Feast your eyes on this!!!! Lovely little spread, bucolic charm, although minus the moo cows, but plenty of free range spray cans. Great views across our alfresco entertaining area, the best the City That Never Wakes has to offer. Inspired by a high end Balinese Spa, the kind you see as you weave your 50cc auto scooter out of the path of an on-coming anjing as you proceed in stately fashion down Jalan Sari Dewi. The only thing to watch here is getting collected by a 500cc dirt bike as they come over the wall and do monos in the very fine kidney-shaped pool.  The design is right, inspired by a desire to connect deeper with mother earth and father sky. The service is second to none, the staff eager to please without being a bunch of obsequious little fucks. Although for extra $50 Hermione in the kitchen may well blow you after our award-winning continental breakfast. Ripper! I pointed the Freedom Machine out here the other day and was chuffed to catch this fine piece of Perth architecture puttin’ on its very own Tiffen (85) warming filter in the late afternoon glow. Whacko the Chook!!!

……so do I return to the bestest place in Perth, asbestos city!!

That’s right!! You’ve seen it first right here on your indefatigable correspondent’s humble blog, The City That Never Wakes turns out “House of the Year”!!! Note the carbon footprint hungry drop down halogens, the 600 square metres of god awful crap. The air conditioning unit the size of Tasmania. The tasteful decor and “no expense spared furnishings”. Just the thing for those weary miners to relax and ponder which Fantastic Furniture outlet will get to see their hard earned. All this and more!!! Much more! Okay, you can’t see any of this, but if you take a cruise down to beautiful Spearwood (aka Valencia by the West) you can spot this little gem, a renovator’s dream, nestled right next to the Watsonia Factory. You’d better move fast though as Location, Location, Location will hook ‘em in by the truck load….make that by the Monaro-load!

And don’t the kids love it!! Well it’s often said the old City That Never Wakes is a good place to bring up kids. It’s also said it’s a good place to retire or die, or both. It’s also said that driving a blunt six-inch nail into the ball of your foot will likely cause discomfort. Of course if your kids don’t drive you to a near death experience, you can always load ‘em into the Freedom Machine and head down to Lake Monger and swat away the flies and marvel at all the other brats and poorly brought up turds. Brings to mind the old Kenyan saying: “Other people’s children are like cold snot”. I wanted to get a t-shirt made up with these very words but instead went for the catchy “Never Underestimate The Power of Stupid People In Large Groups”.  But I couldn’t fit all the words. So here are some gratuitous pics of my kids lovin’ the City that Never Wakes. Actually, they have both had existential crisis the size of a block of flats and at 22 months and 3.7 years want to return to Sydney. In fact we picked them up near the border with South Australia after a high-speed dash at night in the Freedom Machine with Claudette on the wheel and Monty handling the brakes and accelerator. High achievers, don’t you love ‘em? And yes, for the keen-eyed out there that is indeed Monty pulling down his pants and pursuing that poor kid with a look modeled on Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Hey, it’s Perth. There ain’t a lot else to do, even if you’re 3.7 years old.

Well it’s been a while, mainly (actually entirely) owing to the fact that I foolishly decided to “upgrade” from my craopola laptop to a whacko the chook super fast desktop. WRONG. Well, it seemed okay in theory. What followed was a litany of misery only ameliorated by the fact that it was self-inflicted. Hang on!! No it wasn’t!! It was inflicted by those rotten computer types with their pervasive developmental disorders, let’s face it, that’s why people with PSD get into computers right? I mean look at Bill Gates? These were the people who were once getting deposited head down in rubbish bins and toilets back in school. The nerds/geeks/PSDers will inherit the earth, if they haven’t already. Anyway, I have a huge backlog of pics I’m working through. I can’t be bothered posting any camera data or processing guff because I’m feeling annoyed with the world, even more than being marooned in the City that Never Wakes probably warrants. So there….

Crap, I’ve even spelt hyperfocalphotgraphy wrong! That’s what happens when you’ve been in the City that Never Wakes too long, your old medulla oblongata atrophies. In Perth that can be an asset mind you. As for the pic? Oh well, it’s not quite Edvark Munch, but it will do. The Existential Crisis in Perth? Why don’t they just get the agony over and drop thet next neutron bomb of course!!! Not that anyone will notice  mind you, but at least I’d be able to load up the Freedom Machine and head down the south coast, or even “OVER EAST” with a nice strong tailwind.  It will make for great overtaking! Whacko the Chook!

