Club Troppo

I've just finished a biography of Lenin by Robert Service. It wasn't a great biography, but, if you'll pardon the expression, it serviceably addressed my own ignorance. * No doubt some Troppodillians are full bottle on revisionist history since the fall of the wall but not, al...

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For those who are interested..an actual scene from 'Melo', the film mentioned in my last entry.

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Alexander Downer's recent comparison of the Timor Sea to Texas is a little disturbing... but only if you've studied American history . Australia has been negotiating with East Timor over rights to revenues from yet to be developed gas fields in the Timor Sea . According to an...

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Recently, I've been doing a lot of research on early French 'Talkie' films, not only as background for my 1930's crime series, which has a great deal to do with the film world, but also because my paternal grandfather, Robert-Rene Masson, known as 'Bob' , worked from 1929-1933...

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In this month's Atlantic Monthly David Foster Wallace has a long article on Los Angeles talk radio host John Ziegler . DFW (as fans like to call him ) spent a month hanging around KFI 's studios. What he finally came up with is... stimulating. Like most talk radio hosts, Ziegl...

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This post is inspired by a suggestion from reader Steve on my previous post about serious playfulness as a way of promoting constructive blog debate. Imagine that it's 2006. The new Australian Prime Minister Dr Brendan Nelson has been convinced by reading this post at Troppo A...

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I initially posted the following as a comment to my recent post on global warming . But I think it's worth creating a separate discussion thread: I think blogs offer a potentially very useful way to explore and understand complex issues, at least for the minority of amateur re...

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Writing my column I try to follow a fairly standard formula editors seem to really want this of commenting on topical events. Sometimes I find this preoccupation with what's happening now really frustrating. It means that things at least in journalism are not assessed on their...

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The art of the obit is a tricky one and potential exponents have had a field day recently what with Joh - a unique amalgam of the mayor of Porpoise Spit in Muriel's Wedding and a dyslexic John Calvin - and Al Grassby. Al was a colourful - shall we say larger-than-life? - dude...

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Cognitive dissonance and its subset confirmation bias are behaviours of which all of us are guilty, probably more often that we like to admit even to ourselves. We're not perfectly detached, perfectly rational beings. All of us have variable tendencies to frame issues in ways...

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The Imagining Australia quartet look Anzac legend through the eyes of young Australians and see a new cosmopolitanism: It is the tragedy of the event that moves young Australians. We weep for the memory of wasted young lives because in the Anzac spirit young Australians see th...

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Tim Lambert and John Quiggin have both been banging on about global warming rather a lot lately. Tim's Global Warming Sceptic Bingo post is an especially useful corrective source for the spurious and fraudulent material typically trotted out by global warming sceptics. But Tim...

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Watching a doco about Gallipoli yesterday - was there anything else on? - several exerps from the famous diaries of CEW Bean were read extolling the virtues of the ANZACS. The producers failed to mention Bean "admitted that while the Australians at Gallipoli were a tough and b...

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My accreditation as an Austswim instructor is up for renewal. In order that I may have the privilege of paying an exorbitant sum to register, I am required complete at least 20 (unpaid) hours of teaching and renew my cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) certificate. The former...

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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...

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Scott has just deleted an Anzac Day post he'd written. I don't know why, perhaps it was written when tired and emotional early in the morning. But his judgment that it was unworthy of publication is just plain wrong. It was one of the most evocative pieces I'd read in a long t...

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The thing that has puzzled me about the seemingly endless Schapelle Corby drug case is why anyone would bother to smuggle gunja from Australia to Bali, given that I assumed prices are much higher in the former than the latter. But Miranda Devine , of all people, may have provi...

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I could do with a 24 hour moratorium on Gallipoli roadworks responsibility wrangling. There's been a road there for decades. I used it in 1990 when I went to Anzac Cove. From what I can make out, that road has been widened and the current brouhaha is about whether the widening...

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You'd think that we'd have learnt something about land speculation over the last 200 years but in Rum Corps to white- shoe brigade by Jim Forbes and Peter Spearritt - thanks to Currency Lad for the link - the authors show that practices started by Macarthur and the officers of...

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One of the lesser known marital pressures on Australian couples is the North-South football divide. Hailing from Sydney as I do, I occasionally have an urge to watch rugby union or league (and sometimes even to play the former). But it's almost impossible to watch a rugby game...

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