Sometimes I'm proud to be a Canberran: we're the only ones who voted in favour of becoming a republic, for example. And now, the ACT is legislating to recognise same sex marriages. I'm a little confused as to what this actually involves - it doesn't alter the Commonwealth Marriage Act, but (I think) creates civil unions which have all the same rights. Anyway, the best bit of the story is this quote from Chief Minister Jon Stanhope. He has a lot of fans in Canberra, and this blend of sarcasm and bleeding-heart liberalism shows you why:

Mr Stanhope said one choice was to do nothing and maintain the currently discriminatory position, accepting that discrimination against gays and lesbians was okay.

Go Jon!

University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis has called for more freedom to charge fees:

In the absence of public funding, Professor Davis argued, if universities wanted to improve facilities and the education they provided, they had to be able to charge for the real cost of teaching.

The real cost of teaching needs to be covered? So the fees for law degrees should come down then. How expensive can a room and a stack of photocopies be? Surely not $30,000, the going HECS rate - and even more surely, not $100,000, which is how much Melbourne Uni charges for its graduate law degree.

I know it's hard to get money out of the government for anything so liberal as higher education, but the solution can't be putting the squeeze on students. Rule it out, Glyn.

Terrific article on cheerleading in modern society. While it sadly neglects to mention The Rock's monologue from Bring It On as featured in Be Cool, the article covers such diverse areas as nostalgia, the religious right, sex scandals, the horror of male cheerleaders, funding for women's sport, biblical cheerleaders and shock-tactic cultural commentators. Fun quotes:

Cheerleading is so obviously sexually titillating that there are those on the Christian right who want to police it, Iran-style. But this is no clear-cut conflict - it's nostalgists versus authoritarians versus libertarians, with cheerleading exposing the ugly ideological mess at the heart of modern conservatism.

...

While the cheerleader might give us a fascinating snapshot of the American culture wars, Adams reckons there might only be as few as 1.8 million cheerleaders in the entire country. This contrasts with probably more than 10 million female soccer players. Like the soda fountain and the letter sweater, as an icon, the cheerleader is well past her use-by date.

Cheerleading is probably the only thing that could make the Commonwealth Games worse.

Thought I'd share a few more gems from my gym. I think they're reaching further and further towards the lowest common denominator. This is motivation for the mega-slack. Me! So, from the people who brought you "Make Time for Exercise or Make Time for Illness", I present:

Think of Movement as an Opportunity, Not an Inconvenience

Yay! That was my absolute favourite for a few weeks, until I spotted:

If You Are Having a Bad Day, Try Doing a Little. It May Help.

This quote kind of gives away the gym's rehab concerns, but its gentleness is a failsafe way to get me on the fitball. Low-aiming exercise slogans, you rock.

I'm doing actual PhD work today - I thought it was time - so I'll share with you all an insightful quote from Elizabeth Long's Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. It's an analysis of one of the book club episodes on Oprah.

The show offered thematic discussion that moved to consider, in the case of While I Was Gone, forgiveness, consciousness, memory, and the place of the past. Yet in the main, it constructed the text as a transparent veil (a figure echoed in many of the visual representations of semitransparent pages on the show) through which readers could access another world or another level of understanding of their own inner lives.

This resembles one common strategy of appropriating books among many reading groups. But Winfrey was not simply another member of a grassroots book club. As founder of Oprah's Book Club, she was responsible for choosing books and for shaping the ways other readers appropriated them. She wielded the power of a cultural celebrity, and, as such, she was teaching both what to read and how to read.

In that sense, I agree with critics who worry that she might have been approaching books on the easiest level and using them to reinforce the status quo. On the other hand, Winfrey offered an alternative to more academic literary cannons and analyses, and that might have opened up some cultural space for readers – space for them to forge their own ways of relating to the books they read (Long 206).

Good, eh? A bubbling confluence of celebrity, tradition, personal therapy and power.

I enjoyed Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth, and not least for its tagline: "Assassin. Traitor. Heretic. Lover." My name's Elizabeth, and of course I'm all of those things, so I was deeply impressed.

Now they're making a sequel, and I'm thinking taglines again. "Elizabeth II"? Hee hee hee hee. It's not even a funny joke, but I've got the giggles.

Apparently the real tagline is "Elizabeth: The Golden Age". Ho hum. Why couldn't they let fly with "Elizabeth: Too Fast, Too Furious" or "Elizabeth Rides Again" or (stop me, someone) "Elizabeth: The Empire Fights Back"? Happy Commonwealth Games Eve.

Those bloody Brits with their colonial airs and plummy voices have banned our honest, salt-o-the-earth tourism campaign, the one called "so where the bloody hell are you".

Struth. Still, it's not all doom and gloom:

Tourism Australia managing director Scott Morrison said the ban was a massive boost. "We thank the UK authorities for the extra free publicity and invite them to have a bloody good holiday in Australia, especially with the Commonwealth Games now on and the Ashes coming up later in the year," he said.

