Do shirts grow on trees? Not often but sometimes. Let me explain.
On our quiet residential cul de sac stands a sapling and one morning when out with the dog, we noticed it had a shirt dropped over a lower branch. Hmm. It’s Newtown and we are inured to weird sights. We ignored it for a day, and then I stopped to take it off – thinking, though the thought was not fully formed, to put in the bin for tomorrow’s trash collection, removing another eye sore from the street.
Other eye sores have included mattresses dumped at the end of the street. No doubt some green voter thinks the mattress fairies will look after it. Detritus from home renovations. Nails which have given us more than one flat tire. As I said: Newtown, where a little bit of the wild West remains.
As I touched the shirt I realised it was not, as I had unconsciously supposed, a filthy rag but rather a clean, ironed, King Gee workshirt, and that it was heavy, heavy because there were keys in the top buttoned pocket.
Turning the shirt around to get at the pocket I also found a University of Sydney crest on it. Huh!?
In sum, there was a clean, near new, University of Sydney building and grounds workshirt with a ring of half a dozen keys on it. Wait! There is more.
The keys were security keys, those double channel that used to cost of a hundred dollars a piece to replace when I was head of department. I know this because Dr. Twit, a loser in every other respect, lost a key regularly. That was five years ago so now probably $200.
We pondered how anyone could lose the shirt off the back. We wondered why the shirt was so neat. Why it was dropped over the tree branch. Most of all, we wondered why it was so far from the University. We speculated how it might have happened but none of our ideas made much sense. (No snide remarks please!)
Because she was going to meet an old comrade in books for lunch on campus, on the way the Child Bride took the shirt to the Campus Security Office. There she was told, as the keys and shirt, were gratefully received, that nothing had been reported missing – there is a standing order to report lost keys immediately. Dr Twit was good at that.
The return of the shirt was a quick transaction and no details were asked or given, so we shall never know the next act in this drama. Let the imagination begin!
We may also imagine who King Gee was, because the King Gee web site is mum on the subject.
Category: Service
Best and Brightest 2014
Showcase for IVth Honours Research
The fifth annual presentation of undergraduate student research in the Honours from the Department of Government and International Relations took place on Tuesday 13 May at Parliament House. The presentations were punctuated by two question times. A reception with light refreshments and finger food followed the formalities.
The five panelists were Dominic Jarkey, Christine Gallagher, Luke Craven , Aishwarrya Balaji, and Charles Cull. The proceedings were chaired by Cindy Chen herself a panelist in 2013.
Aishwarrya BALAJI, Charles CULL, Dominic JARKEY, Cindy CHEN, Luke CRAVEN, and Christine GALLAGHER
There were more than 160 registrations for the event. Those present included parliamentarians, solicitors, journalists, researchers, economists, public servants, sponsors of prizes in the study of Government and International Relations, other who have hosted interns or collaborated on research projects, members of the Department, and current IVth Honours students, and other alumni.
Volunteers from the Politics Society staffed the welcome desk, ushered, and managed the floor microphones.
More photographs will be posted in due course.
Congratulations to one and all.
Link for Best and Brightest Pictures
The link is live for 21 more days. Have a look. Please cut-and-paste. The hyperlink tool remains inactive.
http://lft.ucc.usyd.edu.au/lft-download.cgi?id=e41d8a33d4701943cff2f35e
How to read half a book.
Some books are too complicated for a reader’s good. Here’s what I do about it.
Many of the krimmies I read have two parallel story lines: the police procedural and the villains getting up to villainy, often in every-other chapter. Toward the end these parallel lines meet. The technique is common but it takes an uncommon writer to do it well. To make both the plodding police and the risk-taking villains believable and interesting.
For the most part, the technique is connect-the-dots because it spins our the story, makes the book bigger (so the punter feels like it is more for the money, etc). A successful writer’s second book is never shorter than the first one, that must be a rule in publishing, and so on to the third in a mindless progression. But the results is unbalanced, not in page count, but in interest.
I am reading one such example now: Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Absent One (2012).
The police procedural part is well done, the characters interesting, the office politics credible, the dogged persistence refreshing in a world of 30-second attention spans, the speculative leaps satisfying if sometimes ill-judged, the varying interpretations that evidence supports intriguing, and so on. That is the half I am reading.
But every second chapter concerns the villains, and they are such cardboard characters that as they enter the pages a hiss rises from book. The author’s distant contempt for anyone with money and they are always the villains in these books is blinding. Everyone who drives a BMW or owns a house is presented as an unindicted war criminal who grew up pulling the arms off the children of the toiling working class. So I express right through those chapters by turning the pages. These villain-chapters fatten up the book but they only parade the author’s prejudices, no doubt in the effort to tap into the like prejudices of readers. Oh hum.
Ergo I can recommend half of The Absent One, but not the whole.
Best and Brightest 2013
The Best and Brightest Showcase of IVth Honours Research in the Department of Government and International Relations will be on 22 May from 6 p.m. at Parliament House on Macquarie Street in the theatrette.
Will graduates please Like this page on Facebook. I hope so.
Alumni corner
Keep in touch with classmates by adding a comment here. There are pictures of most of my classes. Find yourself.
This is a place for graduates to get in touch with each other. When the blackboard unit of study web site ends, students can shift to this one. When I have occasion to contact graduates I will ask them to visit this blog and leave a comment. Open this post and you may find yourself pictured.
The Paradise Report 2010
The top three for this visit were (1) Shangri-La, (2) Pacific Aviation Museum, and (3) Waiklele Premium Outlets. Each is recommended.
We kept a travel diary on this trip, as we always do, but it now competes for input with Kate’s blog
http://knittatpug.blogspot.com/
and mine https://theory-practice.sydney.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/
Not to be out done, Julie also blogged their part of the excursion
http://julie.stuffworld.info
October 2009 Community Partners Reception
Degree in a Day – 16 April 2009
Here is the PowerPoint file on Leaders, leadership, and us. It is a link to You_Tube.
Best wishes.
Michael Jackson
Government and International Relations