Matchless in its Sydney Shell Sail Splendor, the Opera House is unrivalled as a Symbol: it is a threshold that presides over the old and the new world. The House of Sails is symbol of human ingenuity, technological genius, and touches the sailing dreams of every migrant in different ways.
That shell is more than a shell: it’s alive, it speaks to people. Some people come here to find themselves. Before the luminous shell icon wildness within Greiners, Lowys and Imrichs is one, a fragile one.
Happy Birthday to you! Creative & Unique SOH

Ah...Congratulations are in Order ABC!
Young Creative Australians Making Crazy Noise
Crazy Noise is a festival without tickets, venues or performances. Instead, it happens across the media – in print, on television, on the radio and here online. Tune in and check out stories throughout October on the ABC.
· Our ABC: Absolutely Priceless [ABC.Net (Australia)]

Deflation 2004AD Reserve Mon(k)ey
Prime Minister John Howard has warned people against taking out big mortgages amid fears that the housing bubble will burst soon and predictions of higher interest rates within months.
Investors can write off rental losses against tax and since 1999 pay tax on only half the capital gain when they sell. That, along with historically low interest rates and relaxed lending practices have encouraged the investment surge.
· Come Winter 2004 [Age, The]
· Cooling Market Madness? I Doubt It...More to Come Courtesy of Greed [ SMH]

Short Term Political Point Scoring
Rumours have been circulating all week that the former Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson is about to reveal in the Bulletin that a decade ago, the current Liberal aspirant Malcolm Turnbull was sent by the prime minister, Paul Keating, to canvass with the Senator For Kneecaps some future options...Taking self interest loaded leaf out of Wran's biographical books?

Labor, Liberal ... Politics Without Any Lines or Shames Top end of town turns out for the Turnbulls
For Sale Sign
Nobody here ever opens their own home for these functions other than for their own self-interest, no matter how altruistic they might appear to be. There was certainly the expectation there, that they could be called up to support Malcolm in some way or another.
· Rent a AAA-list crowd: Me, Myself and Michael in High Society Boys Do not Cry [SMH ]

Apathy in the Middle Players, Pollies, Pokies, Porkies: Powerless Always Suffer Most
Regretably, Poker Machines are the widely spread cancer across all ages in our modern Australia. What is wrong introducing card games such as bridge or canastas into club cultures rather than addictive armless bandits?
We could make a big difference in a tight election.
· Poker Players [SMH ]
· Rogue Robbers [4Corners ABC]

Carr's, (train driver's son), ship out message does not shape up. If John Howard had said what Bob Carr said last week about a series of shootings between people of Lebanese descent, he would have been crucified. He would have been accused of racism, Nazism, dog whistling, dividing the nation, channelling Pauline Hanson, exposing his black xenophophic heart, you name it.
[Sun Herald 19 October 2003]
· Shots that Shook Sydney [SMH ]

I Used to Work with Browns in Queen's Africa (and the Greenish Bear Pit)

Tim makes Antipodean bloggers laugh...Exclusive sense of humour.
As we walked to the Rock n' Roll museum in Cleveland last week we were joined by 50,000 or so others heading to the football stadium next door to watch the local team play. When my wife and I realised that the local team is known as "The Browns" we both looked at each other and said words to the effect of, "Imagine what Roy and HG would do to a football team called the 'The Browns'."
Same thing with a national transport company, UPS, who advertise heavily here. I presume because their vans and trucks are painted in a distinctive brown colour, they refer to themselves in their ads as simply "Brown": Brown does this, Brown does that, you can count on Brown for the other. One of their slogans I've heard in recent ads is, Brown Knows.
· See what happens when you don't have Roy and HG to keep you in line? [RoadtoSurfdom ]

For 19 years I've been so lucky to be with a ballerina who first kissed me under the lamp post at Circular Quay opposite the Opera House.
It seems symbolic, but we also got married on 20 October 1984, the year (of Orwell) Opera House celebrated its 11th birthday. 19 years is a long time to spend in any relationship, let alone a dangerously intimate one with Bohemian and Antipoedian mix. Every marriage, no matter how obscure and no matter how dynamic, has its own mesmerising raw energy. How many times have we found our selves in deep water over small and not so small issues? One of the symptoms of an approaching marriage breakdown is the belief that ones ego is terribly important. It is fatal to fall for the ego game. Ours is a great friendship because we are both survivors of numerous personal tragedies. Lauren has had the dysfunctional yet priviledged teenagehood and Granville rail disaster nightmares to cope with and my life was invaded by totalitarian tragedy before even I could swear: Kommunist ****. As painful as our journey have been, our ability to see tragedy and suffering as a constant source of redemption is what makes our friendship to thrive.
Having our first daughter born exactly 9 months after the Velvet Revolutiont is, perhaps, one of the most remarkable illustrations of how hope can spring from the most appalling of tragedies.

