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Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Breaking Alexander the Great News: Botany Bay Brain Trust Chris Johnson on French Invasion in 2088


Glamourous film stars, multi-million dollar yachts and a coastline to die for; could this be the future for Botany Bay that an organisation representing some of the industry’s biggest developers is predicting? Last week NSW Local Government Minister Paul Toole announced the merger of Botany Bay and Rockdale Councils to form the new Bayside Council (not to be confused with Victoria’s Bayside City Council) after a lengthy court battle over the merger came to an end.
Urban Taskforce CEO Chris Johnson said the decision cleared the way for more residential development around Botany Bay’s waterfront.
In fact, he is predicting a bright, perhaps Mediterranean-inspired, future for the area. Johnson said: “Last year the Urban Taskforce proposed mid- rise buildings around the bay that reflected the character of the French Riviera. This reflects the aspirations behind the establishment of Brighton-Le-Sands as a resort town in the 1880s. Bay Sydney's French Riviera



200-strong crowd watched on in amazement as a family home at Longueville on Sydney's lower north shore sold for $4.925 million – $1.175 million over reserve on Saturday.
The four-bedroom, two-bathroom home at 11 Lucretia Avenue was on a decent 1,359 square metre block, has tranquil northerly views over Woodford Bay and a pool.


“Shakespeare did not coin phrases such as ‘it’s Greek to me’ and ‘a wild goose chase’, according to an Australian academic. In an article for the University of Melbourne, Dr David McInnis, a Shakespeare lecturer at the institution, accuses the Oxford English Dictionary of ‘bias’ over its citation of Shakespeare as the originator of hundreds of words in English.” 
Unoriginal Shakespeare language

`Unsheathe His Sword and Be Done with It'

A thoughtful reader who is an attorney has alerted me to a decision handed down last year by the Supreme Court of Texas that cites in a footnote “The Gordian Knot,” an essay by Zbigniew Herbert. I covered courts for many years as a newspaper reporter and never mastered the art of deciphering legal documents or understanding the reasoning of some judges. This case involves a woman suing the University of Texas at Arlington after she fell and was injured in the campus stadium. Read the decision if you wish but the interesting part comes in the concurring opinion by Justice Jeffrey S. Boyd, who writes: “Alexander the Great himself could not figure this one out. Instead, I suspect he would do what legend says he did with Gordian’s Knot: he would unsheathe his sword and be done with it.”

Then look at the footnote on the first page of Boyd’s opinion, or near the bottom of the full decision, for the Herbert citation. It refers to the translation by John and Bogdana Carpenter in The Kenyon Review (1984), which was later collected in The King of the Ants (1999). Herbert is an adept of irony. He never harangues. He is poker-faced when recounting absurdities.  His Alexander is no clever resolver of insoluble problems, but a brutish vandal, not unlike the Stalinist masters who ruled Poland. Alexander, Herbert tells us, “legalized in a sense a certain hideous kind of violence,” and adds, “it is not known at what point the escalation of crime begins.” Herbert concludes:


“And also later, those pyres burning through centuries up to our own days -- torches of darkness -- pyres of heaps of papyrus, manuscripts recorded on calfskin, pyres of books, in which is thrown -- as if only as a supplement -- the nonsubmitting author.”