Category Archive: Uncategorized
Look Homeward, Angel (Vale Della Reese)
Della Reese (July 6, 1931 – November 19, 2017) had a 60 year odd career as singer, actress, TV host and Minister of Religion. These talents combined in her most most lasting work, as Angel-in-Chief Tess in the series Touched by an Angel. In the first episode of Touched by an Angel that I saw, the lovely angel Monica (Roma Downey) was talking to a troubled woman out the front of her house at night. The woman’s sadly neglected child was inside playing with matches (we knew it but the mother didn’t and somehow the angel didn’t either). When a handsome…
Continue Reading →The Cars That Ate Reason
Mitsubishi folded car manufacturing in Australia in 2008. Last year, Ford closed. This October, Holden closed its plant at Elizabeth, with stacks of local workers shown the door and associated industries going to the wall. It is not as if we made crap cars. It wasn’t from lack of an enthusiastic local market for Holdens and Fords. And it’s not as if the good old Aussie taxpayer hadn’t stumped-up its fair share of subsidised cash to keep the embers glowing. Market forces are many and varied. But they tend to follow immutable, organic, rules. When organised car-making started up in…
Continue Reading →We Won a Battle – Are We Losing the War?
“I have of late, lost all my mirth, Such that this goodly frame, the earth Seems to me a sterile promontory; Golden fire frets roof in glory Majestical, but foul and pestilent, Vapours gather, and are spent. What a piece of work is man! When he formulates a plan ‘Gainst nature, how very like a god! He presses boots so heavily shod Upon his fellow, so that he will learn That everyone must have their turn Or, dust and ashes, all will burn.” (with apologies to William Shakespeare) October 2017: One hundred years ago Lenin issued his famous call to arms and ‘the people’ (well,…
Continue Reading →From the Inside
Songs in Our Heart # 86 From the Inside (Marcia Hines) (written by Artie Wayne; released October 1975) [Marcia shone in heaps of songs, including this lush, soulful classic from the fabulous 70s. There’s a tricky lyric structure here that many pop singers couldn’t overcome easily – Marcia does it without raising a sweat. Go on, girl!] “Urging me on, and making me strong You kept on saying Go on girl you can do it, It’s only life There’s nothing to it, no…”
Continue Reading →Wish We’d Said That
Photo of Wilde by Napoleon Sarony (1882)
Oscar Wilde (16 October 1854 to 30 November 1900) The Divine Oscar is recalled daily by defamation lawyers, cautioning their prospective clients. But we prefer to recall his playfulness, his essential kindness, and gargantuan wit. Richard Ellmann, in his biography of Wilde (1987), said of him that he “had to live his life twice over, first in slow motion, than at top speed. During the first period he was a scapegrace, during the second a scapegoat…His language is his finest achievement. It is fluent with concession and rejection. It takes what has been ponderously said and remakes it according to…
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