What I’m reading, and more

John Quiggin7 Comments

River of Gods by Ian MacDonald. It’s set in a politically fragmented India in 2047. Very promising so far. My plan is to read all the nominees for the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the only one left now is Charles Stross Iron Sunrise, which I’m looking forward to, as I enjoyed Singularity Sky.

Also on the SF front, I started off liking the new series of Dr Who, but now I’m getting annoyed. He can travel as far as he wants through time and space, but he hardly ever seems to leave London or to move more than about 100 years away from the present. OK, he went to Cardiff once, but he could just as well have taken the train. And it seems like just about every episode involves some variant on zombies/bodysnatchers. Not that I have anything against zombies and bodysnatchers, but couldn’t we have a bit of variation: say, sharks with laser-beams attached to their foreheads?

I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much, as the Doctor clashes with the football, meaning that I’ve been tuning in at quarter-time. Last night that was a mercy, I guess, though it left me trying to work out what went wrong in a game that (for the 75 minutes I saw) was very evenly matched. But in future, I think I’ll be watching the whole game.

More seriously, I’m working on reviews of Affluenza and The End of Poverty. I hope to have drafts of these up on the blog before too long. I also read and enjoyed Deirdre Macken’s Oh, No! We Forgot to Have Children. I assume the title is an allusion to this classic image

Blogs on the front page

John Quiggin2 Comments

Both literally and metaphorically in today’s AFR (subscription required). There’s a frontpage story about a defamation action taken by a car dealer against the creator of a “dealerxsucks.com” site. The inside continuation of the story shares the page with a piece about Technorati and its woes, and the likelihood that one of the big search companies will make a takeover. And further on there’s a 1.5 page feature article lamenting the boringness of corporate blogs.

As I said in my Festival of Ideas piece, it’s striking that innovation is now flowing from the household sector (bloggers typing stuff in their spare room/study/lounge) to the business and government sectors rather than vice versa.

Water, again

John Quiggin43 Comments

My piece on water in last week’s Fin (over the fold) got a couple of interesting responses. Before talking about that, thanks as usual to everyone who help me sort out my thoughts and particularly to Jason Soon at Catallaxy who noticed the interesting difference of views between Costello and Howard on the issue of urban-rural water trade.

One response was a letter from Gary Nairn, Howard’s Parliamentary Secretary, backing away a bit from the comments I quoted and criticised here and in the Fin piece. This was interesting, as I don’t often get ministerial responses to Fin pieces, and my criticism was pretty moderate. I suspect it was not so much the criticism of Howard as the praise of Costello that elicited this.

Also a writer from Canberra argued that, rather than buying water from Murray irrigators (the ultimate recipients of flows from Tantangara) Canberra should simply take more out of Googong Dam and leave less for the Murrumbidgee irrigators downstream. I’ll need to look up the relevant agreements to see who is supposed to own this water. Independent of who pays, though, there’s the argument as to whether extra water for Canberra is better sourced from the Murray or from the Murrumbidgee. I’ll need to look at this again.
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Unexplained spam

John Quiggin5 Comments

Comment spam seems to be resurgent at present, disappointingly since the nofollow tag ought to make it pointless. I deleted a whole bunch of the usual stuff today, at least the fraction that got through the Textdrive outer defences and my moderation rules. But there were a few I couldn’t make much sense of, like this one

I can’t work out what gives here. The spurious poster links back to msn.com, presumably not the source of this spam. Can anyone explain this to me.

Back in Brisbane

John Quiggin12 Comments

After a month in which I seem to have been travelling more often than not, and cold almost constantly, I’m settled back in Brisbane, enjoying, as Tex Morton put it[1] “our beautiful climate! Where we never see ice or snow!” I was talking to a taxi-driver who mentioned that he’d been attracted to Queensland by this song, also a favourite in my household.

fn1. Or, more precisely, pinched it, from Pappy O’Daniel

Asleep on the job

John Quiggin27 Comments

I’m not a huge fan of scandals, and I haven’t followed the Plame spy scandal very closely. Still, anyone who reads blogs has known for at least a week that Karl Rove, Bush’s closest advisor, leaked the name of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative, as part of a political vendetta against her husband, Joseph Wilson. Bush has presumably known this for many months, the media similarly have known for a long time, and so on. This is a serious offence, at a minimum requiring Rove’s resignation. Yet the average American, reliant on the mass media knows nothing about it, and, as noted at Obsidian Wings there seems to have been no interest in finding out about it.

The NYT has finally woken up to the story, but what took them so long?

If I thought this meant that US journalists were going to give up covering scandal and focus on serious issues, I’d be cheering them on, but there’s no indication of this. Instead, as with the Downing Street memos, the Washington press seems to have been cowed into silence by the Bush machine.

A pleasant surprise

John Quiggin9 Comments

While I was in Adelaide for the Festival of Ideas, the Advertiser ran a piece I wrote on blogs and wikis, aimed at a general audience (it’s over the fold). I was going out for breakfast the next day, and the guy behind the counter said “Don’t you write for the Advertiser?”. It turned out he’d read my piece which ran with a small picture of me from the News Limited archives, used as a dinkus.

What was particularly nice about this was that they used quite an old (that is, young) photo, so it seems age is not wearying me too much.
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