Media Dragon

2012-02-01T05:40:00.006+11:00

It’s been said that a biographer is a novelist under oath. A life story cannot be told with facts alone. It must be marshaled to maximum literary effect... In the Footsteps of Giants

Congratulations to Andrew Tink for his book on Lord Sydney, providing us with a fascinating biography of the person for whom our great city of Sydney was named

The former Chairman of the NSW Public Accounts Committee, Shadow Attorney General and Shadow Leader of the House in New South Wales Parliament, Andrew Tink will next week introduce his latest book, Lord Sydney: The Life and Times of Tommy Townshend at Willoughby City Library’s Talks@Willoughby at 12.30pm, Thursday 2 February at Chatswood Library, Lower Ground, The Concourse, 409 Victoria Avenue, Chatswood. Note also the extract of the book entitled Gamble at the birth of a nation
Offering insight into the difficult political environment of late eighteenth-century Britain, Lord Sydney is a comprehensive biography of Thomas ‘Tommy’ Townshend. As Secretary of State for the Home Department, Lord Sydney was the minister responsible for recommending the adoption of a plan for a settlement in Australia and the man for whom the city of Sydney was named. Since his retirement from politics in 2006, Andrew has concentrated on two of his great passions – writing and history. His first political biography, William Charles Wentworth was awarded ‘The Nib’ CAL Waverley Award for Literature in 2010.

Bookings are essential for Talks@Willoughby, visit library website or phone 9777 7900

SYDNEY WITH A WHY OR AN EYE? Good Lord, there's a story in our city's namesake
HE gave his name to our city. Yet there is no official statue or memorial here to commemorate Lord Sydney, the British home secretary who was instrumental in transporting convicts to NSW.
''I don't think there should be,'' said Andrew Tink, the former state politician turned biographer. ''But the life of the man whose decision it was to order the European settlement of Australia is worth a book.
''There has been no biography of Sydney. And I'm finding it very hard to understand why I'm having so much trouble getting this one published.''

Our book of the month is Andrew Tink's fine new biography of Lord Sydney, promoter of the 1788 settlement of New South Wales and the man for whom our city was named. Andrew Tink spent nineteen years in the New South Wales Parliament, including eleven as a Shadow Minister and three as Shadow Leader of the House. Had he stayed on he would now be in government of course, but he chose to step down in 2007 to concentrate on his writing. He is a politician who can write; and he understands history better than most. Politicians ought to be good at history (otherwise, as we know, they will be condemned to repeat it) but not that many are, and we think none in recent times has dug quite as deeply as Andrew.

The man who gave Sydney its name risked his career in choosing the penal settlement's site and governor. But he was lucky and wise, writes Andrew Tink in this extract from his new biography.
• Risk assessment in the justice system isn’t new; Nation built on second chances [Andrew Tink. Epping, NSW 2121. Central Northern Sydney, Sydney Northern Suburbs. p: 02 9877 0266. http://www.andrewtink.com.au ; Lord Sydney: The Life and Times of Tommy Townshend ; Andrew Tink's paper on the naming of Sydney ]
• · Andrew Moore speaks with Andrew Tink, author of a biography of Lord Sydney, Thomas Townshend. Tue, 06 Dec 2011 09:45:00. 2GB archived ; History: Andrew’s Story
• · · The little known part Charles II had in the naming of Sydney. Australia’s most populous city derives its name from Algernon Sidney, a British politician executed in 1683 for treason, following the 1784 decision by his nephew Tommy Townshend, as Britain’s home secretary, to establish a penal colony in its distant territory. ;Andrew Tink, the former MP, fresh from his prizewinning William Charles Wentworth, decided to fill this gap. It was not easy. Most of Sydney’s personal papers are in the Clements Library in Michigan. The records of his role in dealing with George III’s madness are with the Royal College of Physicians in London. Yet when Tink had finished his manuscript, Australian publishers showed little interest. Peter Coleman on Sydney
• · · · It’s taken Andrew Tink 7 years to find a publisher but after the success of his award winning biography of the great explorer William Charles Wentworth Ascension Press have now published Lord Sydney, The Life and Times of Tommy Townshen.; When Lady Frances Sidney ran foul of Queen Elizabeth I, she adopted a family motto which the much-maligned organisers of Sydney's 2000 Olympics might well have copied: God preserve me from calumny! Lady Sidney was born in 1531, the daughter of Sir William Sidney of Penshurst, Kent and the aunt of the poet Sir Philip Sidney. In 1555 she became the second wife of Thomas Radcliffe, who in 1557 succeeded his father as Earl of Sussex. Like her husband, Lady Frances was a trusted courtier, serving as one of Queen Elizabeth's Ladies of the Bedchamber. After the Earl's death in 1583, Lady Frances incurred the Queen's displeasure, as a result of slanders about her treatment of her late husband, so she adopted the motto Dieu me garde de calomnie
• · · · · Premier O'Farrell (right) was accompanied by his colleague Andrew Tink—another veteran of that era-who left politics a few years back and has published a couple of very well received biographies on William Charles Wentworth and Lord Sydney since that time. It was terrific to see him in good fettle this week as he has suffered from ill health in recent times. In Uncharted Waters; What If …
• · · · · · Risk assessment in the justice system isn’t new - A statistics professor says he can predict crime before it occurs Drawing from criminal databases dating to the 1960s, Berk initially modeled the Philadelphia algorithm on more than 100,000 old cases, relying on three dozen predictors, including the perpetrator’s age, gender, neighborhood, and number of prior crimes. Misfortune Teller; Media Dragon predicted the birth of this book by Andrew on Lord Sydney back in 2006 Fortunate Teller

2012-01-26T09:48:00.012+11:00

Who Makes you proud? Our population is made up of nationalities from around the world ... Each year Antipodeans celebrate the achievement and contribution of creative Australians through the Australia Day Awards. Australia Day, that holiest of days for Aussies, is one huge celebration of everything Australian. Australia Day, in 2012, is an occasion on which many people might reflect how fortunate they are to live in a country so distant from most of the problems apparent elsewhere in the world.

Mr Bawa Singh Jagdev, OAM, and Mrs Vera Hatton, OAM, can now add the Medal of the Order of Australia to their impressive resumes after being recognised in the Australia Day honours for their services to the Community. They join the total of 439 recipients announced today by Governor-General, Quentin Bryce who noted:

I want to give my strong support to the awards made through the Australian honours system. They elevate the concept of giving to others. The honours announced today recognise community values and celebrate what is important and unifying in Australian life.

Commit to making a difference as a regular human being, because we have that power.

Sikh Chic

A migrant who arrived in Australia from Keya, East Africa, with his wife and two children more than 30 years ago for a big adventure has received a today’s Australia Day honours. Mr Jagdev may have been born and bred in Punjab, under the Himalayan Mountains, but since 1975 he calls Sydney his home and uses the Southern Cross as his compass. Mr Jagdev has spent his life in Australia working to improve outcomes for others. It is this selflessness that has been recognised with the Order of Australia. Mr Jagdev is the first turbaned Sikh to receive such high honour. One might describe Mr Jagdev as someone who knows how to make a difference, given his ability to motivate others. The simplicity and beauty of Sikhism left a lasting impact on Mr Jagdev. Sikhism is about compassion, forgiveness and unshorn hair and kirpan are an inalienable part of Sikh culture. For Mr Jagdev the OAM comes as an acknowledgement of his passion for community as there were a lot of barriers for new immigrant cultures that needed to be broken down. He was instrumental in establishing the first religious place of worship for the Sikh Community along with weekend language schools. Other significant work undertaken by Mr Jagdev for his community includes the provision of free meals for the community, the establishment of a free meditation area and the organisation of many cultural and sporting events, not only for members of the Sikh background but also those of Muslim, Hindu and Christian backgrounds. Today, most Australians see a Sikh as an Aussie, not as a foreigner. Today’s award tops off the fairy tale for him ; We come from a very privileged nation. For centuries (around two centuries to be precise) we have been known as the ‘Lucky Country’. I don’t think there is a more apt description for our wonderful land Down Under. Blessed with perfect climates, with open spaces, with paradisiacal topography, with freedom, democracy and free speech – Australia sets the bar for many people the world over. One of the most multi-cultural societies on the face of the planet
The Sikh presence at the parade has been possible due to the efforts of the Sikh Council of Australia (SCA), and in particular its officers Ajmer Singh Gill, Vickram Singh Grewal and Bawa Singh Jagdev. They have lobbied hard to have the contribution of the Sikhs in both World Wars officially recognised ANZAC- Sikh of Sikhs

Australia Day - Celebrate what's great! Top Australians awarded highest accolades Rush …In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia Fair!
The Australian of the Year 2012, Geoffrey Rush, has now celebrated 40 years as an Australian actor, achieving the rare international distinction of the ‘Triple Crown’ - an Oscar, a Tony and an Emmy. He also has three Australian Film Institute honours, three British Academy Awards, two Golden Globes, four Screen Actors’ Guild Awards, and last year was inducted into the ranks of Australia’s elite with a Helpmann Award.

GEOFFREY RUSH'S trophy room, one might assume, would be a fairly impressive and comprehensive sight - and now the abundantly talented thespian must make room for one more: Australian of the Year 2012. We are natural at acting the goat, taking the mickey, playing the clown

The director Neil Armfield, a long-time collaborator on acclaimed theatre productions such as Exit the King and Diary of a Madman, said the award was well deserved. ''He's put such incredible work into his profession,'' he said. ''He's never sought rewards, he's always gone for the most interesting jobs and it's paid off brilliantly with this incredible career.''
• Starring role for Rush, the clown prince of acting Australia Day 2012 Honours List ; In the nine decades since her birth on the island of Murrungga, Laurie Baymarrwangga has seen the arrival of missionaries, exploitation by Japanese and European fishermen, war and tumultuous change Laurie Baymarrwangga [The Governor-General is pleased to announce the following appointments and awards: Australia Day 2012 Honours List; The Biographical notes for each recipient in the Australia Day 2012 Honours List. PDF - Australia Day is a reflection of our nation's identity]
• · History - The tradition of having Australia Day as a national holiday on 26 January is a recent one. Not until 1935 did all the Australian states and territories use that name to mark that date. Not until 1994 did they begin to celebrate Australia Day consistently as a public holiday on that date Australia Day - Celebrate what's great! ; Google Draws hundreds of Ausie Stories Together
• · · AUSTRALIA Day has become the quintessential day to celebrate being Australian. How we celebrate can take many forms - attending a citizenship ceremony, seeing a concert, watching a regatta, playing cricket in the park, enjoying a barbecue with friends and family or watching the fireworks. What is important is that we do celebrate our successes as a nation and that each of us, in whatever way we want to. Join in that celebration ; We love the fact that we can count bogans, westies, toffs, posh bastards, concrete cowboys and yobos amongst our mates. Bondi Icons
• · · · 2012 Australia Day Address: Professor says racism still rife in Australia Address Taps into mysterious human disease; If a Chinese person were to fall on the wrong side of the law, it would be to the detriment of the entire Chinese community. Dr Charlie Teo ; Dr Charlie Teo says the racism problem is very real.
• · · · · Exploding the myths about our country No bigger occasion for nationAs Australia Day approaches, the great Aussie annual introspection starts. ; Clinton wishes us a happy Australia Day
• · · · · · The ultimate Aussie dish; Maggie's Australia Day pavlova ; Remarkable and truly inspirational runner, Centenarian Sikh runner Fauja Singh is an inspiration for others. While running marathon races in London, New York and Toronto, he raised money for various charities promoting Sikh culture around the world. He has also raised money for a charity dedicated to the care for premature babies. "Turbaned Tornado

2012-01-25T19:58:00.000+11:00

I hope my daughters Sasha and Gabbie read wisely and live even more wise --- When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. Life is a choice. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness…

I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
I wish I didn't work so hard.
I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Twenty top predictions for life 100 years from now Twenty top predictions for life 100 years from now: "Last week we asked readers for their predictions of life in 100 years time. Inspired by ten 100-year predictions made by American civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins in 1900, many of you wrote in with your vision of the world in 2112. Many of the "strange, almost impossible" predictions made by Watkins came true. Here is what futurologists Ian Pearson (IP) and Patrick Tucker (PT) think of your ideas : Twenty top predictions for life 100 years ; Strange, almost impossible

Help Me To Save … You Sweating The Big Stuff
From the obituary of Jonathan Richardson (shoe shine worker, dead at 74): In the context of his reaction to joining civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama:" When someone puts you down, you just smile at them, and that makes them wonder what you're thinking. You just smile at them and walk away".

From the obituary of Aimee Joan Grunberger (mother, teacher and poet, dead at 44 from complications related to breast cancer): "From where she sat in her study, she could see through the town. She saw the pettiness and the politics. She saw the people hurrying around and the squabbles. "These people need cancer," Aimee Grunberger said. "These people need cancer, not enough to kill them, just enough to make them see what's important". It was something she wouldn't wish on anyone. To a degree, it was something she would wish on everyone".

• Obituaries - what are they good for? - When someone goes "before their time" there is often reflection on the meaning of live, and what a well-lived life, purpose-inspired might look like. I found some deep meaning in a recent post by Bronnie Ware, who worked for many years in palliative care. She found that every single patient found their peace before they departed. When questioned about any regrets they had, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five she found... Regrets of the Dying/Lessons for the Living [Mounted intellectual property actions will not need much scrutiny in terms of credibility The Wikipedia Blackout: Congress and digital erasure; Sitting as Chair or Director on a board can merely mean maintaining a privileged culture of insider game playing Protest and Occupy: the promise for 2012 ]
• · Social media is revolutionising the way we all communicate. Despite this the financial sector has been slow to embrace the opportunities that social media provides. Within this research report we explore and analyse current perceptions and future perspectives within the financial sector towards social media Made in heaven or marriage from hell? Social media and the financial sector (PDF); Given that today’s world is faster paced and more dynamic than ever before, and the increasingly complex and overwhelming amount of information that is therefore available, the rise of organizations whose primary goals include the generation of research and the provision of information should, perhaps, come as no great surprise. Indeed, think tanks have enjoyed massive growth – both in number and in their role in global policymaking – over the last decade 2011 Global Go To Think Tank Index
• · · The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period E-book reader Ownership Nearly Double Over ; Employees who chat over the photo copier or around the coffee machine are not necessarily wasting time. Gallup research shows that socialising is good for employees' wellbeing - and company performance. Office socialising found to be good for wellbeing and company performance
• · · · Making good on part of the House of Representative's commitment to increase congressional transparency, today the House Clerk's office launched http://docs.house.gov/, a one stop website where the public can access all House bills, amendments, resolutions for floor consideration, and conference reports in XML, as well as information on floor proceedings and more. Information will ultimately be published online in real time and archived for perpetuity. The Clerk is hosting the site, and the information will primarily come from the leadership, the Committee on House Administration, the Rules Committee, and the Clerk's office Sunlight Foundation: ; A seductive approach to homemaking Bigger and better
• · · · · William Browder is head of Hermitage Capital in London’s Golden Square. He is a naturalized British citizen, the grandson, as it happens, of Earl Browder, the head of the US Communist Party in the 1940s. That link did neither him nor his mathematician father no favours in life. In the last year he has received 11 death threats – a text message quoted the Godfather about history showing that ‘there is no one so powerful they cannot be killed’. The calls were traced back to Russia. They probably did not come from gangsters, but from the senior figures in the Russian police, or more worryingly the FSB secret police. They are the ones who poisoned the late Mr Litvinienko with polonium in the middle of London Biziness and justice, Russian style ; We decided to help raise the level of integrity Italians turn to the Internet against tax evasion
• · · · · ·
When city services can autonomously go online and digest information from the cloud, they can reach a level of performance never before seen. How the "Internet of Things" Is Turning Cities Into Living Organisms ; Social and internet fill the top two slots, echoing what we saw in the 2010 API stats. Telephony has become a larger part of the directory for likely two reasons. First, telco operators are waking up to the API world. And secondly, the Twilio API has shown everyone the utility of infrastructure-as-a-service.
o Twilio (234)
o Google Maps (169)
o Twitter (142)
o Twilio SMS (133)
o Facebook (99) Programmable Web Services Directory of over 100 government [local, state and federal] APIs released in 2011

