American historian SLA Marshall is best known for his study Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command. In this book, he asserted that, in most US Army units in the Second World War, only one in five men actually fired their weapons. In elite units, the ratio was one in four. Of those who …
Author Archives: Ernest Zanatta
Dangerfield: Not My Store
To mark the King’s Birthday weekend, hipster clothing store Dangerfield has put up various posters in their store windows with ‘Not My King’ emblazoned across the face of King Charles III. Such frivolous and ignorant posters trivialise the importance of maintaining both civil debate on constitutional matters and careful consideration of the underpinning protections afforded …
Ted Lasso – Redemption Rather Than Tragedy
Some misguided people believe that Christopher Marlowe faked his death to avoid arrest by the Elizabethan authorities on blasphemy charges and went into hiding, becoming the actual author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. I doubt that anyone who has actually read Marlowe would see that as halfway plausible, given the much darker and more …
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Time for olive harvest
I’m estimating 20kg worth of olives this year. I’ve already picked about 8kg so far.
Should the AFL expand to 20 teams, and if so, where?
As a child, I think that the first ‘chapter books’ I read were Ruth Park’s Muddle Headed Wombat series. She was quite prolific and there were over a dozen of them in my primary school library. Close to a decade later, I also read her rather tragic adult novel, The Harp in the South, which …
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Do Tasmanians Really Have Twice As Many Mouths To Feed? (And Other Reflections On AFL Expansion)
Given the title of this post, I had better address the Thylacine in the room first up. We do have many unkind jokes about Tasmanians, the nicest being that the small population results in limited genetic diversity and therefore leads to them all being two headed and red haired. That is now out of the …
Broo’s Unhappy Anniversary
Give or take a day or two, it is now one year since ASX listed craft brewer Broo (ASX Code BEE) entered a trading suspension on the Australian Securities Exchange. I don’t think that I can say ‘Happy Anniversary’ on this momentous occasion. I have kept a close eye on Broo in that time, or …
Happy and Glorious!
God save our King!!!!
Not In My Backyard – The Australian Dream Is Fast Becoming A Nightmare
20 years ago, when I moved into my home in Avondale Heights, I was surrounded by other homes on house blocks approximately 535sqm in size. My first week, I planted several citrus trees in my backyard, and a gum tree sapling 3m from the back fence. The orange trees are all about to fruit again, …
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Lost For Words! 