I watched Denton tonight and needed a shower on conclusion. He interviewed Frederick and Mary Glucksburg. A couple who might have been a mid-ranked corporate duo anywhere in the western world really - perhaps a double -diamond Amway family or goodlooking Scientologists maybe....
Continue reading →
The Academy Awards ceremony was just dedicated to US military forces serving overseas.
Continue reading →
In a typically sarcastic comment to my earlier post about John Howard and Straussian neoconservatism, my partner jen sardonically questioned why I hadn't included a reference to Derrida in a post that fearlessly embraced rambling irrelevance in just about every other way. Well...
Continue reading →
Or, The Art of the Academic Jobsearch I spent part of my morning finalising my application for a Research Fellowship in Griffith Uni's Socio-legal Research Centre . All the advice that's been around for years in HR is that cvs and selection criteria responses should be succinc...
Continue reading →
I've been a regular net user since 1997, and first discovered the thing in 92, when we were delighted to find we could access the Village Voice sitting in the Semper Floreat offices at UQ. A feature in the Fin magazine on Friday made the point that many of the utopian claims m...
Continue reading →
I don't know quite what to make of John Howard's decision to almost double Australia's commitment of troops to Iraq by sending 450 Darwin-based soldiers to protect Japanese engineers around Basra. Is it, as Tim Dunlop seems to imply , just another example of Howardian deceit a...
Continue reading →
I thoroughly enjoyed the Inaugural Brisvegas bloggers' meetup on Friday night. My first post-grogblog comment was at Mel Gregg's place and a round up of other attendees' posts can be found at the Meetup message board .
Continue reading →
First good news on the election front since Premier Pete won 63 of the 89 Legislative Assembly seats in Qld a year ago - Labor continues its clean sweep of the states and is re-elected in WA . Discussion Question : Given that the Howardians are so dominant federally, why are t...
Continue reading →
When American academic Stephen Duncombe discovered zines he was awestruck. "Somehow these little smudged pamphlets carried within them the honesty, kindness, anger, the beautiful inarticulate articulateness ... the uncompromising life that I had discovered (and lost) in music,...
Continue reading →
Norm Geras has a post up on Normblog about a survey which asked people in various occupations whether or not they liked their work. There was no occupation which claimed a majority of people liking their work--it seems most people who responded don't like their job! But the oc...
Continue reading →
Sunbeam's Personal Groomer ($14.95) removes the unsightly hair that grows from a man's nostrils when he reaches a certain age. It appears along with Remington's Precision Dual-Head Nose , Ear , and Eyebrow trimmer ($22.95) on page 71 of this week's Bulletin . That just about s...
Continue reading →
I'm looking forward to my parents coming to Darwin next week. That is if my Dad is up to it; he fainted at the pub last week and has been in hospital until today. In any case, I suspect that Mum will come anyway, regardless of Dad's health, she want's to celebrate her 80th wit...
Continue reading →
The WA election is tomorrow. I haven't been following it, so will make no predictions. However, there are certainly national implications - the rise of the Beazer was said to be essential to Labor's prospects for re-election, and if the Coalition are elected, it might be inter...
Continue reading →
Or, Tres Catholique [After Umberto Eco] I had the very great pleasure tonight of showing a couple of friends from Melbourne the wonders of the Valley - or at least that we do good Jazz band (Kafka) and good bar (The Bowery) here in Brisvegas. Or at least, that being a regular...
Continue reading →
Quick pitstop from the Toowong net cafe closest to Thesis land. Just wanted to remind people in Brizvegas of the grogblog at Ric's Bar tomorrow night - Troppo readers and commenters are most welcome. Also a plug for Funk for Tsunami at No. 12 in the Valley tonight - which a fr...
Continue reading →
"A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work." In his recent post on postmodernism and history , Chris Sheil discussed Umberto Eco's great novel The Name of the Rose . I've just dug out my copy of his Reflections on the Name of the Rose . What he writes in the fir...
Continue reading →
Or, the Return of the Political While I remain disinclined to engage with the contention of some Troppo commenters that anyone who identifies with the Left or admires Eric Hobsbawm must immediately don sackcloth and walk towards the scaffold on the Place de Greve with a lighte...
Continue reading →
Back in December, Scott wrote about internet dating . I'm single again, and as I'm hardly likely to meet anyone sitting in an office in Toowong by myself writing a thesis, I'm giving cyberdating a go . I don't want to write about my experiences, as I don't want to invade anyon...
