Last night on Australia's only watchable reality TV show, the wildcard entries into the Final 12 were chosen. I have, sadly, been socialising on Sunday nights rather than watching TV so I'm a bit out of the loop, but I can say this much. And say it I will.

Anthony? Sure. He certainly doesn't sound any worse than Hooberstank, for what that's worth. Emelia? I'm a bit disturbed by the one earring thing but she has cute freckles so OK. That left us with the final two as voted by the public: Marty and the luminous, all-kinds-of-cute and immensely talented Ngaiire - who is from my birthplace, Lismore. And who gets chosen? Not the interesting and gifted one, no. The one who sounds like a wishy-washy Nickelback. I'll reluctantly admit that Marty has a fairly warm personality and a spark of attitude, but that singing! It was cock rock without balls.

After that crushing disappointment, I can only say how soothed and heartened I was by the excellent first episode of John Safran vs God. It was hilarious, clever, brave and eminently lovable. Oh, and Mediawatch was in fine form too. Yet to watch the taped episode of Wildside. Long live Monday nights...

University of Sydney transport planner Peter Stopher is that rare thing - an honest car lobbyist who doesn't even pretend to support public transport, walking or cycling. No - we are living in a great car age where people happily sit in long lines of traffic, enjoying their own music and puffing away on their cigarettes.

There's no problem, apparently, with the fact that Sydney's 4.2 million residents drive more kilometres and use more petrol than the residents of any European or Asian city.

At the beginning of this month, Stopher voiced his views in the SMH, in an article titled Love Your Traffic Jam. He claimed:

There is serious doubt as to whether it is feasible to increase public transport [use] by a significant amount ... given the sheer volume of passengers that would have to be carried

Implausible, yeah? If you have to move 10,000 people, it's much easier to do it on a couple of trains than in 10,000 cars. Stopher's claim that PT capacity is inadequate may resonate with Sydney's present PT troubles - but just think about the converse. If no one was catching PT and everyone was driving, whole Sydney suburbs would have to be demolished to accommodate the new roads (as demonstrated by WA transport guru Peter Newman). As the excellent PTUA website will tell you, Melbourne's PT system is carrying less than half the people it carried in the 1950s, and Sydney would also be carrying less people now than then. Our infrastructure can handle increased services and patronage.

As oil prices skyrocket and environmental pressures mount, it is simply irresponsible to pretend that cars are the only way to get from A to B. Sure, make car engines greener and cleaner, but a commitment to making PT an attractive option for commuters is paramount - it can be done easily, extremely cheaply (compared to the cost of building freeways) and quickly. Public transport also promotes social equity - not everyone can afford a car or get a driver's licence.

With crap like Stopher's arguments clouding up the Sydney idea-osphere, no wonder Sydney is struggling to provide even basic PT services at the moment.

The Song: Joanna Newsom, Bridges and Balloons

The Bullshit Review: Can a song be a poem? The answer depends on your concept of what constitutes poetry: Is it a formal description meaning a piece of writing broken into stanzas and lines, or an aesthetic one, meaning any work that aspires to the state of poetry? The poet Russell Edson said that the great thing about the prose poem-- a form that usually involves unbroken, unrhymed blocks of text, first popularized by Baudelaire-- is that anything that can't be classified as something else is probably a prose poem. The form has remained controversial: Various manifestos upon the form have attempted to cement what separates a prose poem from prose: It must be short, impressionistic rather than narrative, self-contained, it must (and here's the key) express a poetic intent. Since many prose poems violate all the rules except the latter that trying to devise any rules as to what constitutes one is futile: It is a paradox, and when it comes down to it, the only way to define it is that we know one when we see it.

[blah blah blah for three paragraphs]

How do I know this song is a poem? I could tick off provisions for days, and still not say anything as true as this: If the tongue has receptors for different tastes located in different places, then perhaps the heart is the same, and "Bridges and Balloons" seems to hit my poetry receptor rather than my music receptor. Maybe one day, when the debate rages over what separates a song from a song-poem, we'll say we know one when we hear it. Remembering Newsom singing, "Catenaries and dirigibles/ Brace and buoy the living room/ A loom of metal, warp-woof-wimble/ And a thimblesworth of milky moon/ Can touch hearts larger than a thimble," despite any semantic ambiguity, we'll all know exactly what we mean. [Brian Howe, June 21st, 2004]

Lyn's Response: Can a review amount to a transcendent piece of philosophy? The answer depends on your concept of what constitutes philosophy: is it a formal meaning, meaning actual thoughts spelt out on paper, or an aesthetic one, meaning any piece of writing that keeps asking rhetorical, empty, meaningless questions one on top of the other?

