There comes a time in every inner urban geek’s life when he has to get out of the city, and go somewhere that closely resembles the city in nearly every way.
Hepburn is my choice - spas, flotation tanks, vaguely healthy breakfasts.
The only problem is the drive is long and incredibly boring. Anyone know of any good overnight spas close in to Melbourne?
In my early to mid 20s I was technically rotund. Girth was an issue - it was all looking down hill in terms of weight. My metabolism decided to have a nice lie down to watch Jerry Springer. The kebab became an exciting late-night option.
Then in my late 20’s I started walking to work, going to the gym and generally being a bit active. (I also became single, which does wonders for the waistline.)
Now I’ve slowed the exercise down, and it’s starting to show. My three-piece suits are tightening around the vest region, and I’m rapidly becoming less than sprightly.
My excuse is changing jobs, driving the Little Green Bastard (my anaemic Hyundai Excel) to work every day, sitting at a desk and working later than my gym is open. I also have a geekette that enjoys making expansive dinners.
The work and commute ain’t going to change, so I’m wondering, has anyone got tips for work fitness?
What can burn calories at the desk? Or what’s a great lunch hour fitness activity?
Does your work have a fitness program? and if so, does it work?
Suits. After a blisteringly fast duo core running vj software at sixty frames, suits are the most glorious goods and services the modern geek can aspire to. And the most glorious exemplar of this glorious art is Anton’s.
Anton’s resides in the Paris end of Melbourne central.
If i die tomorrow, I want to die there, ritualistically abusing my credit card in the service of buying something incredibly loud, but so fantastically well cut that no-one will be able to object to it.
This is not the sort of place to go to if you’re after the standard office-grey number that will allow you to skulk into your work cubicle without the horrid social responsibility of having to actually talk to someone.
No. An Anton’s suit speaks for you. It says: look at me and shout my owner a Bloody Mary.
The staff at the store are fantastic. They buzz around, encouraging you to play dress-ups with a wide array of obscenely colorful suit fabrics, ties to make your pupils bleed, and other crap normal folk would never wear.
Wearing one of their suits makes you feel like you could take on the world - if only you could find your butler to pack for you.
The inlaws are halal eatin’ folk, which tends to impact on the venues I can take them to on those Sundays I’m feeling vicariously filial.
Late night kebab vans - my meal of choice - are prevalent in my nook, but not really the type of venue you want to take the geekette’s mama.
Now I have Kantara, Laabanese Bar and Grill, in Victoria st North Melbourne.
The food is good and plentiful. The dips are fresh, and run to more than just your standard humus and babaganush. The meat supply is large and imposing.
The best bit though is the owner. Within three minutes, he knows your family history and has explained exactly what those flurecent pink vegetable strips in the salad are. (Pickled turnip apparently).
Glorious stuff.
Multi-part question here - but first, the background. I wrote a whine about having to drive to Blackburn every day, something that until recently, I had no call to do. You see, until recently, I had been a die-hard pedestrian, and never really come to terms with the idea that Brunswick was not an outer suburb.
I got some great responses from the whinge, and a few tut-tuts about harming the environment. Fact is, a form of green locomotion has been on my mind for a while. I just can’t stand the thought of two-wheeled transport.
‘Buy a bike!’, my unkempt hippy friends cry.
‘No Thank you… and the soap’s on the credenza!, I cry back.
I generally then fob them off with a yarn about the Great Failed BMX Experiment of 1981, and how this scarred me from touching another two-wheeler for 15 years.
But the tale I tell them - filled with stackhats and spokydokes - is a mere front for a much darker truth.
The fact is, I just don’t like push bikes.
As a committed pedestrian, I have the same animosity to bikes as the pedal power crew have to cars. To me, bikes are just plain dangerous, especially when driven down the footpath or going through red lights because the flashing red man ‘doesn’t really apply’ to them.
But a bike it might have to be, if I’m to be able to put the Little Green Bastard (my glorious and manly 1995 Hyundai Excell) back in the garage where it belongs.
What’s a slightly bewildered pedestrian semi-commuter supposed to do?
Recumbent Tricycles!
I have no idea if they work, and I have no idea if one will get me to Blackburn in less than a day. They do look snazzy though, and apparently stay upright of their own volition.
I like the notion of both, so my questions are:
Are recumbent tricycles any good?
Am I thoroughly deluded at the thought of riding one all the way to the Paris end of Zone 2 every day?
Before a couple of months ago, I’d spent my entire working life in the CBD - very handy for a North Melbourne commute.
Now I find myself working in sunny downtown Blackburn.
When I realised the travel time to Blackburn, I immediately dusted off The Little Green Bastard (my Hyundai Excell), put away my pack of short trip tickets, and started driving into work every day.
And then the words of my hippie friends started ringing in my ears, imploring me to go green and use public transport.
Don’t get me wrong, I like PT - but only to a point. I resolved to take public transport. I lasted two weeks.
Yeah, public transport is fine down Erroll Street. Not so much in zone two. Nope, two hours of buses, trains and a tram (going one way).
It also doesn’t help that I’m going against the traffic: good if you’re in a car, five types of dodgy if you’re in an emphasemic non-express train.
The car is now back getting a workout.
