Sunday, January 05, 2020

In reality they are not after MEdia Dragon: They are after you - we are just in the way ...

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
— Charles Lamb, who died in 1834 



How To Vote For An Oscar Script

Actually, no one truly knows how to do it. “It’s also a real evaluative mystery. How do you know good writing that, as a moviegoer, you can’t see and, as Academy voters, you’re not obligated to read?” – The New York Times

 Agencies shut doors as smoke lingers

        Livres Hebdo/GFK have determined the top twenty bestselling titles in France over the past decade; the article reporting on this is (largely) paywalled, but you can actually find and click through all twenty titles in the 'Livres cités (20)'-column on the left side of the piece ..... 
       The top seller was Stéphane Hessel's Time for Outrage !, followed by quite a few Asterix-comics (four of the next five titles). Impressively, Elena Ferrante (just) beat out E.L.James (though with four titles in the top 20, her series as a whole did better) -- and Camus' The Stranger came in a strong eleventh. 
       Two other titles are under review at the complete review:The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker (17th) and The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (18th). 

       I always enjoy the personal and personal-website/blog year-in-review/reading overviews, especially when they share books-read lists and numbers and statistics; The Millions always has their 'A Year in Reading'-collection -- from almost a hundred authors this year, which is enough to keep you busy for a while -- but here are a small selection of other posts from readers and sites I also follow:

A hilarious quote (courtesy of Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti) from Clive James, “Primo Levi’s Last Will and Testament”:

The translator’s Italian is good enough to make sure that he usually doesn’t, when construing from that language, get things backward, but he can get them sidewise with daunting ease, and on several occasions he puts far too much trust in his ear. To renderpromiscuità as “promiscuity,” as he does twice, is, in the context, a howler. Levi didn’t mean that people forced to live in a ghetto were tormented by promiscuity. He meant that they were tormented by propinquity. The unintentional suggestion that they were worn out by indiscriminate lovemaking is, in the circumstances, a bad joke.


Goodbye to the Goodfellas
In The Irishman, Martin Scorsese offers a stunning elegy for a distinctly American figure: the gangster.

Hollywood’s Looming Content Crisis – Big Franchises Squeezing Everything Else Out


This year, a huge chunk of total sales went to a handful of titles. The top 10 films at the domestic box office have accounted for 38% of ticket sales so far this year, according to data firm Comscore. That’s up from 33% in 2018 and 24% five years ago. – Los Angeles Times
Cira, the organization that manages the .ca top-level domain, is offering a free stock photo library featuring typically Canadian scenes, like “lumberjack and hockey player discuss quarterly numbers” (above). They also have their version of the distracted boyfriend photo (“hockey player checks out lumberjack while woman in Canadian tuxedo looks on in disbelief”)
And Dublin is very walkable. You can easily just walk to any destination.

And look at the doors. There is even a sightseeing tour with the most beautiful doors of Dublin.
Legal theorist Wojciech Sadurski, an outspoken critic of the Polish government, is facing legal proceedings intended to silence him -- the "sue to scare" tactics of the ruling party and its hounding of Sadurksi "is a clear violation of freedom of expression under EU and ECHR law

    How Art Training Helps Doctors, Police See Detail

    “As I rose through the ranks, people would ask me, ‘Did the art background and training have an effect?’ There is something to that. By training in the art field, your brain tends to adapt and see things in a way people might not see.” – Artsy
    Published: 

From imprisoned dissident to president: Vaclav Havel remembered at Frankfurt Book Fair | Books | DW | 17.10.2019

https://m.dw.com › from-imprisoned-diss...

vaclav havel from m.dw.com

At the beginning of 1989, Czech dissident Vaclav Havel was in prison. By the end of that year, he became president of his country. The Peace Prize winner's values and ideas are more ...

 Never in a million years did I imagine myself wanting to live in a yurt… but that was before peeping the yurt that Zach Both and Nicole Lopez designed and built over the course of six months. You might remember Zach from a few years back when he turned a used cargo van into a mobile studio and then shared details in a step-by-step manual so you could trick out your own van, via The Vanual. Now he’s gone bigger and bolder, along with his girlfriend Nicole, to offer the same kind of do-it-yourself guide, aka Do It Yurtself, to help others build their own modern yurt. Before you start buying land and building materials, take a look at the modern yurt they call home ...
Boston Globe, Trial Begins For IRS Agent Accused of Raping College Intern:

IRS Logo 2Weeks after a college intern in the Internal Revenue Service’s Boston office turned 21, an agent twice her age invited her for drinks at a nearby pub, where she got drunk and he showed off his gun to a woman hosting trivia night, a prosecutor told a Suffolk County jury Thursday.

The agent, James Clarke, offered the woman a ride to South Station after several hours of drinking at the Kinsale on July 26, 2017, then handcuffed her once they were inside his government-issued car with tinted windows, Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Ian Polumbaum said in his opening statement at Clarke’s trial. Clarke then shoved his gun in her mouth and raped her, he said. ...

Clarke, 45, is charged with aggravated rape, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, and indecent assault and battery. ...

Clarke’s lawyer, Robert Sheketoff, dismissed Polumbaum’s opening statement as “a very interesting speech from someone who wasn’t there” and told jurors that the encounter between Clarke and the woman was consensual. ... “The defense is not that they didn’t have sexual relations of some sort in that car,” Sheketoff told jurors. “The defense is that it was consensual.”

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