CODA: Zappos.com Email to 24 Millions Customers on Password Hacking January 15, 2012 - "Subject: Information on the Zappos.com site - please create a new password. First, the bad news: We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password). THE BETTER NEWS: The database that stores your critical credit card and other payment data was NOT affected or accessed. SECURITY PRECAUTIONS: For your protection and to prevent unauthorized access, we have expired and reset your password so you can create a new password. Please follow the instructions below to create a new password. We also recommend that you change your password on any other web site where you use the same or a similar password. As always, please remember that Zappos.com will never ask you for personal or account information in an e-mail. Please exercise caution if you receive any emails or phone calls that ask for personal information or direct you to a web site where you are asked to provide personal information. PLEASE CREATE A NEW PASSWORD: We have expired and reset your password so you can create a new password. Please create a new password by visiting Zappos.com and clicking on the "Create a New Password" link in the upper right corner of the web site and follow the steps from there. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have any additional questions about this process, please email us at passwordchange@zappos.com"

2012-01-22T11:38:00.002+11:00

Gabbie who is living her acting dream in Melbourne invaded Sydney for a few days to touch basis with her friends and to smell the salty air of Sydney Beaches ... I was never as brave as Gabbie, what a brave young woman, to travel around the world in 8 eight months. Enjoy your 20s, go out, have fun, travel, get some life experience, fall in love, have your heart broken, be disappointed, put out good plays, put out bad plays, but when you get to your 30s, that's when you'll put out important works, that's when you'll act in the best roles of your life ... Inspiring teenagers across the world

The tortured lives and spiritual anguish of three great modern poets. The accursed poets. Name the malady, Baudelaire, Verlaine, or Rimbaud suffered from it: arthritis, diabetes, alcoholism, syphilis. Each relished his own martyrdom, even flaunted it... The Cursed Poets and Their Gods

What should be a blessing – more leisure – has become a curse. Or as Slavoj Žižek puts it: Being exploited in a job is now considered a privilege... Capitalism produces unemployment.

Enduring allure Taking a Novel Approach to Life
Attention, novelty junkies: New is not always improved. Ideas that succeed are those that stick around long enough to become old...
Neophiliacs tend to chase the new at all costs. Neophobes—also known as fuddy-duddies—tend to avoid it.

Are we overwhelmed by the new or trapped in the old? The digital age bombards us with technological wonders. And yet, as Simon Reynolds argued in the recent book "Retromania," our attachment to the past leads us to consume pop culture well past its shelf life. The iPod may have revolutionized how we listen to music, but many people are using it to listen to tunes that hit the big time half a century ago—or using their iPads to book tickets for a revived 1950s Broadway musical or for the latest movie based on a comic book from the 1940s.

• · Taking a Novel Approach to Life [ On the Internet, expertise is pooled, intelligence is collective, and discovery is being reinvented. Welcome to the era of open-source science Sunlight; Joan Didion is guilty of a great artistic and personal crime: She got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old. Her bag of tricks doesn’t work anymore The Autumn of Joan Didion ]
• · · Authors’ ability to endlessly edit their digital work will overturn publishing. Maybe books will improve, but movable type is easily abused...Books That Are Never Done Being Written ; The writer’s work is a triumph—and a disaster; The Internet, says John Brockman, is the infinite oscillation of our collective conscious interacting with itself, adding a fuller, richer dimension to what it means to be human... Undercover
• · · · Saint or crank? By turns a pleasure-seeking aristocrat and a peasant guru of antimaterialism, Tolstoy was both monstrous and moral... Tolstoy: A Russian Life; Enduring allure ... More Persian and Indian than Arab, The Arabian Nights is the stuff of Occidental fantasy. What explains Scheherazade’s enduring allure? Visions of the Arabian Nights
• · · · ·Who is Vladimir Putin? A master of persuasion, not coercion. No ordinary KGB-trained thug, he doesn’t destroy enemies. He manipulates them Putin and the Uses of His Story; William Shirer devoted 1,250 pages and 25 years to understanding the Third Reich. He didn’t pretend to have all the answers. Some things are inexplicable... Revisiting The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
• · · · · ·Sigmund Freud, the boy who was born on the banks of the Moravian river Morava, is out of fashion. The reason? His heroic refusal to flatter humankind Freud: the last great Enlightenment thinker; The human mind, he wrote, is a perfect computer corrupted by ‘incorrect data’ Religion, grrrr

2012-01-21T18:00:00.002+11:00

Welcome the littlest and newest member of the extended family Malachi Grant … 21-1-2012 - 18:00 PM Something like a saint - an insane saint ; Couple ditch nest to show some mercy

CODA: Someone commented that M's family seems to be breeding M & M’s with the advent of Michael Jonah and Malachi Paul!! Michael had been called the Big M in the last few days … at least it wasn’t the old M.

2012-01-14T00:02:00.002+11:00

For three weeks, 21 days, the Sydney Festival makes the city alive and buzzing with a rich array of guru music, arts , manuchao entertainment and outdoor events.

The chief appeal of theatre is its capacity to bring people together – a room or an oval or an opera house – in real space and time. I Am Eora did this for Imrich Media Dragons, Tony and Tina to boot with the the best seats in the house. As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. I Am Eora is crammed with images and contradictions. The theatre at Carriageworks is big, and they used it to full effect, with lots of movement, sound, and lights. SOON after the quiet opening of this show the extraordinary Jack Charles interrupts the cast from the back of the auditorium: "You can't go back to traditions! You have to move on!" And move on is certainly what Wesley Enoch's show does. They all took part in the early struggle between the Eora group of nations, who inhabited what is now called the Sydney basin, and the white settlers. Part concert, part savagely ironic dance spectacular and part story telling The stage was filled with reflections of moving water and stylised fish, as the Stiff Gins (Nardi Simpson and Kaleena Briggs) and a glamorous Wilma Reading - appropriating, in a shimmering purple gown, the traditions of the pop diva - celebrate strong black women. I Am Eora (I am of this place) breaks new ground in contemporary Australian performance, telling the stories of Sydney's Aboriginal continuity in a celebration of its heroes. There is a very funny routine by Elaine Crombie as a bride, and an appearance by politician Linda Burney, reperforming her fine inaugural speech as the first elected black woman to speak in the NSW parliament. Frank Yamma sings the moving She Cried. Towards the end Charles, as Bennelong the conciliator, comes back and speaks in his golden voice, full of rhetorical emotion. There is a projection of a midden behind him - the piles of shells built up over thousands of years that were ground up to make the mortar that built Sydney. How will our children know where they are? he asks, of us all.
In a nutshell, it was a mix of dance, music, theatre, and projection art, with a cast of Aboriginal performers from across the country. It was meant to be a modern manifestation of the spirit of some of the big figures in Sydney’s Aboriginal past. How will our children of Velvet Revolution know where they are?
I don't make it my job tracking trends in odd sounds but big bands are in judging by the mixed audience last night at the Enmore where everyone wanted more and more brass … Wielding flying bohemian fiddles and accordions in formation with cimbalom (hammered dulcimer) and wearing tacky nylon suits and battered trilbies, Romanian Taraf de Haïdouks join forces with Macedonia's Koçani Orkestar to bring us Band of Gypsies. The violins, cimbalums and accordions of Taraf de Haïdouks battle it out with the brass and percussion of Koçani Orkestar. They drew on dragon and vampire type traditional gypsie music, urban Balkan pop, medieval ballads, oriental brass band music, Turkish influences and even a touch of Bollywood for Malchkeon

Six impossible things before or after dinner Big Days of our lives - Like a seed of the mustard tree
Sharing changes the way we work together. Politics has accelerated to light speed over the past year, as 7 billion people connected through 6 billion mobiles, share their frustrations, aspirations and strategies for dissent. Sharing is a two-edged sword: it makes everything more efficient by making people much more potent. It's getting hard for any government to push its people around.

So when you borrow your neighbour's mower this summer, remember it's just the beginning. We live continuously connected lives, and our possessions are beginning to reflect that. In a few years we'll have forgotten that there was a time, before tomorrow, when sharing was hard.

• A shared future will connect society; Love most important ingredient to kitchen memories The aromas of my mum’s kitchen are floating in the Cold River : [ More on Sydney Festival ; The best seats in the house Finders Keepers at Carriage Work ]
• · There will be a political sex scandal in Canberra in 2012. There'll be one in Washington, too. And probably in Sydney. What predictions came true this year for you; Andrew Clennell - Bruce Hawker, the long-time Labor strategist, says the best thing O'Farrell could do over the next three months is a comprehensive reshuffle to bring in some fresh blood Boring Barry on a very slow boat ; Google On OO’FFarrell
• · · The Beatles are not only the greatest pop group in history but may also be able to teach you tons about how to get ahead in business…and what it takes to survive. That post leads off our small business roundup today with plenty of other resources about how to make your small business great. What the Beatles Could Teach Small Business ; What is happening now is the revenge of the market. A high literary culture, utterly divorced from economic realities, was artificially propped up for fifty year. Everything Old Is New Again - Commentary Magazine
• · · · Bohemian Tash is having having two shows in February. One in Sydney with fellow artists Ruby Jackson and Andrew Dixon. ‘Postcards from the Fringe’ is showing at Kaleidoscope Gallery in Dank Street, Sydney. I will post more details closer to the date. Postcards from the Fringe ; Woody Guthrie on New Year's Rulin's ; I Top 10 Need-to-Knows About Social Networking and Where It’s Headed - The importance of social networking in today’s online experience cannot be overstated. Social networking is the most popular online activity worldwide accounting for nearly 1 in every 5 minutes spent online in October 2011, and reaches 82 percent of the world’s Internet population, representing 1.2 billion users around the globe t’s a Social World
• · · · · Atlantic - The Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Foods Ari LeVaux: Chinese researchers have found small pieces of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the blood and organs of humans who eat rice. The Nanjing University-based team showed that this genetic material will bind to proteins in human liver cells and influence the uptake of cholesterol from the blood. We are eating not just vitamins, protein, and fuel, but information as ; This article details the networked production and dissemination of news on Twitter during snapshots of the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions as seen through information flows—sets of near-duplicate tweets—across activists, bloggers, journalists, mainstream media outlets, and other engaged participants. The Revolutions Were Tweeted
• · · · · · It is often better to travel than to arrive, particularly with a good book in hand. How travel broadens the mind; Don't Mess With Taxes; Meaning discovery engine Be Spacific links for solid research; Vrbov and Wordnik is a new way to discover meaning ; Writer's craft is now a ghost in the machine

2012-01-10T08:05:00.000+11:00

Tax refund fraud continues to be a focus for revenue agencies everywhere
Tax fraud is a crime. It places an unfair burden on people who do the right thing and contribute their fair share in accordance with the law Suspected promoters of an Education Tax Refund scam had their personal computers and records seized yesterday with the execution of multiple search warrants by the. Australian Taxation Office and Australian Federal Police

Counting the cost of tax havens

TAX evasion - which costs Australia $41.4 billion a year - is the cause of the Greek debt crisis that is destabilising Europe, according to the author of research into the problem.
Every year tax evasion costs the world's governments $3.1 trillion, or about 5.1 per cent of world gross domestic product (GDP), activist group the Tax Justice Network says in a report.
''Greece's problems stem from 40 years of tax evasion and not collecting enough tax revenue,'' TJN director John Christensen told BusinessDay.

• High Cost of blind trusts fraud in tax haven; This country needs extraordinary measures, because the situation is extraordinary Spain to Crack Down on Tax Fraud [ Targeting tax crime: a whole-of-government approach ; Tax crime investigations and results；Although its main focus is on tax crime, the OECD is also concerned with money laundering. Tax and Crime ]
• · If you peel back the layers of Louisiana’s tax structure, you’re likely to find confusion, outrage and, more importantly, room for improvement. The Truth About Taxes ; Who Guards the Guards
• · · Identity criminals claiming millions in tax refund; tax refund fraud was rampant in the state prisons where he served his sentence, and he tried for years to tell the federal government what was going on； Satirists have long joked that America is the land of opportunity—everybody can become a taxpayer. Identity thieves are taking this opportunity literally by assuming taxpayers’ identities for their own financial gain. Identity Thieves ‘Make It Rain’ Cash With Fraudulent Tax Refunds
• · · · IRS steps up efforts to fight fraudulent claims for tax refunds; Lessons to Be learnt； IRS sees staggering jump in identity theft cases
• · · · · An accountant has been arrested at Sydney Airport after allegedly stealing nearly $50,000 from her clients in the city's west. Philippines - Airport arrest over tax return thefts ; It’s always good to have someone on the inside. At least that’s how Nancy and Laurie Sondrall must have felt. Nancy’s sister and Laurie’s aunt, Pamela Marie Dellis, was providing them with ill-gotten booty from the Minnesota Department of Revenue. ; U.S. District Judge Myron H. Thompson also ordered Bates to pay $246,064 in restitution to HSBC Taxpayer Financial Services and $30,211 in restitution to the IRS. Evidence at trial proved Bates took the names and Social Security numbers of student loan borrowers from the databases at her former employer and conspired to use the stolen identifying information to steal money from the government and from a bank Millbrook woman gets prison for student ID thefts ; In Multiflex Pty Ltd v. The Commissioner of Taxation (2011) FCA 789 the taxpayer challenged the Commissioner's ability to withhold goods and services tax (GST) refunds pending the completion of verification or audit activity. ; The criminal activities date back to the years 1996-2002 when Bena company imported more than 200,000 tonnes of diesel oil and petrol from Slovakia to the Czech Republic - Czech police accuse three of tax evasion for 2.6 billion crowns
• · · · · · Directorate General of Intelligence and Investigation Inland Revenue (IR) has picked a mega tax scam of Faisalabad as a test case to determine the role of tax officers, gangs of fraudsters, banks staff and others for taking appropriate countermeasures in controlling fraudulent income tax refunds payment and similar nature of organised financial crimes in future. ; Prisoners Become Tax Preparers ; Six men were convicted of tax evasion by a German court today following a fraud linked to the sale of carbon-emission certificates to Deutsche Bank AG. ; Big Boys Small Returns; Limit human involvement and you raise efficiency and reduce the risk of fraud. This is the thinking behind the SA Revenue Service’s automated Vat risk engine. Risk engine misfiring ；A survey conducted in the autumn shows the UK economy loses an estimated £2.7 billion per year due to identity fraud which affects 1.8 million people annually . Identity fraud covers a range of widespread criminal activities with many organised groups being known to supply or use false or stolen genuine personal identities. Crimestoppers launches campaign to fight ID fraud in the run up to Christmas ； Identity Theft and Tax Fraud tax fraud identity theft

2012-01-08T07:11:00.000+11:00

It's here, it's here, it's here! But you knew that already. You have printed the schedule, checked the map, planned your public transport, practiced the words to Manu Chao , got the kids excited for Holly Throsby and Tangle and shone your dancing shoes for the Trocadero Dance Palace Sydney Festival 2012 is a party that starts off with a bang

Huge crowds flocked to The Domain to watch performances by the French-Spanish singer Manu Chao, the Australian singer-songwriter Megan Washington and Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. as simply the voice of Australia

This is our city in summer by Google

2012-01-07T07:27:00.001+11:00

Dragon years in the 12-year Chinese zodiac are typically popular for births because the icon of China's emperors symbolizes power and wealth …

This is my personal blog. It does not reflect the views of any organisation I work for, have previously worked for, or may work for in the future. In my day job I put crumbs of bread on the table. Here I comment on the bread and the table. Most people understand that difference… This year is the year of the Media Dragon and it is not difficult to argue that blogging has done more to spread scary knowledge and even scarier ideas than any other publishing innovation since the printing press. Printer and photocopier salesmen of the late 20th century frequently peddled their wares with the pitch that a personal printing device could turn anyone—schools, neighborhood associations, churches, individuals with a message to get out—into small time publishers. Yet the revolution they hinted at didn't come about on their watch

A brilliant article in Quarterly Conversation offers a fresh take on Lev Loseff‘s much-discussed Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life. Marbled with impressive insights, it represents the finest standards of literary journalism, and should establish a new highpoint for the rapidly disappearing genre … let me dissemble no further, dear reader, I myself wrote the review ; Joseph Brodsky

Watch Out: Year after year, these literary gems and websites deliver the goods Feeling rejected? Read these
Take heart, rejected writers everywhere!

