Another top-notch article in the Age by Caroline Wilson looks at how the Brisbane Lions board was told in 2002 that the team was capable of four premierships in a row, but if they did try for it, there would be a long term price to be paid. The board took the short term option...
Continue reading →
The sound of one hand clapping after Freo-St Kilda farcical finish Ken has asked me to resume my post on Club Troppo, as post-modernist AFL curmudgeon in residence. Since I find blathering on about football almost irresistible, and my cat is tired of hearing my views, I've dec...
Continue reading →
Old time Troppo readers who actually liked my stuff can get their fill at my new blog here . (Blogger is a really sound platform these days.)
Continue reading →
Larvatus Prodeo ยป Butget Orthodoxies and the Politics of Greed How much for one of those PhD's again?
Continue reading →
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...
Continue reading →
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...
Continue reading →
If you think YOUR job is bad, check this site , stop whining, and get back to work.
Continue reading →
I've heard of factional heavies, but this is ridiculous ...
Continue reading →
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...
Continue reading →
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...
Continue reading →
Indonesia can't take a trick at the moment. The Prime Minister is sending medical teams back to Sumatra; hell, they only got home this month from the last earthquake. I mean, its just terrible. Two in three months...
Continue reading →
I got an email from the hosting company this morning alerting me to the amount of trackback spam and they have disabled the trackback script. I'm content to leave it off. Trackbacks are nice, but they are not worth the effort to keep afloat. It is a considerable pity that this...
Continue reading →
The Good Professor weighs in on the Schiavo case : Well pardon a Bunyip being frank, but this business isn't about compassion. It's about control -- control of both the individual and society's direction. As so many advocates of slow starvation are now demonstrating, they beli...
Continue reading →
A case of the Dreaded Lurgi hasn't prevented me from reading the papers, as per usual. As I was wiping snot off the monitor, I came across this article , describing the controversy about these 'do it yourself' DNA kits. It is not quite at the 'do it yourself' stage, but it is...
Continue reading →
Now that Mark Bahnisch has gone solo and presumably taken his sociology/philosphy minded readers with him, we can get back to politics. It's good timing on Mark's account because after a six month slumber after the election, some interesting things are happening, not least to...
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 →
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 →
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 →
Any lawyers out there with too much time on your hands? How about setting up an Australian version of " Sue a Spammer ". It is bad enough that we get all the world's spam in our inboxes. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be much we can do about that. But if we can at least put the...
Continue reading →
The Evil Pundit, baiter of left-wing bloggers everywhere, writes This applies to people using Norton Internet Security, Norton Personal Firewall , or similar software firewall products. For people who use this, the default privacy settings on the firewall will prevent posting...
Continue reading →
In the comments to this post , Geoff Honnor got a bit cranky, and it provoked the following exchange: At this time of year, I think the probable deaths of upwards of 50,000 people in an horrific natural disaster might rank higher than what Gerald Henderson - or even someone ot...
Continue reading →
Terrible earthquake in Indonesia has claimed an estimated 14,000 lives although it is quite possible that this number could climb much higher. See Tim Blair for many links about what is going on. There are estimated to be close to 6,000 Australians in the affected areas. If yo...
Continue reading →
Tim Blair has put together some of the quotes of 2004. The year's nearly over. But the Currency Lad is writing some fine stuff as well. Me? I'm stuffing my face, and drinking lots of beer etc. Writing? Pfft.. I'll be back sometime after Christmas, but before New Year. Merry Ch...
Continue reading →
I've been looking for work. It is one of the things that keep me busy, busier then I like to be. I find the job-hunting task to be an exceptionally frustrating and difficult experience. It brings out the total 'procrastinator' in me. Applying for jobs requires an individual to...
Continue reading →
Long before I started blogging, most of my online interaction with people was through chat-rooms. The first room that I made myself home in was a room dedicated to cricket fans, and through that room I met a lot of interesting people. It was great- we even did a get-together i...
Continue reading →
In The Weekend Australian Magazine , Paul Kelly interviews the Prime Minister, in an interesting portrait of the very ordinary/extraordinary man who has dominated the political landscape of Australia since 1996. There is a online preview that can be read here . Left-wing reade...
