Weekly Wrap 510: The beginning of the end of the world

The week of Monday 2 to Sunday 8 March 2020 started to see the rise of panic buying in Sydney thanks to overblown fears about the novel coronavirus COVID-19. And in Canberra, the government continued to suffer embarrassments.

I won’t talk about the latter here, or indeed the former, except to note that Australia’s toilet paper shortage fears seemed to reach their peak on Wednesday night, as this chart of Australian Google Search activity for “toilet paper” shows.

Articles

Media Appearances

  • On Thursday one of my tweets was quoted in a story titled New Aussie obsession ruthlessly mocked at The Chronicle in Toowoomba, and I believe in other News Corp mastheads as well. Classy stuff.
  • Also on Thursday, that damn bird ended up on an Israeli website. I won’t type the title here because I can’t figure out how to embed the right-to-left Hebrew script properly.

Podcasts, Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

It’s a week of cat-sitting in Sydney, peppered with all manner of meetings and such, and a bunch of writing. As one might expect. Actually the work is the key thing, but the cat-sitting does shape the week’s logistics.

On Tuesday lunchtime, there’s a book launch at the Lowy Institute, Contest for the Indo-Pacific: Why China won’t map the future by Rory Medcalf.

On Wednesday morning, there’s a thing called “AustCyber AllStars: Launch of the CISO Lens Benchmark and Australia’s Sector Competitiveness Plan“, which is what it says on the tin. In that those two things will be launched. I’ll explain later.

On Friday I’m being interviewed for an episode of the podcast Well May We Say with Jeremy Sear-Pirko.

Further Ahead

So many little events pencilled in!

Please let me know if there’s anything I should add. Send airline tickets if it’s outside the Sydney region, yeah?

[Photo: Empty Egg Aisle at the Coles supermarket in Ashfield, Sydney, during the coronavirus scare of early March 2020. People had mostly started panic-buying paper goods such as facial tissues, paper towels, and of course toilet paper, but on 7 March they’d also bought out the eggs.]