MAN THESE ARE GOOD

Questions



The man your man could smell like

THE ART OF BLACK & WHITE # 2

Woman

TIME TO STRUT

Spanish style

Stay with it, after the 30 seconds of awesome Spanish dialogue it's one minute of pure strut. Still the greatest walking/strutting song of all time. Cos I know ya all love to strut....

POP ART BLUE - ZERO 7

It's free download week here at YeLPar



Zero 7 have a new album out soon, can't wait

FROM THE COOL FILES

For the third time in the last 6 days, another line of nasty storms rolled through Chicago on Wednesday evening. In this clip you will see three of the tallest buildings in Chicago get struck by lightning at the same time. Willis Tower (Tallest), Trump International Hotel and Tower (2nd Tallest) and the John Hancock Building(4th tallest).

HD Video was shot on a Canon EOS 7D. Video was edited with Sony Vegas Movie Studio.

"Wed's storms towered up to 63,000 ft, unleashed 80 mph gusts, local 3"+ rains and 15,000 cloud to ground lightning strikes in a single hour." via @Skilling

Music: Sufjan Stevens - To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament

Directed filmed and edited by: Craig Shimala

THE HOOD # 112

Look, Love and Leave and I think that's meant to be a Dope Obama above



awful cropping but I took a few and this is the only one not blurred <- I suck

COSMIC LOVE

A nice short club remix of Florence and The Machine's song Cosmic Love, and a bunch of other free downloads from them for ya all here....

DOGS IN CARS

So it's a dog see, and it looks like it's driving the car and there's a smaller dog in the back seat being chauffeured by the other dog. Get it? Get it? It's like they're human. Too funny....

yeah okay, it just that it gets kinda boring when you're fueling up the car

TRA VINH

"So what's the plan for tonight, where do we want to eat?"

"I really feel like a Vietnamese soup, let's try the place on the corner of William and Brisbane st"

"Are you sure, I never see anyone in that place, pretty sure it's just a front for drug money"

I was assured that it wasn't and in fact as it turned out it wasn't even the place I was thinking of, Tra Vinh is a few buildings further down Brisbane st. I'd actually wanted to eat in this place for ages, it's nearly always packed, that's a good sign.

Tonight though it was only 3/4 full so the three of us managed to get a table. 60 seconds after we sat down a waitress thrust herself upon us asking us if we wished to place our order? I was still getting my coat off, Gaz had actually opened his menu and Waz was staring at the cover of his. "Probably gonna need a few more minutes" I said. No doubt she figured us as amateur Vietnamese soup eaters, surely we'd know what we wanted before we got there.

We then made a bit of a mistake, Waz and I decided we'd have an entree. Gaz declined, it was as if he had eaten here before and he knew, he simply knew. Tra Vinh is simple Vietnamese fare and the entree section in places like this are really only put there to appease the stray Anglo client who happens to wander in. Entrees don't really feature much in Asian cuisine, at least not in the same way as they do in western cuisine, this is reflected in the standard choices on offer of wantons, spring rolls and satays.

Being very Anglo we soldiered on with the charade, I chose the chicken satay and Waz the wantons. Now the wantons arrived first, pretty fair to say that they had been "fried the shit out of". Two minutes later out came my satay....

You can see from the pic that I was unsure if I had ordered satay sticks or satay soup. It really didn't matter in the end as the only resemblance to satay in this dish was....well there wasn't any. The sauce was tasteless and I'm really not sure what it was actually made with, gel like in consistency and impossible to wipe up with a paper napkin, strange! The chicken itself was dry and overcooked and why there were slices of tinned mango on top, well I'll never really know. It wasn't off to a good start. But you really shouldn't judge a place like this by their crappy Anglo orientated entrees should you?

Within 60 seconds of my satay floater arriving the soups came out, the idea of a gap between entree and main just doesn't float here, however, my satay sticks certainly floated....okay enough of the satay jokes already. It's not that we were surprised by the immediacy of the mains, we 3 eat out a lot, we're used to it and in fact tonight we welcomed the speed of their arrival. Now this is where Tra Vinh gets it pretty alright. Waz chose a crispy skin chicken noodle soup, Gaz I think a meat and noodle soup (correct me if I got that wrong Gaz, I know that piece of something or other you chose not to eat was definitely offal of some sort) and I had the braised duck noodle soup.

That's my braised duck soup in the foreground, it was served with a rather dry and crusty looking leg of duck which once attacked fell away from the bone beautifully and really had a lovely flavour. I chose to break it up and add the meat to my soup. Waz chose to throw his chicken straight in, bones and all. He decided soon after, that he'd chosen wrong. Gaz had no bones. That deadly looking bowl of chillies mid frame looked so deadly that I wasn't game to add any of it to my food, nor was anyone else for that matter.

The soups are good, the broths tasty and the ingredients fresh. At $44 for all of the above it's pretty cheap as well. Would I head back? Yes definitely, would I order an entree? Hell no!

THAT'S A PARTIAL BABY

I almost forgot about this happening tonight and I was just about to head out to Karks' party when I heard the neighbours entire dinner party bundle themselves out the front door. That got me wondering why a dinner party suddenly hits the street and that's when I remembered. I used my 300mm lens but even that doesn't give the clarity you need to photograph the moon. Happy though that I managed to capture some of the copper/brown they said the moon would turn tonight.

