The fuss over Ender's Game

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is a terrific sci-fi book. It's about ultra-intelligent children being trained to defend the earth in a space war against alien invaders. That could be the plot of a really empty action story, but there's...

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Discipline

Around us is an invisible ecosystem of spirit creatures. Tom Corloni is one of the few people who can see them. But this gift means that they notice him in return - and he looks delicious. In order to protect himself from magical predators,...

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Koh Samui

"Thailand stinks," says Barry, an English ex-pat who's lived here and loved it for six years. "You'll walk down the street and go fwooar, what's that pong? It's the sewers leaking or someone's taken a dump in a bucket behind the shops." "But...

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Why Germans are airtight

Some final random thoughts about Germany, from a German-descended Australian who's visiting his German wife's family. Housing Every German home I've visited is essentially airtight. The doors aren't just a rectangular slab like...

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Fun parks and recreation

We have spent the last fortnight in Celle, Germany, visiting with my wife's family. It's a town of around 80,000 people in Lower Saxony, in the north of the country. When we're not visiting with family, we're looking for "family...

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Erse Park

(VIDEO)  We just went to Erse Park in Uetze, Germany. This is a fun place with rides, life sized model dinosaurs, and a whole lot of truly weird shit. German fairy tales are clearly meant to frighten children into silence at night...

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German observations

Thoughts on Germany and Germans, from an Australian bloke with a German name and a German wife. The Roads The Germans are much smarter than us about speed limits, which are slower in town and faster on the freeways. Australians, myself...

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Roaming across Europe

Well, a little bit of it, anyway. Five of us - three adults and two children - have stuffed our gear into a VW wagon and made our way from France to Germany, via Italy and Austria. The highway system that links these countries is consistently...

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The old master

Today we walked up the hill, rising from our seedy city neighbourhood through several social strata to the Musee Matisse. Between the museum building itself and the little cafe outside, there's an absolute rarity - empty space. This...

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Viva la di'France

A French road and a French footpath are more or less the same thing. One has mainly cars and the other mainly pedestrians, but that's mostly a matter of convenience and relative sizes. After less than a week here, it's no longer...

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Hobart to Nice

I'm on holiday. A long break overseas - landing in France, driving into Germany, then flying home via Thailand. Getting here meant 30 hours in transit with a three year old. He did pretty well, though there's a certain level of exhausting...

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Commercial demos

I spent the first decade of my career in commercial radio, doing just about everything that a radio station has to offer. But I spent most of it being a copywriter - writing ads as a part of each station's sales team. I did this in Canberra at FM104.7 / 2CA and then at Canberra FM. After that I moved to Sydney, becoming Creative...

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Dark Mofo beaming up

Let me lay this out for you... MONA is the Museum of Old and New Art, a wacky new museum here in Hobart. MONA FOMA is the MONA Festival of Old and New Art, an annual arts fest which happens here each January.  This is usually shortened to Mofo. And Dark Mofo is the brand new mid-winter arts festival they've just launched...

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Queensland reporting

So the ABC has sent me to Queensland as a recovery reporter, talking to the people around the Wide Bay area about how they're getting on since the January floods. It's an important part of Local Radio's work, so I've done plenty of radio...

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In defence of old fashioned shoe polish

Will you please polish your goddamned shoes? I am sick to death of looking at them. Those devil-may-care scuff marks are like patches of ignorance spreading across the leather. And don't use that pretend polish liquid shit that comes...

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Review - "A Memory of Light" by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

I loved the first few books in this series - they were well written, well imagined, and populated with very distinct characters. Like most fantasy readers, I love getting lost in another world, so I even appreciated their vast size. But...

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