Maybe your holiday haul included one of the new ''pod'' coffeemakers, single-serving machines that brew each cup from an individually sealed sachet. If you're an iPod aficionado, you're among (or even ahead of) 3.6 million people who bought them in 2004 The insidious little word that's taking over the culture
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: GoShire.com Senate Hearing: It's hip to be square
Dust off your dial telephone and move to the suburbs - everything old and daggy is cool again ...
Eytan Messiah, 22, has been a poet for four years. With spoken-word shows swelling up in pubs and popping up on youth radio stations such as FBi and 2SER, Messiah's once-fringe hobby has gone from wanky to swanky.
His early gigs were attended only by other performers, but this year Messiah was one of six poets to take the stage in Slamming, a spoken-word extravaganza funded by the Riverside Theatre as part of the Sydney Festival. "It's funny how fads enter cultures and help us along a bit," he says.
Ugh boots and thongs are staples in any Hollywood fashionista's wardrobe. Models knit to pass the time backstage at catwalk shows and funky youngsters go lawn bowling of a Sunday afternoon
• Geek chic: The rise of uncoolness is also due to a more relaxed breed of young consumer Dust off your dial telephone and move to the suburbs - everything old and daggy is cool again [credits: Christopher Booker's new study just made your life much easier—maybe. Booker compiles a Jungian taxonomy of stories, distilling the entire history of the fictive arts into a handful of flexible but unbreakable archetypes—Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth—and then extracts from those seven imaginative drops a single battle royal between Dark and Light. The Plot Thins: English majors! ; Jeeves and Bloglines ]
• · The Gates, which is literally that: 7500 gates from which will hang 7500 curtains of specially woven, saffron-coloured cloth.
• · · The case against anonymous book reviews No more anonymous reviews, please ; Dartmouth researcher mines Amazon.com to measure literary tastes. It's generally believed that people with emotional tastes are separate from people with intellectual tastes, that these two characteristics can't reside in the same person There are volumes of as-yet unexplored, non-professional literary criticism at this popular website
• · · · Is Reading Really at Risk? In Nitra I studied Kabalah at Darling Point I studied the bible now inside the Shire I just read and read everything ..."The Seventh Beggar," published last month by Riverhead, has a plot as difficult to pin down as the cabala itself, the mysterious and esoteric writings of medieval rabbis collected in 13th-century Spain upon which much of Hasidism is based. None of our stories can end till the Messiah comes Cabalists believe that God created the world with the alphabet Robot comes from the Slavic root Robota - or Hard Work.
• · · · · Lawrence and Alex's Great Publishing Adventure; These days, everyone's an encyclopedist.; These days, Ballarat real estate agents have sex in a client's bed. It would be a great breach of trust. For sale, just try the bed Real estate agent caught between the sheets
• · · · · · A little contempt for luxury is not such a bad thing. How people dress in an age of superabundance and superficiality, how they spend their money, how they are influenced by wealth, how they attempt to distance themselves from people whose style is not theirs but whose desire for the same human bric-a-brac makes them no less precious to luxury companies: An Outcry of Political Dissent, Scrawled in Ruffles; The Gates, which is literally that: 7500 gates from which will hang 7500 curtains of specially woven, saffron-coloured cloth. Christo Curtains for Central Park; Budweiser: Designated Driver Dance Budweiser Wardrobe Malfunction