The poet Russell Edson said - actually, I don't know what he said, because I wouldn't know him from a member of the Australian rowing team - but including a quote like this is more about displaying my erudite knowledge than about elucidating any meaning from the text I'm quoting. Oh, and if Edson quotes Baudelaire, than that's double points right there.

In order to obtain real meaning in a review, you must waffle, you must pad, and you must (here's the key) say less about the text, than about your approach to the text, other texts you've encountered before in your life which have the same words in the title, or even stuff you bought at Coles on the weekend.

In July this year, a little blue booklet produced by the Australia Council and a range of booksellers appeared on stands in every bookshop in Australia. Its title: 50 Books You Must Own. Its content: a bewildering mishmash of approachable classics, sci fi, chick lit and travel writing. There’s no way any one person would want to own all these books. What, I asked myself, was going on?

Superficially, this booklet looks like a helpful guide through the vast and intimidating world of literature. It styles itself as a canon – an authoritative pronouncement on great literature. Other canons include the somewhat amorphous Western canon (Shakespeare, Dickens etc) and the Biblical canon (from Genesis to Revelation). We all have our personal canons of texts we love and admire – mine includes William Faulkner and Six Feet Under. This blue brochure, however, is not a canon. It is nothing but a glorified catalogue. However flawed they might be, articulated canons at least aim to educate or inspire. All this brochure aims to do is sell books. You can see it in the title – these are not books you must read, but books you must own. The must in the title feels like the must of fashion: these books, like pink ugh boots, are the must-have items of the season. God knows, that’s the only way the Da Vinci Code could be considered something you have to own. It's so hot right now.

Many of the books in the brochure are bizarre choices. Why include the Hobbit instead of Lord of the Rings? The Shipping News is utterly unreadable. If you were going to nominate an Anne Rice novel, why on earth would you select The Vampire Lestat instead of Interview With the Vampire? There is no logical connection between books - just a series of completely random jumps from one fashionable best seller (or would-be best seller) to another.

Raising the level of reading in society is a bandwagon, and perhaps that’s why the Australia Council saw fit to support this brochure. But selling books is not the same thing as promoting literacy. This brochure has appropriated the form and power of the canon as part of the arsenal of consumerism, and in so doing has abandoned the discernment that underpins the authority of the canon. According to this brochure, a genuinely great book is indistinguishable from airport trash. After all, they both cost about $25.

As it happens, the extent of my cultural participation this weekend involved going to the pub a lot. I feel that now is the definitive moment to announce my current top 5 pub meals in Melbourne.

1. The London Tavern: kangaroo sirloin with masala potatoes and onion sambol, $17
This is my number one at the moment. Mash is over - these chunks of potato rolled in peppercorns and spices are the perfect foil for the tender kangaroo. I have it with a glass of Konrad (a Marlborough sauvignon blanc) - not because they go together at all well, just because I like that wine and I can't find it anywhere else.

2. The Napier Hotel: steak sandwich, $11
"Steak sandwich" is a somewhat inadequate description for this mountain high, half-metre wide stack of turkish bread, steak, egg, beetroot, a hash brown, tomato etc on umpteen million wedges. For another $2.50, you can upgrade to the bogan burger which also has a chicken schnitzel and a cocktail umbrella. My fave Sunday night feed.

3. Wild Oscar's: eggplant chips, $4.50 for 8.
I'm cheating a bit here, because Wild Oscar's is totally a bar not a pub. But you can have a beer and some grub there, so I'm counting it. The eggplant chips are magnificent: large wedges of eggplant, rolled in parmesan breadcrumbs, deepfried and served with a chilli cream dipping sauce. They're so good, I'll make a special trip down the street for them. And after I've eaten more than my fair share, I'll polish off the lettuce garnish just in case there are any eggplant remnants...

4. The Kingston Hotel: crispy skinned barramundi on green curry rice, about $20
Melt-in-your-mouth fish, mildly tangy rice. The desserts here are pretty fantastic, too. Most pubs don't offer dessert. That sucks. Tough beer-drinking yobboes need their sweet things, too.

5. The Wine Bar at Federation Square: olives braised in ouzo, $7
Cheating again, I know. I guess I am a yuppie if I consider this a pub. But the olives are so great: flavoursome, juicy and with that special something only ouzo brings to the party. They also did these excellent mango mojitos last New Year's Eve - $7 each, or two for $7. That's not a typo - you really did owe it to yourself to drink twice as much as normal.

Voila! I'm more than happy to hear other people's suggestions - although it will take me a long time to be convinced about the merits of chicken parmagiana. It's oily, tough-as-nails, overly cheesy gloop.

It's been two days without a gold medal for the Australian Olympic team.

