Recently, I've been doing a lot of research on early French 'Talkie' films, not only as background for my 1930's crime series, which has a great deal to do with the film world, but also because my paternal grandfather, Robert-Rene Masson, known as 'Bob' , worked from 1929-1933...
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In this month's Atlantic Monthly David Foster Wallace has a long article on Los Angeles talk radio host John Ziegler . DFW (as fans like to call him ) spent a month hanging around KFI 's studios. What he finally came up with is... stimulating. Like most talk radio hosts, Ziegl...
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This post is inspired by a suggestion from reader Steve on my previous post about serious playfulness as a way of promoting constructive blog debate. Imagine that it's 2006. The new Australian Prime Minister Dr Brendan Nelson has been convinced by reading this post at Troppo A...
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I initially posted the following as a comment to my recent post on global warming . But I think it's worth creating a separate discussion thread: I think blogs offer a potentially very useful way to explore and understand complex issues, at least for the minority of amateur re...
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Writing my column I try to follow a fairly standard formula editors seem to really want this of commenting on topical events. Sometimes I find this preoccupation with what's happening now really frustrating. It means that things at least in journalism are not assessed on their...
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The art of the obit is a tricky one and potential exponents have had a field day recently what with Joh - a unique amalgam of the mayor of Porpoise Spit in Muriel's Wedding and a dyslexic John Calvin - and Al Grassby. Al was a colourful - shall we say larger-than-life? - dude...
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Cognitive dissonance and its subset confirmation bias are behaviours of which all of us are guilty, probably more often that we like to admit even to ourselves. We're not perfectly detached, perfectly rational beings. All of us have variable tendencies to frame issues in ways...
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The Imagining Australia quartet look Anzac legend through the eyes of young Australians and see a new cosmopolitanism: It is the tragedy of the event that moves young Australians. We weep for the memory of wasted young lives because in the Anzac spirit young Australians see th...
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Tim Lambert and John Quiggin have both been banging on about global warming rather a lot lately. Tim's Global Warming Sceptic Bingo post is an especially useful corrective source for the spurious and fraudulent material typically trotted out by global warming sceptics. But Tim...
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Watching a doco about Gallipoli yesterday - was there anything else on? - several exerps from the famous diaries of CEW Bean were read extolling the virtues of the ANZACS. The producers failed to mention Bean "admitted that while the Australians at Gallipoli were a tough and b...
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My accreditation as an Austswim instructor is up for renewal. In order that I may have the privilege of paying an exorbitant sum to register, I am required complete at least 20 (unpaid) hours of teaching and renew my cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) certificate. The former...
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So anyway, thanks to the generosity of Caz, the post Ken mentioned can be seen below. As it was posted in the middle of the night under the influence, I think it is crap and I deleted it first thing but Ken and Geoff have asked for it back, so..anyway it is 'below the fold'. W...
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Scott has just deleted an Anzac Day post he'd written. I don't know why, perhaps it was written when tired and emotional early in the morning. But his judgment that it was unworthy of publication is just plain wrong. It was one of the most evocative pieces I'd read in a long t...
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The thing that has puzzled me about the seemingly endless Schapelle Corby drug case is why anyone would bother to smuggle gunja from Australia to Bali, given that I assumed prices are much higher in the former than the latter. But Miranda Devine , of all people, may have provi...
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I could do with a 24 hour moratorium on Gallipoli roadworks responsibility wrangling. There's been a road there for decades. I used it in 1990 when I went to Anzac Cove. From what I can make out, that road has been widened and the current brouhaha is about whether the widening...
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You'd think that we'd have learnt something about land speculation over the last 200 years but in Rum Corps to white- shoe brigade by Jim Forbes and Peter Spearritt - thanks to Currency Lad for the link - the authors show that practices started by Macarthur and the officers of...
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One of the lesser known marital pressures on Australian couples is the North-South football divide. Hailing from Sydney as I do, I occasionally have an urge to watch rugby union or league (and sometimes even to play the former). But it's almost impossible to watch a rugby game...
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The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. Daniel Patrick Moynihan In one of my favourite quotes for me a kind of credo R...
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I had every good intention of picking up on a reader's suggestion that I create a Frequently Asked Questions section of Troppo, to which new-ish commenters could be referred whenever they raised topics that had already been debated ad nauseum , either here or in the blogospher...
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As Andrew Leigh is reminding us on his blog, The Monthly , a new magazine of ideas, is being started up by Morry Schwartz, the man who brought us the Quarterly Essay. Better yet, you can sign up for a free issue by going to their website before April 27. Its probably old news...
