a hazy shade of winter

It's the winter solstice and someone I know very well should have been holding a housewarming tonight. Oh no, that should have been last year, no? Or was it 2006?

Anyway mate, when it does happen we'll be there. When's the next Olympics?

It'd be kind of cool to do some analysis of the 'right-wing' blogosphere ever since we got a 'socialist' government in Canberra.

Socialist? As if. But even so I have the perception that there's more heat and noise from the right-ish end of the 'sphere than before. This is just going on the daily scan of Ozpolitics so it's a sample size of one and a not dispassionate sample at that.

But it wouldn't be surprising if it were so. Remember the lead up to the 2004 election? When Back Pages held sway amongst a slew of 'left and left-ish' blogs, Tampa and the Pacific Solution were still fresh and there was substantial reason to rail against Howard and his government?

Now the boot is supposedly on the other foot, in the most simplistic interpretation, so it's not hard to imagine the depth of feeling and need to rail by "those opposite".

Possum (well, it actually seems to be Graeme Langlands who was popularly known as Changa) has some good analysis of a couple of those leading the charge and the comments that follow are immensely good, with one exception, perhaps. It's not a need to rail according to Possum but something altogether more sinister.

This is definitely a 'watch this space' issue. In the US, the Obamaramarangadangadingdong show has embraced the power of Web 2.0001, so another independent variable is the ongoing maturation of the blog world.

What will we have in Australia when Kevin 0-0 goes to the polls next?

Here's an idea, let's have a party on Bribie. The house should be ready.

the small faces

• Setting up rules to manage your in-box? Tick.
• If you're a busy executive, paying someone to manage information flow using judgement and technology? If you don't have a dedicated PA or there are time differences because you are frequently overseas? OK then.
• Paying a team of MBAs to manage your FaceBook page? Aaaaargh make it stop.

aalice's restaurant

You want to read a review of a restaurant, but you find it contains these words: "I’m perfectly aware of exactly how interesting and attractive a middle-aged, invalid penis is."

Don't tell me you don't want to click through to find out how.

Alright then, how about "...a mincemeat hernia in a bread roll..."

Off you go.

If you don't like Gill you can try Giles Coren, presumably son of Alan Coren, a former editor of the lamented Punch and author of Golfing for Cats, a copy of which still resides in my bookcase.

Here's a taster: "...their arses bulging against the dumpling walls like stolen babies stuffed in a pillow case." Guess what he's talking about.

Alert - it's awfully snobby, young Mr Coren demonstrates that, similar to political ability, being funny can't be inherited.

chapel in the moonlight

The Sunday paper sheds a bit more light on the current craze in weddings. The celebrity affair referred to yesterday is there - apparently it cost $20m, so evidently this is a very well-paid footballer. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Makes even merchant banking seem respectable.

However it is also revealed that "an international magazine" has paid $10m for "exclusive access" to the wedding. The Economist, do you think? What's incredibly sad about this is that someone has made a business decision that investing $10m is likely to return them even more in sales and advertising. Advertising for what - brain removals?

Anyway, the princesses are getting their themed weddings: the paper also reports that one, who had likened herself to Cinderella, had a fairy story theme with tables each named after a storybook character and guests receiving a glass slipper bonbonierre, whatever a bonbonierre might be. I just hope that cleaning dirty nappies and mopping the kitchen floor also renders lots of satisfaction. I don't know what the groom's favourite story character was, but I hope that lawnmowers come into the equation somewhere.

Aaarrgh, cruel and unnecessary, yes?

Well, cop this, then. There's a desperate shortage of eligible blokes in Brisbane. They're all in Mackay and parts west, earning squillions in the mines. Well, that's part of it. The other part is evident in the 'social' pages, where mobs of young females with flashing eyes and bared fangs parade their 'it's all about me' pout. Danger, Will Robinson.

And the AAMI ad: "Give Ami a ring...you following me, Todd?"

(Addresses Mrs VVB: "Geez, I'm turning into my old man, aren't I?")

In other news, the Irish people have rejected the latest incarnation of a super-EU state through voting down accession to the Lisbon Treaty. This doesn't seem to have attracted much comment around the Australian blogosphere, I guess everybody is fixated on Obamaramaworld.

This Times column is headed "Real people 1, Eurocrats 0 (after extra time) and no cleverer headline could you find. Yes, the backroom boys, the urgers, the faceless internationals - along with true believers, no doubt - have seen their dream fall apart yet again, but Mum and Dad, the salt of the earth, etc etc, have maintained some grip on their national culture and, by extension, their history .

