In blogging, if you haven’t posted for a week, there’s a slim chance someone might consider you defunct. If you were a word, the OED might feel inclined to put an innocent looking (Arch.) next to you, or worse, (Obs.).

I feel then, that I should post something to keep the bloggospheric undertaker at bay and, quite fortuitously, there’s lots going on to discuss.

During the week, Australia observed another milestone in the gradual struggle for equality of Aboriginal people, when Marion Scrymgour became the first Aboriginal person (Tiwi) to lead a state or territory. As Deputy Chief Minister, Scrymgour became acting Chief Minister when Paul Henderson, who succeeded Claire Martin, took a holiday.

On the federal side of the political toast however, Rudd and his ‘team’ have been disappointing in just about every respect, right after a strong start last month. Gillard’s warning of legal action to halt industrial action strikes me as odd, given that it comes from a party whose existence is (or should be) based on employee’s rights.

Macklin’s assertion that there won’t be any compensation for those indigenous children who were taken from their family – even though she meant in virtue of the apology alone - clearly sends the wrong signal and has solicited criticism from Aboriginal people.

Also, Swan has gone further down that well-trodden path that Keating macheted back in the 80s, and that Howard, complete with green ’n gold track-suit, continued to tread up until November 23 last year. I’m talking about the further politicisation of the economy (or the further economisation of politics, whichever you prefer) by criticising independent banks’ decisions to raise interest rates irrespective of the Reserve Bank’s official cash rate.

But not everything has been politics. I’ve been busy lamenting the loss of our Transient Building at the University of Sydney, a temporary structure built after World War II, almost entirely of fibrous asbestos. Its recent renovations (to the interior only; the cost of insurance renders any work to the asbestos exterior fiscally indefensible) mean that the building is well and truly permanent. It has now become the Intransigent Building.

I’ve also been busy applying for grants here and there (well, really only here), and doing some peripheral work for a dictionary project in an Australian language, all of which has kept me too busy to take on silly projects of my own.

Which reminds me, I’ve just taken on a silly project of my own; I’ve recently acquired an antique Terra Cresta table-top arcade game, not at all dissimilar to the one pictured beneath, which I intend to restore with all the bits and pieces from a not-so-old laptop, an arcade-game emulator, and linux.

Finally, congratulations to Jane, whose post from July last year, Gunboat Lip-Gloss, was announced last week as one of On Line Opinion’s best blog posts of 2007. Readers of On Line Opinion are invited to comment, and several people have taken the opportunity to lambaste Jane with some old chestnuts, the least surprising of them being anti-intellectualism:

Is that what they teach at Universities these days? It would have been a “Fail” on any paper to misrepresent sources like that when I went to uni.

‘Gobsmacked‘

I shall return to regular-ish blogging soon!