Category Archive: LIFE
The Coddling of the American Mind
By Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt (2018) The Guardian hated this book, so it must be good, right? Not necessarily. it is a bit like Mr. Haidt’s The Righteous Mind – an excellent book – transferred onto campus, where, the authors argue, i-Gen or Gen Z students are being programmed by social media and their professors into fragile, hysterical, blind little snowflakes. This resolves into the ludicrous examples seen in recent years of safe spaces (current example: Arizona State socialist students seeking to bar Kyle Rittenhouse from attending an online course!), cancel-culture and witch-hunts, all vivified by helicopter parents, university bureaucrats,…
Continue Reading →Queensland Museum
November 2021 TVC loves V & A style museums, the ones that pile-up objects, so that stuffed animals lie cheek by jowl with ancient graves, next to planes, trains and automobiles, and so on. (For example, Edinburgh). Housed in a repulsive building after the New Brutalism style of architecture (main image), near to the Queensland Art Gallery’s quaint homage to the Louvre pyramid, the Queensland Museum was opened by then Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen (it’s a wonder the current Premier’s myrmidons haven’t covered-up the plaque). It was a welcome respite from the heat after a brief stop at the Gallery of Modern…
Continue Reading →Stuffing One’s Face in Brisbane
November 2021 The Varnished Culture spent a (very) warm week in Brisbane sampling, inter alia, some of the very nice eateries. From restaurant to cafe, Brisbane serves good food in elegant settings and a relaxed mode. Here’s a sample. Otto (Shop 1, River Quay, Sidon St, Brisbane, Qld) Very posh. A short walk through the steamy riverbank gardens and then seats in the bar with delicious cocktails (a “Sicilian Sunset” – Vodka, Limoncello, Lemon sorbet, Vanilla and soda; and an “Arancia Sour” – Johnnie Walker Black, Lemon, a Chinotto reduction and whites). Then in to lunch. There we encountered some…
Continue Reading →Tigris centenarius
A celebration of 100 years of Glenelg Football Club in the SANFL, Saturday 6 November 2021, Grand Hotel @ Glenelg A good year: one crap day. Unfortunately, that one bad day was Grand Final Day, in which the team was more or less humiliated (15.9 to 4.8.). The Tigers have the worst Grand Final win ratio of any club with 26.32%, having lost 14 out of their 19 Grand Final appearances. (I have seen 12 of those defeats.) So while musing in my room at the Grand Hotel, gazing out at the gloomy sea, it occurred to me that losing…
Continue Reading →The Long Slide
(By Tucker Carlson) (2021) An anthology of magazine pieces by Carlson, author of the fairly recent Ship of Fools, serves not so much as exhibits for an argument against the decline of journalism; rather, as the author points out in an introduction, they are historical markers from times when political differences were perhaps more nuanced, less toxic and bellicose than our present discontent. Or, to put it another way, it is “a collection of nostalgic writings that underscore America’s long slide from innocence to orthodoxy.” (We’re not so sure about innocence, but still). From abortion issues to cancel culture, from…
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