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As Abraham Lincoln said 'To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men' (and women)

Sheldon said in 2000 that the profession of author suited him best: There is no budget to worry about, you can have as many characters as you want; you can give them all yachts ... Sidney Sheldon, a writer whose keen grasp of popular tastes fuelled a string of feverishly romantic and suspenseful books - and made him a perennial bestseller - has died of pneumonia in Palm Springs, California, at the age of 89.
I try to construct them so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she has to read just one more chapter. It's the technique of the old Saturday afternoon serial: leave the guy hanging on the edge of the cliff at the end of the chapter Novels made good junk and their author millions

The Zeccola Family: a land of refuge for film lovers If Tomorrow Comes – Be it Art or Idea
Pull back the curtains on one of Australia’s most influential film families. It was in his birthplace, a humble southern Italian village, that Antonio Zeccola first got a taste for film. Every weekend of his childhood, he would watch movies screened by his father in the village church hall. When the Zeccolas migrated to Melbourne, they brought their passion for film with them. Over the next fifty years, Antonio Zeccola built his own cinema chain. Today Palace Cinemas is a family enterprise run by Antonio, his wife and their four children. It’s a major force in Australian film culture. But the movie business is as high risk today as it ever was, and keeping the family venture afloat is a nerve-wracking operation.

Antonio Zeccola is the Managing Director of Palace Films and Palace Cinemas with a 40-year history of distributing quality local and international titles in Australia and New Zealand. He has received credit as Executive Producer for Paul Goldman's Australian Rules and again for Rolf de Heer's Alexandra's Project, which was officially selected for screening at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2003, where it was nominated for a Golden Bear.
Antonio has a strong commitment to the Australian film industry and has invested in three of the country's most highly anticipated films of 2006: The Book of Revelation, Ana Kokkinos' follow-up to the past Palace Films success Head On; Irresistible, starring Susan Sarandon and Sam Neill; and Macbeth in which the director of Romper Stomper, Geoffrey Wright, brings Shakespeare's play to gangland Melbourne.
Palace Cinemas is Antonio's exhibition division with 73 screens across 21 locations in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth making it Australia's only national group of cinemas dedicated to the presentation of quality film. Antonio's passion for restoring, reinvigorating and saving cinema icons has led him to recently acquire and refurbish the Chauvel Cinema in Sydney and the Westgarth Theatre in Melbourne.
From the foyer to the big screen, the founder of Palace cinemas supports Australian films, writes Gabriella Coslovich.
Talk about extreme makeover. The foyer of South Yarra's Cinema Como used to have about as much personality as a railway station waiting room. Not any more. The new-look Como, being launched on Thursday, is unrecognisable - think bordello meets Gilbert and Sullivan (that's a compliment). Ten Canoes sails off with swag of awards
Credits:
KOKODA
GFN Productions
Executive Producers: Geoff Levy, Lynda House, Antonio Zeccola
Producers: Leesa Kahn, Catriona Hughes
Director: Alister Grierson
Writers: Alister Grierson, John Lonie
Sales and Distribution: Palace Films, Arclight Films

• Curtain falls with a wild ride ; [ Our celluloid wonderland ; For foreign artists often found our country a land of refuge for their misunderstood genius France: a land of refuge for foreign artists ]
• · TELEVISION production and film company Beyond International has closed its loss-making film distribution arm. Managing director Mikael Borglund said the division had been running at a loss for some time and was a major drag on company's earnings. Film arm beyond salvation; Feel free to go back and add comments to my Book Club entries on December 3 and December 10. This is a fluid conversation and I look forward to hearing from you. Book club
• · The hottest siblings in horror share directing and editing duties on their stateside debut, The Messengers, which was the top-grossing film of the weekend. The Messengers ; More and more moviemakers are choosing Australia's southeastern state as the home of their film shoots, including A Cry in the Dark, Picnic at Hanging Rock and, more recently, the live-action Charlotte's Web. Where the Wild Things Are
• · · Or, more prosaically: critical thinking is the skillful application of a repertoire of validated general techniques for deciding the level of confidence you should have in a proposition in the light of the available evidence. A shorter version is the art of being right. ; Sullivan breaks magic 49-second barrier
• · · · To Be Rich and Bohemian A Walk On The Virtual Side; Way Beyond Pretty
• · · · · Are beaches and books in danger?
The conventional wisdom would say yes. After all, more and more media--the Internet, cable television, satellite radio, videogames--compete for our time. And the Web in particular, with its emphasis on textual snippets, skimming and collaborative creation, seems ill-suited to nurture the sustained, authoritative transmission of complex ideas that has been the historical purview of the printed page. But surprise--the conventional wisdom is wrong. Our special report on books and the future of publishing is brim-full of reasons to be optimistic. People are reading more, not less. The Internet is fueling literacy. Giving books away online increases off-line readership. New forms of expression--wikis, networked books--are blossoming in a digital hothouse. No tension ahead of riots anniversary; Forbes has just put out a special edition on the future of books. It looks really interesting and that's just scanning the contents. Peopple still burn books. But that only means that books are still dangerous enough to destroy. And if people want to destroy them, they are valuable enough that they will endure.
"Books are humanity in print."
• · · · · · Donald Mitchell has written 2,923 book reviews for Amazon.com--and made $20,000 doing it. The Secret Life Of An Online Book Reviewer ; (By mate - Jonathan Enfield) Cold River is proof that persistence does pay off. I have never been able to explain to people how despite having such limited movement, achieving my dreams can lift the spirit so that I feel it’s possible not just to overcome my own physical limitations but to defy gravity itself. Man who catch fly using chopsticks can accomplish anything! Electronic publishing isn't leading to the death of books. Stop Worrying About Copyrights