My friend Rob has unerringly good taste. He has never once given me a totally bum steer, not even Damien Rice. So why did I wait so many months before watching The Edukators (aka Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei)? It is bloody marvelous, a wonderful exercise in small-scale ensemble acting that kept me...

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Biopolitical's comments on labelling prompted me to check again the whole story regarding Monsanto's product Posilac, a synthetic version of the hormone called bovine somatotropin. BST is produced in the pituitary gland and influences the production of milk (among other things). Farmers can inje...

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Sometimes I kick myself for being too busy to blog something I consider important; with all those jillions of sites out there, someone else is bound to have said what I wanted to say. But it seems I’m in luck. Everyone else seems to be lathered by that long god-bothering piece in the New York Times,...

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Almost two years ago a woman was arrested in Melbourne when customs officers heard suspicious “flipping” noises emanating from beneath her skirts. I remember it, because I blogged it. At last, the case has come to trial, but the report that alerted me did not give details of the sentence. She’s...

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Non-bridge players, look away now.

We sat down to a friendly Sunday afternoon rubber, and had already played four hands when Massimo declared, “I have only twelve cards”. Everyone counted, and everyone else also had only 12 cards. This was odd. We searched everywhere on the table, under the score...

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