Archive for June, 2007
The Age’s feature this morning about the intervention in Mutitjulu is well worth reading: link.
The excellent journalist George Packer (author of the excellent book about the Iraq war, The Assassin’s Gate) has a blog: Link. There’s lots to see there.
I enjoyed this David Byrne blog post: link. Excerpt:
I have been riding a bicycle in New York City for almost 30 years! For transport, not for sport. At first there were only a few of us. Loners, losers, maniacs and nerds. Some of the members of Talking Heads used to make fun of me [...]
I wrote about the government’s Northern Territory intervention the other day with an optimism that I didn’t know I was capable of. Days have passed, and so has my initial state of shock that a government was actually doing something about the crisis up North. It’s stopped feeling like news again, and started [...]
Two ways of reducing carbon emissions are carbon taxes (where companies are charged a certain amount per unit of carbon emitted) and capping-and-trading carbon (where the government decides how much carbon emission would be acceptable, and then gives out permits for emitting carbon, and allows companies to trade these credits). The Economist has a [...]
I recommend this article at Edge to anyone interested in linguistics or psychology: link.
Here’s my mangling and oversimplification of it: Noam Chomsky’s ‘Universal Grammar’ theory of language says that the differences between different language are superficial; they all follow the same rules, and the differences in syntax and grammar are just the effect of [...]
The cover of the current Brisbane News has the inane headline to end all inane headlines:
PAWS FOR EFFECT: Pampered pets have never had it so good. With more bling than a pre-prison Paris Hilton, life is just purrfect.
They started with a tired cliche of a non-story, and then crammed the word ‘bling’, a reference [...]
This sketch from Dave Chapelle’s Show is genius.
This sketch from Dave Chapelle’s Show is genius: link.
I’ve been obsessed lately with Todd Rundgren’s 1972 album Something/Anything?. Rundgren produced and played all the instruments on almost every track, and it has the same kind of homely cosiness of an early Paul McCartney album. It’s sprawling (25 tracks) and covers almost every genre of lovable pop, rock, and soul. In [...]
I’ve been obsessed lately with Todd Rundgren’s 1972 album Something/Anything?. Rundgren produced and played all the instruments on almost every track, and it has the kind of homely cosiness of an early Paul McCartney album. It’s sprawling (25 tracks) and covers almost every genre of lovable pop, rock, and soul. In terms [...]
The federal government — any government — is finally treating the situation in third-world northern Australia as what it is: an emergency. Link. The government plans to:
take over about 60 Indigenous communities through five-year leases
ban alcohol sales widely for six months
restrict half of welfare payments to food and essentials
put in compulsory medical assessments for [...]
