I am a freelance journalist, based in Asia, specialising in business and economic features, and suffering from terminal boredom.

THE QUOTE FARM

Why don't they write songs like this any more?

No matter how much we sozzle and souse,

The sun never sets upon Government House

(Noel Coward, the intro to Mad Dogs and Englishmen, 1932)

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I think I'll adopt Browning's lines as my motto:

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious atheist...

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And it goes on... (this is the first few lines of a blog I found)

Slavoj Zizek: The Secret’s Out 18 08 2008

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Slavoj Žižek. Photograph: Mykel Nicolaou/Rex

Slavoj Zizek, 59, was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities in London and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s institute of sociology. He has written more than 30 books on subjects as diverse as Hitchcock, Lenin and 9/11, and also presented the TV series The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema.

When were you happiest?

A few times when I looked forward to a happy moment or remembered it - never when it was happening.

What is your greatest fear?

To awaken after death - that’s why I want to be burned immediately.

What is your earliest memory?

My mother naked. Disgusting.

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Tapos na. And now Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia demonstrates a complete lack of grasp of one of the major intellectual battles of the last decade (in Australia, anyway - sort of a squabble between tadpoles, yes), and in which also the subs of the Sydney Morning Herald demonstrate a disturbing lack of any ability to discriminate between "squirm" and "skirm" - or have I caught something from them?

"Rudd squirmishes with Howard over the history wars"

(Headline in the Sydney Morning Herald, 28 August 2009)