This is too delicious to pass up: Flavorwire has 10 nasty rejection letters to eminent writers. (We wrote about famous rejection letters some time ago here.)
Here’s a 1912 rejection for Gertrude Stein by publisher A.C. Fifield:
Dear Madam,
I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.”
Sincerely Yours,
A.C. Fifield
Here’s another for the manuscript that eventually became Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer‘s The Estate and The Manor, rejected by Knopf editor Herb Weinstock in 1959:
It’s Poland and the rich Jews again.
With endless editorial work and endless serpentine dealings with Moshe Spiegel, the willing translator-adapter, this might be turned into an English novel nearly as good and nearly as salable as The Family Moskat. I honestly do not think it worth Knopf’s time and effort … Personally, I’d reject.
"You are scum."
Have to agree with the Guardian Books Blog on this one, which isn’t technically a rejection letter. It’s Hunter S. Thompson‘s letter to his biographer, William McKeen, following the biography’s publication in 1991. It opens: “McKeen, you shit-eating freak.”

• The Guardian blog noted that McKeen now has the letter, framed, on his wall: That’s one way to deal with rejection [It’s January 6th – the epiphany. According to folklore, La Befana visited all the little children in Italy last night, bringing toys and candy to the good ones, and lumps of coal to the bad ones. (Yeah, I know. We get a kindly fat man dressed in red, and Italian kids literally get an old hag. On the plus side, they get to live in Italy, so don’t feel too sorry for them). While I search my home for some lumps of black carbon (surely she wouldn’t forget Italian Americans, right?), you enjoy these links. According to Italian folklore, ; Good King Wenceslas In Prague, Father Christmas is known as Mikulas and he’s usually flanked by the devilish Cert and an angel. According to Czech folklore]
• · One of the best blogs out there on white-collar crime is the White Collar Crime Prof Blog ; Annual blog extravaganza features 25 fresh picks, from politics and pop culture to travel, tech and beyond The Time ; Some tech blogs are fueled mostly by snark and rumor. AllThingsD, by contrast, is powered by old-fashioned hard work. A Web-based spin-off of the Wall Street Journal's swanky annual conference, it features Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg, ace investigative reporter Kara Swisher and a growing lineup of writers who specialize in meaty, dependable coverage of consumer gear, Web trends, mobile communications, business computing and more The Best Blogs of 2011
• · · This is not good enough Media Dragon Seen As too Bohemian rather than Antipoedian ; Kim's writing is insightful, informed and topical. She also has an acerbic wit and is not afraid to criticise the media in Australia The news with nipples
• · · · The mainstream media isn’t giving us the information we need. It is giving us what they think is good enough for people like us, gathered by people that mainstream media organisations regard as competent; but this is not the same thing at all. George Megalogenis; Kevin Donnelly has written for ABC’s The Drum for the last two years, regularly warning us of the dangers posed by: the Gillard government, poor people, Islam and textspeak. He’s a former teacher as well as serving as senior Liberal Kevin Andrew’s chief of staff. Most of the time he’s inspired derisive snerking from me. Occasionally he’ll draw a ‘yoooou idiot’ (articulate, I know) from a piece. Usually, however, I’m content to leave him alone. That is until today’s piece, in which he advocates that the Bible be included in the National Curriculum. It is so bone-headed, wilfully ignorant and petulant that I just had to say something.; THE competition watchdog has banned imported biscuits which use logos featuring a koala, gum leaves and an Australian flag to disguise their Indian origin Ozdownunder Super Sandwich Cream Cookies ; The land of surfing, barbies... and dope ;
• · · · · Alexa Global Traffic Rank, and U.S. Traffic Rank from both Compete and Quantcast."*#*" ; E leventh Annual Weblog Awards
• · · · · · thebattleoftheblogs ; Sara Shaw and Sam Jewler met while living at Occupy D.C. in McPherson Square. They have been dating for six weeks and even moved in together, sharing a tent on the north side of the park 99% of Love; Collection of PDFs

2012-01-06T16:20:00.000+11:00

"The doers cut a path through the jungle, the managers are behind them sharpening the machetes. The leaders find time to think, climb the nearest tree, and shout 'Wrong jungle!' Find time to climb the trees."
-Peter Maxwell, director of the Leadership Trust, writing in the "Guardian", 6 October 1999

Now it's time for real cultural, ethical, governance and management reform at HMRC

A little over a year ago UK Uncut began its protests, and the world looked on, bemused. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t: I knew they’d hit the zeitgeist, although they and Occupy have done so in ways I could never have imagined. It’s been my pleasure to support both movements in the last year.

Tomorrow is a mass day of action by UK Uncut. Vodafone remains a rightful target. And the pressure is working. As the Mail reports:

Deals struck with the tax authorities to wipe billions of pounds off company bills are to be investigated by a former high court judge.

Sir Andrew Park will scrutinise the tax settlements of ten companies – including Vodafone and Goldman Sachs – following allegations that agreements were made between the firms and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to write off unpaid tax bills.

That’s the good news.
And it’s the right news we need to hear.
But we need do more than that. I’ve been interviewed a number of times this week on this them and my message is always the same. HMRC has been corrupted from the top down.

It’s been corrupted by neoliberal corporate thinking. It’s been corrupted into thinking taxpayers are customers. They’re not.

It’s been corrupted as a result into thinking that tax law is just a contract for services. It’s not.
It’s been corrupted into thinking that a contract can be varied by consent of the parties, so the operation of tax law is optional at its whim. It’s not.

It’s been corrupted by people who do not know about tax but do come, especially in the case of some non-execs, from environments where tax abuse is normal, and even rewarded.

It’s been corrupted by a cult of personality around Hartnett, that he came to believe.
It’s been corrupted by cowardly politicians who do not believe in the state and its right to tax.
And it has to be reclaimed, from the top down for the people of this country so it does its job properly.
So that it collects as much as possible of the missing £95 billions that could pay for the services we need.
So that it creates a level playing field so that all businesses can compete in this country knowing their competition can be expected to pay tax and not undercut them by tax abusing, unlike now where a deliberate competitive advantage is given to the tax cheats.

So that it is seen to offer fair play, and have enough staff to ensure that this is seen to be done in the communities it serves and supports.

So that never again is it captured by big business in its interests.
So that never again does it try to avoid its duty to parliament.
So that never again does it serve the interests of its board.
This can be done.
The question is – will it be done?
The answer is key to our economic, social and cultural future in this country.
It’s a choice between prosperity, ethics and fairness and living in a criminogenic state

2012-01-01T01:11:00.003+11:00

Here's to a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year, to all media dragons! I thought it would be difficult to decide what to write for my first blog entry. I thought it would need to be original, witty, unique, and somehow perfect. Yet, I don't have a perfect track record when it comes to new years resolutions, so this year MMXII I am not even planning to change the world for the better. The reality is that in 2012 Media Dragon is 10 years old and how the decade just flew. My daughters will be both in their twenties and how I managed to get grey hair is beyond me ... I might be older, yet the mind and idiosyncrasies of women and computers are still a foreign language to me. I must have done something strange in my previous lives to be blessed with four sisters, two daughters etc ... ;-) New Year's Resolutions I've Already Broken.

There's been a dramatic end to New Year's Eve celebrations in Melbourne, with the iconic Arts Centre spire catching fire - (hat tip to MT iphone).

Tens of thousands of revelers filled Melbourne Streets, while we watched George Cluney in the Descandants, to ring in the new year Saturday night. Counting backwards from 10, the crowd cheered as the clock struck midnight and fireworks even peppered Catholics at St Kilda

Wishing one another a happy new year, many people shared a kiss with a significant other, while others traded high fives and hugs. May this new vintage be a bit more than peppered with good intentions ;-) Happy New Year to media types everywhere

If your conscience is clear, you've nothing to worry about. Your innocence will be proved, but you have to fight for it! I believe that if one doesn't give way, truth must always come out in the end. Maria in Václav Havel, Vyrozumení (The Memorandum) (1966)

-In certain countries, theatres do not merely hire half-starved performers to act out the writings of half-starved writers. They also launch (escapes and)revolutions! Absurdity and truth: the passing of Václav Havel

The Joy of Quiet: Happy New Year to Quiet Douliae types everywhere Gabbie Melbourne Gal: Out with the Old, and iN with the New
When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

I never ... watch TV ... Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.
Has it really come to this?
In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

• · Hat tip - Gina F The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages [A Variety of New Year's Resolutions
‎ - 666 Pure Vodka run a workshop in NY where Sam Ross (former Melbourne bartender, now manager of Milk & Honey in New York and recently awarded American Bartender of the Year at the 2011 Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards) described his bartending philosophy and shared various cocktail techniques to a mostly industry-only crowd. It was a really interesting session (I took lots of notes, nerd that I am) Melbourne Gal in love with her city - Milk & Honey ; Chichi Bella and her recommended readings Divine Simplicity of Life in Melbourne; Gabbie and her How to do stuff sites Crafts]
• · · Melbourne erupted in a blaze of colour and light at midnight as Australia ushered in the new year in style Melbourne Arts Centre set ablaze during fireworks ; Sydney turned on a dazzling display of fireworks on the harbour that cost $6.5 million and lasted 12 minutes Cities of light deliver hope in darker times
• · · · Happy 2012 for all crossworders ... ... but may it be a bad year for the crossword gremlins; Metropolis
• · · · · Sydney and Hong Kong set the standard with glittering extravaganzas, while London geared up for a firework display over the River Thames to usher in a year in which it will host the Olympic Games World rings in New Year in blaze of fireworks ; The NSW Minister for Planning has asked two lawyers and ex-State Government ministers - Tim Moore and Ron Dyer; one Liberal, the other Labor - to review the NSW Planning System. Into the swamps of the current system, or a clear view of where to go?
• · · · · ·In announcing the end of the Iraq War, President Obama ignored its horrors, so as not to further upset its still-powerful supporters. But his silence removed the context for Pvt. Bradley Manning's moral decision to expose these crimes of war. Bradley Manning: traitor or hero?; Apocalypse now: caught in the Web of Revelations - In Hell there is nowhere to hide. It's official: we've all gone to hell

2011-12-30T10:30:00.005+11:00

Both in Melbourne and Sydney you will find this story today. The Age which Gabbie now reads is our paper for few days Havel's New Year message: we have reason for hope

Twenty-two years ago, on New Year's Day, Vaclav Havel gave a speech to the people of Prague, who had peacefully overthrown their communist government.
In his own words: "We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved"
Western governments, he said, are organized on a flawed premise not far removed from the Soviet system that had just collapsed. "The modern era has been dominated by the culminating belief," he said, "that the world ... is a wholly knowable system governed by finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct ... objectively describing, explaining, and controlling everything."
These bureaucratic structures are profoundly dehumanizing, Havel believed, striving to control choices that should be left to human judgment and values. This "era of systems, institutions, mechanisms and statistical averages" is doomed to failure because "there is too much to know" and it cannot "be fully grasped." The drive towards standardization is fatally flawed, Havel believed: "life is nonstandard."

Vaclav Havel's Critique of the West

Gabbie keeps the garage door open at St Edmonds - at this all day eatery off Greville Street even when Adam and Eve conspire to sleep in Gabbie's Garage

Geoffrey Rush goes Wilde in drag-rags Our Hour With Rush

2011-12-19T00:18:00.001+11:00

R.I.P., Vaclav Havel A hero of mine has died. Another great intellectual light has left the planet. The Czech National flag and two black flags wave in front of Saint Vitus Cathedral

I only met Havel twice and wouldn't pretend to know him well. But he mattered as much to me as my father ... I met him once in Prague after he signed the Charter 77 and again in 1995 when Johno Johnson, President of NSW Legislative Council fame, invited me to luncheon in Sydney Parliament House. But I really first met Vaclav Havel at my sister Aga’s deathbead in 1975 when I first came across his classic play, Vyrozumní (The Memorandum). He was something of a bohemian George Orwell. Like Orwell, Havel satirised the 'doublespeak' of the official bureaucratic language of the communist regime …
In 2003 I wrote a short tribute to my hero who even inspired me to grow moustache after the military service in Czechoslovakia circa 1979 to 2003 when I shaved my moustache as Havel’s political era was over Today I Farewell My Teenage Hero: Vaclav Havel
The Cold River: A Tale From My Heart
Message from Vaclav Havel

We are all hugely diminished today by the passing of a man, small of height but towering in moral stature and courage over those he called the "professional rulers" ; Cold River: The Cold Truth of Vaclav Havel’s Freedom

Havel’s talent for the theatre of the absurd, when read in the context of the communist experience, is just mind boggling

Old Mate! In the gusty old weather,
When our hopes and our troubles were new,
In the years spent in wearing out leather,
I found you unselfish and true —
I have gathered these verses together
For the sake of our friendship and you…

Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.
- Vaclav Havel

Bells ring across country to commemorate Václav Havel Vaclav Havel: Living in truth A man for all seasons on behalf of liberty
Vaclav Havel's death is a reminder of something which parts of modern world are in danger of taking for granted, at best, and, at worst, of forgetting altogether.
Candles are placed at the Venceslav Square to commemorate the death of former Czech president Vaclav Havel, in central Prague, Czech Republic, December 18, 2011

How good a dramatist was Václav Havel? Undeniably one with a wry, sceptical, highly original voice. But he defied the easy labels we love to slap on writers. Just as Latin American novelists often claim that what we term "magic realism" is for them a truthful picture of life, so Havel made nonsense of the "absurdist" category to which he was sometimes consigned by critics. His plays are not a cry of protest against a meaningless universe. "The ultimate aim of Havel's plays," as translator Vera Blackwell wrote, "is the improvement of man's lot through the improvement of human institutions."

