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Librarianship, like other disciplines, has its seasons and its personalities. Warren Horton will take his place as one of the great figures in the history of the profession in Australia

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Bridging cultures with books
Whether their parents read them fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, or even encouraged them to explore Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, most Japanese have been exposed to overseas literature from an early age, and many go on to discover the likes of Tolkien, L.M. Montgomery, Michael Ende and J.K. Rowling for themselves -- mostly in Japanese.
· If there is a search in 'Out,' [like the usual mystery formula], it's a search for an exit, a way out, for women living desperate lives. That is what 'Out' is about. All that makes it highly original [link first seen at Szirine: NYC, Berlin, Amsterdam]
· See Also Blowing Off Steam of inhumanity...
· See Also Andrew Wylie: An international agent argues for a global approach to selling serious literature
· See Also Jeanette Winterson: Of love and other demons
· See Also In July 1980 it was time to hit the Escape key; Pandora: Creation of National Library of Australia
Loch Imrich Imrigh \Im"righ\, n. [Scot.; Gael. un-bhrigh chicken soup.] A peculiar strong soup or broth, made in Scotland [link first seen at Shameless Plugging]

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To the country boys here, if you're a different nationality, a different race, you're sub-human... Good ol' girl who enjoyed cruelty

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Blame Ourselves
You know how they get away with it? Because we, the people, let them. In the end, Bush, Blair and Howard invaded Iraq because our democracies were not strong enough to stop them. Blame politicians, blame the media and blame ourselves. The question for all of us, after we purge Australia of this weak, amoral excuse for a leader, is to work out how we can ensure we never let any "leader" do this to us again.
· Strong men encourage dissent from people of good faith with expertise, not silence it [ via SMH ]
· Peter Costello: It's pre-budget week and, as usual, there are more leaks than the Titanic
· See Also John Mangos, Alan Jones, and political fun(d)raising...
· See Also We only really disagree on religion, religious grounds, I refuse to treat him like God
· See Also Politics of Nicknames [link first seen at Crikey ]

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Don Boudreaux writes about why even economists shouldn't (only) be in charge of the world's money

Santoso family
The waterfront Sutherland Shire mansion hid a secret. For four years, an Indonesian woman - brought in on a false passport by a wealthy Indonesian-Australian family - was a servant in first-world conditions earning third-world wages. Masri, who was 18 when she came to Australia with the Santoso family in 1995, was on duty 17 hours a day, seven days a week doing the house and yardwork, and helping to care for the couple's three children. During the four years she was paid a total of $5190. She sent half of that home to her family - subsistence farmers in a village.
· Sutherland Secrets
· See Also Ambiguous usage of the word "want."
· See Also The only thing that meaningfully separates Wal-Mart from its competitors is its incredible success
· See Also Who will be the new Fred at Fairfax? Professor Buynip(sic)?
· See Also Battle for the online billion-dollar monopoly dollar

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Mum's the word:
On this glorious Lauren's Day I came across a blog entry about the Gender differences in online feedback: Research shows that women are interacting more with the celebrity on celebrity blogs than men...

Bloggal Animals: Luxuries are Becoming our Necessities
The most hated bloggerjournalist in Australia: Stephen Mayne is the man behind Crickey.com, the website that has a go at everyone...
I like the fact that he trades in gossip because I think a lot of us journalists dress up that idea and are just a little bit holier than thou about the fact we don't trade in gossip … we do, we just refine it a bit better and make a couple more calls and turn it into news, but it fundamentally is the talk of the traps … and that's interesting stuff, it’s what readers want.
· See Also Crikey.com
· See Also Spooks blink in hot light of digital future: It is claimed from time to time that we have been responsible for murdering individuals who have become "inconvenient" in some way [link first seen at Barista]
· GuruNet: Bookmark this site, librarians...that's an order! [link first seen at Blogcards ]
· See Also Half-wit reality house: Oh m'God, Oh m'God. This is, like, the kitchen. And this is, like, the dining room. And this is, oh m'God, this is, like, the toilet. Hi, I'm Bree. Oh m'God!
· See Also A virgin at 24, she discovers at 42 she is 19 weeks pregnant
· See Also Degrees of happiness
· See Also Law Lords: This is a very good day for lying, drug-abusing prima donnas who want to have their cake with the media, and the right to then shamelessly guzzle it with their Cristal champagne
· See Also Google is in answering certain questions, compared to a well-connected person on a phone and someone in a library

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It's no wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom 'Friends' right now. They're the only friends we have, and even they're leaving.

