Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Author Liam Hogan

  • Kebab

    TODAY, 11 JULY 2025, is World Kebab Day. I have solemnly observed this totally not-made-up Day with a beef kebab, with hommous, tabouleh, onions, tomato, lettuce, and garlic sauce. It is an honour and a privilege to eat one of the world's greatest hand-held meat-in-bread dishes, while sitting in the glorious calm winter Sydney sun. Don't thank me for my service, it is enough to take part.

    For the record, mine is from Saray on Enmore Road in Newtown.

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  • Ambassador

    THERE IS A CERTAIN tragic drama to the rough month between the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of the First World War. Everyone who ever studied history in high school (or watched the really pretty good 37 Days) knows the basic story and I'm, in spite of myself, a bit fascinated by it: here was a closed world, an exclusive masculine society of gentlemen, of the upper class in their own countries but also members of a cross-national exclusive elite, speaking the same languages, familiar with the same Greek and Latin and French, bearers of an enormous responsibility to their governments and the world. They all valued their ability to maintain a kind of concert peace amongst great powers. They were aware of themselves as a class and as a professional corps of diplomats, habituated to the exercise of unaccountable influence, answerable at best only to a Cabinet and at worst to an uninterested monarch, and regardless of their shade of politics (from liberal to reactionary) had a kind of mutual sympatico that let them always empathise with one another regardless of their countries' positions.

    So, how well did a group of highly skilled, professionally serious, high-minded, exquisitely literate and trained communicators handle the world-historic outbreak of violence? Pretty badly, as it turns out. Nobody mourns them.

    The United States will be represented in Malaysia by its new Ambassador, former Ashfield Councillor, reject from the Liberal Party, 'alpha male' influencer and success coach, probable self-parodist (though who can be certain, honestly) Nick Adams. It's absolutely typical Trumpism to elevate the last guy whose book he read or whose TV slot he saw. How will the Hooters-loving, performatively chauvinist influencer go as plenipotentiary to a majority Muslim nation already at odds with the US over its support for the war in Gaza? Is diplomacy better in the hands of top-hatted and tailed gentlemen or MAGA fabulists?

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  • Drafting

    WHEN I BEGAN THIS blog a... number of years ago it was because I was unemployed and had a lot of time; cooking blogs were the rage, I had less grey hair, etc. etc. Life intervened of course and I both got work, and stopped blogging intermittently, and the blog description became increasingly less and less descriptive of what it actually did.

    Now, like so many other things in 2025, like fascism, it threatens to become very relevant again. I'm currently about to start a new bit of study, a Cert IV in Residential Drafting at TAFE. I may set up a specific studyblog, or I may not.

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  • What I'm reading: smoky rooms and serious people

    Dan Davies, black boxes and smoky rooms:

    Some Planning Inspectorate reports read curiously like Agatha Christie novels. Chapter by chapter, you get detail of the objections and analysis, and then a concluding section in which the Inspectorate assumes the role of Hercule Poirot and explains which of them were red herrings and which were killers.

    Ned Resnikoff, Serious People:

    As one prominent Sacramento YIMBY put it, “This election separated the wheat (people with sincere views on urban policy reform) from the chaff (people who use urban policy reform as a cudgel against their enemies).” Among those who genuinely care about housing affordability, Mamdani attracted support both from the left and (though not without reservations) from the center. The centrists who loathe the left more than they care about YIMBY policy reform denounced Mamdani, while the leftists who hate shitlibs more than they like winning elections did everything they could to make clear that shitlibs were not welcome in the Mamdani coalition.

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  • Andropov

    IT'S A WELL KNOWN observation that organisations that prize loyalty over competence tend, in the end, to failure. History is full of examples of failed gerontocracies, and political systems that chose long-running death over renewal: poor old Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko, elderly placemen lacking imagination, all of them causes and symptoms of the USSR's degrading later-20thC crunch. The British car industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Wests Tigers. The list goes on.

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  • Ugly Ducklings

    PRU GOWARD AS MINISTER in 2017 sold off the public housing that was the last vestige of the working-class presence in The Rocks. Now the housing stock which she saw as too valuable to be wasted on the poor is winning architectural awards:

    Even by the miserable standards of more than a century ago, the Workmen’s Dwellings in Sydney’s The Rocks were considered dark and gloomy.

    Now they’re a popular Instagrammable backdrop often used in wedding photos.

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  • Pledge

    THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY has an extraordinarily strict code of behaviour relating to membership, and an elaborate mythology relating to its rats throughout history. The great crime is to be elected as a member of the ALP and then, having benefited from the collective efforts of the whole, to go back on your pledge; it's related to the similar---but very different---great taboo that operates amongst trade unionists for people who cross picket lines. The Labor rat is a cultural hate object, and something like the prodigal son, they're generally more famous than the well-behaved. Mal Colston will live on in notoriety, Billy Hughes will always be loathed. Who remembers the loyal?

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  • Productivity

    NOBODY UNDERSTANDS WHAT PRODUCTIVITY is and nobody cares. Yes, sure, you might think you know the macroeconomic definition, that it's a ratio of economic inputs to outputs, but you, in 2025, would be wrong. You have the notion that measures of economic activity actually lend themselves to interpretations about the real world, but like the characters in Spufford's Red Plenty you are trapped, ideologically, in a fairy-tale past where such conceptions did matter, and now, they don't. Sorry.

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  • What I'm reading: solitude and lies

    Ned Resnikoff, You'll Never Think Alone Again:

    What I’m really worried about is less an active plot than the terminal erosion of those habits of mind and cultural practices that sustain a mass democracy. We’ve arguably been in real trouble on that front since before Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death. We wouldn’t have gotten Donald Trump and the present crisis without televised infotainment’s anti-democratic properties and potentialities. But reality TV and cable news look primitive when compared to devices that promise to fully replace your internal dialogue.

    John Plotz, Public Books, 'Lying in Politics': Hannah Arendt's Antidote to Anticipatory Despair

    In the face of deliberate deception—engendering self-deception and leading to full-on defactualization—we can still offer appeals to shared human frailty, and a belief in the durability of truth. Arendt reminds us that even would-be authoritarian lies, with their utter disregard of reality, do not last. It is that disregard of truth, that phoniness, that makes them inherently unstable. By describing the ways in which America in the 1970s (as again in 2025) fell into a crisis, she reminds us that the strong fabric of laws and a palpable American commitment to human equality and diversity are still present, albeit muted and obscured beneath the blanket of lies.

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  • Statues

    THERE IS A BRIEF and fascinating article on a group of people involved in toppling and vandalising statues:

    For a year-and-a-half, this anonymous group from Melbourne has been going after colonial statues – toppling, breaking or defacing them in the night. While there has been more than one group going after these statues, this one is the most active.

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