It's here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months . It is also on Kindle . It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries and rich countries. They include our children, the...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Print media, History, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, Theatre, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Terror, Science, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Health, Political theory, Law, Dance, Review, Bargains, Travel, WOW! - Amazing, Social, Parenting, Ethics, Medical, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy, Employment, Sortition and citizens’ juries, Isegoria, Coronavirus crisis
Societies are evolving and complex, which often makes it hard to see at any moment where things are going. It was thus with the move of Northern European countries towards democracy in the 19 th century, which seems inevitable and clear in hindsight but blurred at the time by...
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Posted in History, Humour, Education, Theatre, IT and Internet, Geeky Musings, Climate Change, Business, Immigration and refugees, bubble, Social, Bullshit, Employment
Dear Troppodillians, lend me your critical eye. I ask you to consider the system of citizen-jury appointments I have in mind, and tell me how the vested interests would try to game it, ie why it would not work and whether the system can be improved. Bear with me as I describe...
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Posted in Politics - national, History, Society, Theatre, Libertarian Musings, Political theory, Law, Business, Social, Cultural Critique, Democracy, Sortition and citizens’ juries
Wellbeing & Policy Making Book Launch Event on 1st July 5-6.30pm London Time. Attending the Launch is Free, the book is not! [blurb from Nancy Hey, director of the WW Centre for Wellbeing]: The What Works Centre for Wellbeing , and our commissioning partners at the ESRC: Econo...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, History, Society, Theatre, Economics and public policy, Science, Health, Political theory, Social, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Social Policy, Democracy
As one the best illustrations of the way our minds deal with uncertainty, consider the following video. Please listen and watch at least 30 seconds so you can experience the three sequences of spoken words. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWGeUztTkRA[/embed] Pretty much...
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There have long been scientists who were celebrities in their own time. Galileo, Keppler, Goodall, Linneus, Cousteau, Darwin, Smith, Leeuwenhoek, Da Vinci, Ibn Khaldhun, Curie, and many others in the last 800 years were followed and admired. They in many ways performed their s...
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Posted in Politics - national, Life, Philosophy, Education, Society, Religion, Theatre, Economics and public policy, Science, Geeky Musings, Health, Cultural Critique, Social Policy, Democracy, Coronavirus crisis
There are 5 aspects of the covid-19 pandemic I really did not see coming, all pointing to a phenomenon that European sociologists of a century ago spent their whole lives describing, coming up with theories about crowds and their behaviour - theories now largely forgotten. Sch...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, History, Society, Theatre, Economics and public policy, Science, Social, Cultural Critique, Coronavirus crisis
Episode 5 of the final season of Game of Thrones showed us a vengeful fallen angle, Daenerys Targaryen, after whom thousands of children in the real world have been named. Even though her enemies had been defeated and surrendered, she nevertheless used her massive weapon, a fi...
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Posted in Life, Print media, History, Literature, Society, Religion, Films and TV, Theatre, Media, Geeky Musings, Law, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Social Policy, Democracy
[I just read a self-help book and, like Don Quixote, need to vent...] My 10 rules for becoming a successful guru: Appear popular at the start : humans are just like dogs that follow other dogs. So have a legion of disciples and followers. Make them up when you start out. Don’t...
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Posted in Life, Society, Theatre, Journalism, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Law, Space, bubble, Social, Ethics, Cultural Critique
Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately holding on to their colonial empires. Now, a confident China is the up-and-coming...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Philosophy, Environment, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Society, Religion, Sport-general, Theatre, Music, Economics and public policy, Science, regulation, Gender, Journalism, Media, Geeky Musings, Climate Change, Political theory, Business, Travel, Immigration and refugees, Information, Intellectual Monopoly Privileges, Innovation, Social, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy, Bullshit, Indigenous, Employment
[cross-posted, slightly updated, from Pearls and Limitations] Observations: About 40% of the population of Catalonia and its capital Barcelona was not born there, but largely comes from the rest of Spain. Internal migration is high , with about 0.4% of the population moving fr...
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Posted in Politics - international, Life, History, Education, Society, Theatre, Economics and public policy, Media, Immigration and refugees, Ethics, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy
Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...
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Last night I attended the launch of Creative State which was the culmination of over a year of engagement between the Victorian Government and the arts community. It involved a taskforce or some such and an Expert Reference Group - on which I sat. Anyway the Minister was very...
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The supreme vice is shallowness Oscar Wilde to Bosie I went to see Love, Love, Love by the terrific actor's ensemble theatre company Red Stitch tonight. I'd previously seen Grounded which I thought was an Arthur Milleresque masterpiece which was very well delivered by the sing...
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Fellow Troppodilians, especially those resident in Canberra, may I commend this production of Black Diggers to you. I saw it last year in Sydney at a packed out matinee (only tickets available) at the Opera House on Australia Day! It was electrifying: great script drawing on e...
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I wonder why oz theatre icon David Williamson reacted with complacent high dudgeon to a bitchy review on Crikey of his latest turgid thespian offering Don Parties On ? After all, the Murdoch and Fairfax reviews were almost as negative, and redoubtable blogging theatre critic A...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh0jOiz7pXk Joan Sutherland has passed on. Inevitably, obituarians are taking the opportunity to contend that she was the greatest soprano, or even the greatest singer, of the post war period, or even of the 20th Century. Others are content just...
