{"id":49245,"date":"2013-06-01T21:06:51","date_gmt":"2013-06-02T05:06:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=49245"},"modified":"2023-09-23T14:14:40","modified_gmt":"2023-09-23T22:14:40","slug":"the-howard-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=49245","title":{"rendered":"The Howard Years"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just finished watching this four hour ABC Australia documentary on former Australian prime minister <A HREF=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Howard\">John Howard<\/a> (who once called cricketer <A HREF=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Donald_Bradman\">Sir Donald Bradman<\/a> the greatest living Australian). It was a great way to catch up on my Aussie history.<\/p>\n<p><iframe width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/aj9zl01SCKQ\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The predominant feeling I took away was one of sadness. He seemed to have made a bad choice following President Bush into Iraq and Afghanistan. He hung on too long as a leader and was badly defeated in the 2007 election. it&#8217;s hard for me to get enthusiastic about a GST (General Services Tax) or banning automatic guns. White nationalist Pauline Hanson fascinates me and John Howard&#8217;s dance with her.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m reading a book now called <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.penguin.com.au\/products\/9780670076109\/bradman-s-war\/311277\/q-malcolm-knox\">Bradman&#8217;s War<\/a> by Malcolm Knox (born in 1966 like me), who <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/profiles\/profiles\/malcolm_knox.htm\">thanks me<\/a> in the intro to his 2007 book Adult Book. <\/p>\n<p>This new book is about Bradman&#8217;s 1948 tour of Britain, when Aussie never lost. <\/p>\n<p>I like watching ABC&#8217;s Four Corners documentaries on youtube.<\/p>\n<p>When Australian batsman <A HREF=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lindsay_Hassett\">Lindsay Hassett<\/a> in WWII saw a sheikh arrive with his 199 wives, he said, &#8220;One more and he&#8217;d be entitled to a new ball.&#8221; In cricket, you get a new ball after a certain number of overs.<\/p>\n<p>According to this new book, Sir Donald Bradman was so nasty on the cricket field and conducted it like war because he was a psychosomatic invalid during WWII, skipping the real war while the blokes who fought real war didn&#8217;t feel like playing cricket like war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just finished watching this four hour ABC Australia documentary on former Australian prime minister John Howard (who once called cricketer Sir Donald Bradman the greatest living Australian). It was a great way to catch up on my Aussie history. The &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=49245\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[182,15903],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia","category-cricket"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49245"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152571,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49245\/revisions\/152571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}