This year, I had as close to a classic Oz Xmas as I can remember. At the beach, in Sydney, with prawns and pavlova for Xmas dinner. The atmosphere at the beach was great, with no hint of the troubles a couple of weeks ago, and no-one interested in much more than getting wet, grabbing a wave or two and soaking up some sun.

Admittedly I was staying at Avalon, about as far from Cronulla as you can get and still be in Sydney, but the scene was just the same all up and down the coast as far as I could tell. And even in that fairly Anglo stretch of the coast, the beach crowd was diverse, including a sprinkling of hajibs along with more traditional beach attire (or lack thereof).

Great prezzies too. I got a facsimile version of the last incomplete voyage of Aubrey and Maturin from my younger son, and, from my older son and his wife a high-tech corkscrew, guaranteed to uncork the old Black Stump Bordeaux at a rate of three seconds per bottle. Came in very handy as you can imagine. Plus A Hundred Years of Solitude, which I’ve never read, from my wife, along with more from Margaret Atwood and Shirley Hazzard.

A great time was had by all, and a slow return to normality is indicated.

I’m always interested in new ways to raise money for charitable causes using blogs. Tim Worstall has a plan which involves referral bonuses for those signing up for Google’s Adsense account. If you’re thinking of including ads on your site, you can do a bit of good on the way.

A big statistical milestone, and a well-earned standing ovation, for Lanard Copeland, who racked up his 10 000th point in the NBL in the course of a nailbiting 110-107 win for the Bullets over the Cairns Taipans. Most of those were scored in his long and illustrious career with the Melbourne Tigers, but he’s still averaging 10 points per game coming off the bench for Brisbane.

… on the Bullets, they came out with the kind of form that everyone was predicting at the beginning of the season, crushing the Adelaide 36ers 130-109. And it was a game to watch, with McKinnon scoring some massive slams and an impressive alleyoop (via Rucker), Rucker scoring four three-point shots in succession and Black, Bradtke and Brannen all doing amazing things. If anything the scoreline flattered Adelaide, who scored 37 points in the third quarter but even then did not look at all like a winning team.

If they can keep this up, they’ll be contenders. If not, at least this match means the season wasn’t a total wipeout for me.

The Socceroos are finally through to the World Cup, after beating Uruguay 1-0 last night, then winning a penalty shootout. They certainly deserved the win, dominating most of the game, while the Uruguayans mostly seemed happy enough to hold the goal difference down to one (though they still came close to scoring in extra time, against the run of play).

Although the shootout was exciting to watch, and we got the result, I can’t help feeling this is an unsatisfactory way of resolving a tied game (or, in this case, a tied series). I’d prefer more extra time, maybe with a rule change like sending the goalkeepers off.

Joanne Jacobs points to this emergency evacuation of Brisbane public transport apparently in response to an anonymous terrorist threat, which appears to have been a false alarm. She notes the way the story evolves in successive news editions.

Mark Bahnisch comes out against daylight saving, arguing that, in Brisbane’s summer weather it’s better to finish work after sunset.

I’m generally in favour as I tend to wake up with the sun. Because Brisbane is so far east (we’re not far from Byron Bay), sunrise in summer is very early – it’s light before 5am. In some ways, that’s good (it’s a great time to get work done), but not if you want to stay up past about 9pm. It gets dark pretty early, around 6:30.

I suspect that daylight saving here does little more than restore the time in Brisbane to what it would be under “God’s time”, without time zones or other fiddles.

The problem is, of course, that the state is big in both directions. The tropics have very little seasonal variation in the length of the day, which makes daylight saving in summer nonsensical while the west has the opposite problem to Brisbane. But given that we have to have one time zone for the whole state (an internal border would be ludicrous), we should pick it to suit the majority, who live in the Southeast corner.

Of course, anyone who really doesn’t like daylight saving could leave their watch unchanged, stick to their old schedules as far as possible, and just bear in mind that everyone else is using a different time. The reverse is true in the present situation if you really like daylight saving.

Everybody loves league tables, especially when they do well. A couple of people (Graeme Halford and Jack Strocchi) pointed me to the Times Higher Education Supplement university league tables. Unfortunately the tables themselves are behind a paywall, but those ranked highly have not been quiet about it. The University of Queensland is ranked in the top 50 in the world and, for the social sciences, comes in at number 25. (It’s a bit annoying, by the way that the UQ press release runs first on the #29 ranking in biomedical science, and lists social sciences as an also-ran)

This is a pretty impressive ranking, though I’d be interested to see the criteria that put 17 Australian universities in the world’s top 200, compared to 54 in the US and 24 in Britain. It seems to overstate our relative importance, and to suggest that we are punching way above our weight. Still, the THES doesn’t seem likely to suffer from pro-Australian bias.

The Weekend Fin (registration only) quotes Gloria Jean’s executive chairman, Nabi Saleh, as complaining that his competitors sold lousy coffee. Saleh wants to establish some sort of trade body to squeeze out independent competition.

My view is summed up by the AFR’s exercise in voxpop. They asked a couple in a Sydney GJ’s. The wife said you could get as good or better at plenty of plenty of places in their hometown of Bowral (not the sticks but not exactly the centre of cafe culture either), while the husband generously allowed

This isn’t the worst coffee I’ve had though. That was in the army

It seems appropriate to me, in a variety of ways, that GJ’s is closely associated with Hillsong Church.