Tag Archives: car

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Domain Tunnel

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DOMAIN TUNNEL
mrblo

When the Domain Tunnel opened in 2000, the state government set a temporary sixty kilometre an hour speed limit. Their caution seems prudent. Who knows how much the construction firm might’ve abridged basic safety to cut costs. But the explanation they proffered insulted all of us. They explained that Victorian motorists needed time to get used to driving through a tunnel. As if they thought that, finding no sky above our heads, we might flip out and slam on the brakes in traffic.

For weeks, they had run an advertising campaign instructing us just to drive like normal in the tunnel. Don’t get out of your car or try to turn around. Continue reading

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Crescendo to an error

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Crescendo to an errormrblo

A certain private parking area near my brother‘s apartment includes fold-up pedestals that the spaces’ owners can upraise to defend them from other motorists. Each pedestal folds up into the middle of its parking space, where you lock it into place with a key. The distance between pedestals in adjacent spaces then becomes just one pedestal diameter less than the width of the space. Now instead of just blocking your space, the interloping vehicle blocks two spaces.

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Motoring

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CASK WINE UNDER FIRE AS GOVERNMENT PONDERS TAX HIKEwink

Hawthorne, Mike (The Sydney Morning Herald, April 2015)

I swing into the bottle shop with just enough fuel left to reach the petrol station on the corner. They’ve invited me to dinner twenty kilometres away in Southbank. By emptying my change jar, I’ve collected together seven dollars and fifty cents to divide between petrol and the bottle of wine I’ve said I’ll bring. Every cent I save on the wine improves the car‘s odds of getting there.

I locate a five-dollar bottle of rosé and then start foraging for something even cheaper to undercut it. Continue reading

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Chased

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NEW CYCLIST HANDBOOKcyclist

Hewitt, Ben (editor; Rodale Books, November 2005, ISBN 9781594863004)

Winter found me cycling down a service road on the Princes Highway, in the calm of the middle of the night, when two men leapt out of their car and chased after me on foot.

“Oi!” yelled one, “Oi! Stop you bastard!” Continue reading

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Knight’s Errand

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THE SONG OF ROLANDdorothy

Sayers, Dorothy L. (translator; Penguin, reprint December 1957, ISBN 978014044075)

On the phone, she‘d told me that she’d driven the car on to a raised section of the concrete, where she’d had to leave it. It took the security guard and me half an hour to find it. I’d enlisted his help at the parking garage near the haematology building. I thought of him as the squire. Without his help, I’d never have found it.

“Cooey!” he yelled out. Continue reading

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Volkswagen

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A SCANNER DARKLYscanner

Dick, Philip K.  (Doubleday, 1977, ISBN 0385016131)

My grandfather bought the Volkswagen in 1968. He imported it direct from Germany and shifted the steering column over to the right-hand side.

A year later man set foot on the moon. Continue reading

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Bus Shelters

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POLICING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION: AN ENVIRONMENTAL AND PROCEDURAL EVALUATION OF BUS STOPSbus

Kooi, Brandon R.  (LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2007, series: “Criminal Justice: Recent Scholarship”, ISBN 9781593321468)

One day, some transport minister may decide to give up his car for a year so he can experience the reality of relying on public transport. Unless he and all his mistresses live on a train line, he will sit in a lot of bus stops. Some of these, like the ones in Clayton, will follow the old-fashioned, comfortable design of an ass-width plank with either a straight backrest or one arched to match the human spine. Some others, like the unenclosed seats in Mt. Waverley, leave out the backrest, which does no harm. But if the minister rides out to Oakleigh, his backside will discover special pain benches that replace the backrest with a thick horizontal pole at scapula height.

The benches themselves arch downwards to stop you from trying to perch at the front edge away from the pole. They measure twenty-eight centimetres deep, but the pole overhangs them by twelve centimetres. Continue reading

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Carnegie Valet

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THE HIGH COST OF FREE PARKINGshoup

Shoup, Donald (APA Planners Press; Updated edition, June 21, 2011, ISBN 9781932364965)

When I pulled up outside Avi’s, a man ran out of his apartment to watch me park. He wore a singlet tucked into a pair of yellow slacks. He had his hands up. While I reversed in, he hurled anxious glances back and forth between the front and back of my car.

This makes it harder to park. Continue reading

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Flat Inspection

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CRAFTING WITH CAT HAIR: CUTE HANDICRAFTS TO MAKE WITH YOUR CATcathair

Kaori Tsutaya (Translated by Amy Hirschman, Quirk Books, 2011, ISBN 9781594745256)

Bendy crept upon the moth. He moved his limbs one at a time, between clock ticks, splitting each step into tiny motions. He had to keep calm; if he yielded to the temptation to dash, the bell would jingle on his flea collar and scare the moth away. Three more inches and he could pounce.

“Bzzzzzzzzzzt!” Continue reading

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Declaration Of Principles

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(MPAA, 4 May 2006)stealacar

I have it on good authority that the MPAA intend this commercial to discourage movie piracy, rather than, as it appears, to encourage car theft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU

One marvels that such advertisements make it past their first test screening, let alone into the forefront of a multimillion-dollar crusade against copyright infringement. The average viewer must jump ship at the first premise: Continue reading

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Earlier Work [pt.2]

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THE FRANTIC AND EXHAUSTING LIFE OF A PARLIAMENTARY MEDIA ADVISER colinposter

Jacobs, Colin (7 August 2014; Crikey.com.au)

I bundle out of the train in short-pants and find a phone box to call Colin. I’ve started explaining where to meet me when Colin screams and I hear the receiver clatter against the tabletop.

When he comes back on a few minutes later, Colin explains that from his kitchen window, he saw his car start to roll back down the slope out of his garage. He ran out of his house and slapsticked along beside it trying to get the key into the lock as it picked up speed, rolled down the slope and through the neighbour’s fence in front of an audience of staring children. Continue reading

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Flighnay

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REMAINS TO BE SEEN: TRACING JOE HILL’S ASHES IN NEW ZEALANDrema

Davidson, Jared (Rebel, 2011. ISBN 9780473189273)

In a bum one sees the mystery of how he got there. Seasick Steve ran away from home. Joe Hill fell into the Great Depression. Ours came from a tatterdemalion public library on Cooke Street, where he’d spent the morning chroming petrol from a lemonade bottle. Whomever they’d sent to pick him up hadn’t arrived, so we offered him a lift home in Colin‘s Subaru.

The bum lived in a shelter on a street he pronounced, “flighnay!” Continue reading

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