Their only pro-EU comment that I can muster some sympathy for is that Ireland has been ungrateful, as its turbocharged economic growth since the 1960s has been on the back of lots and lots of EU loans and grants.

And that money, folks, was made available in turn on the back of outrageous tariffs on Australian agricultural goods.

However, regardless of its provenance, the Irish made good use of that money - they invested heavily in education and R&D. They also chucked a lot at attracting foreign investment and attracted more than few world leading firms in IT and so on. But I don't think they make Toyotas there.

Anyway, that's nothing compared to this. How come we don't get analysis like this in Australian newspapers (don't bother, no-one answered this last time I asked either). In lieu of a considered response, have some dot points (and count yourselves lucky that I didn't do it in Powerpoint):

• lucky we're in the commodities producing group, eh?
• what will happen to the oil-producing nations when the oil runs out and all they have is condominiums (condominia?) and villas?
• yes, inability to control oneself now results in people being stabbed in supermarket queues: good job in bringing up your children, people;
• governments, under the thrall of the Chicago school, liberalised international financial flows;
• financial whiz kids (read: snake oil salesmen, but highly numerate) invented ever more 'sophisticated' financial instruments to take advantage;
• it all went pear shaped;
• no one saw it coming;
• no one is taking responsibility;
• the OECD, yet another body utterly beholden to neo-liberal economic philosophy, thinks it can devise an answer;
• pull the other one, it has bells on;
• meanwhile the poorest will be starving even more quickly and in greater numbers;
• spell moral hazard, then put it into a sentence;
• maybe another sentence;
• no, a different one;
• what do you think are the chances of some genuinely different thinking. Can you get George Soros elected king of the world or something? He could have Ross Gittins in the boy sidekick role.

OK, enough. You know what I think about all this stuff. Keeping on doing the same thing and expecting a different answer, what's that a recipe for?

Anyway I can't leave you on such a negative note, so I must pass on a friend's advice to her daughter as said daughter left with boyfriend to see the Krusty Demons: "don't flash your t*ts unless you really want to!"

Ah yes, we children of the 60s and our approaches to child rearing. At least our own kids don't stab people.

golden wedding (*)

Gold doesn't cut it any more, it probably has to be platinum, or titanium, or both, with bits of argon stapled to the sides.

That was a joke, I don't think argon can be stapled to anything although next time I'm in Office works, I'll loiter around the staplers and ask one of the attendants whether the Acme 3000 staples argon.

Wtf am I on about? Is last night's meandering still under way?

No, it's all about weddings, the cost thereof, and all that's wrong about it. It seems that some footballer and his footballer's wife have spent the sum typical for a footballer and everyone's up in arms. From different perspectives.

Mrs VVB and I have a view about this issue and it concerns Offspring No 2, because she has been told on many, many occasions that, should the occasion arise, we are not stumping up for whatever the contemporary 'best practice' happens to be for nuptials including themes, wedding planners, expensive venues, fripperies and cakes 9 metres high. And especially 'favours' for guests, any of whom should feel themselves bloody fortunate to get a stubby of light or a glass of cheap fizzy and two glasses of vino collapso without some kind of gift that will end up in the bin by night's end. What the blokes want to drink is up to them.

In fact I believe Mrs VVB has consistently whispered the word 'elope' into Offspring No 2's sleeping ears.



Why anyone needs a wedding planner is entirely bemusing to me - that's what mothers and, in extreme cases, mothers in law do, isn't it? Whenever you read an article on this issue you get comments saying "well when I was married..." and it's no different at Chateau VVB. It was organised by the family, the reception was at a sister's place and it was no worse for having been so arranged as far as I can see.

If we have to underwrite any future union that Offspring No 2 might want to embark on, we'd rather help out with housing than an over-the-top celebration of 'princess' culture.

Offspring No 2 is of course free to provide her own comments on this issue, but caution would be in order, nicht war?

On another topic entirely, Andrew Leigh makes a few comments on Craig Emerson's speech to the Sydney Institute last week. It seems to me that even the more thoughtful bloggers such as Leigh seem too eager to categorise pollies by what they should believe, based on party membership. That said, it probably holds true more often than not and has certainly become a simpler task since the victory of 'markets' over any other model in 1989.