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Otto de Voogd is a Netherlander who has considered the ethical dilemma of traveling in Myanmar. It is impossible to travel to Myanmar without being confronted by the current travel boycott against the country. Specifically the Campaign for Human Rights and Democracy in Burma w...
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I'm enjoying writing my column for the Courier Mail . One of the things I am trying to do is sketch out ways in which very ordinary things and things that people don't associate with economics have economic dimensions - or rather have dimensions which economic thinking can hel...
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The only good thing about the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI is that it will put an end to the interminable prattling on current affairs programs , where a motley collection of logacious loquacious priests and self-appointed Vatican experts discuss a Papal e...
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High academic salaries and low teaching loads are pricing working class kids out of university says David Horowitz . In a talk at Ohio's Bowling Green State University Horowitz told academics that if they really as concerned about the working class as they pretended to be they...
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So I have spent the last three hours trying to get WordPress to work on my server. It works okay, but when I did a dummy run install, it didn't remember who had posted what, and there is a bug in it that means that I can not get comments to work. This is due to something that...
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I've penned - well actually I've pecked - an article on open source software. Its not yet been accepted, so I thought I'd see if anyone wanted to read my draft and offer comments before its too late. I should have thought of this before - but there you are - I didn't. When I f...
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Not long ago I blogged about a CIS paper by Helen Hughes and Jenness Warin which canvassed a range of options in relation to Aboriginal affairs. Most notably, they advocated amendments to native title and legislated aboriginal freehold to enhance individual ownership and alien...
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Never get caught between Rex and a tram seat .
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An interesting speech by Rupert Murdoch discussing the mainstream media's shortcomings (as he sees it) in embracing the Internet age in an effective manner: What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don't want to rely on the...
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AustLII (the Australasian Legal Information Institute) has just released a new facility called the Point-in-time Legislation Project . It allows users instantly to view legislation at any given historical date. You simply select the desired date in relation to any law and it i...
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Endurance athletes are risking death by drinking excessive amounts of a substance that causes brain cells to swell. According to the Mayo Clinic , drinking excessive amounts of the substance dilutes the sodium content of the athlete's blood. This can lead to rapid and dangerou...
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George Williams has emailed me and advised that his detailed opinion on the constitutionality of a Tasmanian Greens Bill aimed at allowing same-sex marriage is available on the Tasmanian Greens website . Melbourne University public law academic Simon Evans (whose blog I've jus...
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The States look like caving in to Federal Treasurer Peter Costello's demands that they abolish seven taxes that they agreed to "review" in 2005 as part of the GST agreement with the Commonwealth. This development is certainly part of the crisis in federalism about which I've b...
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A Tasmanian Greens bill to legalise gay marriage is attracting significant attention in the national media. UNSW constitutional lawyer George Williams is being touted by supporters of the bill as advising that it may well survive constitutional challenge (somewhat ironically)...
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Sometimes events happen in our lives that are so horrible that they scar us permanently. Educationalist Kevin Donnelly , a sometime guest blogger here at Troppo, and his family have had just such an experience. Kevin's son James was killed in a hit-and-run road accident some 3...
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With the British election campaign underway, the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights (LCLGR) worries that gay men might vote Liberal Democrat instead of Labour. So to help Tony out, the LCLGR has distributed beer mats ( pdf ) to gay venues across the country -- the mats...
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If you think YOUR job is bad, check this site , stop whining, and get back to work.
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I've heard of factional heavies, but this is ridiculous ...
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The current relatively conservative makeup of the High Court has a range of manifestations, not just in more newsworthy decisions like indefinite detention of asylum seekers or preservation of barristers' unconscionable immunity from suit . One may also argue with some force t...
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Japanese beer companies are making beer out of peas and soy beans. They don't taste as good as beer made with malted barley so why do they do it? According to BeverageDaily.com it's about tax. When the Japanese government decided to tax beer it defined it in terms of its malt...
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Phil Gomes kindly suggested on another thread that I should stop blogging for the evening and go fishing or go to the pub. At least I think he was being kind. But I had to decline his suggestion. I detest fishing with a passion. Yes, I know it's utterly un-Territorian to confe...
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I think I must reluctantly agree with Christopher Sheil (and I conceded in my previous post anyway) that any scheme to levy a state-based income tax would in all probability be a political suicide note for any state government introducing it. However, as Chris also observed, t...
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In a post a week or so ago I lamented the seemingly imminent terminal dismemberment of Australian federalism at the hands of an arrogant fourth term Howard government with apparently little or no understanding or respect for the fundamental principles of liberal democratic con...
