LCD

I'm not like most people. And I'm not just being pretentiously individualistic. (no, really...) I know it for a fact because i've watched so many of my favourite things disappear from the store shelves these last few years.

An entire brand of boutique ice-cream. Bought out by a competing conglomerate and promptly killed.
A variety of honey. Gone.
Favourite flavour in an ice-cream range: Discontinued.
Ditto a refillable style of air-freshener, a chocolate block, a fresh fruit juice flavour.....
And whatever happened to dark chocolate Bounties? They came and went faster than a new TV series that fails to hit ratings targets in its first week of broadcast.

I took to emailing customer support for explanations.
One replied: "Unfortunately due to sales this product has been deleted."

On the phone to another company, I met a woman who was more candid. Because the big chains would no longer stock the product it was not worth their while making it. So reluctantly they stopped.

I'm sure if i dug further the blame would almost fully lie with Coles and Woolies. They have the technology to count actual individual unit sales over a time period. And their policy is to yank anything that doesn't sell a million units per second. Or thereabouts.

So much for a world of increasing diversity and freedom of choice in which anything we could ever dream of is available to us. Economic rationalism ultimately rules.

In a UK supermarket recently i was quite shocked at how limited my choices were. It was that supermarket's own crap brand of product or one or two other feeble crap alternatives. Often there was no choice at all.

I've noticed Coles, in an act of outrageous egotism and misrepresentation, have deleted some small, independent supplier's genuinely organic popping corn from the health food shelves and replaced it with Coles own brand. There is nothing organic about this Coles brand product. It should be in the snack food aisle alongside the other non-organic popcorns. How stupid do they think i am?

So, unless you're like everybody else, and you like the things that just about everybody else likes, you're going to have to get used to intense, but short-term relationships with some favourite things. Because brand owners won't stop trying to diversify and bring out new varieties, but these "delicacies" won't stick around if they're not massively popular.

Thank god staples like fruit and veg don't seem to suffer this.
Imagine if they stopped growing avocados due to lack of interest.
The horror!

Diss in Code

"SHAVE YOUR ARMPITS YOU TROLLOP!!"

The young man's voice yelled at me from a passing car.
I was wearing a sleeveless dress but it was after sunset so he couldn't have possibly seen my armpits.
And if he had he'd have seen they were shaved.

So I wondered if perhaps this was Brisbane code for "Get a car or get off the road you greenie hippy cyclist."
?

Work in Progress

Brisbane is under-construction. Opening soon for business!

These shots were taken in a single 15 minute commute across the city.
I did not make any detours or special efforts to find them.
I just stopped my bike and snapped, and there were plenty more i didn't shoot.
The off-road cycle-path alone has no less than 4 detours, slow-down or get-off-and walk zones due to construction works.
This is just a tiny subset of the city's construction zones.

And the city is full of dust.

Warning: I am not a photographer. Not even pretending there's anything interesting or pretty about these shots.

tailless skink tales - continued

The cat's patience and focus is admirable, enviable. She's determined single-minded, and had been staking out the garden shed for hours. I went out and came home a few hours later and found her patience rewarded. A dead skink belly-up on my kitchen floor.

Surprise to me: skinks have red blood, just like us.

No sign of cat though. She's back at the shed. Staking out another one. Her cat-brain logic says if there was a skink there before there'll be another one now. That's probably true. But it's bloody minded.