I'm a part of the Hobart wedding trail coming up in a few weeks. I'm expecting a great crowd to fly down and come and jump on a bus or boat and check out the Tasmanian wedding scene. My friend Nina at Isle Weddings is hosting, check out her website for more info.

You're never going to guess who Nouba interviewed.

I’m guest editing The Sizzle today. Apologies for any banana peel in the email.

I'm the guest on the most recent episode of Polka Dot Wedding's Feel Good Wedding Podcast. My audio recording isn't great because it was recorded in a small tiled Italian co-working office room, but the sentiment is great: getting married can be and should be awesome and enjoyable.

Listen on their website or in your podcast app of choice.

And thank you to Dorothy and Mary for having me :)

YouTube bringing that dad energy

Death to paper straws

Home

Can confirm, hearing the instrumental “Still Call Australia Home” as you’re settling in your seat as everyone boards, tickles an emotional muscle.

I’m in the Qantas Singapore Lounge and the waiter poured me a glass of Shiraz, a 2020 from South Australia, on the left.

I make the joke, “2020, not a good year” and then I laugh and smile back at him.

He comes back five minutes later with a 2016 cab sav (on the right) hoping that I like that better.

My comedy is wasted on these people.

Frames from Singapore

Four year old just now at our Singapore hotel as we're getting ready to go to Singapre airport: I don't want to eat here, I want to eat at 'the club at the airport'.

Someone's enjoying her dad's Platinum status a bit too much.

Luna calls cable cars “plane trains” and honestly, that’s a much better name.

When we took the kids overseas everyone told us to make sure we look after them …

Hello, Qantas my old friend

Entering the Paul Kelly stage of our Europe adventure …

Arriverderci, au revoir, aufwiedersen, hasta la vista. Yeah, every fucking city's just the same.

CDG ✈️ LHR ✈️ SIN

We're packing and getting ready for our homeward journey tonight in Paris. We've got three flights left, and the longest ones just earned us a text message from Qantas letting us know that the four of us had been upgraded to business class (RIP my points balance). We've got a few nights in Singapore left and it's back to the Southern Gold Coast after almost a year away.

So because I'm a big nerd, these are our family travel stats since we left home last September and listed our home on Airbnb:

• Photos on my phone: 10,017
• Days away from home: 354
• Flight hours: 87
• Airbnbs and hotel rooms: 52
• Flights: 50
• Airports: 23
• Cars (rented/borrowed/owned): 17
• Countries: 10
• Boats: 3
• Children: 2
• Eurostars: 1
• MacBooks that survived a glass of whisky being spilt on them: 0
• Brown hairs left on my head: -6

Michael A. Fletcher reports for ESPN that the real life story behind the Sandra Bullock movie, The Blind Side, was based on a lie.

Retired NFL star Michael Oher, whose supposed adoption out of grinding poverty by a wealthy, white family was immortalized in the 2009 movie "The Blind Side," petitioned a Tennessee court Monday with allegations that a central element of the story was a lie concocted by the family to enrich itself at his expense.

Every day I think about the fact that so much Of our culture today is built on lies. Where do we go as a people? Do we lean in to it or revolt?

I walked out of the house this morning and a man was urinating onto the street, facing in my direction, two metres away. I called out that he was disgusting and he stared at me in the eyes.

After riding a scooter across town to a store I walked upon a lady on the street bent over and attending to her monthly needs.

Just now walking to the grocery store I witnessed a man with both hands amputated smoking a cigarette, his two arms acting as two fingers.

The Parisians have really left their mark on me today.

Richard Rohr in Things Hidden:

It is amazing how religion has turned this biblical idea of faith around to mean its exact opposite: into a tradition of certain knowing, presumed predictability and complete assurance about whom God likes and whom God does not like.

We have 48 hours left in Paris. I'm I'm curious what your one awesome thing to do, see, eat, or photograph in Paris. We travel slow, don't travel like tourists, don't really hit the common "top 10 things to see" lists, and we're travelling with two kids, so sometimes we miss things that everyone thinks is awesome. Give me your one recommendation.

I think I’ve spent too much time in Paris this year.

I just got into an argument with another dad about which Parisian playground is the best one.

The American fool thinks the Lourve playground is the best.

Bearly made it home last night

Another chapter in the ever-growing story of how I interact with, and use, social media:

I wrote a little while ago about choosing two social networks.

I kind of have, Mastodon and Threads/Instagram/Facebook. By which I mean that the Meta platforms all blur together with crossposting and attention.

That leaves my remaining accounts from the tier list, Facebook Page, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X.