We just want our friends to have a good time
For those of us born around 1965 or '70 it is almost impossible to imagine an earlier era when friends were the people who went by the wayside when you grew up and found a spouse—or when friends were subordinate not just to the nuclear family but to the extended family. A combination of forces and trends—the poor job environment of the early '90s, the delay of marriage, the new indispensability of graduate education for long-term employment—conspired to create for Gen Xers, when we arrived in it, a friend-centric "real world."
· Just Drop By - How Friends became palatable after the ironies of Seinfeld
· Unpalatable Truth: President and the Defense Secretary seemed to find out about this the same time we did
· See Also The irony that these abuses were taking place in Abu Ghraib, the most notorious prison during Saddam's regime
· See Also Kosovo::UN and Nato troops are using the trafficked women and girls for sex and some have been involved in trafficking itself
· See Also Bush apologizes for atrocities, war crimes, rapes, and murders commited under his command
· See Also Complete text of Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba
· See Also The Cost: White House Asks G.O.P. in Congress to Add $25 Billion

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Reason: Fools for Communism: Still apologists after all these years
In 1983, or more likely in 1984, the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system."
Barely six years later, the Soviet empire began falling apart. By 1991 it had vanished from the face of the earth. Did Professor Byrnes call a press conference to offer an apology for the collective stupidity of his colleagues, or for his part in recording it? Did he edit a new work titled Gosh, We Didn’t Know Our Ass From Our Elbow? Hardly. Being part of the American chattering class means never having to say you’re sorry.
· In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr [ courtesy of REASON ]
· See Also Prague's Liberation: Only years later would I learn that the western part of Czechoslovakia had been liberated by troops of the U.S. Third Army under the command of Gen. George S. Patton
· See Also European Union: Giving Good Soldier Svejk a needed break
· See Also BookWorldPrague is back, with an impressive literary flourish

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The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.
Jean Giraudoux

Peter's principles
The budget is not Peter Costello's bottom line. Here's a man with a surprisingly radical vision for Australia. It is an exquisite irony that the better Costello is as Treasurer, the more firmly he entrenches Howard in the job that Costello covets above all else. And the question of how and when he might succeed Howard remains awkwardly unresolved as the Government looks to the polls.
· Exquisite Political Ironies
· Punchbowl Brawlers: John Brogden has ordered an inquiry into a punch-up at a Liberal Party branch meeting
· See Also Money and power: how the ReserveBank got it all [via Official: housing bubble has lost its hot air]
· See Also We know the test of our humanity is not overcoming the power of others, but how we treat those who have none
· See Also Business News

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Joe is Hollywoodly challenged. Sex, drugs, scandal - reveals how his pursuit of the American dream took him from child refugee to Hollywood star

All the President's flaws
He helped bring down one American president - Richard Nixon. Now he believes the Bush presidency is even more corrupt. John Dean spoke to Paul Sheehan on the eve of his first visit to Australia
· Something to Sequel About
· See Also Antony Loewenstein: It was typical Times, not wanting the public to realise that their reporters were not gods, that it took so many people to do solid reporting. It was essentially a policy of lying for marketing
· See Also Even if Lance Collins was right about the doctoring of intelligence on East Timor, he may be wrong about who did the doctoring

Roozendaal Clause

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Roozendaal Clause: Thanks to the benevolent timing of the Premier, Mr Eric Roozendaal will not have to endure the cutbacks promised by both the Prime Minister, John Howard, and the federal Opposition Leader, Mark Latham.

Do Australians want a private welfare state? Are they getting one anyway?
Private businesses now deliver a much higher proportion of health, aged, and child care services than Australians think is ideal. It is not hard to see why private businesses move into human service provision: taxpayer subsidised essential services make good business sense. But there are good reasons to suspect that privatisation makes bad social-policy sense, according to Gabrielle Meagher
· Do Australians want public/private nepotism and cronyism? Are they getting them anyway? [Link Poached from APO ]
· See Also Response to the Australian Broadcasting Authority’s Alan Jones 2GB Report (PDF formatß)
· See Also Toads: Highways, byways and beaches: not all fun and frolics
· See Also Silver Lining: The benefits of an ageing population (Judith Healy of The Australia Institute Fame PDF file)
· See Also The dynamics of child poverty in Australia National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling

