“If you’ve got money in your pocket and a switch on the wall, we’ll keep your dirty lights on.” So goes a song by American alt-country singers Darryl Scott and Tim O’Brien about coal mining and power generation. Their album Memories and Moments includes a version of John Prine’s Paradise, which remains the definitive song about the downsides of coal mining. That seemed a noteworthy way to introduce the potentially dry topic of energy, be…
Conversations in the street of any Australian town often involve the weather, which over the past four months has been bereft of rain or “dry” (pronounced “droy.” Tim: “How’s things, Harold? Harold: “Droy, mate!” Tim: “Got 10 points last night – hardly worth measurin’.” Harold: “How’re dams holdin?” Tim: “Nothin’ but mud and mosquitos.” Mrs Harold: “If it doesn’t rain soon, mate, we’re gonna move back to the town.” The latter is the narrator’s refrain…
There’s an Aussie saying – ‘they’re doing it tough’, which can mean any variation on the theme of hardship, be it financial, emotional, physical or all three at once. When the word ‘hardship’ is employed, it typically means financial struggle: in other words, privation, destitution, poverty, austerity, penury, impecuniousness and so on. If you search the word ‘hardship’ online you will find a range of links purporting to explain (if you are doing it tough),…
In case you were curious, the word blog in Farsi looks like this – وبلاگ. Iranians who didn’t like the way things were going in their country started وبلاگ’ing (blogging) like crazy after the 2000 crackdown on Iranian media. Iranians who interact with the internet are by definition risk-takers. As recently as late 2016, five Iranians were sentenced to prison terms for writing and posting images on fashion blogs. The content was decreed to ‘encourage…