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Tim Dunlop has a very nice post up at Road to Surfdom, about his Catholic education Reading it, and the comments people made on it, made me reflect once again on just what it is that my own Catholic education gave me, and the tensions and gifts it bequeathed to me. My experien...
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Sound familiar? A DECISION will be taken within weeks on whether to switch off the "futile" life support for the woman left for dead in the boot of her car in Melbourne earlier this year. Melbourne Magistrates Court heard today that Maria Korp would die in two weeks if medical...
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Meika the Dolebludger has been writing a novel , and it's nearly finished. An intensely thoughtful (if perversely prickly) individual, Meika poses the following question? Now, a[n] ethical problem. As a longterm dolebludger, should I:- A) sell it to a mainstream print publishe...
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Amazing news this morning--Jalal Talabani, the respected and doughty Kurdish leader of the 'peshmergas' (literally 'those who walk with death') and the founder of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, has been elected President of Iraq. He is the first Kurd ever to be in the top p...
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Another sad thing to report on the Australian film front, as yet another 'great white hope' looks set to segue into 'big flat flop.' Apparently, the film version of Robin Klein's well-loved, funny, tender and whimsical novel of school and family life, Hating Alison Ashley, is...
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As various other bloggers have already noted, the UK election campaign is off and running towards a 5 May election date. I was particularly interested in Antony Loewenstein's claim that the Liberal Democrats are poised to overtake the Tories as the second most popular politica...
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Australian Democrats deputy leader (and serious blogger) Andrew Bartlett has a post about the role and importance of blogs (or rather their lack of importance) from the viewpoint of working politicians: Occasionally I read something usually on a blog - about the power of the b...
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For the last couple of days Jen has been attending a teachers' conference at CDU. Yesterday I attended a session with her to listen to Dale Spender, aging 'digital diva' and former guru of the non-radical feminist movement, spruik about her new hobby horse: information technol...
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I'm really not good at putting sorrow into words but there was something really depressing about the Sea King crash that killed nine Australian servicemen and women on the weekend. They brought the bodies back home . I'm glad the Governor General put a sprig of wattle on the c...
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On North Terrace here in Adelaide there is a fine building known as Parliament House. This ornate structure is home to the most laughable legislature known to man. There are plenty worse around- Zimbabwe's springs to mind just at the moment, but for comic ineptitude, it is har...
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I was asked recently by the editors of Online Opinion to write a short op-ed piece on what I saw as the future of new media, such as blogs. I thought Troppo readers might be interested in the piece, which has just been published on the Online Opinion site My own piece, if you...
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Nicholas Gruen must be psychic. He's been spruiking in these pages for creative ideas for state government co-operative policy action. And lo and behold! The States themselves, led by longtime Kyoto advocate NSW Premier Bob Carr, come out with a proposal to introduce a State-b...
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Just popping in to my old home quickly to alert Troppo readers to a post on the Politics of Civility over at my new digs at LP . It's not a comment on recent controversies on these pages , but rather some reflection on how civility works politically in blogosphere debates, and...
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I never cease to be amazed at how, with only a few questions, the quizilla people seem to get it so right. Or perhaps they simply feed back what we want to hear. From Timbuktu to Tijuana, you know all about world culture and politics. You've seen it all, and what you haven't s...
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"Tough, fearsomely intelligent, loyal, fast on her feet... a woman possessed of a withering wit" Fenella Souter's feature in the Good Weekend shows that Julia Gillard can be both entertaining and ferocious. Would she like a senior ministry? "I'd cheerfully kill several hundred...
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The death of Pope John Paul II was hardly unexpected, yet it is momentous. This was, I think, a Pope who was perhaps the most exceptionally talented and extraordinary man to fill St Peter's shoes in a long time; one of the great men of the twentieth century, and like all great...
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Sophie's Masson's compares the terrorism of 19th anarchists with that of Al-Qaeda today. Many of those sympathetic to anarchism object to this kind of comparison and I can understand why. But if you read her post carefully you'll see that Sophie is also making a more interesti...
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With election results expected to be released shortly I am not at all optimistic about the chances of free and fair elections in Zimbabwe. But hopefully I will be proven wrong and The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) will succeed in overthrowing the ruling ZANU-PF governme...
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Moderating a group blog like Troppo, where both contributors and commenters possess a more diverse range of views than seems to be the norm in the blogosphere, is a challenging task. Sometimes (like now) it gets so tiresome I feel like walking away and leaving the zealots to t...
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