I just inter­viewed Neil Gaiman. It was one of those things where I was offered the inter­view and then went out to pitch it to someone, came back with a com­mis­sion to do an entirely dif­fer­ent story from the one I pitched (a sub-cul­tures story for Mel­bourne Magazine on…

Appar­ently, UN ‘peace­keep­ers’ have mas­sacred 23 people in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. On July 6th, more than 300 heav­ily armed UN troops car­ried out a full-blown mil­it­ary attack on a densely-pop­u­lated sec­tion of Port-au-Prince. Mul­tiple sources con­firm the “peace­keep­ers”…

Howard apo­lo­gies to Rau and Solon over wrong­ful deten­tion. And he’s making changes to the staff in the Depart­ment. Van­stone’s keep­ing her job and of course, she’s said this has noth­ing to do with Aus­trali­a’s policy on asylum seekers. Of course not. These cases, she…

Assor­ted clips from Fox News in response to the bomb­ings in London. I’m not sure if I’m more hor­ri­fied by the guy who says his first thought was “time to buy” on the stock­mar­ket or the com­ment­at­ors who express dis­gust that global warm­ing and African aid were higher on…

1. Five arres­ted at Queer Col­lab­or­a­tions protest in Perth [1 | 2]. I’ve been read­ing the first-hand state­ments some of the people there have made for the police and it sounds pretty heavy handed. So much for the free­dom to asso­ci­ate! [nb: this post has been edited] 2.…

Ross Git­tens on Howard’s IR reforms in the Sydney Morn­ing Herald. If you’re at all con­fused about what’s going on or just want more inform­a­tion, Git­tens ana­lyses the Howard Gov­ern­ment’s claims in week­end advert­ise­ments, one by one, clearly and shockingly.

Lab-grown meat on its way. Ah, sweet sci­ence fic­tion future. There you are! I’m intrigued: qamar and other vegetarians/political eaters out there. Would you eat lab-grown meat?

As the protests and repres­sion were taking place on the streets of Scot­land, a summit to deliver Africa into the arms of the G8’s cor­por­a­tions and aban­don the (already heav­ily com­prom­ised) Kyoto treaty cli­mate change was also hap­pen­ing behind the fences and armed…

The BBC aired foot­age of people’s mobile phone video. That’s not what used to be con­sidered ‘broad­cast qual­ity’. I star­ted to get into dis­cus­sions with people in journ­al­ists about how Wikinews and Wiki­pe­dia can or can’t be cred­ible sources given their collaborative…

So… I’m help­ing to update the Wikinews report on the recent London bomb­ing. I’m find­ing this to be a fas­cin­at­ing pro­cess. I typed in the G8 state­ment as I heard it on Aus­tralian TV, checked the spelling and posted it in order to get it there ASAP. Before I had a…

Com­pletely rearranged my lib­rary. I do this peri­od­ic­ally as I have a tend­ency to use it as stor­age space rather than a real room, so I go through peri­ods of chan­ging it to a harem-like read­ing room with cush­ions to make it more enti­cing or shift it to be a more…

Went to open­ing night of Mel­bourne Theatre Com­pany’s King Lear. It was a fairly tra­di­tional ren­der­ing trans­posed into modern-day clothes (kings and courtiers as rich besuited cor­por­ate bosses, inter­est­ing cast­ing of Aaron Ped­er­sen as Edmund) with a very ver­sat­ile set.…