It doesn’t seem to me that there’s much to talk about that’s new. The Labor Government is trying to get through industrial relations legislation which some argue will take us back to the 1980s. If true, that will be diabolical. World leaders have gathered in Egypt for another useless gab fest about climate change. And…
The Melbourne Cup has been run and won, much to the chagrin of a bunch of activists who think horse racing should be banned. But I won’t give these people any more air time. What’s more important is gambling. Gambling is a huge industry and for a small group of people, it’s a destructive addiction….
As I write the United Kingdom has yet another Prime Minister. At least this time they avoided the weeks of rudderless drifting to extend the vote for the PM to the Conservative Party membership. I gather Liz Truss was not as popular with the members of parliament as she was with the party membership, and…
Back in 2006 John Doyle and Tim Flannery made a mini-series entitled ‘Two Men in a Tinnie’ in which they travelled the length of the Murray-Darling River system. That year was hard. In December we were told that Australia had suffered the worst drought in 1,000 years. The Guardian reported that “David Dreverman, head of…
There’s been a move in Australia that’s gathering pace to rename places from European names to Aboriginal names. Generally speaking, it’s a great idea, especially because the European name tended to be the name of the person who ‘discovered’ the location, or the person who paid for the expedition that did. A good example is…
I mentioned last week that I’ve found a wonderful new way of being creative – Midjourney. It’s a website that uses Artificial Intelligence to create images based on a prompt entered by people like me. /imagine followed by whatever you’d like to see. The AI is learning all the time from choices people make, refining…
I’m glad we’re not Optus customers. The theft of something like ten million customer records from the Telco’s databases is … frightening. I can understand why Optus would have a record of people’s phone numbers and addresses but it took me a while to work out why the company would have Medicare, licence, and passport…
The funeral is over, the Queen has been buried beside her parents, her sister, and her beloved husband. So ends the second Elizabethan era. I think history will treat this remarkable woman kindly. She lived through tumultuous times; the abdication of her uncle, the second world war, the death of her father when she was…
We’ve been home from our France trip for about five weeks now. We’ve both had lingering coughs and are still feeling lethargic, probably left overs from covid. But life goes on. We’ve finally received our new Rav 4 which we ordered after our 3-week-old Pajero sport was stolen from our garage about a year ago….
We awoke on Friday morning to the news that Queen Elizabeth the second had died. I can’t say we were surprised. The last time we saw her on TV, just a day or two ago, she looked, for the first time, frail, despite the usual generous smile. And I think we were both surprised at…