Today my best friend, Christopher, is celebrating golden birthday. How time flies as we both remember Bondi in the 1980s, the English classes under Tatiana, Spanish club with Saturday cabaret. How nice to hear Christopher to say - I'm old enough to know better, but still young enough to do it anyway ;-) Play something we can dance to!
The Russian Odessa is never the same after Nokolai and Irena, Anna with Rudi, Yvona with Anthony and Lidka with Mal invaded the dancing floor. Goral dancing brings together people from all walks of life... and erases their differences! It does not matter how old you are... it does not matter who you are or what you do for a living... all that matters is that you want to dance! One of the luckiest immigrants to the Australia has to be Christopher who now has Lidka, Olek and Kuba
Words are important. Their history. The weight of centuries of connotations built into their very structure like fossils. I have known Christopher for over 25 years and we have not exchanged one crossed word … Do we see some memoir as short vignettes, like a mosaic, that make up the total; sort of like an impressionist painting? Or as everything related? Words in Deep River
A fish-out-of-water memoir Our search for meaning
Christopher and Media Dragon are pleased that this month our favourite Czech film maker, Milos Forman, once again returns to the international screen with Goya’s Ghosts
As a young man, Forman saw his parents dragged into the Auschwitz concentration camp, never to return. He saw his country nearly ravaged by the Russian troops in 1968 and became part of the Czech New Wave after attending the Film Institute at the University of Prague. But in 1971 the director started to lay claim to international territory when his first American film, Taking Off, landed the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Since then he has won two Best Director Oscars and led eight actors to Academy Award-nominated performances, including Jack Nicholson’s first win for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and F. Murray Abraham’s only Oscar statuette for Amadeus.
• Riverdeep Emotions; [Another day, another billion-dollar capital raising - Valad Property Group became the latest ASX-listed property group to tap into a buoyant market for property securities to fund a significant strategic offshore move. Valad is poised to become Australia's 10th largest listed property group with its $2 billion acquisition of the British property funds management company, Scarborough. To help fund the acquisition, Valad has raised $1.3 billion through the issue of new securities under a non-renounceable entitlement offer. Recent capital raising by property funds including Centro Property Group, Centro Retail Group, ING Industrial and $3 billion by Westfield Group total more than $6.7 billion. Marvell: Is Going Private Its Best Option?; Two new High Court justices will be the pick of the crop, but whose crop. YOU may not know it, but the Howard government is about to appoint a new High Court judge. This is likely be announced soon so the new judge can take over from Ian Callinan. The Constitution requires that he retire on 1 September, when he turns 70. This will mark the start of substantial change to the High Court bench. The Chief Justice, Murray Gleeson, must retire by August 30 next year, while the greatest dissenter in the history of the court, Michael Kirby, will retire on March 18, 2009. The result is that during 18 months three of the seven, or nearly half, of the High Court will be replaced. Two of these appointments will go to the winner of this year’s federal election. Discerning judge of character ; A feeling of helplessness is a huge problem facing us all today. The sense that nothing you do will make a difference, so why try? Many people give up at the immense scale of the task of making the world a better place. There is a saying I love: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time"...One Pizza at a Time ]