There's no reason why Emerson shouldn't quote Adam Smith - why, I even once managed to get a reference to Hayek into a letter I once had to write to the State Treasury while arguing, no doubt, for some market intervention somewhere. I wish I still had it: while I felt awfully clever at the time, I rather suspect that the argument must have been pretty tenuous.



Anyway, I also believe that more pollies should refer to the Theory of Moral Sentiments rather than the Wealth of Nations, which usually gets selectively interpreted anyway. Abject disclosure: I haven't read either of 'em but I am much taken with the except from the former in Andrew Leigh's post. Certainly security of ownership of property provides the basis for commerce so don't think that I'm one of those who advocates the State grabbing it willy-nilly and distributing it around the polity.



But you do get an awful lot of regulation which tends to entrench a property-owning class, which is not a good thing.



(*) For Woody Herman fans.

woman

Heart Foundation launches female awareness campaign

Very thoughtful of them, but I've been aware of women since...a long long time.

Oh, that's not what it was about? How silly of me.

lost in a lost world

Do you see what I see I wondered a little while ago, alluding to the tendency to read our own desired beliefs in any notional randomly independent issue.

One of the things that I see is the greater ability of the 'left' - as so defined from any eon to any random minute - to see flaws in their own team than the right/conservatives in theirs.

It's a rubbish argument of course, but:

• a) it's Friday night; and
• b) go to post number 1 and remind yourselves that I promised you neither robustly argued positions nor a rose garden.

Anyway, in a small but fitfully growing list of anecdotal references in support of this dodgy hypothesis I give you Peter Martin. Many of his previous posts have to do with economic issues seen from a social democratic or 'leftist' view of the world, but increasingly his posts are critical of the current Federal government, a government whose outlook we would normally expect him to support.

After this entirely baseless assemblage of generalisations, I then ask you to try to remember an Alan Wood column that was critical of the previous Federal Government.

In the absence of any responses, even given that I haven't posted this piece yet, I rest my case and go "nnnyyah".

Particularly because, as a result of very slow typing, I'm another glass or so through the bottle.

This, as the saying goes, proves it.

In other news, it's been a long time since Mrs VVB have been reunited and I look forward to next time we see each other. And blow me down, that was her then on the phone. Must be mutual, or something.

Earlier on in the bottle, I was thinking that a nice first for VVB would be a reflective piece on...on...something that seemed important at the time. Why do we do the things we do? Why do other people do the things they do? Why don't we do the same things?

It's a miraculous relief that the moment of inspiration has passed, because it was truly a very small piece of inspiration.

It was probably related to the hope that the impending mutation of Chateau VVB into VVB-by-the-sea turns out to be a good move. Many of the portents were, and are, positive but there's some current stuff that makes you think "geez what have we done?"

So the trick is to focus on the positive: things will work out for the best, we will establish ourselves in VVB-by-the-sea and sip pina coladas while te]he sun goes down.

Although the sun will go down behind us - and the house - rather than as we gaze at it. This is only a minor inconvenience.

Enough.

unpublished critics

Let's start with Ms Pants' comment on the last post about similarities between the early days of the Rudd and Blair governments. Of course Blair sent his emissaries to Oz to study the success of the Hawke/Keating era, just shortly before the Australian public decided it was far from similarly enchanted and got itself 11 years of whining and disdainful indifference, unless you happened to be a bit pigmented.

And Rudd has been sending people to the UK to study the success of the Blair, now Brown, government just before it plummets into England's green and pleasant land in a shower of spin and soundbites. Of such ephemera is government now constructed.

To which you can add the fascination with plans, Key Performance Indicators, critical objectives and 100 day statements of "success" or "progress", both of which serve as frail euphemisms for "activity."

Enough.

Anyway Kevin has thrown several bucketloads of your cash at Toyota to keep a bunch of Victorians in employment - and of course due to supply chains and just-in-time management, willing workers in other States and overseas too.

Does it make economic sense? Of course not, see a couple of posts ago. Should we be doing it?
Of course. We used to make aircraft, now we import them from Brazil of all places. Something else, like a predeliction for using knives as weapons, that happened while our backs were turned.

Are hybrid cars the answer? Probably not, but neither was the steam engine. You with me?

Anway, can the car fancier - the paid one - who reads this blog kindly impart some of his wisdom on the issue? Do we need a sophisticated engineering and design industry in this country and how much are we prepared to pay for it, or should we rest on our laurels as diggers of world class dirt and currency arbitragers?

