Like a clean set of bed sheets, Australia’s Labor pollies have opted to freshen up the cabinet and air out the House of Reps, voting to pull Kevin Rudd from PM and replace him with Julia Gillard early yesterday morning in a midnight coup. The first question… Read full post »

It had it all: glitter, falsies, tears, betrayal, a birthing montage, Olivia Newton John and Journey. The Glee finale was everything we expected, yet the emotion was as fleeting as an audience on 42^nd street after a show.

Glee has danced between parody and unabashed… Read full post »

The haircut is anticipated for months – months beyond whenever the last hairdresser told you a haircut was required to maintain their artistic vision – and fanciful visions of pampering, fancy chemical smells and sublime hair ensue in the days and hours prior. I always f… Read full post »

Hegemony, mixed peel and other cultural delicacies

Lesotho: so that’s where it is

Reductionism for the busy gentleman

Countries that graciously owe legislative thanks to the American constitution, and polite ways to bring them up

Twenty synonyms for fried potato patties in… Read full post »

The film cognoscenti are split on “Hot Tub Time Machine”: for some, the inanity and complete circumvention of plot deserves no more than a shake of the head; for others, the bravado with which John Cusack and production team tackle a premise the width of a clothesline peg… Read full post »

The novelty of going from 60 degree weather to having your daffodil bulbs puked on by a chundering spring snow storm cannot be underestimated, particularly when the fabled “snow day” is invoked by Corporate. Of course, I had a meeting that I couldn’t enable remote… Read full post »

A brief comment on the reporting around the "hurling" of "racial epithets" at members of the Black Caucus, including Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who was also spat upon. Obviously the behavior of the Tea Party needs no additional comment from me - these people must be very confused, very… Read full post »

Nothing conveys the tight weave of American society better than the perennially denim-clad butts-under-God, indivisible, who make a point of saying, “Here I am. Observe my curve. Give me your tired, your pert, your heaving saddles yearning to walk free.”

The Amer… Read full post »

So much fuss about HFCS. So much stock photography of fat torsos clutching soda cups. Someone is going to give America a complex. Today, I wish to speak of the String Bean belt.

Stretched lithely from Seattle to Portland, and wisping down to San Diego… Read full post »

It is time to celebrate the corporate spirit industrial complex; a niche market that has spawned millions of low thread-count polo shirts, logoed biros with curiously short ink lifespans, coffee mugs, free bagel Fridays, quarterly management heart-to-hearts and great, monolithic, framed panoramas of… Read full post »

An Australian grandma ploughing through her nineties has long trumpeted her dislike of ATMs, to the point where she still won’t use one – a choice facilitated by the availability in her small, country town of a local branch where she knows everyone by name. Last I heard, she had come… Read full post »

Open letter from Examiner James Fughall to the driving instructor of Janet Manley-Norkin:

To whom it may concern,

I had the recent pleasure of accompanying Ms. Manley-Norkin on a routine driving test in Denver’s southeast. I became apprehensive on sight of her unloading a… Read full post »

Americans are not an embarrassed people. This perhaps contributes to their hardy pitch and lofty decibel of speech. In my early days in the U.S., constant calls for an increase in my spoken volume only reddened my cheeks further, my utterances seemingly stark naked in conversation, ripe for the ridic… Read full post »

Having aborted several blogs, I decided to take on a subject matter greater, more profound, than myself. The American sub-continent seemed apt, as I had just passed through the second anniversary of contiguous living in the U.S. Moreover, I am plagued with conversation bombes that begin "it's funny,… Read full post »