ACTion...

...or lack thereof. This is the third J00ster post on the city everyone loves to hate - Canberra. To be honest, it's not that bad. I mean, when the biggest gripes are centred around the eerie absence of cars on the smooth wide roads; the fact it's still blazing hot even on an autumn's day; and the sleepy opening hours, you know it could be worse. There's plenty of cities out there with slightly more pressing problems, like the chance to get dismembered by a pipe bomb, or buried alive by molten lava.

And yet... the fact the next four pics centre on a metal orb suspended outside the National Gallery, says a lot.

Rock does his best School of Athens impression.

Plato, inspired by his weighty treatise on The Forms, argues the sphere is the most perfect embodiement of the ideal.

Aristotle, dismissive of reasoning without empircal observation, asserts that the sphere is merely another object percieved through the imperfect window of man's senses.

Rock reckons it looks a bit like the Deathstar. Truely, this is an intellectual battle being fought on an elevated plane.


A big fountain and a big ball. What a city!

Rock reckon's he has what it takes to fill that empty space in Path to Abstraction gallery between the Mondrian and the Kandinsky.

The autumn colours may be out in force, but I'm noticing a decided lack of autumn chill in the stiffling 30 degree afternoon.

In Canberra you have to make your own fun.

Careful, with shots like this you're ruining Rock's my-city-is-better-than-yours cynicism.

Rock still fancies his chances at artistic glory. "Composition No. 27 with Two Bars and Tower" is a searching examination of mankind's innate imprisonment behind the rigidity of our megre perception.

Pop quiz - name the artwork mimicked in the snap below. Luckily for the uneducated out there, there's always wikipedia.

From master painter to master sculpture. Is this the next Michaelangelo? Well, it is until it's time to roll out the male nudes...

Just to make Canberra look a little cooler, they build this bizarrely named village of Queanbeyan next door. When the biggest excitement there is standing in the a depressingly deserted car park with a nostagic tear in the eye, you know you've achieved the impossible - found somewhere that makes you want to turn around and head back to Canberra as quick as a straining 1.3L Toyota Echo can chug along.

But wait, who would have thought a little gem of a Thai joint would be hidden in an old federation house in this depressing hamlet. Even more remarkable, the joint actually made the Qantas inflight magazine... and not just in a poll of the least likely new Qantas destinations.