Water damage

Some eBay purchases arrived today; a batch of cheap history books. One of the books, Daniel J. Boorstin's The Creators, had significant water-damage on the last 100 pages. This wasn't mentioned in the book's description, and although the book was a bargain, I still feel a tad ripped-off. It's always difficult to know what to do in these situations. One one hand, I want the seller to be aware that the book's condition wasn't described adequately, but on the other, I don't want a refund, as I want to keep the book. UPDATE: I just opened J. R. Hale's Renaissance Europe 1480-1520 and heard (and felt) the spine crack as I did so. This will mean that the pages will eventually start falling out. It's a 1971 paperback, so it's not unexpected.

Recent purchases

Terrabyte

Brunswick East Ghost Town

I'm usually at work on a Monday, but today I took some leave to work on an essay. I wandered out around 12:30pm to get some lunch. I'd been meaning to try Shang Hai Ling for some time. It's been getting some good reviews in the press, copies of which are posted in the window - I read them whilst waiting for a tram recently. I took a mental note that there's a special on noodle soups on Mondays and Tuesdays, and that they open at 11:30am for lunch. Alas, when I arrived, it was closed - although the opening times state that it's open for lunch, the take-away menus state that it's only open for dinner. Confusing, but I guess the take-away statement is the latest word. I wandered south. There's a tiny sandwich bar near the Quarry Hotel which I've never seen open, because I'm never around during the week. It was open today, so I ventured in. I was hoping to discover a slice of old-Brunswick, hidden amongst the new-Brunswick establishments like Small Block and Plan B and Comfy Chair. Alas, it was crumby - a small bain-marie of chips and potato-cakes, some unappealing white rolls, and limp-looking sandwich ingredients lurking in little compartments. I looked around for a moment, then left. I heard a voice calling after me - "Hey! Whatsa matter mate?" Headed north to Sugardough - closed. Headed further north to The East (oops, it's called the East Brunswick Club now, innit?). I was the only person in there, besides the barmaid. I ordered shepherd's pie. It was pretty terrible - the meat was dried-out mince with no flavour - not even any gravy or sauce or any kind, and the mash-topping was nothing special. Walked home - it's like a ghost-town around here on a wintery Monday. Here are some great photos of the East Brunswick Hotel from 1964.

Lord Northcliffe's memory compartments

I've spent the last two days in the State Library working on my next essay, which will be on the impact of the telegraph on foreign news reportage in The Times. I've been reading about carrier-pigeons, morse-code, all kinds of interesting stuff. I could easily research an essay on Julius Reuter alone. Yesterday I introduced a friend to Spicy Fish. She ordered the chicken with chilli, while I had the stewed chicken in spring onion sauce, which is my current favourite. Sure enough, as predicted in previous posts, someone at an adjacent table ordered the trademark spicy fish. Today I wandered around looking for somewhere to have lunch, and found a Japanese place on Russell Street. I'm annoyed with myself that I forgot to take note of the name. I had chicken okonomiyaki, which apparently translates to "cook what you like, the way you like". Whilst at the Library, a guy sitting two corrals away from me - who had been sitting there all day as I had - had his laptop stolen. He came back from looking up a book, and realised his laptop was gone! He asked me if I'd seen anything, which I hadn't. He was gutted, as you could imagine. Poor guy. One book I was reading today was H. Simonis' The Street of Ink: An Intimate History of Journalism. Simonis was an English journalist in the late nineteenth century. He proclaims that nobody knows the history of The Times better than he, with the exception of Lord Northcliffe, who was still alive at the time of writing. The State Library's copy is from 1917, and is correspondingly charismatic, as old books tend to be. I enjoyed this observation on Lord Northcliffe's personality;

(Simonis has just described Lord Northcliffe's ability to succinctly summarise a person's character in a few words)... This gift of diagnosing character, so to speak, is allied to an extraordinary memory. I have rarely met a man who remembers facts and faces so well. Lord Northcliffe has, indeed, a remarkable equipment of strength of mind and manner which gives to his personality a wonderful charm. As he uses his memory for facts and figures in his daily work, so he uses his memory for faces and conversation in the exercise of a supreme tact that conveys to one whom he has met before a gratifying sensation of having left an agreeable impression. This is heightened by the way in which he devotes his whole attention to the subject he discusses, whether it is personal or otherwise. For the moment he locks every compartment of his brain save one which he uses for the time being. When you have gone, he will lock this, too, and open another. If, in the course of conversation, you ask him a question, there is another mental pigeon-hole fully stored with all the information you want. Never, apparently, could there be a mind better equipped for its special needs and more methodically ordered than his.

I have met people like this, and sometimes wish I could be more like it myself - people who remember things about you, and even though you've only met them once, they follow-up on things you told them about yourself last time you met.

Another lapse

Once again, a lapse in posts. I've been quite busy at work, and with my studies. Workwise, I had to defend our Mac-based video-editing lab from an attack by Windows-lovers. There was a serious attempt to dump the Macs, and purchase some Windows boxes running Premiere. A nightmare! Luckily, the Macs won out in the end, but only because I managed to source some cheap Mac Minis to replace our aging 486Mhz G4s. So often I get frustrated at the lack of money in the university sector, I begin to wonder if I should even bother pursuing a teaching career - surely there's even less money in state high schools. Studywise, I submitted an essay on the history of education in colonial Australia, looking at the shift towards free, compulsory, and secular education. Currently working on an essay on the emergence of 'new journalism' in England in the late 19th Century. Spent the weekend at Phillip Island with my family. On the way home I took a detour to Fountain Gate to purchase some Krispy Kreme donuts, just to see what all the fuss is about. It was a cold, rainy Sunday night, and yet there was a long, thick queue stretching out the door and down the footpath. The waving chain of headlights waiting to get drive-through was also astounding. Apparently it's been like this constantly since the outlet opened. Victorians have gone absolutely mentalist! I just kept driving. UPDATE: Tubagooba has an excellent post on Krispy Kreme's place in Melbourne's donut landscape. I can vouch for the statement that Sugardough on Lygon Street is to Krispy Kreme what Pavarotti is to Richard Marx.