍
“In universities, as our liberal assumptions would have it, knowledge is disembodied and 'out there', ideally for anyone to use freely. But perhaps knowledge is not best understood as disembodied and free' but as existing always in relationships with others.”
Pretty in pink, with a string of pearls.
Alice Elizabeth Anderson #Australian businesswoman, garage proprietor designer & mechanic. Set up 1st all-women garage workshop in Australia in 1919, mothers from across country would send their daughters to garage to learn how to drive. d. #OTD 17 Sep 1926 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_E...
A fun commission for Jerez about an architect building a maze.
Bees 🐝
A Wodehousian Aunt if ever I heard one! 🤭
“If we leave it up to the market, you would have only offices, furnished tourist rentals and second homes — a Paris without Parisians, a Paris for the rich” (Indeed. Look at Anglosphere capitals. Amusing to watch the FT try to get its head around this pretty excellent policy) on.ft.com/4nxze08
There’s a quiet comfort in knowing who’s picking you up. With Shebah, that moment at the curb feels easy, not anxious. And that's how it should be 💚
Melbourne folk! Do you have young kids? I’ll be doing a storytime at Parkdale Library this Friday 19th. It’s for Talk Like a Pirate Day. 🏴☠️ 10.30am - 11.30am. It’s free, but book here: libraryevents.kingston.vic.gov.au/event?id=160...
Exactly 😊
Sitting in my car, absolutely *riveted* by Queen’s “Don’t stop me now” on ABC Classic radio 📻 Performed by an ensemble called Philharmonics, comprising five artists from the Vienna and Berlin philharmonic orchestras. Hilarious, joyful, charming 😍
Thanks, Jenny — loving these highlight clips 😍
Australia’s quietest cockatoo is running out of trees. We have betrayed its gentle curiosity | Joseph Earp
(though I wish somebody would come up with a not-colonialist/racist name for them 🙄)
This week it's the vase of oriental lilies on the hall table: their sultry perfume wafts gently throughout the house.
Handwritten text: "14/10/07 We arrived here yesterday leave next Saturday for Liverpool ask Polly to knit a pair of gloves and comforter and send to Liverpool for next trip"
But portable!
An offline friend is reviewing a pile of 30 or so 'endorsements' to an insurance policy - lists of amendments, essentially - without having access to the original policy (yes, she did ask for it). Similar vibe.
wtf kind of survey was this?? Sounds invasive at best, sinister at worst.
I like @fyfepeter.bsky.social’s approach - using the free-text box* on a pointless or poorly-designed survey to exercise a bit of whimsy and caprice. * and any other opportunity
Physics, glorious physics: Two of my heroes: Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein shown to be even more brilliant than we already knew. (I taught physics for decades): 10 years ago, gravitational waves changed astronomy. A new discovery shows there’s more to come theconversation.com/10-years-ago...
Hear hear! Even better if gender, relationship status, and ownership/rental were separate questions, for more accurate analysis.
“Other”
Fifty years ago, Papua New Guinea became independent from Australia. The speech Gough Whitlam delivered on that day reminds us both of Australia's history as an empire, and how thoroughly the nation has forgotten its colonial past and the responsibilities which grow from it.
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
According to legend, the role of information architect was first posited by actual architect Richard Saul Wurman in his book “Information Anxiety.” He was pretty good at influencing: founded the TED conferences.
Mystery solved => hopefully opens a path to better treatment/management of the new condition and its effects 🤞🏻 No pet pix, but I did encounter this handsome soul at NGV today, gazing adoringly at a tiger on the other side of the jar.
This one’s for @gailcarriger.bsky.social #ParasolSpotted
Paul Potiki 
