So here I am in South America, loving absolutely everything about the place except for its notorious machismo culture. This awkward combination of chivalry and chauvinism forces me to suppress my feminist reflexes and bite my tongue on a daily basis - "piropos" (flirtatious comments made by men on the street that at times verge on sexual harrassment) are a part of everyday life here and the only way to deal with it is to feign ignorance or indifference. My local girlfriends tell me they hate it too, and wish men were "more civilised" like they supposedly are in countries where gender equality supposedly reigns.

So imagine my disgust when upon checking up on the latest news from home I read this report of Mt Isa Mayor John Moloney calling for - and I quote - "beauty disadvantaged" women to move to his town where they would be assured of finding a male partner (the gender imbalance there is about 5 blokes to 1 sheila). He proudly proclaims that Mt Isa is a place where "ugly ducklings can flourish into beautiful swans" - of course, no mention is made of the appearance of their potential suitors. I'm not sure what exactly he hoped to achieve by making such comments - somehow I doubt there are now thousands of ladies falling over themselves to move north and make it with a miner - but I guess it reminded me that just because it's not quite so visible on the streets doesn't mean that latent sexism doesn't exist in our society, even within the official ranks of government.

I do hope that someone back home is beating the drum about this!

A friend showed me this animation after I expressed a vague desire to photograph all the great street art around here. Clearly there is no point in doing so as nothing will ever top this for a combination of graf & snaps.

Described by the crazy-brilliant Italian urban artist BLU as "an ambiguous animation painted on public walls" in Buenos Aires and Baden, It is quite possibly the coolest thing you will ever see.

Check out more of BLU's stuff here.

You’re probably familiar with most of the touted evils of globalisation - McDonalds stores cropping up next to ancient shrines, *certain* shoe companies exploiting sweatshop workers in so-called “Export Processing Zones”, traditional Zulu dancers bopping along to JT’s latest track while drinking Coca-Cola and wearing Adidas sweats (if you’re not, go and read Naomi Klein’s “No Logo”) - but there’s something less visible happening as the world morphs into one homogeneous blob of mindless consumer culture: linguicide - i.e.: language death.
Remember Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction - “ENGLISH, MOTHER-FUCKER! DO YOU SPEAK IT?” - that’s basically what’s been going on as multi-national companies plant their sucker roots from Argentina to Zaire. There might be more people by number speaking Chinese, but there are more places - and more money - where English will get you to where you want to be.
A language is pronounced dead when its last native speaker passes away - and according to the experts, this is happening at a rate of one every two weeks. Truth be told, this is practically inevitable in some cases - for example, in shrinking indigenous populations where language is purely an oral tradition. But one of the major contributing factors is “assimilation” - i.e. where speakers of one language become bilingual in another language, and eventually that language takes over. And guess who’s most to blame there?
Sorry guys - but it usually comes down to people like us. We quite happily trot off overseas to non-English speaking countries, quite confident in the knowledge that not only are we guaranteed to find someone who speaks English at those crucial checkpoints (airport/hospital/police station/cocktail bar) should disaster strike, but that we can even find paid work ‘spreading the word’ there.
While on an individual level TEFL (that’s Teaching English as a Foreign Language) might be helping people open themselves up to better employment opportunities, the big picture really looks a little bit culturally arrogant. So how can you do your bit (there aren’t exactly the equivalent of OxFam stores selling free-trade dictionaries)? Learn another language.

Billboards. Posters. Flyers. Train stations. Shop fronts. Adshels. Bus stops. The sides of buses. The backs of buses. The backs of cabs. The backs of toilet doors. Is there no place sacred anymore?

If you’ve ever felt completely overwhelmed by the lack of visual quiet-space in the big smoke, consider a trip to São Paulo, Brazil, where outdoor advertising has been banned outright. The “Clean City” law was passed in 2006 by the city’s right-wing mayor Gilberto Kassab in an attempt to tackle the “visual pollution” problem, but it takes a bit of time to pull down over 8000 billboard sites and it’s only now that the full effect of the policy can be appreciated.

Photographer Tony de Marco has been documenting the metamorphosis from Blade-Runner-metropolis to an urban environment that some (i.e. advertisers) have described as a ‘bland concrete jungle reminiscent of communist Eastern Europe’ and others consider “a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash.”

If the biggest city in the southern hemisphere can do this, then surely there’s a chance we could rid Brisbane of all those vile yellow “Nasal Delivery Technology” billboards?

I have a confession to make. Sometimes I tell my friends I’m too sick to go out on a Saturday night, and instead, stay at home drinking gin and listening to Fleetwood Mac and wishing I’d been born 30 years earlier. Now I’m glad I was born late enough to appreciate Ladyhawke’s Stevie Nicks/Blondie/Bruce Springsteen-meets-Peaches/New Young Pony Club/Phoenix “bunch of stuff”. I think you will be too.

Get to know Ladyhawke aka Pip ‘born in NZ - bred in Australia - residing in London’ Brown better at www.ladyhawkemusic.com. She will gleefully bend your sense of time and place.

For an ostensibly Catholic country, Argentina - well, Buenos Aires at least - takes a remarkably liberal attitude towards matters of a sexual nature. Aside from the piles of soft porn on display at every kiosko on the street, you will find whole chapters of street-press and ‘what’s-on’ guides dedicated to gay-friendly events, venues and businesses.

What’s really surprising though is the abundance and conspicuousness of “transitorios”, or “telos” as the slang term for them goes. Now, I’ve always thought of ‘love hotels’ - the usual euphemism for any establishment that charges rooms out by the hour - as seedy places where people pay for more than just a bed, if you know what I mean.

But here, killing a few hours between the sheets with a loved (or at least lusted-after) one is as socially acceptable as meeting for coffee with friends. In fact, rather than being seen as scourges of society telos are generally considered to be providing a much-needed public service: safe, clean, comfortable places for young couples - who often live at home with their parents well into their 20s - to dance the horizontal tango in private.

Options range from basic bedrooms (always with a private bathroom) to luxury suites to themed extravaganzas (for those who suffer ‘Jungle Fever’ or like to bump-uglies ‘Under the Sea’). If you need inspiration, you can arrange for a television with films to get you in the mood or ask for a water-bed with ceiling mirrors. A courtesy call 10 minutes before your time is up gives you a chance to extend your stay if you’re not quite done yet, and rooms are completely ‘refreshed’ in between tenants to ensure it’s all good clean fun.

The whole exercise is generally considered romantic rather than tacky, and it’s so mundane that even married couples with their own homes are known to use telos for a change of scenery. Viva la diferencia, huh?

Last week I stepped out of my apartment building and into a scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s next film “Tetro” (a quasi-autobiographical black & white epic about an immigrant family, set in Buenos Aires).

This week it was a film clip, starring a lemon-yellow 1953 BMW Isetta being driven by a very tall African-American man in a gold spacesuit, with a sharply dressed Devito-esque passenger and two midgets on Vespa scooters riding alongside...