As the announcer on ABC radio said this morning, "Australia failed to win a medal in two cycling finals, two shooting finals and two rowing finals." We don't care who actually won these events, of course. Sporting excellence is hardly the point. It's GoldGoldGold! Or, in this case, Notgold!Notgold!Notgold!

The "Meh" Olympics, tm Jason, are failing to deliver. No wonder Howard's ruled out a September election.

Michael S alerted me to this story, splashed all over the UK tabloids. Iorworth Hoare, a rapist on day release, bought a lottery ticket and won 7 million pounds. People are outraged.

I think this reveals fascinating attitudes towards the lottery system. A lottery is egalitarian - each person has an equal(ly small) chance of winning, regardless of merit, moral worth or hard work. It is the precise opposite of, say, Protestantism. The problem here is that people object when randomly good things happen to undeserving people.

Hoare wasn't profiting from his crime. He had the sort of windfall that can happen to any person, anytime. Do provisionally-released rapists lose the right to access such windfalls? The BBC article suggests there may be some inconsistency in the rules - football pools are out but lotteries are OK. That would be weird. (A further interesting point is that now it might be worthwhile for Hoare's victims to sue him for compensation - the money is being held by the government.)

Perhaps we need to query the place of day release, and the conditions attaching to it. But we can't afford to place the conditions of punishment in the hands of the outraged tabloid-fed majority - that way lies the death penalty, mandatory sentencing regimes and other forms of disproportionate retribution.

Leaping Larry is, like, my favourite sports journalist ever. He used to have a page on Sundays which featured the Wide Word of Sport - gems of ridiculousness from commentary boxes all over the nation. Clever appreciation of language meets the biff. You can read his work now in Thursday's Age, where he takes the piss out of ads as part of the Green Guide. It's magic.

So I did a bit of leaping myself last Thursday night, and got along to see and meet the man himself in a session of ACMI's Lounge Critic. This series takes a critical look at television. Next month, someone else funky will be examining medical operations on TV and what's so fascinating about them. Larry's brief was "Unduly Rough Play: Sports and Its Stars in the Media."

Some great ideas were raised about the soapstar-isation of sport in the media. This year, athletes have been front page news for their relationships, drug use, sexual orientation, bad behaviour - anything but their sports performances. Larry showed clips from the Shane Crawford documentary and the Footy Show, as well as media reporting of the sexual misconduct storm that surrounded both the NRL and the AFL.

In the lead up to the Olympics, it was all about the bronzed bodies. I think now a bit more attention has turned back to sport, which is arguably less scintillating if a touch more relevant.

It's a rare move for a female columnist in a major newspaper. Miranda Devine is writing about something other than women/babies/new feminism/choices. She's writing about seed. Do we dare hope that she will have something interesting to say? I dare. I hope.

(Beth reads column)

Well, her general anti-greenie rants aside, I largely agree with Devine's defence of genetically modified crops. The reactionary movement against these has largely been based on ignorant fear and a misplaced belief in the purity of traditional farming. This fear has serious consequences - African villages have had to refuse aid that contains genetically modified food, since this might contaminate their own crops and cut them out of any possible trade with paranoid Europe.

But Devine doesn't need to paint such an extreme picture. There are still serious concerns that should be raised about GM crops. First, they just haven't been around long enough for us to accurately assess the environmental impact. Devine cites a University of Sydney study that found environmental benefits to pesticide resistant crops - but for how many years was this study performed? There are potential dangers that may take decades to emerge, like the cross-fertilisation of GM crops and weeds that may produce pesticide-resistant super-weeds, and the diffuse harm done to ecosystems.

The potential economic effects are just as concerning as the environmental dimensions. In Australia the issue is less prominent, but in developing nations GM crops are being "licensed" to farmers who are forbidden from collecting seeds and replanting them the following year (a marker has been inserted into the genetic material of the seed). For decades now, the planet has produced enough food to feed everyone. The problem was distribution and access. Does genetic modification solve that?

Until these issues are adequately and soberly addressed, I think Devine's enthusiasm for GM crops should be toned down.

Christopher Bantick's desire to critically engage with teen magazines is laudable - it's a great idea for both parents and teens to think about the messages they are receiving through what they read. But by offering a blanket reaction against the sex articles in these magazines Bantick misses an opportunity for nuanced criticism.

Sex itself is not a bad thing to raise with teenagers, and not all articles about it are harmful. When, as Bantick quotes, Girlfriend advises readers that "negotiating sex is so much easier with your clothes on", the magazine is giving practical advice that helps young and unsure girls to say no to sex. After reading these magazines off and on for years, I am certain that when you see a headline "Do You Really Want a Boyfriend?", you can bet that the article will tell girls that they are fabulous individuals and don't need a man to be valuable.

