15 - XV: Creatures of the Night and Google Love MEdia Dragon: Half Million Hits - “The Second I'm Rich”

The whole point of writing something down is that your voice will then carry for thousands of miles, whereas in direct conversation it fades at a hundred paces ...
— Matteo Ricci, who died around this date in 1610 (This Post is Either Quite Late or Somewhat Early ...)

“Books let you fight well dressed media dragons of 1960s, meet the love of your life, travel to faraway lands and laugh alongside friends, all within their pages. They’re an escape that brings you home..." We are grateful to homes of insomniac especially in Amerika and Europe as without them MEdia Dragon would remain unclicked and unread or even worse 📜📚📒📔📓📖📋📕📗📘📚

Since 2002 (spelled backward) MMII, MEdia Dragon has linked to more than 33,000 articles, quotes, cybertech, crime, tax reform, book reviews and essays...
As someone who’s struggled with insomnia all my life, I face this question on a nightly basis, whether it’s better to reach for a sleep med or tough it out without sleep.  Advertising assures us that there’s little danger from sleep meds, but the scare stories of Michael Jackson and Heath Ledger suggest otherwise.

How to sort through the hype and hysteria? ... Media Dragon is the perfect blog to help you fall asleep and impress your significant others with ecclectic Kanbana myths and other trivia stories 💻🎥📞📺📼📡🇦🇺🇩🇪🇺🇸🇨🇦🇩🇰🇫🇮

Kangaroo a.k.a. Klokan: The Kindness of Strangers | ABCtales

We reached the celebration worthy almost 555,555  ( half million) visitors during 15 years of blogging - called the labor of love - According to AI InfograPhics, key virtual widgets include almost evil 6666 entries together with 1000s of body counts of retired bloggers who started in 2002 and moved to #covfefe-full and sexier twitter.com and other channels ... The entries hit these marks on Platform created by Do No Evil Blogger aka Google ... Thank you, Spaciba, Sergey and Larry

It was inevitable that eventually one would grow tired of drinking and doodling. And when family and friends sleep like logs one has to rely on strangers ... It’s now 15 years since I published my story of escape across the Iron Curtain as ebook via Double Dragon (hard cover was born  three years later Cold River : Jozef Imrich : 9781554043118 - Book Depository) —More than 25 years since I started writing about Prague's Second Spring, and more than 35 years since I started working towards it -  My Surreal Vienna. But with every passing year I feel I understand more about what the book is really about—and why it’s important. I wrote the book, as its title 'Cold (War) River' suggests, to contribute to the demystifying totalitarianisms. But as the years have gone by, I’ve realized that the core of what’s in the book actually goes far beyond communism —into many areas that will be increasingly important in defining our sense of why we live, write 
and read:

“If a man tells you that he writes, paints, sculpts, or sings for his own amusement, and at the same time makes his work public, then he lies: he lies if he puts his signature to his writing, painting, sculpture or song. He is intent, at the very least, on leaving some shadow of his spirit behind, something to outlive him.” [The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations]

Thank you for reading my comments on these pages and my blog for 15 years - Daily Pilot - Los Angeles Times
15 Lessons from 15 Years of Blogging - Anil Dash

15 Years Blogging And Still Learning How To Grow Thick Skin - ProBlogger

One Blogger and his 15-years of blogging

WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE A 15 YEAR OLD BLOGGER


 Informal Inquiries: Bloggers: motives, methods, and madness...

“What a rich virtual mess our chromosomes turned out to be, what a heady mix of toxic blood was running through our veins!”

We’ve made it to middle age. That we are still blogging, still producing links and still engaging new audiences is amazing. 

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” — Joyce Carol Oates

Every day is different and dare We say fun. We’ve been so fortunate to work with men and women whose ideas have the potential to change the civilised world…or at the very least, one particular corner of it.

"I came to this world naked and I will depart naked. When you die, you take nothing no matter how much you have..."  The day Manny Pacquiao gave a man $100 to shine his Louis Vuitton shoes 

“The trouble is that if an artist knows he has genius, he’s done for. The only salvation is to work like a labourer, and not have delusions of grandeur.” Pierre-Auguste Renoir, quoted in Raymond Durgnat, ... read more

The Power Of A Collective Story In Times Of Repression And Fear

A chilling, inspiring tale from Communist Poland. “In that courtroom, in a split-second during Jaromar’s speech, my classmates and I connected in the mutual understanding of something profound, something that gave us power.”

