it was certainly a day

So it has been a weird couple of weeks in the sense that firstly I stopped my long association with Duolingo, and that feels like a bit of a loss, and also the Little Dum Dum Club, which is a podcast I've been listening to for over a decade now, perhaps a slightly guilty pleasure and tbh also not always a pleasure, ended, suddenly and without warning (another tbh: I had been considering possibly it was time for me to stop listening, because I felt either it was losing its mojo or I was losing the mojo to listen to it). So... things which anchored me, are a little bit absent. 

Today I went to the SLV to look at some stuff I'd ordered. I am doing a conference paper about Island City, which was proposed to be built off the coast of South Melbourne for a brief period of time, then axed in an instant once the plans were released (February 1974). I was looking into some of the conservationist/activist groups around at that time and I checked this out. 

I do recall the controversy around the building of the Newport Power Station, which is of course a very real thing today and just sitting there on the banks of the Yarra not greatly upsetting anyone anymore. This publication, amongst other things, raises the case that I well remember for the 'heat bubble', the upshot of which seemed to me then and still seems this way now, to have been a warning to the comfortable and smug eastern suburbanites not to get too 'it's out of sight, should also be out of mind' about this structure because it was going to pollute the east. I don't really know if this happened. 

This: 

is a cool diagram someone spent a lot of time on in the mid-70s, and they published it in this newsletter:

I love the idea that there was a publication called Beach Use. The above is as glossy as it got (with the printed, um, letterhead? of the first page, and the rest I guess roneo'd or something. Anyway, pretty cool. 

Speaking of beach use, I saw a bit of Jacinta Allen promo today that talked about a young-ish man who was walking the length of all of Melbourne's 600km of railway to raise money for cancer research (I think), and it mentioned he walked to Stony Point from, I assume, central Melbourne and I thought well I wonder how long that would take. So I looked it up on mapsonmyphone and got this: 

Yes, according to mapsonmyphone the only way to walk to Stony Point from the CBD is via Phillip Island. Does that make sense to you? I wanted to set it to go via Hastings (for instance) but it wouldn't countenance that as a possibility. Anyway it's nonsense but there you go. 

Other things that happened today - I went shopping for my mother, who has covid (she feels fine). I had work meetings and listened to an interview with Sam Prekop, who I like, and also Marc Maron's interview with Elizabeth Olsen, which was a very enjoyable listen, actually. I also did admin and tied up some loose ends on a new book chapter that's coming out soon. 

So, it was certainly a day.