Sunday, December 02, 2018

The Human Brain As Time Traveler

Lead yourself whenever your boss' leadership deteriorates. When your boss doesn't praise what you do, praise yourself. When your boss doesn't make you big, make yourself big. Remember, if you have done your best, failure does not count. 
~Mario Teguh


All the criticism and all of the praise, it doesn't - it's not worth the salt that goes on my bread, because TV is fickle. You can be loved one day and hated the next day. One day, you're getting an award. And the next day, you're getting a death threat. 
Nancy Grace


Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.” W.H. Auden, “D.H. Lawrence” ... read more






Blue Mountains filled with roses 🌹 Fairfax Road  filled with singing and Nude pizza filled with Tony’s stories ...

Lyndon Terracini - Opera Australia


There is no sugary happy ending to the story, no lulling assurance that good always prevails over evil. Perhaps because Sand’s own country was still haunted by the grim specter of the French Revolution, she composes a sad, beautiful, cautionary ending — a realist’s reminder that good only prevails when we put all of our might and our ethic of love and our unflinching commitment to kindness behind it, for, as Zadie Smith would write nearly two centuries later in her spectacular meditation on optimism and despair, “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.”

George Sand’s Only Children’s Book: A Touching Parable of Choosing Kindness and Generosity Over Cynicism and Greed, with Stunning Illustrations by Russian Artist Gennady Spirin





One day, an old man was walking along a beach that was littered with thousands of starfish that had been washed ashore by the high tide. As he walked he came upon a young boy who was eagerly throwing the starfish back into the ocean, one by one.
Puzzled, the man looked at the boy and asked what he was doing. Without looking up from his task, the boy simply replied, “I’m saving these starfish, Sir”.
The old man chuckled aloud, “Son, there are thousands of starfish and only one of you. What difference can you make?”
The boy picked up a starfish, gently tossed it into the water and turning to the man, said, “I made a difference to that one!”



New Biennial Will Be Devoted To Indigenous Art


Sydney's new 80km walk to be most spectacular in the world


A walking trail connecting Sydney's Bondi with Manly is about to become a reality after federal, state and six local governments agreed to connect public land.




“…Over a period of four months, from high summer to late autumn, the Guardian dispatched writers across the American west to examine how overcrowding is playing out at ground level. We found a brewing crisis: two mile-long “bison jams” in Yellowstone, fist-fights in parking lots at Glacier, a small Colorado town overrun by millions of visitors. Moreover, we found people wrestling with an existential question: what should a national park be in the modern age? Can parks embrace an unlimited number of visitors while retaining what made them, as the writer Wallace Stegner once put it, “the best idea we ever had”?

The Human Brain As Time Traveler


In just a few minutes of mental wandering, you have made several distinct round trips from past to future: forward a week to the important meeting, forward a year or more to the house in the new neighborhood, backward five hours to today’s meeting, forward six months, backward five years, forward a few weeks. You’ve built chains of cause and effect connecting those different moments; you’ve moved seamlessly from actual events to imagined ones. And as you’ve navigated through time, your brain and body’s emotional system has generated distinct responses to each situation, real and imagined. The whole sequence is a master class in temporal gymnastics


The greatest book ever written about the theater? The Season by William Goldman, who died recently. What makes it great? Its bluntness Who Is Partly or Partially Blunt 

The monochrome myth. Plenty of evidence that ancient sculptures were full of color can't compete with our ardor for whiteness. It's a centuries-long act of collective blindness... Myths do classical colours



For A Producer, Knowing When And How To Close A Play Is As Important As Opening It


“One of the industry’s faults is that producers can find themselves in financial trouble and in a bid not to lose face may not want to tell anyone else about it. Invariably, this sees the situation escalate to crisis point, and by that time with the problems apparent, they’re often irrevocable.”

The Nation – Ad Hoc Nation – The unmaking of the steady job. Reviewed – Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary, By Louis Hyman“…Today’s temps, permalancers, subcontractors, and underemployed do have an advantage that their predecessors didn’t: The effects of the gig economy permeate society more thoroughly and visibly than any of the downsizing and outsourcing that came before them. There are hints of disruption and quiet reminders of insecurity anywhere you care to look. You can order almost anything—cleaning, furniture assembly, food—at the touch of a button and never have to go outside or consider the effects of Uber, TaskRabbit, Seamless, and Craigslist on the industries they’ve taken over. But at the same time, as you scroll through the apps on your phone, how can you be sure your own job won’t be chopped up and posted on Upwork?”