The idea of a blog is that you write something, chuck it out there and the world either ignores it or responds. The best responses are ones like this one:
Lads can wander the drains, chaps with dogs can wander the drains.
I had to walk home from Georgetown to Tighes Hill, from an appointment, recently and I gave a moment’s thought to walking beside the drains. “I might meet Mark”, I thought, “and say hello”.
But then I realised: an eighty-year-old female, her broken hand in plaster, walking beside the drains, someone would surely ring welfare agencies and interfere.
Not fair.
At least I was able to take a short cut through the TAFE.
And this:
Do you have a location that a 71-year-old, with a bad knee, might be able to access the system? We briefly walk beside it, and have a look into it, every time we walk from our parking spot to the Hunter Stadium for soccer and league games. I’d love to have a walk along it.
I’m seriously going to have to get onto Hunter Water and re-discuss the issue of access to the creek, not just for me but for all my older drain-loving buddies.
At other times the messages are less light-hearted. They are, in fact, intriguing to the point of being unnerving. I’m neither Woodward nor Bernstein, and this blog is hardly the Washington Post, but I did get an email recently after the Goo story post about the state of the gasworks. In it were contained detailed instructions on how to access information from various websites: “enter this URL …. scroll down to X … scroll back up to Y … enter [search term] …” and so on. I felt rather like Kevin Costner meeting Donald Sutherland’s Mr X in JFK.
So much secrecy over a silly gasworks!
By the way, yes, I am still waiting to hear from Jemena’s PR people about clearance of the photos that I took in there on my walking tour.
Hamilton North, NSW 2292 
Deep Throat! Thanks for the laugh. The clip too…great movie. My message clearly left the opposite of the intended effect. I was simply showing that if Jemena isn’t interested in answering your questions (or aren’t answering them fast enough for your liking), information regarding their dealings with the EPA is public. I thought I was doing a favour by showing you how to find it. Sorry for creeping you out!
Not creeped at all, sa, and I did appreciate the public service!
BTW, big spike in views that day so maybe Jemena shared it …
Nice work, in a post about secrecy, to have a photograph of a lettered cube showing only three of the six letters – “D”, “E”, “A”.
So what are the concealed letters? A sinister “D”, “L”, “Y”? Or perhaps an exasperated “R”, “M”, “E”?
Pure coincidence! Damn conspiracy theorists!!
Ah, Newcastle, the venice of the mid-coast 🙂
Apparently, Birmingham in the UK has more miles of canal than Venice. But saying “Newcastle, the Birmingham of the mid-coast” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it!