Now for a good luck story. Because (temporary) pied a terre VVB doesn't have anywhere you can vacuum the car, I took the office chariot to the car wash to vacuum out a few weeks' worth of mud and crap.

Then, as I was there, I decided to wahs the car as well. I had $5, just enough for a wash, that stupid foaming brush that doesn't get the embedded bugs off, and a rinse.

I put $3 in, put the other $2 coin in my shirt pocket for easy acccess, and went to washing like a dervish.

Which resulted, almost inevitably, in the $2 coin jumping out at some stage and leaving me with a soapy car to drive home. Embarrassing.

But I drove the car forward and there was the $2, just on the edge of the grate. I nearly knocked it in when I bent down to pick it up, but good fortune smiled again.

We need all the good fortune we can get. Returning to the first theme, I recall the stumbles and sheer amateur ineptitude of the early Howard reign, but such was the disenchantment with Keating that he got a pretty easy run, Ministers' financial indiscretions aside (well, you sort of expect that with the Libs, eh?).

Now we have our Labor government back and they're proving a little embarrassing. They've got a year or so but they'd better get over it. And, at least our eyes are open, not an attribute I've noted in Howard-huggers.

That's enough rabid generalisations for one night.

do you see what I see?

Of the many, many things I didn't like about John Howard, one was the perception that he was always snarling and scowling but moreso always 'on' as Prime Minister. Well, the story was that he'd wanted to be PM since he was ten years old, so you can imagine that once he was PM, he didn't want to miss a minute.

Anyway with today's Queen's Birthday honours there he was again and the networks obliged by showing him power walking and scowling, haranguing and snarling and generally looking quite dislikeable.

Whereas with PM Rudd you get plenty of the technocrat but you also get pictures of him genuinely relaxed, even in the company of the people noticeably different to him (and us).

It's all in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?

Unless he gets the wheels back on pdq he's shaping up as a bit of a disappointment, but he's certainly better than the current or recently deposed alternatives. And it's nice to see a PM who is multidimensional, who can adapt to his environment and those around him and be himself. We never saw that in Howard except when he was putting the fear of god into the country about one thing or another.

He needs to get a rocket under his Cabinet, although I doubt they'll ever reach the capacity of the first Hawke ministry whom the old man dubbed "the best Liberal cabinet ever."

Those were the days.

remember the days of the old schoolyard

Today's Sunday Mail carries a mildly hysterical little piece on how children and their parents are having trouble dealing with a rating system that indicates that some children might be performing better than other children in the same class.

Hmm, I remember many years of half-yearly exams which carried out exactly the same function. I've been ruined for life although not as ruined as my parents thought after I once came 7th.

Anyway, anything we can do the Japanese can do better so sit back, pull up a comfy chair and enjoy this story. As one commenter pointed out, it is indeed a shame that there wasn't a picture, not least because it raises the spectre of a bit of a furphy or urban myth.

And here's something else that the Japanese - well apparently, according to Jeremy - do better. However I'm with Johan from Bruges (see the comments) which is why, although the new VVB-by-the-sea lacks sufficient garaging or even parking space, there will be a TR6 or something similar in the drive - or on the grass - as soon as I can arrange it.

law is for protection (*)

Shaun Carney does the political sums for Kevin Rudd's government using the current future of the motor vehicle industry debate - a long-running serial in Australia.

Going back to the days of Hawke and Keating, the Productivity Commission provided the intellectual muscle for economic deregulation and those governments generally followed its advice.

Yes, they did. So in subsequent years, the argument very simply became, "we need more deregulation." Only a little bit more here, a bit more there, and we'll be OK.

It's a seductive argument all right.

The trouble is, it's undermined by common sense because it rests on an assumption that there's a single correct answer to any question and that answer is always the same. Doesn't make sense, eh?

The argument goes that without protection, we stop doing things that don't add up economically and we will specialise in the things we do well.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the answer.

Now, this mob is extremely good at what they do, of that there is no doubt.

The question is: can we, as a nation, get by on this skill set?

(*) Kris Kristofferson, it seems.

i'm standin' on the outside looking in

Except this story is about people standing on the inside looking out. And making a motza while they're at it.

Interesting that of the small number of comments, two come from Australia. With our small, incestuous finance and business community, I wouldn't be surprised at a level of insider trading that should, in any fair and decent world, call for a full scale review and rejigging of our institutions for financial dealing.

