What we admire in pirates—at least our fictional pirates—is that they so enjoy their villainy. They’re not sly or covert or subtle. Everything about them is over-the-top, histrionic: they glory in their infamy. While most of us drag ourselves through the daily dullness of our lives, they swagger, they pirouette, and, in the case of Captain Hook, even dance a tarantella. Like the trailblazer and the gunslinger, the pirate represents a New World ideal of freedom—a proud renegade living by his wits and his daring.

LIKE MANY OTHER AGL customers I’ve recently received a very strange text message:

AGL estimates average electricity savings of 7.8% off NSW AGL residential bills by removing the carbon tax. See agl.com.au/carbon for details.

When I queried it, AGL’s twitter account informed me that the law required them to send it:

@AGLenergy: @liamvhogan Hi Liam - these are courtesy SMSs on upcoming price changes to your account. We're obligated by law to advise you ~Thanks, Matty

ELIZABETH FARRELLY, A MASTER of her art, wrote these sentences with apparent sincerity.

Newcastle has excellent bones. Its pretty, gridded sandstone core drapes over a headland set between river and ocean. Sure, the surrounding sprawl is ugly, but rail lets you ignore all that, popping up like a meerkat right in its heart. Newcastle is as close to a European-style town as you’ll find in this country.

BECAUSE THIS BLOG EXISTS, AND because I get to choose what I do with it, I’m going to start putting up excerpts and links to things on the internet that I have read that I think you, reader, would also enjoy. I understand that’s the original definition of ‘web log’. But what’s historicisation of technologies between web-‘social’ acquaintances in a relationship mediated by marketing? Call this post the first in a beginning form of adaptive re-use.

There’s increasing discussion about the role of the public sector in setting standards that mandate design quality in housing. Projects such as this remind us that authorities have another potent form of intervention at their disposal. With deep institutional knowledge and a desire to chase more than the bottom line, they are well placed to lead the development of innovative and life-affirming housing models. Wielded strategically, by a range of authorities across metropolitan areas, projects of this type could visibly lift the bar of housing quality for all of us.

IT’S BEEN A DAY for all of the ex-Labor staffers I know to relish. Premier of New South Wales is becoming one of those jobs you just don’t stay in very long, like the Chief Taster to the Sultan, or the coach of an AFL side coming ninth. We kept losing ‘em to the loathsome effects of Parliamentary crooks and it’s hard not to bleakly laugh when our right-wing friends and family complain that ‘he was one of the good ones brought down’. Yeah, aren’t they all.

INSTEAD OF READING THIS article by Julia Baird on ‘trolling’, read this essay by Jason Wilson on industrial moderation.

I’M PROUDLY A MEMBER of the NTEU, because on and off, I’m a casual academic, amongst other places, at the University of NSW. Generally they’re a pretty good union, but every now and then they drop some piece of communication to their members which sets me off. Boom! Papers go flying around my ‘office’, cups of tea get drunk, drafts get drafted. This morning the following made me breathe deeply and try to imagine calming blue surf while I was on my bus:

I VOTED JUST NOW for Anthony Albanese in the Australian Labor Party’s leadership ballot.

THERE ARE NOW, WITHOUT a doubt, young people studying sculpture at Central Saint Martin’s College who are younger than Pulp’s infamous song.

ROUTINES MATTER. MY GRANDFATHER could roll and light a cigarette one-handed, without spilling any of the tobacco from his pouch. My own morning routine involves dismantling and refilling a stovetop coffee maker, which I’ve discovered I prefer even to someone else making me a coffee at a shop, in a much better machine. I think my grandfather and I—apart from respective addictions to habit-forming substances—share a taste for ordinary rituals of making and busy-work. Disassembling, washing, refilling and heating the machine does a wonderful job of occupying time and activity while I wake up, and it’s not the same if I just hand over $3 for the same drink in a paper cup. I can well understand the dilemma of the quitting smoker, who asks herself or himself, hanging desperately out for a denied cigarette, never mind the actual drug, what am I supposed to do with my hands?