I could never really get into Midnight Oil. I have tended to find their many lefty protest songs rather whiny and annoying, although I suppose they had their place (right up until Peter Garrett tried to be a politician and showed he wasn’t much good at practising what he preached). I always rhetorically would wonder …
Author Archives: Ernest Zanatta
Whether you love or hate the MONA, at least its advertising is honest
I was at the cinemas today for a bit of a treat, and one of the advertisements before the movie was a reel for the Museum of Old and New Art (aka the MONA) in Hobart. It consisted of quoting the one star reviews which the MONA has received. One, featuring a tear rolling down …
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Putin rides a bear from which he dare not dismount
‘Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount. Discuss’ From memory, 3 decades later, my Politics Honours General Paper (an exam prerequisite to pass to get my Honours degree but which did not cover a particular topic I had studied as an undergrad), was an open question very similar to …
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The Return of History? Russia’s Invasion of the Ukraine
‘Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World And that lions no longer need keepers?’ T.S. Eliot – Choruses From The Rock It is a long time since I read any Fukuyama. His neo-Hegelian take on ‘The End of History’ was all in vogue in the early 1990s, when we in the free …
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First World Problem…
It’s a first world problem when, for the first time in over two years, you need to wear a suit to a dinner at a posh club in the city and you look in your wardrobe and realise that all your suit jackets really need to visit the dry cleaners and then you discover that …
Absurdist Humour and our Prime Minister’s taste in music….
Somehow I don’t think ScoMo actually likes TISM….
Pot and Kettle and related Hypocrisies
We obviously have some reds under the beds at the moment. Our Prime Minister has described the deputy opposition leader as a Manchurian candidate. I assume that he expects that most people actually have seen that 1950s movie – personally I have not. Let me put on record that (surprise surprise) I dislike Richard Marles. …
RIP P.J. O’Rourke
American essayist and gonzo journalist P.J. O’Rourke has just passed away and I am a little sad. From around 1989, when I discovered his collection of essays ‘Republican Party Reptile’, there was a period of about a decade when I would eagerly buy and devour his books as soon as they were released. He could …
Ageing 1970s Rockers Resist Attempts To Make Them Relevant In The 2020s
Let’s face it, ScoMo’s ukulele solo on 60 Minutes last night was rather cringeworthy. Besides which, he and his advisors might not have thought through the common associations most people have with the words ‘ukulele’ and ‘Hawaii’, as in ‘Hawaiian Holiday’, as in ‘Hawaiian Holiday during the January 2020 bushfires’, as in ‘Nero fiddles while …
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The Vaccine Policy Lottery
I like to play the lottery whenever there is a big draw. I know that the odds are microscopically small (over eight million to one in the case of Tattslotto and even less for the other two major lotteries), but it is unlikely that there will be any other channel through which I will acquire …
