A brutally large links post

A week's worth of browsing, I'd say.

- Questions that authors are never asked.

What is the most demeaning thing said about you as a writer?
My eight-year-old son, when asked by a school friend what his mother's job was, said: "She's a typist."

-  The story of two black men named Wes Moore. One ended up a writer, the other a criminal.

Both Wes Moores had troubled youths in blighted neighborhoods, difficulties in school, clashes with authority and unpleasant encounters with police handcuffs. But one ended up graduating Phi Beta Kappa and serving as a White House fellow, and today is a banker with many volunteer activities. The other is serving a life prison sentence without the possibility of parole.

- Spain's goalkeeper Iker Casillas has to face his girlfriend after Spain lost to Switzerland. She interviewed him and asked "How did you muck that up?" Awkward! Also, she is very very pretty.

- A murder case in Victoria that never got properly investigated means a killer got away with a terrible double murder.

- Where are they now: Hang Time! I used to watch Hang Time on Saturday mornings! It was about a high school basketball team, who had a girl playing. And a short guy with a lazy eye at point guard (I think that was this show? Or was it Saved By The Bell: The New Class?)

- Reserve pitcher spots a woman in the crowd, writes his number on a baseball and throws it to her. They got married on Sunday.

- Apparently the sex trade is larger than the worldwide drug market.

- The AFL is targeting 100 young Australian basketballers playing college ball in the States. They're looking for mobile ruckmen.

- Kiwi amateur plays in the World Cup against multi-millionaires Italy. He works at a bank.

- Peter Costello remembers when some people - including the ex PM - thought the GST would mean the sky would fall in.

There was no more ferocious opponent to the GST than Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Opposing the passage of the legislation in Parliament he declared: "When the history of this Parliament, this nation and this century is written, 30 June, 1999, will be recorded as a day of fundamental injustice - an injustice which is real, an injustice which is not simply conjured up by the fleeting rhetoric of politicians. It will be recorded as the day when the social compact that has governed this nation for the last 100 years was torn up." I doubt anyone (including Rudd) will be writing next week of the injustice of the GST or the need to repeal it.

- The BP oil spill has spoiled the English accent for English people.

Now for some Rudd and Gillard stuff.

- An economist explains how ridiculous it was for Rudd to rely on twentysomethings for his political, media and economic advice.

Kevin Rudd constructed a benign dictatorship on the back of three influential twenty-somethings with virtually no experience at all. That is to say, his principal political, media and economic advisors had never held down day-jobs in the real world for any meaningful length of time. And how could they have been expected to do so? While brimming with talent, these guys had only been out of university for a handful of years. Rudd's decision to surround himself with kids who acted as echo chambers of his own opinions was a mistake of both stunning and catastrophic proportions.

- Jack the Insider says Live by the Polls, Die by the Polls.

- Barrie Cassidy says Rudd's hypocrisy on climate change was the end.

It helps to cast the mind back four months to the end of February when he went on Insiders and said he would never walk away from climate change. He said this: "When our kids look back in 20 years and ask the question of this generation, 'were they fair dinkum or did they walk away from it?', I'd rather say that I threw everything at it, threw absolutely everything at it, to try and make it work, and to try and deliver an outcome at home and abroad. "We think we've got to act, and act appropriately. That's why we don't walk away from this one bit." Then two months later, he walked away. And when he did, according to Newspoll on May 4, Labor lost a million supporters in a fortnight.

- Finally, the ABC's Chris Uhlmann explains how the story was broken and the risk they took in putting it on the 7pm news bulletin.

We knew that the first sign that we were wide of the mark would come by way of an outraged phone call from the prime minister's office to the ABC's bureau chief, Greg Jennett. That call never came.

Enjoy!