Club Troppo

I always think of this line when asked for a reference. Today Crikey carried a whole bunch of similarly ambiguous one liners for references from LIAR The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations. They're over the fold. I cannot recommend this person too highly. I rec...

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It's been fifteen years since Captain Jeff Kennett, and his corporate turn-around team took the reigns in Victoria and started the State on the road to recovery. It's been thirteen years since Mr. Kennett applied his marketing genius to spruce up the State's fleet of car numbe...

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Poster for International Women's Day via Kirsty at Galaxy of Emptiness Missing Link is now into yet another manifestation. The problem is that it's just too time-consuming for any one individual to read lots of blogs, even with the help of a feed reader, and then produce a dec...

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I argued in a prior post that a directly elected and separate executive is a more democratic form of governance. Not content with that, over at SSR we developed a gubernatorial constitution for NSW. This constitution is nothing new. It contains concepts and existing constituti...

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I reckon this is a bloody good picture. It took my eye in the National Gallery Magazine. It's by Tobias Koster and most of the background is missing - which is a long strip to the right and left of the market in which one presumes the subject of the painting works. Tobias is f...

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Chris Young didn't feel cared about . The food was good, the service was better than usual but it wasn't enough -- he wanted more from his waitress: I didn't feel like she really cared. Sure, she was attentive, but I didn't feel cared about. And I didn't feel like she was bein...

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I'm strongly inclined to liberality of laws when it comes to lending. That is not just because as a lenders' agent I have a conflict of interest. I actually detest the paternalistic idea that lenders trying to lend money at a profit is something bad. We have a ridiculous situa...

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Would Adam Smith please come to reception. Adam Smith Google Alerts have many things to answer for - in particular you can't name anyone without them turning up to your site in seconds answering your charges. Gavin Kennedy (I am convinced) gets Google Alerts every day on where...

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As I've mentioned to Troppodillians previously , Melvin Brag has an interesting show on BBC radio called 'In our time'. It's a kind of amateur hour with a professional broadcaster. He (usually) interviews three 'experts' about something that he's interested in but ignorant abo...

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We're having hell's own trouble with the server at present, and when I posted ML last night I simply couldn't load up three You-Tube videos. So I'm trying again here. Here's Ron and Nancy's message on drugs - remastered to clarify some issues from the earlier screening in the...

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News and politics stuff In reporting Kelvin Thompson's resignation Tim Blair links to this lovely piece of blue baiting. Don't you just love it when people humiliate other people. I know I do. Tim Blair says that "Quite without meaning to, Tim Footman writes the perfect obit f...

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Astonishing revelations Nicholas has already alerted readers to John Quiggin's call for sponsors in The Great Shave. But apparently the wind has gone out of the sails , so he's asking for a bit more help. He will throw in $1000 of his own if the $2000 target is reached by Mond...

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Brad De long republishes a great piece of his arguing that Keynes Tract on Monetary Reform was a great monetarist document. As he concludes: [F]rom our perspective today--in which the Great Depression is seen as a unique disaster brought on by an unprecedented collapse in fina...

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I asked fellow missing linker Darlene who I should go see at the Comedy Festival. Being a reviewer she was very discrete and said she didn't want to play favourites, but that I could of course check out people on you tube. Of course! I hadn't really used you tube for that - th...

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Tim Dunlop thinks this picture is just begging for a caption . He's run a very successful competition supplying one. Troppodillians please help out in comments, either identifying the best comment on Tim's site, or suggesting one of your own. Prizes - well if you're in Melbour...

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Because Wednesday's Missing Link won't be up till this evening, here's a titbit that needs to go up earlier. On the book launch of âOutrageous: moral panics in Australiaâ. The launch is by Richard Ackland and itâs at Gleebooks.

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One of the fundamental intuitions of economists is that there are difficult trade-offs to everything you do â in life and in policy. I think this is overblown often â that often there are âvirtuous circles;â full of mostly good things and vicious ones. As Fred Argyâs been at p...

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Well you won't see them any day on this planet. You've got to change your perspective on things to see the earth eclipsing the Sun or Saturn from above/below. Click on either image for the full picture. Magnificent non?

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What is this object and who does Barista think should be using it? Just one of the things you'll find out from this edition of Missing Link. Well I can tell you that this Missing Link exercise is no pushover. It has probably grown a bit even since Ken started it, but itâs take...

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Seventy two hours (give or take a day) after the news that Kevin Rudd had met with disgraced Labor scuzz-bucket Brian Burke way back in 2005, and the Government scoured the Old Testament looking for language to describe the evil they were witnessing, and the Canberra press gal...

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