Tim Blair updates the Australian version of the English language.
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Unknown medical receptionist, explaining to Will Luke his chances of actually finding a doctor working in his local surgery. June 29th, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Most Americans it seems do not give a hoot about the World Cup starting in Germany next weekend. That is a shame, because they have a good team and a chance of making it through to the second round. They may not be the most talented team in the world but they are very good at making the most of what they have got. That is in stark contrast to Australia, where it seems that despite not knowing much at all about soccer, the country is going over the top with enthusiasm with an over-inflated idea of the national team’s chances. Team USA has a hard group, but with Italy in turmoil, the way is open for an American ambush. They have the ability and nous to do so. Much of the credit for that can be credited to their manager, Bruce Arena. The New York Times has done a interesting feature on him, and his team. You’ll have to be quick to read the full story given how quickly the NY Times shoves things behind its firewall, but here’s a taster… → Continue reading: Bruce Arena’s views on Truth, Justice and the American way of playing soccer June 4th, 2006 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
A huge contingent of police and MI5 officers descended on a London house overnight and arrested its occupants who are suspected of developing a chemical bomb to use in a terrorist attack. One suspect was shot in the shoulder during the raid. Meanwhile in Toronto, Canada, twelve men have been arrested in a raid where the suspects were thought to be assembling an ammonium nitrate bomb, having allegedly assembled three tonnes of the stuff. June 3rd, 2006 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
I had not heard about the Seattle Public Schools fiasco until I read about it on Natalie Solent’s blog. If, like me, you have not been keeping up with statist nonsense out of the Pacific North-West of the United States, the Seattle Public Schools administration defined cultural racism thusly:
Following much-merited riducule from bloggers and exposure in the media, the Seattle Public Schools district has beat a hasty retreat. However, we know that they will be back, with a similar sort of attempt to smear their political opponents. Natalie Solent made the point:
So anyone that subscribes to an individualist philosphy of any kind is clearly on notice; left-wing statists will continue to try to use intellectual gymnastics like this to try to silence Republicans, libertarians, Conservatives or anyone else opposed to their agenda. The racist smear is ideal for this. Part of the point of Samizdata.net is to counteract nonsense like this. on the sidebar it says what we are about:
“developing the social individualist meta-context for the future” means, in part, creating an intellectual climate where nonsense like that peddled by the Seattle public schools board is treated with the laughable contempt that it deserves. It is true that we have a long way to travel, but every day has its own task. June 3rd, 2006 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
While reading about the Seattle Public Schools fiasco, I also spotted this op-ed by Andrew Coulson, who made a very good point about public education in general.
Read the whole thing. June 3rd, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tickets for the Ashes series of cricket Test matches in the Australian summer went on sale yesterday to unprecedented levels of demand. Interest in cricket contests between England and Australia, which have a long history (the first series of Test matches was in 1877) is at an all time high in the wake of England’s winning the 2005 series. The return contest in the Australian summer of 2006/07 has been eagerly awaited ever since. The demand for tickets was expected to be strong, but Cricket Australia’s ticketing system was overwhelmed by the public’s response. I was not surprised by that. As is now traditional, the travelling English support is likely to be tremendous. Even when English sporting teams have been uncompetitive, their travelling supporters have stuck by them; in 2006 England’s football and cricket teams are doing quite well and naturally England’s supporters want to be there for the good times. Thanks to the Internet and air travel, now they can be, and in greater numbers then ever. This is not exactly welcomed by Australia’s cricket administrators. They fondly imagined that they could sell out their stadia to domestic audiences, rake in the cash, and wave the patriotic flag and all the usual sentimental blather. They forget that, for all its history, cricket is an entertainment, and a business. Cricket administrators sell entertainment in the form of television rights and seats at stadia. And of course when you mismanage your pricing, one of two things happen. Either you don’t sell your tickets at all, or they become so valuable that profits can be made by reselling them. The latter is happening in this case. And Cricket Australia CEO is not happy about it:
Scalping on this scale indicates that there’s a severe underestimation of the financial value of the tickets. It’s a bit rich, also, to see an implied threat against purchasers of EBay tickets as well. Once Cricket Australia has sold the tickets, they are the property of whoever owns them, and the owner has the natural right to use them, sell them on EBay, or use them as Christmas decorations if they so wish. It is disappointing, but not entirely surprising, that the CEO of a private commercial organisation such as Cricket Australia does not know, or understand, the basics of property rights. June 2nd, 2006 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
Driving through Adelaide this morning, I idly turned my radio on, not something I normally do. But I happened to hear the South Australian police minister explaining to a couple of bemused hosts that the government here had made the possession of crossbows illegal. The radio hosts were bemused, not so much because of yet another assault on the tattered remains of Australian liberty, but because crossbows hardly seem like a problem hereabouts. It is not like you see gangs of youths roaming the streets with crossbows, after all. The minister explained that there was a case in New South Wales a few years back and the government was keen to clear up ‘loose ends’. Apparently you can still possess one if you can prove you have a ‘lawful use’ for it; the Australian notion of liberty is that you are free as long as you enjoy the good grace of the powers that be. Youths are hardly likely to be carrying crossbows, but they may well be carrying knives. I read this morning’s Daily Telegraph and came across an op-ed calling for a crackdown on knives, which are becoming a serious problem. Going by some of the comments to that op-ed, it’s a fairly popular idea with the ‘Torygraph’s’ readers as well. To be fair, Shaun Bailey does point the finger at the weakness of the criminal justice system, which is causing young people to take to knife ownership with such enthusiasm. However, he also blames ‘culture’, which sounds to me like the old leftist excuse whenever someone did the wrong thing; that ‘society is to blame’.
