The globally-famous rap-artist Coolio (can this be his real name?), best known for his classic Gangsta's Paradise with its catchy and soulful chorus, is coming to Canberra next week.
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Last week's Times featured an interview with him. He was asked about the famous fear-fantasies of the Yarralumla Residents Association that the proposed development of the Brickworks site bringing the wrong sorts of people into the neighbourhood, will turn Yarralumla (and Deakin too) into a "ghetto". He offered some terse advice.
And now Coolio has asked for our assistance in composing a rap ditty about this issue. He and I are collaborating. I'm unable to use in this family column any of the offensive words Coolio uses in his songs (words like "nigga" and "hoe") but here is our first draft. It contains challenging Coolio-style sentiments of which Gang-gang does not necessarily approve. Coolio and I are calling our joint composition NIMBYs Paradise.
Down in superior Yarralumla everyone dere is a serial grumbler
They're encumbered by the shade of their insular penumbra
As the real world approaches they gettin' glummer and glummer
They loll in their mansions worth millions of dollars, these diplomats and scholars
Havin' phobias about newcomers' smells and squalors.
Chorus.
They been spendin' most their lives
Livin' in a NIMBYs paradise.
They been livin' up to their eyes
In a privileged First World paradise.
Hey Katy and Mick,* show some policy agility.
Give Yarralumla a correctional facility.
A tattoo parlour, a mosque, a hospice, a McDonalds, KFC.
Let's make up-themselves Yarralumlans more like you and me.
Hey Katy and Mick, time to give the 'Lumla demographic diversity.
Don't listen to all the NIMBY perversities they picked up at their sandstone universities.
It's time for you both to kick the asses
Of Yarralumla's toffs and snobs and upper classes.
Fill all dem Yarralumla planned new flats with colourful bogans covered in tatts
Make de Brickworks de new site for Summernats.
Chorus.
They been spendin' most their lives/Luxuriating in a NIMBYs paradise ... etc.
*Chief Minister Katy Gallagher and Planning Minister Mick Gentleman.
The emu in the stars
Thursday's astronomically popular column discussed the new Mt Stromlo Interactive Heritage Trail and how one of the 14 stations along the Trail celebrates "Australia's First Astronomers".
At Wednesday's Trail-opening event Ngunnawal man Tyrone Bell explained how Aboriginal people have been taught to find an emu in the Milky Way. Here is a photograph of the Milky Way and then another with an artful outline of the emu added to it to enable you too to try to find the emu that stargazing Ngunnawal people, like Tyrone Bell, can see on crystal clear nights. These images are incorporated in the signage on the new trail.
Tyrone Bell told us how "my late father Don Bell senior explained the night sky to us. Dad used to look up at the stars with us and interpret how Ngunnawal people would see the night sky, how our Dreamtime stories would be part of that sky".
For Ngunnawal people (the emu in the sky has different Dreamtime significances for different indigenous people in different places) this emu is part of the legend of Why The Emu Can't Fly.
The legend says that the great spirit, creating emus and at first planning to have them fly, ran out of enough long feathers to enable both the male and female to take wing. And so he grounded them both but as a consolation for their flightlessness gave them those fabulously strong legs and feet that make them the fastest-galloping land bird of all.
Finding ourselves
Forgive our ongoing artistic schoolboy crush on New York LEGO virtuoso Nathan Sawaya, the Vincent van Gogh of LEGO. We stumbled across his artistry while we were doing LEGO homework so as to write, truthfully, about Canberra's approaching Canberra Brick Expo.
Fanatically loyal readers will remember the column used a picture of Sawaya's gobsmackingly weird Stairway. In the absence, then, of any explanation fom the artist of what the creation meant we speculated that the burly figure on the stairway might represent ambition-driven Clive Palmer clambering, panting, up into Federal Parliament (represented by the giant figure), for reasons that the nation still cannot fathom.
But we were wrong. Sawaya's people have contacted this column's people, furnishing us with Sawaya's own definitive explanation. Just as deep-thinking Clive Palmer may have entered parliament to "find himself" that is what Sawaya's blue man is up to.
"As humans, we scour our world for opportunities. Opportunities for success. Opportunities for happiness. But more often than not, we find those opportunities not in the world outside, but within ourselves.
"This sculpture was built from recycled LEGO bricks that had been donated to me."
Everything about the Brick Expo is at www.brickexpo.com.au
