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Existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life, and goes heavily. Every one about here is silly, and after living with them for two or three years one grows silly oneself. It is inevitable... As Anton Pavlovic once observed: How strange... why does God give sweetness of nature, sad, nice, kind eyes, to weak, unhappy useless people - and why are they so attractive?

Chekhov's bitter comedy about country life, drinking vodka, shooting, love, sadness and ennui. What would Gabbie say? There's little wonder it sold out months before opening Richard Roxburgh and Hugo Weaving are captivating in Uncle Vanya, and are still playing to sell-out audiences at Sydney Theatre

Post Script in Sydney: Sydney wife's Russian roulette ordeal: husband charged

Expect the worst - you will never be surprised How to be a popular blogger
By now you’ve probably heard about social media and how it’s making celebrities out of mild mannered public 。。。

Most importantly to be a successful blogger you have to have a sense of humour and not take your self too seriously

• How to be a popular blogger ; [ Grog's Gamut is actually Greg Jericho, ; Fairfax Radio’s Latika Bourke has been named the 2010 Walkley Young Australian Journalist of the Year for her outstanding coverage of the Liberal leadership crisis that saw Tony Abbott topple Malcolm Turnbull. Latika Bourke
• · You become aware that something is 'going on' in the Department, and you decide you must do something about it ... Blowing the whistle into an empty room; At least 72 aides on both sides of the aisle traded shares of companies that their bosses help oversee, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of more than 3,000 disclosure forms covering trading activity by Capitol Hill staffers for 2008 and 2009 Congressional Staffers Gain From Trading in Stocks
• · · The more accurate the forecast the better. Wrong. When it comes to making money all you have to do is look at a list of the 10 best and worst performing stocks in the ASX 200 stocks in the past 12 months and you will realise that all the money is being made in the stocks that everyone gets most wrong, not right Popular Stockmarket Delusions for Dummies; The complete moron's guide to the top 10 long-term stocks； Stocks
• · · · Rajaratnam and one of his co-defendants, Danielle Chiesi, an analyst at another hedge fund, who were the primary targets of the wiretaps, have argued that prosecutors failed to disclose crucial information required by the Wiretap Act to the judges authorizing the electronic surveillance. White Collar Watch: Using Drug War Methods to Look for Insider Trading; The novelist John le Carré, a former British intelligence operative, has given a rare interview to Democracy now, plugging his new book Our Kind of Traitor and ruminating on a wide range of things - including several issues close to TJN’s heart. One, of course, is money laundering:
"Now, this isn’t fiction. That part of it isn’t fiction. Money laundering is simply everywhere. On the grand scale, it’s endemic to banking . . . .money laundering is not some distant fantasy. It’s actually how you handle the profits of extortion, tax evasion, criminal conspiracy and huge quantities of drug money, how you get that into the white sector.
The thing is, it is very undemocratic, because if you or I go to one of these banks along here somewhere with a few thousand dollars in a briefcase, if I’m a Brit and do it, I have to give a really thorough explanation. Bank manager may call in the police. I have to produce my passport. If I want to open an account, I have to produce a utilities bill and all of that. But, if Mr. Orloff comes to a bank here and says, "I am from Russia. I have millions and millions of dollars, please. And here is a letter from a reputable lawyer in Moscow. And here is evidence that I run hotels, casinos, whatnot," bank manager says, "What are you doing for lunch?" And we’re away. So, the bigger the sum, the easier the crime.
John le Carre on all things secret – and unacceptable
• · · · · Morrow is offering a total of 30,000 shares in himself at £10 a piece (he's retaining 30%, "the vital organs and so forth"). Because he's not legally allowed to sell shares in himself, what investors are actually buying is a signed photo of the author, with the shares given for free. Author to float himself on the Stock Exchange ; Kind Kindle to Strangers and his organs ; Red diaper babies

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Denis Dutton, founding editor of the esteemed web digest Arts & Letters Daily, passed away today at age 66 after a battle with prostate cancer. We echo the sentiments of Three Quarks Daily that Dutton’s site set the gold standard that we have aspired to match in our own curating of slightly different intellectual content on the web. Denis Dutton, 9 February 1944 – 28 December 2010

CODA of Dutton's Note: Amazon announced this morning that the latest version of the Kindle has surpassed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as its biggest selling product of all time. In just five months, new Kindle replaces ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ as best-selling product in Amazon’s history

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Rap News episode five, titled News World Order: War on Journalism was made in October, ahead of Assange's leak of almost 400,000 secret logs from the Iraq War, and deals with the implications of the release. Comedy Absurd ; Assange rap cameo raises eyebrows

War on Journalism Sunshine: The truth is out there,
Julian Assange: The Memoirs After dumping mountains of secrets about others, Julian Assange is reportedly planning to divulge some information about himself

Canongate has refused to confirm this story, but several outlets have picked up on it since yesterday afternoon: Everyone's favorite WikiLeaker -- and alleged rapist -- Julian Assange, has sold his memoirs. It's expected that they will be published sometime in 2011, with a first draft from Assange due to his editor by March.

• Memoirs: the anarchic age of the internet [ Google Rapped; What a difference WikiLeaks makes ; Pirate Party aims to draw whistleblowers exposing corruption Bohemians at the Gate ]
• · WikiLeaks' next target is big business - Unable to contain his excitement any longer, Julian Assange has revealed the target of his next 'Leak– Bank of America, come on down! Banks - Anarchist or Messiah ; Protest lost the moral plot
• · · Will it make closed societies more open and open societies more closed?
Popper; Writing in 2006 as the president of a then unnamed NGO and Australia’s “most infamous former hacker,” Julian Assange noted that “foresight requires trustworthy information about the current state of the world, cognitive ability to draw predictive inferences and economic stability to give them a meaningful home… secrecy, malfeasance and unequal access have eaten into the first requirement of foresight (‘truth and lots of it’). Foresight
• · · · Evgeny Morozov discusses the implications of WikiLeaks on open vs. closed societies, the paradox of attacking state power, and the future of Internet privacy. Cloak and dagger doesn't come close to describing how Nicky Hager came to secure the New Zealand WikiLeaks cables. He reveals the spy-novel subterfuge the group demanded, what it was like in their office the day the cables were released to the world, and offers a peek inside the mind of founder Julian Assange.
WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and the dark side of Internet freedom ; wIKI ;
• · · · · Blurring Line Between Spy And Diplomat;
[Foreign Desk] ; Wikileaks: Leak Me Something I Didn't Know
• · · · · · Representative democracy is built on trust. One way of earning trust as a government is by being open about what you do - as far as possible. This will in turn mean that the public feels trusted with access to quality, un-spun information and will be more likely to take part in the political process. They blame Assange, but embarrassed officials can blame themselves. ; Flood of Leaks

In June 2002 Media Dragon was born. In June 2010 the death of Media Dragon was exaggerated. As now after six months of spamming attacks, the Media Dragon is back thanks to Google ...

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Media Dragons and academics on naming blogger Grog's Gamut, aka Greg Jericho. Don't believe the hype - To invert Beckett: I could go on, I want to go on, but I won't go on

'I FEEL myself empty and can't put pen to the implacably white paper," French poet Mallarme wrote in an 1864 letter to a friend.
To be an old man and finished at 23 ...

In 1901 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, that precocious poet, stopped writing his celebrated verse at 26, after penning a pamphlet in which he had a character, Lord Chandos, speak for him: "I have quite lost the faculty to think or speak on any subject in a coherent fashion . . . Everything fell into pieces in front of me, the pieces into more pieces, and nothing could be contained in single concept any more."