YOU could hear Vaclav Havel coming down the corridor of the palace a few minutes in advance. Clip-clip, clip-clop: the accelerated walk of a short-legged man in a hurry. And always the loud chatter of his political advisers, their competing voices like birdsong at dusk. Then came the whiff of cigarette smoke, and with a flourish, the man himself - a theatrical entrance for a playwright-turned-politician. As early as 1988, Havel had hatched the idea of a play about power and integrity. Then the world changed and for 13 years he was head of state, first of united Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic. He moved from being a Velvet Underground fan, to being the architect of the Velvet Revolution and a reluctant co-negotiator of the Velvet Divorce from Slovakia.

• Vaclav , shy and bookish, with a wispy mustache ...Vaclav Havel's Lasting Words ; Google on Havel [The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less Quotes ; Cold War icon Havel dies ; To lose either Christopher Hitchens or Vaclav Havel would be burden enough to bear but to lose them both in the same week is cruel punishment, indeed. ; His home village of Hrádeček Images of Vaclav; As a practical politician and playwright, late former president Vaclav Havel would most probably carefully watch who will come for the funeral ]• · The dissident playwright who wove theatre into politics to peacefully bring down communism in Czechoslovakia and become a hero of the epic struggle that ended the Cold War ; Vale Václav Havel ; Czech pay tribute to revolution icon Vaclav Havel ; Havel, a playwright, spent a ton of time in jail for his political writings
• · · Twenty-two years ago, almost to the day, thousands in Prague's Wenceslas Square roared, "Havel to the Castle." Days later, like a house of cards, Moscow's puppet government collapsed. On December 29, 1989, Vaclav Havel, the dissident artist who had begun the year in prison, took the oath of office as president of Czechoslovakia We will live in an indifferent, demoralized and undemocratic society ; The surrealism of encountering Mr. Havel and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright at the tiny Brick Theatre will NEVER leave my mind.
• · · · Vaclav Havel personified the “power of the powerless.” He understood — as John Paul II understood – the value of integrity, the value of truth. Vaclav Havel: I Was Told in 1968, "You Must Become President"*; When Václav Havel and 241 others signed Charter 77 during the Cold War in 1977, they were denounced by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia as "traitors and renegades" and "agents of imperialism." Such were the epithets by which some of the most courageous Europeans of the 20th century were known
• · · · · In the spirit of the season, and in honor of Vaclav Havel, who died Sunday (and whose life I’ve remembered in another post), what follows is a top-ten list, the first entry being Havel’s greatest hits, and the rest books and writers whom Havel admired—contemporaries or near contemporaries who lived in the same region and under similar regimes. (I am sticking here to non-fiction prose.) They, like Havel, are men and women who lived, and wrote within the truth ; The more platforms we invent, the more stories we need. Stories are critical to winning in the "Lifestream" we are in. When you're a marketer with an annual sales target to hit, stories are your best friend for connecting with consumers. Stand Up The Storytellers - New Havels Wanted Openness is fundamental to representative government. Yet the congressional process is replete with activities and actions that are private and not observable by the public. How to distinguish reasonable legislative secrecy from impractical transparency is a topic that produces disagreement on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Why? Because lawmaking is critical to the governance of the nation. Scores of people in the attentive public want to observe and learn about congressional proceedings. Openness is fundamental to representative government
• · · · · · Organised crime has long been big business in the country. But are mafiosi now enjoying protection by the state Who runs Russia? ; News of the deaths of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong Il hit Burma at high speed this week, and many Burmese rushed online to share their thoughts about the leader of the Czech people, who they admired, and the oppressor of the North Korean people, who they disdained. Kim Jong Il and Vaclav Havel: Two leaders a world apart = Farewell to a Revolutionary, Good Riddance to a Despot

Every man should have a fair-sized cemetery
in which to bury the faults of his friends.
- Henry Brooks Adams

2011-12-07T00:37:00.005+11:00

Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.
- Joseph Conrad, born on this date in 1857

Many characters paid tribute to Tony , a man who has dedicated the better part of three decades to public service, and who has never failed in all those years to put the taxpayers ahead of himself. Tony is a role model for bright young Australians who wish to heed the call to service of President John F. Kennedy in 1961: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

There are times when speakers fight to find the right words, but at Tony's farewell, they flowed like water from a spring - Tim with significant others drowned in extraordinary stories...

Extracts from Tony's Reflections … You could see the years of reflection flashing before his eyes ...

The Union
I was signed up in the union in my first week. Terry …in Expenditure was also a union delegate. I got more and more involved in the FCU TOB… Conference delegate and up to National deputy president … Wonderful people and all were committed to improving the circumstances of their fellow tax officers. Some hilarious and embarrassing moments in the union…
• At my first national Executive meeting I drank a bottle of port with dinner… I was sure my eyeballs were on my cheeks the next day…
• Doing the worm on the roof of a hire car at Hume Weir…
• The behind the scenes discussions and preparations when the FCU TOB merged with ACOA to form the now CPSU…
This created a solid foundation on ensuring that all individuals in the [the agency] were valued and respected.

Office liaisons
I started my romance with Narelle, and informed a mate that I was dating this great “chick”, he of course wanted to meet her so next time he was visiting me I took him around to Narelle’s desk… She was not there and before I could say anything my mate said wow your dating a chair… The people I had to put up with …

Things I will not miss
Looking back on a career of 33 years it has been a wonderful journey and has included meeting many great people, but like all journeys there are bits that I will not miss:
• Meeting report deadlines… In fact any urgent report, minute or briefing, especially senate estimates and QONs.
• The frustration of putting forward an innovation or change.
• Governance
• …Internal spin… If we say it often enough we might believe it.
• System instability
• Funding reductions and doing the same output with less. This in itself was not so much the problem as also being hamstrung by being required to use existing procedures.
• Agency Agreements
All of these things make it a pleasure to be walking away and not looking back. I look forward to doing something different.

What I will miss
The downside is what I will miss… The people I have worked with. It is the people that make it a pleasure to work in the (office) and it is the people I have worked with that have helped me to get to 33 years of service. This experience has gone through a range of feelings including: serious, fun, pressured, sad and memorable. It is the people that I will miss. Fortunately I will still catch up with the Sydney and St Leonards golf groups and with those that attend the [sport] Carnival.

It is strange when you think about it. We are a service organisation. It is the “value add” of our people that makes the difference to our outputs. Yet we seem to have an inordinate obsession with our systems and practices. It seems to me on reflection that in an organisational sense we should be putting the emphasis on the people in the organisation. A happy and engaged workforce is a productive workforce… Whilst the intent is to have engaged staff there is no

I look back on my career in the [public service], it is with satisfaction that I reflect on my achievements and joy at the people I have worked with on that journey.

Good luck to all and enjoy the people you work with.

As you all know I like to finish with a quote - I am also a big fan of Richard Bach and he provided this famous goodbye quote:

Don't be dismayed at goodbyes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetime, is certain for those who are friends.

A collection of colourful movers and shakers and friends of Tony and Johno Johnson:

----

Once was Camelot in Canberra? Reflections on public service leadership

Dare to be Different

What happens when you gather the world’s most imaginative minds under one roof?
The Idea Factory

2011-12-04T18:58:00.001+11:00

... The Rise of the Fifth Reich?

... it is clear that too many American policy makers and opinion makers live in a bubble of conventional wisdom, comfortable assumptions and complacent ignorance. Articles like this one are a useful corrective to that complacency, and even readers who end up thinking Corn goes a little over the top will appreciate the guided tour of European strategic analysis he provides amerika mmxi

2011-11-27T23:03:00.006+11:00

Scientists have discovered that we’re engineered for kindness – or not. The caring button is a genetic trait that determines how we respond to oxytocin (aka the “love” hormone); some of us have it, some of us don’t; most people can spot it a mile off.... Who Cares?

Here’s one to rattle the cage of True Blue Aussie Blokes who prefer a handshake to a hug. A study has found that Australian men who love a good hug are happier and healthier than those who don’t, and also tend to bank more. It’s time to embrace change, mate... Come On Mate, Gimme A Hug

A ONE-MAN MARKET - Money and art Evasive tactic
Oscar Wilde claimed to have put all his genius into his life, leaving only his talent for his work. Many a great conversationalist has done much the same thing. Most people (though not all!) find it easier to talk than to write, and some, like the now-forgotten Desmond MacCarthy, talk so well that they never manage to write anything memorable.

For the professional writer, blogging is an intermediate state. It's writing, but writing of a peculiarly ephemeral kind, the postmodern equivalent of penning a thrice-weekly newspaper column, and those who do it too assiduously run the risk of dribbling away the stuff books are made of. Hilaire Belloc once managed to finesse a similar problem by publishing a collection of more than usually ephemeral essays called On Nothing and Kindred Subjects, but the fact that On Nothing is now as forgotten as Desmond MacCarthy suggests that he was kidding himself.

What I won't do is bore you by making constant excuses for not blogging more often. You can henceforth take it for granted that I wish I were doing so--and that
• I'll be back on the case as soon as possible. [When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts Taking aim at middle-class aspirations, Dwight Macdonald drew a bazooka when a pistol would do. He didn’t open the conversation, he killed it.. ]
• · Jürgen Habermas is angry. “Our politicians have no political substance.” If the EU fails, he warns, democracy will be set back 100 years; The two can’t be disentangled. But some entanglements are more troubling than others. Culture is in retreat before the brute dollar. Jed Perl explains Money and art; Demonstrating the increasing role of the network in people's lives, an international workforce study announced today by Cisco revealed that one in three college students and young professionals considers the Internet to be as important as fundamental human resources like air, water, food and shelter
• · · Economics might act like a science, but it isn’t one, says Robert Trivers. Its key ideas are naive, and it’d take more than a nudge to fix that... Nudge thyself; Americans read Nietzsche without becoming Nietzscheans. As for those few who go whole hog, they’re rarely intellectuals of the first rank. America’s Superman
• · · · Auction prices for his work have jumped 3,400 percent in 25 years. Time for a market correction in contemporary art.. The Warhol bubble - A ONE-MAN MARKET ; The merchandising of Milosz. Pens, postcards, T-shirts, even biscotti – few poets have been commodified and branded with such rock-star exuberance Czeslaw Milosz around the world
• · · · · How a Canadian in a bathtub, together with transgender radicals, and a “mystical anarchist” organized a revolution on Wall Street... Wall Street... The origins and future of Occupy Wall Street ; Advocating for the means to make informed decisions
• · · · · · News must be really hard to follow for an everyday consumer of a newspaper website. First tweets go out, sometimes with no links to additional coverage. Then a few grafs go up on a blog, followed by additional updates, either to the top of that post or as new posts. Eventually, a print story gets started, which is posted through an entirely different workflow onto a different-looking story page. This version is usually written as an hourglass-style narrative, following typical print conventions. For the rest of the day, new updates start going to this story rather than the original blog post. Having a hard time following? Here’s a graphic to help.. The New, Convoluted Life Cycle Of A Newspaper Story, ; Unprecedented news - 99% of NSW Police Force Marching in Macquarie Street ; Escort Tiffanie says minister told her: If you knew who I was you'd be very surprised - On the first day of an Independent Commission Against Corruption inquiry yesterday, counsel assisting Geoffrey Watson, SC, alleged property developer Ron Medich and former boxer Lucky Gattellari arranged for Mr Macdonald to "take his pick" of a group of young women "kept" by Mr Gattellari with the knowledge of Mr Medich "for themselves and their guests 'Gross' minister made me feel sick, escort tells ICAC; Google Sexual favours for Macdonald: ICAC

2011-11-23T01:17:00.004+11:00

Never underestimate the role of the will in the artistic life. Some writers are all will. Talent you can dispense with, but not will. Will is paramount. Not joy, not delight, but grim application.
-Alan Bennett, The Habit of Art - There you have your title. I believe that’s why Americans always want to tell the story of the world. They believe that when you master the story or the tale, it is as if, if something were to happen, they would be the first ones informed The Narrator Never

Party scenes. Not big ones, balls or weddings, but more intimate gatherings, friends gathering over dinner, drinking themselves senseless, arguing about profound nonsense. Sometimes the party is a regular event, not really a party at all but just a routine social activity. A little piano playing, some snacks, some cards. The Crime of Father Amaro and Cousin Basilio both structure the entire book around this kind of scene. Sometimes the party is a rarer bird, a chance to indulge. The Maias has some superb scenes of this type. Chapter 2 of The Illustrious House of Ramires has a good one, too ...
Father Soeiro, his sunshade under his arm, made his way slowly back to the Tower, in the silence and softness of the evening, reciting his Hail Maries and praying for the peace of God for Gonçalo, for all men, for the fields and the sleeping farms, and for the beautiful land of Portugal, so full of endearing charm, that it might be for ever blessed among lands

This is the fantastical tale of Dan Dong, an unemployed factory worker whose life takes a series of unexpected twists upon his discovery that simply by posing as a journalist he can eat exquisite gourmet meals free of charge at state-sponsored banquets. But the secrets Dan overhears at these events eventually lead him down a twisted, intrigue-laden path, and his true and false identities become increasingly harder to separate. When he becomes privy to a scandal that runs from the depths of society up to its highest rungs, Dan must find a way to lay bare the corruption - without revealing the dangerous truth about himself. Like Buz Luhrman, Dan Dong, has konektions to the NSW Parliamentary Library

CODA: If they're worried, then it's working:

A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program “Up w/ Chris Hayes.” The proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association. CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific races in which it says Wall Street would benefit by electing Republicans instead. According to the memo, if Democrats embrace OWS, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street … It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.” Undermining the Occupation: Memo to Media Dragon

2011-11-21T00:08:00.009+11:00

What the Anthropologists Say about shopping in Sydney (or Broadway ...) - small is beautiful!

Surely that little pseudo-gothic church on Broadway, hidden amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age! On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb.
-André Malraux

Paddington's new place to spot chairs, jars and prints
If you’re cuckoo for curios, say hello to your new nest.

This artfully cluttered emporium is chockablock with colourful genie bottles from the ‘60s, vintage glass pharmaceutical bottles, and brushed aluminium canister sets from the ‘50s. Old bric-a-brac sourced from all over Australia mingles with new wares for a special kind of eclectic magic. And what’s more, these Paddington proprietors have kept their prices down to earth so you can snaffle a beauty for a bargain price
i like birds
14 William Street, Paddington 2021
T: 02 9331 5501 The best deals of 2011 - bric-a-brac

Media Dragon Likes Birds Too Tamara: Once there was season of color crimson lake
If fabulously floral chinaware, retro glassware, vintage ‘kitchenalia’ and adorably kitsch collectables are your cup of tea, then you simply must visit the delightfully charming store, I Like Birds, nestled in the heart of Paddington’s uber-trendy shopping district - William St.

