I should probably write more, I reckon. It hasn’t half been a while (again). This blog will be 20 next year, so it’d be a shame if it continued to lay dormant here on this unloved corner of the web. Are blogs still a thing? I suppose there’s Medium and Substack and the like for that now, and the kids are all busy making Tik Toks and whatnot. Anywho. Feel like 2022 should be a…
Ok, ok. It’s not as if the world really *needs* another hot politics take or anything and more to the point I doubt there’s anyone out there to even *read* this blog, gathering dust as it is in this neglected corner of the web, but apropos of nothing in particular and really just for my own benefit here, dear god it’s been depressing watching the absolute state of British politics unfold during this election campaign.…
And so time, as it is wont to do, marches relentlessly forwards. This blog has really just been pining for the fjords, honest mate. I mean it’s not like much has really changed. The sun continues to shine intermittently on Melbourne. I continue to sit in front of a keyboard typing words for a living. Family is now 25% larger and I’m still getting emails intended for other Matts around the world. I mean come…
I’ve already posted this to Twitter (twice, actually) but I’m going to keep posting it until someone else finds it as funny as I do. Yesterday The Age reported on the announcement from Optus of their plans to televise the Premier League here in Oz from next season. My favourite bit, though, was this: Sources close to the business recently confirmed to Fairfax media that 2 and 2 are understood to equal 4. As of…
For some reason The Age chose not to publish my letter. Can’t think why… * Sir, I almost choked on my cornflakes reading Scott Phillips of The Motley Fool in today’s Money section explaining “How to avoid investing in the next Dick Smith“. One answer to this might be “don’t listen to what the so-called experts say”. As recently as October last year one stock picking service was extremely bullish on DSH, writing that it…
Rather like that Douglas Adams quote and the xkcd comic about getting old and fearing technology, it seems that once you reach a certain age you become gripped with the feeling that the youth of today are nothing but no good layabouts who know nothing and expect the moon on a stick to be handed to them on a plate… You know. This sort of thing, which popped up in my Facebook feed earlier today:…
Can it really be 10 years, since I ended a blog post on this very site with the statement Can it really be 10 years since the day Blur and Oasis released Country House/Roll With It on the same day… Well there’s still nothing that highlights the passing of the years to me quite like Time-Since-Britpop™. Those heady mid 90s days when any group of lads with a couple of guitars who’d been to The…
It has come to my attention that the third Manics album, The Holy Bible, was released twenty years ago today, on the 29th of August 1994. I have a clear memory of catching the bus into Southport, as a spotty 16 year old, to go and buy it from Our Price. It was the first CD that I ever bought with my own money. Of course I’d bought records before — so, so many embarrassing…
We heard them before we saw them. We were cutting through Parliament Gardens on our way to the city when we heard the muffled sound of a loudspeaker. “Is that the Grand Prix?” I wondered aloud to Sal. A reasonable assumption I thought, given that the bee swarm like buzz of the cars whizzing around Albert Park had been clearly audible across much of inner Melbourne for the last few days. But as we turned…
So every six months it seems The Age re-runs what is essentially the same story as the latest incarnation of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Cost of Living Index is released. In the most recent of these, they lead with a typically startling claim: It’s cheaper to live in Copenhagen, Hong Kong or New York City than it is to reside in Sydney or Melbourne, according to the Worldwide Cost of Living Index compiled by…