Weekly Wrap 511: Ranting as the world begins to fall apart

The week of Monday 9 to Sunday 15 March 2020 saw a shift in Australia’s reaction to the COVID-19 coronavirus, with the first warnings to start “social distancing”. My burst of productivity will be hard to keep going. I’ll write more about this virus thing another time.

Podcasts

  • Not my podcast, but I was guest co-host on “A Fast-Moving Situation”, this week’s episode of Well May We Say, an Australian politics podcast by Jeremy Sear-Pirko. We had many opinions about things.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

This is the first week in which coronavirus precautions will directly affect me. I’ll start a bit of this “social distancing” thing, though to be fair it won’t be a lot different from my normal introvert existence.

The two Lowy Institute events for this week, Indonesia: A tough road ahead and China’s Xinjiang detentions have been cancelled. I’ll still be in Sydney until Tuesday afternoon, though, because my accommodation booking was non-refundable.

On Wednesday I’ll attempt some shopping in Katoomba. It should be fine because new stock seems to be arriving — apart from this ridiculous run on toilet paper and other paper goods, and hand sanitiser.

I’ll record an episode of The 9pm Edict podcast on Thursday, probably without Nicholas Fryer, and post it that night. [Update 19 March 2020: It won’t be happening for a couple of days, given the chaos of the week.]

Apart from all that, I should get a couple of things written for ZDNet. Life is still normal for me so far. For some value of “normal”.

Further Ahead

It remains to be seen how many of these events will still be happening, but here’s the current list.

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

[Photo: Under the Bridge. The curved brick bridge that forms the railway underpass on Bland Street, Ashfield, in Sydney photographed on 12 March 2020.]