Category Archive: LIFE
Lured Down to the Sea
Lure, Fleurieu Peninsula, Spring 2016. The Varnished Culture got in a jalopy, stacked a bunch of CDs in the player and set off under an early Spring murk, down south to Lure, a new Bed ‘n’ Breakfast on the Fleurieu Peninsula, an hour’s drive from Adelaide. It’s an easy-peasy drive: you take the main arterial road, imaginatively called ‘South Road,’ and turn onto the Southern Expressway (now a two-way road, thank god) which conveys you south expressly through the suburban sprawl, and tips you out near Reynella. From there, you can go inland and trawl through the great wineries of…
Continue Reading →The Case that Will Not Die
The Death of Jon Benét Ramsey We have spoken of the various imaginative, speculative and trashy treatments of this awful case before: See Perfect Murder, Perfect Town and Books About Jon Benét. Disclaimer: TVC has a keen interest in but no actual knowledge of, this matter. Apart from an individual who appears to have confessed to the crime in order to be extradited from a Thai jail, no one has admitted guilt nor been charged. Patsy Ramsey is now deceased and she always denied involvement in the killing, as have John and Burke Ramsey. We are discussing possible solutions on a…
Continue Reading →20 September, 622
(photo by Noumenon)
On this day, the Prophet slipped out of Mecca and decamped to Medina. It was a bad day for a great religion; the day the Sword cut the cords of Compassion and Mercy. One day, Allah shall re-tie those knots, and there shall be The Peace! “Every hardship is followed by ease.”
Continue Reading →Tickled Pink
Photo courtesy of the SANFL website
SANFL Under 18s Grand Final (Adelaide Oval, 18 September 2016) Pink! Unlikely name for a hero! And an unlikely way to win a game of football, kicking 6.20, but that 20th point will go into legend as did Barry Breen’s for St Kilda in the 1966 VFL Grand Final. Here, the winning point was even more unlikely…of which more later. Glenelg took on North in an old-fashioned tug-of-war in which both teams each held sway at various moments of the game. North enjoyed the biggest lead in the first quarter, although the Tigers found their mojo and narrowed the gap…
Continue Reading →Self-Victimisation
We see it everywhere and who can lay blame? It signifies our times and times past, which we thought were dead, but were only coughing up yet more blood. Recently, we reviewed Pascal Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt and in the present context, it is worth quoting from that eloquent, thoughtful and largely instinctive (rather than empirical) book, in the current context: But there is also the danger of transforming these groups’ suffering into a kind of sanctuary, if necessary by embodying it in a law, of making it an impenetrable bastion…We no longer create our own lives, we repeat…
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