Catching the love of G10

InSider is coming to you with some positive public transport news this week. Rare, we know. For all the flak Adelaide Metro cops – especially amid ongoing train strikes leaving passengers stranded – InSider found a positive for any Adelaide Metro employees out there needing a pick-up.

It’s our new favourite Instagram account with the leaving-nothing-to-the-imagination name: “I fucking love the g10 so much”.

You may be thinking, surely they don’t mean the G10 Adelaide Metro bus that travels from Marion Centre Interchange to Blair Athol? Oh yes, that’s exactly what we mean.

Straight from the bio of the page: “Marion Centre Interchange to Blair Athol via Flinders Medical Centre, Flinders University, Goodwood Rd, city, O’Connell St and Prospect Rd I LOVE IT!!”.

The page, which boasts an impressive 5825 followers at the time of writing, shared its first post (a slide show of G10 photos with four love heart emojis to the sound of Billie Eilish’s What was I made for?) just three weeks ago.

In a heartfelt caption penned below another slideshow, the profile’s owner (unknown) writes to “My Dearest G10”.

“As I sit here on your familiar seats, gazing out the window I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the countless journeys we’ve shared together. From the bustling city streets to the serene outskirts, you’ve been my steadfast companion through it all.

“Every time I step aboard, I feel a sense of warmth and comfort, knowing that I’m in your care. Your gentle hum as you navigate the streets soothes my soul, and the rhythm of your movements syncs perfectly with the beating of my heart.”

We could go on, but we’ll allow you to explore the rest yourself. Talk about a good news story!

A heartbreak of tree-size proportions

InSider came across some incredibly sad news in our inbox recently, with a loyal reader letting us know that the centrepiece palm from the Adelaide Botanic Garden’s Palm House had been removed.

It can’t be, we thought. Surely not. InSider had to see this for ourselves, so we bravely left our desk for a stroll to the gardens in the middle of the work day to investigate.

There we were, surrounded by fresh air, the sweet sounds of birds in our ears, surveying a pile of dirt where a proud palm tree once stood.

Left: the palm in all it’s glory September 2023. Right: the palm house looking much less palmy this week. Photos: InSider

(Disclaimer before InSider gets cancelled, we really don’t know much about palms and are not willing to die on the hill of palm tree identification. But, it was some kind of palm species at the very least, if not a tree.)

We did do some digging (pun intended) and reached out to our friends at the Adelaide Botanic Garden who told us that the “Botanic Gardens, and indeed all gardens, are evolving spaces where changes in plant collections take place for a varied number of reasons”.

“Inside the conservatories, such as the Palm House and Bicentennial Conservatory, some plants even outgrow the building and need to be replaced with smaller individuals.”

InSider truly loves the Botanic Garden and is insinuating nothing, but notes the first palm photo is dated just last September and the historic Palm House was made for, well, palms.

So there you have it! So long reasonable-sized palm, welcome to dirt circles.

News Corp accepts the consultants the State Govt rejected

News Corp’s Advertiser reported this week on the state government’s widespread use of consultants (a ‘bad thing’), noting that one of the big four consultancy firms, PwC, had been dumped from the government’s consultancy panel following its tax scandal.

PwC insists its local office had nothing to do with the poor behaviour interstate, but another news report – this time in the Australian Financial Review – caught InSider’s eye this week.

While PwC is not up to scratch for the state government, it is perfectly acceptable to News Corp who, according to the AFR, have hired the consultants to help it cut $15 million from its Australian operations.

The black hole has opened up, the AFR reports, due to “the weak advertising market”, the end of Facebook owner Meta’s deal with news publishers, and an expected flat or lower contribution from Google.

PwC last year decided to offload its government consultancy business in the wake of the scandal.

God save Joe Alwyn

InSider has been shaking in our seats as we await Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department’s 1.30pm release today.

Before a conversation with a local radio host this week, we assumed disc jockeys and announcers would have some early access. That’s not the case, according to our inside source.

They said radio stations get to listen to the album a mere 15 minutes before The Tortured Poets Department’s release and then will play the listed single as the album is released to the general public at 1.30pm.

Swifties have been intensely speculating the hidden meaning behind The Tortured Poets Department song titles, and many expect Swift’s ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn to be the main subject. There’s also talk that this album will be a mix of Folklore and Red, if that means anything to you.

If the world around you stands still at 1.30pm, you now know why.

Democracy re-manifested

In October 1991, a man was arrested for enjoying “a succulent Chinese meal” in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane.

Now, 33 years on, Reddit user SpadfaTurds has posted an Instagram screenshot showing Democracy Manifest man and one of the police officers who arrested him reuniting over a cold beer.

Photo: Reddit

“My Dad and the succulent Chinese meal guy he arrested reunited for a beer today after 24 (sic) years on lmao” the post reads.

It appears that democracy has finally re-manifested itself.

“Ugly” EV chargers still a gripe for Lord Mayor

As EV sales accelerate, the City of Adelaide is making sure there’s plenty of chargers to go around. There’s just one problem, according to the always subtle Lord Mayor: they’re horribly ugly. 

InSider can always count on the Lord Mayor to tell us exactly what she’s thinking, and this week was no different. 

Shh, it’s ok charger, InSider thinks you have a great personality.

In Tuesday night’s Infrastructure and Public Works Committee meeting, Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith raised the ever-pressing issue of aesthetics during the debate about moving the council’s EV infrastructure roadmap forward. 

She said the chargers were “one of the ugliest things I’ve seen on the street”. InSider wonders how closely she has been looking at the streets of Adelaide to make that claim…

Lomax-Smith recalled a recent trip to London, where she saw delicate bollard-like charging banks. She was seemingly disappointed to return to Adelaide’s chunkier tech. 

“We seem to have come up with the engineering solution of the century that is fabulously large, incredible ugly, and obstructive, it defies logic to me,” she said. 

This isn’t the first time the Lord Mayor has told the council it can do better. In October last year, she said putting these chargers on our “aeesthetic” streets is an “abomination”. 

The council will look into alternative chargers that are well-designed and low-impact moving forward, and as the Lord Mayor said, “it’s not rocket science”.