“A lot of people died in Iraq today, most of them kids. This is a very minor matter.” — Chris Murphy, Matthew Newton’s solicitor, to reporters. Is this going to be known as the Matthew Newton Defence: claiming what you did wasn’t so bad because there’s worse things going on, unchecked, elsewhere in the world? ... [More]
I’ve mentioned before my exploits with video, a set of productions made predominantly when we were teenagers, with zero budget, on equipment borrowed from school. The very last production was an episode of the Professionals-inspired “STRIKE”, about a secret crime-fighting organisation. Made in 1993, by which point all of us were either at uni or ... [More]
Mathom sounds like something out of The Meaning Of Liff, but it’s not. Apparently it’s a word from Tolkien meaning something you have no immediate use for, but which you want to keep just in case. In the stories, the Hobbits sometimes had entire extra houses dedicated to mathoms. This sounds just like my mother. ... [More]
I count myself lucky, given the power chaos yesterday. I got out of the city just before things really got pair pear-shaped (even if the train was an old non-aircon one, at least it was moving, and not too crowded, and we opened all the windows, which helped a bit). Marita was, I think, less ... [More]
The past couple of weekends, Marita and I have got on our bikes for a ride. Nothing too fast-paced. Certainly not the hell ride. Not even the slightly-less intimidating heck ride. Probably not even up to the standards of the gosh darn ride. No, we did a leisurely ride down the Nepean Highway service road ... [More]
Have you seen the latest chain email, claiming that Woolworths/Safeway are going to donate all their profits on January 23rd to drought relief? As someone who gets chain emails regularly, and has to almost always Reply All and tell people it’s crap (generally providing a snopes.com URL to prove it) I initially scoffed at it ... [More]
In the bookshop, an old bloke had bought something about WW2. For minute or two he reminisced about Churchill and Stalin and victory in Europe. The bookseller, a woman perhaps in her late 30s or 40s, nodded, being polite, fairly obviously not understanding the significance of the events he was describing. When I was born ... [More]
A big bunch of thumbs ups for all these, from the past couple of months. The First Casualty by Ben Elton — a mystery set close to a century ago, a bit like Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George, and also very reminiscent of Black Adder 4, but with a much more serious look at the ... [More]
Is airconditioning turning us into wimps? We (and I’m as guilty of this as anybody) go from our sometimes-airconditioned houses in our airconditioned cars or our airconditioned trains to airconditioned offices or airconditioned shopping centres. If it’s not 20 degrees indoors, we’re complaining. If the train is not airconditioned, we’re complaining. If we have to ... [More]
The mouse in my house previously spurned the poison put down for it. Last week it managed to get bait out of the mouse trap without setting it off. Then it managed to nibble away at bread that was left hanging in a shopping bag from a door handle. From the trail it left behind, ... [More]
Summer rolls on, with several hot days this week leaving us sweating. On Thursday night we had an evening session of street cricket, always good when it’s warm and the sun goes down late. It’s not exactly The Ashes, and some fielding slip-ups meant one tennis ball went down a drain. Oh well. If we’d ... [More]
A stone’s throw from the exclusive boutiques of Chapel Street, South Yarra, next to the railway line near the underpass, between a set of signalling control boxes, and sheltered by an overhead structure, is a pile of mattresses, pillows, bedclothes, and assorted objects. Occasionally you’ll see someone there, sleeping or awake, apparently as oblivious to ... [More]
Just occasionally I feel like researching something to the Nth degree, gathering some stats, working it all out. Sometimes it’s useful; sometimes it’s really not. This probably falls into the latter camp. Some may recall one day in December 2005 when I got 28 pieces of junk mail in my mailbox on a single day. ... [More]
Happy New Year! The last one seems to have gone pretty quickly. Must be because I’ve been so busy. Some followups from 2006: After driving a Prius a few weeks ago, I note Bill Shorten in The Age called for the car companies locally to work on hybrid cars. At the start of the Christmas ... [More]
Just before Christmas I got to meet some of my relatives for the first time in quite a while. My aunt(-in-law) Gem and my cousin Justin were in town for a few days. Hadn’t seen Justin in almost 20 years… both of us were much younger than at present, and while I barely remember it ... [More]
Christmas was the usual combination of family, presents, and too much food. After a day or two of recovery, we headed off for the Melbourne Aquarium yesterday. So did half the city, apparently. It was crowded — perhaps too crowded to be really enjoyable, in fact. But it was spectacular, particularly the “Fish Bowl” and ... [More]