Skip to main content

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.


This flower finds a way. East Derwent Highway, Lindisfarne. March 2012.

The Internet is a wonderful place filled with the rich and varied treasures of the world holds (as well as pictures of things that have been deep fried but should never have been deep fried.) The following are some things that I've had a look at in the last week. I call this: a Compendium of Click-throughs for Monday Morning...

  • This bloke used to hate Israel, then he went there. Some thoughts on reducing complex issues to bland homogeneities.

  • On that - and it seems almost redundant now - a plea against elevating Joseph Kony. It isn’t just a dis-empowering simplification, it is also irresponsibly naive.

  • Might there be hope? How about a piece on healing Guatemala's emotional scars from the civil war...

  • It’s political correctness gone mad! Dante's Divine Comedy is 'offensive and discriminatory'...

  • The New Statesman asked a collection of writers, activists and politicians the same question: if feminists could campaign on only one issue over the next year, what should it be?

  • Why do nations fail? Largely because their leaders are greedy, selfish and ignorant of history...

  • Parenting advice from the 1920s: "Never hug and kiss them," he wrote, "never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning." More here!
  • Comments

    Popular posts from this blog

    Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

    I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral

    There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

    Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke

    In dreams begin responsibilities.

    A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.