André Brett

Tony Abbott onion video - Wikipedia

It is thanks to this take that I have discovered there is a whole Wikipedia page on Tony Abbott chomping on an onion, huge @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social areas

I was a little surprised how little literature I found in general about railway finance—if anything, Australia is served rather well, especially in the pages of the Australian Economic History Review

For one paragraph in a chapter I wrote 18 months ago (hopefully published soon!), I did a bit of digging—it's when I read Quinn & Turner—and didn't come across much but put this down to the limitations of my uni library and its collection priorities and had to press on with other research

Also I reckon @zahri.bsky.social and @emily-fitzgerald.bsky.social would both enjoy this (scroll up)

Been reading too many essays and theses lately but finally got around to reading this piece and it was indeed thoroughly enjoyable

I cracked up at your description of "the former Greens’ member for Fremantle (now an Independent following revelations of a cross-benches ‘alliance’ of sorts)"

I dunno, I've got a pretty impressive 12% banoffee stout sitting in my fridge right now, and had a very good 10.5% dark choc one the other week. And I'm generally with you re: stout preferences I think

But also I drink a lot of ~7% hazies you'd deplore

Shoulda got something more potent smdh

Multiple meta tags for Pike River stories on RNZ.

This is what happens when you don’t have a metadata policy and you don’t enforce whatever you have.

Yeah true, Richard White’s book Railroaded captures quite well much of that corporate profit-seeking

William Quinn & John Turner's book Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles (2020) includes Britain's Railway Mania in larger context + a good def'n of a bubble

@rwldproject.bsky.social is there a more recent dedicated history of the Railway Mania than Henry Grote Lewin's old account?

Made one of these for the house so I know when to leave to catch a train. There are live train data apis you can just use. Pretty neat of them

Oh wow that is an amazing coincidence!

Ahaha where is this, is it on some old furniture I used?

This is proper "that's not the prime minister" "he never said he was, he said he's John Howard" areas from The Games (2000)

Time for another André to cross the ditch

Freo guernsey. They can’t win flags but maybe they can still be saved

I was going to say Carlton seems the obvious team for him for demographic reasons but St Kilda *are* the Saints (despite there being no saint called Kilda). Collingwood would be too low-effort a troll job. Here your holiness have a Gold Coast guernsey!

Pleased to learn I will never be truly old

(Ross Lyon will return to coach St Kilda from beyond the grave, also I am sure Kevin Sheedy is shaping for another tilt with the Dons or a new expansion club; has Tassie lined up anybody yet?)

I’m sure the NZ selectors are about to ring me and ask if I can come out of retirement (bowling spin in the nets at school) and join the Test squad

Delighted to learn that a bloke born in December 1986, a month older than me, made his Test cricket debut for Pakistan last week. He took 6 wickets in the first innings too! You are still young if there are professional sportspeople on debut who are older than you

The Marsden Grant, New Zealand’s flagship discovery science fund, was recently restructured to focus on research with economic potential, and its total was set to decrease by $15m over three years. The Strategic Science Investment Fund decreased by $24m in Budget 2025, the Health Research Fund by $17m and the Catalyst Fund, for international collaboration, by $12m. Money was reallocated towards the new Invest New Zealand agency, aimed at attracting overseas innovation and investment. Since then, the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to a team of researchers who investigated the link between increased technology funding and sustained societal growth, which Mehr said underscored his point. “Do these people read the news? Like, a Nobel Prize was just awarded to people who proved that investing in science is a better mechanism for economic growth – which Luxon ostensibly cares about – than these other kinds of short-term investments,” Mehr said. “We’ve got $55 million, roughly, per year to spend on basic science. And if you open up the news, what you hear about is Chris Luxon spending 320 times that on a single road. It’s just kind of pathetic. “You could change the colour of the signs on that road, and you would spend more than this entire country spends on basic science. That is batshit. It’s just completely insane.” (The road in question was the Northland Corridor, the low end estimate of which was recently revised to $18.2b.)

I'm not 100% sure but I think Newsroom may have omitted a 'f*cking' from my phrase "Do these people read the news?"

It's wild how consistently shit they are batting first in ODIs these days—except on the rare occasions when it comes off and they win by a bazillion. Feast or famine, and the problem for them is the gamble on feast is usually one they lose

Anglophone media learn the difference between obtaining a plurality and winning an election challenge 2025 (IMPOSSIBLE!!!)

Oh wow that looks GLORIOUS

Great to see Blair Tickner back in New Zealand colours and taking wickets

As for the states, you’d have to go back to pre-1949 when it was possible for a party to win the whole slate of Senate seats in a given state

But also back then there was more open party endorsement on many local councils than there is today

That got close but I think Greens remained mired in single figures? And Brexit Party thankfully a flash in the pan that election campaign

During self-govt, Norfolk had rare instances of MLAs who openly stood for parties (formally endorsed or otherwise); I wonder if anyone on their current council is openly affiliated with anyone? So hard to know sometimes

I've seen some fucking funny subject names on transcripts of students who've done a major in Business