Rather than delete them, like I'd rather, I've trialled throwing them to ChatGPT.

I'm still refining the prompt, but here's what I'm asking ChatGPT 4 to do in a Zapier zap:

It starts with an instruction, or a set up which looks like this ...

You are a content producer for Josh Withers the Australian wedding celebrant, a marriage celebrant famous worldwide for creating epic marriage ceremonies for adventurous people. You believe that the best kind of marriage ceremony and wedding is an intentional one, where everyone invited is invited for a reason and with a purpose, and that everything that happens at the wedding happens with intentionality and purpose. You are not necessarily against wedding traditions but you are against wedding traditions for the sake of wedding traditions. You write and speak in Australian English, and in a classic and timeless nature but with the wit and humour of Australian marriage celebrant Josh Withers. Be funny. When talking about weddings use inclusive language, use bride only if you're talking about a female person getting married, not as the title of the wedding industry client, and explore a diverse range of topics, cultures, and kinds of people that could get married.

Then I prompt it to write a post like this ...

Write another new controversial tweet as Josh Withers, do not enclose it in quotation marks, written in the style of Australian wedding celebrant Josh Withers based off his writing online and on social media, asking a question or posing an thought about Josh Withers's wedding planning style. The tweet can be a controversial opinion about a modern, inclusive, intentional style of getting married; or an insight into modern wedding planning; or a reflection on wedding traditions of old and how they don't matter any more. Designed to illicit engagement and a response from people who see it. Take into account all interviews and responses by Josh Withers Australian wedding celebrant, and everything Josh has written on his online. Keep the message to under 280 characters. Do not start with greetings, do not use Australian slang like "G'day", do not use any hashtags. Be controversial and talk about all kinds of different wedding topics. Make each tweet different and unique.

There's a 66% chance of the zap running that every hour, and 50% of the time the content goes to Facebook.

My engagement on these existing platforms has been very low for a long time, so let's see if this moves the needle. If not, it's a fun experiment into what a LLM can do for social media.

Just a couple of Australians having a French win. Frame from last night in Paris with yours truly.

Will the Australian government send in an SAS extraction group to save Britt, the girls, and I when France loses to the Matildas in the World Cup quarter-finals today?

Did some A-grade marrying in the rain in Paris today

A Modest Proposal; For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick, by Dr. Jonathan Swift, 1729:

I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl, before twelve years old, is no saleable commodity, and even when they come to this age, they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half a crown at most, on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriments and rags having been at least four times that value. I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I'd forgotten how nice Facebook Paper was. What was the last great UX you experienced?

My daily steps over the past seven months

I think it's beautiful that the one thing that binds us together as a global community, regardless of colour of skin, religion, where we were born or where we live, or wealth or lack of it, is how our days old street urine all smells the same everywhere.

Resume the conversation

My only regret from my radio career is that I never once said, whilst on air, the line that inspired my career:

Tank fly, boss walk, jam nitty-gritty. You're listening to the boy from the big bad city. This is jam hot. This is jam hot.

An element of the wedding industry which offends so many inside and out, the part that eventually pushes many insiders out and back into the normal world where couples kissing in front of you all day at work is not normal, is the unreal nature of so many weddings. That for a single day people dress up and play pretend.

I can tell you that although I've witnessed it over my fifteen years in the business, I also push back against it at every chance. I'm also lucky that my clientele aren't indicative of that side of the wedding industry.

Which is why I love film photography. It's so raw and honest. Often imperfect, and perhaps with error, it's a plain and simple recording of the light that entered the lens at that time.

So here's some film photos made by my friend James at the two Italian elopements we had together last week in Tuscany.

Elopements planned by my girl, Britt.

Sari Azout's "letter to a friend who is thinking of starting something new" is beautiful. As Sari subtitles it, 'if you are thinking of leaving your job to start a company or passion project, this letter is for you too.'

1. Will you use this opportunity to grow and evolve or will you use it to beat yourself up?
2. How will you avoid insecurity work?
3. Can you learn to enjoy the process as the end in itself, not the means?
4. Can you learn to enjoy the process as the end in itself, not the means?
5. Will you default to the norms of your industry, or will you be an original?
6. What tools will you use to quiet your ego and see reality clearly?
7. Do you have clarity on what kind of financial value you aim to create?

If I had a beef to pick with anyone in the world today it's how so many of us let life happen to us instead of us making us happen to life.

I hope you get to know your inner world. I hope you thrive financially while living your values. I hope you focus less on what you achieve and more on who you become. I hope you learn to be kind to yourself. I hope you fall in love with the process. I hope you see the point of pursuing passion work is not to drain yourself to create work that eclipses your life, but rather to create a life you are proud of. I hope this new venture takes you far away from conformism and enables you to make a life and a living on your own terms, with your spirit and creativity unhindered.

