- Chamfort
No your friend isn't planning to ring in the New Year with someone named Sylvester instead of you. Silvester is the German name for New Year's Eve – owing to the fourth century Pope Sylvester I. Eventually made a saint by the Catholic Church, his feast day is observed on December 31.
PC World – “Start off right with solid security tools, productivity software, and other programs that every PC needs…”
"The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong but we take leap after leap in the dark."
— Agnes de Mille
'Nothing can prepare you': The DJ behind Sydney's New Year's Eve soundtrack
Sydney disc jockey Dan Murphy began selecting songs for the big night all the way back in May.
No your friend isn't planning to ring in the New Year with someone named Sylvester instead of you. Silvester is the German name for New Year's Eve – owing to the fourth century Pope Sylvester I. Eventually made a saint by the Catholic Church, his feast day is observed on December 31.
Elon Musk proves there is no such thing as bad publicity
The Tesla billionaire has a knack for getting attention that is not always positive, but his business achievements are not in doubt.
Emerging Writers Network
How Are Two Small Canadian Films Making A Splash In Hollywood?
Partly it’s by letting Canada be Canada. “While movies and TV series are shot across the country, the Canadian locations rarely stand in for themselves. Toronto might be New York. Or Vancouver is meant to be L.A. It’s less common to have uniquely Canadian stories — and cities — stand on their own.” – CBC
www.double-dragon-ebooks.com › eAut...
Canadian Double Dragon Publishing - from the pages of your imagination to the screen.
A Powerful Professional Organization For Writers Seems To Be Imploding
Canadian Double Dragon Publishing - from the pages of your imagination to the screen.
A Powerful Professional Organization For Writers Seems To Be Imploding
Or is it self-immolating? In any case, when the RWA suspended writer Courtney Milan, who had spent years on its ethics committee and pushing for more inclusion and equity, for calling a book “a racist mess,” a boulder of anger, past racist treatment, secret committees, and a board exodus started rolling down the RWA’s hill of money and influence. Will the organization – 40 years old and at the forefront of a billion dollar industry – survive? (For more, here’s a complete timeline of what’s been happening.) –Houston Chronicle
St. Sylvester’s day became associated with New Year's Eve with the reform of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, when the last day of the year was fixed at December 31. But despite the holiday's Christian name, many German New Year's traditions can be traced back to the pagan Rauhnächte practices of heathen Germanic tribes, which took place at the end of December and beginning of January.
Instead of recognizing a single day as the winter solstice, the Germanic tribes observed twelve Rauhnächte – hairy nights, so called due to the furry forms of the deep winter demons – or Rauchnächte – smoky nights, due to the practice of smoking the spirits out of one’s house on January 5. Bringing very little sun to the northern regions, the twelve Rauhnächte were considered days outside of time, when the solar and lunar years were allowed to re-synchronise. Silvester took place right in the middle of the twelveRauhnächte and was the night of the god Wotan’s wild hunt, a time of particular commotion and celebration.
As in many other countries, the Germans celebrate Silvester with fireworks, champagne, and boisterous social gatherings. Making noise is key: the ruckus of fireworks, firecrackers, drums, whip-cracking and banging kitchen utensils has been driving away evil winter spirits since the days of the Germanic Teutons. One of the most famous German firework displays takes place at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Private celebrations with Böllern (firecrackers) are also common.
Instead of recognizing a single day as the winter solstice, the Germanic tribes observed twelve Rauhnächte – hairy nights, so called due to the furry forms of the deep winter demons – or Rauchnächte – smoky nights, due to the practice of smoking the spirits out of one’s house on January 5. Bringing very little sun to the northern regions, the twelve Rauhnächte were considered days outside of time, when the solar and lunar years were allowed to re-synchronise. Silvester took place right in the middle of the twelveRauhnächte and was the night of the god Wotan’s wild hunt, a time of particular commotion and celebration.
As in many other countries, the Germans celebrate Silvester with fireworks, champagne, and boisterous social gatherings. Making noise is key: the ruckus of fireworks, firecrackers, drums, whip-cracking and banging kitchen utensils has been driving away evil winter spirits since the days of the Germanic Teutons. One of the most famous German firework displays takes place at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Private celebrations with Böllern (firecrackers) are also common.
Bonus Content--like DVDs!
Clearly my work here is done!Dear Miss Snark,Are you trying to make my life a living hell, or what?
As a hugely successful and incredibly wealthy New York literary agent, I gotta tell you that you’re really causing me heartburn.
In the good old days, crappy writers did a crappy job of submitting their crappy queries, and I was able to cull through the crap at the rate of five per nanosecond, no problemo. And then you came along, dishing up advice and giving away our industry secrets.I now have thousands of submissions in my slush pile that are perfectly executed, beautifully formatted, and follow my agency’s amazingly complex and intentionally contradictory instructions precisely.
So, even though 99.9% of the actual writing is still atrocious, it’s taking me ten times longer to slog through the slush.
