It’s been ages since I’ve been to a “Comedy Night”, and so when the invitation came through I snapped it up immediately.
The Comedy Store EQ’s Festival Club Showcase is THE Joker’s Jackpot of Sydney Comedy Festival’s international and home-grown comedians!
Be prepared for everything! As they drop in to warm up, entertain, try new gags and generally cut loose on Stand-Up in ways you would never see in their structured shows.
The Showcase is an underground favourite with gag mad festival fans; with the worlds brightest and Australia’s finest rubbing shoulders in one massive comedy showcase (at least 5 comedians per night).
Officially on the bill is Britain’s king of the one-liners: John Moloney, France’s premier misanthropist and lover Marcel Lucont, and local flavour Jacques Barrett. Plus secret special ‘festival’ guests all month long.
As I’m not a huge follower of stand-up, I wasn’t aware of any of the comedians at all. I mean, I know a lot of stand-up comedians, with my favourite from the last few years being Danny Bhoy (or is it Dhanny Boy?).
Sitting in the front row we prepared ourselves for a little bit audience interaction, which we played along with. “Are you game?”, I said to Sam. Of course he said yes, probably knowing I’d be the one who was the but of jokes. With both of us coming straight from work, and me wearing my new glasses, we decided we looked like “industry promoters”.
One thing I did notice, though, was that every other couple in the front row was asked “how long have you been together”, “you gonna get married”, whereas we weren’t.
My favourite piece of audience interaction though was when John Moloney did part of his routine, and said something delightfully filthy in German. I laughed instantly. “So you speak German?” he said to me. I blushed, thinking to myself, “Well not too much, but I certainly know the phrase for ‘big penis'”. :)
“What do you think of the new menu?” the manager at my local pub asked me the other night, leaning over the bar with an expectant smile. They’d recently changed chefs, and there was a distinct buzz in the air.
I paused, trying to find a polite way to phrase it. “The food is good,” I replied, “but the menu is terrible. The font is too small, and I can’t read the text against that background.”
Look, I’ll be the first to admit that my eyesight is not as good as it used to be. But I am surely not the only one disadvantaged by this phenomenon.
It’s a scene that’s becoming far too familiar for diners of all ages. Lately, it feels like countless venues have adopted a bizarre trend of tiny, illegible text slapped onto heavily coloured or textured backgrounds. Whether it’s white text on a pastel peach card or charcoal font on dark kraft paper, it’s a design choice that prioritises a vague “vibe” over basic functionality. You shouldn’t need perfect 20/20 vision and a headlamp just to order a chicken parma.
My working theory? Venues probably no longer hire professional graphic designers. Instead, it looks like younger staff members are mocking these layouts up themselves using Canva. Don’t get me wrong, Canva is a brilliant tool, but it doesn’t automatically grant an eye for core typographical principles like hierarchy or contrast ratios. The result is a flood of menus that look pretty on a desktop screen but fail miserably in the dim, ambient lighting of a busy dining room.
Looking through the menus I’ve had to photograph lately, the design errors are glaring.
The worst offenders ignore basic readability. One cocktail menu I encountered used thin white text against a light orange background—virtually invisible in a dimly lit bar. Another printed dark text on dark, textured brown paper, meaning the background grain actively competed with the words.
Then there’s the layout chaos. I’ve seen breakfast menus where the alignment is completely erratic; some prices are glued to the dish title while others float mid-page or drift to the far right with massive gaps of dead space. Without dot leaders to connect them, your eyes have to do extra work to track what a meal actually costs.
Even worse, description text is often squeezed together with terrible line spacing. Ingredients blur into a solid, unindented wall of lowercase text, while dense columns of numbers and confusing dietary acronyms like LDO and VGO clog up the margins. Instead of guiding the diner, it creates immediate visual fatigue.
