Club Troppo

On the comment thread of yesterday's post about Nicole Kidman and privacy laws , someone raised this question: How would you treat situations like [the] pedophile expulson in Murgon yesterday? It's a question that merits a separate post. I think convicted pedophiles who have s...

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Mark Bahnisch continues to struggle valiantly against his blogging addiction, but with less than complete success. Instead of posting himself, he's started to send me emails suggesting topics for me to blog as a proxy!! In fairness, the topic in question involved Mark being un...

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Another trivial issue with a serious edge that I've been considering lately arises from the ongoing furore over Nicole Kidman's obtaining of an Apprehended Violence Order against a couple of paparazzi in the wake of her Sydney house being bugged and an alleged high speed car p...

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Troppo has been getting its usual share of blog spam over the last week since I've been back on deck. The volume is substantially less than it was late last year, due to some magic "fixes" worked by our genial blog host Scott Wickstein, but it's still enough to be irritating....

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Not yet being reliably inspired by the blogging muse, I've instead been catching up with the rantings of others over the last couple of months of my semi-enforced Internet absence. I noticed that Mark B posted an item a few weeks ago in which he referred to Marx's immortal obs...

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[In Place of the Shorter Hendo] I'm off for a bit. I need to clear more time for focussing on the last stages of my thesis, and enjoyable as blogging is, something has to give. At least I won't have to read Hendo this week . Thanks very much to all those who reminded me of wha...

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(Image reproduced by kind permission of Scribe Publishing) During Julia Gillard's candidacy for the Labor Leadership much ink was spilled about whether Australia was ready for a female Opposition Leader, and whether such a Leader would need to be married with kids. I don't wan...

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One of the books I read over the holiday break was Helen Garner's latest, Joe Cinque's Consolation . Like Garner's previous work The First Stone , Joe Cinque's Consolation takes the form of a journalistic dissection of real life events, but becomes something much more profound...

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A big issue in the Australia-US FTA debate last year was the possible implications for local content on tv. It's reasonable to ask whether there is that much compulsively watchable Australian tv around at the moment. Certainly, as just about every tv reviewer in the country ha...

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Bureaucracy was arguably invented in Prussia, and German civil servants are justly reknowned for their impartiality. This apparently extends to cutting benefits to jobseekers refusing sex work .

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Good morning to all Troppo Armadillians on this last day of January! And I am finally out of my major revisions to my novel, Malvolio's Revenge--and just before I restart work on my new one, The Tyrant's Nephew--so thought I should finally come back to do the occasional post....

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Miranda Devine heads her column this week "More Like a Leaking Nuclear Reactor than an Arts Faculty" . The target of her ire is Sydney University's Arts Faculty. I made the point a few days ago in passing that Sydney Uni has seen more than its fair share of disputatious academ...

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...is now done. There are a lot of new blogs added to the leftish and centrist categories. 15 new leftish links and 4 centrist ones. It's interesting to note how many of the new blogs are written by women and also by people in their 20s. As opposed to us thirty something bloke...

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It was my little sister's birthday yesterday - she's 34. As Lucy Harker said in Nosferatu "time is an abyss, a thousand nights deep". I will also be having a birthday soon - on the 13th of Feb (which wasn't a good High School birthday at all - the day before Valentine's...). I...

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The blogosphere doesn't seem to have picked up on a recent presser from a couple of Macquarie Uni speech scientists. Their study has apparently revealed that the Australian accent is moving away from "the stereotypical broad Australian English - a la Paul Hogan" to a more gene...

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The Guardian today has two news items which may not be unconnected - a profile of Lynton Crosby , former John Howard strategist and now strategist to Michael Howard, the UK Tory leader, and a call from the Tories' Education shadow for British students to learn "basic facts" ab...

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John Quiggin thinks that the left side of the blogosphere is a much more vibrant place than the right - a turnaround in John's view from when he first started blogging. I'm in the process of updating the Troppo blogroll - and most of the blogs I plan to add are leftish or cent...

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I recently bought new glasses. I've worn contacts for years but I decided that it was high time I invested in an alternative option. OK, Yes. This feeling was not unrelated to advancing senescence. So, I bought these rimless things made of utterly non-biodegradable super titan...

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Oh the magic of the the internet. Lazily looking through web pages scrutinizing subjects somehow linked to the Teutonic Orders when I came upon this gem. Did you know Australia was discovered by the Chinese admiral Zheng He ? A recent controversial theory put forward by Gavin...

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Long-time Troppo readers may recall that I was once a moderate global warming sceptic, a viewpoint more commonly found in people with far more rabidly right wing views than my own. It tended to confuse readers more than a jot. But my scepticism arose not from Don Arthur's belo...

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