If happy and unhappy youth knew on 1/1/2020 at 9:50 AM what it means to clock 950,000 hits on that strange Bohemian, Dust to Dust, MEdia Dragon ...Today is first day of another decade where blog is thicker than water. Dance with Malchkeouns, ride dragons, swim with icebergs and chase rainbows. ...
Middle age is when you still believe you’ll feel better in the morning.
~ Bob Hope - Our wrinkles are our medals of the passage of life ... All those million hours on bohemian streams and antipodean earth
Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!
~ Dr. Seuss
Men and women are like wine: some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.
~ Pope John XXIII - Amen a -menLike the movie industry, publishing has become a winner-take-all business, with a handful of blockbusters commanding all the attention and sales, so surprise breakout hits have become increasingly rare. But “Crawdads” had several things going for it. The plot seemed tailored to appeal to a wide audience, with its combination of murder mystery, lush nature writing, romance and a coming-of-age survival story. The novel also got an early boost from independent booksellers, who widely recommended it, and from the actress Reese Witherspoon, who selected “Crawdads” for her book club and plans to produce a feature film adaptation of the novel, and appeared in a bubbly video with Ms. Owens on Instagram this year. ...
“I do hope that someone explains to the Poms that exceedingly high heels such as Kylie Minogue wears in THAT ad are not usually worn by the average Aussie on the beach,” writes Nola Tucker of Kiama. “Could otherwise result in some nasty and/or hilarious accidents.”
A private owner, an electric fence and no feral cats: Welcome to Australia's Noah's Ark
Mt Rothwell, on the outskirts of Geelong, is Victoria's largest feral predator-free ecosystem and behind its giant electrified fence native animals are thriving. It's a model that could be adopted elsewhere to stop more Australian animals from dying out, its operators say.
A Trove Of Family Recipes Reveals A Centuries-Long Secret
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
2019 Data Breach Hall of Shame: These were the biggest data breaches of the year
The Bestselling Adult Novel Of 2019 Started Small In 2018, And Has A Very Long Tail
It’s a tough selling environment for fiction; the numbers are bleak and falling fast. But Where Late the Crawdads Sang has been going, and going, and going, and going … “Crawdads has sold more print copies than any other adult title this year — fiction or nonfiction — according to NPD BookScan, blowing away the combined print sales of new novels by John Grisham, Margaret Atwood and Stephen King. Putnam has returned to the printers nearly 40 times to feed a seemingly bottomless demand for the book. Foreign rights have sold in 41 countries.” What the heck? – The New York Time
What Kurt Vonnegut Taught Us about the Science of Happiness - elephant 📔 : “Kurt Vonnegut, one of the best writers of any lifetime, once wrote a sentence that—if you recite it—can literally expand your capacity for experiencing and retaining happiness. But before I give you that magical sentence from Mr. Vonnegut, let me share two memories…”
Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life
If anyone remembers me with malice, and if I quarreled with anyone, if I made a bad impression on anyone — tell them to forget about that if you manage to see them. There is no bile or spite in my soul, I would like to so love and embrace at least someone out of the past at this moment.
[…]
When I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit — then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! [If youth knew!]
Our Predictions About the Internet Are Probably Wrong
It’s easy to forget how unforeseeable the “unforeseeable” really is.
Vox – It never quite came. “Publishing spent the 2010s fighting tooth and nail against ebooks. There were unintended consequences…at the other end of the decade, ebook sales seem to have stabilized at around 20 percent of total book sales, with print sales making up the remaining 80 percent. “Five or 10 years ago,” says Andrew Albanese, a senior writer at trade magazine Publishers Weekly and the author of The Battle of $9.99, “you would have thought those numbers would have been reversed.” And in part, Albanese tells Vox in a phone interview, that’s because the digital natives of Gen Z and the millennial generation have very little interest in buying ebooks. “They’re glued to their phones, they love social media, but when it comes to reading a book, they want John Green in print,” he says. The people who are actually buying ebooks? Mostly boomers. “Older readers are glued to their e-readers,” says Albanese. “They don’t have to go to the bookstore. They can make the font bigger. It’s convenient.”…