This will hurt me...

" Go this way! ", it seems to be saying. They're sprucing up The Shed down on the waterfront. Quite how day-glo eighties nostalgia bits 'n pieces tacked on the what it ultimately an aircraft hanger sans aircraft is an improvement is beyond me. It's an embarrassment! A disaster! A travesty! A tragedy! I need to knock of the television news for a while...

I like photographs involving water. I like photographs involving reflections. I like photographs involving the autumn light. I like photographs involving the morning sun. Here we have all four taken just last Thursday down in Sullivan's Cove! I am currently enjoying Timothy Gaton Ash 's excellent History of the Present . If you don't know his work, he's an academic/historian/author/journalist with a way with words. I will probably expand on my thoughts when I've finished it, but one brief comment struck me as I read it on the bus this morning. It concerns a point early on in the siege of Sarajevo. There was a bombed-out post office with a common piece of graffiti/political comment, " This is Serbia! " Apparently someone had scrawled underneath the retort, " No, you idiot, it's a post office ". I like that. It pretty much captures the sort of inanity that drives people to war, ethnic cleansing and all of the kinds of atrocities within. It'...

Sometimes there really isn't anything that you can say. It has been one of those days.

I am not sure whether it is just too much Le Carré action lately or not enough sleep, but this dude here strikes me as a Tasmanian version of George Smiley . Whether or not he is running agents - or conducting interference on oppositional agents - I cannot be certain. One thing I can be certain is that this fellow would not be driven to evacuate a bus upon the appearance of a solitary (however odious) peanut . Like the smiley face stamps on kiddies intended to stop evil paedophiles from getting their rocks off, rules about taking photographs in public spaces (stop with the paedophilia already), we have indeed entered a bizarre, unpleasant era of hyper-irrationality. Won’t somebody think of the children!?!?

As someone who was aware of his own shortsightedness from a young age, but a combination of ego and vanity compelled me to hide the fact until the age of seventeen. Let's just say that a range of excuses were called upon to explain away a seeming unwillingness to do all of the "copying off the blackboard" that seemed to encapsulate a fair whack of my time at school. That said, I'd like to think that the creativity of my evasions coupled with an enthusiastic zest for challenging authority ensured that teachers - whatever they happened to think of me - never thought me dull What I like most about the above public service announcement are the implications of poor little John passing his optical examination with flying colours. Really, there would be a certain pride in finally excelling at something, but this would come at the realisation that, yes Johnny, you really are as dumb as a box of hammers.

If there is one thing guaranteed to get my goat, it is the continuing tendency of people – often people employed in the media – to immediately blame the state of the road for fatalities. You know what people; highways don’t lurk about in the dark, plotting and scheming before cunningly setting about to “ claim victims ”. If the road DOES happen to be dodgy, show more bloody caution! On this theme, it is about time we got rid of this word ‘accident’ from the reporting of car crashes. Someone falling asleep at the wheel and running headlong into another car is not an ‘accident’. Someone four times over the legal limit flying off a cliff because they can no longer see straight is not an ‘accident’. Someone doing 175 kilometres an hour in an 80 zone losing control and hitting a wall is not an ‘accident’. To my mind, an ‘accident’ is a quite specific, identifiable, unexpected and unusual external event, without apparent or deliberate cause but with marked effects. The person that drives...

I have been dismayed to read much of the comment around the Commonwealth’s plan to raise taxation on ‘alcopops’ in an effort to curb the risks associated with binge drinking. While there should be no surprise that the opposition have rubbished it and alcohol industry groups are unhappy , the general critiques that I've seen are very poor. As ever, of the commentaries, the Herald Sun leads the way in outrage . One that really got me riled up (enough to post about it here), was a piece in Crikey titled ‘ Voodoo tax policy on alcopops ’. In it, Bernard Keane speaks of ‘handwringers’ and ‘wowsers’ with a set against kids having fun. He claims that “we’ve still yet to see any evidence that binge drinking is now any worse than in the past”, and makes particular note that the tax ‘attacks’ young women unequally. In not sure where he has been looking, but a quick note of the stats around alcohol-related hospital admissions, alcohol-related family incidents (mostly domestic violence), al...

If – like me – you are tired of having to answer inconsequential and time-consuming questions, here is a website that you can now direct people to . [Small gesture of thanks in the direction of clusterflock .]

Ronald Reagan certainly knew how to keep friends and family happy. It's this sort of generosity of spirit that got him to the presidency. I especially like the notion of a happy "Christmas Card" carton. There would be nothing nicer than kick back on Christmas morning, cracking open Ronnie's present, and smoking up a storm while watching the kids frolic about on their new bikes. Good times!

In a good example of the point that I was trying to make last week , the ABC's Unleashed website (sometimes good, sometimes bloody awful) ran a pretty straightforward piece critical of the Castro regime . The article itself was par for the course; nothing new or surprising, but to be honest it's pretty tame as far as the anti-Castro brigade go. Yet it's the comments page that strikes me. Seriously, how do people manage to balance their anti-imperialist fury against some of the less savoury aspects of Fidel's rule? Are they wilfully ignorant, or just ignorant? Maybe two wrongs can make a right?

Whether it is students, friends, or even people I don't like very much, I'm often surprised with the lack of concern, and indeed willingness to justify or explain away, some of Fidel Castro's less savoury actions over the years. Given his recent statement about retirement , yet again there is no shortage of educated, 'enlightened', reasonably intelligent people rushing out in force to pay homage to a man who by any stretch should be no friend to rational, progressive and compassionate people. Now, of course people are entitled (maybe even obligated ) to critique the actions and activities that precipitated the Cuban revolution. However, I personally fail to understand how, in the interests of identifying and condemning the political violence, interference and the poisonous influence of western hypocrisy and hegemony in the region, that so many of the above mentioned people appear to automatically grant a free pass to a fellow and regime guilty of significant abuses ...

Today is the 91st anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, one of the largest battles of the First World War. The battle is best remembered for its first day, 1 July 1916, on which British and Commonwealth units suffered 57,470 casualties – 19,240 dead, 35,493 wounded, 2,152 missing and 585 prisoners — the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army. Initial casualties were especially heavy among officers, who still dressed differently from non-commissioned officers and other ranks, and whose uniforms the Germans had been trained to recognise. It’s estimated that the Germans suffered 8,000 casualties on the British front, 2,200 of which were prisoners of war. Nasty business, this war lark!