This Week's Reading and Other Matters

Sunday, 19 January 2003 (Day 37)

This week the Potemkin is moored in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, where I'm baby-sitting a dog. She's a Jack Russell Terrier - the archetypal small nervous dog. This week's Age colour supplement has a profile of Jeffrey Masson, author of The Truth About Dogs, who has been roundly criticised for wildly anthropomorhising and sentimentalising evolution's most successful grovellers. In any event, I'm keeping an eye open for any signs of dominance behaviour: It's hard to think of anything sillier than letting a Jack Russell think that it can run your life.

I have a couple of books here to fill in the idle hours - Manning Clark of course (another chapter or two and I might be ready for the next installment of the Tugboat History of Australia) and one other, where the author poses this question (among others):

How is it then that we have fallen into taking seriously someone like the economist Milton Friedman who walks about equating, in a silly, indeed an immature manner, democracy with capitalism?

Apart from that the bookshelves are full of old "boys' books" from the 1960s, full of stories in the Magnet and Boy's Own Paper tradition where no dialogue is complete without at least one ejaculation, you know the sort of thing:

"You filthy Hun!" ejaculated Biggles.

Of course word order is critical here, otherwise the literary effect can be spoiled by an unintended double meaning which is quite ludicrous. Especially if Biggles happens to be giving his joystick the usual heavy workout.

Around the blogging traps, I notice that Scott Wickstein has blogged on Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies in Left vs Right, or Statist vs Dynamist? If this is a sign of movement in the BlogGeist, I'm weeks in front, for once, but not entirely averse to revisiting this topic. But first I have a small, nervous and slightly overweight dog to walk.