Category Quick Posts

• Live Animal Exports

  AUSTRALIA IS SUSPENDING ALL LIVE animal exports to Indonesia. This is remarkable not because it’s a good thing, which it is, but because it’s an example of a political effect with significant policy and financial implications being forced by an outsider-body to the political process. I’ve seen estimates printed of the value of the trade between $300 million and $1 billion yearly, and it’s been cut indefinitely—with, presumably, entailing loss of jobs—after a Four Corners programme. How often do you get to see that happen?

  Posted 8 June 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Quick Post: Bombs And Cupcakes

  I’VE BEEN READING A BIT of old Len Deighton recently. For the uninitiated, Harry Palmer is a very modern spy, a working-class London version of Bond, who alternates work for WOOC(P), a super-secret British spying outfit, with cooking and fine dining. They’re great novels, and they exist at this moment just at the point where datedness caramelises seamlessly into fascinating curio (well, except for Deighton’s/Palmer’s sexual politics, which deserve a nameless shallow grave somewhere off an unsealed road in the back country of the early 1960s).

  The appeal of the novels was in the liberal use of bureaucrat-ese, acronyms and procedural detail to suggest insider knowledge of a sophisticated gourmet Cold War. Apparently, however, Deighton wrote forty years too early. MI6 are crawling the web for bombs and cupcakes:

  …the choice of “The Best Cupcakes in America” as the text debris source is just too perfect: a simultaneous comment on the terrifying vapidity of online culture (the only thing missing is a cat or some Rick Astley lyrics) and the infantilising, self-indulgent, and individualistic overtones of the cupcake trend. Even if it isn’t a joke, it’s a pretty good joke.

  Posted 7 June 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Quick Post: Rapture

  YOU’VE ALREADY SEEN AND HEARD Deborah Harry commit history’s worst rap crime. Whoop, whoop, that’s the sound of the police…

  Posted 21 May 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Quick Post: Inner Western Public Art

  YOU BUY OR RENT A HOUSE in a suburb of Sydney’s inner west, and you move to a vibrant, diverse, community, with a sense of a common aesthetic. You recycle your plastics, and compost your kitchen scraps. Your children go to public schools—the good ones, mind, not the ones with disciplinary problems—and on the weekends they hang around the local cafes, independent cinemas and parks, not large commercialised shopping centres. You disapprove of mandatory detention of refugees, Australian participation in American wars in the Middle East, and the old Part 3A of the Planning Act. You look down on the Western suburbs where it’s all McMansions and four wheel drives, the North Shore where there’s no vitality, and the Shire most of all where they spend their public holidays organising race riot barbecues. You vote Labor in the lower house, Green in the upper, and if you vote Liberal, you have the good taste to keep your mouth shut about it. Everyone’s happy!

  Then, you make the mistake of painting your wall in a Federation beige in accordance with the Council’s notes about the surrounding heritage environment. Did you submit your application to paint over that derivative bit of graffiti piece of important public art with the local insufferable hipsters community of street artists? Apparently not.

  Slogan: THIS WALL USED TO HAVE ART ON IT, NOW IT HAS COCKS. Mallett St, Camperdown, Sydney.

  As Lenin might have said of the infantile disorder of anarchism, scratch a public artist, find a parochial art snob who likes drawing cock.

  Posted 5 May 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Quick Post: Flu Drugs (We Care A Lot)

  SINCE LATE FRIDAY I’VE BEEN laid flat with the kind of headcold that I find comes around about once every two years or so, like swift kicks in the face and throat followed up with rabbit punches to elbows, knees and each vertebra.

  In the past I’ve been quite happy to call up my boss, claim some of that lovely sick leave hard-won in the EBA by the power of collective bargaining, tuck myself into bed with a packet of Codral Day & Night and sleep about eighteen hours a day. Being sick just isn’t the same, though, when I’m not leaving someone else with my work or shirking my responsibilities.

  Not, of course, that I expect sympathy. Indeed, here’s some Faith No More, telling the world (and Bono, whom I met just the other day) just how much the universe empathises.

  Posted 18 April 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Quick Post: The Religious Right, From The Religious Right

  DR GORDON MOYES WAS a member of the upper house of the NSW Parliament from 2003 2002 until the most recent election in March this year. Originally standing with Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats, he broke with his Parliamentary colleague in spectacular fashion and ran unsuccessfully as a Family First candidate. He is very traditional, very conservative, and very religious. When someone like that warns you about extremism on the Right, it’s worth cocking an ear.

  Posted 8 April 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Quick Post: Hope, For A Good War

  “Agricultural land has not increased at anything like the same rate [as population] so things are going to have to change, as simple as that.
  “[Either that] or you put up with the food riots, or hope for a good war to reduce numbers. These are not alternatives.”
  Professor Batterham is the deputy chair of a working group which advised Prime Minister Julia Gillard on food security.

  If there’s one thing I’m grateful for about having had a liberal education, it’s an appreciation for academic freedom.

  Posted 5 April 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Link: Executed Today

  BY THE WAY, AND SPEAKING OF 1994, if you aren’t reading Executed Today you’re missing out.

  Beavers may have embraced death, but that didn’t make him immune to the pleasures of the flesh.

  Last meal request: Six pieces of french toast with syrup, jelly, butter, six barbecued spare ribs, six pieces of well-burned bacon, four scrambled eggs, five well-cooked sausage patties, french fries with ketchup, three slices of cheese, two pieces of yellow cake with chocolate fudge icing, and four cartons of milk...

  Posted 4 April 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Quick Post: I'm Gonna Treat Ya To A Bruschetta Double Feature

  IN 1994, ROBERTO BAGGIO OF Italy mistook the crossbar for a highbar, and history was made. In Petersham, my friend Salv cried, Norton Street mourned, little Portugal on Stanmore Road cheered, and a larger bunch of high school kids learned lots of new non-English swear words from the cars passing by. Tu e la tua razza va f’an… what?

  Posted 4 April 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Political Quickie: Sartor vs. Obeid, Centre Unity Ultimate Fighting

  FRANK SARTOR’S OPEN LETTER to his brother begins thus:

  Posted 30 March 2011 · Author Liam Hogan