My question is: Are there any options for fast PT going from the City to Blackburn and back again? Any hidden expresses, buses, train/tram combos? Any stations I should get off at then cross to another line? etc.
The planet will thank you, and I’ll feel a little more smug.
1560. In the blazing heat of a June morning, the armies of Imagawa Yoshimoto, fresh from overrunning fortresses of their enemies camped near a forest at the edge of the Kyoto road.
Without warning, a group of samurai swept from the forest and swarmed over the hapless soldiers.
By the end of the day, Yoshimoto lay dead on the field. The ignominy of having died at the hands of a low-ranked retainer a blot on his family’s history.
The new shogun lifted his glass for a toast, his heralds called for food, and they ate into the night.
At no stage however, did they eat avocado.
So why, nigh on 450 years later, does avocado infest nori rolls like gangrene?
It was probably the same contemptible scoundrel who first thought parsley was a great idea.
I work part time on Swanston street. Nice place to be really - good access to food - a tonne of sushi. But only two joints that refrain form the avocado. Such is my detest for the downgrading of the nori-rolling arts, I have come to frequent sushi trains.
Burger Republic: how I learned to love gentrification
5 Comments Published 1 year, 12 months ago in Local services.Burger Republic - somewhere on Erroll st, North Melbourne
I’m pro-gentrification - to a point. I love it when the trendoids descend on a suburb, fix its make up, give it an asymmetrical hair line and attach a crumpler bag under its armpit.
The point I stop liking gentrification is when young families swoop on a suburb so they and little Timmy can enjoy an inner city noisy-bustle lifestyle. And then complain about the noise and bustle.
To put it in other words, the point where I can’t stagger down the street at 3am bellowing Come on Aileen, without someone telling me to shut up, is the point I think about moving on.
Luckily, North Melbourne is in the adolescence of gentrification. We’ve got the cool bars and cafes, but also the students, gamblers and die-hard pub people.
A sign of our growing sophistication is Burger Republic - the best burger joint in the known universe. It’s about half way down the shopping strip.
Decor-wise, it’s clean but sparse - no posters for gigs in the windows, just a selection of magazines. The tables are communal - whether eating choice is trying to fit into the socialist theme of the joint, I have no idea.
The staff are all happy and perky in that cool-yet-comfortable-around-us-geeks kinda way.
But the real difference between this joint and all the other burger bars in the free world is the food.
The problem with most burger joints is that they all seem to be competing to be named as having the ‘Best Burger in Melbourne’. The problem is that the way they normally go about this is by trying to perfect your standard ‘with the lot’ bogan burger - all beetroot and machismo.
What makes Burger Republic special is that it’s unashamedly gourmet, but still slightly grungy.No shoestring fries here. No sprig of rocket on the side. No waiters in aprons looking bored and annoyed at you.
Instead, it’s big chips with satay dipping sauce. It’s blue cheese burgers. Or camembert and cranberry chicken burgers. Wasabi and avocado beef burgers.
Even those spoil-sport vegetarians are happy: tomato, capsucum and goat’s cheese burgers. Purists don’t be alarmed, there’s your standard ‘with the lot’ here to, but the beetroot has been turned into a relish, and the salad spruced up.
Wash it all down with a juice or a dry stella, and you have a place where you could eat in your tracky daks, but would generally choose not to.
I’ve just uploaded a profile image. What do you use for the image on your profile? It’s like your forum signiture, do you choose the earnest quote by some dead French philospher type, or do you go the pop-culture reference?
Or do you, like too many out there, go the Simpsons quote.
The Simpsons quote is like the Monty Python quote of the last generation - the last refuge of a desparate man.
The photo is the same. You want something that conveys your intellectual rigour, while maintaining an aura of mistique.
No people, a screen grab from a 1980’s anime cartoon is not sufficient.
Me, I actually use photos of myself. Not a popular move, I know - but personally I’m a little sick of the psuedo-anonymity of the web. Tell everyone who you are - you never know, they might recognise you in some bar and buy you a mocktail.
The next question is, what image should you use? Me, I go the cheeziest photo possible. There are only two types of image I ever look half decent in - the unintentionally cool, and the cheezy. Of the two, the latter is the only on I can rely on to be photographed looking like on a regular basis.
A couple of weeks ago, I took part in lab 3000, a design thinktank-night-thingo at a fabulous joint called the Blue Diamond Social Salon & Cabaret. I’ve ben told that most of the time it’s a members-only place. Shame. With members-only places, I get a kind of inverse Groucho Marx reaction. I only want to be members of clubs that wouldn’t have me as a member.
That aside, the joint has fantastic views and a well-developed selection of highbrow snacks. It’s equiped with a balcony on three of its sides, giving you a cityscape including some of Melbourne’s best neogothic and deco buildings.
The evening itself was cool, a chance for sneaker-wearing student designers to impress their older colleagues.
The highlight of the evening for me was standing on-stage in a blue three-piece suit from that apex of style Anton’s, telling the collected crew of black-clad design that they were tragicaly underdressed for the occasion.
Nothing like telling graphic artists that they aren’t the most stylish people in the room. I braced and waited for dozens of macbook pros and square-angled glasses to be hurled at me.
Instead, I felt two hundred brains think at my general direction: “I bet he designs office furniture”.
