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
I have never been more happy to be interestingly wrong
I am pretty sure that, if you will be quite honest, you will admit that a good rousing sneeze, one that tears open your collar and throws your hair into your eyes, is really one of life’s sensational pleasures
Did you know that the Google Arts and Culture app does more than just match your selfiesto better identify you on Google Image Search to fun portraits in museums that highlight the overwhelming representation of white men in museal collections? It’s true. For instance, there’s this fun little article on the life and career of cinematographer James Wong Howe:
James Wong Howe was born Wong Tung Jim in Guangzhou, China on August 28, 1899. Howe’s father brought his young family to the US - what he described as the ‘mountain of gold’ - when Howe was 5 years old.
His first home was Pascoe, Washington, where his father opened a general store and became the first Chinese merchant in the town. As a child, Howe faced vicious racism. His first schoolteacher quit as she didn’t want to teach a person of Chinese descent. His second teacher changed his name to be more anglicised, which is how he became ‘James Wong Howe’.
China tries to kill real Paris: I was not surprised to learn that a Parisian photographer was apparently inspired by the story (it later got translated and republished in the French magazine Feuilleton) and set about trying to approach the story visually—ultimately by comparing shots of the real Paris with photographs of Tianducheng, in China’s Zhejiang Province, where about 2,000 people live in a Paris replica, many of them working in a nearby France-themed amusement park.
Images on the left are from China, images on the right are from France, all copyrightFrançois Prost. Latitudinal stuff.
Whether our word for "tea" is from "cha" or "te" depends on whether the term migrated over land or sea Czechs and Slovak say chaj - cay - as those Sikhs do ...
“Most people don’t realize how deeply ingrained their habits are and how where we park our car on a regular basis can tell someone many things about us.”
When 136 Bird Species Show Up at a Feeder, Which One Wins? via The Cornell Lab of Ornithology: “There’s something tranquil about watching birds coexist at your backyard feeder, pecking away in their quirky abandon. That is, until the local Blue Jay arrives, flushing all your daintier songbirds out in a raucous flurry. It might seem like just plain bullying, but there’s more going on than meets the eye in the fast-moving (and frankly addicting) world of bird-feeder drama. Setting out a limited food resource (like a feeder full of seeds) in a time of scarcity (like winter) naturally brings birds into conflict.
In 2016, Dos Equis beer revealed that they would retire Jonathan Goldsmith as their signature “most interesting man in the world” character. To attract younger drinkers, they introduced a new, younger “most interesting man” actor – Augustin Legrand. The reviews haven’t been great and I want to get into why I think the newer stuff misses the mark.
I think that the original ads work because they perfectly parodied a very specific cultural niche. Specifically, the original ads were about urbane straight white guys living out an adventurous life in the 1950s and 1960s. The film is usually in color, sometimes black and white, but always grainy. The events are time very time specific, such as emerging from an Apollo era space capsule or helping to unveil the very first mobile phone. He’s James Bondish in that he often wears a tuxedo and mingles with the global elite.
"New Supreme Court cookbook dishes up history, recipes": Jessica Gresko of The Associated Press has this report
The gravediggers stand by, waiting to close earth's open mouth again and tidy up. Theirs is a job that gets into the pores, and to the core. They'll spruce up later on, head out on the town to bid farewell to the old year and see the new one in.
Nothing for it then but leave you there and drift away, bypassing the signs for GET IN LANE and LOW HEADROOM this darkening afternoon.
on this last dying day of the old year bride and groom make of this inn an everywhere of time and space with fire and funeral.
And so we eat and drink and gossip on. I raise a glass that is still warm, propose a health embracing both sides of the dark river—
In 2012, Michael Lewis gave a commencement speech at Princeton University, his alma mater. In the speech, Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and The Big Short, talks about the role of luck in rationalizing success. He tells the graduates, the winners of so many of life’s lotteries, that they “owe a debt to the unlucky”. This part near the end is worth reading even if you skip the rest of it.
I now live in Berkeley, California. A few years ago, just a few blocks from my home, a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students, as lab rats. Then they broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women, per team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily assigned one of the three to act as leader. Then they gave them some complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating, or how to regulate drinking on campus.
Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn’t. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader’s shirt.
This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He’d been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.
This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay, and I’m sure lots of other human behavior. But it also is relevant to new graduates of Princeton University. In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.
All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you’ll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don’t.
Primitive Technology YouTube channel is up to. Over the past two years, this Australian man has built all sorts of tools, structures, and objects using only what he can find in the forest and has racked up over 330 million views on his silent videos demonstrating how he does it all.
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about “meritocracy” and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.
That’s a pretty succinct summary of the “born on third base and thinks they hit a triple” effect…and it doesn’t just apply to entrepreneurship or being rich.
The next generation of mourning. I have begun like my mother before me to cross out names she lived to read the obituaries of all her friends in my generation . The first girl ever kissed is dead complications of pneumonia . I saw the email on the way from something important to something suddenly not unfold . Nothing is high-powered bullet had passed through me without hitting harder here and were bone later the egg as I remembered when we were 16 in a state of mutual cross and rode to the league that parent approved church sponsored alternative to a real beach trip was particularly bars and carnal temptations and made out in the back seat of a record 64 civilian power was really driving and the ball , looking back now and to wink and ground soon . The romance was over and we moved on , but never forgot that date and when I saw her 40 years later we still joked and smiled about that Ryan and wondered whatever happened to Ray and Maple .
When work changes, companies reward new ways of feeling about it. Enter corporate mindfulness. But what about when breathing exercises aren't enough? Mindfullness
In case you missed Geraldine Doogue last year on Saturday Extra, she conducted three thought-provoking interviews. First was Professor Julian Le Grand of the London School of Economics, on the possibilities of employee-led mutuals contracting to the public sector. Then Sarah Barker and Karl Mallon talked about how firms are incorporating climate risk into their financial analysis. And former Hong Kong Governor Chris Pattenwarned about the politics of identity – a political movement that “savages democracy”. He described how in Northern Ireland he developed practical methods to move beyond identity politics.
In his book review of Polanyi’s A Life on the Left in the New York Review of Books, Robert Kuttner argues that ‘Democracy cannot survive an excessively free market and containing the market is the task of politics.”
Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Game of Mates: How favours bleed the nation. Get the book via gameofmates.com. Follow author Cameron Murray on Facebook and Twitter.Come to the Brisbane book launch on 23rd May, 6pm at Avid Reader, West End (Details and RSVP link). Continue reading →
