Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Long before block-long queues formed for a viral focaccia, Peter Raineri spent his Saturday mornings navigating a different kind of crowd. Before TikTok and Instagram, customers lined the counter of his Five Dock continental deli, shoulder-to-shoulder, arguing over who was next in line.
When the Raineris floated the idea of a ticket system to manage the rush, regulars revolted. They threatened to boycott the shop – the “Saturday morning stoush” was half the fun.
That communal energy sustained the family-run Raineri’s for decades. Peter, who opened P&R Raineri’s Continental Deli on Great North Road in 1981, died last Saturday, aged 90.
“My mum and dad decided to get into the deli business, which was very popular among the Italian community back then,” Peter’s son, Sam, said.
“They started in the small shop, and it expanded from there. It got really popular over time … people just love to come and see us and have a chat.”
Raineri’s has long been a sanctuary for Italian Australians, stacked with chargrilled eggplant, prosciutto, wood-fired breads and enormous wheels of cheese. It also catered to customers seeking the specific staples of their home provinces. The Herald previously reported on Peter’s understanding of those loyalties: Sicilians drink Torissi, Calabrese drink Mauro, and Neapolitans drink Kimbo.
Peter’s presence at the deli was a main reason customers kept returning, Sam says. He still hears stories about his father decades on.
“My dad was always open to everybody,” Sam said. “Because he treated everyone equally, we got this generational thing. Families, their kids coming in, and it’s like, ‘I remember your dad gave me a panino for free when I was six,’ and now they’re married with kids.”
Despite their generous sizes, the sandwiches are $15, no matter what goes on them. Peter was determined to keep his panini affordable.
Peter’s sons, Joseph and Sam, will keep Raineri’s going, having taken over day-to-day operations when their father, then 86, stepped back to tend to his garden. For the four decades before that, Sam said, his father practically lived at the deli.
Even his death did not stop the doors from opening. Sam said they considered closing for a day, but it wouldn’t have been in his father’s spirit.
“We’re going to close on the day of the funeral, but that’s it,” Sam said. “My dad, he’d always send my mum to people’s funerals. He’d always be at the shop because he was so in love with the shop. That was his life, that was his old mentality – the shop came first, and everything else came second.”
While still coming to terms with his father’s passing, Sam said he is beginning to see those traits in himself.
Sam Raineri, son of Peter and Rosaria, took over running the deli with his brother, Joseph.JANIE BARRETT
Follow the Changes: 9 Ways Web Archives are Used in Digital Investigations
Internet Archive Blogs: “Digital journalists increasingly turn to web archives like the Wayback Machine to follow how things on the Internet break, change or disappear – from deleted posts to quietly edited pages. The web has become not only a source of informationbut also the subject of media investigations, prompting journalists, researchers and activists to use digital archives to reconstruct timelines, verify claims, uncover hidden connections and hold powerful actors to account.
As online materials grow more fragile and prone to disappearance, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been critical in making “lost” web pages available – recently celebrating archiving over a trillion pages. As we’ve previously written about on this blog, the Wayback Machine is an important resource for our work as media researchers, helping us to trace histories of digital media objects (for example, changes in ad tracker signatures of viral “fake news” sites over time). We are also interested in how others use web archives across fields, and what we can learn from each other.
In this piece we draw on the Internet Archive’s News Stories collection to surface practices and use cultures of the Wayback Machine amongst journalists and media organisations. We analysed a dataset of about 8,600 news articles, assembled by the IA via daily Google News keyword searches since 2018. Drawing on a combination of digital methods, machine learning and lots of reading – we surfaced nine ways that journalists use the Wayback Machine in their reporting…” [h/t Barclay Walsh]
