Saturday, December 16, 2017

Baring Souls: In Their Own Words

It is not in the  nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.
— George MacDonald, born in 1824


4th Estate will publish the "hopeful, humorous and moving" memoir from the Times columnist Melanie Reid.

Looking back over the years, it seems that time stretches and contracts, depending on my experience of each moment. Some moments are etched in my memory, like the sunlight patterning the water in the river, ethereal moments captured only by my mind. Other longer stretches of time are a blur ….


In her fiction, Jenny Diski preferred self-concealment to baring her soul. Yet her life was her material, and, in the end, she was her writing 

Virtually as soon as humans developed the ability to speak and write, somebody somewhere felt the desire to say something to somebody else that could not be understood by others

Noticed this weekend in Chateuabriand's memoirs:
Incompetence is a freemasonry that has its lodges in every country; and this brotherhood has dungeons of which it springs the trap doors, and in which it causes governments to disappear.
Chateaubriand had just been visiting the court of exiled Bourbons in Prague, and the grand master of this lodge may have been the Baron de Damas or the Prince de Polignac.

Daniel Halévy's The End of the Notables 
ends, as I recall, with the refusal in 1871 of the titular Henry V to accept the throne of France unless the tricolor were replaced with the Bourbon lily. Halévy observes that this refusal had no relation to the essentially realistic approach of the French kings; he refers to Henry V as a nostalgist, a reader of Chateaubriand. Certainly Henry V was a nostalgist, and certainly Chateaubriand knew how to sound the nostalgic note; but from all that I can tell, Chateaubriand was far more realistic than that.




Game Of Thrones’ Tourists Are Devouring Dubrovnik


"Since 2011, when the show first premiered on HBO, tourism in Dubrovnik has seen an increase of 9 to 12 percent annually" - with numbers up to 10,000 or more a day, over 1 million a year in a town of 43,000 people. "While the show's notoriety is good news for Dubrovnik's economy, 80 percent of which relies on tourism, UNESCO has warned that Old Town Dubrovnik, a World Heritage Site, cannot accommodate this crush of newcomers. Some residents have had enough, too." … [Read More]



The Neuroscience Of Changing Your Mind


"Scientists have long accepted that our ability to abruptly stop or modify a planned behavior is controlled via a single region within the brain's prefrontal cortex, an area involved in planning and other higher mental functions." Now it seems that this consensus among scientists was, if not wrong, greatly oversimplified. … [Read More]







Here’s What Science Fiction Written By Artificial Intelligence Looks Like



Their program can identify dozens of structural and stylistic details in huge chunks of text, and if you give them a collection of great stories—stories that maybe you wished you had written—they are able to identify all the details that those great stories have in common.


Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence
Although reason for link remains unclear, data suggests extra care is needed when riding on nights with a full moon ...


“The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.

Those that rob you of things, be they material items, love or kindness, expect chaos to consume you; they expect you to be upset and they don’t often care. Though if you are robbed of anything, smile and go about your life as normally as you can. This way you are not letting the thief steal your happiness as well.


“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

When it rains it pours.




“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” – William Shakespeare

Parents do a lot for their children, and would die for them. To have a child that is thankless is truly painful like the bite of snake.



Malchkeon loved Charleville a place that missed its 150th anniversary by 3 years - we also loved  the  Observatory


“Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.” – William Shakespeare









Top 4 Media Trends in the Film Industry – Latest Blog on Significant ...




FOR THE TIMES, THEY ARE ACHANGING:  It is No Longer the “Normal World” of Publishing.