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If you are of a certain age, you will know what people mean when they refer to "The War". You will be able to cast your mind back and imagine a type of blustery former warrior, of proud bearing, and fixed views on pretty much everything. Having been in the War, they were accor...
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I can't think of a single song of his that is a really big favourite of mine. But has there ever been any big star who was more of a genius as a dancer? Surely not. Not even Fred Astair comes close.
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David, Cate and Andrew in happier (very recent) times - from SMH It's always sad when heroic high achievers begin to lose their powers, still more when they fail to age gracefully and succumb instead to bitterness and envy. But so it seems to be with David Williamson, once sai...
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Am I mistaken or is this a reasonable description of the last - say - thirty years in cinema. A generation ago, you could do a film about foreigners in a normal English speaking accent. The Sound of Music was done in a mix of fairly unobtrusive (to us) English accents (the adu...
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Dave Bloustien looks like a cross between Dr. Who and a 1960s mod with a cravat, waistcoat and sideburns. Certainly a contrast to the t-shirt and jeans that constitutes the usual comedy clobber, but Mr. Boustein doesnt deliver the usual stand-up routine either. Instead he offe...
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It seems incredible, hard to believe, but we've got ten double passes to give away to Highly Suss , which looks like fun. I'd go myself if I wasn't going to be overseas. If you're planning to be in Melbourne for the 4th of April, then let us know and we can send you a ticket t...
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This man is Dave Bloustien. Why should you be interested? Because you will always remember this man's face as the first sign that being a reader of Club Troppo made you an insider , somone in the know and on the money . Yes, folks, due to our extraordinary buying power, our pu...
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Barrie Kosky is a big hit with people who are vastly more knowledgeable about theatre than me. He's very big in Europe. So maybe he's just the ticket. My two exposures to his theatre have been strikingly similar. At the end of something I went to at the Sydney Opera House I sn...
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Last weekend I went to see Guys and Dolls. I had no idea it was such a good show. I remember it was on when I was a kid, so I figured it might have been written in the late fifties or early sixties - definitely pre-Beatles or Buddy Holly even if it chronologically coincided wi...
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There have been a bunch of things I've wanted to post about, but have simply not had the time. I still don't have the time, but I with a bit of enthusiasm and not much time, I thought I'd mention some good things. The first is that I listened to this podcast of Dan Pink talkin...
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One of the numerous tasks that's been distracting me from resuming Missing Link over the last couple of weeks is doing promotion/marketing for Jen's Missing Link Theatre production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story , playing next week in Darwin (I stole the name of the blog revi...
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Catherine Carby, Rachelle Durkin and Gábor Bretz If one wants uniformity to be the basic rule for an opera, it is easy to see that a more perfect subject ... than 'Don Giovanni' is simply not to be contemplated. (Source) Was Kierkegaard right about this opera being the greates...
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Fiona Campbell For the sake of completeness, here's a brief and belated reaction to Juditha Triumphans , which I previewed last week. The production surpassed even my very high expectations. As commenter John Greenfield noted, the sets were not lavish, but I thought the use of...
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I mentioned when reviewing Opera Australia's Barber that there was another production of the same work in the pipeline. By now it's actually too late to see Pacific Opera's season of The Barber of Seville , which finished last weekend. But it's still worth a comment for the be...
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The Barber of Seville is the most popular opera buffa in the contemporary standard repertoire and, according to one estimate , the seventh most performed opera in the world. This is for good reason, because the work is a gem, and also one of the most accessible. However, opera...
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When I first saw that there was a musical called "Keating!" I avoided it like the plague. Keating had his strong points - namely his mastery of the language. But I feared lame nostagia for this Great Land that Keating was going to build. The same Great Land that we heard almos...
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I. I enjoyed myself at The Boy from Oz last Friday night. I'd have loved to see one of Peter Allen's big Broadway shows and was curious as to what all the fuss was about The Boy's great success in New York. Mind you, the reason for its success seems pretty obvious. Peter Allen...
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Australian Squad: I must say I think Connolly's forward picks are a little odd. Start with the front row: clearly (I think) Paul is on the bench because he has booked his flight to the RWC, but then does that mean that Baxter is also booked? I suspect it does. Now what about t...
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There's a certain nastiness about a certain cadre of Australian expats. The big four are Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Clive James and Robert Hughes. They didn't like the Australia of the fifties and early sixties, and a lot of them think we're still the same. This was the...
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I went to David Hare's play Stuff Happens last night. Thinking a lot of the playwright, I've been disappointed by the most recent productions I've seen Via Dolorosa and The Judas Kiss , both of which were OK but basically dull. The play is really a documentary about the invasi...
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Jon Hawkes was one of my class mates at Launceston Grammar. He was the brightest kid in the class and also the youngest by a fair margin. Mr Hawkes was an anglican cleric with an interesting series of posts - Jamaica, King Island, the Huon Valley in Southern Tasmania, Monash U...
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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...
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Norm Geras had on his site today a link to a great article by the wonderful Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials and the Sally Lockhart Quartet, amongst others, about adaptation, from novel to stage as opposed to film. It is well worth reading--as always, with Philip,...
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