Club Troppo

What is Michael Caine doing playing God? He's in the forthcoming film Sophie's World. You might wonder what they're doing turning a kids book on the history of Western philosophy into a film. But then you might have thought a similar things bout the book - which was a huge bes...

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I picked up The Age A2 supplement grabbing some lunch earlier today and read this sweet story . It's nothing that special but I liked its blend of surprise and ordinariness. It's about George Harrison's Mum and the daughter of a Mills and Boon author! It's Troppo category is '...

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Hayek was an an activist liberal rather than a conservative, writes Roger Kimball . And now that the struggle against socialist planning is over, the important question is where Hayek thought we should go from here. What was his vision for a liberal Utopia? In his essay 'The I...

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An exciting day. Dell is shipping Linux PCs. Here's a write up of Mark Shuttleworth talking about the move. He's a major smoothie if you watch the video . I just love the way he avoids the use of the word 'Microsoft'. He he. I reckon it mightn't be long now before Linux become...

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Hat tip to new blogger Leslie Katz. For some reason the You Tube screen is not making it's way through our software - but check this out . Dead simple really!

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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Well, nothing's so handy as a theme, but this edition of Missing Link doesn't have one. I thought Julia Gillard and Bill Heffernan opening their respective mouths to chan...

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Here's an op ed I wrote for The Age in response to the shock and horror of a scandal that's brewing down here in Victoria. Real estate agents are (gasp) underquoting house prices at auctions. Ask a real estate agent what price they expect a house theyre auctioning to sell for,...

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Well that's too much to hope for. I've posted on 'he said - she said' journalism at least once before. Like reality TV 'he said - she said' journalism is the logical consequence of the economics of profit driven newspaper reporting of politics. The journalists' knowledge is ne...

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Reading the Murdoch Press and hearing the Mining companies, one could be forgiven for thinking the apocalypse would descend on us if Labors IR industrial relations policies were implemented. I have tried to understand what the main concerns of business and the media are and I...

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Guest Post by Paul Hobson. A little bit about myself: Im female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. Thats all you need to know. Its all that matters these days anyway. Thats how Riverbend began her Baghdad Burning blog on 17 August 2003. Although for 4 years the war in Iraq has...

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I may trouble myself to write chapter and verse about why you shouldn't bother upgrading to Office 2007 until the inevitable time (though I suspect those days are dying) when Microsoft manages to trap you into needing it for compatibility purposes. But a picture tells a thousa...

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and his mellifluously titled blog interfluidity are often very interesting. He doestn't post all that often, but that's what Google Reader is for - you don't have to visit his site to know if he's got any new offerings. Steve is interested in the financial markets and in parti...

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For more than three decades, from the late 1940s to the 1980s, Heinz Arndt was the most prolific and energetic economist in Australia. His prodigious output of articles, books, lectures, conference papers, reviews and reports is testimony to his productivity. For twenty years...

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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Two events captured Ozblogistan's collective attention: the ALP National Conference, and the World Cup Cricket Finals Fiasco. There were some excellent posts about both,...

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As you've probably noticed, Club Troppo has been almost unuseably slow-loading for the last few days. It has also been out of commission completely for substantial periods. Now the comment facility is not working at all. Apparently the latter is not an accident but deliberate...

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Any hint that virtue is it's own reward offers its own reassurance - bracing though it may be. I fancy that the look on this face is the contentment of genuine achivement. Yes folks you heard about it first on Troppo. A while back I came across a terrific article by Dani Rodri...

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I vividly remember wandering round the town of Nimes in the south of France about fifteen years ago and being completely blown away by the amphitheatre there (pictured above). What blew me away was the way in which this magnificent object had gone on a two millennium journey o...

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I was driving through the Burnley tunnel today. It has three lanes. As you go into it travelling east, the three lanes I was on had to become two to make way for another lane entering from the left. Normally what happens in such a situation is that the three main lanes become...

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Stephen Hawking will be weightless sometime today (if it hasn't already happened). Free at last from gravity which sucks at his body day and night making his life much much harder. A minute later he will be back to the earthly reality.

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