I was reading a book on the history of marriage, and it mentioned a handful of essays that were written in the US in the late eighteen century on the subject of marriage. Wondering what they had to say about the matter, I turned to Google and found one of them. What follows is the text to “On the choice of a wife” by John Aiken, which forms a chapter in his book, Letters from a father to his son, on various topics, relative to literature and the conduct of…

continue reading

The furore over bikes on the road that Shane Warne instigated has not yet gone away. The main development since my last post on mandatory registration and number plates has been the emergence of the account of the cyclist himself and eyewitness reports. It sounds like Warne wasn’t close to being as innocent as he made himself out to be, but this story has become bigger than Warne’s altercation for it has reignited in the media the long-running tension between drivers and cyclists. Bridie O’Donnell — a professional… continue reading

Shane Warne has managed to get himself embroiled in controversy again. This time it’s with cyclists. Firstly he wrote a series of tweets last week where he called for cyclists to ride in single file, show number plates, and pay registration. Unsurprisingly there were a lot of responses, some of which he retweeted. The classiest of them wasn’t from the wife of a certain famous Australian cricketer suggesting that he “just throw a cricket ball at them if they really annoy u”.

Today he had an altercation with… continue reading