Then there is the other modern dining scourge that completely drives me crazy: the QR code menu that forces you onto a web app. Inevitably, the app isn’t scrollable, it lags, or it demands your email address before you can even look at a drink list. I was recently up in Darwin and faced this exact digital roadblock. When I asked the waiter for a proper, physical menu, I pointed out just how frustrating the interface was. A menu shouldn’t feel like a data-harvesting exercise.
Ironically, the one place that seems to have cracked the code on modern tech integration is Thai Tha Pong down in Newtown. They utilise digital menus on tablets right at the table, but they actually understand user experience. If you can’t read the ingredients, you can simply pinch and zoom to enlarge the text. It’s practical, accessible, and elegantly simple.
In the meantime, the rest of the hospitality industry seems lagging behind. Because of this epidemic of poor design, my phone’s camera roll is no longer full of scenic holiday snaps. Instead, it’s completely filled with hastily taken photographs of menus that I’ve had to snap just so I can zoom in and figure out what on earth I’m actually ordering.
Restaurateurs, please: check your contrast, bump up your font sizes, and test your layouts in low light. Good food deserves to be read by everyone.
I’m not sure what it says about me, but I found the photographs of animals far more compelling than those of humans. I’m talking about the World Press Photography exhibition, currently showing at the State Library of NSW. The annual exhibition often features photographs of people in desperate situations around the world, fighting wars, living in poverty, and so on. But today, as I viewed the exhibition, it was the animal photographs which touched me. The rhino with its horn removed. The turtle caught up in a net. The pandas being released back into the wild, by humans dressed as pandas to minimise the trauma. Terrific photographs about issues that matter.
There’s also anther exhibition currently underway, featuring the street photography of Jon Lewis. Wonderful shots, all in black and white, celebrating the cultural diversity of Sydney in this decade. And a terrific way to spend the long weekend public holiday.
I don’t know why, but I was really tired most of the day.
Well actually I do know why. It’s because I had a visitor for the weekend.
And while I would normally spend some of the weekend resting up, this weekend it was all go, go, go…
It’s not a good look, is it, when you find yourself yawning in the lift at work first thing on a Monday morning.
Still, I didn’t feel so bad, as I heard someone in the lift say to another… “Oh God, I wish I was still in bed”.
Mondays are like that, eh?
Nonetheless, I achieved a fair bit throughout the day, and don’t feel like I was entirely a waste of tax-payer’s money :)
I also managed to go out for lunch, which has been my “New Years Resolution” since arriving back from Europe. In fact, I’ve been quite good at maintaining this routine. Mostly, I just go out by myself, finding a quiet spot to eat a delicious meal and to de-stress and relax somewhat. I’ve found it’s also been a good time to resolve an approach to some of those “discussions” you often need to have. Today’s lunch, by the way was a noodle beef dish.
And since arriving home from work, I’ve made a brief visit to the supermarket for a few bits in pieces, and I’ve also spent some time working on a new website.
As I’ve mentioned previously here, I’m part of a small group of art collectors called, “Hawkesbury One”.
Put simply, we each contribute an amount of money each year with which we collectively purchase art works. The works are then shared and rotated amongst us for six months at a time. It’s a very democratic structure, as we all contribute exactly the same amount of money, and all have an equal say in the art works we purchase.
Although we’ve had a very basic website (linked to the Yahoo Group we communicate via) for several years, we resolved this weekend to beef up the website, to document the collection more clearly, and to offer some advice for other people who might like to do something similar.
If you have any thoughts on the site, and what other information might be useful, please have a look at Hawkesbury One – Draft.
It’s about one o’clock in the morning and it’s light outside. Although I know the sun is out there somewhere, I can’t actually see it, due to the fog which has enveloped Narvik.
I’m staying in the top floor room of a guest house. “You’re in the old maid’s room”, the bloke who owns the house told me when I arrived. And as I look out of my window, I can see a couple of houses (one of them has a light on out the front) against a grey sky background.
