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Charlie Chaplin's oeuvre could be worth reassessing

Mike's Pith & Wind - Progress
I ran into The Pardoners’ Sam See at Richard and Di Hauser’s party in Elwood recently and fortunately I had time for a brief chat before we fled back to feed the doggies in Heathmont. I say fortunately because Sam and I are round about the same vintage and it’s always good to check in with him when the opportunity presents and catch up with his view of the world, which is, if anything, slightly more jaded than my own.
We mutually observed that a frequent mistake by, well, nearly everybody really, is that things are getting better and that we’re making progress. Pretty predictable I suppose, but while it’s calculable by persons of our years that things are in so many ways not getting better, the notion of making progress (or not) is a little harder to argue as the political version of progress that’s promulgated so relentlessly these days has become an end in itself.
Anyway, we also discussed that while it’s fairly evident that today more people on the planet are living better lives in a material sense, the ignorance and myopia regarding even quite recent history has condemned us to under-estimate, or worse, actually denigrate the attainments of previous generations.
I conjectured that today’s longer life spans mean that education can be now be confidently spread over decades and that as a result the educational level of a privileged thirteen year old schoolboy of the Victorian era would scare the pants off his modern-day equivalent.
I don’t know what this all means apart.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Pollies
With a sprained right wrist, unsurprisingly the result of falling off my bicycle onto implacably hard bitumen, this epistle is briefer and more painful than usual.
It may be an indirect result of low-level agony, typing using one finger on my left handed on an iPad or the New Year blues but I had been thinking about politicians. In essence what are they good for? Are politicians born, or do they appear every three or four years in clouds of manufactured optimism and press releases? Are they made? If I gave my mother the wool could she knit one?
To my surprise I have met three Prime Ministers. The first was in more innocent times and circumstances. Our grandfather had taken Michael and I fishing on Lake Taupo in a little dinghy powered by a diminutive Seagull outboard motor which moved the craft at grandfather's favourite speed of dead slow. If you also drove.. read more