Fifty years later, Samuel Beckett would express something similar: "There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."Nothing to express


Teach Us To Sit Still Man Bites Murdoch - Jornalist weaves threads of past and present
Sacked Herald Sun editor launches 'a toxic mix of backstabbing and undermining and double dealing, of treachery and appalling duplicitous behaviour.' Ray Martin conceded he could have his 'card marked' by Rupert Murdoch's men for launching Bruce Guthrie's book Man Bites Murdoch at Bottega restaurant.

WHAT'S the collective noun for a room full of former newspaper editors? A press gang? A sack of editors, perhaps? Whatever, it was direly needed at the launch of Bruce Guthrie's memoir, Man Bites Murdoch, at the Bottega restaurant on Bourke Street yesterday.... Martin said the book served as a fantastic window into the alcohol- and adrenalin-fuelled newspaper world, and Guthrie's story was a litany, a catalogue, a cocktail, a toxic mix of backstabbing and undermining and double dealing, of treachery and appalling duplicitous behaviour.

• Ray jokes: Bruce Guthrie tell-all book 'the greatest pack of lies' [Without an anthology you haven't really existed Writers on writing ; We struggle writing songs to be honest. It's not easy. The thing is that we don't consider ourselves as natural musicians, we are more amateurs. song writing ]
• · · He is one of the world's most important men - but to former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd he was simply known as "Spanky Banky" - nickname for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Party Thieves ; Self-promotion and personal selling are skills many of us aren’t confident with but for writers they have to be good at telling their own stories to sell their work. Media
• · · · The secret lives of judges ; One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to - Blocked: Why do writers stop writing?
• · · · · The best way to look at literary awards, and strong dollar, is to see them as a necessary evil. Strong dollar and tax loophole 'hurting Australian artists' ; We have always, of course, found solace in our canine pals - the writer Milan Kundera famously said, "Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent." But our reaching out to them in previously unseen ways - not only through the books, but also devices like Puppy Tweets, a USB receiver attached to your pooch that activates your computer to send you tweets from Fido such as, "I bark because I miss you" - is a manifestation of people seeking new Dogs are our link to paradise; The struggle to exist and to remember; most of all, the struggle to speak. Can you be creative and still make money in Australia?
• · · · · · Amazon called on writers and publishers on Tuesday to submit short works to a new section of the US online retail giant's electronic bookstore called Kindle Singles; Where in the World is Cold River - http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/

WHEN, early in Shakespeare's greatest play, the ghost of King Hamlet makes his fateful nocturnal appearance on the battlements, it is the stolid realist Horatio who distrusts the evidence of his senses. "But this is wondrous strange!" he mutters lamely. Prince Hamlet, by contrast, exalts in the weirdness unfolding before them and delivers a firm rebuke to his friend: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy... it is absurd to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.

Dreams of Water - a gathering of people in charge of the world's books suddenly turns into a bloodbath When writers start to show their age

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A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness... A lifetime’s knowledge brought to bear on 12 images.



It is wonderful to explore the Australian Outback in winter months of July August and September. Australian outback is defined as any area where the population density is small, and the open space is immense The Australian Outback



The Red Center region gets its name from its red sand, and red rocks and red flowers ;-) The red outback is full of very well-adapted wildlife, although much of it may not be immediately visible to the casual observer. Many animals, such as kangaroos and dingoes, hide in bushes to rest. Birdlife is prolific, most often seen at waterholes at dawn and dusk. Huge flocks of budgerigars, cockatoos, corellas and galahs are often sighted. On bare ground or roads during the winter, various species of snakes and lizards bask in the sun, but they are rarely seen during the summer months.
Feral animals such as camels thrive in central Australia, brought to Australia by the early Afghan drivers. Wild horses known as 'brumbies' are station horses that have run wild. Feral pigs, foxes, cats and rabbits are also imported animals that degrade the environment, so time and money is spent eradicating them in an attempt to help protect fragile rangelands. And one can count 9 (nine) cows dead by the road from Port Augusta to Coober Pede ... The Red Center is home to Australia's most recognisable icon, Uluru / Ayers Rock. Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, Kings Canyon, the West MacDonnell Ranges and Alice Springs make you wonder about the definition of peace. The canyon walls towering rock shelter palm full of cracks and pockets of greenery filled with rare plants. The day is filled with Czeching out the weather rock domes of the Lost City Cathedral ... Discovering so many georgeous Gorges ... Adversity brings out the best in the best



Dark orangey-red Monolith Spectacular colours at sunrise and sunset

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewelled seas.
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!
MY COUNTRY
By Dorothea MacKellar

We lived through the eyes of Aboriginal natives, and came across many breathtaking sacred sites in the great heart of Australia. Olgas are even more amazing than Urulu is and Kings Canyon is sooo royal. Wherever we went it rained and it is nice to be known as the rainmaker in this landscape so lush with green vegetation and pools of water and the red moisten roads and the huge slabs of stone. There is magic, majesty especially at Lake Cadi a stone throw away from The Lake Eyre and the great Williams Creek pub ....

• Dreaming of Ripping yarns; Water colours [ Open a book to page ninety-nine and read... The writer Ford Maddox Ford once suggested that readers "open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." It seems like odd advice, but The Page 99 Test blog reveals how effective this technique really is... Australian poetry and literature; Seventy Seven ]





• · From kitsch to collectable ; Can you direct me to the Aboriginal art?
• · · Two of the people responsible for the royal commission that caught dozens of corrupt cops are turning their sights on the NSW Government - running as independents at next year's election. Former independent MP John Hatton, who instigated the Wood royal commission, will run for the Upper House - hopefully alongside fellow Underbelly character, whistleblower and ex-cop Debbie Locke. whistleblower and ex-cop Debbie Locke ; John Hatton - When I announced my candidacy for the upper house at the state election in March, I said: "NSW is a corrupt state." That statement went unchallenged. The frightening reality is that there is a general acceptance that corruption is rife. Basic steps needed to rid this state of corruption ; Reform ; Mortgage pain hurts more in Sydney than in London or New York - The median Sydney house price is $626,444, with mortgage repayments of $4123 a month - three quarters the average monthly income Luckiest City
• · · · If you’re in the market for some earth-shattering ideas, one of the best resources on the internet is Google’s ZeitgeistMinds website. ZeitgeistMinds ; Epiphany or the effortless insights of a genius

Blackfooted gem


Dingo with green eyes

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It is strange how little has been written about the Upper Mississippi,” Mark Twain said. For him, it was the most arresting part of the river A RIVER RUNS THROUGH HIM ;
Swashbuckling historical novels have long pleased the public and been derided by critics. Time perhaps for a serious second look at the genre.... The Master of Historical Fiction

Why are the British so rude, so uncouth? They seem obsessed with butts, tits, penises, toilet humor, strange sex. Their sitcoms offer howling tsunamis of verbal abuse Naughty by nature

Angel Factories Children of the gulags.
Their parents, enemies of the state, had “abandoned” them. Only the miracle of Stalin’s love saved them

Several years ago, a friend who helped me to find my way around the Russian State Archives in Moscow asked if I would like to meet another woman who was also working there. She was not doing research for a book, and she was not a scholar. Instead, she was indulging her curiosity and her nostalgia. Forty years earlier, she had worked as a baby nurse in a children’s home inside one of Stalin’s labor camps. Now she wanted to find out what had happened to some of the people she had known there, to jog her memory of names and dates.

