Was it the shock of suddenly being outside for the first time, today? I'm not sure. But it was very quiet. Cars purred by softly on the main road. Even passing aircraft seemed a bit further away, a bit less harsh. The sun beat down on the concrete under my feet. I wouldn't be out for long.

On returning, I poked around in the cellar at our sump full of water. The cat danced around the hole in the floor above me, wondering what I was doing, and how he could get down to investigate. I drained as much as I could, wondering how a whole room could stay so damp on a day so hot and dry outside.

The day after we moved in, I could hear the sounds of people playing sport in the park out the back - soccer perhaps, I didn't look. It took me back to growing up in the sprawl of the south-eastern suburbs where there was an oval a couple of streets away. On a lazy weekend you'd hear the same background sound occasionally punctuated by an air horn. And so, while sport's never really been my scene, there's something about this particular situation that makes me feel like I'm at home.

i checked on our new house on the way home, as you do, especially when it's so close. at the exact same moment, the current owners came home from work. as they opened the gate and walked to the door, i wondered - should i say hello? but no. coincidences are only significant because we make them so. so without breaking my step i left them alone, wished them well, and kept walking. they're starting a new life in a new town. we'll be starting a new life in the same part of town. things change, things remain the same. as i turned down a main(ish) road, i found myself smiling at strangers. this is my town. this is my part of town. it has been. it will remain so. it behooves me to be friendly. after all, what have i got to lose?

Let the dead bury the dead, as it says in the Bible. But the problem with that is they've got to be dead, not just moribund. Which is round about the problem for the ALP when it comes to Paul Keating.

Keating seems to be going through a resurgence both in interest in the world and attention from the world. His latest intervention is about how generally useless Rudd's team is. It's a surgical strike, if the surgeon you have in mind worked during the Civil War in the US.

Even though he is shaping up as a freelance column-filler, I think Keating is actually correct. Leaving aside the unacknowledged bad blood between Keating and Gary Gray, Rudd's team is a poll-driven bunch of dullards. The depressing thing about them is that they're not in character different to the people who ran Beazley's campaigns, but they could well win this time just because they read the polls better. So in short, no ideas, but they have better timing and a less tin ear for what people want to hear.

The even more depressing thing is that I think Keating's hatchet-job actually works in Rudd's favour in the long run. The ALP's big problem is that they've never really been able to kill Hawke and Keating. Every successive ALP leader has been in the double bind of being simultaneously less colourful and appealing than Keating and yet tarred by association. The more colourless they get in an effort to distance themselves from Keating's perceived economic lunacy, perversely the more unappealing they are.

This time round, Keating might do them a favour by burying himself. The more he appears like Crazy Uncle Paul, the more the ALP is able to say that they've moved on. Sure, he's funny, but he's also mad, so it's kind of a good thing that he's bagging us. And thus the work of mourning can be forgotten - the ghosts of the early 90s will serve only to signify that something died, even if it hasn't been buried.

But that would mean that we'd also be locked into another 10 years before we started to understand exactly how much damage the Howard years have done. Keating is right; Rudd's poll-watchers might get him a win or loss, but either way, they aren't going to offer anything in the way of a new vision.

There's a good project in looking at why post-war North America generated so much social and psychological research. And the character of that research is often darkly fascinating; the McGill sensory deprivation experiments present an opportunity to wonder how much detail you need on the behavioural consequences of locking people in white rooms.

Lucky for us in Australia then that our concerns are more mercantile when it comes to social research. To wit, an RMIT student is examining the business sense of musicians. My favourite quote from the promo is this: "The study will test how musicians react when asked to carry out simple management tasks". My fond hope is that there's a question which tests the artist's ability to maximise transactional efficiency in setting pharmaceutical supply.

The best part of this project is that it's both insane and demeaning. The premise seems to be to test whether musicians have the cerebellar wherewithal to do without the massive business nous injected by managers and labels. Imagine a world without Malcolm McLaren: is it really possible? It's hard to imagine anyone having any sort of knowledge of music from, say, Mozart onwards without forming a fairly jaundiced view of the general human worth of publishers, label owners and managers (Ahmet Ertegun excepted).

My lofty pronouncement of the day is, therefore, that no research projects to do with the music business should be allowed to proceed unless the candidate can demonstrate knowledge of the works of Steve Albini and Dave Gedge.