Our celeb-spotting skills return!

After breaking the news a few InSiders ago about the Queen herself (Olivia Colman) making her Adelaide Lululemon debut, InSider is back again with more icon-spotting.

Picture this: Wednesday lunchtime. Two InSiders have finished their packed lunch, there are 20 minutes left on the lunch break clock. They have heard on the grapevine one of their go-to cafes has been shut down for filming. Interesting, no? Yeah, that’s what they thought. Off they go to Ebenezer Place, right next to another favourite Friday lunch spot. Lo and behold: a fenced off cafe, a collection of plastic tables and chairs, and a lunch buffet ready for a hungry crew. InSider was politely directed away from the set, straight towards the empty chairs and tables.

InSider could not believe it.

They had just walked straight through a real-life movie set(‘s lunch spot…). Walking around the corner, unsure where to go, InSider joked that Olivia Colman was on the set. Never in their wildest dreams did they think the three-time Oscar winner would actually appear.

But appear she did, right behind InSider, and right next to Australian actor Kate Box.

We did not disturb her (besides an unanswered “you’re an icon Olivia!”), just basked in the glory, trying to absorb some of her incredible talent as we breathed (almost) the same air.

Now, contrary to recent examples, InSider is not a celebrity gossip column and not one to grossly invade someone’s personal space to take a photo.

That being said, perhaps someone did hold their phone to their side as they oh-so-subtly snapped one little pic… just for you!

Olivia Colman and Australian actor Kate Box ready to tuck into a buffet lunch. Note the hot pink CityMag sticker pictured on the first bollard. Photo: Insider

InSider is also reliably informed that Colman lunched at Lenswood’s Mt Lofty Ranges Vineyard restaurant at the weekend, so is definitely getting out and about Adelaide and the Hills.

Bird counting

Australia’s bird conservation leaders, BirdLife Australia, has announced the official results of its 10th annual Aussie bird count.

From October last year, 60,598 people across the country looked up to the skies to tally over 3.5 million birds. InSider hopes they were wearing sunglasses… standing under birds can be a dangerous game.

The count was first held in 2014, and participation has grown significantly, with just 9000 people taking part in the first year. The ten most popular birds have remained somewhat steady since then, though the great Ibis has clambered up, pushing the Common Myna out of the top ten.

The Rainbow Lorikeet has claimed top spot each year… proving perhaps looks are everything.

NSW is either the most bird-filled state, or it just has the most bird counters, with over one million birds counted in the state. South Australians counted just 300,000 birds.

A dry argument at Lion Arts Factory

Lion Arts Factory crowns itself “Adelaide’s Favourite Live Music Destination” on its website, but InSider can tell you there’s some disagreement among the live music crowd, with dark mutterings about its bar.

Now, the North Tce venue (formerly Fowler’s Live and Music House) is a good spot to see bands thanks to its location and historic building vibe. It’s a bit cheeky to claim top spot when The Gov has been doing it better for much longer and is an actual pub as well, not to mention Thebby, the newish Hindley Street Music Hall or the legendarily crusty Crown & Anchor, but by all means have a crack.

However, when sweating punters arrived at Lion Arts Factory on a sweltering Sunday night to see Japanese noise-meisters Boris and headed to the bar to ease their thirst, it was soon very far from our favourite live music destination.

First-world worries here, but four of the six beer taps – including all the Coopers – were out of action. At 8pm. Quelle horreur! There wasn’t even any Superdry, which shocked InSider’s companion who thought he was the only one who drank it.

Upturned glasses had been ceremoniously placed on top of each dead beer line, as if to mark their passing with some sort of headstone. The two remaining “choices” were West End Draught (You buy it… no, you buy it…) and Victoria’s Furphy.

“But.. but… why?” we stammered through parched lips. “It’s been a busy week,” was the hapless bar staffer’s answer.

Apparently too busy for management to order more beer for patrons who bought $70 tickets to the well-publicised gig during a well-flagged heatwave, on a festival long weekend. We understand. Actually, we don’t.