With any luck you're reading this article well after I first shared it in August 2023, and if this is the case I felt the need to find the link and send it to you as you consider embarking on something new.

Make this process mean something so we have a cool story to talk about in a decade's time.

Tess McClure in The Guardian reports on Pak 'n' Save's mealbot:

A New Zealand supermarket experimenting with using AI to generate meal plans has seen its app produce some unusual dishes – recommending customers recipes for deadly chlorine gas, “poison bread sandwiches” and mosquito-repellent roast potatoes.

The app, created by supermarket chain Pak ‘n’ Save, was advertised as a way for customers to creatively use up leftovers during the cost of living crisis. It asks users to enter in various ingredients in their homes, and auto-generates a meal plan or recipe, along with cheery commentary. It initially drew attention on social media for some unappealing recipes, including an “oreo vegetable stir-fry”.

We're in the beautiful age of quality assurance in large language models. The giveaway is that the supermarket responds with:

(we are) disappointed to see “a small minority have tried to use the tool inappropriately and not for its intended purpose

Instead of owning the issue and revealing that the whole thing is built on a house of cards and we're all just figuring this crap out.

After two months in London, across regional Austria, Liechtenstein, regional Italy, Puglia, and Tuscany, it is so refreshing for my soul to be walking the streets of Paris again tonight.

I could walk the streets of Paris and New York City for the rest of my days and never get bored or lose inspiration.

Why do airlines communicate a flight's departure time instead of a "be at the gate" time? Every airport and every airline has different timings and many of us live in flight anxiety because of the lack of information.

Is there a good technical reason why departure time is communicated but not gate-deadline time?

Pro tip for flying out of Vienna Airport: you walk past a Starbucks before check-in, and you think, “awesome, a not-Austrian coffee! If there’s Starbucks at check-in there’ll be a Starbucks after security,” but there isn’t.

There is an epic kids playground though.

Over the weekend I wrote a piece about the fluff coming out of commercial radio in Australia, referencing my own time in a commercial radio station in very remote Western Australia, and considering going back last year but the wage had actually decreased.

Anyway, it was poorly written, so sitting at Gate F6 in Vienna Airport just now I edited and fixed it.

Any other errors or omissions are the faulty of your web browser.

Driving from Siena, Italy, to Graz, Austria, today Goldie and I were looking for somewhere to stop for lunch and we decided on this place named after a beach in Los Angeles.

I took Britt’s Fuji X-S10 with the 27mm f/2.8 for a play while we were there.

Not everything is forever. Some things are just internet onions.

This website, the-life-and-death-of-an-internet-onion.com, will live from July 26th through August 30th, 2023 — about 5 weeks total, the average lifespan of a non-refrigerated onion. — Laurel Schwulst

It’s beautiful.

The “_______ is typing” dots are unencumbered by the politics of social media because they’re a passive signifier of attention: the tech does it for you, so it’s an unusually honest message that “_______ is alive and mentally present for you.”

Things I can remember:

✅ My couple's names in a wedding ceremony
❎ Which of my children has which name
❎ My credit card PIN
❎ How old I am?
❎ Which side of the road to drive on in which country I'm in at the moment
❎ Who our insurance is through?
❎ If the h in hola is silent?
✅ The lyrics to Wonderwall

Father of the bride yesterday asked me who's father I was. I'm now that old.

This is your annual reminder that there is a pager emoji 📟 please don't forget to use the emoji for all of your pager-themed conversations.

My favourite part of the wedding ceremony is when we show each other our best memes

Things I learned today:

1. When you drive many kilometres past beautiful sunflower fields in Tuscany full of big and ripe sunflowers ready to be in a florist's shop window, five days later when you go back to photograph them they'll be harvested and in shop windows.

2. Sunflowers follow the sun, so when you go out to shoot them at sunrise, they're all looking down like they've been listening to Nothing Compares 2 U on repeat since they found out about Sinead.

3. "Sunflowers at sunrise in fog" isn't the epic photo I hoped for.

I wonder if Mariah Carey ever regretted collaborating with Ol’ Dirty Bastard?

Adi Ignatius inteviewing Karim Lakhani for the Harvard Business Review:

Just as the internet has drastically lowered the cost of information transmission, AI will lower the cost of cognition.

And he comes in with the zinger, which I believe to be true:

What I say to managers, leaders, and workers is: AI is not going to replace humans, but humans with AI are going to replace humans without AI. This is definitely the case for generative AI.