sometimes when I'm a bit bored...

 

I like to look at real estate listings for incredibly cheap properties in Tasmania and imagine what it would be like to live there, and consider what kind of appalling life changing situations would make me up stumps and go and live in for instance Rosebery where I saw this mural on the wall of a room in a house in a Domain listing. 

the rot sets in

Our area is about the only one in Melbourne to have increased in value over the last six months, where everything else is in decline (this means little in real terms - it had a lot of catching up to do). Anyway, this is the kind of crap we have to look forward to as land values rise. These are big blocks. If these horrors get built, the vendor will do well (financially) but will go to hell.

enticing

I am smart enough to realise there was something wrong with this, but dumb enough it took me a long time to figure it out. It is of course the language that twists the idea of 'one of a kind' from being 'the only one of its kind' to 'one purchasable element of many constituting a "kind" of item'. Wow.

Real estate advertising - like all advertising - is one of those things you can't sit down and argue with; it just is, is stupid, is clever, is canny, is deceptive. In this case, the fact that one of the monopolyesque houses is blue appears to be sufficient to set it apart (in at least one reading of this graphic) from all the others which are curiously set in a circle backing onto each other (great arrangement, unfortunately the house on which this ad was placed was just another dreary late 19th century North Melbourne terrace on a dreary mid-19th century grid, though yes, I am sure the back windows of the actual home do look straight into someone's kitchen and someone's bedroom and vice-versa). If anyone does buy into the North Melbourne real estate dream where prices start, I gather, above the half a million mark, then I hope they are making some calculations a little above the level of 'what a darling little blue home', but the agent's research must have revealed that the darling little blue home has a poignant gut-level meaning.

Meanwhile on the topic of real estate I found this very funny.

?

Very weird use of graffiti on this billboard in Parkville. I thought maybe it was just that they couldn't graffit on the well-lit room but perhaps it was more - a vestigial longing for home and comfort as represented by that delightful rear addition? Really makes you ponder.