Continue reading →
It has been a long time since I wrote a serious post; many troubles have beset me, both in keeping this blog empire functioning, and away from the screen as well. Be that as it may, a serious post is in order lest this blog become known as the Daily Mark Bahnisch . The Left mi...
Continue reading →
Comments boxes not working? You might be using crap software. Thanks to ace technical consultant boynton , I learn that the cause of the comments box thing being forbidden is that users are using Internet Explorer! Oh, the shame! Get Real. Get Firefox! Of course, if you MUST u...
Continue reading →
Many readers will have noticed that pressing the comments button will produce a 'forbidden' message. This is happening across the domain. I do not know why this is happening (it is not happening for me- everything seems fine here.) However, if this is happening for you, a way...
Continue reading →
Nightmares including SQL databases crashing, and the like. UPDATE- Everything seems to be back to normal. The SQL part of the server crashed, and I had to remember to repair the database. Once I did that, everything worked, except for Troppo, which required a rebuild. To see h...
Continue reading →
Tim Dunlop is complaining about the prevalance of creationist ideas , and notes that it is not just a US problem: Speaking completely anecdotally, I have a cousin who is a geologist and who was doing surveys in NSW a few years back. He said he had to speak to a lot of property...
Continue reading →
I have just spent the last hour deleting and rebuilding over 400 spam comments that came in a wave just after midnight. I'm trying to watch the soccer, not hacking away with this blog all night. But it only took that long because the server was belching under the assault. Once...
Continue reading →
They get to be too busy to blog. I promised Ken a post as to my views on the US elections; my post got overtaken by events, and by the time I will have time to finish it, it will be very stale indeed. But I notice much angst about 'the state of the left' in electoral terms, bo...
Continue reading →
Tim Dunlop is very very rude about a bloke named Jim Wallace , who is executive chairman of the ominously-titled Australian Christian Lobby. We here at Troppo Armadillo are much more deeply civil, but I must agree Tim has a point. Wallace unsurprisingly claims that " Christian...
Continue reading →
Thus spoke the Chief Armadillo : I suspect the reality is that it remains impossible to predict with confidence who's going to win. He's quite right. To me it does seem impossible to have any confidence in an election prediction. But if pressed, I would predict a.... ...fairly...
Continue reading →
When US television network CBS presented explosive political documents without enquiring too closely as to their actual credibility, they unleashed a firestorm from US bloggers who quickly identified the documents as fakes. Soon enough, the ferment from political bloggers spre...
Continue reading →
I've been watching Fox News today as they have been covering the impact of Hurricane Ivan on the Gulf Coast near Alabama. It is a terrifying storm with winds around 200 kph and driving rain. You can read about the details here But what got me is that there are Fox News reporte...
Continue reading →
Some rather foolish people are suggesting that Australia should 'negotiate' with the rag-tag terrorist outfit Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). I would not normally comment on such a suggestion, but 29% of SMH readers seem to think it is a good idea. It should of course be dismissed out...
Continue reading →
In the wake of yesterday's tragedy in Jakarta, terrorism is back on the electoral agenda, whether we like it or not. It has not really gone away of course, but the political parties in Australia seem to have had a mutual non-aggression pact to not discuss the issue. That could...
Continue reading →
Insomnia strikes again. Surfing round the blogs, I finally noticed that Don Arthur has finally upgraded his computer from a dodgy Apple Mac (though I suspect he's only upgraded to another dodgy Apple Mac), and has been hard at work. But he keeps linking to Clive Hamilton . Cli...
Continue reading →
There is no doubt that the Prime Minister is in some political difficulty and is struggling to gain the initiative in the first week of the campaign. The essential Mumble website suggests that the ALP has a small but constant edge in the opinion polls, and entering the campaig...
Continue reading →
Ken Parish has most graciously allowed me room to opine on politics, without me having to go to the bother of re-establishing a blog of my own. Time pressures mean that posting from this quarter will be erratic at best, but I hope to pop by once in a while to give my own 0.02...
Continue reading →
HI THERE AND WELCOME TO THE FINAL RESTING PLACE of TROPPO ARMADILLO. On first inspection, you may be thinking "Gee this site looks crap". And you'd be right too- it does look a bit like it was put up in a hurry. That is because it WAS put up in a hurry- Ken was making ominous...
Continue reading →
