It’s Chinese New Year! I went down to Chinatown in the Valley on Saturday February 17th to take some photos for you, so here we go:

Keep reading to see 50 photos and two videos of Chinese New Year in Brisbane.

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Fantasy author Terry Pratchett, who is most famous for writing the Discworld series of humourous fantasy books, talked to about 150 fans and signed copies of his books at the Great Hall in Brisbane Grammar School, Spring Hill (click here to see the exact location) last Wednesday, February 14th.

DISCLAIMER - some of the links and ads in this article (including this next one) take you to Amazon.com, where you can buy copies of Terry Pratchett’s books.. If you do, I will make a commission which I will share with the publisher of Brisbane Is Home.

If you are in Brisbane, you should consider instead buying your Terry Pratchett books from Riverbend Books, who sponsored the speech. They are at 193 Oxford St, Bulimba, (click here to see a map of the exact location) and you can call them on 07 3899 8555 (+617 3899 8555). You can buy online or visit their store.

All these pictures from the speech are stored at flickr, the photosharing website. Click here to see the photos - you can see larger sizes, watch a slideshow, see the photos on a map, and download the photos for your own use.

Continue reading to see more than 50 photos, plus my report of Pratchett’s speech.

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Photo from ExploreChinatown.com - taken by flickr user sayheypatrick

Ok, that’s not Brisbane. It’s New York, actually. I couldn’t find any Brisbane pictures from Chinese New Year that were licenced under Creative Commons.

So I’ll be at Brisbane’s Chinese New Year celebrations at the Chinatown Mall, Duncan St, Fortitude Valley on Saturday and Sunday this weekend to make sure that problem is solved. Click here to see the exact location of the Chinatown Mall (it’s not the same as the Brunswick St mall - it’s one block closer to the city).

Some of the highlights will be:

Chinese Fortune Market all weekend.

Music and dancing at different times on Saturday and Sunday.

The God of Wealth handing out red packets and toys.

A Chinese fashion parade (a time tunnel of Chinese fashion).

Cantonese opera.

And, at 5.30pm on Sunday February 18th, the official New Year Welcome Ceremony

Picture of fish-shaped Nian Gao (New Year’s cake) by flickr user KateMonkey.

What are you doing for Chinese New Year? Leave a comment and let me know.

I’m trying to make a living blogging my city - that’s how passionate I am about where I live. If you’d like to try blogging your town, here’s three simple questions - and plenty of answers - that will help to get you started.

How do I find story ideas?

You need to make sure you have a big list of ideas if you are going to write a story every weekday. So make a note of every little club and society that you can find. You can check meetup.com and upcoming.org, but the best thing to do is to go through your free local suburban newspapers - especially the community noticeboards, arts guides, websites for amateur theatre groups, alternative music media, neighbourhood groups and so on.

Check LiveJournal to see if your city has any groups of people. One of the most helpful places for me to find stories has been the brisneyland LJ community. If your city has something similar, it can be a great resource. Lots of people go to brisneyland to ask questions about little things - like what is the best venue to hire for a big party.

Ah…flickr and YouTube. You are my friends. But if you’re doing a commercial site like this one, you’ll need to be careful about videos on YouTube that violate copyright…you don’t want them disappearing from your site six months down the track. This is not a problem with flickr - there are about 5, 500 photos about Brisbane on flickr that are free to use, even for commercial reasons - here, here and here. A thousand of those photos are by me.

Remember how the pros do it: every newspaper keeps a ‘circular calendar’ - a list of what events happen at the same time every month or every year, and you’ll need to do the same. Each month you need to be able to look at your calendar and say something like : “Great, the State Fair is on in a fortnight, the art gallery starts its regular exhibition next week, the football season starts in two and a half weeks, and the mediaeval re-enactors will stage a huge display at the end of the month”.

Keep reading to see the other two important things:

How do I start writing?

What Makes Your Blog Special?

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WARNING - some of the video clips in this article, and some of the websites behind the links, use quite coarse - even offensive - language. Please don’t press ‘play’ or visit the links if you think you wouldn’t like to hear that sort of thing.

[youtube]71izDnhv_qY[/youtube]

One Brisbane band that’s done very well in the last few years is Butterfingers - see their myspace page and listen to four of their songs by clicking here. (To see the Butterfingers Wikipedia entry, click here).

Butterfingers play hip hop, but they don’t pretend to be gangsters and they have an irreverent Aussie attitude along with a warped sense of humour.

They are definitely a bit rude, but Butterfingers are very very funny. Their first single ‘Everytime’, was a hit a few years ago on alternative radio:

Everytime I skate, I get another bruise
Everytime I get drunk, I vomit on my shoes
Everytime I scratch, the needle jumps
Everytime I drink milk, it comes out in lumps

and

Everytime I brush my teeth, I find another cavity
Everytime I try to fly, I discover gravity
Everytime I have a craving, I run out of food
Everytime we spin the bottle, I’m the 1 who ends up nude

and

Everytime we play piggy in the middle, I’m the pig
Everytime we play tiggy, I’m the one who’s it
Everytime I lick a toad, I get warts on my tongue
Everytime I see a killer bee, It’s me that’s getting stung

These aren’t even the funniest bits of the song, just the bits I can safely quote here without being too offensive.

So if you like this sort of thing, read more to see more Butterfingers - but remember not to do this if you might be offended!

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