In our current, unfair and indecent world, it's not going to happen. The vested interests, rather like the military rulers of Burma or Robert Mugabe, have too much at stake to quit.

I'm...

I'm not talking about destruction either.

Maybe excepting wealth.

Other people's.

Of course.

Difficult, isn't it?

our house

For the last few weeks Chateau VVB has served up morsels from the Times of London. But tonight we go to the Guardian, various readers will feel more at ease I guess.

First the serious: an opinion piece on the recent UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) talks, particularly in relation to biofuels. It's not a bad article but wow!, the comments. Surely we get some comments of insight and substance (and not just at the Guardian either, I should point out) that are really a level above.

Having, at one stage, been the 'desk officer' for the FAO within a bit of the Australian bureaucracy (later followed by similar roles for other UN organisations), I'm not in the least surprised by the outcome as well as the process of getting there. "Watered down language" is another way of saying 'compromise', with the added slant that it's not win-win, it's lose-lose. The conference has an end date and time and there has to be a communique, regardless of what it says.

One commenter talks about the increasing inability of the UN to produce outcomes, much as the League of Nations before it.

I'm torn on this - having seen the workings up close, you'd be demoralised to hear how bad it is. But what's the alternative? A commenter talks about delegates being beholden to their protectors who nominate them: in many cases yes, in others (such as Australia where the nomination process is reasonably transparent, within bureaucratic norms), no. Systems within systems, it's a complex world and you can't control all the consistent bits. But the big picture stuff - the objectives and arrangements between nations - should be reviewed. Should we just rebalance the power structure within the UN? Just a useful first step?

The second article is meant to cheer you up - what's happening with Big Brother's ninth season in the UK. There are a number of really classic comments in the article, you should just read it as I can't ad anything.

So, here we are in pied a terre VVB with a long weekend coming up when I won't be back in the bosom of the family back at the Chateau in the leafy western suburbs. We have signed the contract for the new Chateau and in a couple of months we'll be in it. However, it's not really a chateau - it's a bit more flat and funky - so it'll need a new name.

Suggestions, on the back of a large bank cheque, to "the new owners, VVB-by-the sea."

Hmmm, that's not bad, actually.

so tired, tired of waiting

"tired of waiting for yoooooouuuuuu..."

Midweek-ish, plenty of work so too busy to spend much time here, I'll tell you what I'm sick and tired of:

• opinion polls of politicians' "approval ratings": it's only been 6 months since the bloody election for crying out loud, if Rudd's "approval rating" goes down x% and Nelson's comes up y%, what actual impact could this possibly have?
• similarly, "MSM analysis" - it's not analysis by any definition, it's a primary school-level book review stuff of at best superficial ephemera;
• the continuing infiltration of US slang: today I saw a genuine - well as much as any could be - story with the word "takeout" in the title. Puke.

What I'm feeling much more warm about:

• country shows with lots of bull, literally;
• real people;
• including farmers in RM Williams and all the gear, including very large hat, talking about phenotypes - Australian agriculture has come a long way in the last couple of decades;
• buying a new Chateau VVB.

Au revoir, mes amis.

happy mondays

As I look out my window over the mighty Fitzroy towards the hills, I notice -well, it's pretty much inescapable - that it's wet, foggy, dismal and grey. Very unusual.

So I'm sipping at the puky instant coffee - pied a terre VVB is not an oasis of civilisation by my usual measure - and waiting the time to pass so I can go to collect Mrs VVB from the airport. And I run across the Guardian's regular (I think) contest for readers to send in song title around a theme.

This week the theme is optimistic songs, so for all of you reader who is interested in music, you'll find a treasure trove of suggestions, ranging from the obvious to the extremely obscure, especially as it's a pommy paper.

I guess Martin Seligman would approve: you can teach yourself happy, although we might park any conclusions until we see responses to next week's them.

So a wave of optimistic goodness washes over me while I gaze into the grey outside - it's gonna be a wonderful day.

the fall

A couple of opinion pieces in the Times of London.

Gerard Baker posits a decline in the Britishness of being British...economic stagnation and a political system that isn't quite democracy.

India Knight looks at the same issue from the viewpoint of the recreational habits of a substantial underclass without hope, and what they make their society. The upright working class, the "conscience and backbone" of the nation, declines into an uneducated, hateful and bitter underclass.