As I enter my fifteenth year of blogging on MEdia Dragon (which I will celebrate simply for the fact of still being alive) I  thought it would be also useful to dig some links, cartoons etc that knitted the power and knowledge of collective storytelling together with amusement snippets over coffee, wine, or spirits with family and friends ...

Little drops of water do make a mighty ocean. The key is to not take those little drops for granted and give up before the ocean actually arrives ...

“What a strange world this… Before I’ve even had time to blink they’re already calling me old, when inside I’m like an unripe fruit.”

Tiny, family-run newspaper wins Pulitzer Prize for taking on big business Poynter Institute. Well worth a read for Iowa’s complexity.

CHARLIE MARTIN:  Remember the VICTIMS of Communism on May Day!

 Meaningless rituals might be good for you like blogging for MEdia dragons 

The Internet Archive linked to MEdia Dragon won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Webbys

First Edition Of ‘Crime And Punishment’ Turns Up In $17 Box Of Used Books

An anonymous woman in northwestern England purchased an auction lot of old secondhand books for £14. When she finally had time to go through the contents, she found the 1886 edition of the Dostoevsky novel, the first published in English. She has now made a 96,300% profit. 

“Every (blog)  says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.”
― Milan Kundera, The Bohemian French MEdia Dragon Reader 

“There is anxiety, but it comes after you’ve finished filming because it’s out of your hands; people are editing it, they’re cutting it, marketing it. And it’s… part your career sort of rides on that. But when you’re actually filming it’s a team thing and it really feels good there for me.”

 ~Hugh Jackman
    Is someone trying to control you?  If so, make a sharp turn and think about new ways to address that behavior.  You may just find yourself feeling much less anxious at work...

For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” ― Mary Oliver 

Parallels Between The Arts And Medicine

“It’s said that literature helps us to explore ways of being human, grants glimpses of lives beyond our own, aids empathy with others, alleviates  distress, and widens our circle of awareness. The same could be said of clinical practice in all of its manifestations: nursing to surgery, psychotherapy to physiotherapy. An awareness of literature can aid the practice of medicine, just as clinical experience certainly helps me in the writing of my books. I’ve come to see the two disciplines as having more parallels than differences, and I’d like to argue they share a kind of synergy.”

 

“Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible force. And that Death which was present in this dear brother (who, waking up, moaned and by habit called indiscriminately on God and on the devil) was not so far away as it hitherto seemed to be. It was within himself to- he felt it. If not today, then tomorrow or thirty years hence, was it not all the same? But what that inevitable Death was, he not only did not know, not only had never considered, but could not and dared not consider.”
― Leo Tolstoy

Bob Dylan Talks Amy Winehouse, Leonard Cohen, Much More in Rare, Extensive Interview | Pitchfork

Controversial movies that went too far in the name of art

THERE'S a line between dedicated and insane, and when it comes to art, that line is frequently played with. This is all to say that some of your favourite movies have dramatic backstories, ranging from behind-the-scenes fights to film and acting ..

So Much Of What We Know About How We Learn Seems To Be Wrong

“We think of our minds as like computers: Information comes up and then gets filed into various folders. Instead, we need to really engage with material, and discover what connections there are with what we already know. Self-quizzing can help with that, because you’re explaining things to yourself — making that information meaningful.”

Sentimentality is far worse than death

Bring Back the Book Jacket Photo link to Book jacket photos

Flip to the back of a new book. What do you see? Blurbs. Line after line of praise, proclamations, and predictions. Tucked in a small corner square is an author’s photo, a passport-size acknowledgment of the face behind the book. Often those faces are hidden inside a jacket flap.

By NICK 

Bring back the book jacket photo.

Bring back those full-page portraits that pronounced I wrote a book, damn it.

It's not all fun and games at Full Frontal. Political comedy is "grounded in research and journalism," says host Samantha Bee. "We have a team of journalists working here, and a fact-checker. We care deeply about facts." Read the Wired interview.

Saddest news in relation to blogging hit hard many of the early adopters when we read about IOWAHAWK LEAVING TWITTER, This excerpt from his farewell tweetstorm, sadly we have now more haters than lovers in the blogosphere - I gather Rome was not destroyed in day - not sue which single snowflake will cause the avalanche or when, but comments on blogs are already in a poor shape ...

"Influenced by Yoga is as Yoga does." 1967