I am certainly no expert on ‘popular culture’, but I would question the idea that ‘culture’ forces anything on young people. Cultural industries like magazines and music and television programs really are businesses just like any others; they have to respond to what the market is asking for. The point is that cultural industries are a lagging indicator, not a leading one. What would change the culture is a change in society so that perpetrators of criminal behaviours face the full consequence of their actions; I suspect that would have a far greater impact on ‘youth culture’ then any ‘initiative’ to meddle with our culture; or to take away from lawful citizens their legitimate right to defend themselves. Which is where sloppy thinking like Shaun Bailey’s op-ed will take us to. June 1st, 2006 | 52 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was interested to read Condoleeza Rice’s remarks about Iran which flagged the possibility of the US joining the European “Group of Three”‘s so far futile talks with Iran about that country’s nuclear weapons program. While answering questions from reporters, Ms Rice seemed to imply that there was some sort of ‘understanding’ with Russia and China on this issue:
A very good understanding, huh? I can not imagine what understanding that the United States could come up with that that would compensate Russia for oil being north of $70 a barrell. Needless to say, Iran has accepted the US offer with conditions of its own, namely that it will continue its business with nuclear research at its own pace. The slow slide towards US surrender on this issue is starting to gather a momentum of its own. June 1st, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Chinese Taipai, or Taiwan, or the Republic of China; whatever you call it, you have to admit that the small electronic island has some of the best legislators in the world. Not because they are particularly wise or sensible, but rather, they are perhaps the best exponents of the ‘scrummage’ school of legislative thought. The proceedings of the Parliament there are frequently punctuated by brawls, biffs, and other exciting interruptions. And they have been at it again:
In Australia, although there is plenty of legislation going about, I fear it has almost zero nutritional value. However, I applaud Ms Wang Shu-Hui’s novel approach to legislation and I think it should be adopted in legislatures throughout the world. May 31st, 2006 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sometime Samizdatista and now Texan, Alice Bachini, has some thoughts on advertising on blogs.
I will have to leap into the defense of advertisers here, on openness grounds. I think that if there’s a big flashy banner involved on someone’s blog, you can be sure that money traded hands. And like Dr. Johnson, I have faith in the innocence of those who are out to make money. Mind you, I think you have to be a fairly large blog to make advertising worth your while. I had ‘google ad-sense’ on my old sport blog, and that did not make any money for me even though I was getting 400 or so readers a day. Not a lot, but it is no easy task to start a blog from scratch and get 400 readers a day. But I will agree with Alice Bachini that the aesthetics are just awful on many blogs. Those huge ‘pajamas media™’ ads one sees around the place look dreadful. It is not for the likes of a humble mortal such as I to guess at the complex and elevated deliberations of the mighty. However, if the Editorial Pantheon ever do decide to go down the advertising road, I do hope they will not disfigure the stylish nature of this page in the process. May 25th, 2006 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
An alteration of my domestic arrangements is afoot, and that caused me to have to relocate a bookcase today, so to do this, I had to empty the case of its books. Deep in the depths, I came across a tattered dictionary. Because I am the sort of idler that will do anything to avoid work, even to the extreme of reading a dictionary, I opened it. In faint pencil, the name ‘Jack Wickstein, Port Augusta, 1928’ was written. It had been my grandfather’s. I wonder if it was a gift. Those were different times when you would give a young man of 20 a dictionary. However because he’d spent much of his childhood interned on the family farm, he never got a complete education, and he was the sort of fellow that never stopped trying to improve himself. So maybe the dictionary was not so illogical a gift after all. In the wake of the Great War, Jack’s Father had issued a family edict that henceforth the family was to avoid looking or sounding German, and an excellent command of the English language was a good way to go about this. The dictionary itself is rather odd. The first pages are a series of colour plates devoted to underwater sea life. Then a list of worthies who contributed to the articles in the dictionaries. The names mean nothing to me, but the Universities were, and are, the cream of New England learning. I read the Introduction. One passage sprang out at me.
Thus wrote the editor, Joseph Devlin, in 1925. Eighty years into the future, and his optimism about the future of the English language seems, if anything, to have been restrained. However, it is also a sign of the times that it is rare, if not impossible, to see such rampant optimism about the future in print. Oh well. Blogging about it will not get the chores done. Back to work I go… May 23rd, 2006 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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