News and current affairs
Part of what makes Friday’s tragic events in Bourke Street so horrible is that it could have been any of us who got hit. One can only have the deepest sympathy for all those affected. I work on Bourke Street, and often go walking along it at lunchtime. On Friday I was on Spencer Street ... [More]
Happy New Year. Congratulations for surviving 2016! This blog post attempts to wrap up a few loose ends for the new year. Here’s a short video of the Footscray New Years Eve 9:30pm (official!) fireworks. Footscray fireworks (official)Happy New Year everyone! đđ pic.twitter.com/L0WkAqArhT — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) December 31, 2016 2016 was a bit of ... [More]
My native garden attracts native birds. These are our latest residents, visiting for Christmas: rainbow lorikeets. Very colourful; they seem to be enjoying the food available at the moment. Christmas is almost over at our house. Due to travel commitments, the various arms of the family had their gatherings over the last two Sundays. As ... [More]
One of the things you start noticing a lot more when you have two tertiary-level film and television students in the house is aspect ratio. Local council elections are in October, and posters have started going up for candidates. In some wards you see full-sized billboards, but in ours — so far — the most ... [More]
It’s Census night. Normally it’s relatively uncontroversial, but this time it’s different — a number of concerns have been raised by people, especially those interested in privacy and data security. Some of the issues raised include: Names and addresses to be kept for four years. This obviously creates a risk of privacy breaches if the ... [More]
I can be a bit of a pedant, so this photo caption in Saturday’s Age caught my eye: “Former NGV director Patrick McCaughey” pictured in 1986 — so was he the former NGV director back then? No — the article text makes it clear he was the director in 1986. There’s a simple way of ... [More]
OK, so you’ve seen a big problem, and since you carry a very capable camera in your phone everywhere you go, you’ve decided you want to get footage of it so the world can find out about it. Great! This really helps activists, and can get problems fixed. When you’re filming or snapping photos, here ... [More]
The neurosurgeon attacked at Footscray Hospital was Dr Michael Wong, aged 43. I went to school with a Michael Wong; presumably he’d be 43. Digging around, I haven’t found any other detail to confirm or deny it’s the same bloke (there are tons of Michael Wongs, even just in Melbourne, and my usual method of ... [More]
Christmas Day was largely spent with family, eating too much, playing with a giant cushion-like water balloon (which burst when, tragically, nobody was watching/filming) and swapping presents. Our haul this time around included a Wii U, which should be fun, and for my own personal stash I got some great movies on Blu-ray (Help, and ... [More]
Thanks perhaps to a couple of big presents this year, our small aging plastic Christmas tree looks more Christmassy than usual (yay rampant consumerism!) — though a lot of the lights have stopped working, and need to be replaced. Hope everyone’s had a good year… have a merry Christmas and a happy new year.
The whole idea of state-sanctioned racism, treating non-whites as second-class citizens by law, seems ludicrous now, yet it lasted into the 1990s in South Africa. It was always a ludicrous concept, of course. No wonder The Goodies parodied it as “Apart-Height” in one of their episodes. As a kid growing up, there had often been ... [More]
My time on the PTUA committee only overlapped with Paul’s by about a year or so. I was newsletter editor in his final year as President. But I remembered him from my days as an “ordinary” member in the 90s, and in my time as Prez and afterwards, I encountered him regularly around the traps. ... [More]
I get The Age delivered on weekends. On Saturdays in particular it’s good to lazily read its numerous sections in the morning. So I picked it up wanting to know who won the football last night: Richmond or Fremantle? I just want to know if I tipped it right. Sometimes they have the score on ... [More]
Passchendaele This report from last night’s ABC TV news is well worth watching: Western Australian students visiting Passchendaele, and taking on the roles of real WW1 soldiers for a day. The emotional moment in the story is as the connection with their forebears is really nailed, when late in the day, they learn of “their” ... [More]
Tragic events in Boston last week. Being quite interested in language, a couple of things about the use of words caught my eye as events unfolded. Active shooter This is something I’ve noticed before, during all-too-often incidents in the US: the term they now use is “active shooter”. In this case it was at MIT, ... [More]
In looking through my late father’s papers, I found the following, which he wrote about an incident on Rupert Murdoch’s Sydney Daily Mirror in the mid-1960s. I found it fascinating in light of the News Of The World controversy that was uncovered during 2011, though of course one should not jump to conclusions about the ... [More]