Category Archive: CRIME
Wentworth
Remake series 1 – 3 (Foxtel) It is not Covid-19, but FLU-68 that is destroying Australian television. Fervid Ludicrous Upscaling first infected Australian drama series writers (and directors) in 1968, causing them to throw Charlie Cousens off a silo in the eponymous town of Bellbird (ABC 1967-1977). Each generation of writers catches it from the last and is less able to resist its degenerative depredations, no matter how many doses of Edge of Darkness (BBC 1985) or Better Call Saul (Sony etc., 2015-2019) vaccine they have had. Perhaps there’s been a switch a la The Young Doctors (1976-1983) and the syringes are filled with Erinsborough tap water. Australian tv…
Continue Reading →Murder by Decree
22 October 2020 Another serving of much-needed food-for-thought from the John Bray Alumni Network of the University of Adelaide: this one from Bill Smith AM, former plod and police prosecutor in Whyalla (country SA) who came to the Big Smoke, got his degree, and found himself immersed in the frustrating but fulfilling world of international criminal justice. Modern crimes against humanity, in reflection of the new world order, have been somewhat inverted in practical application. Whereas a whole new jurisprudence had to be developed in the wake of the crimes of the Nazi regimes, the end of WWII, the development…
Continue Reading →So Long, Sisto
'Pellegrini's' with the Tribute to Sisto in the window
Melbourne, November 2018 It might be the first time a restaurateur got a State Funeral, but we won’t fuss because Sisto Malaspina, barista and bartender of Pellegrinis Bar, was a Bourke Street institution, who died needlessly after trying to render assistance to man who appeared to have been injured in a car wreck. The man, 30-year-old Somali-born Hassan Khalif Shire Ali, was an Islamo-nut who had deliberately wrecked the car and ignited gas bottles loaded in the back, after which he set about the street on foot with a knife. He stabbed Sisto to death, knifed two others, and then danced about…
Continue Reading →The Worst Sculptor in the World
We celebrate Robert Jacobsen (4 June 1912 – 26 January 1993), Danish creator in the realm of the plastic arts. Robert inhabited the artistic niche of great sculptors such as Alexandros of Antioch and the ancient Greek masters, and moderns such as Auguste Rodin. Jacobsen’s claim to fame is as the Worst Sculptor in the World. A modernist (naturally) who enthusiastically embraced the avant-garde through the toxic COBRA movement of northern Europe, working with welder, mask and subsidized iron, he and his ilk dispensed with hard work and consideration of structure, theme and aesthetics, preferring to hide their laziness and…
Continue Reading →Socialism as Religion
Be careful who you give awards to...the Reverend Jim Jones, 1977's Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian award winner
Born May 13 (1931), the Reverend Jim Jones is famous for his deep Christian-Socialist beliefs, his humanitarian impulses, his Peoples’ Temple in San Francisco where he organised leftist demonstrations, and of course, the workers’ paradise he established at Jonestown in Guyana. His passionate commitment to equality and fairness drew inspiration from thinkers such as Jesus, Buddha, Lenin, Marx, Castro and Mao, and won him kudos from the likes of well-known lib-labs Walter Mondale, Rosalynn Carter, Jerry Brown, and Harvey Milk (who called the Reverend “a man of the highest character.”) In any case, the socialist paradise shuddered to a halt…
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