Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Author, Jane Austen who spent most of her life in Hampshire has a bicentenary in 2017.The year will be full of exhibitions and events. Jane Austen 200 Calendar - JASA - Jane Austen Society of Australia
Of the forty-five people crammed into the train car that took Levi to Auschwitz, which he notes was “by far the most fortunate wagon,” only four survived. Toward the end of his memoir, in diaristic form, he offers a harrowing perspective barely imaginable to any free person:
This time last year I was a free man: an outlaw but free, I had a name and a family, I had an eager and restless mind, an agile and healthy body. I used to think of many, far-away things: of my work, of the end of the war, of good and evil, of the nature of things and of the laws which govern human actions; and also of the mountains, of singing and loving, of music, of poetry. I had an enormous, deep-rooted foolish faith in the benevolence of fate; to kill and to die seemed extraneous literary things to me. My days were both cheerful and sad, but I regretted them equally, they were all full and positive; the future stood before me as a great treasure. Today the only thing left of the life of those days is what one needs to suffer hunger and cold; I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.
It takes an extraordinary person to not only survive such a devastating extreme of inhumanity but to emerge from it with the awareness that existence always leans toward equilibrium. Reflecting on his experience in the camp, Levi writes:
Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief. The inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of them intermittent and hence supportable.
Autumn is here and Wiley rock pool is still warm. The colours on Trees at The Bluest Mountains are blooming in 50 shades of reds and yellows. Birds are singing. We're not engaged in any nuclear wars
at the moment.
Governor Lachlan Macquarie wrote of 'this grand prospect' when he stood at Sublime Spot or Point in 1822 'On our arrival at the summit of the mountain, we were gratified with a very grand magnificent bird's eye view of the ocean, the 5 Islands, and of the greater part of the low country of Illawarra...The whole face of the mountain is clothed with the largest and finest forest trees I have ever seen in the colony'. MEdia Dragons are moving to a historical house
This spring, the magnolia tree at the edge of the yard is in full bloom. I was determined to show you an image of just one of its magnificent blossoms. Then the ... read more
Yale 360 Environment: “A survey of 12,000 adults and children in the United States has shown that many people have lost a close connection with nature, although a wide cross-section of respondents expressed a desire to close that gap. The study, conducted by the public relations and marketing firm DJ Case and Associatesin conjunction with state and federal wildlife and park agencies, underlines what many people have intuitively known for years: that the increasing use of computers, smart phones, televisions, and other technology, coupled with a growing movement from rural areas, is pulling many Americans away from the natural world. “It is increasingly normal to spend little time outside
Turmeric is a yellow coloured spice widely used in Indian and South East
Asian cuisine. It’s prepared from the root of a plant called Curcuma longa and is also used as a natural pigment in the food industry. In the literature, curcumin is reported to be an antioxidant that
protects the body against damage from reactive molecules. These are
generated in the body as a result of metabolism and cause cell damage
(known as free radicals). Sikh Tumric Magic at killing bacteria
“The imagination,” wrote the trailblazing philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft in a 1794 letter, “is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords.”
The Lysicrates Foundation aims to link Greece and Australia by honouring
an ancient Athenian tradition in today's Sydney. Musical and drama
contests at the annual Dionysia festival would bring the city to a
standstill for a week.
John and Patricia Patricia Azarias Azarias have the same aim as the
Athenians did in their theatre contests: innovative, bleeding-edge drama
written by locals for local audiences.
Daniel Munoz
John Azarias looks up at the Lysicrates Monument in Sydney's Royal
Botanic Garden. Above us, in newly carved sandstone, the Greek god of
wine and theatre Dionysus is once again turning his pirate attackers
into dolphins.
It’s a great and self-serving mess, this claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” which we hear from almost anyone who talks about religion in public, outside those the worldlings define as fundamentalist (me, probably you, Joseph Bottum, David Goldman, Benedict XVI, Hassidic Jews, devout Muslims, religious families with more than four children)
Being “spiritual” does not do us any good. As I recently wrote elsewhere, it works fairly well when you are healthy and have enough money to enjoy life, and just want from your spirituality the feeling that all is well with the universe, particularly your corner of it. But it doesn’t help you much when things go from good to bad.
The man wasting away from pancreatic cancer will get no help nor comfort from the “spiritual,” which will seem a lot less friendly and comforting when he feels pain morphine won’t suppress. He has no one to beg for help, no one to ask for comfort, no one to be with him, no one to meet when he crosses from this world to the next. He wants what religion promises.
