I'm old enough to know that I don't have any answers, but that won't stop me talking
People reading my blog are going to surmise after a while that despite my libertarian convictions, I am pretty conservative on a lot of things, if not downright reactionary. For example, as a property owner and a ratepayer, it appalls me that mere tenants are able to vote in local government elections. I consider this …
Continue reading “Why My Local Upper House MP Bernie Finn Deserves A Knighthood”
I have been reading the somewhat satirical Betoota Advocate a lot lately, which claims to be one of the oldest newspapers in Australia (it actually did not exist until its online edition was introduced a few years ago, in case you are inclined to take it seriously). Hence you might see a resemblance in the …
Last year, I wryly noted in this blog that a future former friend (whose delusional tendencies border on the certifiable) had once caused me to make a spectacularly unsuccessful speculative investment. At that time, I wrote that the director of the company at the heart of that investment had already prepared a shopping list of …
I once almost was a neighbour of the great Australian poet John Shaw Neilson. For the first seven years of my life, I lived in Gordon Street Footscray, number 156 to be precise, in a neighbourhood which was gobbled up in 1976 by the Footscray Hospital when the brutalist concrete psychiatric facility was constructed behind …
Continue reading “Dark Emu and Other Great Australian Literary Hoaxes”
I think, when I was younger, I had a rather blindly Manichaen view of the world (ie good versus evil and all that). Hopefully, I have outgrown such simplistic views as I have accumulated life experience. Perhaps a remnant of that puerile Manichaenism is my love for villains. I greatly enjoy the Shakespearean villains (Iago, …
“For want of a nail, a shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, a horse was lost. For want of a horse, a rider was lost. For want of a rider, a message was lost. For want of a message, a battle was lost. For want of a battle, the war was lost. For …
Continue reading “My Kingdom for a Horse! Reflections on Malcolm Gladwell’s Latest Book.”
Readers of this blog (and there are 3 or 4 I suppose, even though I appear to have lost all the readers from the PRC since the start of January, causing me to suspect my blog has been blocked in Communist China) would know that I am not a great admirer of the technocratic dictator …
Collingwood Football Club’s boast in their theme song that the ‘Premiership is a cakewalk’ is not borne out by recent history. In my 50 plus year lifetime, they have been runners up 8 times and won 2 premierships, as compared to the 11 they won in a 36 year period leading up to 1936. However, …
The 1980s was a more innocent or naive time. Or at least it seemed so to me, given I was a teenager for much of them. Once, circa 1984, I was on an English class excursion to the city to see a movie, and we actually took a chartered bus rather than public transport, and …
Lost For Words!