It’s been an interesting few weeks already in 2016, with celebrity deaths (Bowie, Rickman, Frey…), jittery stock markets (down 7% one week, up 5% the next, down 2%, up 3%…) and the worst heatwave in 80 years (heralding in the Chinese New Year of the Fire Monkey). And it’s only Feb 14th, Valentine’s Day. Where’s...Read More

On Friday I attended an Economic Outlook breakfast, hosted by RSM, with NAB chief economist, Alan Oster. Here are my notes… it’s more positive than you might have guessed (which was the main take away.) The headline is that there will be no recession in Australia in 2016, continuing an amazing 24 year run for our economy. Basically,...Read More

I read a statistic recently that more people die around the world taking selfies than in shark attacks. Mashable reported than a Japanese tourist died after falling down stairs at the Taj Mahal while attempting to take a selfie. 12 selfie deaths in 2015 puts selfies as a more common killer than sharks (8). It’s...Read More

Jonathan Stuart Lebowitz (aka Jon Stewart), from New Jersey, the world’s foremost satirist, did his final ‘Daily Show’ this week, after 16 years spent poking fun at, and laying bare, political absurdists, buffons and bulls**t artists. Not a hard job, you may ponder, but done with the precision of a supreme Zen master. Jon used...Read More

The passing of Alan Bond this week has made many think back to the decade of the ’80s with its big hair and even bigger, brasher entrepreneurs. It was the decade that saw a new generation of leaders in Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Richard Branson come into their own (their companies still hold sway to this...Read More

I’ve been a David Letterman fan since I first saw his shows in the late 1980s. I loved the irreverent send-ups, self deprecating humour, the sharp quick wit. It was New Yorker wise cracking, stand up delivered with a huge smile. It was fresh. David was having as much fun as everyone else. In January 2010,...Read More

Looking back, it seems odd that an Aussie would be anchoring live cricket on TV in England from the 1960s onwards. 50 years and 500 test matches in all. Could the old dart not find a homegrown talent to front the game? (I doubt it would happen in any other sport.) Richie Benaud’s professionalism seemed to personify the...Read More

“It’s not the cheating that got me, it was the feeling I had got away with it.” I’m not sure what movie that’s from (do please tell), but when I heard it I understood the meaning. The guilt, the knowledge that your victory had been sullied, that you had not played fair was all consuming....Read More

In my previous post I related the story of my history teacher Peter Sibley, who we suspected was not exactly reading every (any?) word of our essays, over 30 years ago. 15 years pass. I am now a teacher myself, in far flung Singapore, and have helped organise a cricket tour back in the old country,...Read More

When I was training to be a teacher back in the mid 80s, I remember marking my first set of (Economics) essays. I was excited to see what my first batch of students had written – had they understood the concepts, could they apply it, what original ideas could they come up with..? Sadly, I was...Read More