Photography I Created
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London: get into the palace and take out Prince Andrew.
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Oxford: get an education.
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Paris: have as many Nutella crepes as you can physically stomach and do the Big Red Bus tours, buy your wife nice things in the nice shops so that when you’re home and you have forty kids you can look at that nice sweater and remember that time you travelled the world.
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Berlin: do a walking tour or two, the real Berlin is seen from street level, learn about the pedestrian crossing lights, look for bullet holes in the side of buildings, be surprised at the location where Hitler died, walk into every cool shop just because it’s cool, visit Computerspiele Museum - the computer game museum - it’s a lot of fun, stand in awe at the monuments, memorials, and existing parts of the wall. It’ll move you.
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Unless of course you mean Bern in Switzerland in which case I have no idea. Same for Lauterbrunnen. I did not know these places existed until I googled them wondering if you didn’t mean Berlin.
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Venice, I hear it’s lovely, but get up to Santa Monica while you’re there. Seriously though, I don’t know. Apparently you need to walk everywhere in the Italian version so pack light.
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Florence: Get out into the regions, like San Gimignano, Siena, or Chianti or so many others, just get in a car and go. Italy’s regional areas are the opposite of Australia’s regional areas, which is to say, they’re really good. The main surprise is that they eat late and they don’t understand the concept of takeaway food, which is great if you’ve got a crying baby. That said, feel free to pass her off to a nonna for a hug, this also applies to bub.
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Rome: There’s a small handful of landmarks you’ll probably recognise when you Google the town name, but my tip is to never eat in a palazzo. They’re full of tourists and bad food. There’s so many great restaurants there, but you have go to Trattoria Der Pallaro purely for the experience. Visit the Via del Corso Apple Store because its beautiful.
Smiling for photos is largely the result of marketing campaigns
From this week’s Dense Discovery email:
When looking at older portraits (first painted, then photographed) you would notice that very few subjects smile. As this piece explains, up to the beginning of the 20th century, “a grin was only characteristic of peasants, drunkards, children, and halfwits”. In the first half of the 21st century, camera company Kodak tried to make the experience of having your photo taken less awkward and more fun, and thus created a marketing campaign to emphasise the pleasure of photography. The photographic smile became a byproduct of an increasingly sophisticated advertising culture focused on telling cheerful stories about products.
A wild Filet-O-Fish spotted near Hinze Dam on the Gold Coast
The sunset over Tugun tonight was all levels of madness.
Advice to a friend travelling Europe with a baby
A text message I thought was worth sharing as a blog post:
First stop, I reckon you need to get into a camera. Look at a Fuji X100 or a Sony RX100 as a start.
Secondly, have you figured out your travel kit? For a trip like this, with a kid, I’d urge you to not take a laptop, maybe an iPad, and to work out a charging solution like an Anker multi-port USB/USB-C charger with an international plug on it.
Thirdly, have you chosen a travel cot and travel pram? The BabyZen YoYo travel pram is a cool glass of water in hell. You’ll give me a sainthood for making you buy one. Choosing a travel cot is tricky, we have the Phil & Ted’s which packs smaller, but the BabyBjorn and the new Bugaboo travel cots are still small but much quicker setup. Choose your poison.
Basically, there’ll be lots of dragging this stuff around, particularly in Venice where you have to carry everything, so take as little as possible.
Have you phoned Qantas to request a bassinet seat?
Here’s my city tips:
It seems like the path to podcasting success isn’t to create good new content, but to have old good content
Sliding into the weekend from Burleigh
Some people donate to good causes, my personal contribution to world peace is wasting time for scam callers. Rosie here just spent 30 minutes trying to get me to install the Anydesk app so they could help me with my NBN.
The only thing more terrifying than a Black Hawk rocking up on you in the middle of a battle with a load of bad ass soldiers, would be a ghost Black Hawk, just looking at you, ready to charge.
Why?!
When I moved to Tugun four years ago we paid half what is now marketed as “Tugun’s most affordable home” … what a time to be alive.
Finally made it to Buzzfeed
Readers and viewers aren’t dumb, via The Why Axis email.
Whites Beach, New South Wales
Gm Byron Bay 👋💪
Wategos Beach for sunrise this morning
“When rain falls, it flows downhill. If desired, you can collect the rain in a bucket and carry it uphill, but the natural tendency of water is to flow toward the lowest point.
Most situations in life have a tendency—a direction in which things want to flow. You can choose to go against the flow (just as you can choose to carry water uphill), but your results tend to be better when you find a way to work with the gradient of the situation.
Position yourself to benefit from the external forces at hand and you will get more from the same unit of effort. Energy is conserved and results are multiplied.”
— James Clear