I haven’t seen too much of Narvik yet, retiring to bed soon after I arrived at seven o’clock tonight. After the activities of the last few days, and today’s intense day of travelling I was exhausted. And, in stark contrast to the communal living of the youth hostel, I’ve found myself in a single room with an extremely comfortable bed which proved far too enticing.
As I walked around Stockholm last night it was just beautiful. Even at about 10 o’clock, the sun was shining, adding a wonderful gentle yellow glow to the city’s buildings. And when I left Stockholm early this morning, it was definitely “shorts weather”. Actually, it was even a little bit hot. “So this is the famous Swedish summer I’ve heard about”, I thought to myself as I caught the suburban trains to Arlanda Airport.
“Personally I’d take the Arlanda Express”, the young bloke at the counter told me at Stockholm Central when I asked him about catching the suburban trains this morning. “Does it take too long and is it too hideous for words?”, I asked him in return, to which he replied in the negative. He smiled in a friendly way when I told him I came in via the express and was just looking for another, a different adventure.
Although I’d read previously the Swedes can be a little stand-offish, I haven’t found this to be the case so far. In fact, I’ve found them to be incredibly welcoming and helpful most of the time. Thus, when I asked (in Swedish) a nearby woman on Platform 16 to confirm that I was on the right platform for Upplands Visby (the connecting route for Arlanda Airport) she replied with a smile and some helpful information.
I suspect I was a bit of an oddity on the train also, as most non-Swedes would probably catch the express. Subsequently, I found people quite warm and helpful, giving me instructions along the way.
There was a woman of about 60 opposite me who looked at me, though, in an odd kind of way. Not negative, just confused about why a non-Swedish tourist who wasn’t an eighteen-year-old backpacker would be catching the suburban route. After a moment or so of looking me up and down you could see she has convinced herself I wasn’t a serial killer and gave me a smile.
At about this time, a middle-aged man with a Middle Eastern complexion (maybe Turkish) came walking through the cabin and dropped a brochure on neighbouring seats. The flyer explained that he had two children who both had leukemia and that he was in need of financial assistance. It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen people begging, and I’ve wondered how these people have slipped through the Swedish welfare net. I’ve seen no obvious evidence, so far, of on the street homelessness related to either mental illness or drug addiction, as we have in Sydney.
The Swedish woman looked at the brochure with a sneer and further caught my eye with a smile when the bloke said something to me (which I couldn’t understand), and I replied with an “I don’t speak English very well” response.
As you go further and further out of central Stockholm, it gets more and more like Sydney’s Western Suburbs. More like any outer suburban area really, as you see more and more working class and non-caucasian faces getting on and off the train. You also hit the factory belt and the countryside pretty quickly.
And it was also then that I really started to feel the warmth of the Swedish sunlight coming through the windows of the train. I could also feel it through the window on the aircraft on the flight from Stockholm to Kiruna.
Aside from spilling some milk on the young woman sitting next to me (“Inte problema”, she said to me when I apologised), the plane trip was without incident.
I noticed, however, that I was welcomed onto the plane with “wilkommen”. It’s not the first time I’ve been assumed to be German and I guess it won’t be the last. Clearly, I don’t look Swedish in the typical kind of way, and clearly, I look like a bit of a tourist, but I never assumed I looked German.
As we made our way towards Kiruna, it occurred to me that, in an Australian context, I was flying to “Western Australia” and that Kiruna was probably Sweden’s answer to “Karratha”. As you fly from Stockholm you see the landscape change dramatically, and as you fly into Kiruna you see what is essentially a mining town in the middle of an extremely attractive landscape.
The contrast between Kiruna – organised, industrial – and the nearby landscape is dramatic. With the melting of the snow, the landscape was lush and green. But even now in the middle of summer, you still see mountain tops covered in snow. Even the Swedes on the plane, who must have seen it a thousand times, were in awe at some of the sights.