Continue reading →
I was on campus on Monday to borrow some books for my PhD. It's the first time in nine years that I'm not gearing up for the teaching semester, so I'm feeling fairly relaxed at the moment. I'm evidently so out of touch that I didn't realise til I got there that it was O Week....
Continue reading →
No doubt everyone's heard of the fracas over the premature end--or at least the postponement--of the latest Great White Hope for Aussie filmmaking, Eucalyptus. From what you read in the press, the reasons for the implosion are fairly complex, but centred around the script. I h...
Continue reading →
Aside from IR, the big issue Cabinet will be discussing today is welfare reform . A single payment, which I support, is still too difficult according to Minister Kevin Andrews. One reason might be, as the Fin reported yesterday, that there is no portfolio of Social Security an...
Continue reading →
OK, by 'popular demand'--well I can call it that if I want to!--and following on from 'dullest authors', here's the latest list: what are the most boring, awful movies you've ever seen? Of course there are many, many candidates for this, as the wide field for the Golden Turkey...
Continue reading →
As part of my work, I regularly read US periodicals such as The Public Interest and Foreign Affairs . The former is home to leading neo-cons, while the latter is more the house journal of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. Both are enormously influential in setting t...
Continue reading →
With the electoral process done and dusted for another three years, political talk has been in short supply hereabouts. As you may have noticed. Troppo isn't the only blog to have wandered off the political playing fields, for want of anything better to write about. Tim Dunlop...
Continue reading →
On the weekend, we went to see one of the best new films I've seen in quite a while--French director Julie Bertuccelli's first feature film(her previous work has been in documentaries), Since Otar Left. It is an almost perfect film, with glorious acting, fantastic setting, gre...
Continue reading →
or, Bollywood Bliss I'd never seen a Bollywood film before today. I'm a longtime fan of Hong Kong cinema, particularly the work of director Tsui Hark , and this genre has well and truly become a crossover phenomenon, both in terms of style and effects in action films, and in H...
Continue reading →
A couple of polls for a leisurely Sunday.. First of all, and Troppo Armadillians who've been commenting on music and composers recently might like this, Norm Geras over at Normblog is now conducting a poll of 'five favourite classical composers.' Just send him a list of your f...
Continue reading →
Looks like Troppo was right to place Saintinastraitjacket in the "centrist" category on the blogroll - he's done the Moral Politics Test and scored the perfectly centrist position . It's a better test than some, and one of the fun things is that you get compared with US Presid...
Continue reading →
...is the title of an article by Sigmund Freud, who along with Marx and Nietzsche, has been seen as an originator of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" and thus a spiritual parent of postmodernism. In the wake of the Troppo theory wars, John Quiggin has reminded us that one of hi...
Continue reading →
Since, as we all now know, Troppo is home to lovers of literature, I'd urge you all to visit Catallaxy where two posts are of interest. Andrew discusses the importance of the opening line in written expression , which has led to some great examples in comments, and Jason has a...
Continue reading →
Overlooked in the vigorous debate over postmodernism that has consumed Troppo over the past week or so is the distinction between postmodernity and postmodernism, which is one strongly established in sociology (often associated with the work of Zygmunt Bauman .) Bauman argues...
Continue reading →
As a follow up to his last commentathon, which raised over 2k for the tsunami disaster relief fund, John Quiggin has opened another comments thread - this time he is donating $1 for every comment up to 1000 to Medecins Sans Frontieres , with a preference for the money to go to...
Continue reading →
Richard Ackland blogs writes about the Swain High Court decision in today's SMH. You know, the bloke who got $3.75 million for diving into a sandbank between the flags at Bondi Beach and making himself a quadriplegic. Ackland apparently shares my bemusement about the basis for...
Continue reading →
Despite Janet Albrechtsen's recent tirade on the necessity of free speech, femonazis and PC etc etc, the "debate" on abortion seems to have disappeared from the headlines. This in itself points to the limitations of the media as a true public sphere for the resolution of issue...
Continue reading →
The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal has just reduced by 10 years the head sentence of Kathleen Folbigg, who was convicted of the murder of 3 of her infant children and manslaughter of a fourth over a 10 year period. The head sentence was reduced from 40 to 30 years and the non-pa...
