So I am having a beer in Richmond at my favourite watering hole The Richmond Club Hotel after a week of Crikey. I love having a beer on a Friday with my mates, and we were at the RCH to have a few cold ales for my good mate Boundi’s birthday. I live in Richmond, [...]

What a difference a year makes. A look back at last year’s photos sees bright and joyful times.

No one has got around to putting decorations up this year. I haven’t brought flowers in to the Crikey office for weeks. We are broken, tired little souls in desperate need for Melbourne to get some sunshine and quit acting like it’s June.

But let’s take a look back at the year, since it’s been a big one for the Crikey crew. Jason Whittaker gave up the sunny skies of Brisbane to stalk the theatre aisles of Melbourne, as Crikey’s new deputy editor (and ruler of the Curtain Call blog). Website editor Ruth Brown left us for the coffee shops and hipster hangouts of Portland. Cinetology blogger Luke Buckmaster became website editor and Tom Cowie got hired as a journalist after his desperate and shameless search for a job (he even demanded I link to his blog. That’s how shameless he is).

There’s only one way to tell it: a year in iPhone photos.

Lovely Jason joined in the fine Crikey tradition of drinking coffee.

He did not like it.

Mick the sub wore some rad boots.

That is, when he wasn’t also appearing on the front cover of Fairfax publications.

An intern bribed us with macaroons. Can’t remember who, but obviously they were great.

Front page FAIL #56. Shepparton News, what are you doing? Keyboard Cat is YouTube impact. Kanye West’s “I’mma let you finish” is YouTube impact. B-Mac’s 1100 YouTube hits is not an “insane response” — nor YouTube impact: Maybe we can help bump it up a bit: Doing it for Vinnie and Huey. From today’s NT [...]

Did you hear? Prince William and Kate Middleton are getting married! As a proud member of the Commonwealth, it in this author’s opinion that our little old Antipodean outpost should do everything in our power to be embarrassingly sycophantic in the rush to praise our Royal overlords. Luckily for me, it appears Australia’s newspapers agree… [...]

Royal romance in the air. So Prince William and Kate Middleton are getting married. Hell, there’s already commemorative mugs available. So I turned my attention to the British papers and I wonder if yesterday’s Evening Courier — “the voice of Calderdale” — jumped the gun a little early… Meanwhile, it’s a Victorian election campaign… and [...]

Every so often, depending on how many tea towels First Dog sells, a packet of ‘premium biscuits’ — sometimes Tim Tams or even Caramel Crowns — will appear randomly in the Crikey tea room.

These biscuits rarely last long, often just for a few minutes, but their presence is always a point of much discussion in the fabled Crikey Skype chat.

The following is an unedited transcript — including spelling and grammatical typos — of one such occasion, when a packet of Caramel Crowns made their way into the Crikey team’s hands and led to a political imbroglio of heretofore unimaginable proportions.

It was a typical Monday afternoon in the Crikey bunker…

Geelong turns on favourite son … cane toads, WTF? … Derek the Angry Dugong…

Sexy UFO abductions … Tiger in Oz …

Crikey website editor Luke Buckmaster wanted me to start blogging my daily findings with the aim of starting a daily record. So here it is, with all the wonder that stories about crocs and UFOs and vox pops bring…

With this we promise — with great uncertainty — to possibly blog more about interesting stuff that actually happens within these hallowed walls. If it happens at all.