In Case Disney Are Really Listening….

The other day, a colleague who is really into all the Star Wars derivative shows on Disney+ asked me if I was up to date with The Bad Batch and had finished watching Andor yet.

I told him that I was not even up to date on the rebooted How I Met Your Father (a rip off of the hugely successful How I Met Your Mother) which Disney is currently flogging.

Then I said to him that perhaps there could be a Star Wars version of How I Met Your Father.

It would be an animated series (like Clone Wars or Bad Batch) with the force ghost of Padme retelling the prequel trilogy to Luke and Leia.

My colleague replied: Ssssh. Disney is listening and they might do it.

If they do, Bob Iger, then remember me for show runner!

Kangaroos actually do sometimes hop down the street….

My front verandah is one of my favourite parts of my home. Provided it is not too warm, it is a great place to sit in the evening and enjoy the end of the day.

I was sitting on it last Saturday night with one of my friends, sipping some wine (red of course – I am now over the Covid impacts on my taste), when a kangaroo hopped past my house.

It was fast, and the picket fence obscured the view, but it was definitely a kangaroo.

A few minutes later when a couple of neighbours walked by and I asked them if they had seen it, they laughed and asked if I had seen it before I had opened the wine bottle.

Not long after, the joke was on them, as other people texted them with videos of the kangaroo as it advanced further into Avondale Heights.

As one of my neighbours observed, there is a mob of 6 or 8 grey kangaroos down on the valley floor near the river, not very far from my home.

And whilst I have not seen a kangaroo hop down my actual street before, I have seen them near the river three times (counting the time over a year ago when one hit my bus near the bridge).

I find it gratifying to know that there is still a lot of native fauna not far away, even though there has been a fair bit of development close to the river in recent years.

The Problem With Pell – The Passing of A Prince of the Church

I have met George, Cardinal Pell, four times. The first was when a friend of mine, one with far greater devotion to Catholicism than I, organised for him to speak at Monash University in mid 1988.

He was a newly appointed auxiliary bishop at the time, and he spoke diffidently but firmly, like someone might speak who was still new and unused to the spotlight that would from then on be part of his life.

I do recall clearly still that he said something like “Karl Marx was a pretty nasty piece of work who usually sponged off his friend Engels instead of getting an honest job.”

The last time I met Cardinal Pell was in Rome in September 2016, when I first visited Italy, and we did lunch, organised through the auspices of that same close friend in common we had.

We spoke for almost three hours, whilst eating pasta and slowly sipping wine, and talked about many different topics – literature, business, politics, economics, history, and absent friends and acquaintances.

We shared a fondness for the writings of Evelyn Waugh, although he did see much greater value in Waugh’s out of milieu biopic about the Emperor Constantine’s mother than I did (and I will say that much as I appreciate Brideshead Revisited for its theme of repentance and redemption, I much prefer the wickedly irredeemable Decline and Fall).

But as a churchman, it would not be surprising that Helena would be preferred – it is as close to a biography of that particular saint as we are likely to see.

He also did remark on his stay in a Roman hospital in relation to his heart condition. He observed that whilst health care in Australia is probably much better, health care in Italy is probably much kinder.

My mind immediately turned back to that remark this morning, when news broke of Cardinal Pell’s death in an Italian hospital following a hip replacement operation.

Pell was a Prince of the Church, as devouter Catholics than I of an earlier generation might have said. He was both archbishop of Melbourne, and then of Sydney, and Vatican treasurer, one of the senior ministers of the Church.

But his legacy is forever shadowed, in this world at least, by the elephant in the chapel, the allegations of child sex abuse. That the High Court overturned those convictions is not going to change the opinions of those who always presumed him guilty.

Most people, like me, have never really looked closely at the evidence or the circumstances of those allegations. The people who told me they were glad to see him in gaol were mostly speaking from prejudice, a willingness to believe in the worst in him, and particularly not from the belief that he had actually done anything himself, but that he deserved to be punished for being perceived as covering up the crimes of other priests.

I have not seen a need to look at the evidence. If there is another life after this, there will be a court where there is more perfect knowledge of truth than we have here, where justice cannot be escaped. If on the other hand there is no other life than this, then was the evidence presented to the jury and then examined by the learned jurists of the High Court sufficient to establish those accusations as facts?