So InSider and others begrudgingly paid handsomely for the beers we didn’t want. Still, apparently we were lucky. One punter said later that they tried to pay for a drink with cash and it was refused. Another reported ordering a drink and trying to pay for it with a crisp $50 note, and it was refused.

Maybe the bar ran out of cash as well, as surely a state government-owned venue in an arts industry hub wouldn’t refuse to accept bank notes, which was legal currency last time InSider checked.

Anyway, there we all were, drinking (or not), to find near the end that the bar had actually shut with the band still playing, and now only dispensed water.

Maybe they’d actually run out of their last two beers. Maybe it’s actually a secret Temperance Union venue steering us away from the demon drink. We were herded out into the hot night five minutes after the band ended. Rock and roll!

Councillor’s travels continue

For those playing along, Councillor Henry Davis was missing from this week’s council meeting. But InSider is pleased to report he didn’t ghost the chamber this time, having officially requested a leave of absence from the Lord Mayor.

Davis’ latest absence was due to his beginning the 2024-25 Young Leadership Dialogue Program in Melbourne. This program was a hot topic in the first council meeting of the year – which Davis missed while holidaying in Bali. At that meeting, the council approved the $4500 registration fee to be paid for him to attend.  

Given the Adelaide City Council is paying, Davis said it was “absolutely the right thing” to apologise and request a leave of absence. 

After quaffing 24-carat gold cocktails in Bali and cracking the giant pepper grinder of Jakarta, we can only imagine the councillor will search for a big red ball of wool in Melbourne for the all-important Insta post. 

University installs high-tech security doors

Students at Flinders University have never felt safer than on the Bedford Park Campus where a large door is secured by a long plank of wood.

For the doubters, don’t worry the sharpie scribbled on the plank assures us these are “security door stops”. What is perhaps most alarming is that ‘door stops’ is plural. Were there others in the same doorway? Is this plank the last man standing? Or are there other locations throughout the campus that have also had this genius mechanism installed in the name of safety?

The safety mechanism wedged between the sliding door and the wall was snapped by the editorial team at the university’s student magazine, Empire Times, and shared on their Instagram.

According to the Empire Times team, the security door stop has been there for more than a year now, to their knowledge it’s the only one of its kind and “it does the job”.

An Empire Times editor told InSider the Flinders uni security does a damn good job and that this innovation “might say more on what security is doing with what they can with the resources provided”.

“Anyone that studies late at night at Flinders knows you see some weird stuff, after a while it becomes the normal,” they said. 

One student commented on the Empire Times Facebook post saying, “having spent a decent amount of time on military bases, this does look pretty military-grade”. 

So there you have it, validation for your university sharehouse that resorts to a slat of wood to reinforce a dodgy lock. Although InSider would hope the university can afford to get the locksmith in.

Empire Times shared a series of pictures of the high security installation on their Instagram.

Stuff you should know…

Our American colleagues at the recently launched news site Semafor reported that NASA regained contact with Voyager 1 after months of garbled messages.

Quoting from a report in Scientific American, Voyager 1, which launched with Voyager 2 in 1977, is now more than 15 billion miles from Earth and radio signals take 22.5 hours to reach it.

This artist concept shows NASA Voyager spacecraft against a backdrop of stars. Graphic NASA

In November, a malfunction left it sending seemingly meaningless data, and NASA worried that the mission was ending. But on Wednesday, the team decoded some of the garbled information with hopes to get “good science data back,” one researcher told Scientific American.

But the Voyagers’ power sources are weakening, Semafor reported.

“Eventually, they will go silent, tumbling ‘like a message a bottle’ through interstellar space — to the sadness of the team, some of whom have worked on Voyager for their entire careers,” the news clip read.

The article’s author, Nadia Drake, wrote that “today there are several billion people on Earth who have never taken a breath without the Voyagers in our sky”.