I watched bits of Mediawatch last night, because Desperate Housewives has finally become too awful to bear. And I was amazed by this story: reporting the deaths of six teenagers in Mildura, the Age gave not only the name of the driver whose culpable driving caused the deaths, but listed his previous appearances in court!

Oh my God! I said

Yeah, Jon Faine was really upset about that too, said Clay. (Clay listens to an impressive amount of talky radio, while I can't escape the temptation to singalong to cheesy top 40 hits or classic golden oldies)

That's because he's a lawyer, I said, and this goes to the very marrow of due process!

What was The Age thinking? It's not only unethical but also criminal to publish those details. What were the legal staff doing? Jeepers.

Three chapters into Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, and an otherwise excellent reading experience is marred by this:

Her shoulder-length, ash-blond hair was fastened with a clip at the back of her neck.

I'm known for my hesitance to make blanket judgements, but nonetheless - this hairstyle is IMPOSSIBLE. Shoulder-length hair simply cannot be fixed at such a low point on the base of the skull without the side pieces escaping en masse. Particularly if you are using a clip, which has less grip (because more surface area) than an elastic band.

Even with curly hair, a quality which Schlink does not ascribe to his seductress but with which I have some familiarity, even curly hair, with its added tension and length, cannot be fastened with a clip at the back of one's neck when it reaches only to the shoulders in length.

You realise how attached you are to the reality effect in novels when a glitch like this happens.

What a relief it is to know that when I'm a rich and famous writer, I won't have to be inconvenienced by actually seeing, hearing or sharing personal space with actual fans.

Thanks to Canadian author Margaret Atwood, and her newly formed corporation Unotchit (you no touch it), authors can sign books remotely. The LongPen(tm) will be launched at the London Book Fair in a few weeks.

I knew writers were a misanthropic, isolationist bunch...but wow. I'm sure Atwood just wants to relieve some of the burden of the unceasing book tours (and it is remarkable how this has become the main way in which a book is promoted), but you've got to admit, the LongPen has a bad faith feel.

The historian who denied the holocaust has been sentenced to three years in jail, after a routine traffic check in Austria activated a 1989 arrest warrant.

Much as I detest Irving's views, I just don't feel quite right about this use of the legal system. At the very least, shouldn't there be a statute of limitations on the expression of stupid opinions?

I've never been a massive champion of free speech when it's invoked as a way of being substantively hurtful (hello, Danish cartoonists) but this sentence feels like a particularly blunt instrument to use against someone's words.

Plus, of course, the whole thing just gives him more publicity and allure. Bad result.

At the recent planning weekend of the Public Transport Users Association, I had to put my foot down with a firm hand on more than one occasion. Certain lobbyists (not Daniel, who is good) insisted on referring to buses, signalling loops, single gauge tracks or whatever as either sexy or not sexy. "None of it will EVER be sexy!" I screamed. "Only sex is sexy!" I continued. "And perhaps French cooking!"

Woe is me, for it appears that my frenzied outburst was not enough to prevent one of these people from getting the ear of Age transport reporter, Royce Millar:

The Government is mindful, however, that improved bus and rail services are not as "sexy" as an expansion of the rail network.

I get so downcast at times like this.

It's hard to imagine how Emma Tom, darling journalist of the late 90s, thought she could get away with writing a biography of Princess Mary while still maintaining a semblance of cool. Who did she think her readers would be?

The biography was trashed in no uncertain terms by the Age, and its quibble was precisely this clash of authorial and subject images. Tom is snide rock'n'roll, Mary is sweet women's magazine fodder. According to the Age, Tom tries to embrace her new genre (no doubt, and with no criticism from me, aided by the pay cheque Tom recieved for doing the hack job). But she couldn't let go of a little bit of counter-cultural distance, resulting in a mish-mashed tone: half descriptions of clothes, half sarcastic comments:

For example, when describing Queen Margrethe - "a genuine polymath who speaks five languages and is a gifted artist" - she cannot simply admire a talented and intelligent woman. Rather she finds a minor fact - the Queen apparently won some obscure award called the "Christmas Spoon of the Year" - and decides this is the perfect opportunity to restore her (that is, Tom's) cred by sneering, "You really know you've hit the artistic big time when you start the [sic] getting the spoon work."

A sneer which is not only gratuitously but also doesn't make much sense.

Do you think that last sentence in the Age review was deliberately grammaticaly incorrect? Tough call.

Anyway, let this be a cautionary tale to us all. Manage your professional careers carefully. Credibility is precious, and does not mix with royalty.

Courtesy of John Wright in the Age, my favourite three of his favourite ten love quotes:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye. Miss Piggy

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love. Charlie Brown

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. Groucho Marx

I love Groucho Marx.

One of my New Year's Vague Aspirations was to "see more live music", and last weekend seemed as good a time as any to start. So on Friday night I checked out the free Twilight Jazz and Voice series at Federation Square: a Maori choir, an African-inspired jazz band and a surprise feature vocalist. And "surprising" really is the word to describe Axle "Video Hits" Whitehead's scat-man routine.

