Club Troppo

Reuters reported about half an hour ago that Prince Charles will marry Camilla Parker-Bowles on the 8th of April . Kim Beazley's recent desire to revive the Republican debate in Australia will now probably get a kick along. However, that will be for the wrong reasons if it's s...

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The phrase of course is courtesy of a previous column by Andrew Bolt lamenting the politicisation of education . In a week when education has had a few headlines - with Dr Nelson's proposal for a National Leaving Certificate exam being almost universally dismissed as impractic...

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After Liberal MP Dr Mal Washer (who was instrumental in killing Tony Abbott's plan last year to invade the privacy of doctor-patient confidentiality for teenagers) proposed that sex education be made compulsory in all schools regardless of religious affiliation, John Howard ha...

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I see that the High Court has allowed an appeal from the NSW Court of Appeal in a matter called Swain v Waverley Municipal Council , thereby effectively restoring the original jury verdict that had awarded Swain damages of $3.7 million for injuries sustained when he dived into...

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I feel a deep urge to vent my spleen. Despite being a babyboomer whose personal tastes in rock/pop music coincide to some extent with the voters in the Normblog poll that Sophie Masson blogged about immediately below, I find myself getting mightily irritated by the extraordina...

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Here's something worth a look! Back in December, Norm Geras asked people to send him their Top Ten favourite pop/rock songs. He had a record number of entries for such a poll--230--so it took some time to sort them out. Well, the results are now in, and it's interesting to see...

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I've been doing some rearrangement of my life and working arrangements to reduce the time taken on my PhD to manageable proportions, without driving me crazy. I've now got til March 31st to submit the thing, and what I'm also doing is hiring an office in a suburban location wh...

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I was reading the Oxford Companion to English Literature yesterday, looking up the entries for various Golden Age detective fiction writers (as I'm planning a mystery series set in the 1920's). What intrigued me was the contrast in the entries for Agatha Christie and Dorothy L...

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Just wanted to emerge quickly from thesisdom to draw people's attention to three new posts on this tragic issue which is increasingly exposing a lot of very flawed practices in a range of public domains. Saintinastraitjacket has some very interesting thoughts as well as a comp...

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As obergruppenfuhrer of a nominally Northern Territory-based blog, I can't help feeling I should write about the only piece of even slightly significant political news to come out of Darwin in quite some time (except the Bob Collins saga, which we can't talk about anyway). For...

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"Religious leaders and politicians have a perfect right to discuss abortion, writes Gerard Henderson ..." Well yes, and (unlike some) I'm prepared to accept that Tony Abbott, Ron Boswell and John Anderson are sincere in their interest in pursuing abortion law reform. But what...

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"You know you really dated yourself, Jen, by that comment about Matlock Police . Even I can hardly remember that one. Now who did it star again? Michael what's-his-name?" "Pate." "That's right, Michael Pate . He carved out an entire career playing a red indian in Hollywood mov...

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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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A Troppo Scoop* Troppo was the first to bring you news that Australia was discovered by Chinese Admiral Zheng He , and also broke the story that the Templars live in tunnels under Hertfordshire ... The true identity of "Nabakov" (pictured above, centre), the commenter who alwa...

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... if Andrew Bolt is really a right wing op/ed columnist or a master of satire? Check out his thoughts on Channel 7's Desperate Housewives or feast yourself on this Bolty appreciation by Jess at Ausculture , and make up your own mind about the mystery of the preacher-teacher...

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Michelle Grattan writes with some anger of Amanda Vanstone's pathetic failure to apologise over the detention of schizophrenic woman Cornelia Rau in Baxter Dentention Centre . A confused Ms Rau was discovered by Queensland Police claiming to be a German national, put in a gaol...

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Andrew Norton at Catallaxy recently published a scathing review of Marion Maddox' book God Under Howard . His scorn for this work by someone very loosely described by her publisher as "the leading authority on the intersection of religion and politics" in Australia is justifie...

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I have to admit, as Troppo's resident RWDB, that I occasionaly drop into Inner Margolia for a bit of a giggle. And I had a hilarious laff at this effort by 'the Jack' Robertson, well known errr... he says he's a soldier, writer and former blogger. The Jack seems to have a lot...

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The other day we watched what I thought was impossible--a bad Cary Grant movie. Or rather, it was a bad movie--a lame, wooden, limp(to thoroughly mix metaphors) in which Cary Grant had the misfortune of being completely miscast. It's the historical potboiler, 1957's The Pride...

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I can just imagine an echelon of ex-insurance salesmen (there were hardly any seriously successful 'insurance sales-women') salivating at the thought of the commissions to be made when superannuation Choice of Fund is introduced in July. Most of you are too young to remember t...

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