Category Quick Posts

• 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

• Correction

  I WILL NOT PESTER YOU with further niceties applicable to the difference between houses of correction, and work-houses, and poor-houses, if any there should be, which are not work-houses; between the different modes of treatment that may be due to what are looked upon as the inferior degrees of dishonesty, to idleness as yet untainted with dishonesty, and to blameless indigence. The law herself has scarcely eyes for these microscopic differences. I bow down, therefore, for the present at least, to the counsel of so many sages, and shrink from the crime of being ‘wiser than the law.’

  That’s Jeremy Bentham, appealing to The Australian’s universal truth, that for every problem, no matter how simple or wicked, there exists a solution: thoroughgoing industrial relations reform.

  Update: No food blogging until further notice. Principles to weigh up. Faith to keep…

  Posted 29 August 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Compulsory Riot Reading

  SCOFIELD TOUCHED MY ARM. “HERE we is,” he said.
  We had come to a huge tenement building.
  “Where are we?” I said.
  “This is the place where most of us live,” he said. “Come on.”
  So that was it, the meaning of the kerosene. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe they had the nerve. All the windows seemed empty. They’d blacked it out themselves. I saw now only by flash or flame.
  “Where will you live?” I said, looking up, up.
  “You call this living?” Scofield said. “It’s the only way to get rid of it, man…”

  —from Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, first published 1952

  Posted 9 August 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• This Song Shall Be Our Parting Hymn

  THE PEOPLE’S FLAG IS DEEPEST red,
  It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
  And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
  Their hearts blood dyed its every fold….

  Jim Connell wrote the song, and gave it to the social democrats and labourists of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The British Labourists still sing it; even the Australians still know the words.

  Norwegian kids can’t be that different to the young women and men I spent my twenties arguing with. Like A, I’ve been an earnest teenager in a youth wing of a moderate, labourist, reforming Party. For pleasant and unpleasant times, for all their enthusiasm and compromise and cynicism, they’re my people. And to read the news makes me sick to my heart.

  It well recalls the triumphs past,
  It gives the hope of peace at last;
  The banner bright, the symbol plain,
  Of human rights and human gain.

  Posted 24 July 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Very Quick Post: Libyan DIY photos

  My favourite TV show when I was ten was the A-Team. You know the plot: someone attractive needs saving from drug lords, Communists or an African dictator, BA Baracus refuses to fly, the A-Team scrounge together very improvised weapons, there’s a car chase or action scene and George Peppard smokes a cigar wearing leather gloves. Wholesome entertainment.

  I already have an office chair, a hoodie, some old sneakers and paint-spattered jeans. Now all I need is an FAL and I can be light anti-aircraft defence.

  (The full series is terrifying and amazing in about equal measure, and reminds you that despite smartarse beret-wearing Westerners there’s kind of a war still going on).

  Posted 18 June 2011 · Author Liam Hogan