Remember these people? They stood in the Ukrainian snow defying a rigged election and the power of a gruesome regime with savage neighbours.
They won. This has been a terrible year – and we can never forget the Asian catastrophe – but some good has come out of it as well.
Think of this as [...]

Since I am a God in my own mind, I thought I would leave 2004 with a few awards. Time Magazine – I spit on your irrelevance.
The Barista Person of the Year is Andrew Wilkie. He resigned from his job at the Office of National Assessments in March 2003 in protest against the Howard government’s [...]

Looking for ways to sum up the challenges presented by 2004, I found Quiggin’s post on foreign aid, which does it all for me.
How can we create a foreign aid engagement with our neighbours which makes a real difference, is sensitive to local needs, is not stolen, and creates goodwill between us?
How do we create [...]

I try to be a tough minded player in today’s dog-eat-dog culturatiscape, but then this happens.
I asked a website for the single that was top of the British charts on the day that I was born. Seeing as how I was born in the UK and my mother was very partial to her wind-up gramophone [...]

I know there are some among us who are so wounded in soul and body that they are slaves to cannibal saliva.
If that is the case, I have a small suggestion for your New Year’s Eve. Pack the bucket bong, load up this site, and just read it aloud to your mates.
Put plastic on [...]

What on earth is going on here? Larger versions of the pic reveal a pair of inner city cafe gypsies wearing fly hats, leaning over a fence out beyond the Black Stump waving violin bows and bent over with laughter.
“Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor are two virtuoso violinist/composers who specialise in new music [...]

Something to make us go all gooey in a fog of nostalgia, remembering when Mummy and Daddy could make it all better…
and renovations were done when the rellys got together with some tinnys (flagons if you were a New Australian) and lit the barby by the incinerator and just ripped the back of the [...]

Chris Corrigan’s Maps and Territories is “An occasional blog by an amateur map lover”, which grew strongly for a few months and stopped in January 2004.
A lovely combination of maps and text extracts, it now seems to be a coherent piece, covering a fixed piece of time, like a stranger’s journal washed up in the [...]

This is a satellite image of the tsunami just before it hit the beach in Sri Lanka with an enlargement to show the seawater being sucked off the beach into the gathering wave:

There is a chilling but fascinating collection of videos of the tsunami here.
The aerial before and after satellite imagery is extraordinary.
Remember, [...]

Lisa Montgomery, the woman who killed a pregnant woman and stole the baby, had a strange past.
She met her first husband, Carl Boman while she was still at school, while his father was courting her mother. Carl, seven years older than Lisa, married her soon afterwards and they had four children in quick succession, [...]