Club Troppo

America's young conservatives have President Bush confused with Buffy the Vampire Slayer Take the National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg for example. Even conservatives have reason to "cheer the immense popularity of the Buffyverse," he wrote in June this year . Why? Because...

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Or, The End of Empire Part Two John Quiggin has an excellent take on the US Imperial overstretch I commented on in an earlier post .

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As Latho multiplies the apologies by adding one to all of us for the Labor Party's latest bout of navel gazing and back biting , finally someone in the ALP has something sensible to say. Wayne Swan's staffer, Denis Glover, calls on the party not to ditch the elites . Analysing...

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Photo by the Sydney Morning Herald's Dean Sewell. There could be trouble ahead in Redfern. I can remember when, in search of affordable hotel accommodation attending a conference at Sydney Uni in 1998, I stayed in nearby Chippendale. The hotel manager warned me not to walk the...

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It's been an amazing spring here in New England. There's been a lot of good rain followed by warm weather, so the countryside looks fantastic--green and lush, with flowers everywhere and lots of budding fruit (and sadly, lots of flies, too--the sheep farmers must be having a d...

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I don't often agree with observa, a frequent commenter on this and other blogs. However, I was struck with this comment on the Latho thread : one of the great attributes that Howard has, is a management style that allows the various personalities to make the running from time...

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Journalists everywhere are wringing their their hands about the consequences of Australia's ageing population . But why is it that they have left out the most important part of the demographic transition? In the future, old people will become drug-crazed cyborgs. Falling ferti...

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There is a good review in the Guardian by Simon Waldman of Dan Gillmor's new book on the impact of blogging on journalism , We The Media . And the Guardian is also raising the profile of the British blogosphere for its readership with a competition for the Best British Blog ....

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Well, it'll be an interesting day in Canberra tomorrow when the ALP Shadow Cabinet meets. Mark Latham, who increasingly finds himself subject to leadership destabilisation , has taken the bit between his teeth and vowed to discipline Senator Stephen Conroy, the Labor Senate De...

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Nightmares including SQL databases crashing, and the like. UPDATE- Everything seems to be back to normal. The SQL part of the server crashed, and I had to remember to repair the database. Once I did that, everything worked, except for Troppo, which required a rebuild. To see h...

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We seem to be returning to Ancient Greece for our film plots. The latest entry in this genre, Alexander , being an Oliver Stone film, has stirred up some controversy . And it's not just about Colin Farrell's silly wig, or Angelina Jolie's portraying his mum when she's only a y...

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Yesterday I bought, and am nearly finished(it's a real page-turner, you see!), a new and very enjoyable crime novel, The Walker, by a new Australian author, Jane R.Goodall. Set in London in 1971, with a prologue in 1967, it's a very spooky, well-written and unsettling read abo...

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Paul Keating's intervention during the 1996 election campaign when he claimed that Asian leaders wouldn't deal with John Howard is almost universally recognised as a big mistake. Of course, a lot of odd things are said on the hustings - well, that is to say, impromptu odd thin...

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Over at Kick & Scream , Rob Corr's commenters kick around the idea of another non RWDB-centric Australian Blog Award. Rob also has some interesting thoughts on bloggers and commenters meeting in "real life". I'd be interested in hearing Troppo readers' perspective on this. Do...

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Tim Dunlop is complaining about the prevalance of creationist ideas , and notes that it is not just a US problem: Speaking completely anecdotally, I have a cousin who is a geologist and who was doing surveys in NSW a few years back. He said he had to speak to a lot of property...

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Around the time of the US election, Don and I had quite a few posts about the cultural divide in the Land of the Free and its implications for politics. For new readers wanting some background, go here , here , here and here for a sense of the debate... Continuing this convers...

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Norm Geras had on his site today a link to a great article by the wonderful Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials and the Sally Lockhart Quartet, amongst others, about adaptation, from novel to stage as opposed to film. It is well worth reading--as always, with Philip,...

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Today is moving day, when Ken and Jen move into the new nest we've been preparing. The removalists are due at Jen's place at 7am, and at my joint some indeterminate time later to move the piano and the rest of my worldly goods for the third time in 12 months (aaagh). I'll prob...

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Or at least February? More reports are in today suggesting that Latho's shelf life may be very limited , with the leaks turning into a stream and the knives well and truly unsheathed. I commented in an earlier thread that any attempt on Latho's part to reach out to new constit...

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In his SMH column today, Ross Gittins reports on some interesting new research which shows that while Independent Schools do better in getting students into Uni, these same students are out-performed in first year by students from Government and Catholic schools. Gittins also...

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