A gorgeous collection of both new and vintage homewares sourced from all over Australia, I Like Birds is more treasure chest than standard homewares store. Upon entering the canary yellow terrace and embarking upon your voyage of discovery through this eclectic store, it soon becomes evident that this is quite a special little shop indeed. Every glass vase, quirky cushion cover, flying duck, cowhide rug, bell jar, mohair basket and vintage apothecary bottle has been carefully and thoughtfully selected by the shop’s inspired and passionate owner, Tamara. Nothing is there without reason; no product chosen without love. Awww!!!

ilikebirds loves modern, urban interior design & classic decorative art ... so much so we go to great lengths to source rare, new & vintage homewares from all around Australia and abroad to bring you that perfect piece for your office, home and garden. We have a hand picked selection of homewares, gifts, prints, collectables, glass, soft furnishings and much more. We also have an urban garden nursery with both indoor and outdoor pots and plants.
• Birds, Plants and Past Voices of Silence ; [When price and small size matter Gifts - Labor of Love ; Part Bird]
• · Customers have mixed feelings about Black Friday shoppin ; You're going to spend more this holiday season, you'll probably shop both at stores and online - possibly with a smartphone or tablet computer - and while you're at it, you might buy something for yourself 10 Holiday shopping trends
• · · Many small businesses try to outwit the giants this holiday by offering a personal touch Midnight is new riching hour; Jozef Imrich & Media Dragon When the clock strikes 12 ... the Black Friday shopping will begin ...
• · · · Wall Street Journal open a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology ; Keep it simple
• · · · · Though reluctant to work with the U.S. military, anthropologists have a lot to say about the war in Afghanistan. Alex Star listens...What the Anthropologists Say ; Thanks to the Internet, everyone has a say, everyone is a cultural arbiter. A golden age of criticism? Nonsense. The Web has made criticism obsolete.. A golden age of criticism? Nonsense
• · · · · · Alienation and misanthropy. Stephen Sondheim’s muse is misery – about success, relationships, aging, and mankind itself. With Stephen Sondheim’s second collection of his lyrics, the hyper-articulate, neurotic, modernist master Broadway songwriter takes a curtain call the-art-of-making-art ; If you’ve been at death’s door or your wit’s end, about to bite the dust or cast the first stone, you’ve inhabited the King James Bible With more bone breaks in my body than you've got bones in yours; The Book of Genesis is a bedtime soporific, not a page-turner. God, says Jonathan Rée, is the death of narrative, and narrative the death of God..
• · · · · · · Jonesing for Freakonomics: Social psychologists are addicted to findings that make headlines. Data massaging is warping the field Freakonomics: ; Liberals are stupid, according to a ballyhooed study. Now it’s been retracted. Turns out conservatives are stupid, too..

PS: Can you understand, my father used to ask, the despair of that condemned beauty, of its days and nights? Over and over again it had to rouse itself to fictitious auctions, stage successful sales and noisy, crowded exhibitions, become inflamed with wild gambling passions, await a slump, scatter riches, squander them like a maniac, only to realize on sobering up that all this was in vain, that it could not get anywhere beyond a self-centered perfection, that it could not relieve the pain of excess. Józefina Szelińska - That whole lumber room of ancient beauty has been subjected to a painful distillation under the pressure of years of boredom

2011-11-19T19:27:00.005+11:00

What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.
--André Malraux, Antimémoires

A new camera captures hundreds of images and lets you choose your own reality Creative expression is a wonderful thing. It makes you feel alive. Small wonder then, that one of the most enduring forms of self-expression, writing, should turn out to be good for our physical and emotional health. So next time you’re feeling down or out of sorts – write it up! Real stories come from the successes and failures, joys and sorrows of everyday life. And 20 years of research tells us that devoting 15 minutes each day to writing about what we’ve experienced , felt or dwelt on can help improve almost any ailment, body or mind. Write the wrongs ; Putting pen to paper can reap surprising health benefits Time is a river, a violent cold current of events...

Never underestimate the role of the will in the artistic life. Some writers are all will. Talent you can dispense with, but not will. Will is paramount. Not joy, not delight, but grim application.
--Alan Bennett, The Habit of Art

Happy Scribing Sometimes Even to Live is an Act of Courage
Stock analysts are not known for being a rebellious sort. Their jobs generally involve writing up dry technical reports on public companies. But Mike Mayo is not your typical stock analyst.

Since joining the industry nearly 25 years ago, Mayo has shaken up the financial world with his bold and forthright analysis of the banks he researches. In 1999, he told investors to sell all bank stocks. In 2007, he was ahead of the pack in downgrading Bear Stearns Cos. and Citigroup Inc.
Perhaps predictably, this hasn't earned him a lot of love, given that he has worked at banks himself and that his employers wanted to do business with many of the banks he was analyzing. This led to often short and stormy tenures at UBS, Credit Suisse and Lehman Bros. before he landed in his current position at Credit Agricole Securities.
Now, after a financial crisis for which banks have taken much of the blame, Mayo has written a book, "Exile on Wall Street," chronicling the problems he sees with the procedures in place for monitoring the financial system. He contends that regulators, accountants and credit rating firms do not have the right incentives to serve as good watchdogs. He slams his fellow stock analysts for providing misleadingly positive portrayals of public companies because of conflicts of interests.

• Watchdogs ; [It is a deep irony that FAMU student Jan Látal's newest documentary is titled Paroubek of a Thousand Faces. The finished product, admits the 31-year-old director, fails to uncover the "real" politician and erstwhile prime minister of 16 months. In fact, Jiří Paroubek wore his "politician's face" for the duration of the shoot, Látal says. Politician has a face for all occasions ; Only two-thirds of Czechs proud of their nationality - poll Only two-thirds ]
• · Having charted Billy Beane’s sports-management breakthrough in the best-selling Moneyball. Billy Beane’s sports-management revolution, chronicled by the author in Moneyball, was made possible by Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. At 77, with his own new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel Prize-winning Kahneman reveals the built-in kinks in human reasoning—and he’s Exhibit A. Michael Lewis on the King of Human Error ; In novel after novel, he floats lofty, universal ideas, and then unzips his fly. The Grapes of Roth: Solipsism and lust
• · · Pakistan lies to us, sponsors militants who attack American troops, and may have knowingly harbored Osama bin Laden. With a friend like this, who needs enemies? The Ally From Hell; Kurt Vonnegut wrote - We are what we pretend to be so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” He heeded his own advice The novelist and master of self-marketing became an icon of the counterculture
• · · · Fire snowball mask movie: how leaders spark and sustain change, Peter Fuda and Richard Badham, Harvard Business Review, November 2011, p145-148. Transform to become an effective leader using interdependent metaphors - fire (representing ambition), snowball (accountability) , mask (authenticity and movie (self-reflection). It takes utter courage to name the mask.; Going to work is a high-pressure business! Between the state of economic challenges, your personal issues and family concerns—it’s easy to overlook the value of a forgotten virtue called courage (and its intrinsic value). Courageous Leadership—Dare to Take Control
• · · · · Three dead at Moravian factory as gunman was brother of arms dealer Karel Musela opened fire at the Aircraft Industries (AI) plant, killing Pavel Vlach and Petr Veselý, both members of the company's board, and injuring director Ilona Plškova, before turning the gun on himself; A libertarian economist discovers that our political leanings leave us more biased than we think. I Was Wrong, and So Are You
• · · · · · A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but anyone with even a poor sense of smell and negligible knowledge of botany will have noticed that some roses smell sweeter than others. The same goes for the names of books. As some titles evidently smell particularly sweet, there can be some rather unexpected bookish twins. Inside Books: What’s in a name?; Italian clothing company Benetton withdraws publicity shot of Benedict XVI kissing grand sheikh of al-Azhar mosque in Cairo

2011-11-15T20:44:00.013+11:00

Dullness in matters of government is a good sign, and not a bad one - in particular, dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success.
---Walter Bagehot

Top Trends

This week Ronda Miller was appointed Clerk of the Legislative Assembly for the NSW Parliament – the first female Clerk of the lower House. She replaces Russell Grove who recently retired after 21 years of service as Clerk

The first female Clerk of the lower House: Asamblea de Ronda Ronda Mary Miller - Magna Carta
The NSW Parliament is the mother legislature of Australia and also one of the oldest public buildings in nation of Down Under. A building where Ronda and Media Dragon used to receive paper cuts from newspaper clippings.
I have very much pleasure in announcing that following recent recruitment action I have requested the Premier to recommend to Her Excellency the Governor approval for the appointment of Ms Ronda Mary Miller as Clerk of the Legislative Assembly. The Premier has confirmed that the recommendation will be made to Her Excellency the Governor and the appointment is expected to be made next week. Congratulations, Ronda.

I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the staff of the committee for their untiring work during the year, particularly the director, Mrs Patricia Azarias; Mr Ian Clark, then the senior project officer; Mr Joseph Imrich, clerk to the committee; Ms Caterina Sciara and Ms Debbie Isted, who provided administrative support; and our accounting and auditing adviser, Mr John Lynas, who is now on secondment from the Auditor-General's office. I should like to pay special tribute to Ms Ronda Miller, the Clerk-Assistant (Committees) for her ready and constructive assistance to the committee on many occasions.

Some people suggest that the problem is the separation of powers. If you had a parliamentary system, the struggle for power would not result in such complex peace treaties that empower so many different people to pursue so many contradictory aims.
-James Q. Wilson

The first organised opposition by women to women's suffrage in England dates from 1889, when a number of ladies led by Mrs Ward appealed against the proposed extension of the Parliamentary suffrage to women.
-Millicent Fawcett

The standing orders of the Parliamentary Party, however, apply to me, apply to every other Member of the Parliamentary Labour Party and they put into a context the way in which those rights to freedom of speech should be exercised.
-Ron Davies

Unlike the previous parliamentary Marco Polo, Ronda invaded roads less traveled, but with very colourful characters such as Mr Barry O'Farrell to boot to San Francisco of all placed in July 2003 ...
• · Art of Hansard; Magna Carta of Assembly Lines; [ The New South Wales Parliament presented a Mace to the National Assembly for Wales in recognition of the historical connection between these two parts of the world. The Mace was carried into the Siambr by Ms Ronda Miller, Serjeant-at-Arms of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, presented to The Queen; Robyn McClelland (C’lth) stepped down as Chair of the Committee in 2007 and Ronda Miller (N.S.W.) was appointed as her successor by the Executive Committee. John Mandy (W.A.) and Carol Rankin (N.Z.) were asked to continue on the Committee and Rick Crump (S.A.) was co-opted during the year. Lessons from Abroad; Legislative Assembly and Council Privileges Committee Search Warrants & Parliamentary Priviledges]
• · · All Legislative Roads Lead to Dr Cope Parliamentary Librarian; Sad history
• · · · As the friendliest and considerate President in my time in NSW Parliament, Johno Johnson, noted: In 1991 Dr Russell Cope, the Parliamentary Librarian, concluded 40 years of meritorious service Dr Cope is one of those living treasures that few institutions have; The Clerk advises the Speaker and members impartially on parliamentary procedure and manages the Department of the Legislative Assembly. The current Deputy Clerk of the Assembly is the Assembly's first female Clerk. She became Deputy Clerk in 2004. In 2007 the Assembly appointed its first female Serjeant-at-Arms. Lynn Lovelock has served NSW Parliament (The Lords of the Upper House) in many roles. In 1987 she was a parliamentary administration officer, in 1988 she was appointed as the Usher of the Black Rod—as members know she was the first woman to hold that position—in August 1989 she was appointed Clerk Assistant, and then in December 1990 she was appointed Deputy Clerk. In 2007 Lynn was the first woman appointed Clerk of the Parliaments and Clerk of the Legislative Council Women on Top
• · · · · Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith Another book lover; Review of Note on MD first birthday
• · · · · · ... THE 99% of Another WORLD: Many seasoned political professionals in Washington are deeply jealous of the copywriting skills of the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd. The young movement’s slogan – “We are the 99 per cent” – is one they wish they had thought up themselves.The funny thing, walking through “Occupy DC”, the fast-growing little brother of OWS camped a block from the White House, is that the movement’s followers don’t look like 99 per cent of anything other than a ragged modern-day counter-culture. For a better litmus test of the country’s political mood this week, you had to travel far from the tents of McPherson Square in downtown Washington to the bellwether state of Ohio. We Are the 99 Percent; Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world said http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifearlier this year that “There has been class warfare going on... and my class isn’t just winning, I mean we’re killing them”. The onset of neo-liberal capitalism in the late 1970s that saw a shift away from manufacturing because the rate of profit for the corporations therein had flatlined, towards a finance capitalism in particular, facilitated a huge squeezing of the US working class, dashing the American Dream for the majority and massively increasing the wealth of the tiny minority of super-rich. Website lets wealthy 1% show support for the other 99%; Quotes

2011-11-08T20:22:00.012+11:00

I know all about couch grass, and the fearsome bindweed, and the way to get the dandelion with its root . . . . Apple trees and pear trees shed their fruit barely formed and the currant bushes, as if taken by surprise in order to please me, are going back to the wild.

This song was dedicated (and vocalised by Helen's David) to our well-balanced friend, Mark, who was born under the relevant star-sign … Indeed, advanced age is not so bad when you consider the alternative.
We sang So may you live to be 100, Sto Roky, Mark!

Man of the Moment Libra Tango (instead of Libertango)

Having forgotten Petersburg and my criminal character
I found a way to please my wife quite legally:
I sometimes go to a dancing soiree with her
And there I am forced to count “one-two-three” like a lunatic

They teach me there to dance salsa
And tango and a bit of waltz…
But no matter how hard Eugenia trains me
When I dance waltz the freylekhs (folkloric jewish dance) comes through

I want to forget reality when dancing
To think that I am still 20 or at lease just over 30
But there is this orthodox part in me that
Does not let me get away from the Jewish rhythm

My wife dreams that I lead her properly in the dance
But when dancing with other women that I should behave myself
But the moment I see other people
My soul and lips are both ready for a kiss

I don’t get to go to parties on Sundays, -
I just pop in for a minute or two…
Then I spend another 15 minutes kissing
And for the rest of the night I have a party with my passengers

So what if there are cameras out there
And “film directors” hiding in bushes with radars, -
Nothing will interfere with my party -
Neither red lights nor huge fines.

Fellini is crying, Bertolucci is weaping,
As neither of them will get as much attention as me.
I am rushing forward, and I won’t brake,
‘Cos life is beautiful, and that’s what matters!
-Partly composed by his better half, Eugenia, who is a genus of flowering plants in the myrtle family Myrtaceae.

