Club Troppo

Films Marina True story of beloved singer, songwriter and accordionist, Rocco Granata, from his early life as an immigrant in Belgium to his emergence as a worldwide musical phenomenon with his 1959 song Marina, one of the biggest international hits of that era.1948 Calabria,...

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‘Nor is wisdom only concerned with universals: to be wise, one must also be familiar with the particular, since wisdom has to do with action, and the sphere of action is constituted by particulars’. Aristotle [caption id="attachment_31744" align="alignright" width="387"] Looki...

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By the time economic reform matured as a political project – let’s date it from Paul Keating’s announcement about its popularity with the resident galah in every pet shop – it was already on the slide into the kind of ideological formula of mercantilism that Ken Henry so power...

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Today the people residing in Scotland can decide whether they want to see an independent Scotland or to have Scotland remain in the UK. The betting markets concur with the opinion polls and favour the status quo: the markets give roughly 20% chance that the ‘yes’ vote will win...

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As we head back to Iraq, I'm struck by the way in which those making the case both for and against are avoiding certain ideas which seem to me to be true: This is not 2003 all over again . At least on a moral level, and at least as far as action in Iraq goes. We have been invi...

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Well gentle readers, it's come to this. Scottish independence is going down to the wire. It is hanging by a thread, though if you are concerned that I am mixing my metaphors, I think you're flogging a dead horse after it's bolted. In any event, in the question of Scottish inde...

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Miles Kimball, for the uninitiated a sensible centrist commentator on economic policy is also an admirer of John Stuart Mill and has supported the case for decriminalising drugs . At the same time, since he thinks drugs - certainly recreational drugs or the new ones - are bad...

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Creative Destruction: Barriers to Urban Growth and the Great Boston Fire of 1872 by Richard Hornbeck, Daniel Keniston - #20467 (DAE DEV EEE EFG LE PE) Abstract: Historical city growth, in the United States and worldwide, has required remarkable transformation of outdated durab...

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Ross Douthat in the New York Times presents a compelling theory about the waves of sexual abuse scandals , from Roman Catholicism to Rolf Harris to Rotherham. Remember that these scandals are scandalous precisely because their perpetrators all got away with rape and abuse for...

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I recently visited the National Gallery of Victoria's exhibition of 1950s furniture . I went to see Fred Lowen's furniture. Fred was a Dunera Boy - who I became aware of towards the end of his life when he had an exhibition of drawings at Australia Galleries in Collingwood. Th...

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On Tuesday I gave a talk to a Queensland Public Service Conference. The Conference is quite a production. It's a regular annual fixture and makes a good profit. Over 500 people attend and they take the opportunity to fund some excellent speakers. Dominic Campbell who founded F...

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Delivered for your amusement - if not necessarily mine: :) This conversation took around 15 minutes as I was working on other things. Thank you for choosing Optus. Please wait for a site operator to respond. Optus has a privacy policy, please let your consultant know if you wo...

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Oh aren’t they so tough our current leaders? Beating their hairy chests over the ISIS threat to Western civilization. Here’s Cigar chompin’ Joe Hockey Wenesday morning We will not be intimidated by the threats of murderers; we will never be intimidated as a nation or a people...

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Busy Troppovians have no-one other than Troppo to let them know when something serious has happened in the chess world. If Troppo had been going at the time, Troppovians would have been the first non-chess aficionados in the world to hear of Bobby Fischer's extraordinary explo...

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In this marvellous essay , Jesse McCarthy puzzles over why there is "a bloody knot in the social fabric that is as vivid in Ferguson, Missouri today as it was in Baldwin's Harlem half a century ago." He starts with "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a Letter from Harlem", James Baldwin's...

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Following David's excellent post on the NBN, a somewhat related aside. Malcolm Turnbull was interviewed on AM yesterday about the NBN review, followed by a brief minuet around some current political dramas. What a contrast. By comparison, his colleagues still seem be strugglin...

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The latest cost-benefit analysis of various Australian broadband proposals is out. It's part of a report from an inquiry chaired by former Victorian Treasury head Mike Vertigan. And it says in essence that Australia's expected growth in demand for bandwidth is big enough to ma...

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It is remarkable - non? - that, with the vast amounts spent on arts marketing it's so hard to know what great arts events are on, where they're on and whether you should go to them ahead of other arts events. In other words that it's so hard not just to ensure that the informa...

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I managed to trigger the warning email below, presumably by installing Gmail Meter. But I've uninstalled it. It comes every day or so. The first link generates a "Forbidden: Error 403" while the latter link invites me to do some programing at Google Developer. I can't unsubscr...

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Chris Anderson managed to get an article, and then a book of the article (a pet peeve of mine, but we'll move on) out of the idea that 'free' is a big deal. Better than a low low price, free avoids 'mental transactions costs' and is all round a Big New Thing. One thing that I...

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