• Gulag [Cold War heroine? Margaret Thatcher, it seems, a lady who knew when to be Circe and when to be the nanny from hell. Arms across the ocean ; “I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.” Ayn Rand also regarded herself as simply “the most creative thinker alive”... St. Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin and Ayn Rand. Garbage and Gravitas ]
• · “Keynes is back” is now a cliché. But hang on, did John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century, ever leave? Keynes, Recovered ; Unless we know how things are counted, says John Allen Paulos, we don’t know if it’s wise to count on the numbers Metric Mania
• · · Sex and the City 2 takes all I hold dear as a woman and a human – working hard, contributing to society – and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car Burkas and Birkins ; Despite the sea of women in Norman Mailer’s life – six wives and countless lovers – his great literary handicap was his failure to learn from them Even in his grave, Norman Mailer is providing gossip
• · · · Charles Dickens was a great travel writer because he came to realize that travel in itself is not that interesting. People are... Charles Dickens: The First Great Travel Writer? ; Readers are fleeing newspapers in droves. What can the papers offer to lure them back? P.J. O’Rourke has a bright idea: the pre-obituary... Not Dead Yet ;Arthur Koestler’s double suicide with his wife was hardly heroic. It was a sin against his own lifetime of literary work The Prisoner Intellectuals
• · · · · The first challenge of sorrow is cognitive, says Leon Wieseltier: “Making Toast is a small glowing jewel in the literature of grief” Death and the Dishwasher ; When we rely on spies, Malcolm Gladwell reminds us, we rely on sources that can’t be trusted. “The next time a briefcase washes up onshore, don’t open it”. Pandora’s Briefcas
• · · · · · Like many people at Google, Franz Och sees himself as campaigning for freedom and equality. His aim: to open all the Web to non-English speakers Google Delivers Foreign Tongues at the Press of a Button ; Culture is what remains after we’ve forgotten everything we’ve read Reading in a Digital Age

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FORMER Macquarie banker and mergers and acquisitions guru John Green's new career as a publisher under the management of his daughter Alison appears to be taking off. Yesterday, their Pantera Press launched News Limited NSW political reporter Simon Benson's political bodice-ripper The Betrayal, based on a reported promise by the now Prime MinisterKevin Rudd to then NSW premier Morris Iemma in September 2007.Benson writes that Rudd's promise was that if Iemma held off privatising electricity in NSW until Rudd was elected, thus giving Rudd a clear run without getting the unions offside, Rudd would come back and help Iemma do painful things to the NSW power unions. As we know now, Iemma ended up getting ousted from the premiership in September 2008, mainly as a result of pressure from the unions over his privatisation plans, which still haven't come to fruition. If that sounds dry, by last night Pantera had ordered a second print run to follow the first run of about 9000. "It is selling like hotcakes," Alison Green told our spy Betrayal story sells like hot cakes

Information society? More accurate to call it the interruption society. It pulverizes attention, the scarcest of all resources, and stuffs the mind with trivia. The Uses of Half-True Alarms Google, rock videos, and the Web will no more make you stupid and shallow than propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap will make you smart and deep

No One Would Listen: A true financial thriller The man who figured it out: Peter W Clark and Jozef Imrich
Simon Mann meets the mathematical genius who tried to warn the world about Bernie Madoff and the biggest fraud in history.

Harry Markopolos describes himself as the ''proud Greek geek''. Raised in a family that ran fish and chip restaurants and diners in Maryland and Delaware, he's a maths natural, who ''gets'' logarithms and differential equations. He can unpack complex financial instruments such as derivatives and can run his mental slide-rule over a balance sheet and know, instinctively, that there is fraud lurking within a company. He wears the sort of clobber that makes him look every bit the chartered financial analyst that he is.
Which might help explain the bemused reaction of the local police sergeant in a small town in Massachusetts back in 2005, when a panic-stricken Markopolos burst in pale as a ghost, sweating profusely and carrying his Model 642 Smith and Wesson.
This was no Dirty Harry, you understand, but Harry the accountant, a man who had taken to checking under his car for bombs before turning the key in the ignition and who had equipped his wife with a gun. ''I laid out the broad strokes for him,'' writes Markopolos in his new bestselling book. ''Basically, I told him I had uncovered a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that was global and the biggest fraud in history and I was afraid people might try to kill me to shut me up.''Part of his desperate pitch was lost in translation. The sergeant had no idea what a Ponzi scheme was, though he understood the concept of billions of dollars.And that was another irony, because here was Markopolos, a former National Guardsman who had been instructed in the triumvirate defence of shoot-move-communicate, still trying to communicate what he'd discovered almost five years earlier about a rogue named Bernie Madoff, the so-called Jewish T-bill, who was running the biggest-ever heist on Wall Street and yet no one wanted to know.

• MAD Off [The vampire story was born in the 19th century, wicked love child of rural folklore and urban decadence, refined from the raw ore of peasant superstition. All the Dead Are Vampires ; As pieces of Henry Roth’s amorphous body of writing are sliced off and honed as “novels” and “stories,” his very sense of life may be polished out of his work... The Skinless Novelist; Greedy publishers gouge libraries for digital journals. Now at last the University of California libraries are ready to fight back. Jennifer Howard reports. Rising Journal Costs ]
• · The Terminator Comes to
Wall Street - How computer modeling worsened the financial crisis and what we ought to do about it Computer-based program trading ; The economics of happiness, nature and nurture has an answer: Parents’ sacrifice is much smaller than it looks. Having kids – what’s in it for me?
• · · These users comment on everything from today’s news to hotel rooms. Many are harmless. But some are ruthless. Who are they exactly, and why do they do what they do? Anonymous online comment forums; Since the 15th century, the world has been taught by Europe and exploited by Europe and made by Europe. Maybe Europe has had enough. Eating Vichyssoise in Athens
• · · · An article from the New York Times on the merits of sitting or standing at work piqued my interest recently. At work some of us are sitters, some standers, some pacers, (some sleepers) and – for reasons of comfort and concentration – most of us like to mix it up... Sit. Stand. Go. GOSSIP if you are Adrian Low with gossiping earing in your ears ;-) Workplace gossip is not simply idle chatter. It’s a form of “reputational warfare,” says sociologist Tim Hallett. It is ubiquitous, occurring by the proverbial water cooler as well as within the formal setting of a meeting. Once a bad reputation has been solidified, justified or not, it usually sticks—often with consequential results for the entire organization. Hallett’s findings, published in the fall in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, illuminate not only how gossip occurs in the workplace but how it can be handled before it dilutes a person’s ability to manage effectively, poisons workplace congeniality and contributes to employee turnover. “If we can understand how gossip works,” says Hallett, an assistant professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, “and how it unfolds and what people are doing as they are engaging in gossip, that gives you an opportunity to manage it.” .... >
• · · · · Managers should look to the findings of happiness research for new ways to manage the needs The economics of happiness: give your workers something to smile about ; Steve Sedgwick Australian public sector reform
• · · · · · New ratings from Glassdoor.com, a website that takes employees’ temperature on how they rate their bosses A Long Time At The Top – Glassdoor.com; Decent scholarship is drowning in an ocean of low-quality journal articles. We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research

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As Pavol said Common Ausie Common and Frank Lowy another Slovak born character is not very pleased wuith the soccer politics.

