Club Troppo

Do films based on printed fiction do justice to their source? Or do they trash the original spirit of the book? Can a film be better than the book it's based on? Or is it always, inevitably less satisfying? I don't think there are general answers to those vexed questions, but...

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Now is the time to submit your nomination for Best Australian Blog . Apparently, according to Jess at Ausculture , Tim Blair wins every year. Will this poll break the run of the 'coalition of the willing'? UPDATE: David Tiley advises us in comments below of another Best Austra...

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As the Sydney Morning Herald reports that a new BBC Channel 4 reality tv series will show footage of couples having sex (in a tasteful way and for educational purposes, of course), news.com.au brings us the tantalising tidbit that Gretel Killeen has dumped Saxon . The wonderfu...

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Have you ever thought that music, even instrumental music, shows definite national characteristics--that Russian music sounds, well, Russian, and French French, and German German, and English English, and so on? Well, it's not just an instinctive, slightly politically incorrec...

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Sadly, BackPage s is no more , but Gerard Henderson continues to provide fuel for bloggers' illogic spotting impulses . In today's Sydney Morning Herald , Henderson tackles Latho's triangulation dependency . Mark Latham is a long-time proponent of the Blairite 'Third Way', fro...

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One of the unpleasant things about being in the literary field is the snobbery that surrounds the definition of 'literature'. There are people who seem to think that if a novel is accessible, fun, and exciting with a gripping story and vivid characters, it's bound to be bad li...

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Knowing the academic bent of Troppo readers, I thought I would advise that Google has a new offering - Google Scholar . The aim is: Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts a...

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Yes, you read correctly. The great German sociologist Max Weber once answered the perennial question of whether religion was primarily conservative or progressive in nature through a discussion of theodicy. His answer was that it can be either. Theodicy is the philosophical pr...

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No, James Naughtie is not a Tory MP. Rather, he's a British journalist who's just published a rather interesting book called The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency . Naughtie's analysis of the close identification between Blair and Bush is fascinating - and rev...

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Or, Latho's Farewell to the Working Class Robert Reich, Harvard Economist and Clinton's Labor Secretary, made something of a splash in policy terms with his coinage of the term "symbolic analysts" in his 1992 book The Work of Nations . Reich argued that comparative advantage i...

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Sometimes I get an overwhelming feeling I'm living in a strange and totally alien world where almost everyone is quite mad. Or maybe I am? How could anyone not question reality itself when a fat ugly chick who shouts wins Australian Idol , and the world's worst batsman scores...

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The other reading problem According to the Australian's Janet Albrechtsen teachers have been inflicting 'whole language' teaching on kids for more than 30 years and the consequences have been disastrous. If this was the whole story you'd expect to find that Australians who sta...

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She's 18 , anti-nazi , and wants drugs decriminalized . Why is this news? Well... her name is Julia Bonk , she looks like this , and she's been elected to parliament in Saxony.

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I have just spent the last hour deleting and rebuilding over 400 spam comments that came in a wave just after midnight. I'm trying to watch the soccer, not hacking away with this blog all night. But it only took that long because the server was belching under the assault. Once...

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I know I'm supposed to be one of those over-educated lefties but one thing I love is a good hamburger. Hamburgers and beer. What could be better on a Friday night? The trouble is, most of the burgers you buy at the big chains are gross. The beef patties are small and thin, the...

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Last night, we watched 1940's The Philadelphia Story (starring Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart and Cary Grant), the latest in a long line of old romantic comedies that we've greatly enjoyed--mostly, much, much more than modern romantic comedies. And it set me thinking again a...

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The playboy, the lawyer, the Catholic college, and the big fat burger The Sydney Morning Herald is carrying a third-hand story about Hardee's new ' Monster Thickburger .' But do a little Googling and things get a lot more interesting. If you're going to do cut-and-paste journa...

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Sad day. Christopher Sheil has given up blogging , at least for six months or so while he finishes writing a book. The blogosphere will be a less interesting place without him. Chris and I didn't always see eye-to-eye (to put it fairly mildly), but he is an unfailingly thought...

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What with most southern capitals facing severe water shortages and scorching summer temperatures already beginning to occur (I gather it was 37 in Adelaide yesterday), it's an opportune time for passionate advocates of the Kyoto Climate Protocol to start ratcheting up the rhet...

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Well, the SMH is playing host again to a Masson family piece! This time, it's actually a Masson-Leach piece, our youngest son, 15 year old Bevis, writing an opinion piece about the joys of skateboarding , free of the controls of well-meaning programs like the government-funded...

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