Saturday salon 14/6

voltaire_230

An open thread where, at your leisure, you can discuss anything you like, well, within reason and the Comments Policy. Include here news and views, plus any notable personal experiences from the week and the weekend.

For climate topics please use the most recent Climate clippings.

The gentleman in the image is Voltaire, who for a time graced the court of Frederick II of Prussia, known as Frederick the Great. King Fred loved to talk about the universe and everything at the end of a day’s work. He also used the salons of Berlin to get feedback in the development of public policy.

Fred would only talk in French; he regarded German as barbaric. Here we’ll use English.

The thread will be a stoush-free zone. The Comments Policy says:

The aim [of this site] is to provide a venue for people to contribute and to engage in a civil and respectful manner.

16 thoughts on “Saturday salon 14/6”

  1. I heard two lengthy programs on ABC celebrating the Beatles Australian tour 50 years ago.

    I was in Adelaide at the time, but was not one of the 300,000 who lined the streets. At that time I thought there singing was shouty and didn’t like it all that much. The concerts were pointless as all you heard was a crowd screaming. Later I came to like some of their work and do possess a Sergeant Pepper’s record.

    Better listening was ABC FM’s Baroque and before countdown, culminating in The Messiah on Sunday evening.

  2. Annoying and post-worthy, but I didn’t get time, was Australia Post’s plan to cut 900 workers.

    The chief executive gets a cool $4.8 million. The equivalent person in the UK only gets half a million. You need make sure your top decision makers are really out of touch with how the workers live, otherwise the wrong decisions might be made, right?

    Seems they are going to split off the struggling letter post sector and possibly only deliver three days a week.

    I want a dependable service rather than a profit-making corporation.

  3. Brian @ 2
    Don’t know if I’ve mentioned it but I’m originally from SA (various different places, including three years at Berri, which I think is near where you came from?).

    I went to Beatles and Rolling Stones concerts in Adelaide. Didn’t scream though.

    Since I got back to Melbourne, I’ve been going to marches – been to three protests against the budget now and expect to go to more. Can always rely on Melbourne to protest. But the latest news is reminding me of the biggest rally of all – 200,000 people against the Iraq war. It was exhilarating, but worked out sad and disillusioning, when Howard completely ignored us. Times like this you think the madness never ends.

  4. Sorry I can see that my previous comment was a little confused time wise! I left SA over forty years ago. When I say “since I got back to Melbourne” I mean this year, after my trip to Germany.

  5. Watched a couple of episodes of series 6 of True Blood. Vampires, fairies, werewolves, shapeshifters etc, if you like that sort of thing. Been thinking of getting Vampire Diaries. Anybody seen it?

  6. Can’t say I have, Paul. I just don’t get time for some of the pleasures of life.

    Val, my mother came from Adelaide, but left when she was two fostered by some Lutherans who were going to Queensland. She was a ward of the state.

    My father grew up around Kapunda and the Tanunda, but left for Queensland when he was 16.

    I worked at the Adelaide University Library for three years from 1964 and then a year and a half at what was Wattle Park Teachers College.

    That’s my main contact with SA where I’d have to rate as a foreigner. I have a daughter and indeed a granddaughter who lives there.

  7. Brian: I remember being introduced to Beatles music by a friend in a garage party. Thought it was fantastic and tremendous music to dance to. At that age I thought the sound level was about right when it was loud enough to vibrate my diaphragm.
    My problem now is a like most music soft enough that Hazel can’t hear it.

  8. Brian @ 8
    Ah thanks Brian. I think you must have written something about your father’s family coming from that region which gave me the impression you grew up there. So it seems instead that the few years you were living in Adelaide happened to be the same years when I was a teenager going to those concerts.

    John @ 9
    I can pretty much remember when I first started to find live music too loud, and I think it was the first loud gig I went to after having my first child. So I guess I had about ten years of going to loud concerts but I didn’t go to too many, because my hearing is still ok, fortunately.

  9. The chief executive gets a cool $4.8 million. The equivalent person in the UK only gets half a million.

    As I understand it, the CEO of the Postal Service in the US gets about the same as the UK CEO. Given the relative ‘responsibilities’, could it be the case that the Australian CEO is being paid too much? Just jokin …

    When it comes to CEO remuneration, we must ‘meet the market’, or so we are told – except when the ‘market’ fails to justify egregious rewards.

  10. WPD I heard the Australia Post CEO salary defended in exactly those terms.

    To me it sounds high, even in terms of other Australian listed companies.

  11. Gentlefolk:
    My introduction to The Beetles was my introduction to crowd/riot control. Had been in the Army only a few months and was in Melbourne for a weekend leave. I was stopping in the cheap accommodation at the White Ensign Club (a club for sailors but members of other services could stay there too). We bumped into a huge crowd outside the Southern Cross Hotel with a pitifully small group of Police hard-pressed to keep them all from swamping the hotel. I raced back to the White Ensign and grabbed a couple of dozen rum-sodden young sailors and a few unsober others; we all ran/staggered to the hotel, linked arms and protected the Beetle’s virtue or something like that. Biggest problem was when young ladies fainted in the crowd; they had to be passed over the heads of the crowd then we carried them to a St John’s first aid post. Definitely not the expected quiet weekend a couple of drinks, a restaurant meal and an evening of dancing.

  12. Re the former highly-efficient, comprehensive-service Postmaster General’s Department …. which became Snail Mail and no-bars Telstra:
    Massive profits and effective service are mutually exclusive.

    G’day WPD. You mentioned “market”@ 13 …. may I suggest a somewhat different market …. one where CEOs “sound of wind and limb” as well as “obedient and free of ALL vices” can be auctioned off to do field work on the Master’s plantation. I’ll start the bidding off with Twenty Pounds for that tall young mining company CEO; he looks very fit to me – if he slackens, the Master’s overseer has a way of encouraging the lazy ones to do a proper day’s work. .

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