At a time when you could buy a decent house in Perth for twenty thousand dollars, MGM agreed to pay Julie Andrews – the world’s number one box office star – a million dollars to do a movie. When it came time to make it, they paid her a million dollars not to do the…
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Oct
How would the people on the sinking Titanic have felt if told that 105 years later, they’d be immortalised in a Lego exhibition in Perth?
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Oct
If you want job security, being an Australian Football League coach is probably not for you. I suspected that the same applied to baseball managers in the United States. To test this theory, I did a Google search of baseball manager fired and got 23.4 million results. I was going through some drafts, found this…
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Oct
‘No taxation without representation’ was one of the complaints that American colonists had against the British government in the eighteenth century. They had to pay taxes, but weren’t allowed to elect representatives to the Parliament in London. This slogan has got better with age. At the time, it was a privileged white man’s fight, as…
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Oct
Foggy Bottom is a part of Washington DC that starts a little west of the White House. It includes the Kennedy Center, where great gays can come of the closet in a coffee mug … … and the Watergate Complex, best known in history for the break-in that led to Richard Nixon’s downfall … ……
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Sep
SPOILER ALERT! I’ve now re-watched all three of the early Tales of the City mini-series on Netflix. The first was fresh and charming, the second was fun and familiar, so how was Further Tales of the City? This is Mary Ann Singleton (centre, below) at her best. She’s lost the Cleveland naivety and is independent…
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Sep
Last night, some friends took me to Cine Vivo, a movie night in a cute room in the centre of Perth. The main feature was the documentary Chavela. All I’d heard before I entered the room was that she was a Costa-Rican born Mexican lesbian who smoked cigars. But the documentary showed her to be…
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Sep
Australia is currently playing the fourth cricket test against England at Old Trafford in Manchester. They’ve spruced up the ground since my friends Rory and I popped in when we were touring the north of England and Scotland in December 1991. They’ve probably spruced up the security as well. Although it was the off-season, it…
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Sep
