About to be off to Melbourne. If goes right it’s 34 hours door to door. I seem to remember it used to be quicker than this, but 34 it now is. The main aim for the journey, apart from sleeping and thinking about stars, is listening to Derek Jacobi’s reading the Fagles translation of The Iliad. If there are lots of Achean and Trojan examples in my papers for the next few months, you know whom to blame.

A quick update on the Australian politics story mentioned below. The newspaper article Jacob was relying on said that tomorrow’s Newspoll will have bad news for the Labor opposition. The Age says that it will show a 3 point rise in Labor’s 2PP vote, so the 2PP vote is now only 51-49 to the Coalition. Apparently that’s with a fall in both Labor and Coalition primary vote, so it’s not great news, but it’s not awful news either. Lots of people have won from 51-49 down 18 months out from an election. (Though it’s worth noting there’s no incumbency boost to opinion poll numbers in Australia, if anything there’s often a small ‘protest vote’ in opinion polls, so you’d like the opposition to be at least at 52 at this stage of the cycle before you felt they were even.) And The Age reports that the fact that Labor isn’t in front will trigger a Beazley challenge, which I’m not sure is a good idea, but sort of continues the parallel with the situation the Coalition faced in 1994. Anyway, the main take-home lesson from this is never trust anything from a Murdoch newspaper anywhere in the world that reflects badly on left-wing parties, at least not without something like independent confirmation.

I was going to leave a list of other blogs I’d recommend you read while TAR is on light posting while I’m in Australia. But instead I think it’s better to recommend that more people start blogs. Now that there’s a Boston area philosophy blog, what about New York, or New Jersey, or Melbourne? (Or anywhere else, but I think those are the three main non-New England areas of TAR readership.) Anyone starting, or for that matter continuing, a philosophy blog is encouraged to use the comments boards here to promote it.