Leaping Year of Ringers: Crazy fintech predictions for 2016

Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying “Look at me.” “Look at me” is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame ... It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the influence of vanity throughout the range of human life, from the child of three to the potentate at whose frown the world trembles.

Russian police have arrested a nanny for beheading a young girl in her care, investigators said ... *Bill Simmons announces new web site The Ringer

Pascal Bouvier, newly installed as a venture partner with Santander Innoventures fintech venture fund, dusts off his crystal ball and peers into the not-too-distant fintech future Crazy fintech predictions for 2016

Australia’s Housing Bubble: In the Grip of Insanity Pater Tenebrarum 

In Sydney a building collapses on Liverpool road in Enfield not Enfield Rd At Liverpool

Human beings show their superiority to the brutes by their capacity for boredom, though I have sometimes thought, in examining the apes at the zoo, that they, perhaps, have the rudiments of this tiresome emotion. However that may be, experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings.

The dining table is the stage for much of the theatre in our lives. It’s where we tell stories. It’s where things happen that become stories. The drama can be in the events before the main course or after dessert. Sometimes the story is not about what was said during the meal, it’s about what wasn’t said across the table Malchzkon Who do you dine with or drama with ...

Authorities were unable to determine how much dodgy money was ultimately produced by the operation, which was run from a modest family home in the Sydney suburb of Sylvania Waters. "The quality of the $50 notes tendered in evidence was such that I was unable to tell them apart from real currency," NSW District Court Judge Ross Letherbarrow commented at the 2013 trial Australia is flooded with fake 50 notes so good they fool banks

Gerald M.United States

You probably wonder what you are looking at. Well it is a salt pond from the San Francisco area viewed from the sky, shot from a helicopter. I had noticed previously the beautiful shapes and colors of those ponds when I was riding as a passenger on airliners coming to land into SFO airport. I contacted a local helicopter company to charter a ride over those amazing ponds and enjoyed the nice colors and shapes it can bring ....

It is ... Is is ...  It is not always a given that good people make good characters. Over at The Atlantic, Tony 

Visual trickbait That last square on the promoted story grid, “Ever look yourself up? This new site is addicting. If you enter your name on this site,” is a special visual version of trickbait Clickbait Klikbait

A bizarre incident at a cemetery in Alicante  The bizarre love ceremony 

Tulathimutte explains how none other than one Philip Roth taught him the importance of showing every aspect of your characters–even the bad ones. Here’s an older piece from the same series in which Paul Lisicky writes about Flannery O’Connorand her “flawed characters.”

Unruly Characters: A Conversation with Kelly Link and Keith Lee Morris  BY KEITH LEE MORRIS I wrote the last sentence of the story first, and then the next to last sentence, and so on for as long as I could — maybe I could have done it all the way back, but at a certain point I got really interested in figuring out how it started.

Sarah Jeong’s Harvard lecture: “The Internet of Garbage” Boing Boing 

Apple, FBI, and the Burden of Forensic Methodology Zdziarski’s MEdia Dragon Blog of Things

More than 200 patients at NJ hospital possibly exposed to HIV, hepatitis Reuters