Unsurprisingly, Barbie prompted Salmon’s provocative essay, but it is not a film review,
Its headline’s question:
Has Barbie killed the indie director?
Comments closedCategory: word power
Looking for a succinct summary of how Australia’s national government is “addressing” this growing problem?
Jon Kudelka’s contribution to Issue no 449 of The Saturday Paper, published May 13 2023, can be seen, read and grasped in less time than it takes to lay one brick…
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Natalie and Walt have just unwittingly delayed the promised leopard post!
(it will be the next one, I promise)
The photo alludes to one of my favourite Walt Whitman poems, from Leaves of Grass.
Most printed interviews with musicians are time-wasting, publicist-driven piffle.
A notable exception is The New Yorker interview, published today – worth reading, whether or not you admire/know Natalie Merchant’s singing/songs.
There aren’t a lot of people writing love songs to Walt Whitman.
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(Yale-based historian Timothy Snyder is best known as the author of Blood Lands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, a book which profoundly enriched/jolted not a few readers’ understanding of “The Holocaust”, this reader’s included)
What European history really shows, and quite powerfully, is that in order to become, quote unquote, a ‘normal’ European country, you have to become post-imperial, [meaning] you have to lose your wars.
Snyder’s words, quoted immediately above and below, are from an article published in today’s Australian edition of The Guardian.
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From a research article published this week in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology:
Our results suggest that the enrichment of natural soundscapes using underwater speakers may provide an efficient solution for boosting early recruitment and habitat building by oysters.
However, caution the researchers, restoration practitioners must consider the potential for negative impacts from speaker enrichment.
A question for you, dear reader:
before you read the quoted words, had you ever contemplated oysters’ “hearing”, much less their response to sounds played through underwater speakers?
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Australians’ 2022 views on taxation – and on taxation “reform” – are “informed” by a confusing array of truths, lies, twaddle, insight, credulity, chicanery, chutzpah, self-interested opportunism (sometimes naked, sometimes disguised) , rank hypocrisy, timidity, virtue-signalling, obfuscation, indifference, compassion, cruelty, ignorance, knowledge, and honest uncertainty.
The featured image is (Jon) Kudlelka’s cartoon for the 08 October 2022 edition of The Saturday Paper
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In this writer’s view, such a headline fairly describes how Australian governments, plural, have now “dropped the ball” on COVID-19.
Don’t take my word for it, but please do pay attention to the words and views of actual experts on epidemic management:
The number of deaths from COVID in Australia in the first nine months of 2022 is more than ten times the annual national road toll of just over 1,000 – but we are not rushing to remove seat belts or drink-driving laws so people can have more freedom…
While it was hoped hybrid immunity from vaccines and prior infection would reduce subsequent infections, this has not been the reality. Reinfection is becoming more common….
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Only a modest number of human feet have walked its actual sands, but every day of our so-called “21st” century many millions of human eyes see this singular beach, virtually.
An image of it is the “screensaver” viewed countless times by subscribers to Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system.
Doubtless, most of those subscribers have no idea of what and where is this “iconic” beach.
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…are all integral to this post, which is a sequel to both the immediately-preceding one and to the 28 January 2022 post on “Hope”.
If you do not already know Emily Dickinson’s poem Hope is The Thing With Feathers you should click here before you read/see/listen to the rest of this post.
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It is worth remembering that these are the observations of a former senior Federal Government Minister, also – in Opposition – a Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, and that he departed Parliament at a time of his own choosing, as one of its more widely-respected members.
A government that must deal with sensible independent centrists is better than a government that must rely on the support of the most eccentric ends of its party spectrum.
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