Category: Culture

God Bless New Zealand for maintaining the time-honoured traditions we’re less attached to in Australia! James Barr’s answer to What are the “Burger-ish” foods in your culture or country? I suspect every culture has their own burger/sandwich-like food: hearty, inexpensive, easy to prepare, consistent with meat in between flour/rice/corn-based bread thing. details the venerable Dead […]

More cultural relativism, people. I think Adam Hartline has said it best: Vote #1 Adam Hartline’s answer to Why has booing someone off stage become a negative thing? For whom? All the polite people? The actor stares in my face and asks me a question, am I not allowed to answer him however I please? […]

The first five pages, I’d decided: nah. The tone is all bouncy and frivolous and a little Hooray Henry. The language is good, but he doesn’t have the magic he had in Heart of Darkness. Once the first storm hit the ship in the story, the ship was derailed, but the prose was set aright. […]

I am a dunce in the visual arts. I walked through the Uffizi, and kept saying, “meh, Raphael can’t draw… Michaelangelo thinks people are made of granite when he draws… Finally, someone who gets it!” (Caravaggio) So my choice is a dunce choice. I like it a lot: sensuous, elemental, striking, visceral, driven by symbols, […]

Oh, this was good. I was in the strange position of having watched the film (SEEN: Apocalypse Now Redux) before the novella. So instead of finding the references from the film to the book, I was going the other way: “Oh! So the Russian is the Photo-Journalist! And the essay is the MA thesis!” But, […]

Habib, you’re on a roll here, aren’t you! Confucian virtues Industry Most people I hanged out with at high school. And undergrad. Spicy food East Asians, Not South Asians; I’m from Australia, not the UK East Asians, Not West Asians. Does anyone even say “West Asians”? East Asians, Not North Asians. People definitely don’t call […]

Ah, Michael, Michael, Michael… I see this has become a random word association task, and that it has spawned Be honest: what do you think of when you hear “white people”? OK. Let’s see where this takes me. African-Americans. Not Africans. Not Jamaicans. Not Australian Aboriginals. If I see a Somali in town (our second-last […]

Oh, zut, Habib le toubib: European-Americans Oh, and Europeans as well, I guess White Aussies? Ok, I’ll give you them too The bizarre American notion that white people are uncool and bland Hegemony Racial purity American demographics at war with each other White privilege Oppression Bingo Oppression Plantations One drop rules Melanin Social constructs “Surely […]

The learned researcher Susan James (Vote #1: Susan James’ answer to Why do humans want to have sex with attractive people?) is of course right in the evolutionary selection angle, and even more right in the cultural situatedness of attractiveness. The body-ideal of Botswana sure isn’t the ideal of the 2016 US, which wasn’t the […]

Nikos Tsiforos was a Greek humorist, who wrote a series of humour pieces covering all of Greek Mythology. I’ve cited his collection here a couple of times. At the end of the 640 pp book, he wrote this. Few of us Greeks know Greek Mythology well. (Before I started studying it to write it up, […]