I'm old enough to know that I don't have any answers, but that won't stop me talking
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, …
I had an email from Telstra the other day, warning me that I had used 85% of my 100 GB monthly data allowance on my internet plan, with more than 2 weeks to go til the end of the billing cycle. This is the first time that has happened in the year since I got …
Amway strikes me as a really efficient way to lose your friends and alienate your family. My only direct experiences of multilevel marketing are two separate instances where acquaintances and friends of mine got entangled into Amway and its Australian offshoot Omega Trends and tried to get me involved (out of politeness I heard them …
Lost For Words!