Causes? Guesses, anybody?

The loose, lax and permissive 60s? The lingering effects of excessive union power through the 70s? The unintended consequences of hard line economics where there is no such thing as society? The legacy of ten years of the triumph of spin over substance?

Hmm, that's 3 against 1, the ideological orientation of this little blog is getting wobbly again. Any more of this and we'll be back to public corporal punishment as the panacea for all that ails us.

Hmmm...

You can rest assured that the quick and easy answer will be wrong, but how the various policy environments have combined to get the current results is far too big to be bitten off here. 'Cos I'd like to believe that it was the single one in that list that did the damage, but common sense gets in the way.

I wouldn't like to see a return to that stultifying obeisance to authority that characterised the period when I was born. I look at Offsprings 1 and 2 and think, "well, for kids of characteristically 'wet, wishy-washy left' parents who grew up in a period when kids had a lot more freedom, they didn't end up too badly given their various educations."

But we can't go arguing from the particular to the general here, can we?

We don't need national service, but some grammar and speed and accuracy mental arithmetic tests, such as the late father used to put me through on the long drives from Sydney to Dubbo, wouldn't go astray.

we're gonna party like it's...2008

Corey Delaney, eat your heart out.

This is the professional way for spoilt brats to celebrate.

I love the divergence in the comments - no wonder we have wars! Such as:

Question from Spain: where is the ''all these lazy, unprincipled foreigners are destroying the social fabric and the wonderful british way of life and should be kicked out'' brigade?

The party rocked!!!!
Kev, Marbella,

(Thanks Kev, are you Australian by any chance? Surname Kavanagh?

Theres gone be a lot of alcohol an amazing DJ.” “There’s so much damage and clothes stolen. A lot of broken doors. people caight
(SIC) having sex.” -- Well done. Nothing like a top-notch private education.

I lived in Southern Spain 2 years ago and the chavish loutishness is identical to
the uk , only with better weather and cheaper grog.

kraftwerk

One I hadn't heard before.

I had to officiate at a 'do' tonight. We had a visiting delegation of 6 people: I introduced them all then did a bit of a spiel.

I then introduced one of the group who was to do a talk. Part way through I thought, "I forgot one of them when I did the intros." Then the one speaking mentioned this bloke by name and I thought, "ahh, he's made up for it, I must have forgotten him."

So when I came back to do the link between the speaker and next one, I mentioned the bloke I had forgotten.

Later, once it was all over, they said to me, "you didn't forget him, you mentioned him."

I made a comment about my memory to which one replied, "ah, you're like me, you've got CRAFT."

CRAFT = Can't Remember A Fucking Thing.

Exactly so, and now I have a new way to describe it.

shine a little light

Wayne Swan has just been eviscerated (within normal 7.30 Report boundaries) by Kerry O'Brien.

Four departments briefed against the national Fuel Watch scheme, so why is the Government going ahead with it?

Hmm...so where were the leaks during the Howard government's reign? At least we know that the current government is getting frank and fearless advice.

Looks like the ABC will definitely continue to be on "we are independent" watch.

Despite the "we're not racists, but..." comment made by a woman interviewed by the ABC after the meeting at Camden about the Islamic school, "Why is Channel 2 in favour of the school?"

Indeed. Channel 2 brings crime, I expect.

I particularly liked this bit:

Another resident said: "It's not for racist [reasons], just all the crime and stuff that other foreign people bring into the town."

Ah yes: thanks for that. QE f*****g D, as they say.

Speaking of which, I ran across a whole host of stories and opinion pieces about the growing use of knives in youth crime in the UK and Australia. Haven't got time to write at the moment - got work to do - but it looks like other people have noticed the trend. Got a lot to do with drink, I imagine, but...any views?

why don't we do it in the road

OK, thanks to Political Theory Daily Review, here's why I do it.

By "it" I mean blogging, what on earth were you thinking I meant?

Anyway it's therapeutic and unless I write this drivel I'll be certifiable. Actually I need to be certifiable to write the drivel, it's all cause and effect.

I mean, innit?

Even if correlation is not causation, well, nothing even correlates with what goes through my tiny mind while I write so what you get on the electronic page is probably more random than it appears.

And again from Political Theory, a link to a book that could have been written for us here in the Chateau - actually it sounds like a good common sense kind of book that the functionally innumerate such as yer 'umble correspondent could do with.