Latest Posts
Benefits of global warming
I’ve just had another idyllic Sydney day – a bushwalk by the harbour this morning, followed by a relaxing coffee in the sunshine – all brought to you by global warming. It used to be that this time of year in Sydney was colder and wetter than the average now.Continue Reading
Book Review: Nowhere People
This week’s book review is Nowhere People, by Henry Reynolds. Henry Reynolds is probably Australia’s most prominent exponent of what its opponents call the “Black Armband” school of colonial history. The Black Armband school of history (as contrasted by its originator, Geoffrey Blainey, with the “three cheers” school of history)Continue Reading
Household delegations
E is not feeling the best today, so I volunteered to take the boys and do the weekly shop. He decided against it, so we all did it together. The reason he decided against it? He didn’t trust me to do it properly. This is a classic (reversed) gender stereotypeContinue Reading
Income inequality
A recently published summary of the HILDA survey got a fair bit of press – the AFR and the SMH both did front page stories on Wednesday, and both picked completely different angles. So I had to go back to the source, to see what interesting nuggets I could pickContinue Reading
Female writers
Lazy blogging, but I found this very interesting meme from Under the Ponderosa. I had to add an extra categorisation – for books which I own, but haven’t got around to reading, because there is an embarrassingly large number of those. Bold the ones you’ve read. Italicize the ones youContinue Reading
Responsibility
I haven’t bothered commenting on the AWB royal commission before, mainly because it seemed too depressing. Once again, a government has done the wrong thing and brazened it out because the voters don’t really care about the technicalities, and they have enough “I didn’t know stuff” to hide behind. TheContinue Reading
Cooking
At cake this afternoon a colleague was telling me this long involved story about his family, which ended with his six year old son telling his mother she was a hero and giving her three cheers for cooking tacos. So my colleague ended by telling me that all I hadContinue Reading
Book Review – The Great Influenza
This week’s book review is The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in historyby John M Barry. The book is the story of the “Spanish Flu” – in 1918 and 1919 (depending on where you were in the world) a deadly influenza swept the world, killing between 50Continue Reading
Part time work
I went to a lunchtime presentation today from one of last year’s AFR Boss Young Executives of the Year, Jane Adams. She is a COO at a recruitment consultant, and is part-time – works three days a week (which was not part of the criteria for the award). She talkedContinue Reading
History
C has come home from school lately telling me about our local history: “We are white people. The white people came in ships from far away, and the aborigines who were here before moved to where Ayer’s Rock which is in the middle of Australia”. His story is a veryContinue Reading