IN the last World Cup Australia was dudded by a referee who was duped into awarding a free kick to an Italian player, who faked a foul.
In our next game, against Germany, Australia was again on the receiving end of a dodgy call by a referee, who unfairly red-carded striker Tim Cahill. One week after that episode Harry Kewell was sent off after a referee's dubious interpretation of the handball rule. Gosh, Australia has had bad luck with referees in the World Cup, don't you think? Or at least this is the narrative that many seem only too willing to believe.Our soccer slump is due to some hard facts, not sneaky refs

Germany has a population of 82 million, and soccer is its only real football code. Australia has a population of 22 million, and soccer is one of four codes. What this means is that the German soccer team should be roughly 15 times better than us, and therefore should have beaten us 15-nil. What a pack of Hunderachievers those Germans .... http://www.ajc.com/sports/australia-beats-serbia-2-555946.html
Soccer is billed as ‘the beautiful game,’ but like any sport it is a partisan affair—and the better for it Soccer like art? Sure, with more fighting

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Welcome back to Sydney Steve ...

Moments of Genius is a series of six interviews running on bigthink.com. The interviews with a range of modern-day Edisons delve into the back stories of great discoveries and earth-shattering insights, and tease out the elusive eureka moments. Moments of Genius

Planning in NSW is out of control New political force - Julian Assange - John Hatton
The growing audiences at corruption fighter John Hatton's public speaking engagements, like the one in Wollongong tonight, may herald a new political force come next March.

AFTER a wave of community enthusiasm at recent public meetings, 12 residents from community action groups have taken up the John Hatton challenge to form Highlands Voice. The steering committee chose Mr Scandrett and Geraldine Turner to act in the roles of the group’s convenor and co-convenor.

• Penrith poll sends Labor fair warning ; [ Group gathers, so now the Southern Highlands has a voice ; O'Farrell's chief of staff at the time personally confirmed to me by phone that "the evidence is strong", but nothing was done. ]
• · Television is the ultimate connector. I’ve been saying this for a long time. The reason TV is so engaging is because it uses sight, sound and motion to deliver the three keys to a person’s heart – mystery, sensuality and intimacy. Every year the last few decades, trend pieces start popping up in magazines predicting “The death of television,” yet here we are, more than 60 years into the TV era and it’s stronger than ever. Television: Part 1 - We’re All Screenagers ; When all else fails, try being good. - So starts New York Magazine’s excellent feature this month on why American television is better than it’s been in ages. In a world where American Idol, Survivor and Dancing with the Stars are used to being the center of attention, smaller shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and 30 Rock are changing the way Americans look at TV. When all else fails, try being good
• · · Dinner last week was with two crazy Italians, Giuseppe Caiazza and Domenico Siniscalco. Giuseppe cut his teeth at Club Med, Ford and Toyota and is now going to Milan to run Saatchi & Saatchi. Domenico is an incredible guy who has had three careers. A leading academic at Cambridge, the Minister of Finance for Italy for five years, and now a banker with Morgan Stanley. The three of us are in different decades in age terms and I had just read a great article from Tony Parsons talking about the various decades of man. Discussion ranged over 2001 Chateau Haut Brion and we concluded that Tony was pretty much on the button. Decades of man. ; Wikileaks and The Next HOPE DecAde of Wikileaks - Founder Fears For His Life
• · · · Whistleblower website Wikileaks has made contact with the US government over claims that an American serviceman is one of its sources. Wikileaks makes contact with US government
; It used to be nondescript parcels on the doorstep, cryptic phone calls at midnight or shadowy meetings in underground car parks. Now explosive information is more likely to arrive - to the tune of a novelty sound effect - in an email. But profound and important questions surround the transaction of secret, highly sensitive, classified material. Governments and big business are fiercely protective of their internal dynamics and increasingly are coming down hard on leakers and whistleblowers. The public though demand and defend their right to know when governments they’ve installed are making decisions on their behalf, or the actions of big business impact their lives. JULIAN ASSANGE - WikiLeaks founder drops 'mass spying' hint
• · · · · Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security, government officials tell The Daily Beast. Pentagon ; Google Iceland safe haven for press freedom: Wikileaks insider
• · · · · · Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland in 1971.[1] Assange has said that his parents ran a touring theatre company, and that he was enrolled in 37 schools and 6 universities in Australia over the course of his early life. One of the most intriguing people in the world" and "internet's freedom fighter Julian Paul Assange ; Iceland has passed a sweeping reform of its media laws that supporters say will make the country an international haven for investigative journalism. The new package of legislation was passed unanimously at 4am yesterday in one of the final sessions of the Icelandic parliament, the Althingi, before its summer break. Antony Loewenstein

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Happy Birtday godson - Kuba (and June)

It is the perpetual dread of fear,
the fear of fear, that shapes
the face of a brave man.
--Georges Bernanos

T here are some real gems among these 21 finalists. Our judges Scott Monty (Ford), Ann Handley (MarketingProfs) and David Meerman Scott (author New Rules of Marketing and PR) are finishing up their reviews of these sites.
Finalists – Top 10 Social Media Blogs 2010

Good police need to find a way to get a voice Police investigating police
TThe barrier to proper investigation of police misconduct seems to revolve around a misguided sense of loyalty to fellow officers.
One of the problems is that within the force, these can often be the ones who are the life and soul of the party around the BBQ. They are the ones who trumpet the solidarity line and the “us and them” approach the loudest ...

I loved being a police officer with all its ups and downs, stresses and strains. I have had a few jobs in my time but never one that has taught me so much about life and myself as being a copper.
So it is with incredibly mixed emotions I await the imminent release of the Crime and Misconduct Commission's report on the Queensland Police Service's investigation into the death in custody on Palm Island in 2004.
If the report is as critical as has been leaked, it could be another chance for a defining moment for the Queensland Police Union. For once again they can choose whether to help their members move on to become a professional body or they throw up the barricades, attack their critics and blindly defend those police who have let the majority of their compatriots and the notion of police professionalism down badly.

• It is not police it is community who does policing [After being the resident band for Pete Isaacs legendary Jelly Jazz parties, The Underbelly are now ready to detonate their full potential with two tracks that will knock your socks off and make you wanna dance barefoot. Sasha and Underbelly ; Roxie Ray aka Sasha BBC Six live ; Spain and UK ; The album, which blends a mix of up-tempo raise-the-roof instrumental funk with vocal tracks and summery jazz funk, features the voice of Australian singer Roxie Ray, who sounds not unlike Amy Winehouse or Paloma Faith. Famous Five]
• · People love participation. We love getting involved with things. We like choices. As every industry is trying to figure out how to make the social networking craze work for their businesses, it seems that some restaurants and food brands have taken the notion of participation to such crazy places they just might work... Participation Dining ; Participation Economy
• · · Six Social Media Trends for 2010; Top ten best
• · · · 20 Top Social Media Jokes, Clips & Cartoons for January 2010; 25 of the Best Blogging and Social Media Icon Sets
• · · · · 2010 has been an interesting year for social media industry with evolvement of social media experts, social media books, social media startups and social media companies ; Mediatrust Blog
• · · · · · Sometimes people who have been visited by a Kadaitcha man get sick and die within a few days ... I have a dream;It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs Google launches my dream - GoogleCL for Linux, Mac, and Windows