From the cobbled sandstone expanses of Federation Square to a late night gig in the grungy back room of a Fitzroy pub. Steve Boyd and the Preachers delivered hand-on-heart country music with a few special touches: smooth backing harmonies, occasional driving riffs and a catalogue of songs about girls from different Melbourne suburbs. My favourite was the Fern Tree Gully "Misty Mountain Woman" who "worked all night long". The Mont Albert girl with the "cool disposition" was a snob, and as for the Werribeean innocent with the "butterfly tattoo"...kill her now.

The next night I joined 10,000 other Melburnians for a massive "Where's Wally" game in front of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at the Myer Music Bowl. We counted

* four red and white striped tops
* one black hat with white hair
* one white hat with black hair
* one baby blue terry towelling hat
* one baby pink terry towelling hat
* two little kids dancing like maniacs to the trumpet solo

No magic scrolls though. The music was sublime, the atmosphere was festive, and when the orchestra launched into the closing movement of Tchaikovsky's Symphony no. 4 the sky exploded with fireworks.

Well, I jumped through the flaming hoop of confirmation; my 12-month-mark progress report was accepted, praised and then duly pulled apart. And now that I have a red tick next to my first chapter - a truly excruciating effort setting out the applicability of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology to literary criticism - I can move on to The Fun Stuff. Chapter 2 will look at the historical association between women and commercialised literature (romances, the novel etc) and then consider Oprah as both the apotheosis and a reworking of this alignment. Oooh.

The tricky bit was always going to be connecting Bourdieu to this analysis. My basic chapter syllogism looked a bit like this:

1. Bourdieu has written a bit about gender, but not much, and not in relation to literature.
2. Gender plays an important role in shaping the values and logics of literary culture.

But how to get from 1 to 2? HOW? Out of the blue, a literature review provided the answer, in the form of an absolutely perfect sentence that does all the necessary intellectual work. I'm talking about Bridget Fowler, who wrote (and I paraphrase)

While Bourdieu has written about the structural constants of masculine oppression, he has neglected to apply this historically to any particular field.

Perfect! For the first time, I truly appreciate the point of a literature review.

Last night, the Melbourne City Council released its draft transport strategy. Now, keep in mind that this is the council that runs the CBD: dominated by big business interests and very conservative. It's not, for example, the green-led "progressive" Yarra City Council (a council that has done nothing for transport).

So what might we expect the MCC strategy to contain? How about:

* calling for bus only lanes on Queen and Lonsdale Streets;

* calling for infrastructure improvements to the City Loop rail tunnel such as signaling upgrades to improve capacity;

* calling for a new Doncaster railway line;

* protecting the municipality’s northern suburbs from the impact of increased traffic caused by the opening of Eastlink;

* creating a city pedestrian network plan and opening up more laneways to pedestrian traffic;

* allocating more road space to pedestrians and cyclists by installing wide pavements and bicycle lanes;

* giving trams priority at city intersections and creating tram only road lanes to improve the speed of service;

* lowering city speed limits to 40kmh to improve pedestrian safety;

And how frankly amazing it is to see Lord Mayor So and Councillor Catherine Ng saying stuff like "the car is no longer king".

Talkback this morning branded the measures anti-car, but it's the world that's anti-car - add up petrol prices, peak oil, congestion and the nightmare of parking in the city, and it's pretty easy to see why public transport, walking and cycling should be given the priority.

To begin with, garlic prawns: get little claypots sizzling with oil, chilli and garlic, add prawns, cook for a few minutes, and eat with crusty bread and a bottle of marsanne. So far, so already brilliant.

Then duck with raspberries. Cook duck breasts skin down in a frypan until the skin is golden, then rub a mix of cinnamon, sea salt and raw sugar into the skin. Turn over and cook the other side. Meanwhile, mix together a little creme de cassis, red wine and arrowroot. Remove the duck from the pan and throw in the cassis mixture. Admire the translucent stickiness! Toss in the raspberries for a few minutes, then drizzle the lot over the sliced duck. Finish that second bottle of wine.

I feel this is going to be a very good month.

I was informed today by a friend reading Latham's Diary that one of the golden moments related therein is an address made by Latham to some students, circa 1998. I was one of those students! I remember it well. Latham did come across brilliantly that day, full of new ideas and scintillating insights, and he seemed to be having a ball. I'm glad that I did my duty by Australia and, indeed, the Labor party, by fostering one of its leaders. Sadly my influence on Latham waned towards the end of his career, hence the exploding catastrophe of Latham's last days. Sorry about that.

I had moved up to drinking Vanilla Coke by the 1.25 litre bottle. I had also stopped being able to sleep at night. With a little help from Clay, I joined the (remarkably proximate) dots.

So, in the last five days I've had no Vanilla Coke, only three coffees, and I'm sleeping like a sleepy baby. Plus, I have my counter-cultural cred back!

Is anyone else staggered by the amount of promotional material Coke has splashed around for its Coke Zero drink? I've seen 2 metre tall wraparounds at supermarket entrances, blackboards at cafes, street art and god knows what else. Thankfully I'm now immune.