I did lunch last week at the Great Northern Hotel in North Carlton with a friend who is a very senior barrister. Given that I am about to hop on a plane to Italy in a few days’ time, we talked a fair bit about travel, and particularly about the scandals which are currently plaguing …
Author Archives: Ernest Zanatta
Qatar’s Clumsy Attempts At Both Sportswashing and Skywashing
This week has seen a bit of a blow up in the purported controversy about Qatar Airways being denied the opportunity to have more flights to and from Australia. The revelations that Qantas has been treating its customers in what can be charitably described as a kleptomaniacal manner has raised rage at the protection that …
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Insightful Albeit Fictional Monologue About America
youtube.com/watch Just discovered this last night. It’s from a TV drama The Newsroom, and features the way underrated Jeff Daniels. It really hits the nail on the head about America. We Australians need to think about what it might mean about us too.
Don’t you miss the days when graffiti had something to say?
During and since the Covid lockdowns, much of Melbourne has been covered in graffiti. Most of it is indecipherable tags, where the only message is comprehensible to the purported artists and like minded morons of their subculture. [I make no apologies for my views on these vandals.] As a result, given that our Premier is …
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Facebook’s AI is not ready to take over the World – yet
It’s been one week since I made the dubious decision to finally join Facebook – a decision which immediately caused me to have my account ‘temporarily suspended’ presumably by an AI. Despite this suspension, I have been able to log into that account via the mobile phone through which I set up the account. It …
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The Imminent and Indirect Remutualisation of IOOF
After the Banking Royal Commission made its report in the not so distant past, I read several of the books published by finance journalists with morbid curiosity. The way that major banks and leading financial institutions had behaved, particularly to honest business loan holders and to trusting mum & dad investors, showed a degree of …
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Sometimes, you do need to be Italian to really ‘get’ Italian literature
My god daughter is having her 8th birthday this weekend, and so I am loading her up with chapter books so she can become more proficient at reading. I doubt that the Muddle Headed Wombat I ordered will arrive in time, and I realised when I re-read Paddington Bear a few years ago that the …
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Joining Facebook – An Inauspicious Start
Readers of this blog who scroll far enough into the deep recesses four years ago when I set it up will know that I have no fondness for Facebook and that this blog was originally set up as an alternative way for me to share my travel adventures from my 2019 trip to Italy. That …
The Embassy Taxi Cafe
I first visited the Embassy Taxi Cafe in Spencer Street in May 1989, either before or after the Metallica concert at Festival Hall. They made, and still make, some of the best fish and chip shop burgers in Melbourne. I was reminded of this last Friday when I popped in for the first time in …
Good Luck Lionesses!
Do unto Spain what Elizabeth the First did to the Armada!