Publicity issues aside, the ban does seem both hypocritical and out of touch. But perhaps it's just as well to be reminded that we hate England. Don't be fooled when the Queen wafts around Melbourne next week, don't succumb to warm fuzzy feelings about the remnants of British imperialism (aka "the Commonwealth"). Perfidious Albion it was, and Perfidious Albion it always will be.

I'm a big Oprah fan, but sometimes she really pushes the friendship. I thought her after-Oscar special, screened at lunchtime yesterday, had great potential: the visual of her on the Oscars stage, and the theatre filled with blonde bobbed women in their forties, was spectacular.

But Oprah disappointed. And it wasn't because the show was too light and fluffy - that was fine, and even what I wanted out of anything Oscars-related. The footage of red carpet interviews was super, likewise the chat with Jon Stewart.

No, what I really minded was Oprah's interview with Reese Witherspoon. Oprah not only declared that Reese's tortured, self-righteous, blathery acceptance speech was the Oscars highlight! but replayed the speech in full! and analysed it in detail to explain just why it was so amazing! "You really showed us who you were in that speech, and that's what counts" and so on.

I know Reese's brand of seriousness and The Oprah Winfrey Show's emphasis on personal transformation/social responsibility are a perfect fit - but surely a woman of Oprah's intelligence must sometimes want to step outside the brief? I like Reese Witherspoon's acting, but offscreen she doth protest way too loud about how smart she is, what a responsible mother she is, and how dumb everyone else in Hollywood is. Relax, Reese. You're not saving cancer patients.

And on preachy, earnest Hollywood, see Miranda Devine, who almost makes sense.

When the awards are spread so evenly across a pool of films, the newsworthy story becomes the nominations: and so, it remains commendable that the Academy nominated so many independent, low budget, arty, envelope-pushing movies. Yay. Crash as Best Picture? I wouldn't have chosen it above Brokeback Mountain, but perhaps we should just be grateful it wasn't Titanic or Shakespeare in Love or something.

I thought some of the presenters performed well: compere Jon Stewart got me giggling on the couch several times - particularly when, after a nauseating montage of all Hollywood's social-activist-do-goody films, he announced "that none of those issues have ever been problems again". Ben Stiller's green-suited visual effects spoof was endearing, and Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep's playful homage to director Robert Altman was an absolute knockout. Those classy, clever ladies.

Salma Hayek looked stunning behind the podium, in a vivid blue dress and tousled hair. Jessica Alba, Uma Thurmann and Charlize Theron came up trumps in the frock stakes too.

As for "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" winning best song, I certainly enjoyed Queen Latifah exploding with laughter as she announced the win. The performance of the song sounded hollow and tinny, but I guess it's hardly rap's natural venue. On the other hand, as Stewart said to the audience, "If you're wondering what a pimp is, it's an agent with a good hat". Tee hee.

As the triumphant finale for February the Month of French Cuisine, Clay and I rocked along to a French cooking class at the Queen Victoria Markets. The instructor, Sebastien Piel, was a dead ringer for Jamie Oliver's French twin. That French twin he has kept secret from the world, euhhh...

That last word? That's French. I learnt it from Seb. Often preceded by donc. He spoke French better than English, but covered his miscommunications with a megawatt smile and a swig from his glass of wine. And the food was heavenly.

We cooked seared tuna with ratatouille and cous cous and the most mouthwatering tapenade ever. Then duck with plum sauce, melting potatoes (pommes fondants), carrots and spinach. Then creme caramel. I think it's the techniques for cooking the veges that I'll take away with me: the slow simmer in stock, the judicious application of goosefat, the effect of cutting things into different shapes.

Now that it's March, the featured cuisine is Moroccan! Stay tuned.

Books Bought:

None. But I did buy two bookshelves.

Books Read:

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Crusoe's Daughter, Jane Gardam
The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

You know a book is amazing when it doesn't just feed you new ideas, doesn't just move you to a new emotional register, but actually changes the entire pace of your life. While I was reading Gilead, I think my entire body clock slowed and I lived in a meditative trance. Robinson's gentle, unhurried prose reveals its truths gradually, and because of that, with devastating power. Just brilliant.

Crusoe's Daughter was a valiant attempt to grapple with a big meta-ficitonal idea: Gardam tries some tricky stuff to do with the bond lonely children feel with fictional characters, and the effect this can have on their lives. Definitely interesting.

The Reader marks the fifth Oprah's Book Club selection I have read (out of a possible forty seven). It's a corker. The Reader was Schlink's first realist novel after a string of detective stories, and it's got the pared down and evocative feel of crime fiction. He's also a lawyer, and well able to juggle some complex moral quandries. The gaffe over the hairstyle has been excused - I'll put it down to the exigencies of translation.

What begins as a love story turns into an obsessive rumination on guilt, history and generational conflict in post WWII Germany - while remaining a love story, but a pretty messed up one. I especially loved the passage where the narrator visits the site of a concentration camp and tries to feel the reality of what happened there, but keeps being overwhelmed by numbness. Something about the way Schlink wrote that section kept my attention short-circuiting, so that I felt the same confused, guilty lack of empathy.