St Jozef and Fake Books

“Literature, I tell aspiring writers, is a mug’s game. The author of Moby Dick died in his seventies utterly forgotten…Not one newspaper obituary noted his passing. Some thirty years after he died…the academic field of American literature was swamped by a tsunami of second thoughts about Melville…[who now is] right up there with Aristotle, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Tolstoy in the University of Chicago’s Great Books of the Western World, #48 out of 54….A mug’s game, I say, a crapshoot, the stakes one’s heart’s blood.”
~Bathroom Quote yellowed pice of newspaper floating inside Cold River

A few lines from that partialy pregnant poem called “Misunderstanding” 

“All those years I kept trying and failing and trying
to find my one special talent in this life –

Why did it take me so long to figure out
that my special talent was trying?”

Philosophy's true home

Rebirth of the real left Le Monde Diplomatique 

Does writer's block exist? Yes. And while blocked writers are blocked in their own ways, the remedy is the same: Think of something ludicrous Pretend to be the Biggest Name Dropper

Over at the Observer, Brent Underwood writes on  how he self-published a fake book on Amazon. He sold a total of three copies, enough for him to earn the #1 Best Seller badge in several categories. Now his fake book has landed an actual book deal and is available in paperback

The business of surviving as a writer has always been precarious, and it remains so: The average professional earns $16,000 a year... 1% The value of MEdia Dragon ;-) 

Literature is where we go to identify ourselves, where we shake off attitudes and beliefs. The novel, says Arthur Krystal, is the vehicle of our discontent...  Koldest Riekas

“I almost had a first draft, and as any writer knows, once you have that, the going gets easier. There is just editing: adjusting, adding the better word here and there, finding the perfect phrase, the enlightening metaphor, taking away the drift of words that have become too plentiful on the snowy white page.”

“Everyone likes to read about peculiar actions. Especially ones that aren’t hugely significant. Ones that don’t sum everything up, I mean. Things that just happened because they happened.” Cold River is Empty due to Global Warming it just happened ...

The World’s Best Whistler Explains How She Got So Good Vice

Paris is so filthy that Japanese tour guides have started cleaning the streets themselves.

A group of nine guides, funded by the Paris Tourism Association, dispersed throughout the City of Lights Sunday to begin their cleaning mission in hopes of bringing more Japanese visitors to town.

Japanese in Paris Streets Revolution

The idea that willpower is a finite resource, a muscle that can be exercised to exhaustion, is a staple of psychology. It also might be bogus...

Sally Betts the Waverley Mayor who rules Sydney's east

“Indian court issues summons to Hindu monkey god Hanuman” Again? [Lowering the Bar]

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, a sweeping and celebrated history of humankind, falls prey to the great intellectual temptation of our age: to reduce everything to science... Holy Science

Unsolicited proposals are generally encouraged by governments as a means to innovative infrastructure or service delivery solutions with private sector partners who are uniquely positioned to provide value for money. But as evident in Kerry Schott’s experience with Australian Water Holdings nearly 10 years ago, they can be a magnet for corruption and accompanied by unscrupulous lobbying.  Usolicited proposals

The Public Service Minister flags an announcement "within weeks" about reforms to APS flexibility, recruitment processes, gender pay gap reporting and unconscious bias training Flexible by default: Cash foreshadows APS flex time reform

Amazon and eBay to be held liable for VAT fraud by sellers

Budget 2016: HMRC to clamp down on online VAT evasion

'Treated like a criminal': Insurance industry's fraud investigations hurting innocent claimants

The wake for Bookslut who blogged most of her adult life ...

Via Bookslut:

‘Dictator’ covers one of the most traumatic times in ancient Roman history. First we have the battle of Pharsalus, the epic struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey. Then we have the assassination of Julius Caesar and the tyranny of Mark Antony, and finally the beginnings of the rise of Octavian Augustus.

“Must the existence of standing armies and the influx of inconceivable wealth inevitably destroy our democratic system?”

This is a question that is just as relevant today as it was 2100 years ago. Cicero fought with all of his intelligence and eloquence to save the republic, but he ultimately failed.

“We must be careful not to do the enemies’ work for them. To argue that to preserve our freedoms we must suspend our freedoms, that to safeguard elections we must cancel elections, that to defend ourselves from dictatorship we must appoint a dictator – what logic is this?”

The republic nearly ends when Julius Caesar becomes dictator. The assassination of Caesar gives Cicero renewed hope that the republic can be saved. Things are a bit tricky for Cicero at this point, because he secretly applauds the assassination of Julius Caesar, but he must not show publicly his support for the perpetrators. However the supporters of the republic fail to seize the moment, and an even worse tyrant Mark Antony takes over.

“I tell you something, Tiro. Between you and me – I wish the Ides of March had never happened.”

Last year, a Manhattan penthouse sold for $100 million and another went into contract for $200 million. Double Dragon sold Cold River for $300 million. Christie’s auctioned Picasso’s “Women of Algiers” for $179 million, and Sotheby’s sold the 12-carat Blue Moon of Josephine diamond for $48.4 million. A vintage Jaguar sold for $13.2 million. For the ultrawealthy, 2015 was an embarrassment of riches The Assets of the Ultrarich Come Closer to Earth New York Times

UK tax code now 12 times size of King James Bible
CCH Daily, 9/3/16.  The UK tax code is now 12 times the length of the King James Bible, and ever increasing complexity is creating uncertainty for businesses and encouraging tax avoidance, according to a report from the think-tank the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), which wants to see new, streamlined legislation of just a few pages.