Continue reading →
This will be my last entry in the Troppo literature wars, which I suspect are running out of steam with the same positions being reiterated. However, I wouldn't be doing my job as a sociologist if I didn't point out that the way that we read literary works and assess their val...
Continue reading →
OK, so I've criticised pretty strongly the current hopeless approach to the teaching of English in schools, most particularly in NSW, which is the one that I know about. It's been fantastic to have this chance to express these things, and to debate it with you all, and it's al...
Continue reading →
Our new home is on the wrong side of the Nightcliff peninsula in Darwin, the Rapid Creek side where part-Aboriginal families were housed from the early 1960s. The area long ago began to be gentrified, but it still bears the imprint of its recent history in somewhat lower house...
Continue reading →
Longtime left commentator Martin Jacques has an interesting article in the Guardian about the politics of New Labour's Third Way, a phrase we're unlikely to hear anyone in the ALP utter any time soon in the wake of Latham's departure into the ether. But the similarities betwee...
Continue reading →
... can be found here , for new readers. The exam will be on Friday at 9am sharp. Bring a 2B lead pencil, as your chief examiner/Grand Inquisitor, Rafe Champion , will be setting a multi-choice test. Seriously, I'd love to post more on my literary obsessions like Kit Marlowe,...
Continue reading →
I posed a question on Sophie's thread which is yet to be answered - if Nelson's mooted enquiry decides to turn English teaching on its head, how will it achieve its aims? The accreditation of teachers and the framing of curricula are state responsibilities. Getting away from t...
Continue reading →
A propos of my post yesterday, on English in school, I'd like to present to you the assignment my son brought home yesterday afternoon from school, an assignment which exemplifies everything I've been talking about. he was, by the way, in a state of wild revolt about it. It's...
Continue reading →
Troppo has been filled with sometimes fairly arcane discussion about the merits or otherwise of postmodernism in recent days, sparked off by the Sawyer Affair (there are multiple posts but follow the links from the most recent one). I don't want to revisit the questions of Eng...
Continue reading →
Ok, although we're doing the poll thing on Troppo a lot of late (on recent popular music and children's books that influenced us ), it's been a while since we've had a good old fashioned Troppo contest. The topic is David Lynch's Mulholland Drive . The usual prizes will be awa...
Continue reading →
The usual stoush over education guarantees the usual old left wing/right wing divide, arguments about po-mo, deconstruction, etc. I'd like to bring the matter back to a more realistic level--the level of schools themselves. I have contact with schools all over Australia, on a...
Continue reading →
Hendo (who may or may not be a Republican, it's hard to tell) thinks Camilla will become the Queen of Australia under Australian constitutional law . In other revelations, Hendo predicts that "Charles will never be Governor-General of Australia". Ho hum. Oh, Hendo would rather...
Continue reading →
As Mark Bahnisch observes below , the confected furore over Wayne Sawyer's silly editorial has now given federal Education Minister Brendon Nelson a pretext to launch an enquiry into teacher education. Readers will recall from multiple previous posts ( here and here and here )...
Continue reading →
A staple of state oppositions' rhetoric is to accuse the incumbent government of holding too many enquiries and not taking decisions. I wonder why nobody's been saying that about Brendan Nelson. Last year, we got the enquiry into phonics, graced with the presence of Miranda De...
Continue reading →
Scott's post on Tintin inspired me to get a move on with a post I've been meaning to do for a little while--on the contrasting joys of the two great Belgian comic-strip adventures, the Tintin books and the Asterix books. Like fellow Belgian, the fabulous singer/songwriter Jacq...
Continue reading →
A cabbie told me the other night that it's really difficult to get people to work as drivers at the moment because there are so many more pleasant and better paid jobs on offer. This, he claimed, was the reason so many recent Sudanese immigrants are driving cabs in Brissie. We...
Continue reading →
We interrupt this blog temporalily to announce the first meeting (well, in a while) of the (grandiloquently titled) Brisbane Weblogger Meetup Group . We're meeting at Rics Bar in the Valley on Friday 25th at 6pm . Any visiting or resident bloggers, commenters or blog readers a...
Continue reading →
I was delighted as well as surprised to see the picture of Tintin in Mark's post below today. I had a passion for the Tintin comics when I was a child. It was John Quiggin who inadvertently re-ignited my old passion. He made a request for civil discussion . That provoked some...
