194 Dawson Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

Or, "how Mow Your Lawn! got its name".

It was 31 December 2010 and time for that annual celebration when the entire planet joins weirdos like me and Charlotte to be number nerds and celebrate something as basic as one number changing to another. I mean, I think interesting dates are a perfectly good reason to get drunk and set off fireworks, and it's comforting that once a year, everybody else joins in.  What, you're telling me there's a bit more to it than that, something called "culture" and all that?  Oh, well then.  That's not the point!

The point is that, on this particular New Year's Eve, Charlotte and I were going to meet my mother and her partner for dinner.  Classy souls that we are, we got smashed on delicious cider before even getting out the door.  So we stumble onto the tram, and I'm trying not to be one of those obnoxious, overly loud tram drunks talking about totally inappropriate subjects (cf Charlotte when we took Helen to see Alpine in November).  I don't think I entirely succeeded.

We already had some budding curiosity about decrepit buildings and crankiness about shonky modern architecture.  See, for example, this post and another post on this topic from Charlotte's blog.  On this particular trip, we'd already - and fairly quietly - noted a couple of Melville Road's more curious places (like Gibbi's Pizza and the shop next to Con's).  But then the tram pulled onto Dawson Street, I laid eyes on #194, and blurted:

"Mow your lawn!"

Because, christ, this thing really does need a mow, soon.  The property is otherwise lovely, and with a nicely mown lawn would attract a considerable amount of approval from me, not that this hasty shot shows much beyond the overgrown lawn:

I spent the next ten minutes critiquing unmown lawns and even urging one concrete paradise to "get a lawn!", which just made me think of a line from the Late Show's sketch about things wogs would never do.  Charlotte finally forcibly got me to shut up, or perhaps it was the urgent call of my bladder, parlously overloaded with cider.

Anyway, all I was getting at that night, and all I'm getting at now, is that you should mow your lawn.  You can't do a whole lot on an unmown lawn (except pass out in it, or hide power bills you don't want to read), and it's probably going to wind up home to things that want to kill you.  Especially in Australia.  And since this country is only three quarters of a mile from the sun, it's a bushfire risk too.

Rating: MOW YOUR LAWN!, or on our oh-so-formal scale, "lick o' paint".