I'm old enough to know that I don't have any answers, but that won't stop me talking
The men (and it would have almost invariably have been men) who undertook the Haj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, prior to the modern era, would have been both rich and brave. Rich to be able to afford to leave their affairs and families unattended for the duration of the journey, and to pay for …
Continue reading “Modern Exploration: Thrill-Seeking or Ghoul Tourism for the Mega-Rich?”
I’m not really retired yet, but I have 12 and a half months of extended leave to get used to the idea, and I am not going back to work. I started my leave at lunchtime yesterday, marked with a very large farewell drinks at my Club with about a hundred colleagues and friends. The …
http://www.joe.ie/movies-tv/netflix-warrior-nun-uncancelled-776838 I am delighted that Warrior Nun has been uncancelled and I look forward to bingeing season 3 on Netflix!!!!
There is a very memorable passage in AB Facey’s beloved memoir A Fortunate Life where an unnamed senior British officer visits the front line at Gallipoli. When he suggests a highly risky and pointless action and is told that they do not want to lose more men needlessly, his callous reply is: “What is a …
Continue reading “What’s A Few Men? War Callousness and War Crimes”
American historian SLA Marshall is best known for his study Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command. In this book, he asserted that, in most US Army units in the Second World War, only one in five men actually fired their weapons. In elite units, the ratio was one in four. Of those who …
To mark the King’s Birthday weekend, hipster clothing store Dangerfield has put up various posters in their store windows with ‘Not My King’ emblazoned across the face of King Charles III. Such frivolous and ignorant posters trivialise the importance of maintaining both civil debate on constitutional matters and careful consideration of the underpinning protections afforded …
Some misguided people believe that Christopher Marlowe faked his death to avoid arrest by the Elizabethan authorities on blasphemy charges and went into hiding, becoming the actual author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. I doubt that anyone who has actually read Marlowe would see that as halfway plausible, given the much darker and more …
Continue reading “Ted Lasso – Redemption Rather Than Tragedy”
I’m estimating 20kg worth of olives this year. I’ve already picked about 8kg so far.
As a child, I think that the first ‘chapter books’ I read were Ruth Park’s Muddle Headed Wombat series. She was quite prolific and there were over a dozen of them in my primary school library. Close to a decade later, I also read her rather tragic adult novel, The Harp in the South, which …
Continue reading “Should the AFL expand to 20 teams, and if so, where?”
Given the title of this post, I had better address the Thylacine in the room first up. We do have many unkind jokes about Tasmanians, the nicest being that the small population results in limited genetic diversity and therefore leads to them all being two headed and red haired. That is now out of the …
Lost For Words!