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, …
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The Victorian Government’s Not-So-Clever Plan to destroy the Laneways of Melbourne
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 …
Allen & Unwin Publishers grow a new backbone
I hope you have heard of Silent Invasion, Professor Clive Hamilton’s 2018 expose on how Communist China was quietly and systematically subverting Australian democracy and society. I bought three copies myself – one for myself, one to circulate around the office amongst my colleagues and friends, and one to give to a friend who is …
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A quick shout out to Real Freedom News
Through some idle net surfing this morning, I discovered an interesting recent website called Real Freedom News. Here is a link to it: https://realfreedomnews.com I find it interesting for two reasons. One is that it includes a segment called China Watch which appears to share my concerns about Communist China. It is always a worthy …
Vaccinations and the wrong way to calculate risk
In the 1990s, I was a big Tom Clancy fan. I saw The Hunt For Red October and Patriot Games before I read any of the novels, but I quickly got onto the Jack Ryan novels. They did quickly get a little bit over the top, although thankfully the Super Bowl was never nuked by …
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Where’s my lollipop?
I was not at Highpoint last Thursday night, but I pretty much could have been. The risk of catching Covid would have been low but having to isolate would have been very disruptive. That spurred me on to get my first dose of Astra Zeneca yesterday. I was a walk in at the vaccination centre …
HaHa is even less funny
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-26/asio-reconsiders-huifeng-liu-s-national-security-risk-status/100168336 Having libertarian convictions means that usually I am a bit skeptical about ASIO and the security apparatus. However, when you look at the way our democracy is bring subverted from within by rich donors to political parties who happen to have close links to communist China, I am totally on board with ASIO’s efforts …
2021 Olive Harvest!
So far, I’ve picked half of my olive tree and it’s a bumper harvest, unlike last year when I only ended up with a handful of fruit. I picked about 2kg a few weeks ago and another 5kg this past few days. It’s a great feeling to indulge my Italian peasant origins in this way.
Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
Like most men, I suppose, I have a puerile streak. It partly manifests itself through a love of James Bond movies. I do think that Bond Super Villains are amongst the most interesting characters in cinema, and direct descendants of the classic Shakespearean villains from the golden age of Elizabethan Theatre. Twenty five or so …
Liz Cambage reminds us of the irrelevance of Basketball in Australia
Margaret Thatcher is quoted, probably Apocryphally, as saying in 1990 when discussing with Kenneth Clarke the England team’s defeat against Germany in the semi-final of the Association Football (aka soccer) World Cup: ‘They might have beaten us at our national sport, but we managed to beat them at their national sport twice in the 20th …
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Lost For Words! 