Ikaria: Real & Imagined Lives & Laughter

"If you try to write 'good lines' you'll likely wind up with strings of dumb, unconnected applause lines. The audience will probably applaud--crowds of supporters are dutiful that way, and people want to be polite--but they'll know they're applauding an applause line, not a thought, and they'll know they're enacting enthusiasm, not feeling it. This accounts for some of the tinniness of much modern political experience."
~Peggy Noonan, A Sunday Thought ("Peggy Noonan's Blog," The Wall Street Journal, Feb 2013 AD

Instead of 'mood-boosting books', imagine doctors handing out prescriptions for gloomy masterpieces by Samuel Beckett and Thomas Hardy. Martin Chilton looks at the appeal of 20 great depressing stories Depressing books could be just what the doctor ordered; Inside Cold River - black dog

On the island of Ikaria, in Greece, there are more centenarians than you can shake a stick at. In Loma Linda, California, the Adventist community has a lifespan that's five to seven years longer than the average American's. These are people who eat a Mediterranean diet, and we've long inferred correlations between that and their prosperity and longevity. But we haven't had solid research to show us how important their diet -- as opposed to other factors genetic, lifestyle, and social -- actually is. Pivotal research in the New England Journal of Medicine today confirmed well-worn notions that the Mediterranean diet -- including produce, olive oil, nuts, etc. -- significantly reduced Attacks and Strokes, as compared to a low-fat diet. Now, to make these foods as accessible as corn sugar. ...Live slow, die old ~ drink at least seven glasses of wine while reading cold river

Do you fantasize about being a tenured academic? A globe-trotting journalist? A novelist? How our unlived lives shape our lived experience... “Every modern person, has their own repertoire of elsewheres, of alternatives—the places they go to in their minds, and the ambitions they attempt to realize—to make their actual, lived lives more than bearable. Indeed the whole notion of escape—that it is possible and desirable—is like a prosthetic device of the imagination. How could we live without it?
“We may need to think of ourselves, as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening. Who Could I Be Now

The idea that humans are by nature free is persistent, powerful, and, says John Gray, “one of the most harmful fictions that’s ever been promoted”... Silence of the Animal Soul

There are times in life when we are galvanized by inequity. So it was for a group of women who were touched by a panel at the recent Vancouver Writers Festival and determined to do something to right a perceived wrong. Needs € fears of readers