Desperately seeking chow mein
Posted by cacophony in : Eat & Drink , add a commentDoes anyone know where I can find a good, cheap Chinese restaurant in the city? I live four blocks from Chinatown but I haven’t been impressed so far and I don’t know where to start.
Any suggestions?
Musings of a festival fan
Posted by cacophony in : Entertainment , 2 comments
Is MUSE going to play the Big Day Out next year? And if so, can my eardrums take it?
Sunday afternoon craic
Posted by cacophony in : Entertainment , add a commentThe Quiet Man Irish Pub Pty Ltd
“I’m a rover, seldom sober
I’m a rover of high degree
For when I’m drinking I’m always thinking
How to gain my love’s company,”
- Irish folk song
By the fireplace are gathered a circle of no fewer than 12 people, each of them seated with a traditional Irish instrument. There are a few bohdrans, accordians, guitars, a tenor banjo and a lot of very drunk people in full voice, all belting out traditional Irish folk songs between swigs of dark, thick, frothy stuff in big glasses.
Around them are people at tables heaped with hearty, simple food. Sometimes they talk over the music, at other times join in. This is more ritual than performance.
The musicians are swaying in time, tapping their feet and facing each other so at first, you feel like you’ve intruded on a private rehearsal but every now and then someone will look up and smile at you. You sing along if you know the words - which aren’t hard to pick up after the first chorus - and clap your hands.
Your friends all share your soda bread. Then you make new friends and they have some too. Everyone is grinning. A boy child whirls around to the fiddle and knocks over a pint belonging to a drummer. The drummer laughs and yelps in time with the music. The boy and his mum go to the bar to replace the pint.
The waitresses speak in thick brogue. A woman dances with her elderly mother, who seems to be in a stout and music-induced rapture. For an afternoon, under the eye of Angus Mac Og, she is at home.
Location:
271 Racecourse Rd
Flemington, VIC 3031
Australia
(03) 9376 6232
It’s not easy being green
Posted by cacophony in : Making News , 4 comments 
Feeling guilty about your enviornmental footprint? What if you could buy your way out of it?
Eco-agencies are springing up throughout Australia to get their cut of the new carbon-trading industry, which stands to make them millions of dollars in feel-good money. But does all this goodwill translate into real environmental benefit or just another boom industry?
The New South Wales Government has just started trading carbon credits. Melbourne Council is considering it. To qualify for these credits, which have a market value of about $80 each, C02 producers - energy companies - must prove they are reducing carbon emissions. The companies in turn are outsourcing the responsibility to emerging eco-entrepreneurs, who get the credits for planting trees on their behalf or giving their customers free energy-saving lightbulbs.
Seems like a perfect plan, right? Let these eco-pioneers offset the emissions for your car, your office, the reverse-cycle air-conditioner you leave on while you go to the shops; that loud stereo you couldn’t resist. Someone is taking care of it - and making money in the process - and you can sleep at night (at a climate-controlled 21 degrees) knowing you’ve done your bit.
But whether it is actually helping the environment is debatable.
Queensland Premier Peter Beattie says carbon trading is not a panacea and the answer is to invest in alternative energy sources, like his $300 million investment in “clean” coal.
He told the ABC last week: “Politicians are really good at saying `We are going to have a carbon trading regime and it will be bloody wonderful. We’ve fixed the problem and we can all go out and have a red wine’.”
“But without investing significantly in technology, and there has been a reluctance to do that … we are not solving the problem.”
In fact, it may be making the problem worse because it gives governments an “out” from biting the bullet and spending up big on things that we know will help the environment; like putting water back in the Murray or legislating for more sustainable farming practices.
Carbon trading strikes me a little bit like those “ethical purchase” stores, where you can buy No Sweat shoes or organic chocolate. You’re allowed to have a conscience but not so much as to reject the capitalist principles that these stores are still bound to.
But then I suppose I can’t talk. I don’t even know where my coffee shop gets its beans…