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What happens to the people who unwittingly find themselves at the centre of a media scrum? From the blogger who inspired a "web hate frenzy" to the Glasgow baggage handler who thwarted a terrorist attack, five people talk about fleeting fame and what happens when the spotlight is turned off 15 minutes of fame

THE disgraced former policeman Roger ''the Dodger'' Rogerson writes a blog on which he fields questions about people with whom he has associated and their fictional counterparts on shows such as Underbelly. Rogerson blogs Bumper issue

Strengths and Weaknesses of Blogs Citizen 'journalism' not yet a threat
E mulating Britain's writing awards might improve political journalism The Orwell Prizes have become Britain’s most prestigious awards for political writing. About 400 people gathered for the presentations. The winners are kept secret until they are announced. The London room was filled with journalists from all over Great Britain. This year, 212 books were entered for the Book Prize, 85 journalists for the Journalism Prize, and 164 bloggers for the Blog Prize

The good news for the professional news industry is that the researchers found citizen journalism websites (news and blog sites) are presently not viable substitutes for daily newspaper sites. Only 25 % of the amateur sites published on a daily basis. Even if they do have daily postings, they tended to have significantly fewer news items, which the study attributes to the inherent budgetary constraints of most models of citizen journalism that have surfaced thus far.

• Media and blogs [We have a tradition of dirty politics and especially dirty politics right before an election ... He says blogs have strengths and weaknesses ; Australian journalism student boosts first-job hunt with social media campaign Tom Cowie launched the 'Tom wants a job' website ]
• · All Media Is Local; Colleen Newvine, MBA '05, is the consummate storyteller. She began her career as a newspaper reporter, and today she continues to share tales of interesting people doing interesting things through freelance writing and her widely read blog, Newvine Growing. But her position as head of market research for the Associated Press (AP) requires her to tell stories from an unconventional source — numbers - A spreadsheet is similar to an interview with a source. I look at it and ask what story it's trying to tell me. Then I communicate that story to the people who need to know it Every Number Tells a Story
• · · One blog, which is based on openness of information has become the most popular website in Greece, receiving millions of visitors each day. The blog, is only outvisited by Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo, and Blogger The fifth estate: A rogue rodent ; For the past year, we've been considering an interesting problem that confronts media as a whole – the Babel problem Participatory media: for love or money?
• · · · Since I’ve become so famous on The A.V. Club for hating Mark Millar that people assume bad reviews of his work are written by me even when they aren’t, I might as well address the thing he does that drives me so crazy ; It's very empowering getting your opinion out there. For many, other than their vote, it's their only voice. But just because you've had a thought for the first time doesn't mean no one else has ever had that thought. Like teenagers, over time, the newbies will hopefully mature and reserve their comments for salient and well thought-out points and the blogosphere eventually will be richer for that Boors that clog the blogs ; Look who's stalking
• · · · · Rob McKibbin has been a “workplace bully and corruption whistleblower” in South Australia for ten years. His 5000-hits-a-day blog has kept the South Australian government honest over the last year, but it seems the powers that be might have had enough Whistleblower’s blog banned. ; Twitter is my main source of support because it's so instantaneous. From social media to real deal
• · · · · · Day the reptiles rallied to the dopey duchess ; FACEBOOK, everyone's new best friend forever, suddenly knows what it's like to feel the cold hard sting of rejection. Talk to the hand, because Facebook ain't listening; Poor David Campbell. You can only imagine his dismay when the Channel Seven journalist Adam Walters told him on Thursday afternoon that footage would soon be aired on the 6pm news of him coming out of a gay sauna, Ken's at Kensington, ''Sydney's Most Intimate Sex Venue . . . for men who prefer men''. No wonder colleagues reported a loud argument coming from Campbell's office about that time. A family man beyond our ken

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You do something wrong, FATCA shoots your neighbor
- As Seen on Google

Google has grown from an idea generated by two students at Stanford University in 1998 to one of the world’s most well known and successful companies. Liane Hornsey, Director of People Operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa says that the company would not have been able to innovate as quickly as it has, nor create the products it has in such a short space of time without highly valuing employee engagement ;
- The Wikileak video spread like wildfire across the internet and what next this week?
I'm not a wealthy man, but I'm rich in my convictions The West Needs a Good Dose of Perestroika -‎ Nothing Beats Helen Womack ‘s Analysis
During the Cold War, oppressed political dissidents around the world often had an easier time getting human-rights groups to advocate for their freedom. Today, however, it seems that dissidents often fail to garner the international spotlight they previously held. The reasons are manifold--ranging from the politicization of human rights to economic globalization to moral relativism.
Launching the Labour manifesto for the recent British election, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown stood against the backdrop of a golden cornfield and promised a future fair for all. As I watched, I was struck by a powerful sense of deja vu. Where had I seen and heard all that before? Yes, of course, the Soviet Union circa 1980 — the old propaganda that spoke of bumper harvests and five-year plans fulfilled and overfulfilled.

A fresh page was turned in Prague on April 8 when Medvedev and the US President, Barack Obama, signed a treaty to reduce Russian and American stockpiles of strategic nuclear weapons. Before that, Obama had cancelled a Bush-era plan to deploy ballistic missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, a prospect that had unsettled Moscow. The treaty was seen by some defence experts as a "one up" to Russia, but others saw wider benefits for the West in the politics of win-win and the new goodwill wafting from the Kremlin.

• Back in the CCCP - USSR ; Moscow Times [It was the greedy free market, supposedly, that created both the housing bubble and the housing bust and led, inevitably, to the “great recession.” Capitalism, according to most liberal pundits (and even Alan Greenspan in a bad mood), is an inherently risky and unstable system that requires government regulation to correct its flaws and moderate its excesses. Crony Capitalism Is NOT Capitalism ; Faking It Won't Make It ]
• · Nothing beats a quiet Sunday afternoon in the traditional book store. Last week I whiled away a couple of hours at two of my favorites – Daunts and Hatchards. Daunts is the best travel bookshop on earth, while Hatchards has five floors of imaginative, beautifully selected, beautifully laid-out books... Nothing Beats Book Stores ; George Clooney and Up in the Air have a lot to tell the employers about the downside of reducing face-to-face contact. Efficiency and savings are often illusory when it comes to computerizing and centralizing businesses. Sydney Expo and Up in the Air ; You thought only conservatives got mad about taxes? Tea partiers, eat your hearts out: A group of liberals got together Tuesday and proved that they, too, can have a tax rebellion. But theirs is a little bit different: They want to pay more taxes. ; Law students and the consumers of legal services like to think that professors are hired by law schools on the basis of pure intellectual ability and achievement. No doubt, individual intellectual ability and achievement play significant roles in law school faculty hiring. However, another important dynamic is overlooked, wealth
• · · Chris Masters in the Telegraph writes about gang violence in Melbourne and Sydney in a story headlined 'Why Sydney's hitmen are deadlier'. Under the usual pictures of the Ibrahims, Morans and the late Michael McGurk, he explains various motives behind the violence and deaths, including the practice of an underling serving jail time for a superior but not being properly rewarded after release. ; hitmen Underbelly 3 - The Golden Mile, set in Kings Cross, debuts this Sunday, Channel 9 8.30. It gets a rave review plus some great site Kings Cross footage on The Australian
• · · · THE Sydney underworld's war without end, the ongoing battle for temporary supremacy, has in recent years featured the most visible members, bikies. The clearest evidence that the jungle rule book of old has been torn up comes from the prisons. Chis Master; Hell on Wheels; Underbelly; I HAVE a particular affection for my Australian friends of Middle Eastern background - they seem imbued with a special generosity and. zest for life
• · · · · The reframe is powerful; arguing in favour of envy would appear as difficult as opposing hope, faith or charity The politics of envy ; Planning laws and lobbying NSW Inc
• · · · · · Founded on a growing evidence base that working is good for health Arbeighcht; It is a fitting coincidence that this new chapter in our tax history coincides with our centenary and in preparing ourselves for entering our new century of tax and superannuation administration! tax history ; Well, it's a good thing I'm rich and famous on google