The Bronze Horseman (Russian: Медный всадник, literally The Copper Horseman is an equestrian statue of Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Commissioned by Catherine the Great, it is also the name of a narrative poem written by Aleksandr Pushkin about the statue in 1833, widely considered to be one of the most significant works of Russian literature. The statue came to be known as the Bronze Horseman because of the great influence of the poem. The statue is now one of the symbols of Saint Petersburg, in much the same way that the Copper Harbour Bridge is a symbol of Sydney or Statue of Liberty is a symbol of New York City. Saint Petersburg has inspired great works of literature by Russian authors such as Aleksandr Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, and Nikolay Gogol. The city that arose from the swamps and rivers in the early 18th century became the grace and wonder of the northern lands; Mark's Petrograd

Peter the Great: Krasny Window to the West World Wide Web of Global-literature Tour
The Guardian's been doing a world-literature tour, asking readers to name "the best authors and books from a series of countries, creating an atlas of literature." (Yes, they already know about Jozef Imrich)

Agreed that the World Lit tour is very valuable when it identifies little-known authors from little-known countries, but the classics shouldn't be neglected just because they are classics (and not everyone has read all the classics). For Russia, I would single out Pushkin ('Yevgenii/Eugene Onegin') and Chekhov's short stories for the 19th and early 20th centuries, and Mikhail Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita' (not mentioned yet, I don't think) for the mid-20th century. Don't miss Nabokov's memoirs Speak, Memory
We put the names in a hat and pulled out ... the Czech Republic

• On the River Again [Birthdays are like girlfriends, they come and go-unless you enjoy them Job Watch and Media Dragon's Signature; Steve Jobs wasn’t an inventor. He was a tweaker, an idiosyncratic perfectionist who took Media Dragon's ideas and made them better.. The real genius of Steve Jobs ; Wall Street Journal blogger Steve Yang offers insights into the genius Apple co-creator and CEO of the world's second most valued company (and for some moments #1). The key is that much of Jobs' brilliance and the beauty of Apple's creations can be traced back to the influence of Zen Buddhism and an emphasis on absence defining presence...Absence of his Signature Defines Presence ]
• · Social science is wrong: Crowds are not violent forces that submerge individuality and destroy rationality. In fact, they bring out the best in people CROWDS R US ; When the day was done, P.G. Wodehouse returned to his chief pleasure: writing stinkers to people who attack media dragon A life in letters
• · · When obsessive math whizzes mate, it’s bad genetic news for their offspring, says Simon Baron-Cohen. That’s the theory, anyway... Simon Baron-Cohen noticed that children with autism are drawn to 'systems' such as machines and numbers. Geeks in love ; From Lionel Trilling to Huey Newton: What is it about this anti-Christian, antidemocratic madman that appeals to Americans?.. Nietzsche-mania Born in the USA; Vladislav Davidzon's story about reading Isaac Babel in modern day Odessa made Bookslut aka Jessa miss Odessa. (“The Godly city, the star of our exile, that reluctant wellspring of all our troubles!”) Even if the only things I learned there was that vodka with honey drizzled in it is delicious and how to hitch rides without being raped/murdered. (Old cars! Only get into old cars without power locks.) His story will make you miss Odessa, too, even if you have not been
• · · · In private, Samuel Beckett was as you might imagine him: sullenly professing distaste for his own work, too fatigued to do anything new. How I dislike that play now ; The lament of an aging professor: Everything is suddenly a distraction to William Ian Miller. His brain is balsa wood floating in a helium sea. In truth, his brain is shrinking. And so is yours Losing It
• · · · · As creatures of thought, we are thinking all the time, but that does not necessarily mean that we are thinking well. Answering the law school exam, like solving any problem, requires that the student exercise thinking in an effective and productive manner. This Article provides some guidance in that pursuit Thinking' in a Deweyan Perspective ; Will you still house me, when I’m 64?
• · · · · · This highly personalised political sphere provides the perfect environment for populist politics No role for the drover’s dog: the contemporary emphasis on leadership; Strategies without tactics is the slow road to victory . . . it is better to have the right strategy and then work out the tactics - Major General Jim Molan AO Leadership – Strategy rules!

2011-11-06T19:08:00.000+11:00

Courtesy of TM (Trademark of Intel):
The Dunning–Kruger effect is acognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them themetacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.

Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others". The effect is about paradoxical defects in cognitive ability, both in oneself and as one compares oneself to others.

Although the Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward in 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger have quoted Charles Darwin ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge") and Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision") as authors who have recognised the phenomenon.

The hypothesized phenomenon was tested in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, both then of Cornell University. Kruger and Dunning noted earlier studies suggesting that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

Dunning has since drawn an analogy ("the anosognosia of everyday life") to a condition in which a person who suffers a physical disability because of brain injury seems unaware of or denies the existence of the disability, even for dramatic impairments such as blindness or paralysis.

2011-11-06T11:21:00.002+11:00

Everyone knows teens live with abandon online—exposing their secrets, likes, dislikes, sexual preferences, home addresses, phone numbers, and so on—in ways their parents can’t understand. But it’s not just this generation’s sense of privacy that’s eroding. It’s their sense of permanence. They act as though the words they write and pictures they post and texts they send vanish into the ether. But in fact they’re leaving a running transcript behind, a digital trail of their hopes, their anxieties, and, in the case of at least one small Canadian town, even their crimes:
When Kruse IM’d Kim to see if she was done babysitting, no response came. But he didn’t expect one. The instant message was a cover. Kruse knew Kim had never made it to her job. She was right there in his house with him and Cam. Bound. Beaten. Raped. And, by the next morning, stuffed in his freezer. Dead

PS: Kimberly Proctor was born on January 1, 1992.

2011-11-03T19:55:00.005+11:00

All eyes are on India as the world awaited the arrival of its seven billionth child and my parents in law might actually meet the baby in the holy gurudwaras.. Good tidings as the spirit of Diwali is still spreading in the land of wonders...

A nice way to finish the week - Chief Executive magazine from New York has named this missive among its Top 10 CEO blogs. KRConnect has been going for five years now, covering whatever comes to mind, falls across my path, or is close to my heart. A rough count makes this post 1,046. KRConnect

The world had changed suddenly, but I hadn’t. I think part of me knew that it passes, and then it moves on. All you have to do is hold on through the wave, so that you don’t get washed away. It does pass. It was very peculiar. You’re turned into some kind of object, and writers are determinedly subjects. Recently people have been starting to say that it’s all about sales, that the companies behind it are very proud of the sales of the books, and nobody’s talking about the books. There’s quite big PR machine behind it, and we know how PR machines are. The writer is a kind of incidental figure in the middle of this global PR exercise. Presumably writers dream of having such a thing happen but actually what we dream of is the fantasy of suddenly breaking free from your critics, which is not actually what happens. You’re freed from a certain amount of financial tension, but if you weighed money too much in the balance you’d never become a writer in the first place. When you get into it, it’s for whatever kind of reward is there. Though I am very interested in what money does to people, because I’ve had money and I haven’t. The years from 1993 to 2007 were pretty thin. I’m interested in how stressful it is not to have money, but also how, if you do have money you cannot imagine what it is not to have it

Man of the Moment Lessons From Leaders: Leaders and leadership are not always the same
Great leadership is uncommon, but given the state of the world, at the moment more than uncommonly necessary.

Major global trend-forecasters are sounding the alarms that humanity is on the verge of entering into the most tumultuous period in our history. The prospects of a global depression, global war on an unimagined scale and societal collapse are increasing.
Governments have been optimistic with all their happy talk. Is the worst really behind us? Raising interest rates is one way to find out! Maybe our leaders need to look at the facts! Is the economy in deep trouble - hence the delay in raising interest rates now?
Worldwide, the economic crisis has many bubbles. The main event on the horizon is the "bailout bubble" and the general world-debt bubble, which could plunge the world into a Great Depression.

• < Is the economy in deep trouble [ The power of political soap opera Stress tops list of long-term absence causes - Stress is now the number one cause of long-term sickness absence as employees struggle with heavy workloads and job loss worries. Mental health problems hit manual and non-manual staff; Tracking the Trackers: Where Everybody Knows Your Username Tracking the Trackers: Where Everybody Knows Your Username by Jonathan Mayer - Click the local Home Depot ad and your email address gets handed to a dozen companies monitoring you. Your web browsing, past, present, and future, is now associated with your identity. Swap photos with friends on Photobucket and clue a couple dozen more into your username. Keep tabs on your favorite teams with Bleacher Report and you pass your full name to a dozen again. This isn't a 1984-esque scaremongering hypothetical This is what's happening today ]
• · Digital Omnivores: How Tablets, Smartphones and Connected Devices are Changing - Today’s digital media environment is rapidly evolving, driven by the proliferation of devices people use to consume content both at home, at work and on the goSheding light on the direction of the ever-evolving digital media landscape ; Personal technology at work: IT's Arab spring, The Economist People are demanding to use their own gadgets in their jobs. Trying to thwart them is futile
• · · Risk Leadership: How to be heard, Risk Management Partners, 2011. This risk management white paper has found that the secret to communicating a risk management message to the right people was knowing the audience; learning how to talk to them in their language; and telling them what they wanted to hear while telling them what they needed to hear. Risk professionals needed to draw senior management a picture of what risk management really was. ; The Peter Principle revisited: a computational study Winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Management for mathematically demonstrating that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random
• · · · Anger management: there's an upside to seeing red at work - New research from the Australian School of Business shows tempered anger in the workplace can have a positive effect. Venting may clear the air or have a catalytic impact, signalling a matter of importance. It could even be a necessary "evil", just part of the job. But before letting fly, be mindful that things may turn sour if it's out of control - and the cause of the outrage will affect how it's perceived; GRAHAM Richardson was a 'gifted liar', and an 'archetiypal trickster' as Labor Party warlord, Bob Hawke's biographer and wife Blanche d'Alpuget says. However you choose to describe him, just like his old boss, Paul Keating, he knows when to throw the switch to vaudeville. This week he sprung a masterful media trap for Kevin Rudd to help spruik his incarnation as a political commentator on Sky News Richo a tart for publicity
• · · · · One world many stories ; Edward de Bono recently made an appearance on ABC down under, sharing some typically flamboyant thinking, mostly around the subject of thinking itself. I’ve been a de Bono fan for years and this was fresh as ever. Among his key insights were: Fresh Thinking ; They say bad luck runs in threes, but these crises aren't luck, they are all of our own making. As with diseases of the human body, problems in business become much easier to resolve if detected early. The Australian - We're the richest nation on earth, according to a Credit Suisse report. 20 October 2011. AUSTRALIANS are the world's wealthiest people on a median basis and second in the world behind Switzerland on an average basis, According to a new Media Dragon report
• · · · · ·Increase your productivity by doing less- A change of attitude could be enough to see us doing jobs sooner, easier and better ; Jenni is heading to Praha for 5 weeks Only in Bohemia ;-)

2011-10-23T10:42:00.002+11:00

He has endured 12 premiers, eight speakers and sat through countless debates - and scandals - in the bearpit in Australia's oldest parliament. After 21 years, the reign of the longest-serving Clerk of the Legislative Assembly, Russell Grove, will come to an end when he retires on November 4. Russell Grove has been Clerk of the Legislative Assembly since 1990, having entered Parliamentary Service in 1971.

I've enjoyed every single day of my working life. I'm very fortunate in that regard.

Reflecting on how the parliament has changed in the four decades he has worked there, Mr Grove said there was ''probably more camaraderie 40 years ago. Civility is a big issue in politics internationally. But there is also more pressure on MPs''.
In the public gallery during the tributes were Mr Grove's wife, Frances, and daughter, Sarah-Jane.

Afterwards MPs joined Mr Grove for morning tea in the Speaker's Garden and he received a standing ovation at the end of question time. Mr Grove said he would tackle a pile of political biographies, but has no plans for a tell-all book of his own. On what makes a good clerk, he said: You just need to keep your mouth closed

It has been a great honour for me to have Russell Grove and his wife, Frances, as my constituents. From their location in Springfield Avenue in the heart of Kings Cross they have given me feedback about the night-time activities in Central Plaza. We also have a common interest in the Pearl Beach area. I know that although Russell is retiring I will still see Russell, Frances and Sarah-Jane.

Over this long period there have been great challenges and many changes. Throughout these times I have come to the view that only by having confidence in itself, and an ability to adapt to the new challenges while respecting the value of past practices, can the House survive as the sovereign body of our State. Unwarranted and unfounded criticism from whatever quarter should not deflect Members from their important duties and responsibility as representatives of the people of New South Wales ... To some extent we are honouring today the man who was not there. The fact is that the officials who sit at the table of Parliaments like ours in the place are invisible. Parliamentary Marco Polo

CODA: The Ghost of Grahame Cooksley is haunting Homer's Springfield...

2011-10-21T20:45:00.002+11:00

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
-Alfred Hitchcock

The 19th-century social network. To enjoy the crowd, Baudelaire told us, one must have masks. His love of observing was at war with his fear of being seen...

We live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning?

Pinker the Prophet The Better Angels of Our Nature
Hitler, Stalin, Mao – three reasons to question moral progress. But has cynicism blinded us to a worldwide decline in belligerency?

WITH THE United States fighting two wars, countries from Tunisia to Syria either in or on the brink of intrastate conflicts, bloodshed continuing in Sudan and reports that suicide bombers might foil airport security by planting explosives within their bodies, it is hard to be cheerful. But Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker tells us that we should be, that we are living in the least violent era ever. What’s more, he makes a case that will be hard to refute. The trends are not subtle—many of the changes involve an order of magnitude or more. Even when his explanations do not fully convince, they are serious and well-grounded.

• Why Violence Has Declined [ Showmanship and luck, but also a taste for secrecy and controversy. Most of all, be a blank slate: What makes a good prophet? ; The Alice books have been interpreted to death: an allegory of Darwinism, a tale of toilet training, a story of sexual desire. All miss the point. Tolstoy of the nursery.; Politics of personality. How to explain William F. Buckley? He had ideas, of course – 50-some books. But what mattered was his charm]
• · . The Jewish wit and the morose anti-Semite shared a friendship and a compulsion: extreme frankness. When Groucho Marx met T.S. Eliot; For Philip Larkin, letters were a crucible in which to refine his poetry. They were also the venue for airing regrets... I’m sorry that our lovemaking fizzled out
• · · Politics between the sheets. Revolutionaries must be monomaniacal, it’s said. But what is a revolution without sex? Without art? failure ; My brain made me do it. Can neuroscience distinguish between an automatic impulse and a self-directed action? Mike Gazzaniga chooses to weigh the evidence Decoding the Brain’s Cacophony
• · · · Take a clear-eyed look at the book biz. Only two major players, Amazon and Google, are still standing. Everyone else is looking for the best way to go bankrupt..; The great illumination. Streetlights changed everything, a fact not lost on those who prefer the dark: thieves, prostitutes, drunks, students...
• · · · · Hemingway’s later years: Ill health, night terrors. Forgive him anything. He writes like an angel ; Why do we exist? asks Richard Dawkins. Why are we here? For the 70-year-old biologist, a compelling answer: to continue deft battle withm intolerably conventional wisdom
• · · · · · Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. The Internet makes it hard to concentrate. Good, says Cathy Davidson. Disruption and distraction spark innovation and creativity ; Fashion, Kant wrote, belongs “under the heading of folly.” But men, it seems, have always been bemused by catwalk-gazing fashionistas
• · · · · · · Ours is a culture of whateverness: Disbelief trumps belief; opinions, buildings, behavior are trivial curiosities. Enthralled by ephemera, we’ve become idea surfers... ; When Ariel Dorfman fled Chile, he left his library behind. His years of roving were shaped by the books he could not read... Exile and identity

2011-10-13T18:30:00.000+11:00

After two hundred twenty days or seven months around the world, from NY to Mexico Argentina, Bohemian Czech land of Prague, Spain and much much more Gabbie is back to swim the Sydney beaches ;-)

The Power of a mistake
Note from NZ When I started my career at Mary Quant in the 60s I was schooled in the fail fast, learn fast, fix fast, mantra. Lines went from conception to launch to discontinuation at lightning speed; it was a great place to discover the power of a mistake as a way of learning and improving.

In a similar vein Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says he learns more about the human mind when it makes mistakes than he does when everything is working perfectly. Kahneman has been studying intuitive thinking for 40 years, and said this at the start of a recent master class on the science of human nature:
If you want to characterize how something is done, then one of the most powerful ways of characterizing the way the mind does anything is by looking at the errors that the mind produces while it's doing it because the errors tell you what it is doing. Correct performance tells you much less about the procedure than the errors do.
We focused on errors. We became completely identified with the idea that people are generally wrong. We became like prophets of irrationality. We demonstrated that people are not rational. The Power of Failure

2011-10-06T07:07:00.003+11:00

Sitting with my gin or whisky afterwards I would often manage to get into conversation with some lonely man or other--usually an exile like myself--and the talk would be about the world, air-routes and shipping-lines, drinking-places thousands of miles away. Then I felt happy, felt I had come home, because home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment.
Anthony Burgess, The Right to ...

