Rob Lowe Has Broken My Heart. He Doesn’t Know It Yet.

Rob Lowe was asked to name his best on-screen kiss, and he answered immediately: Nastassja Kinski. They kissed in The Hotel New Hampshire back in 1984. Apparently she was so beautiful that he was nervous.

I have taken this news with the dignity you would expect from a woman whose in her sixties. I’m going to lie down for a bit.

Of course, Nastassja Kinski is gorgeous. I’ve seen her. I’m not disputing his eyesight. What I object to is Rob Lowe still remembering a kiss from 1984 while I’ve spent the intervening forty-two years being available in a purely theoretical sense.

The really annoying part is that he’s still gorgeous himself. Rob Lowe has somehow kept the face and the hair. It feels excessive. There ought to be a limit. Boy... He ought to try being a woman. There is no such thing as a gorgeous, craggy woman!

He’s been married for decades, I’m happily spoken for, and the kiss happened on a film set before many people reading this were born. None of which makes my disappointment any less real. I didn’t ask for an explanation of who his favourite was. I was quite content not knowing.

So congratulations, Nastassja. You won a competition you probably didn’t realise was still running. As for Rob, I’ll forgive him eventually.

Probably by lunchtime.

He Rated Her Looks. What A Dick

Coco Pickering, 22, working at Commonwealth Bank has apparently become the subject of a LinkedIn post calling her “beautiful”. And now corporate Australia is arguing about it, because a young woman should be able to go to work without a man publicly assessing her appearance.

LinkedIn is meant to be a professional platform. People use it to talk about jobs, skills, promotions and the occasional leadership lesson discovered while making toast. Yet somehow this man looked at a young bank worker and decided the professional contribution he had to make was a comment on her looks.

Perhaps he thought he was being nice. That’s often the excuse, isn’t it? It was a compliment. But a compliment is usually for the person receiving it. A public post about a woman’s appearance invites everyone else to look at her through his eyes. She didn’t go to work to become content for his LinkedIn audience.

I’m sure she has a job to do and ambitions of her own. None of those appears in the headline. What does appear is her age, where she works and a man’s opinion of her face. That’s a fairly neat demonstration of the problem.

And before someone says we can’t say anything nice anymore: yes, we can. Tell a colleague she handled a difficult customer well. Praise her work. Thank her for helping you. There are hundreds of pleasant things to say about a woman at work that don’t sound like you’ve wandered in from a dating app.

The man may be surprised by the reaction. I’m more surprised that he pressed post without once thinking, “Would I write this about a 22-year-old male bank worker?”

Probably not. Which tells us exactly how professional the post was.

Good for her! What a sleazy old pig.

Grand Final...

Yesterday I didn't get to blog. Normally, I wouldn't have.  But yesterday, it was the AFL Grand Final.

It wasn't overly exciting... Well, I guess it was if you consider the score. Brisbane won by a goal; or there abouts. But they won with about 2 minutes on the clock. It was a fantastic game.

Still, last year at least we had a Victorian club playing in it. Geelong. But that wasn't overly exciting either. It was my team, and we lost.

I have been to 5 losing and 4 winning grand finals.

I'll admit; winning is better.

Why Can’t They Just Let Her Leave?

A woman decides she has had enough. Perhaps she says it aloud. Perhaps she quietly starts putting money aside, looking for somewhere to live, imagining a future in which she can shut her own front door and breathe.

And sometimes, the man who claims to love her decides she isn't allowed to have that future.

Why can’t he just let her go? It is such a simple question. People separate every day. It hurts. They argue over the house, the dog and whose turn it is to explain things to the children. Then, somehow, they carry on. Yet some men would rather kill their partner than accept that she has a life beyond them.

In Australia, 32 women were killed by a current or former intimate partner in 2024–25. That is about one woman every 11 days. By 19 September this year, a separate public tally had recorded 51 women killed by violence in 2026. Those 51 deaths are not all partner killings, and we should never blur the numbers to make a point. The real figures are dreadful enough.

I keep coming back to the word love. We use it in headlines about these deaths as though it explains something. He loved her too much. He couldn’t bear to lose her. He was devastated when she left. But a woman is not a possession someone has lost. She is a person who made a decision.

For some violent men, that decision means a loss of control. The threats, the checking of her phone, the rules about where she goes and whom she sees may have been there long before she tried to leave. Violence is more common where a man believes he owns his partner or has the right to make her decisions.

Then we tell women to leave, as if walking out is the end of the danger. Of course, women should be able to leave. They should also be able to survive doing it. A man who threatens to kill his partner needs to be taken seriously while she is still alive to be protected.

And the rest of us have a part in this. When a mate talks about his ex as though she owes him her time, her location or another chance, don’t laugh along. When he calls constant surveillance “caring”, say what it is. When a woman says she is frightened, believe her before her photograph appears beneath a headline.

I don’t want another solemn announcement that “something must be done” after another woman has died. I want her to be able to pack a bag, walk away and get on with the ordinary business of living.

Why can’t they just let her be?  :( 

The Left-Wing Radicals Have Left the Building

Two delegations walked out during Donald Trump’s speech at the United Nations: Iran’s and Cuba’s. Which is quite a feat, really. Most people who find Trump unbearable can turn off the television. These people had to get up, gather their papers and leave while the cameras were rolling.

Trump’s speech covered Iran, Cuba, drug cartels and his familiar warning that communism must never reach America. Iran’s delegation walked out as he spoke about military strikes against their country; Cuba’s left during his remarks about its government. Calling them all “left-wing radicals” makes a wonderfully punchy headline, but it does rather flatten the detail. Iran and Cuba were protesting different things.

I’m not going to pretend I’d enjoy being trapped in a room listening to Trump for 37 minutes. He can turn a speech about world affairs into something that sounds like a man arguing with every country at a very large family Christmas. But I do wonder what a walkout achieves, apart from giving him a fresh audience reaction to talk about.

Then again, staying seated and looking furious would have given the cameras something too. Perhaps that’s the problem with a Trump speech: whatever you do, you’re part of the show. The only person guaranteed to enjoy the spectacle is Trump.