dunny (n) Australian colloquialism meaning a (usually) outside toilet. Popularly used as a simile e.g. “As noisy as a dunny door in a storm” or “…stuck out (conspicuous) as a dunny in the desert.”
One day I am in London on holidays; it is Sunday morning and I am walking around Covent Garden. Suddenly – probably [...]
Entries from January 2007
January 27, 2007
Dunny Hunting in Covent Garden
January 20, 2007
Over the din of a tragic history
A few years ago my father came home fuming. Driving through a large Australian country town, he’d come across the following scene:
Two drivers – one turning onto the main highway and one turning off – recognised each other in passing and stopped to have a talk through their open car windows. This effectively stopped [...]
January 13, 2007
What’s so funny?
They say you can tell alot about people from what they laugh at.
I am sitting in a bar on the Champs Elysees with an American I met on the ferry to Calais that day. This is just after the US election that sees Jimmy Carter ousted from the White House and the end of the Iranian hostage [...]
January 9, 2007
Scuffle in a London Bar
Are we merely an amalgam of all the things we remember? Is our sense of self predicated on the memory of experiences throughout our life? Julian Baggini (in his book The Pig that Wants to Be Eaten) suggests the possibility:
“…if we are in a sense composed of our memories, what happens when those memories become [...]
January 4, 2007
You have a nice voice, Paul
Robert Hughes, the famous art critic, was interviewed on television recently and told the following story. As a teenage student at a Catholic school, he was taken with his class to view an exhibition of abstract art. At one point – and in response to one of the pictures – the young Robert guffawed in [...]
January 1, 2007
Flogging the Penis of Jimi Hendrix
I notice that you can now buy a plaster cast of the penis of the legendary guitarist, Jimi Hendrix for a mere US$1 500. As the maker, Cynthia P. Caster says,
“Because this was one of my first shots at plaster casting, the end result came out kind of gnarly. I prematurely cracked the mould [...]
