Category Quick Posts

• Pirates!

  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.

  Posted 12 September 2014 | Author Liam Hogan

• Voting for Albo

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

  

  Posted 1 October 2013 | Author Liam Hogan

• Feta Margherita

  YOU WAKE UP UNDER a slowly rotating fan, the sweat pouring from your body onto the sheets of the bed you barely remember sleeping in. A tatty venetian blind casts narrow shadows across the room in sepia. One of The Doors’ songs, naturally, plays slowly, as you give a monologue describing your mental disintegration, and the progress of your terminal journey through another country’s trauma.

  Posted 29 January 2013 | Author Liam Hogan

• Fried Onion

  WHO DIDN’T TELL ME about this? Who neglected to mention the simple process, that could have delighted me so well in the years since I have been old enough to be trusted with a sharp knife and a hotplate? What horrible self-censorship stopped me ever doing this, and what shameful ignorance ever ruled the process out of bounds, non-decision, un-knowledge?

  Take half an onion, chop it very finely, toss it in a teaspoon of flour, and fry it in lots of sunflower oil.

  The recipe is that simple, if you want lovely crispy onions like burger places put on their hamburgers, like Indian places put on top of rice, like anybody would want an onion to turn into. The italics are mine for importance: this has been an honest-to-Protestant-American-come-to-Jesus-moment-cliché revelation. Open palms in the air, dancing, call-and-response, Billy Graham with fried food, genuine hallelujah-and-pass-the-chicken-salt stuff.

  Put it all over your messy-as-hell omelette. Yeeeeahhhhh.

  

  Posted 10 January 2013 | Author Liam Hogan

• Toasted cheese sandwich

  ‘HOW DO YOU MAKE such nice toasted cheese sandwiches?’ my assistant asked me.
  ‘Emmental’, I replied.

  

  Posted 10 November 2012 | Author Liam Hogan

• Peas

  FRESH PEAS, YOU ARE SO delicious to eat, but so very tedious to shell. No wonder I usually buy you frozen instead.

  

  Posted 12 October 2011 | Author Liam Hogan

• Political Journalists Two Minutes Hate

  I READ THE NEWSPAPER, AND was infuriated: then I remember that above the level of incoherently muttering to one’s self, on the Maslow Pyramid of Internet Needs, lies the level of futilely declaiming to the void on one’s blog. “You’ve got one of those, remember”—I reminded myself.

  Here’s Peter Brent aka Mumble in (this will become important) The Australian.

  Posted 10 October 2011 | Author Liam Hogan

• Lorikeet

  SPRING IN SYDNEY IS BOTTLEBRUSH season. Every LGA with the good taste to plant callistemon around the footpaths fills up with red trees and birds, as do the backyards of people with both bottlebrushes and flowering gums.

  

  Lorikeets are lovely birds. They’re a consolation for those foot-puncturing razor sharp gumnuts that drop for the rest of the year.

  Posted 7 October 2011 | Author Liam Hogan

• Everything Is Possible Again

  THE ACCELERATION IS THOUGHT TO be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma—perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again.

  As usual, the italics are mine, as are the goosebumps. As the great scholar of romantic exploration reminds us, all men are Portuguese, and they are lost, seeking the Indies.

  Posted 4 October 2011 | Author Liam Hogan

• Forty Thousand Dollars

  THANKS TO ARTIST DENIS BEAUBOIS, we know what $20,000 in clean hundreds looks like. But it’s thanks to a crime story like this one, involving a drug trafficker, a real estate agent, and $40,000 in dirty notes, that we’ve had a bit more about Sydney’s political economy illustrated.

  Posted 4 September 2011 | Author Liam Hogan