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Wow! Gabbie, it's your 18th birthday. Even in the Central Europe, you are now regarded as an adult. It is official a bohemian girl star is now a bohemian woman star













- Memories of memories of a 6 foot woman at 18 Footer

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Happy Mothers Day to Dial, June and all the wonderful women in this amazing world

Every year we gaze enviously at the lists of the richest people in world. Wondering what it would be like to have that sort of cash. Global Rich List

A Boy with Double Dragon Tattoo is now on the Global list . A list, very few Czechs make it Bohemian Media Dragon
or Australians ( Dangerous Journeys)

Creating a healthy happy world John Hatton Empowering Communities - Matters of Amazing Grace
Having looked at history and done theory on happiness in recent blogs, here’s a top 10 from Dr Mike Pratt to pin to your wall Happiness – 10 Key Things We Know

Creating a healthy happy world is a worthy pursuit which we all have a stake in. It’s something academic colleague Dr. Mike Pratt has been working on to evolve Peak Performance theory. This week I have three posts based on Mike’s recent work, and for starters here’s some historical ground from the deep delvers:
BC 384-322: Greek Aristotle strikes it long and deep: Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence
• BC 341-270: Greek Epicurus hits the pleasure button (Epicureanism), and gets tagged as a supporter of hedonism. To his credit, he said you have to draw the line somewhere.
• On sweeping levels, Buddhism and Islam develop powerful paths to happiness.
• 13th century, the Italian Roman Catholic priest Thomas Aquinas weighs in with: “Every man necessarily desires happiness.”
• 1711-1776: the Scot David Hume high five’s Aristotle’s view.
• 1776: The American Declaration of Independence includes the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right.
• 1748 – 1832: Englishman Jeremy Bentham defines happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain. An advocate of utilitarianism, he describes natural law and natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts.”
• 1806 – 1873: John Stuart Mill works up utilitarianism with Jeremy, and focuses on actions that generate pleasure. He says OK to different types of pleasure, and pumps ‘higher pleasure’.
• 1818 – 1883: Karl Marx sees happiness as the ultimate destination, achieved through crashing the lead vehicle.
• 1844 – 1900: Friedrich Nietzsche says happiness is something for British Shopkeepers. Ronnie Barker’s sitcom alter-ego, the grocer Arkwright, to double negative, wouldn’t disagree.
• 1879 – 1955: Albert Einstein compares moral aims like well-being and happiness to the ambitions of a pig.
• 2000 – 2010: Happiness gets pondered, indexed, studied, measured, blogged and tweeted about.

• Stand by for more about his happiness… [ The Inquisition: the Wood Royal Commission ; FORMER independent MP John Hatton has called on the Southern Highlands to be awake to political corruption and incompetence. Mr Hatton, who in 1994 led the push for the Wood Royal Commission into police corruption, which will see him played by John Waters in the latest Underbelly series. Corruption buster, John Hatton, to give talk on empowering communities ; The average person in the community has every right to feel powerless; Not one to mince words, former Independent MP John Hatton had a public meeting of close to 150 people taking notice Not one to mince words, former Independent MP John Hatton had a public meeting of close to 150 people taking notice ; Underbelly; Underbelly ]
• · It's wonderful to unexpectedly stumble upon a kindred spirit – or at least a person who holds a worldview eerily similar to your own. This happened recently when I came across the work and writings of Gunter Pauli, who is about to release the English language version of his book, The Blue Economy ; 15 April 2010 marked the 6-year anniversary of TaxProf Blog
• · · Sarah Palin's contract discovered by two students to speak at Stanislaus college includes private jet and expensive hotels…MUST BE a r larger for West Coast Events; or, a Hawker 800 or larger for East Coast Events and both are subject to the Speaker's approval Lear 60 ; NYU Hosts Reading Today of Dan Shaviro's Getting It Following up on my prior post, the NYU Graduate Tax Program is hosting a reading and discussion today of the new novel by Tax Prof Daniel N. Shaviro (NYU), Getting It (iUniverse, 2010): Bill Doberman is a liar. He's also a conniver, a phony, a hypocrite, and a cad -- and those are his good points... Evelyn Waugh meets John Grisham. Hilarious and gripping ; The tax bar is commonly referred to as a "special priesthood," and it is only slightly more tolerant than the Catholic Church in ordaining women tax priests. -- Paul L. Caron
Special priesthood
• · · · The 3 most critical skills for managing a remote team, Wayne Turmel, bnet.com, 1 March 2010. The author suggests that managers of 21st-century teams need the ability to: create human connections quickly, know what tools to use when - and how to use them, and create loyalty; A blog launched today provides the public with an opportunity to participate in the development of the Rudd Government's Standard Business Reporting (SBR) program...the blog provides a online forum for businesses, reporting professionals, software developers and the broader public to discuss SBR issues Lindsay Tanner ; Standard Business Reporting Open for Comment ; The new social media policy recognises the widespread influence that blogs and wikis have within the community, and that of course includes our staff whom we want be alert to the potential risks of identity fraud and other threats. DIAC Use of the web New social media policy to guide staff online activities; It's all the rage for ministries and agencies to have a Facebook or even MySpace page these days. Governments are going where their citizens are. So why bother having a web site at all? Will Facebook profiles replace govt web sites?,
• · · · · Arkadi Kuhlmann, Ivey Business Journal, March-April 2010. Arkadi Kuhlmann, Chairman and CEO of ING Direct USA (America's largest direct bank), describes the steps that he took, and that other leaders can take, to build a distinctive and dynamic culture Culture driven leadership ; Over the last eighteen months of economic turmoil, leaders, and their ethics, morals and judgement, have been scrutinised and questioned. Leadership and its role in business, politics and wider society has been the subject of great debate. Leadership challenges ; In the new movie Date Night, Steve Carell plays tax lawyer Phil Foster, who is married to Claire Tina Fey
CODA: The ninth edition of "As Certain as Death -- Quotations About Taxes," the collection that I have assembled and published in Tax Notes over the last 16 years. It contains 1,577 quotations, a 426 percent increase over the 300 quotations that made up the first edition in 1994....
No matter how cynical you get, you can never keep up. A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can depend upon the support of Paul …
[T]axation, in reality, is life. If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can tell their whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity.
A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right.
As Certain As Death -- Quotations About Taxes

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Winston Churchill once said, The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

Bohemian Elizabeth and Media Dragon go a long long way back to 1980s Wild wild Polish Polish at Chrsitophers pad at Bondi ...
Elizabeth Wojciak - Entwined - 09 April - 06 May 2010. Olga and her Harrison Galleries is in Paddington, the art district of Sydney. The gallery was established in 2000 and has quickly developed into a dynamic and reputable commercial contemporary art gallery. Elizabeth at 123 at Adelaide




Entwined: Get Drawing Versatility is key for Polish eyes ELIZABETH WOJCIAK: Dreams & Hunger: A Manifesto
Elizabeth was born in Poland, and after extensive travelling moved to Australia in the early 1980s, eventually settling in Adelaide. She studied at the Adelaide Centre for the Arts and graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts and Applied Design in 2004, majoring in painting and receiving an Outstanding Academic Achievement Award. Since her studies, Elizabeth has received several awards including the 2004 MinterEllison Lawyers Rising Star Award and the Art Stretchers Award for Highest Achievement in Painting in 2005.

