New look archive here

This blog, as its title suggests, is an archive from my first WordPress blog covering the period April 2006 to November 2007. It continues “live” on New Lines from a Floating Life and on Ninglun’s Specials.

As of today the ten most popular posts and pages here are:

Two Australian poems of World War II 2,155 visits
Bill Heffernan! 1,819 — mainly for a picture of Elizabeth I
Assimilation, Integration, Multiculturalism 1,620
John Howard: bullying expert extraordinaire 1,523 — but not because of John Howard, I suspect
Does Tim Blair still do global warming jokes? 1,498
Book and DVD backlog 1,454
3 — Indigenous Australians 1,408
About 1,407
On the awkwardness (and fatuity?) of discussing religion 1,294
Friday Australian poem #17: Bruce Dawe, “Homecoming”  1,286

2007 in review: #2 — best pics used here in 2007

1. This one came from Creative Spark, an Oz in Singapore.

An old bloke

Lovely story of Election Day in Coffs Harbour NSW from Pip Wilson.

Did something happen last night?

Meanwhile, time for the seven day survey of the top individually visited posts and pages in the seven days to Saturday.

ENGLISH/ESL

Physical journeys and Peter Skrzynecki’s poems 615 visits
Workshop 02 — NSW HSC: Area Study: Imaginative Journeys 313
Studying the Gothic, or Emily Bronte? 215
How should I write up a Science experiment? 94
Physical journeys and Peter Skrzynecki’s poems updated 76

HERE

Bill Heffernan! 91
The connection has timed out — Firefox 85
Book and DVD backlog 80
John Howard: bullying expert extraordinaire 69
Is Australia a Christian country? 53

New taste (for me) and M’s travels

New taste

Coaching finishing a bit late last night I went to a tiny Uigur restaurant — a real hole in the wall — near the Entertainment Centre. They asked me if I wanted mild or spicy; I opted for mild — which was quite spicy enough for me. (Depends how much you like chilli.)

Gotcha!

Putting the temporary message at the head of each new post has worked a treat, though I did have to reword it so people on legitimate aggregators like Pinkboard didn’t get the wrong idea. What happens when I fill the first five lines or so with an instruction to report a blog scraper to Google Adsense may be seen below:

Sprung!

While I slept

There have been 115 visits to this blog and Oz Politics since midnight; it’s now around 8am. They come from all over.

Two passing thoughts

1. Small joys of blogging: right now someone in Kathmandu is reading Friday Australian poem #11: “Because” by James McAuley. Everyone should…

2. On tonight’s Compass I found myself most drawn to Inga Clendinnen, historian and atheist, and least to Jim Wallace.

I’m right-brain dominant

Why am I not surprised?

Left Brain	Right Brain
logical	random
sequential	intuitive
rational	holistic
analytical	synthesizing
objective	subjective
looks at parts	looks at wholes

 Just about everything I write here would confirm that.

Go to Which way? on Volacious.net and do a really good test.

Election 07

Well, just on a week to go now, and some are rather tired of it all. The consensus is that Howard is History, but that still may turn out to be “History-making” in winning yet another term and going on to break the Menzies record. For those who see that as your worst nightmare, take comfort in its unlikelihood, but still keep your fingers crossed.

Writing and readability

Pia Savage points out in her comment on the previous post that the “score” in those readability tests comes most likely from the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test. This has been around since John Howard was in short pants; we learned about it, and similar measures, in Dip Ed in 1964, and they were venerable then. The grade level is calculated with the following formula:

Obviously one cannot “fail” such a test, nor is it in itself a good or bad thing to get a particular result as the test totally ignores both meaning and context. That is a serious failing. Nonetheless, it is a useful indicator of the likelihood of communicating effectively.

I am however something of a fan of the Plain Language movement. I spent a very profitable year in 1978 studying Language Variation and Stylistics with Professor R D Eagleson, one of the Australian gurus of that movement. I attach his Writing in Plain English.

Writing in Plain English (PDF)

Actually this pleases me…

I have filed the pic here instead of using their code, by the way, to avoid the dodgy ad that accompanies this. I am sure WordPress would not approve. Neither do I… I take much comfort in the fact John Baker’s blog gets the same rating. So do Eteraz and Man of Lettuce, while Yawning Bread scores “Junior High” and Courting Destiny is “Elementary School”! All these are blogs whose styles I admire.

The literary genre of Acts. 1: Ancient Prologues

While this is on a “rationalist” blog, it is also excellent Biblical scholarship which fundamentalists really need to take seriously — indeed anyone interested in history or theology.

Yesterday’s Sunday lunch

The Shakespeare Hotel in Devonshire Street Surry Hills was the venue again. Simon H (who turned 50 a week ago!) was meant to join us, but was delayed; he did arrive in time for drinks.

Looking back I note the equivalent Sunday last year:

This very informative documentary was made for PBS in America and there is an equally informative website; Part 2 is on SBS next Sunday night.

Lord Malcolm recommended it to Sirdan and I as we pushed him in his wheelchair from the hospice to the fish restaurant, where we had an excellent lunch.

There will probably not be many more such excellent lunches.

That story continued until the beginning of June this year. Right now another friend is facing a rather ominous diagnosis, but I am not free to say more about that. And M has had a bad experience in South America; again I can’t go into it, but at least it was not life-threatening and isn’t a health issue. It may cut his trip short though.

Global warming a hoax? No, the hoax claim is a hoax…

Interesting.

See Global warming a hoax? No, the hoax claim is a hoax. Rush Limbaugh fell for it, though, as did several others who profess to be skeptical of global warming.