Club Troppo

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...

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From an email from Scott Wickstein:

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Phillip Adams - pundit unjustly maligned? The longer I keep blogging, the more I empathise with Phillip Adams. Adams is regularly assailed by assorted RWDB bloggers (notably Professor Bunyip - who seems about to make an overdue comeback to the blogosphere) for journalistic sin...

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The lobby at Google headquarters - where "open source management" (whatever that is) no doubt takes place Here's an interesting article on Google - on how it tries to maintain it's evolutionary edge as an organisation. The thinking in it is very much in the style of modern man...

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Tamsin Carroll belts one out in Dusty: The Musical Troy Dodds at AussieTheatre.com has an engaging rant about the "jukebox musical" genre, of which Dusty: The Musical (recently doco'd to death on ABC TV) is the most recent Australian example: Australia has been dealt some incr...

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Are birds better conversationalists than humans? Why the cover illustration? Some Troppodilians may be interested in this New York Review of Books review of a book du jour entiled On Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller. Though this is far from 'must re...

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Courtesy of Slashdot, there's a new documentary on open source and free culture featuring various leading lights - most particularly Laurence Lessig and Richard Stallman. Go see a trailer here . Looks interesting. It's odd that they haven't 'open-sourced' the doco itself, allo...

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Yesterday I asked people to tell me what a list of books have in common. They include Enid Blighton's The Magic Faraway Tree and Milan Kundera's Unbearable lightness of being . Lance Armstrong's It's not about the Bike and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights . Now you may think t...

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Jacqui Stockdale, The Nature Maker . Courtesy Art Gallery of NSW. The Art Life has a long-ish post reviewing the Wynn, Sulman and Photographic Portrait Prizes (decided at the same time as the much more famous Archibald Prize for portraiture). Actually, although TAL has some in...

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The Third Battle of Ypres/Passchendaele in 1917 One of the advantages of blogging for almost 4 years (as I have done for my sins), is that you can occasionally get away with brazenly recycling old posts that have become lost in the dim recesses of the blog archive files. This...

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What do the following books have in common? Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins It's not about the Bike Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights Enid Blyton The Magic Faraway Tree His Holiness The Dalai Lama & Howard C Cutler The Art of Happiness Joanne Harris Chocolat Terry Jones Lady C...

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Another evil old man or a ray of unexpected hope? Tim Dunlop has an excellent post (with which I wholeheartedly agree) about an editorial in The Australian praising Pope Benedict XVI for deciding to reconsider the vatican's prohibition on HIV-infected males using condoms when...

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I hope this is the right Gillian Bouras. I Googled her to find a photo. I've just returned from a talk by Gillian Bouras as part of the launch of her book about her sister who took her own life which I wrote up here . I even met Peter - a Troppo lurker - which made me feel esp...

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Eel gets crushed but team wins game Howdy Troppo Readers! Ken has kindly asked me to come on board and be Troppo's NRL columnist. Some of you may know me as a one-eyed (or even blind) Parramatta Eels fan. But have no fear. I will not allow my love of the Eels in any way to lea...

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Shaun Cronin has joined the Troppo team to write occasional posts on rugby league (cf Christopher Sheil's rugby union posts). Shaun mostly blogs at Larva Rodeo on political stuff. His LP bio sketch says: Shaun Cronin is the blogger formerly known as Immanuel Rant. Back in the...

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[photopress:beach.jpg,full,pp_empty] The Top End's dry season officially starts next Monday, the 1st of May, which I point out solely as an excuse to run a cartoon to see how it copes with this new-fangled layout.

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As you can see, we took the opportunity of adopting a new theme while fixing the formatting and database problems that have bedevilled Club Troppo for some time now. The work has been done by Vicki Berry of DistinctiveWeb (her blog is here ). It's a slightly tweaked version of...

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Cyclone Monica looks like it's going to follow pretty much the same track as Ingrid last year: directly westward skirting the north coast straight across Cobourg Peninsula and Melville Island and then on out into the Timor Sea. Cyclone Monica looks like it's going to follow pr...

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Spog, who commented liberally on a post of mine a few days ago sent in this explanation of his comments on the effect of Family Tax Benefit B. It appears below the fold together with illustrative diagrams. They are posted with Spog's permission and my thanks over the fold. As...

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Jen's show isn't quite like the Disney Broadway version. It's funnier and more self-aware ... If anyone has wondered what's happened to Jen over the last couple of months, she's been working 80 hours a week (or more) on her school's production of Walt Disney's Beauty and the B...

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