Rubénerd!

Flowers in the various parks around my neighbourhood in Sydney started to bloom, so I went out with my D60 and my favourite little AF-S NIKKOR 35mm f/1.8 yesterday for a quick break :)

You can view the full gallery on Flickr, if you so desire.

Perhaps our first unintentional pun on PunWatch:

Deutche Welle - European Union News

EU commission is loosing patience with Greece

Either they've made a classic loosing/losing typo mistake, or they really mean loosening. I'd like to think it's a Freudian slip with regards to European Union policy... giving them the "slip" perhaps? ;)

UPDATE: They've fixed it, darn! Fortunately, I made a screenshot!

On my botanic garden photo post:

The Royal Botanic Garden Sydney says: We love your photos of the Garden, Rubenerd. Thank you.

I think this is the first time I've had a representative from a place I've take pictures comment on them! Gave me a warm fuzzy feeling, and makes me want to visit more often. Great PR! :')

I spent much of my teenage years on my iBook G3 at the Singapore Botanic Gardens, when it wasn't raining. I love urban gardens, and Sydney's is beautiful.

My Chinese New Year Twilight Parade photos are in the pipeline! In the meantime, here's part two of my Sydney Botanic Gardens stroll from Saturday!

If you haven't seen them yet, you can find part one here. As I said there, nothing terribly special here, but I really loved the colours! ^_^

While I wasn't on Twitter, I went with my old man around the Botanic Gardens with my D60 and my NIKKOR 35mm f/1.8. Nothing special, but I loved the colours ^^.

Not strictly speaking a journalistic endeavour this time, but one that still deserved to be added to the collection:

Wikipedia: Big Four (banking)

Big Four is the colloquial name for the four main banks in several countries, where the banking industry is dominated by just four institutions and where the phrase has gained currency.

Oh you! Reminds me of that Westpac campaign in 2009, where I also suggested a possible followup to. I was so witty in those days.

I arrived a little too late for much of the Chinese New Year Markets in Sydney this weekend, but that didn't stop me gorging on dumplings and taking a few photos! Enjoy, and Gong Xi Fa Cai! :)

The early evening

The night

After wandering around enjoying the atmosphere for an hour, I head off to the nearby Starbucks on Elizabeth Street. In Singapore they had Chinese New Year themed drinks with mandarin and other such flavours, but no such luck here. Oh well!

I did some more wandering around Chinatown, then came back after the sun set to take a few more. Without a tripod and with the D60 that looks super grainy even at 1600 ISO it was tough, but still fun :).

Checking out one of the latest entries on Heartdrops.org that arrived in my RSS reader, one particular section really struck a chord with me.

Australian news sources

It’s always "three thousand people were killed when a ship ran aground on the east coast of Whatchamacallit. About fifty of them are believed to be Australians". The latter sentence always ticks me off, because for some reason, when a large number of people have died, the fact is always put forward that so-and-so Australians have died.

This x 10¹⁰²⁴.

For me, nothing showed the shallow nature of much of the Australian media than when the Bali bombings took place. I was still living in Singapore at the time, and remember reading the stories in the Australian newspapers online about how many Australians had died in the attacks. If other nationalities and the greater number of innocent Indonesians were mentioned at all, often it would be in a throwaway remark or in the footer somewhere.

I don't care about nationalities, or patriotism, or any of that feudal nonsense. We're humans, and humans died.

Other news sources

I begin to wonder if it is like that in other countries. Perhaps not.

Unfortunately, Australia isn't alone in this case. As I've lamented on Twitter time and time again, I'm so sick of reading about all the American fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan without any mention of the hundreds of thousands of civilian fatalities. I'm sure you've all noticed this too.

I've had people try to spin this, but to me all this says is some lives are more important than others. The truly horrifying part is, some people don't see an issue with that.

My brother, on the other hand, gratuitously laughs and repeats lines from newsreaders that follow as such: "Good evening a man has died…" where there is no pause for breath between the greeting and the announcement of a tragic incident.

Reminds me of those line from a Jack Johnson song. Why don't the newscasters cry when they read about people who die? At least they could be decent enough to put just a tear in their eyes.

He answers the question in the same verse. It's just make believe.

It's Monday again, so to lift our spirits I thought I'd post something adorable and utterly pointless. Well, more pointless than I usually post. Enjoy.