I’m not a lawyer, nor have I been called to serve on a jury. Nor am I am active in the Church Laity and seeking exoneration or condemnation of a Church leader. Looking at the case presented, which has ultimately been found to be insufficient, would not serve me any profitable purpose of my time.

What I will say is that whilst I did not really know George Pell, we did have some close friends in common, people who I consider to be amongst the finest and most decent people that I have ever had the privilege to know and to count as my friends. I trust those friends, and I believe in them. As their belief in the innocence of George Pell never wavered, I too believe in his innocence of charges.

May we meet again for lunch one day, in the next world. And next time, let’s drink more than just one bottle of red.

Anno Quandamque Anno Futurbus (aka I get intellectually self-indulgent about the year in review etc)

I am being a bit self indulgent with the title for this blog post, which most means something like ‘The Year That Was And The Year That Will Be’ in Latin.

[I assume I have mentioned at some point during the nigh on three and a half years life of this blog that I studied Latin for four years at the Centre for Adult Education in Flinders Lane in a vain (in both senses of the word) attempt to make up for the failings of my no-thrills state secondary schooling.]

At the start of this year, I made some vague predictions about what we would see in 2022. Two of my predictions – the outcomes of the Victorian State Election and The Australian Federal Election – were both dead on the money. But anyone could have predicted those.

The other three things I wrote about were Communist China, Irredentist Russia, and financial stuff in general. I expect that I was sufficiently vague in those that I did not get them wrong.

I must say though that I am an optimist. I was hoping that there would not be a war involving Russia, and despite that, we have got something very nasty going on in the Ukraine right now.

I am relieved that there is no war involving China. I was more worried about that, to be honest.

With money predictions, if I knew anything, I would know the six numbers to tonight’s $40 million Tattslotto draw, and then I would not have to care about any of that.

Looking at what to expect in 2023, I think I will limit myself to what might happen in the environment, China, Russia, and financial markets.

We will do nothing, or so little as to be grossly inadequate, to address environmental concerns in the coming year. I believe, despite my love for free market capitalism, that we need to give the planet the benefit of the doubt, so I am rather concerned about plastic waste, global warning, and pollution generally. I am also skeptical about herding the cats who comprise humanity in a direction where we will give up on our standards of living sufficiently to make a difference.

We will, however, talk about it a lot.

Looking at China next, I do not see an invasion of Taiwan happening. There are too many problems facing China domestically, such as the demographic time bomb, the ripple effect of its Covid policies across society and the economy, and the high likelihood that its military forces are simply not up to the task of taking on several cutting edge militaries at once.

Russia and the Ukraine war…. What can any of us say? It is sad and unnecessary, yet probably the result of policies during the Obama era to install a pro-Western Ukrainian leader which have piqued the existing paranoia of an extremely paranoid nation. You do not poke a bear with a long stick without getting it rather angry at the goat in the same cave.

I don’t think that the war is going to end until Putin either achieves his aims, dies a welcome death, or is overthrown (probably with a welcome death tossed in for good measure).

Financial markets next. I am very leery of pundits and experts telling us what is going to happen in the year to come. After all, I have inadvertently subscribed to a financial advisory newsletter which uses astrology as one of its tools for predicting the property market.

I have no idea about whether the markets will go up or down, although right now I have no spare money to invest anyway (saving for a trip to Italy), but I am inclined to just let my abundantly sized share portfolio of mostly ETFs and LICs sit for now and to harvest the dividend stream.

Interest rates going up is not a bad thing, and nor are house prices coming down – at some point there will be a happy medium where houses can become affordable for people in Gen Y and Z. My house is paid off, so I don’t really worry too much there.

And then there is Bitcoin. 18 months ago novice Gen Y investors were dipping their feet into cryptocurrency as their first ever investment outside a term deposit. How clever does that seem now? I see Bitcoin as a form of Magic Beans. It is not a Ponzi scheme, but it is very possible that some of those who sell you those Magic Beans, eg that crypto exchange which collapsed last month, are running such schemes.

Anyway, I am looking forward to many good things in the new year, not least taking a very large amount of long service leave prior to retiring young. Now I will leave you, gentle reader, and go and check whether the cheap bottles of Rose and Sauvignon Blanc in the freezer are cold yet.