Hmmm, home by midnight and I'm suprisingly sober and yet it was a great party, what's up with that? Here's the eclipse....

PRYOR ST ATLANTA

An awesome then and now I've found, it's Pryor st in Atlanta. First pic in the 40's or 50's, second pic is the same intersection today, using google st view. If you look down the street you can just make out a single building that's still standing from the first pic. Not striking me that the neighbourhood updates improved it all that much over the decades. What do you think?

Then

and now

CHROMEO - NIGHT BY NIGHT

Okay, time to dance everybody

THE HOOD # 111

A piece by Creepy and others on some worksite boardings, Beaufort St, Northbridge

365 DAYS WEEK 32

Week 32 of my 365 Day challenge was spent without much of an internet connection (still the case) so not much YeLPar action I'm afraid. I on the other hand have been crazy busy, moving into my new house, meeting new neighbours and discovering my new hood (not that 3 blocks constitutes a new hood, but it has opened up the northern edges a bit). It's good to own a home again, this is gonna be a lot of fun.

HOSIER LANE, MELBOURNE

My buddy in Melbourne, Ged, snapped these pics in Hosier Lane and he was cool enough to let me share them here. I love this lane and I snapped a couple of pics on some of my trips there a few years back. I fact, this pic I took has some samurai which you can still see bottom right of the second pic below, almost 4 years later. That's pretty cool too.

I AM A SPACE SHIP

yes you are

spotted in the back streets of North Perth

365 DAYS WEEK 31

Week 31 of my 365 Day challenge was enveloped in the big move. I finally bought a house again, well it's more like I bought half of an old church hall that's been turned into a house. And I'm kind of lovin it big time, sadly the week ended poorly but I wont dwell on that cos it'll just ruin my high.

DIRECT ORDERS

"You have been given a direct order to rock the fuck out"



"Rock out like the streets and the books are all on fire and the flames can only be extinguished by doing the electric slide"

so much awesome

ON THE MOVE

Things may go a bit silent around here over the next week. I'm moving house and the whole connect internet thingy apparently takes a few days so I shall be internetless till then.

Here's my Vespa leaving its' old home and heading to its' new one where she has a lovely undercover spot to sit and wait for me to eventually get my damn licence so I can ride her. Soon, soon I promise.

MOVING HOUSE

Yep I've finally got my act together and bought myself a house of my own again. I've been renting for 8 years now and I really should have bought sooner. I've found a converted church hall in Mt Lawley and I'm moving tomorrow. More on that later.

One of the benefits of moving house is finding stuff you thought you'd lost. Like these old pics of Penny and myself in Surfers Paradise, QLD. Late 80's I think. Both of us looking extremely young, fit and tanned ....ahhh the days! Photo booth pics are the best aren't they? Sadly most are colour these days and that's only if you can actually find one

Check out my rad Ray-Ban Wayfarers....hello ladies!

...............

Yes I know that's a 96fm windcheater, but hey that's all we had back then :/

365 DAYS WEEK 30

Week 30 of my 365 Day challenge began up in the Pilbara and included the most incredible sunrise I have ever seen. Then it was back to the urban life for a wile.

TIME FOR A WHINGE

Years ago (back in the 80's) I did a stint chefing in London. London is awesome, but some aspects of English life leave plenty to be desired. Sure the weather sucks and the food is (was) for the most part boring but one thing that struck me hard was the newspapers. Tabloid rags for the most part. There were exceptions with the likes of The Times, The Independent and The Guardian. But so many like The Sun, The Sunday Sport etc etc were nothing more than crappy gutter tabloids with wildly imaginary or outrageous headlines.

For example, I once scoped a Sunday Sport headline that said....

"Hitler is alive and well and living on the dark side of the moon"

Riiight, sure this was an extreme example and clearly no semi intelligent person would believe it would they....would they? The other that stands out in my memory is the ever amazing headline....

"Freddie Starr ate my Hamster"

It was of course complete bollocks but many people believed it to be true and it serves as a fine example of the crap they did and still do serve up to the English public. So when I see my local rag dishing up headlines like this one....

"Demonised dentists deny dodgy deals"

I seriously cringe, I see a future filled with devoured Gerbils. I mean, has the mining boom turned all of the decent journos into driller offsiders? Are they off chasing the big bucks that come with the resource boom? I know it's often hard to get good service in a Perth restaurant because all the good staff are up north making a killing but have the journos jumped ship as well? Are we doomed to a future filled with 3rd rate journalism? "Ooh aren't I clever I know 5 words that start with D and form one of those long wordy things, you know, um....a sentance, sentence, sentince? Something like that".

Aaaaggghh my left kidney for a decent newspaper. It needs fixing or the print news service is dead. What will we do over breakfast? Talk to our loved ones? Dear god, morning conversation? This cannot be allowed to happen. We need newspapers, save the paper, for the love of god save the paper.

"Maddened Male Murders Mate Over Morning Muesli"

See, I can't find six words that start with m that form a sentence, that's what we need/have journalists for.

THE ART OF BLACK & WHITE # 1

Americana