Sydney Opera House celebrates 30th birthday
Boats crammed the harbour and people crowded the foreshores as the Queen opened the Sydney Opera House on October 20, 1973. Those who worked on and in that magical building share their memories of its first 30 years.
· Under Full Sail [ ABC]
· Women & Men v Bambinos: The Heartland of Discontent [ SMH]

Sentence after sentence that I agree with and couldn't have said better myself...

Don't let them get away with murder
The Penrith Panthers (Sydney Footbal team living in fibro houses had beaten cafe Latte Eastern Surburbs silvertails) didn't think winning was an impossible dream, despite the odds! I don't have much hope at the moment for a top-down commitment to values of honesty and humanity. Even Simon Crean seems prepared to give Bush a standing ovation. How can he? What sort of leadership is that?
If the politicians won't behave properly, the people must challenge them - again and again. They are not ethereal beings but fallible, the same as the rest of us.
Can we please be a democracy rather than just pretend we live in one? Can we please start talking together rather than behaving as if discussing politics or human values is the equivalent of parading dirty underwear? Our politicians are answerable to us. Put your head above the parapet. Write to them, demand answers, ask them how they justify their decisions, organise your own forum. Don't let them get away with murder.
· Don't let them get away with murder [Margo Kingston: SMH]

Shires & Kingdoms
October 2003 AD, Dubya upgrades Australia from 'deputy' to 'Sheriff'.
The word sheriff descends from the old Anglo-Saxon term -shire reeve: 'shire- from OE (scir) - an administrative subdivision of the kingdom, a county...
One and only Mike (Ritzish) Carlton writes My old sixth-class teacher, John Beaky Morris, has sent me what he says is an old Ethiopian proverb that may be helpful when President Bush addresses Parliament in Canberra next week. When the aristocrat comes, the peasant bows low and farts silently, it goes.
· A local administrative agent of an Anglo Saxon king [Webdiary ]

Fox has long demonstrated a clearer commitment to changing public policy than to reporting it. People are proceeding from radically different sets of facts
· Some so different that they're altogether fiction [Washington Post]

Yesterday, Dr Mahathir ranted about how a few million Jews "rule the world". Will anybody listen this time?
Or will it all go unnoticed as it did 60 years ago? [SMH Letters (18 October 2003)]

Shames of Spiritual Battles
Malaysian PM Mahathir proclaimed that Jews ran the world Mahathir's speech is an absolute invitation for more hate crimes and terrorism against Jews. Politicians everywhere seem to be making and encouraqging racist remarks. The role of politicians is to make peace loving bambinos not war spinners! Let us dream...
· Final Defeat? [USToday ]
· French Victory? [Haaretzdaily ]
· The bottom has fallen out of Arab and Muslim support for the United States. [CS Monitor]

Enlightened Ministry
Church, like NSW Bear Pit, is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.
· Interactive rather than Shadow Ministry [Tim Bednar]
· NY Times Reporter Has Seen It All Before, and He's Still Pessimestic [Online JournalismviaScoop]

Canada: Of not From
FOI.net, a site maintained by Syracuse professor Alasdair Roberts. It tracks statistics and developments in Canadian freedom of information issues, and has a database of requests filed under Canada's Access to Information Act since 1999
· FYI [FOI]

Ding to a New Study
Tall people earn considerably more money throughout their lives than their shorter co-workers, with each inch adding about $789 a year in pay, according to a new study. If this is true, I should make a killing! Hmmmm..... At 6'3, I disagree, while Bill Gates is smiling all the way to his huge Library Room
· Height does matters for career success [Yahoo ]

Nightingale & Reid: Modern Flirting
Good lord, women and girls are more aggressive than they used to be. Reactionary Nostalgia alive...
After she resigned from her job as adviser on (flirting) women to Gough Whitlam, Liz Reid told a conference in Texas: If you don't **** the press, you won't get good press, and if you don't **** the cabinet ministers, you won't get your programs. If I turned up as a potential you-know-what, they at least listened.
· Girls Find Old Ways Did Have Their Charms [WashingtonPost ]

Our lives begin to end when we become silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King

The Two-Income Trap: Going broke over Lattes
Today's two-income family has 75 percent more earnings, inflation adjusted, than their parents had a generation ago. The reason, of course, is because today's average family has two people in the workforce, instead of one. But this year, more children will live through their parents' bankruptcy than their parents' divorce.
What they discovered shocked even themselves: the effort to keep the kids in a good school district when one parent is laid-off is the main factor driving Americans into bankruptcy court, not all those trips to the Niketown store.
· Foreclosures: Silent Shame [Salon ]
· Wealthy bosses have good reason to worry [SMH ]

The Soviet Republic of Texas
You might think America's rigged system of congressional elections couldn't get much worse...
What is clear, however, is that it will aggravate the triumph of extremes in Washington while further sovietizing America's already-fixed electoral game.
· Electoral Games [WashingtonPost.com]
· Don't Look Down (Under) [NYTimes Krugman]