Continue reading →
Aside from two entries at Troppo by Sophie and me , there's been some other commentary on the Charles/Camilla nuptials around the blogosphere (for a sample, try Tim , Currency and saint .) There is no doubt - aside from the constitutional/legal arguments previously advanced at...
Continue reading →
At the suggestion of sundry commenters, Troppo is pleased to present a poll on books that you read as a kid that had a great impact on you. It's quite a nice exercise in nostalgia and reflection, and seems appropriate to me because today's my birthday! Please nominate ten. If...
Continue reading →
American playwright Arthur Miller has passed away at the age of 89. A writer who helped shape the face of American theatre, Miller's voice will be a continual presence for many generations to come and will probably remain on the HSC curriculum for many more years. Like many sc...
Continue reading →
We're getting far too serious and polite here at Troppo. Something needs to be done about it. Other bloggers don't labour under the dead weight of deep civility, and this week has seen some vintage fearless and full-bodied opinions: Currency Lad (on abortion): In [ Emma ] Tom'...
Continue reading →
Or, RWDB Political Correctness Run Wild Observa asked on Ken's comment thread below with respect to Associate Professor Wayne Sawyer, whose ill-chosen comments about school English and voting for the Coalition have provoked vigorous debate (at least here at Troppo ) and sundry...
Continue reading →
I know Mark Bahnisch has already focused on the RWDBs who've been ranting in the opinion columns of The Australian ( here and here ) about the teaching of English in secondary schools. But I reckon it's worth another post from me as well. This topic is beginning to look very m...
Continue reading →
Mark's post on Troppo re the 'republican debate revived' apparently because of the news of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles's impending wedding, prompts me to put forward a few provocative thoughts of my own. The main one being that I think the optimum time for a repub...
Continue reading →
Reuters reported about half an hour ago that Prince Charles will marry Camilla Parker-Bowles on the 8th of April . Kim Beazley's recent desire to revive the Republican debate in Australia will now probably get a kick along. However, that will be for the wrong reasons if it's s...
Continue reading →
The phrase of course is courtesy of a previous column by Andrew Bolt lamenting the politicisation of education . In a week when education has had a few headlines - with Dr Nelson's proposal for a National Leaving Certificate exam being almost universally dismissed as impractic...
Continue reading →
After Liberal MP Dr Mal Washer (who was instrumental in killing Tony Abbott's plan last year to invade the privacy of doctor-patient confidentiality for teenagers) proposed that sex education be made compulsory in all schools regardless of religious affiliation, John Howard ha...
Continue reading →
I see that the High Court has allowed an appeal from the NSW Court of Appeal in a matter called Swain v Waverley Municipal Council , thereby effectively restoring the original jury verdict that had awarded Swain damages of $3.7 million for injuries sustained when he dived into...
Continue reading →
I feel a deep urge to vent my spleen. Despite being a babyboomer whose personal tastes in rock/pop music coincide to some extent with the voters in the Normblog poll that Sophie Masson blogged about immediately below, I find myself getting mightily irritated by the extraordina...
Continue reading →
Here's something worth a look! Back in December, Norm Geras asked people to send him their Top Ten favourite pop/rock songs. He had a record number of entries for such a poll--230--so it took some time to sort them out. Well, the results are now in, and it's interesting to see...
Continue reading →
I've been doing some rearrangement of my life and working arrangements to reduce the time taken on my PhD to manageable proportions, without driving me crazy. I've now got til March 31st to submit the thing, and what I'm also doing is hiring an office in a suburban location wh...
Continue reading →
I was reading the Oxford Companion to English Literature yesterday, looking up the entries for various Golden Age detective fiction writers (as I'm planning a mystery series set in the 1920's). What intrigued me was the contrast in the entries for Agatha Christie and Dorothy L...
Continue reading →
Just wanted to emerge quickly from thesisdom to draw people's attention to three new posts on this tragic issue which is increasingly exposing a lot of very flawed practices in a range of public domains. Saintinastraitjacket has some very interesting thoughts as well as a comp...
Continue reading →
As obergruppenfuhrer of a nominally Northern Territory-based blog, I can't help feeling I should write about the only piece of even slightly significant political news to come out of Darwin in quite some time (except the Bob Collins saga, which we can't talk about anyway). For...
