Club Troppo

Singapore's Straits Times gives the Abu Bakar Bashir trial outcome the sort of finessed analysis that eludes the crapped-out, where's-the-fuckin'- handle-gone gestetner, that is the PR vehicle of the alleged Leader of the Australian opposition. You could imagine the briefing C...

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Tim Blair blogs approvingly on (of all things) an Alan Ramsey column in the Silly Moaning Hillmer which castigates Labor frontbencher Craig Emerson for his apparently inept performance when interviewed by Laurie Oakes about the Hanson/Abbott affair on the Nine Network Sunday p...

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We watched the first doco 'The Topic of Cancer' ten years ago while our son David was in the middle of chemotherapy treatment. At the time we were certain that he would pull through and consequently found the program interesting but not particularly upsetting. Even when the Da...

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MEMO TO : OFFICE OF NATIONAL ASSESSMENTS FROM : DEFENCE SIGNALS DIRECTORATE SHOAL BAY ECHELON INTERCEPT DATE : August 28 2003 CLASSIFICATION DISTRIBUTION TO LEVEL MSC1A Based on identification of DICTIONARY item " Department of Defence" the following intercept was received on...

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Steve Edwards blogs about the latest Newspoll on the standing of the federal parties and their respective leaders. I agree with pretty well everything Steve says, especially this paragraph: The ALP is behind by two-percent in the two-party preferred stakes. This doesn't sound...

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Chapter 3 of Suzy's autobiography Close to the Bone is now formatted and uploaded. I've broken each of the three chapters to date into smaller, bite-sized chunks so they're much more manageable for Internet reading. I suspect I won't be blogging much myself until I finish load...

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My father reached his 77th birthday two weeks ago. I love him dearly and I don't like to disagree with him but in the last few years he's become obsessed by, what he calls, the blight of single mothers. It started out with his bitching about the cost of welfare payments. He us...

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Sonia Harford has written a pretty piece, A long-lashed barman leaning across the counter to ask for your order. A couple on a bus smiling smugly and leaning into each other as the vehicle bumps and sways. A woman's long, languid yawn, bangles skittering down her arm. A police...

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In the late 1800s, economist and avid gardener Vilfredo Pareto established that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. While gardening he later observed that 20% of the peapods in his garden yielded 80% of the peas that were harvested. And thus was born a...

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Matt Price always a master at reporting the shenanigans at Parliament House has a short article in the Sunday Telegraph, which I stumbled upon by accident. The story focused on the Senate vote to increase the printing allowance of every MP to $150,000. You might recall that Pe...

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Fount of blogospherical wisdom, Bargarz, points to the lamentable tendency for Simon Crean to emerge like some cheapjack, showbag Jack-in-the-box - roughly every fortnight - to report on his latest "gate' discovery. "This is ethanolgate" he sonorously pronounced shortly before...

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The comment thread to my previous post Can Pauline Sue Tony Abbott? has thrown up some fascinating discussion. It also seems to have reached a consensus of sorts, well summarised by Dave Ricardo: " I agree that what Abbott did was just grubby business as usual politics. But th...

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I like reading ... anything, everything, my tastes are exceedingly eclectic. I'll sometimes pick up half a dozen books from the library and read the lot in a day or two, even though I know from the first page that they are crap, it seems that once started I feel as though I ow...

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For those of you who don't know - or who've forgotten - Scott Wickstein is taking your entries, under the heading, The Ten Most Influential Australians Of the 20th Century over at his place . He's going to be collating them tonight and plans to publish the outcome tomorrow. Th...

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Uncle at ABC Watch and Tim Blair have both blogged on ABC Radio National's suspension withour pay of Religion Report host Stephen Crittenden. Nothing surprising about that in itself. Both are serial Auntie-bashers from way back, and both seem to define "bias" as a concept meas...

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Gianna is pregnant ! Congratulations! Plenty of time for late night blogging while coping with teething, chronic gripe and insomnia from 4am feeds.

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I must say I've been a bit bemused by the reaction of some in the media (not least Red Kezza on this evening's ABC 7.30 Report) to the imagined revelation that Tony Abbott had lied to Four Corners in 1998 about whether he had bankrolled or arranged the bankrolling of disgruntl...

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What with the Blaster virus and Sobig F still causing headaches in computer networks around the world, I thought it was worthwhile posting this joke email just forwarded by Suzy Kruhse BE ON THE LOOK OUT FOR THE FOLLOWING VIRUSES: CLINTON VIRUS: Gives you a 7 Inch Hard Drive w...

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What an unedifying spectacle we have before us. Pauline - according to her sister Judy - wearing thongs! "I've never seen her wearing thongs before" Judy confided merrily - perhaps a tad too merrily, given the circumstances - to the massed media outside Walco Gaol. I for one f...

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This post is just an exercise in housekeeping, intended to provide short biographical details (and in some cases photos) of the Troppo Armadillo blogging semi-co-operative. The biographies are mercifully short, although they may still tell you more than you really want to know...

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