The USA gets a bad rap in the rest of the world. But I unashamedly love America. I lived there for two years with my wife and three young children. Although their politics and health care might be problematic, and their ultimate freedom can be described in a Clint Eastwood way as ‘The Good, The […]
Mental Illness Is A Metaphor
March 27, 2011 by
When I was a young man, working through a medical course in the 1960s, there were 10,000 psychiatric beds in the State of Victoria. That is, in a population of about 3 million. Now our population has doubled and the number of psychiatric beds has fallen by about 80%. We spent weeks and weeks’ as […]
There Is No Limit To This Moment
March 26, 2011 by
I would like to thank Fritjof Capra. Like millions of others since 1975, I own a copy of The Tao Of Physics. I have the 1982 Flamingo paperback edition, pages dog-eared and yellowed, cluttered with scribbles and highlights, re-read often. The subtitle of this book summarizes its attractiveness: ‘An exploration of the parallels between modern […]
Point Your iPad At The Sky
March 24, 2011 by
Michael Leunig is an official ‘Australian Living Treasure’. He is best known for his minimalist, laconic cartoons, often without captions, which do seem to capture many of our insecurities. Sometimes they don’t work. Often they do and we are enthralled. Although opinions vary, I feel one of his best depicts a father and his young […]
No Definitely Good News At All
March 22, 2011 by
Eric Blair is a gentle name, and it’s hard to believe that an Eric Blair was, inter alia, a policeman, a tramp, a wounded soldier, and a (sort-of) revolutionary. This bio might fit a name such as Che Guevara or George Patton, but an Eric Blair? However, Eric had another life, and using the nom-de-plume […]
And This Image We Call Time
March 20, 2011 by
People spend a lot of time thinking about Time. I’ve just searched Amazon books for ‘time management’ and there are 17,283 entries. From ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’ (in your dreams) to ‘Getting Things Done’. The seductive titles are bespattered with noble nouns which are all attractive, and all relate to managing Time: Happiness, Discipline, Strength, […]