Steve Jobs, Bohemian Revolutionary

He personified his industry in a way few people do today. Not even Bill Gates has the star power of Jobs. Gates is more of a pure businessman (and now philanthrophist), while Jobs always seemed to be the innovator, the rock-star genius revolutionary. Who is the universally recognized person at the head of the American automobile industry? I guess you could say Rex Tillerson at Exxon-Mobil personifies the oil industry, and of course Warren Buffett is ultimate investor. But by and large, corporations and entire industries are faceless, ruled by come-and-go CEOs Tribute to to a guy who created home for many of us - Steve Jobs

Now we know that the presentation was taking place while the company's co-founder, the man who was the inspiration for everything that Apple did, was in his final hours. As the noted blogger Robert Scoble wrote, apologising for his own harsh words about Tuesday's event, that fact must have been known to Tim Cook and his closest colleagues. Think different and follow Robert Scoble admit to mistakes

Steve Dared to Think Different

2011-09-24T21:24:00.001+10:00

The image of Sydney is similar to New York it is a city of a giant switchboard. It is very social in Sydney among the Japanese Canadian Polish friends who stage parties and friends keep introducing you to other friends …
AussieScan is a small Australian company that focuses on nothing but scanning photos, slides and negatives. We can scan 35mm, medium format and large format negatives and transparencies Jeff

The Grief of Others The Art of Struggle - A Short Life and Its Consequences
There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft - The Kite Runner

Even at their moments of most intense grief, Cohen does not allow her characters to plunge into self-pity. She has faith in their resilience; or rather, she finds the bedrock of resilience beneath swampier emotions. Sometimes the very sources of guilt and shame — acts the individual would wish undone — are the means of building a bridge back to the trust and affection that have always lain under sadness. For all its deep-seated sorrows, this is a hopeful book, a series of striking vignettes illuminating the humanity of these. fully realized characters

• Sometimes i can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives i'm not living - 7 Revolting Things About American Culture Amerika [The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture\The Wrong Side ; The poems are transparent (they need no mediation), yet they tantalise the reader with glimpses of an impenetrable self: so much yearning, so much debility; an eros that self-thwarts and self-finesses ]
• · And into the brown paper bag of my heart, Eddy slipped a smile. - from The River Why by David James Duncan. The book weighs profit and loss in terms of past and present, social and political developments. But its emotional core is in 'private grief / or private fears,' its struggle to reconcile an inner life with external pressures. Profit and Loss - private grief / or private fears ; You can still rely on Media Dragons for a reality check Cold River invented a poetry for its tale ; "You gotta look beyond, beyond the border to understand the history of your country Interview with CS Giscombe
• · · Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are the opposite. When they finally know you they're ready to leave - J Salter - Such is the danger of first books, and the first poems therein: high expectations. Onward John Beer! Leave these barren fields, cropped and rotated to extinction. There are verdancies ahead that you and we have yet undreamt of. I can see a forest for Some Trees ; Stopping everything is something. Stopping everything and stopping all of that thing is something. Stopping everything and then doing nothing in stopping everything is something
• · · · So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselesly into the past - The Great Gatsby,Nick on resilience = I do not write memoirs. I do not write novels. I do not write short stories. I do not write plays. I do not write poems. I do not write mysteries. I do not write science fiction. I write fragments. I do not tell stories from things I’ve read or movies I’ve seen, I describe impressions, I make judgments. The modern man I sing - When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue; D]espite a love for teaching his students, their generation is not living up to the radical attitude his own almost took for granted. But nevertheless, there is a feeling of bathos. Of sorts an ode to possibility, The Poetry Lesson unfortunately leaves the reader feeling a little deflated. Entertained, yes, and wiser, for sure. But not exactly inspired
• · · · · "[Vasko] Popa thus offers us poetry that does something, that believes in an active language whose intention derives not from an author but from the power of words themselves, simultaneously avowed and disavowed in the impossible exactitude of the curse: ‘God give you a gold coin weighing a ton, so you can’t carry it or spend it, but have to sit beside it begging The Golden Apple: A Round of Stories, Songs, Spells, Proverbs and Riddles ; "[In L.A.] it felt like all the waiters and waitresses were on stage, waiting to be discovered—the smiles were megawatt but skin deep, and attempts at conversation often swayed very swiftly to auditions A Trunk Full of Random T-Shirts
• · · · · · "Freedom is what [Álvaro de] Campos seeks: ‘No! All I want is freedom!/ Love, glory, money – they’re prisons’, he exclaims in an untitled poem from 1930; and freedom is also what the heteronym bestows on [Fernando] Pessoa himself." Unlike a pseudonym, or an anonym, the heteronym is a wholly fabricated persona ; One has the sense of [Arthur] Rimbaud stringing together some of his favorite words to create in a breath a sense of rapturous identity. How does one become a genie? By making love to one.

2011-09-21T21:18:00.003+10:00

Happy Birthday Ruby

Although our hearts ache that we no longer experience the daily joy of living in the same house with our kids, we are comforted by Ecclesiastes 3:1:
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.

Gabriella is in Praha - Prague - this week with my sisters and the rest of the family and my army days come back to haunt me as I was 19 like Gabbie when I was forced to serve 2 years of compulsory service. Many thanks to Janka, Lydka, Gitka and one and all at the good old Czechoslovakia for looking after my muse ;-)

Memories of Cold River Flows Prague’s Bad Dream
THE WEB SITE FOR Prague’s Museum of Communism instructs visitors to make their way to No. 10 on Na Prikope in the heart of the city:

We are above the McDonalds and next to the Casino.” Against these flashy consequences of the Velvet Revolution, the museum itself has a cramped, grubby feeling appropriate to the four decades of Czech life that it memorializes. During my Sunday-afternoon visit, I need to crane my neck over someone’s shoulder to read the display panels, and have to wait in a slow-moving line to reach the de rigueur piece of the Berlin Wall at the exhibit’s end. If for example, a girl received 20 dollars from a foreigner for a night of love-making, she could exchange it in the state bank for about one hundred and sixty Tuzex crowns, which she could sell on the black market for 800 Czechoslovak crowns, which equaled the monthly wages of a shop assistant

Bizarre story from Gabbie from Berlin where the police and British consul staff are trying to identify an English-speaking teenager who says he lived in German woods with his father for five years
• Postcard from an awakened city ...; [Lloyd Evans Tara FitzGerald’s beauty is fabulous. Literally, there’s something unworldly about the surfaces and contours of her face. It’s as if the codes of her biology had been transmitted to earth Out of this world; The brilliant foreignness of Australian crime fiction. It is a rare crime novel that doesn’t seem better in the first part, when we are still trying to find our bearings. Perhaps we want to feel the way we did as children, when the genre was so much more thrilling for being slightly over our heads. This is the good thing about Australian crime fiction: as an American, you are never completely at home in it. True, the suburban backdrops appear very familiar, and on the printed page the Australian variant of English is almost identical to our own. But the characters in these novels behave much more differently from Americans than do the Swedes in those Stieg Larsson books, and this never stops feeling odd. Among male friends an intensity of joshing camaraderie is in evidence that even our frat boys would find stifling. At first I chalked this up to over-imitation of Hollywood films, only to read in The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature that the Sunburnt Country has a true-life tradition of especially tight-knit “mateship.” Not for nothing did Australian prisoners in Japanese POW camps survive at a higher rate than American ones. Most other characters in these novels interact with a reflexive prickliness, and that includes husbands and wives; there is a constant effect of chips on shoulders. Stephen Knight, the leading expert on his country’s crime fiction, talks of “drily aggressive wit” without explaining the aggression itself. Down Underworld]
• · Our obsession with musical nostalgia is strangling pop. Nostalgia is now thoroughly entwined with the consumer-entertainment complex. We feel pangs for the products of yesteryear, the novelties and distractions that filled up our youth … The passage of our time has become indexed to the procession of rapidly obsolescing fads, fashions, celebrity careers et al. Has pop culture, uh, stopped? Why do the major musical developments of the past decade include Guitar Hero, reunion tours, hip karaoke, the rise of the tribute band, pop stars made entirely from bits of other pop stars, and Van Morrison re-performing Astral Weeks? Lady Gaga, bless her radical retro soul, is Cher after three weeks in Warhol’s Factory. Cee Lo is Motown with swearing. This month, even as Roger Waters breaks temporarily from his transglobal plod-through of Pink Floyd’s 32-year-old rock opera, The Wall, Roger Daltrey sallies forth with a production of The Who’s 42-year-old rock opera, Tommy. One salutes the unkillability of these gentlemen, one reveres their work, but, honestly. And wherefore this pile of rock docs and rock bios, these waves of compulsive historicization? The Making of Frampton Comes Alive! … The Making of The Making of Frampton Comes Alive! … The Making of The Making of The Making of Frampton Comes Alive! … Everything Old; Evil and us. Sloppy historical analogies, amateurish psychological speculations, oversimplifications, tired moral platitudes – we’ve gotten evil all wrong Evildoers and Us: The open secret: Everyone does something illegal
• · · Marvellous mashup - great literature and 80’s pop music! Long live the 80’s ; Klassikal Kozak of my Czechosloval Army days Alexander Lebedev, Russian owner of the Independent, lashes out at property tycoon Sergei Polonsky ; Marx was wrong: Capitalism, not communism, killed the bourgeoisie. Now there’s no escaping the mercurial market forces. Prepare for further upheaval A Point of View: The revolution of capitalism

2011-09-16T07:21:00.003+10:00

Compassion is something individual and voluntary. You cannot compel somebody to be compassionate; nor can you be vicariously compassionate by compelling somebody else. The Good Samaritan would have lost all merit if a Roman soldier were standing by the road with a drawn sword, telling him to get on with it and look after the injured stranger.
-Enoch Powell, Still to Decide

Outback Australia: “if you know Bourke, you know Australia” so wrote the famous Australian poet Henry Lawson in 1882. Art has a privileged status in the production of symbols of national identity even at Bondi Iceberg... A number of artists today look at the outback country and the life of the small inland town(s) with an entirely new eye. Behind their pictorial observations on the drovers, the rabbiters and the small selectors of the drought-stricken areas of the west is a seriousness of purpose that has brought home to us for the first time in paint a side of our country and people that unfortunately is too little understood and realised by the town dwellers, and up to now was not thought worthy of being put on canvas. Belinda Williams (not related to RM Williams) is one of the rare artists who is able to transport us back to Kakadu; Katherine, Kings Canyon corner of those breathtaking antipodean landscape Not so long ago, about the time Media Dragon invaded The Lake Eyre, Belinda was involved in a wonderful Australian project, Utes in the Paddock. “Utes in the Paddock” is the brainchild of Graham and Jana Pickles, graziers whose passion for the outback led them to start a Dorper Sheep Stud on their historic cattle station Burrawang West at Ootha near Condobilin. Each artist was presented with a Holden ute as our canvas, and Belinda created DrizAkubra. The outback is a never ending source of inspiration which continues to feed my desire to portray this element of the Australian countryside and community.
-Those who love Australia and the Antipodeans such as Media Dragon and Mal find their feelings reflected in the bold, sincere and deeply human records Bel has made of the landscape and its inhabitants, black and white.

2011-09-15T07:05:00.000+10:00

Happy Birthday Olek - Every culture has its coming-of-age rituals. A child is inducted into the adult realm through a transformative experience, whether it's becoming more steeped in religion or killing a deer or having a vision Coming of Age at Sweet 16

Anyone with a Blogger account and an interesting angle has the capacity to generate content and cultivate a sizeable following. As a result of this trend in developing personal digital brands through blogs and social media sites, there has been a shift in the types of new authors that publishing companies are seeking. No longer is the sole requisite for garnering a book deal simply a unique idea; individuals must bring their own leverageable audience to the table, whether through a social media fanbase on Twitter of Facebook, or through followers of a content site like a personal blog. This has had the effect of both widening and narrowing the types of individuals able to successfully attract publishing agencies.... Books will always be great branding tools, positioning an expert with potential to be a household name, but the rules have changed and a new marketing paradigm is taking precedent; social media experts with high volume platforms are fueling book deals How Successful New Authors Are Branding Themselves Through MEdia Dragons and Social Media

Cirque du Soleil’s Zarkana, which recently opened at Radio City Music Hall June 29, offered a “blogger” performance on July 20. The creative team is looking for “trend-setting bloggers who like theater, entertainment and/or New York cultural events” to attend a special performance of the new acrobatic spectacle A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
Mass murder and the Internet
You can ignore jihad, but you cannot avoid the consequences of ignoring jihad. That was the first reaction of American anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller to news of the terror attacks in Norway. When it turned out the mass murderer was an anti-Islamic terrorist, whose 1,500-page online manifesto was replete with material from anti-Islam writers such as her, she shrugged: “He’s a bloody murderer. Period. He is responsible for his actions. He and only he. There was no ‘ideology’ here.”

Bruce Bawer, the Oslo-based American author of a jeremiad about the Muslim takeover of Europe, was more thoughtful. Noting that Mr. Breivik, in his manifesto, quotes approvingly and at length from my work, mentioning my name 22 times, Mr. Bawer reflects, with decent dismay: It is chilling to think that blog entries that I composed in my home in west Oslo over the last couple of years were being read and copied out by this future mass murderer in his home in west Oslo.

• Online, you can easily find the thousand other people who share your perverted views ; [Yale's 'World Fellows' program a melting pot of elites. A Tunisian cyberdissident and a Russian blogger may not appear to have much in common, but they were brought together at Yale University in a program drawing elites from around the globe ; The agony of originality. Four thousand years ago, an Egyptian writer lamented his stale prose: “Would I had phrases that are not known.” If he was late to the party, what about us Heart Like a Wheel -The agony of originality; Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure. - Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice Blogger discovers whole fake Apple Stores in China ]
• · Blogger who chronicles every outfit becomes internet sensation - Poppy Dinsey sports everything from designer dresses to bikinis and pyjamas and now has so many clothes that her bedroom looks ‘more like a warehouse’ What I wore today ; Style Wax Poetic is a Los Angeles based blog written by Kristen Cohahan, which covers the latest in trends, fashion and music. According to her site, Style Wax Poetic was inspired to exist from the romanticized notion of fashion being a true art form of expression Style Wax Poetic
• · · Is it possible for a play to be so well known that there's no longer anything new to do with it or say about it? Yeah, sure. The plague of publishing these days is to mistake ubiquity for significance Knotted: How the Necktie Changed the World ; Big rejection numbers in publishing are not important. Big numbers in general are not important. No, the number to worry about is one. One. That's how many sentences you have to impress an agent or editor. Step aside, Dale Peck. When it comes to sheer brutishness, no book critic compares to John Wilson Croker, who wrote the review that killed John Keats. I've found out why people laugh. They laugh 'cause it hurts... 'cause it's only thing that'll make it stop hurting
• · · · The patent war. Nathan Myhrvold is a polymath with a knack for making money. Is his latest venture a shakedown of Silicon Valley?.. When Patents Attack; The politics of yuck. Sewage on a hot day is simply gross. Disgust, however, is actually quite complex. In fact, it’s dangerous... The politics of yuck
• · · · · "What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person." — John Green (Paper Towns) ;. We spend billions to live longer, yet give little thought to how to live longer, better. Here comes the silver tsunami.. Aging and innovation
• · · · · · The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads. — John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath) Umberto Eco is fascinated by fallibility. His vast personal library includes the works of the errant Ptolemy, not the accurate Galileo Open Book: This is Not the End of the Book ; Teachers in Central Bucks schools could face strict new rules about what they can, and cannot, post online. The proposed policy comes after one teacher made national headlines for posting very controversial comments about her students. District looks at social media policy in wake of blogging teacher scandal

2011-09-10T07:21:00.000+10:00

Happy Birthday Sasha ...