If you know the recipes date back to Portugal and Spain during the Inquisition, does that tell you what the secret is? “One of the most unusual recipes … uncovered [was] a sugary dessert called ‘chuletas,’ the Spanish word for pork chops. ‘It’s designed to look like a pork chop,’ Milgrom explains, ‘but it’s really made from bread and milk.’ Basically, it’s French toast that’s fried in the shape of a pork chop and dressed up with tomato jam and pimentos.” – NPR
Read the story in NPR
A Trove Of Family Recipes Reveals A Centuries-Long Secret
Read the story in NPR
A Trove Of Family Recipes Reveals A Centuries-Long Secret
A decade ago the rise of the ebook was all but assured — and yet it hasn’t come to pass. What changed?... E Bbook
What’s Funny Changes. And So Does Comedy
Humor is about connection—shared references, shared emotions, shared perspectives. The best comedians both surprise and unite the audience. They create a moment. But moments keep coming. Over time, attitudes change, and humor has to change with them. When older comedians complain that they can’t perform at colleges anymore because the audiences are too “politically correct,” they are missing the point. –The New Yorker
If you live on a planet that circles a sun, your time is governed by the patters of light and darkness, summer and winter, warmth and cold. And, of course, life and death. Once our forebears learned to farm, they planted and harvested at the equinoxes, but it was the solstices that caught their attention. The extremes. They watched their days shrink from the bright abundance of high summer to the bleak, dark cold of winter, and they invented rituals to make sure the light would come back again: to bring the new day, the new year, the rebirth of life.
The rebirth rituals have become traditions we still celebrate, whether or not we remember where they came from. Some of them are so old that only their monuments remain. On the morning of the winter solstice at the great earthwork Newgrange, in County Meath, Ireland, the day’s first beam of sunlight shines in through a passage that Neolithic people built there five thousand years ago to catch it, and for seventeen minutes, a dark room deep within is filled with the sunshine of the shortest day.
'It Could All Be a Very Enjoyable Book'
Eudora Welty in Mississippi acknowledging a gift from William Maxwell and his family in New York City on Christmas Eve 1957:
“Your tray all spread came safely—and how to imagine a tray from your house not spread—so ready, like the table that appears on a wish in a fairy tale.”
Welty turns a thank-you note into a gift, an expression of gratitude embodied in her distinctive, careful, celebratory prose, suffused with her spirit.
LISNews – Ten Stories That Shaped 2019: “As we limp headfirst into a new decade, it’s beginning to feel like many of these stories have become perennial entries. 2019 saw yet more drag queen story hour protests, vendor buyouts, the persistence of fake news, scandals, and lawsuitsaplenty, along with the usual spate of book burning and banning. Below are some of the other notable headlines from the past year’s library-related news…”
PC World – “Start off right with solid security tools, productivity software, and other programs that every PC needs…”
No lie, look here—so
Little, so narrow, it’s got
No middle, a matchstick inlet,
A little shuttle to get
Across it, so long, hello.
Little, so narrow, it’s got
No middle, a matchstick inlet,
A little shuttle to get
Across it, so long, hello.
Make that so little, so
Narrow, bet your shadow
Beats us to it, better not
Fidget or you’ll miss it, no
Kidding, kiddo.
Narrow, bet your shadow
Beats us to it, better not
Fidget or you’ll miss it, no
Kidding, kiddo.
Narrows, not shallows: no
Little bridge over it, no
Long way around it, so
Here’s the two-bit ferryboat
About to spirit us straight
Little bridge over it, no
Long way around it, so
Here’s the two-bit ferryboat
About to spirit us straight
Into the narrow channel no
Bigger than a moat or wallow
With its piddling cargo of fellow
Small-fry carfuls, the far shore so
Nearby you could spit on it.
Bigger than a moat or wallow
With its piddling cargo of fellow
Small-fry carfuls, the far shore so
Nearby you could spit on it.
To write—so little, so
Narrow, no wonder it’s cut
Out for us, the closest we’ll get
To a perfect fit.
In The Korea Times Anna J. Park reports that Powerful storyteller Kim Un-su touches global readers, in a lengthy profile of The Plotters-author.
Kim describes his writing routine:
"In the past, I used to pack myself and go deep into the forest or a mountain and stay there for several months to write, as I could gain necessary focus and calm to write," he said. "But now I write at home. I live in the quiet countryside in a southern region of Korea. I usually wake up at around 3 a.m. every day and write until around 11 a.m. or noon.
PC World – “Set up antivirus, clear out bloatware, and perform other tasks to keep your PC humming well into the future…a new PC isn’t like a new car; you can’t just turn a key and put the pedal to the metal. Okay, maybe you can—but you shouldn’t. Performing just a few simple activities when you first fire it up can help it be safer, faster, and better poised for the future. Here’s how to set up a new laptop or desktop computer the right way, step by step…”
please stop saying ‘UFO’…The Washington Post – [watch this Christmas Eve in full screen mode – stay focused and read the text that that explains the event] “In December 2017, two videos emerged that showed Navy pilots encountering mysterious spherical objects that appeared, at first glance, to move through the air in ways that baffled experts. A third, released in March 2018, depicted a similar encounter. Everyone who watched — including the pilots who filmed them — had the same question: What, exactly, are these things? Last week [September 2019], a Navy official publicly called these mysterious objects “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP),” giving name to the inscrutable little dots and reigniting scrutiny around the unidentified flying objects (a term the Navy does not want to use even though the objects that are flying cannot be identified.)…” [Note – UFOs are now UAPs]