Poems for Paws

It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.
— Boris Pasternak, born  in 1890

"I now perceive one immense omission in my psychology -- the deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated."
~ Confessions of William James

Record-breaking astronaut: ‘Do what scares you’

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire… More

Queen reprises famous 1985 Live Aid set at Fire Fight Australia concert

The sold-out crowd went into raptures as the band belted out favourites including We Are The Champions and We Will Rock You.

CLAUDIA KARVAN * SARAH BLASKO * MERRICK WATTS * SUSAN PRIOR * ROBBIE BUCK * RYAN JOHNSON * MATT OKINE * TOBY SCHMITZ * GRACIE & BARRY OTTO * EWEN LESLIE * TIM FREEDMAN * LILY STEWART

POEMS FOR PAWS | GIANT DWARF

 

Presented by Brendan Cowell and Lily Stewart in association with Giant Dwarf

Amazing atmosphere at Poetry for Paws 🐾 

Creative industry reliefs triumph at the Oscars®

One of the night’s biggest winners, ‘1917’, benefitted from creative industry tax reliefs thanks to HM Revenue and Customs.

7:30am, 12 February 2020

 

Surprise Oscar result means it's 'game on' for Australian filmmakers

Parasite's best picture win on Monday could mean the doors just opened a little more for Australian filmmakers, say Oscar veterans.

Banksy Is Brilliant At Manipulating The Media And Art 

Market. But Is He A Brilliant Artist?

The one part of the art world that has seemed resistant to him is the ultimate conferrer of status: museums. Will he be remembered as an important artistic figure? And if so, will that be as a painter, an activist, or a Duchamp-like “conceptual prankster”? – The New York Times

 

Google Blog: “…Earth View is a collection of thousands of the planet’s most beautiful landscapes, seen from space. Over the last decade, the collection has been witnessed by millions around the world as wallpapers for Android devices, screensavers for Chromecast and Google Home, and as an interactive exhibit in Google Earth’s Voyager. Earth View was even once featured on the world’s biggest billboard to bring a little zen to Times Square during the holidays. Today, we’re making our biggest update to Earth View by adding more than 1,000 new images to the collection, bringing the total to more than 2,500 striking landscapes. The upgraded imagery features more locations around the globe and is optimized for today’s high-resolution screens—featuring brighter colors, sharper images and resolutions up to 4K….”

 

  “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” The Kenny brothers write:

“Live for tomorrow, be happy today

Laugh all your sorrows away

Start now and cheer up

The skies will clear up

Lose all your blues laughing at life”


Mirella Freni, Matchless Italian Prima Donna, Dies at 84 - The New York Times. 

Actual, Classical, Ancient-Classroom-Approved Pig Latin Medium

Darling Habour - Why Walking Helps Us Think - The New Yorker” – Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.

What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them…”

 Criticizing critics 

Exclamation point!

For the love of Larkin

Clive James' brilliant final book is a moving testament to the greatness of Philip Larkin.

In order to explore Clive James’ lifelong fascination with the poetry of Philip Larkin – which has culminated in the new volume, Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin – I had hoped to be able to interview James. I naively assumed his miraculous life, after a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2010, was set to continue into its ninth decade. Alas, that was not to be the case, as James died in November, aged 80.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Beer Still Drinkable After Nuclear Apocalypse.

"I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it."  
~ Mark Twain


"No person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia

Magic Of Chess Video

The Magic of Chess

In this charming short film, The Magic of Chess, some young competitors at the National Elementary Chess Championship explain what they find so intriguing about the game. From an Atlantic piece on the film:
The children interviewed in the film are articulate and wise beyond their years. “When I asked the kids questions like, ‘What has chess taught you?,’ I was surprised, given their limited life experience, that they could formulate a response beyond the obvious mechanics of the game,” Schweitzer Bell told me.
Chess “teaches you how to make a plan,” one child says in the film.
“When you lose, you learn from your mistakes,” says another.
I was curious about the tournament, so I looked up the results and the standings are so full of Asian, Indian, Latino, and other non-European language names that my browser offered to translate the page for me.
 Another thing that jumped out at me was that most of the top competitors in the K-6 competition were 6th graders, except for 2nd grader Aditya Arutla finishing in 8th place. Wow!