Continue reading →
"Religious leaders and politicians have a perfect right to discuss abortion, writes Gerard Henderson ..." Well yes, and (unlike some) I'm prepared to accept that Tony Abbott, Ron Boswell and John Anderson are sincere in their interest in pursuing abortion law reform. But what...
Continue reading →
"You know you really dated yourself, Jen, by that comment about Matlock Police . Even I can hardly remember that one. Now who did it star again? Michael what's-his-name?" "Pate." "That's right, Michael Pate . He carved out an entire career playing a red indian in Hollywood mov...
Continue reading →
There've been some interesting discussions developing on the thread about Andrew Bolt's demonisation of Desperate Housewives . If I'm reading it correctly, commenters are having difficulty agreeing to a definition of what constitutes "quality" in television, and the issue of t...
Continue reading →
A Troppo Scoop* Troppo was the first to bring you news that Australia was discovered by Chinese Admiral Zheng He , and also broke the story that the Templars live in tunnels under Hertfordshire ... The true identity of "Nabakov" (pictured above, centre), the commenter who alwa...
Continue reading →
... if Andrew Bolt is really a right wing op/ed columnist or a master of satire? Check out his thoughts on Channel 7's Desperate Housewives or feast yourself on this Bolty appreciation by Jess at Ausculture , and make up your own mind about the mystery of the preacher-teacher...
Continue reading →
Michelle Grattan writes with some anger of Amanda Vanstone's pathetic failure to apologise over the detention of schizophrenic woman Cornelia Rau in Baxter Dentention Centre . A confused Ms Rau was discovered by Queensland Police claiming to be a German national, put in a gaol...
Continue reading →
Andrew Norton at Catallaxy recently published a scathing review of Marion Maddox' book God Under Howard . His scorn for this work by someone very loosely described by her publisher as "the leading authority on the intersection of religion and politics" in Australia is justifie...
Continue reading →
I have to admit, as Troppo's resident RWDB, that I occasionaly drop into Inner Margolia for a bit of a giggle. And I had a hilarious laff at this effort by 'the Jack' Robertson, well known errr... he says he's a soldier, writer and former blogger. The Jack seems to have a lot...
Continue reading →
The other day we watched what I thought was impossible--a bad Cary Grant movie. Or rather, it was a bad movie--a lame, wooden, limp(to thoroughly mix metaphors) in which Cary Grant had the misfortune of being completely miscast. It's the historical potboiler, 1957's The Pride...
Continue reading →
I can just imagine an echelon of ex-insurance salesmen (there were hardly any seriously successful 'insurance sales-women') salivating at the thought of the commissions to be made when superannuation Choice of Fund is introduced in July. Most of you are too young to remember t...
Continue reading →
On the comment thread of yesterday's post about Nicole Kidman and privacy laws , someone raised this question: How would you treat situations like [the] pedophile expulson in Murgon yesterday? It's a question that merits a separate post. I think convicted pedophiles who have s...
Continue reading →
Mark Bahnisch continues to struggle valiantly against his blogging addiction, but with less than complete success. Instead of posting himself, he's started to send me emails suggesting topics for me to blog as a proxy!! In fairness, the topic in question involved Mark being un...
Continue reading →
Another trivial issue with a serious edge that I've been considering lately arises from the ongoing furore over Nicole Kidman's obtaining of an Apprehended Violence Order against a couple of paparazzi in the wake of her Sydney house being bugged and an alleged high speed car p...
Continue reading →
Troppo has been getting its usual share of blog spam over the last week since I've been back on deck. The volume is substantially less than it was late last year, due to some magic "fixes" worked by our genial blog host Scott Wickstein, but it's still enough to be irritating....
Continue reading →
Not yet being reliably inspired by the blogging muse, I've instead been catching up with the rantings of others over the last couple of months of my semi-enforced Internet absence. I noticed that Mark B posted an item a few weeks ago in which he referred to Marx's immortal obs...
Continue reading →
[In Place of the Shorter Hendo] I'm off for a bit. I need to clear more time for focussing on the last stages of my thesis, and enjoyable as blogging is, something has to give. At least I won't have to read Hendo this week . Thanks very much to all those who reminded me of wha...
Continue reading →
(Image reproduced by kind permission of Scribe Publishing) During Julia Gillard's candidacy for the Labor Leadership much ink was spilled about whether Australia was ready for a female Opposition Leader, and whether such a Leader would need to be married with kids. I don't wan...
Continue reading →
