It is delicious when hundreds (literally) of Poms puffs their chests out in pride to assert that cheque was the original spelling, and dastardly Noah Webster simplified English spelling because Americans are stupid, and pip pip, we speak English and its our language, and the Yanks perverted it, and they can’t tell check and cheque apart… … only for historical fact […]
Answer deleted by Quora for violating Be Nice Be Respectful policy. I won’t appeal, but it needed saying. Dear denizens of the Old Continent (Γηραιά Ήπειρος, as Greeks like to call it): You discard your poor huddled masses, and you repay their passed down love and homesickness with sneering, now that you’ve grown fat. […]
The Australian Bachelorette is about to screen Season 7. Its protagonist is Brooke Blurton, who was a contestant on The Australian Bachelor Season 6. Brooke Blurton is bi, and has has made out with another former female contestant, Alex Nation, on the followup Bachelor In Paradise; so this is her third outing on the Bachelor […]
I have had occasion to think, in recent times, on two songs of loss. I’ve cried to them before the loss, and I’ve thought of them ruefully after the loss, when I had no tears left. I will analyse them and discourse on them in The Other Place; and I’ll have fun doing it; and […]
Silence is golden. Gold peals where you walk, intuited and whole, in silent clamour. It slips beside its own: no need for talk, no weighing down with words. Mere joy and glamour. Not so with us. This river’s dammed with rock, and damned with talk, pleading aloud for grammar. The age of iron follows gold. […]
I have written on this blog ten years ago on my discovery of the changes in the traditions around Cretan folk music this past century. These changes have taken me by surprise: if you are immersed in an (albeit commercialised) folk music tradition, you assume it was ever thus. In fact, Cretan music used to […]
Those of my vintage will recall these two scenes from This Is Spinal Tap: There was something of a reenactment of that on The Project last night. The Project, as Australians know and others don’t, is a talk show hosted by Australian Muslim public intellectual Waleed Aly, along with some people who aren’t Muslim or […]
In days of yore, before computers, books were how knowledge was disseminated. And a knowledge economy had developed in the humanities, that went like this: A humanities scholar got tenure in a university by producing one or more published monographs. Because published monographs are still goods, there had to be suppliers and consumers of the […]
On the day of the High Court decision upholding the strict interpretation of Section 44i, I posted on the Facebooks: Why am I surrounded in this country by dolts? The High Court passed down the banhammer on the pollies. (Fun fact: turns out I’m as British as Xenophon is.) [False alarm.] The commentators get wheeled […]
So, we’ve had a little constitutional crisis here. The Australian Constitution disqualifies people from running for parliament if they have allegiance to another country, as part of its eligibility conditions. 44. Any person who – (i.) Is under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a […]