Unconscious Bias
On this International Women’s Day, we notice the return of calls for the elimination of unconscious bias in the legal profession. This got a lot of airplay back in the 1990s, especially regarding alleged gender bias in the Judiciary. (Apparently, there were a number of ‘beer man’s judges’ about). Recently, the President of the Law Council of Australia, Fiona McLeod SC, issued a press release announcing “a national first, a customised unconscious bias training program aimed specifically at the legal profession…Human beings are hardwired to notice personal characteristics and to prefer those with attributes or experiences similar to their own, without…
Continue Reading →Our Smoking Ruin
"Wasteland with Elephant" (image by Topangahomeboy)
South Australia – a Looper’s Paradise If you’re unlucky enough to live in (or almost as bad, be passing through) Australia’s benighted State, the coalmine canary of the Commonwealth, cheer yourself up by logging-on that superb website, SA Great [http://www.sagreat.com.au/]. You’ll be treated to a hard-to-navigate map and several invitations to submit an event, a business, a restaurant, a job, or a coupon (but not a complaint, not an idea). Adelaide closes down for a couple of months every year to host a stock car race (that ‘climaxes’ today), a pallid homage to the Formula-1 Grand Prix that we used to hold (annoyingly)…
Continue Reading →Jenny Had it Coming
("Girl with a Guitar (Daydreams)" by Richard E. Miller, 1916-17)
JENNY HAD IT COMING (Peter Jakobsen ©) A play in two acts CAST (A disparate group of thirty / forty-somethings) Alicia Harold Penelope Raymond Seth Sid ——- ACT ONE [Scene One: A dingy, untidy hospital waiting-room is set some degrees off centre-stage. It contains several seats, a low coffee table with magazines, a broken clock on the wall. A lavatory door and vending machine stand as sentries at the back. A Thomas Cole print, “Desolation”, (or similar, perhaps something apocalyptic by John Martin) is prominent on the wall, along with the inevitable public health notices. Swinging doors give onto the waiting…
Continue Reading →Black Lincoln Continental!
(photo c/- Joost J. Bakker)
You can keep your puerile, Ian Fleming-wet dreams about Aston Martins. Stow that yellow Rolls Royce and those Gatsby-roadsters. Forget fleets of pink Cadillacs and MGs in British racing green. My fantasy car is a 1973 Lincoln Continental Mark IV, with a moonroof and ‘opera windows’ (two little oval portholes in the back panels). 460 V-8 engine. Tinted windows; leather and cranberry-red Victoria velour interior. So jet-black that (as Douglas Adams would say) light just falls into it. I don’t care that this hulking beauty may not be so easy to dock in a crowded parking garage. I don’t care that the weight of the ’73 model (4,908…
Continue Reading →“You Don’t Own Me”
Songs in Our Heart # 74 You Don’t Own Me (Ormsby Bros. version) (written by John Madara and David White; released 1973) [We think Leslie Gore’s original version (of a decade earlier) is good but a little too strident for our taste. The cheerful, tousled-haired, antipodean answer to the Osmonds, The Ormsby Brothers, deliver a smoother, richer sound. Whilst Australia suffered through the Young Talent Time syndrome – kids singing adult songs, some creepily inappropriate, this one is pretty harmless and tuneful – male singers striking a blow for Mens’ (Boys’) Lib!]
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