It’s all because of a truck and the still pending progress of the Coffs Harbour bypass. I’d spent the past week thoroughly enjoying my highly customised Focus Mares around the Bellingen area of Northern New South Wales (river country, bad roads, wonderful lack of people, deep mysterious shaded coastal hill country, almost tourist…
Posts
Recent Gravel Bike Adventures or Finding the Perfect Gravel Bike
The gravel biking scene has been a bit of a black hole in recent times. It’s been a gigantic gravitational well seemingly sucking the entirety of the cycling world’s marketing efforts with a fury from which there is no escape. Once upon a time, say, five years ago, anything went when it came…
War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength
In my last post (Managerialism 19), I was very critical of current Australian attempts to ‘govern’ the Covid 19 ‘plague’. That’s kind of easy as this has been the most astounding case study of abjectly dysfunctional governance of, really, any issue in living history. Read that previous post if you want to know why. It’s…
Managerialism 19
There have been two plagues in my life so far. The first killed my academic career and the second we all currently share. Both plagues are wrapped around each other and are, really, one and the same. If I said that the first plague was the obscenity of managerialism you’d probably wonder what that has…
Waiting for Someone to Say Something Intelligent about Covid
There are going to be whole university departments set up, all around the world, dedicated to unpacking insights from this, the world’s greatest sociological experiment: Covid 19 It’s a bit like trying to summarise the dimensions of the universe. It’s all overwhelmingly big. Too much to wrap the mind around. As with any great world…
Making Sense of Gravel Biking
I suspect that the collection of memes now gravitating around the generic term “Gravel Biking’ are as nebulous and contestable as those collecting around that other ‘new’ dimension of e-biking. As with most concepts emanating from humans, what we end up with by way of a definition (of anything) is kind of an exercise…
Background Story
Of course, when you are paying tuition fees (deferred or otherwise) the aim of the game when doing an undergraduate degree at a university is to pass all your courses and gain the intended qualification. What is the point otherwise? And these days, all undergraduates pay tuition fees (of one sort or another). When your…
The Managerialism Epidemic
It is hard not to admire a cleanly efficient machine. The intricate efficiency of the traditional mechanical clock, the wonderous perfection of the bicycle, the impressive busyness of a bottling plant; you name it. We especially like machines that embed a kind of art through the connection of form and function (with the road racing…