Is Understood To Be More Than Double

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…

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Letter To The Editor

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…

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Time Since Britpop

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…

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I Am So Angry I Made A Sign

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…

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I’m Not A Tech Head

So in the end this most predictable of federal elections played out just about the way everyone said it would. I know I live in a bubble of latte-sipping inner city hipsters, and this is a big old country with lots of odd people in it, but at times the election seemed to be taking place in a parallel universe. There was a bit at the start where they just talked about boat people over…

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Civic Duty

I just scraped in. Tomorrow I become an Australian citizen and — thanks to the special provisions that allow new citizens to provisionally enrol to vote — on Saturday I’ll get to exercise my civic duty in the 2013 Australian Federal Election. I’m taking this seriously, even if I might just be in it for the sausages. I’ve studied the advice from Dennis the Election Koala, I’ve read the only real guide to the election…

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Schrödinger’s Medicines

So there I was flipping through the paper yesterday when I noticed something a little, um, odd about the massive full page ad on page 6 of The Sunday Age: You can’t quite see it from that distance, so lets look a little closer… Yeah. That’s odd. All the labels on those little bottles of Swisse Snake Oil are all blurry. A printing error maybe? Surely not… I assumed that this would be something to…

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Oi, Oi, Oi

So this morning I popped into the city to sit the Australian Citizenship Test. It turns out there are some, um, interesting sections of the test material. To prepare for the test, they give you this book to read — Our Common Bond — and can ask you questions on anything featured in the “testable section”. While the non testable section does at least acknowledge some of the more questionable aspects of Australia’s recent history…

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I’m Not Doing Requests

This is a bit weird, innit? You all sitting down like that… So says Mr Gallagher, three songs into his set, to his hitherto entirely seated audience at St Kilda’s The Palais theatre. Do you have to sit down? I mean, have they told you that you have to sit down? <pause> Well stand up then… <audience rises en masse…> Thanks Noel. Someone had to say it. Thus began an entertaining hour and a half…

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You Don’t Bring Me Flowers

So. No posts since September would appear to suggest that I have become a person who does not blog. I’m not entirely sure how this happened. Maybe it’s Twitter’s fault. I used to look at the world for things that made me think “I should blog that”. But that’s so very 2004. Now if I see an amusing typo or a funny sign I just think “I should tweet that”. Sure, it’s more immediate, but…

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