We suffer from “nature-deficit disorder” and the accompanying pretenses of citified life. Take a cue from Hobbes, Rousseau, Einstein, Dickens, and Hazlitt: Take a hike..mmmMedia Dragons »
Kaiser Health News: “A new study looks at the effects of electrical stimulation on the brain, and how those pulses can improve and impair memory.”
The New York Times: ‘Pacemaker’ For The Brain Can Help Memory, Study Finds – Well-timed pulses from electrodes implanted in the brain can enhance memory in some people, scientists reported on Thursday, in the most rigorous demonstration to date of how a pacemaker-like approach might help reduce symptoms of dementia, head injuries and other conditions.
NPR: Clues To Failing Memory Found In Brain Stimulation Study – “When memory was predicted to be poor,” he explains, “brain stimulation enhanced memory, and when it was predicted to be good, brain stimulation impaired memory. “In other words, on a bad memory day, stimulation helped. On a good day, it hurt. When stimulation was delivered to the right place at the right time, the researchers found, it could improve memory performance among the patients by as much as 50 percent.”
NINA TEICHOLZ: Ditch The Egg White Omelet:“We were told for decades to avoid yolks and limit our dietary cholesterol to help protect against heart disease. Yet in 2015, the U.S. dietary guidelines dropped the daily cap on cholesterol. It turns out that studies since the 1950s had found that dietary cholesterol had little meaningful effect on blood cholesterol. What a shame for all of those delicious omelets we never got to eat. And, more seriously, for all the vitamins we missed — egg yolks are far more nutrient-dense than the whites, with super-rich amounts of biotin , choline and lutein.”
Poprad, Slovakia
Take one small city with a heart of medieval mitteleuropean quaintness at the foot of magnificent, snowy mountains. Then add an open-air spa where everyone has year-round fun, be it quietly relaxing in hot pools or screaming down water slides. The happy result is Poprad in Slovakia. Its historic centre, Spišská Sobota, is not huge, but its baroque architecture places it firmly in an old and very central part of Europe. Vino and Tapas on leafy Sobostské Square does great-value fine dining; for accommodation, Pension Sabato (doubles from €60 B&B) has a lovely garden at the back.
Be sure to venture beyond the old town to discover the highlights of other districts, notably chocolatier Bon Bon on Dominika Tatarku, over the river near the station, and the Podtatranské historical museum on Partizánska Street further west. Best of all is the quick, cheap public transport to the High Tatra mountains, with cable car connections for skiing or just enjoying spectacular panoramas. Starý Smokovec is the main village. Back in town, the spa, Aquacity, is hugely popular with locals (family day ticket €52). Those whose idea of enjoying cold weather is a long lounge in an open-air hot pool before breakfast can even stay here (doubles from €119, including spa access). Zima: Top Secrets
I'm pretty sure James Gates Percival, author of this week's Forgotten Poem, is the only geologist-poet I've come across so far. He studied and practiced medicine, briefly taught chemistry, and was a state geologist both for Connecticut and for Wisconsin, where he died. He also assisted Noah Webster, of Webster's Dictionary fame. And he wrote poems. It's the kind of oddball career path you really don't see anymore, but he also seems to have been a kind of splendid oddball all around.
I Saw on the Top of a Mountain High (1822) by James Gates Percival I saw, on the top of a mountain high, A gem that shone like fire by night; It seem'd a star, which had left the sky, And dropp'd to sleep on the lonely height; I climb'd the peak, and I found it soon A lump of ice, in the clear, cold moon. Can you its hidden sense impart? 'Twas a cheerful look, and a broken heart.
I keep wanting to read Percival's scientific interests into this poem. Its central image -- the bright distant gleam that turns out to be "a lump of ice" when seen up close -- seems like something he could have plausibly seen while surveying geological formations, except he hadn't started doing that when he wrote this poem. At the same time, it's a weird image: how big of a patch of ice would it have to be in order to be visible in the moonlight from that distance? Are we talking about a glacier? Are we in the Alps, in reliably Romanticterritory, or are we somewhere more like Percival's native Connecticut, where the highest summit is a lot more modest? This poem's rhythm is a little on the jaunty side, with anapests breaking up the iambic regularity of nearly every line. (I'm not going to go off into an explanation of how meter works in English poetry, because we'd be here all week, but you can read more about ithere, if you're curious. But an iamb is a metrical unit of one unstressed and one stressed syllable, as in this line of five iambs: "The CURfew TOLLS the KNELL of PARting DAY." And an anapest is two unstressed syllables and one stressed: "I am MONarch of ALL I surVEY.") Instead of a more metrically regular line like
The world is suddenly
obsessed with roses. But why? Jeff Ihaza investigates beauty.
Evangelical to being a Catholic