Not really, hey, when you’re on a good thing. Here’s a pano shot of the bestest place in Perth, which unlike the bestest place in Sydney won’t be developed anytime soon.

All Aboard for the City that Never Wakes!

That’ll be $2.50 return for all Australopithecus bonehead miners

All bound for Snoring Town, many miles away….

Wow!!! What a weekend in the City That Never Wakes! An “Event”!!! I knew things were looking up today when I was in cruising the Freedom Machine through the neutron bomb addled streets of the beautiful western suburbs when I spyed a sign hastily plonked on the side of the road. “Event Ahead!” Well spanky my botty! It can’t be the under-eights’ Interpretive Dance festival (that was last week), and the idiot plane race when Brazilian pilots ditch in the old swany has been axed for being too boring (Perth upstaged it too much) so it must be…..a City to Snooze!!! Yeehaaa!!!! No worries, Perth knows a thing or two about hosting an event, quick! Partition the city into fifteen ill-conceived and ill-fitting pieces that bear no relation to each other, man the barricades with grunting Australopithecus boneheads (hey, the miners must be on their two-week Perth rotation) tell everyone via the internet certain streets will open at certain times and then keep them closed up to 45 minutes longer. Stand back and watch what happens! That’s right! A complete fuck up!!!!! Who’d have thought? Not the canny planners of Perth, that’s for sure. Anyway, I digress, given the recent transport chaos on the City That Never Wakes, the State Government has been on the case. They’ve decided to scrap the train network and reintroduce trams. Fortunately, the most incompetent government in the solar system (that would be NSW) just happens to have a few lying around in Glebe. So off to Perth they go, hopefully in time for the next stunning cock-up, the 2011 City to Snooze!

NIKON D3
28-70mm 2.8d
50 mm
f11
ISO 200
1/8
Three bracketed exposures
45 shots stitched in PT Gui

Yippee!!!! I’m leaving the City that Never Wakes! Well, for a week at least. I’m heading over to Sydney, and while I’m there I’m going to head on down to the bestest place in Sydney, the Glebe trameroo warehouse that will shortly be bowled over to make room for that most splendid Sydney preoccupation, Meriton apartments. Much celebration! I will post some pics next week, but in the meantime here’s a pic of some old remnants under the Narrows Bridge. The razor eyed among you will notice I have judiciously cropped out Perth! But only for the art, Guvner!!!!

Or at least by treading water! The Freedom Machine let me down badly the other day. I’d leapt manfully over a fence with gear in tow to get some pics of the South Fremantle maritime museum and when I returned…..it wouldn’t start! Horror of horrors, marooned on the South Mole with a cold front the size of Uzbekistan rolling up Gage Roads and water rats (nay!!! Shetland Ponies with big nasty teeth!) were emerging from under the dock looking for a tasty treat. Me. I beat the brutes off with my volcanic rock Gitzo tripod (you can’t be serious Gitzo) and managed to call the RAC with my free hand. They promptly arrived and fired up the dead battery. Seems all those high-speed manoeuvres (burning off concrete trucks etc) in the Freedom Machine can drain a battery quicker than a 1/8000 exposure. Anyway, I digress, this is now my Bestest place in Perth, after the South Freo Power Station that is now my second Bestest place in Perth, apart from the Airport that is because that means you are about to leave the City that Never Wakes. Hmmmm, notice how all the Bestest places in Perth are south of the river? Why is that? Simple really. It’s because there’s nothing but shit and shitheads north. Now we’ve cleared that up, we can all get back to feasting our eyes on those South Freo vistas.

NIKON D3
28-70mm 2.8d
50 mm
f11
ISO 200
1/8
Two bracketed exposures
28 shots stitched in PT Gui

LR3 vibrance, clarity tweaks, blacks, CS5, Colour Balance, Channel Mixer, dodge and burn, Local Area Contrast, LAB Colour adjustment.