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On torture, only the US is beyond international law

Responding to Torture
But let us also accept that the reaction to this incident is indicative of larger moral asymmetries that are the burdens of the West when it goes to war, a culture that so often equates the understandable absence of perfection, either moral,...
· Moral Perfections
· See Also Mother’s Day -- the “anti-gun” Million Mom March will gather on the West Lawn in D.C.
· See Also ASIO's headquarters played host to television cameras for the first time in the agency's history
· See Also An al Qaeda 'chemist's' quest for ricin

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Sutherland Shire and the rest of our reading world:
According to the local newspaper the Leader (no link), Six sexy shire librarians will soon rule world's reading scene... Amy White, Kristy Wright, Brian Jones, Michael Dahl, Georgina Konstanta and Jeanette Dean have stepped up training for the marathon read to be held at Sutherland Shire Council Library from 9 am on Monday 24 May 2004. The current Guinness Book of Record mark is 75 hours clocked up by German school librarians last year.

Punchbowl: Liberals' new branch masters art of the stack, the stoush and the all-in brawl
The right's starting a fight . . . there's a riot . . . the police have arrived," said the final message to an MP's mobile phone.
The venue was the Croatian Club on Punchbowl Road. The event? A meeting of the newest branch of the NSW Liberal Party.
It's simple. It was a straight branch stack that went horribly wrong.
· If they were throwing punches around, they weren't terribly good at it
· See Also The boy from Hurstville who now rules a big virtual empire
· See Also The southern Sydney community of Oyster Bay is to become the city's first plastic bag free suburb
· See Also 50 moments that shaped popular musical history in the last 50 years
· See Also Falling in love - that crazy, blissful hormonal feeling
· See Also Hourglass figure fertility link
· See Also Size really doesn't matter. You can be just as healthy if you're fat as you can if you're slender

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Disney has dropped the hammer on Moore's, the saint of documentarians, new film. They are refusing to allow Miramax to distribute his new film Fahrenheit 9/11. Michael Moore posted a public letter on his website Wednesday crying that it's censorship...

Iraq 2004 AD: History's Day is maturing
Balanced op-ed in recent USA Today by military historian. It’s just a reminder that virtually every war we’ve ever waged pretty much sucked all the way through until in ended and we realized it was a win (or didn’t realize the loss in Vietnam). That’s why the definition of success here is what is crucial.Everybody thinks we’re ending something in Iraq (Saddam). It’s the other way around. We’re starting something.
· A good reminder for the darkest days: “Expert, too, become lost in fog of war”
· Celebrations of a New, Expanded Europe Are Clouded by Old Fears of Immigration
· See Also Greek capital hit by triple blast: If a bomb goes off, and nobody's hurt, does it make a sound?
· See Also US Elections

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Daniel Boorstin memorial turns into "book lovefest:" If Boorstin is remembered for nothing else, he will always be known as the one who opened up the Library of Congress to the people. Until he came along, the library existed pretty much to serve Congress. Boorstin saw the world's largest repository of knowledge as "a multimedia encyclopedia" and insisted that the bounty be shared with everyone.

Bipartisanship: Riding in Style
Kelvin Bissett of Australia’s Daily Telegraph used documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to show that top State MPs have spent more than $100,000 of taxpayers’ money souping up their official limousines with sports suspension, sunroofs, spoilers, mag wheels and even satellite navigation systems. The Holden Caprice vehicles have leather seats, ABS brakes, cruise control and alloy wheels standard, but some MPs added items such as mag wheels and Pirelli tires. Even the usually frugal Treasurer Michael Egan, who often drives his white Caprice himself, added a $2000 sunroof, as well as cigarette lighter and ashtray. The extras total $2451.
· Souping up [ via Scoop ]
· Backpages: Privatisation of public infrastructure... Must be some sort of magic pudding, eh?

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Bush team takes hit on secret files
In several recent cases, the administration first refused requests for information by saying that releasing it would jeopardize national security, then released that same information itself at a moment when it became politically convenient to do so -- leaving the impression that it was safe to release all along.
· Document declassifications: Why a Village Well Is a Weapon in the War on Terror
· See Also Wilkie, Bolt and ONA at odds over top secret report
· See Also Webdiary columnist Antony Loewenstein interviews U.S. whistleblower Joseph Wilson

A growing log of omissions, alterations, and distortions of vital information that was once readily available through government sources.
· See Also MisInformation Exchange