I'm old enough to know that I don't have any answers, but that won't stop me talking
I think I was about 15 when I first started reading The Chronicles of Pern by Anne McCaffrey. Teenagers have a very limited budget, so I mostly borrowed the books from either the local public library or the school library. I only ever bought one of them, the second book, Dragon Quest, which I was …
Continue reading “Reason and its discontents: The Problem with Anne McCaffrey”
For someone who has never bothered learning to drive (this is actually a very good thing for the safety of the world), I do have quite a thing for the aesthetics of muscle cars. Indeed, if I were to win a very large amount on the lottery, I would buy the old Stan Cash furniture …
On my hallway wall, I have a framed canvas map of Melbourne in 1956, the year we hosted the Olympics, and the year before my mother arrived in Australia. It’s a fascinating map. It is colour coded by municipality, according to the cities and shires which existed prior to the Kennett government’s council amalgamations of …
Where should I start when writing about the end of the world? Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut is a good place to begin. You see, in the last decade of the Cold War, the 1980s, I was a teenager. One of my favourite cousins was an English teacher then, and hence influenced a lot of my reading. …
Continue reading “Coronavirus, Ice Nine and the End of the World”
I was doing coffee yesterday with two of my colleagues, and somehow the topic got onto music. One of my colleagues, being a Western Australian by upbringing, once owned a rare busker tape by the dreadlocked John Butler, which he sold for a handsome sum. He also owns two copies of some rare vinyl pressing …
Continue reading “Music for the Conservatively Minded (or not) – How not to be a Killjoy”
I know very little about gridiron, that sport which Americans call football, and which seems to be a version of Rugby where they wear helmets and throw the ball forward instead of backward. But I recently decided to adopt an NFL team of my very own, the Cleveland Browns. I discovered them whilst reading Existential …
I went through my Leo Tolstoy binge when I was about 24. I finally bit the bullet and read War And Peace, and then backed it up with Anna Karenina. I must say, whilst War And Peace is both epic on the grand scale and deeply moving closer to home, I think, as a novel, …
Continue reading “What would John Galt do? Ayn Rand and all that.”
I doubt that I would ever make a good music critic. A bloke at work whom I sometimes manage is a drummer, and one of the bands he was in happened to be ARIA nominated (he refuses to clarify which one exactly it was), and whilst one of my friends from the office assures me …
Continue reading “Down the Rabbit Hole – the Musical Tragedy of Grace Slick”
I’m what is commonly known as from Generation X. Here in Australia, we could also be called the Countdown Generation. Countdown was a popular one hour weekly music show on the ABC from 1974 to 1986, hosted by former music producer Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum. It usually featured as guest host some popular musician or band, …
Until this month, whenever I have walked around the city at lunchtime and noticed various international students wearing face masks to filter out the pollution, I have thought them rather silly. After all, this is Melbourne, not Kuala Lumpur or Beijing. Guess who is laughing on the other side of his face now?!? This morning, …
Lost For Words!