Just because these articles are about sex doesn't mean they promote sex. Other articles might - and teasing out the mixed messages and contradictions within the magazines is an important skill to teach young women. But an undifferentiated attack on all magazine articles that deal with sexuality is unfounded and unhelpful.

UPDATE: After this rant of mine was published in the Letters to the Editor section of the Age, Mia Freedman, editor of Cosmo and Dolly, came out and agreed with me: "These same fathers may mistakenly assume that reading about sex equates to doing it. Not true."

One should never ignore one's hunches. When there was considerable fanfare over the documentary Spellbound a few months ago, I had a feeling I wouldn't like it. American kids and all the thrill of the National Spelling Bee? I just knew where that was going.

After renting the video this week and attempting to watch it, I can confirm that I was absolutely right. The 8 kids featured in the doco are 8 flavours of scary geek: an Indian facing enormous parental pressure, a prayerful black girl from the ghetto, the genius daughter of Mexican immigrants, the semi-autistic wunderkind and so on. They are shown learning vast lists of words, studying 8 hours a day, feeling unbelievably thrilled when they win at the regional stages and coping with the stress of high level competition.

There are two reasons why this documentary fails to entertain. First, anyone who has participated in a piano eisteddfod, a dance competition or a debating tournament as a teenager knows that the fierce competition we throw children into is not cute or amusing, it is intense and potentially scarring. Second, I'm just not into freak shows. This film slots right into the tradition of documentaries about weirdos, and I don't like it.

Perhaps the problem for me is that, unlike other reviewers, I didn't experience that frisson of finding words an unexpectedly interesting subject for a documentary. I always expect words to be interesting. I just don't like them being used to stress out and rank kids. That seems joyless.

Now that the Iraqi government has closed down the local office of al-Jazeera for a month for "security reasons", we see the true nature of this new, imported American democracy.

I'm simply staggered. If we want to get detailed, then I'd make this point: Al-Jazeera is accused of broadcasting inciting images. As I saw in Control Room, the Americans accused al-Jazeera of the same thing when the network showed images of dead Iraqi civilians. That's not incitement, that's good and honest journalism based firmly on fact. It wasn't al-Jazeera doing the killing.

But the issue is bigger than that - a democracy must be able to withstand (nay! encourage) criticism and a multiplicity of voices and interests. One of the absolutely definitional requirements for a democracy is a free press. It's amazing that the Iraqi puppet government's despotic act hasn't galvanised the international media.

If a story transfixes Sydney tabloids, then it transfixes me. Last week a pub security guard called Karen Brown shot and killed a young man. She claimed she was medically unfit to be interviewed by police, but later that week sold her story to Channel 7 for $100,000. She has now been charged with murder.

The interesting point people have gleaned from this is that the Channel 7 interview might corrupt potential jurors. But I reckon this issue arises, in perhaps a less direct form, with any high profile case. It's an inherent problem with the jury system in a media-saturated society. Fortunately, the trial will take months and the media's attention span is about 10 days.

I recently watched the Wildside episode where a security guard with two days firearms training fatally shot a would-be burglar who was armed only with a plank of wood. The terror on the guard's face in the following days was an exact match for Karen Brown's: "I was just doing a job." Detective Bill McCoy was contemptuous towards the guard, but his real rage was directed at the employer - the man who set up a private army, a gang of amateurish thugs. Will Karen Brown's case result in some review of the training and regulation of security guards? At the least, some public discussion about their role?

I'm on holidays! I love Balmain and ferries and friends and sunshine. The newspapers are still, unfortunately, crap. I haven't seen a film in two and a half days and I'm feeling withdrawal symptoms, but hopefully I'll swing by Fahrenheit 911 sometime soon and ease the pain.

Meanwhile, in the world beyond film reviews, interesting things are happening. In a literary scandal reminiscent of Helen Demidenko-Darville back in the 90s, Norma Khouri's account of honour killings in Jordan has been exposed as a hoax. To be more precise, her claim that the book is a factual memoir has been discredited - she lived in Chicago, not Jordan, etc etc. You can read a point by point comparison of her claims and their refutations at the SMH site.

The question here for us is this: given that the terrible mistreatment of women in Muslim countries is a real and genuine issue, and that honour murders do take place, is Norma Khouri's crime against literal truth more or less forgivable?

I think less, since her fraudulence undermines the credibility of other women who would speak out about their traumatic experiences. Whatever one may think about the existence of truth in the abstract, there are certain social conventions about what truth is (a correspondence between claim and lived experience, say), and Khouri's violation of these conventions discredits her in the eyes of the community (and draws some very vicious comment from the papers). Khouri has emerged from this scandal looking like an attention-seeker. This doesn't help the cause of oppressed women.

Those who think that merely raising the issue into public consciousness is a victory may disagree with me.