Gay hipsters and zealots

HEY you! Latte-sipping hipster of Newtown or Fitzroy. You’re worse for the environment than a fleet of trucks.

Look at you, sitting there in your wholefood cafe, munching on your kale salad (yum!) and whingeing about why your city can’t be a freewheeling bicycle utopia like Paris. You just don’t get it.

This is the entirely unflattering view NSW’s Roads Minister Duncan Gay takes of Australia’s inner-city residents, as he rails against (or, should that be “roads” against?) their extremist pro-train agenda.

Politicians continue to fend off criticism from residents (oh, and pesky planning experts) for prioritising mega roads — such as Sydney’s whopping Westconnex motorway and Melbourne’s maligned East-West Link — over public transport.   Gay hipsters and zealots

Don Watson recently published Bendable Learnings. Like Death Sentence, it contains some chilling illustrations of language which has had the life sucked out of it.

Of Bob Hawke: “When speaking off the cuff he embarked on his sentences like a madman with a club in a dark room: he bumped and crashed around for so long his listeners became less interested in what he was saying than the prospect of his escape. When at last he emerged triumphantly into the light we cheered, not for the gift of enlightenment, but as we cheer a man who walks away from an avalanche or a mining accident.”

"Trachypithecus obscurus" spotted by triggsturner:

Facebook users in Australia are on average spending the equivalent of a full working day on the social networking service each week, a new survey shows.
According to the Sensis Social Media Report, a survey that is done yearly, Facebook users spent on average 16.64 minutes on the service each time they used it in the past year. Multiplying surveyed users' average time by the average number of usage occasions (31.2) shows that the typical user spends a whopping 8.5 hours per week on it.