Category Not Even Food

• The Larva Rodeo

  IS THERE A THING OF which it is said,
  ‘See, this is new’?
  It has already been,
  in the ages before us.
  The people of long ago are not remembered,
  nor will there be any remembrance
  of people yet to come
  by those who come after them.

  When you turn your PC on in the morning and browse through the usual sites of work and study avoidance—email, Google Reader, the front pages of the newspapers, twitter—you generally expect most things to be as they were when you closed the machine down the afternoon before.

  Posted 10 April 2012 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Light Rail

  “HE WOULDN’T KNOW A TRAM was up him unless the driver rang the bell” was one of the old-fashioned stock phrases for stupidity a co-worker of mine once liked to use. He wasn’t from Melbourne: he was merely old enough to remember a Sydney where tram tracks ran down the centres of major roads. Whenever I wind up talking or thinking about trams and light rail in the context of urbanism I think of that phrase—-because trams, more than being vehicles in a streetspace, are much more important as tokens of human urban imagination.

  Posted 6 March 2012 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Death To The National Media

  THERE IS AN ASSUMPTION THAT TV and radio… provide a means of expression and self-expression for a tiny group addressing a vast multitude. That assumption is no longer technically valid, and it is doubtful whether it ever really was. …
  All the political problems arose with the realisation that the contours of society did not, or did no longer, follow the contours around which the broadcasting institutions had been built.¹

  That’s a description of the destruction of the older institution of broadcasting in the 1970s, from which we got the current landscape of broadcasting and print. The simple problem was that older organisations—like Lord Reith’s BBC in the UK, and the older commercial networks—had been built to service a society the founders imagined as a relatively homogeneous, happy mass, in need of education and communal entertainment everybody could share and enjoy, in a community of shared recognition of mutual meaning. The social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s destroyed that happy illusion and print and broadcasting industries profoundly altered themselves to match the new world: in Australia, we got SBS, campaigning city-based tabloids, vicious and ruthless talkback, the short-lived Nation Review and the greatest still-existing fossil of the era, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian.

  Posted 20 October 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Mutt and Gmail

  A RECIPE IS A LIST of instructions, just that. It’s not necessarily about food or edible goods; it can be oh so much more. As this is a blog not just about the consumption of meals and drinking, but also time and energy, it seems fair that I also document the other ways in which I choose to profligately squander the short time I will walk the earth.

  I quite like the free email service Google provides. I also have a soft spot in my heart for using computers to do things in ways that aren’t entirely in keeping with the browser-heavy experience of those one generation younger than me. How can I reconcile these two?

  Posted 14 October 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more