I'm old enough to know that I don't have any answers, but that won't stop me talking
‘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 …
Continue reading “Putin rides a bear from which he dare not dismount”
‘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 …
Continue reading “The Return of History? Russia’s Invasion of the Ukraine”
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 …
Somehow I don’t think ScoMo actually likes TISM….
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. …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “Ageing 1970s Rockers Resist Attempts To Make Them Relevant In The 2020s”
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 …
I have lived in Avondale Heights about 19 years now. I like it – and whilst I am not particularly Italian, I feel comfortable living in the most Italian suburb in Australia (20% of people here claim Italian descent – compared to 3% in Australia and 4% in Victoria overall). Just over the Canning Street …
I used to think, as a child, that Norman Gunston was real. Not even his parody song Kiss Army in 1980 at the height of Kissmania disabused me of this illusion. It was only much later that I discovered that Norman Gunston was a fictional character, just like some others nurtured by the ABC, such …
Lost For Words!