Elizabeth (Polish friends sometimes refer to Elizabeth fondly as Ela)has also been selected to exhibit in the Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize, represented ACArt Adelaide at PICA in Perth, WA, and is included in several national and international private collections. Her first solo exhibition in 2008, Recent Works, demonstrated Elizabeth’s expressive and
intuitive approach to painting.

• Moving in Artistic circles - Polished Ideas in Images [In these recent works Elizabeth continues to explore her interest and fascination with the human form. While Elizabeth principal concerns are with the formal qualities of drawing and painting, these figure compositions in landscape and interior situations invite the viewer to construct their own narratives ; Even Google who gives Media Dragon ranking of 5 is artistic Google gets Aussie/Polish/Bohemian kids doodling]



• · "Our Culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any." — David Shields Reality Hunger: A Manifesto; Discover the Bohemian Art and you fall in love - Why preserve an artist’s palette? Look for artists at their easels around Media Dragon
• · · Learning about life and love A marriage of Poetry and Painting; Few of us live so strenuously as never to feel a sense of nostalgia for that Saturnian reign to which Virgil and Claude can waft us
• · · · The starving-artist lifestyle may be colorful and appealing for a while, but it gets old fast if you are bunking on a friend’s sofa, living under the same roof you did in junior high and lying awake at night wondering how you are going to repay your staggering five-figure student loan. If nothing changes, the next generation of journalists will give up and move on to entirely different pursuits. And you can’t blame them What do journalists and starving artists have in common?; The well-used phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" was never more apropos than when I journeyed northwest to join The Wild Party, the musical presented by Ohlook Performing Arts Center in Grapevine. Interpretations of PPWP
• · · · · More blasts from the past: Teenage bouncer John Ibrahim (Firass Dirani) saves Kings Cross bouncer 'Hammer' (Salvatore Coco) from being clobbered by drunks, earning him a chance meeting with Kings Cross Boss George Freeman (Peter O'Brien), whose mentor-like advice prompts John to take life changing matters into his own hands. Country girl Kim Hollingsworth (Emma Booth) takes her first steps into prostitution as a result of her abusive boyfriend Trent (Mark Furze) stealing her money. With Politician John Hatton (John Waters) pushing for a Royal Commission, Detective Inspector Dennis Kelly warns Detective Sergeants Jim Egan (Daniel Roberts) and Trevor Haken to clean-up their act, but instead, Jim and Trevor devise a plan to swindle $200,000 from the Federal Police, with the assistance of Drug King Bill Bayeh (Hazem Shammas) and his crew. Surviving a brutal stabbing, John Ibrahim strikes up a deal with a nightclub owner to buy a percentage of the Tunnel Cabaret and finally gets his foot in the door as an entrepreneur.
Underbelly: The Golden Mile; The cops and their mates got away with murder. The Stewart inquiry which I thing was part of a National Crime Authority inquiry into bent NSW cops and another royal commission into police couldn't get them. I reckon when the Wood Royal Commission which reluctantly was set up by the NSW government in late 1994 a few months before an election, thanks to the brave efforts of 4 independent NSW MPs, in particular John Hatton, as after a couple of bi-elections the independents had the balance of power, Justice Wood and his team probably watched the tapes and made a pledge to make sure the bent cops and their criminal mates weren't going to get away with it this time. Like Al Capone they couldn't get Rogerson on his corrupt activites. He got 3 years in 1992, for perverting the course of justice in relation to $110,000 deposited by him in bank accounts under a false name.; NSW political perspective Matilda of Hung Parliament

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Happy St Patrick and St Jozef Day to Media Dragons everywhere this week

W e live on the thin ice of unexplained phenomena.
-Patricia Highsmith, notebook entry, October 14, 1944

H umor is a far more complex process than primeval pleasures like sex or food, but just as much tied to the inner complexity of the brain. The Tax office does have a sense of humour. It cites Wikipedia as its source for a definition of private equity was about the only amusing aspect for most international investors and tax lawyers as they digested the ATO s draft rulings arising from the TPG Myer case. Media Dragon and Google are the two internet giants whose informal corporate motto is - don't be evil
After all, the dissemination of good ideas and their victory over bad ideas are forms of technological progress.



Media Dragons are huge working horse failures ;-) Failure is a teacher
Run a web search on some phrases built around failure, and you’ll come up with quite a few reflecting a very true statement, “Failure is a teacher.”

Our histories and leadership legends all benefit from the context of understanding the final outcome of the story, but the telling of the story doesn’t adequately capture the powerful emotional forces that occur at the moment of failure. Certainly, the stories are right and the lessons instructional. They inspire us to persevere, but the failure-leading to-success legends don’t guide us how to respond and cope in the moment

• The Bohemian Art of Failure [Simon Sharwood flags the following technologies as ones to watch: cloud computing, new Microsoft upgrades, virtualisation, biometric authentication, next-generation firewalls, employee-owned IT, loyalty schemes, solid state disks, smart grids and hybrid servers Top 10 business technology trends for 2010 ; Contrary to popular myth, “being a visionary” is neither a prerequisite for leading, nor is it bestowed upon the chosen few as they ascend to their lofty perches above us ]
• · Tens of thousands of years of human mating norms are evaporating as Cro-Magnon males drag women into their caves, and the. women love every minute of it ; Tucker for Mafia and Triads
• · · Is media multitasking driven by a desire for new information or a wish to avoid hard thinking? The easy option dressed up like something hard ; The human brain, for all its power, is quite suspicious of difficulty. Effective marketers, politicians, and sales people all know to keep it simple KISS
• · · · “When you say banker, a lot of people think Jewish.” So what if they do? What if people are just a little prejudiced about Jewish bankers?... Bankers ; Casanova made prodigious use of English frock coats, the “little preventive bag invented by the English to save the fair sex from anxiety”... Librarians - it's easier to get forgiveness than permission
• · · · · Threatsaurus: the a-z of computer and data security threats: Whether you're an IT professional, use a computer at work, or just browse the internet, this book is for you. We tell you the facts about the threats to your computers and to your data in simple, easy-to-understand language. Sophos Group; Successful innovation requires as much attention to the soft side of business - people and their knowledge, skills and motivations - as it does to hard financial objectives or strategic reasons. The active management of innovation needs goals, structure, fair process, a diverse skill base and focused support. Gaming innovation

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London is Calling
A snippet from Basement Alex is heading to UK in March 2010 AD for 6 months

Alex aka Sasha aka Roxie Ray has come a long way in a short time and now. heading for UK tour The sassy Sydney native has emerged as one of the soul revivals brightest stars. In a short space of time, she has appeared on several international record releases incl Lack of Afro, Milano Jazz Dance Combo and others and has performed continuously, drawing from her passion for the sounds and feeling of the jazz divas of the last 50 years Roxies voice and presence is unique, striking and emotive. Its a full-on, straight-up, knock-out soul-sister seduction.

http://events.liveguide.com.au/655165_thumbnail_280_The_Liberators_Michelle_Martinez_and_Roxie_Ray_DJ_Russ_Dewbury_plus_special_guest_Toon_Eastside.v1.jpg

Music to our ears



Being Digital and Young Ideas and Sounds
Last week, along with Tom Eslinger, our Worldwide Creative Head of Digital, Kevin Roberts was at Lancaster University talking to HighWire students about our digital world. Digital technology means there are no barriers of scale or production to distributing great ideas and true creative people should welcome learning about this.