That, however, was not the case for two nearby women as we travelled by train from Kiruna to Narvik. While I was “oohing” and “ahhing” at every minor change in the landscape, they were looking at trash magazines and were reading out every bit of minor trivia contained therein. Not being able to understand everything they said though, I listened more for tone and intonation. In Australia, they would have been Cheryl and Sharon, here they seemed a little more exotic. :)
I personally found the train journey quite remarkable. You start off with a fairly flat green landscape, progress into a spectacular lakes district, and climb the mountains to true alpine country, before finding yourself on the Norwegian coastline. I spent most of the trip with my head stuck out the window taking as many photographs as I possibly could.
It was really great to watch the vegetation change also. At the beginning, it’s all flat and Savannah like, where the trees are all about the same height. Then, in the lakes district, you start to see some of the typical alpine vegetation of conifers. And by the time you’ve reached the top of the mountain, the vegetation has largely disappeared and it’s mostly just rock. You see the occasional white flower, though, in the midst of it all. “Is that eidelweiss?, I thought to myself at one point.
Oh, and I loved how they did the border change. As you cross from Sweden to Norway you go into a tunnell, and, quite simply you see two flags next to each other. Voila! You’re in another country. Bloody EU – where’s my passport stamp?
In contrast to everyone else on the train, I was still wearing shorts when we arrived in Narvik. They were all rugged up for the winter and maybe some skiing, while I was here on a summer holiday. Peer pressure got to me, though, and I put a jumper on just minutes before arriving at the station.
I had a great feeling of elation in arriving in Narvik. “Wow”, I’m here”, I thought to myself, on the top of the world, on the opposite side of the world. The train station is fairly simple, almost run down, and the first pay phone I found didn’t work. But, like all train stations and airports, there was a real sense of joy in the air, as people met their friends and relatives.
“Are you from Narvik?”, I asked the bloke who owns the guest house. “No, but I’ve been here 50 years”, he told me, adding that his wife was from Narvik. On the way to the guest house, he pointed out the shops where I could buy food. And when I asked him if there was a simple, polite local greeting I could use in shops, he told me I should just speak English. “All Norwegians speak English. It’s just the English, the Americans and the Australians who speak only one language”, he smilingly said.
Anyway, it’s now 1.40 am, and the fog has lifted. I think it’s time to go back to sleep for a while.
Tomorrow (Tuesday) marks seven weeks that I’ve been “working from home”. I’ve been in to work only once (to pick up some equipment to assist me to work at home). For the most part it’s been a pretty positive experience, though there are some negatives about the blurred line between “work” and “home”.
For example, I’m having lots of work-related dreams. And because there’s no “commute” between work and the office, I sometimes forget to have a shower. “Did I have a shower today?”, I’ve sometimes asked myself. I’m also sick to death of wearing pretty much the same casual clothing seven days a week.
What’s keeping me sane? The little things.
I always listen to a lot of radio. Even at work I can multi-task by listening to the radio most of the day, while going about my job. With fewer distractions – phone calls, conversations – I’m listening a lot more intently, which I’m enjoying very much.
I’ve also been watching a bit of narrative television, which is something I ordinarily don’t do a lot of.
Text conversation with a friend. Me: Have you watched Mrs America? Can’t decide if I like it or not. Keep giggling at Tracey Ullman thinking she’s taking the piss. Her: I have and I want to love it but it’s a bit one note … and we get it Gloria is gorgeous..
I also watched Hollywood on Netflix the other day. In fact, I watched all seven episodes on Saturday alone. I found the first few episodes interesting and entertaining, as it explored some of the taboos of Hollywood in the post-war period. But as the series moved on, I lost interest, and found the final episode quite predictable. Still, Patti Lupone is awesome, and there’s a bit of eye-candy in the show, too.
The other show that’s been recommended to me is called “A Secret Love”. It’s a Netflix show about two women who’ve been in a relationship for 60 years, but only “come out” towards the end of their life together. “Lots of tears”, according to one friend. “A bit too long”, according to another.
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