A How-To vote in online polls 29.6.2013

There’s a coal poll in the Herald today about how jobs are being lost in the industry.

Rail Polls 15.12.2012

There’ve been at least three very different polls about the planned closure of the Newcastle rail line in the last 24 hours.

An imperfect tree

Gregson Park.

The first Lord Mayoral minute of the new Council 7.10.2012

Tuesday is the new Council’s first meeting.

The Herald yesterday highlighted the new Lord Mayor’s first demand [2.6MB file] : a contractor to act as his ‘special advisor’. Not advertised or put put to tender.

Apologies to Terry 5.7.2012

Voila.

The sign from the last blog entry.

And in more current Newcastle news there was yet another story in the newspaper yesterday about The Rail Line That Is Ruining Newcastle. The ?devitalisation of the CBD isn’t because of huge shopping centres ringing Newcastle; it’s because of a public transport corridor. [edit: Being sarcastic. I should have said ‘Yeah right.’]

My favourite Paragraphs from the article are these:

“Despite the [global financial crisis] and an emasculated property market, development continues to occur in the Honeysuckle precinct while the Hunter Street strip continues to languish,” David Rose from Suters Architects said.

“This represents a serious illness for the City of Newcastle. While most accept the city needs to be revitalised there is no clear agreement between the three tiers of government, business and the community how this can be achieved.

“The NSW Long Term Transport Master Plan is currently under way and a regional forum was held in Newcastle in early April. [At which the vast majority agreed the rail should be retained.]

“There have now been more than 40 studies into the potential for transport in and around Newcastle done in the past few years and still no action has been taken.”  [What action? It’s not broken so we don’t need to fix it; we’re Keeping It. How is that not ‘action? I guess it doesn’t require the services of architects…]

The report by Mr Rose and Michael McPherson, also from Suters, acknowledged the proposed law courts at the civic precinct and the University of Newcastle city campus would help revive the CBD. [
How are the students going to get to the CBD? I know – train.]

And a holiday snap:

Home

Laughing Stocks 25.1.2012

The General Manager spent thousands of ratepayer dollars today to put a full-page ad on page 24 of the Herald today to tell the community that everything’s OK – Council is ‘very comfortable’ with how stupid it looks its four – oh, no: not four – reports on Laman Street, and to tell residents ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy: protest respectfully; we vandals are Just Doing Our Job’.

Stormy Weather 16.6.2011

Don’t you love photoshopping programmes?

Children and Civic Park 25.2.2011

Take a child to a park and s/he’ll have a good time with or without something that screams ‘Play Area’ but it’s always seemed a shame to me that there’s no beautiful play equipment in our CBD park. This means the poor dracaenas cop it from kids climbing on them – mine are as guilty as everyone else’s – because there’s nothing else to use.