We talked about a lot but the key thing on my mind was that digitization, and the power of the Internet and the mobile, should be the most liberating forces ever for creativity. We believe at Saatchi & Saatchi in the unreasonable power of creativity and nothing can set this free more than being digital.

• Being Digital [Binge drinking is a problem which can have devastating results, and it seems to take particular hold in cold dark climates ; This paper contends that the hype surrounding the steep rise of social media networking website use has tended to mask the reality of a corresponding growth in online fraud and crime. New Web 2.0 technologies may enable inventive interactivity online, but they also foster innovative ways for those intent on nefarious means to achieve their ends. Cyber Crime 2.0 versus the Twittering classes ]
• · After a review demonstrated concerns about leadership and communication skills among staff at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, action was deemed necessary. ASIC; TONY Abbott is a latter-day Muhammad Ali dancing around Kevin Rudd's Joe Frazier. He messes with Rudd's mind, taunting him on climate change, industrial relations and health.
Political orthodoxy would suggest that raising the salience of these policy areas -- in all of which Labor leads the Coalition in public perceptions -- should assist the government.
• · · Sadly, one fifth of the workforce keep their Blackberries on at all times, night, day, weekend and wedding anniversary. I’m all for sight, sound and motion, and the enhancement of the screen to become a force for good in the world, but not at the expense of the world itself... Who Needs Information? ; Urban sprawl has nothing on the Internet, in terms of breadth, depth, hidden gems – and frequently, confusion. Some smart people at the BBC have shown the Internet visually, giving an intuitive sense of the big picture… Where In The Web?
• · · · New York magazine had an interesting recent feature, 50 Steps to Simple Happiness. We each develop our own strategies for preventing and relieving stress and promoting joy and contentment in our lives. The key for me is the idea of work / life integration Happiness ; Debate on the upside and downside of the Internet continues to rage, and won’t be settled any time soon. I’m an upsider, and take the view that powering forward imperfectly beats staying still or rolling back perfectly. The liberating and involving nature of the Internet cuts creativity loose on such a fantastic scale, that I think we’ll have the capability to fix the flaws as we go. Good News Travels Faster
• · · · · When Geoffrey Canada's extraordinary and uplifting 'Harlem Miracle' one day makes it on to film, it might be tough to sell as a true story. But as an inspirational teacher movie, it will blow you away. Up where they belong; Google keeps a record of everything: Quincy Tang's (Financial Investigator at Australian Crime Commission) professional profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the world's largest business Quincy Tang - Financial Investigator at Australian Crime Commission

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Just when we thought it was safe to go back to the future we all have to follow our relative Hambrich (sik sic) who identified three kinds of people: those who make things happen; those who watch things happen; and those who wonder what happened.

Malchkeon makes things happen... Happy Birthday and many 18footer-moments wherever you go ;-0

Here we go again … our latest list of the 100 best websites sees short attention spans, the rise of Twitter, more browser wars and celebrity gossip sites setting the news agenda. Slovak born veteran media dragon, Andy Warhol, talked of a time when everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. With hindsight, however, he might have wanted to revise that down to about five minutes. On today's web, phrases such as "here today, gone tomorrow" seem to involve ridiculously long timescales. People who moaned that blogging represented a move to shorter attention spans – 250-to-350-word posts rather than 1,000-word stories – have now seen blog posts start to look big and, frankly, old-fashioned. Today's trendsetters are using "microblogging" sites such as Tumblr, Posterous and Soup.io, which are taking the opportunity for creative "borrowing" to new heights Best of Best Media Dragons


Endless Love of a true visionaries Love and Science are In the Air
Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Romance and science aren’t the most traditional bedfellows – perhaps with the exception of that ultimate first date make-or-break, ‘chemistry’.

However a recent LA Times article revealed that increasingly scientists are finding the chemistry concept isn’t just a metaphor for the sparks that fly (or fizzle) when two people meet. Love and attraction causes real changes in the brain, releasing high levels of the chemical dopamine which provides that first buzz, and then later bonding hormones like vasopressin and oxytocin. And researchers are using MRI machines to observe and measure these effects, with some surprising results.

• Radical Attraction [Life entails more than sitting in a sealed-off room wrapped up in cotton-wool. Mark their words: the battle begins - Maurice Newman's address to ABC staff Avoiding risk or avoiding life? ; The demands of blogging have pushed many to abandon the form for faster, simpler word bursts on Twitter or Facebook. Today, there is increasing evidence that the art of blog writing is losing ground to even faster forms of communication, from 140-character Twitter blasts to one-sentence status updates on Facebook and MySpace. Nielsen Media Research estimates that of the 126 million blogs counted by its crawlers, the vast majority are rarely – if ever – updated. Has blogging peaked? ]
• · DEPRESSION, WAR, AND COLD WAR Challenging the Myths of Conflict and Prosperity ; Communist China now has more billionaires than any other country besides the United States, according to Forbes magazine. There are a total of 64 people in that bracket in mainland China, the magazine says in its annual list of the world's richest people Forbes ; BBC on Rich ; Namesake; Guardian
• · · A Gold Coast businessman found guilty after a major tax evasion investigation which is also looking into Crocodile Dondee star Paul Hogan's affairs blogged on Google’s networking site Buzz about beating the authorities in the middle of his Supreme Court fraud trial, it can be revealed. Adam Hargraves and business partner Daniel Stoten, both 38, were found guilty this week of conspiring to cause a loss to a commonwealth entity and remanded in custody for sentencing Blog boasts in fraud trial- Courier Mail, 11/03/2010, ; "We won't lie about our marriage on our tax forms, either, filing as the married people we are," Marla Stevens wrote on a blog in September 2005. "We've racked up about a million dollars in potential criminal fines and about a hundred years in potential prison time under the old sentencing guidelines between us - so far. Marla Stevens once bragged about how she and her spouse, Phyllis, violated federal tax laws
• · · · A new transparency and accountability seal is being developed by Washington News Council, a non-profit forum New transparency 'seal' initiative for online journalists; The attention economy has gotten plenty of, ahem, attention. Competition for limited attention spans has led many companies to get louder, either literally, or figuratively via social media, deep discounts or misguided attempts at technological differentiation. No doubt, the attention arms race has escalated - but this has been to little avail as customers have found ways to tune it out. The Rise of the Inattention Economy
• · · · · Now, this may come as a bit of a shock but over the next couple of months this blog is going to contain, in the words of a 1980s comedian, "a little bit of politics". "We'll still be knocking on doors," one senior party official told me, "it's just that we'll be organising the knocking-on-doors via Facebook". I'm taking up a temporary position as the BBC's digital election correspondent, with the job of examining how politicians and voters are using new technology in the run-up to the general election. I will still keep an eye on the rest of the technology landscape, but the blog will gradually become infused with the political scene. We'll still be knocking on doors ; Why all the fuss about Facebook?; The Hurt Locker upsets Avatar Did Blog Buzz for “Hurt Locker” Predict Its Oscar Win?