Not Just another Birthday,
But quite a grand event,
And here, to greet you, Twenty-One,
These wishes are now sent..
May happiness go with you,
May all your hopes come true,
And in the most delightful ways
May life be good to you!
Happy 21st!!

21st birthday celebrations

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
- Mark Twain, the New Shelton wet/dry

Let’s speak frankly, says Slavoj Žižek. The left hates me even though I am supposed to be one of the leading communist intellectuals A life in writing: Slavoj Žižek

The Spirit Is Willing, and So Is the Flesh The politics of self-immolation
Mohamed Bouazizi, Thích Quảng Đức, Jan Palach: Their willingness to die offers a repulsive and fascinating lesson in how to live

ORDINARILY, POLITICS is very much about living bodies—bodies assembled or scattered, hungry or well-fed, bodies migrating or accommodated. In a world without bodies, there would be no politics, and no need for them. Under extraordinary circumstances, however, a dying body comes to perform political functions that a living one cannot even dream of. In such cases, the sheer act of dying can generate among those who witness it an uncanny mix of awe, repulsion, and fascination, which could be best described as a form of power. A naked readiness to die—that’s something that defies human understanding, as well as our basic instincts. Thanks to the voluntary nature of their death, to their commitment to doing something that only very few of us would do, the performers of such acts somehow envelope themselves in an aura of election and transcendence. These people gladly trample on whatever makes human life possible: survival instincts, self-protection impulses, and fear of death. In so doing, the performers of voluntary death come to inhabit a territory where other rules apply and a different logic operates. And it is from there that some of them, like the Tunisian self-immolator Mohamed Bouazizi, come to dominate our imagination, win over our hearts, and, sometimes, even shape our lives.

• A Light for the Future: On the Political Uses of a Dying Body; [Inside the vision for the largest library in history A bookshelf the size of the world ; He lives every moment of his life to the fullest, so overusing the word ‘literally’ seemed like a Good character fit ]
• · arlier this month a blog post called 'Why I quit my job' written by CTV reporter Kai Nagata went viral. That blog was much more gracious than the one written by the Whole Foods employee, but it still touched some sore spots. In it, Mr. Nagata criticizes the state of Canadian TV journalism, including Sun TV and Conservative politics. He expresses his frustration with the fact that he wasn't allowed to express personal opinions as a reporter and said he now wants his opinions back. He ends it with writing: I'm broke, and yet I know I'm rich in love. I'm unemployed and homeless, but I've never been more free. Everything is possible. To quit your job with maximum drama, blog about it How the age of Google has accelerated the assault on the public sphere - It's rare that anything of substance comes out of the Aspen Ideas Festival, that annual orgy of techno-triumphalism and political self-seriousness, the bastard child of Davos and TED. But something odd happened when Eric Schmidt, until recently the CEO of Google, appeared at the high-powered mogul gathering in 2009 to speak about Google and the future of the American economy Search and Destroy The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) ; White collar crime will be on the rise thanks to M Thru F and legal loopholes
• · · Drugs, sex, exercise – all tickle the brain’s pleasure circuits What doesn’t? ; What do their books reveal about feminism today What is feminism? "Simply the belief that women should be as free as men . . . Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are
• · · · Adventures in fandom. Opera is too often dismissed as out of touch, an elitist obsession of the wealthy. It’s that, of course, and so much more.. The Sopranos ; The old cliché is true: One person’s trash may be another person’s treasure. But let’s be serious: Thomas Kinkade’s cloying, dew-kissed paintings are, quite unambiguously, trash Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall ; Blog for the RepRap project at www.reprap.org - a project to create an open-source self- copying 3D printer
• · · · ·Dan Savage is out to save marriage. His pitch: Monogamy destroys families; infidelity can save them ; Married, With Infidelities ; What happens in the brain when we experience a panic attack?; In both "Friends With Benefits" (currently playing) and the previously released "No Strings Attached," casual sex is anything but casual Casual Sex: Is It Worth It? ; Ski resorts around the globe are a seething pit of sex, love and lies, and that's just the seasonal staff at ski school. Seasonal workers are a sure-fire way to get your heart broken, as the snow melts they're on their way with a "I love you but the season's over" line that's worn around the edges Sex, lies and love at the snow
• · · · · · Looking for love? There is powerful software for that ; After this memory I thought, “I don't want to be loved because I'm rich and famous. I just want to be loved.” I realized that if people only loved me ... Almost Famous: Re-thinking Being a Famous ADHDer, Part I

2011-09-08T19:07:00.004+10:00

Media Dragon have been married four years today. Time flies fast and if we think of it, as it still feels like we still deserve Just Married ... stickers
Traditionally the fourth year wedding anniversary is signified by fruits or flowers. They are meant to symbolize a blossoming and fruitful relationship. For the fourth wedding anniversary, the traditional anniversary gift symbols are fruits and flowers

2011-08-11T18:31:00.014+10:00

Based in Katherine in the Northern Territory since 2000 Top Didj holds something for everyone. FiDj stocks an extensive selection of Aboriginal paintings from the wider regions of Katherine and beyond. We were impressed with the Cultural Experience in its two-hour activities. We loved the way Manuel and Adriene both are part of Desert and Top End Aboriginal culture and we were able to ask questions about their culture whilst being educated on the significance of their painting depictions, weapons used and how they lived off the land. The highlight of the Cultural Experience and what sets it apart from other cultural experiences, is the painting styles which are demonstrated by the Aboriginal artists. We had the opportunity to complete a painting of our own. The artists, Manuel and Adriene, taught us how to paint such styles as cross-hatching and dot painting, which are famous in the Northern Territory. Manuel signed our dijireedoo Top Didj

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Aboriginal Art - The Time Traveller Nitmiluk aka (Katherine Gorge)
There's nothing like immersing yourself in the tranquility of such a wonderful place, and taking in the reflections and ambiance after a refreshing swim.

This entry is also a way of expressing Media Dragon's appreciation for the service and accommodations we received at Nitmiluk on 10 and 11 August 2011.
We have traveled extensively throughout the NSW. Queensland and Northern Territory...
Comparing to some of the accommodation in other states everything at the Nitmiluk was excellent! The staff at the front desk were warm, as well as courteous, responsive and helpful.

The dinner cruise was outstanding - all staff greeted and treated us on a personal basis and were prompt, courteous, and helpful; especially when they managed to deliver burrumundi in order to meet Mal's special requirements as slamon is something she cannot eat ... Rocky was on a day off but jumped on a boat and delivered a wonderful feast to the first Katherine Gorge where we were watching the sunset ... Housekeeping at the lodge and chalets were just above our expectations as we have stayed in the past at luxury accommodation be it nunneries, manors,headmistress cotages and we have never come across such happy and easy going staff ...

• One of the main Australia tourist attractions is of course the Australian Outback itself. But the Outback is a huge place. Most of the Australian continent could be classified as Outback. If you want to see "the great Australian Outback" you will have to focus on one part of it, you can't see it all... Endless Appreciation ; [Images of Art ;Dine under the stars in the tranquil surroundings of Katherine Museum. Watch the wallabies and hear the local wildlife in the surroundings reminiscent of an outback stockman's camp Camp Tucker ]
• · It is a loooong drive from Sydney to Darwin. We foud the drive itself attractive: the endless horizon, the sense of space and freedom, the everchanging landscape, the slow change from red desert interior to lush, green tropics... But not everybody agrees. It is a long drive, and there is not much on the way in terms of fauna and flora and storytelling ... Nothing compares to the thrill and adventure which is experienced meeting this hulk of the horizon which is so lone and impressive at Tatranka - also known as Mataranka where you will bathe in hot springs, and from there it's only 105 km to Katherine and one of my favourite attractions in Australia: Katherine Gorge. Northern Territory is recognized as real Australia ;To all croc and eagle seekers! If you want to see guaranteed crocodiles, the place to head is Yellow Waters and Ubir. Walkabout with Natasha - Bill's Ganddaughter
• · · Outback, mountains, jungle and scrubby outback-Australia is flat, it's vertical, it's soaking wet and bone dry. Choose the mainland or sail between any of 12,000 islands. ; Many of Australia's journeys bring you closer to the world's oldest culture. Having read a few books related to Aboriginal people and their culture-and having been highly fascinated, I was curious to interact with the native people. It's estimated that their culture and way of life has existed without outside influence for anywhere from 10,000 to 60,000 years, depending on different expert speculation. That blows me away, especially in this day and age. Arrival of the Europeans, especially the British colonists, in the late 1700's wrought havoc and decimation to a great number of Aboriginals. Who says all humans need to be brought into the 21st century? I find their culture beautiful and extremely harmonious with the flow of the natural world. Modern society has a lot to learn from many of their ways. Unfortunately, our superior attitude and lack of respect for those different from us stunts our ability to grasp the messages others are here to teach us. Australia's Red Center
• · · · From deserted islands to actual deserts, you'll find the perfect backdrop for romance in Australia.; DREAMTIME
• · · · · Waterfalls and Crocodiles! ; The seasons in Australia’s “Top End” come in two distinct flavors: torrential wet and mud-cracking dry. Teeming with wildlife, you’ll find 60 species of mammals including kangaroos, wombats, dingoes, possum, bats and dusky rats. The Park is also famous for its reptiles like the awesome and dangerous Australian Saltwater crocodiles (salties) that patrol many of the Park’s waterways. Watch for large monitor lizards (goannas) and colorful frill-necked lizards, too. ; Healing the past will not be achieved by alienating others. Invasion or arrival?; THE COW STARES AT ME AND I STARE BACK. Finally this huge example of a Brahman decides to move, and I'm grateful. Grateful that it's going to amble off the road and grateful that I didn't hit its bovine bulk at 100km/h. On this remote far north Queensland road, the results could have been catastrophic. Fortunately I've been warned, as graphic road signs alert me to the dangers of cars meeting cows head-on. On this part of the Savannah Way between Cairns and Karumba, the main dangers are cattle, kangaroos and the 50-metre-long road trains. NRMA Inspires Many People

Bill's Granddaghter, Natasha, who has some Scandinavian background:

2011-08-09T23:40:00.001+10:00

Australia: Red in the centre, blue on the outside with a ribbon of gold in between. And enough thrills and spills to turn any experience into a blockbuster. Whether that be trekking through the rugged heart of the Outback or exploring its never-ending coastline.
No adventure to the Red Centre is complete without a self-drive trek to the most famous rock in the world. Known to you and I as Ayers Rock, the legend of Uluru dates back 20,000 years, and what better way to go around it than on a camel? It’s most beautiful at dawn, but dinner at Uluru accompanied by the rock’s spectacular light show is simply awe-inspiring Epic adventures in high definition ; Wet, wild, wonderful ; Show-off croc likes to pig out

Wet, Wild, Wonderful FEAST FOR THE SENSES
Featuring running waterholes , rainforest canopies and exotic wildlife, the second day takes the agents to Australia's largest National Park - Kakadu. As some agents quiz Ted on the meaning of the Aboriginal art enshrined on the passing rock faces, others venture towards the Ubirr lookout to prepare for another glorious sunset. As the day draws to a close at the Gagadju Crocodile Holiday Inn - the only resort in the area - the agents exchange photographs before indulging in another feast of local produce and retiring to their cosy apartments to recharge for a final day of sightseeing in the Katherine Gorge.

As the agents wipe the sleep from their eyes for the early morning start, Ted explains how each Inspiring Journeys adventure is based on the four pillars of discovery, exploration, learning and relaxation. As the coach ploughs across the floodplains en route to our final destination, the agents agree they've explored and learned, and have no doubt the relaxation element is well and truly covered. The discovery element becomes apparent as we arrive at the Edith Falls shortly afterwards. Some agents opt for a short wander among the greenery, while others make the most of a final opportunity to have quick dip before the finale to the trip - a sunset dinner cruise along Katherine Gorge. As the boat gently chugs through crocodile infested waters, past towering sandstone cliffs, agents chuckle among their newfound friends and another delicious meal makes its way to the table. Cradling glasses of chilled wine, they share their experiences of the short journey and the tales they will choose to share with their clients. The general consensus was that the scenery, wildlife and dazzling sunsets were worthy of a mention, along with Ted's tantalising tales and broad grin. All of these, it was agreed, would whet the appetite of their clients.
Whatever the verdict, the agents were convinced Ted's warm character would continue to entertain many more travellers into the future as he leads from the front seat of the Inspiring Journeys bus.

• Inspiring Journeys ; [ NT Holidays: ; The Territory.com.au: ; Tourism Top End: ; Darwin City Council: ; Northern Territory Holidays: ]
• · It has been a cold and frosty start to the day across much of southern Queensland, with the mercury plummeting to almost minus 4 degrees Celsius in Roma and minus 3 degrees in Dalby and Oakey Charleville ; Roma ; Shivers

• · · At a fabulous party at the Aviation Institute last night, Festival Artistic Director Jo Duffy launched a fascinatingly diverse Darwin Festival program 11 – 28 August Festival ; This year’s program sets the scene for a sensational dry season of arts and culture with Jessica Mauboy in her first ever solo show in her hometown, the return of the wonderfully seductive Meow Meow, lively, feel good pop-rockers Little Red, dark, funny, risqué circus treats from Strut & Fret’s Cantina, US funny man Arj Barker, the simply stunning Drags Aloud with the Sistagirls, ultimate organ salesman and showman Barry Morgan, Jason De Santis’ mischievous and inventive pantomime Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui and auditory delights from ACO2’s Bach and Schubert ; Darwin is arguably Australia's most cosmopolitan city, boasting a population made up of people from more than 60 nationalities and 70 different ethnic backgrounds. Darwin's traditional owners, the Larrakia people, are prominent and active members of the community, and many still adhere closely to their traditional beliefs and customs Visiting Darwin ; On the job compo taken to new level: worker hurt during sex in hotel -An Australian government employee injured while having sex during a work trip has taken her fight for worker's compensation to the Federal CourT. The lawyer representing a woman who was injured while she was having sex in a hotel room during a work trip in rural NSW says his client was undertaking "normal behaviour" akin to bathing or sleeping and is entitled to compensation On the job compo taken to new level: worker hurt during sex in hotel‎
• · · · Eremita's Great Adventure Mataranka is a one-street town with a population of 400. The biggest attraction is the Mataranka Hot Springs Hot Springs in Mataranka ; Fran of Fran’s Devonshire Teahouse/defunct police station & jail renown (needless to say there was no such listing and all my entreaties to the operator that in a town of two residences and 6 - 8 people – she could not be too hard to locate, unfortunately went unheeded) Fran

2011-08-08T00:47:00.001+10:00

Steve on socializing banking - The book serves as a guide to executing innovation and reinvigorating the business of banking.

As social media use has become ubiquitous, industries have been hard at work determining how to best take advantage of the often-frequented social network communities. With Facebook at over 500 million active users, Twitter processing over 155 million tweets per day and LinkedIn with over 100 million registered professionals, it is no wonder organizations are looking for ways to leverage what social networks bring - people.

2011-07-31T20:03:00.002+10:00

Theatre is like politics; it's the theatre of the possible.
-Media Dragon

My hallmark as a writer has always been Faulkner's statement, from his Nobel Prize speech, where he said, 'the human heart in conflict with itself is the only thing worth writing about:

The gender stuff is just furniture. You can have a science fiction story with aliens and starships, you can have a mystery story about a private eye walking the mean streets, you can have a fantasy story with dragons and kings and sword fights, but ultimately any of these genres or the other genres are all about the human heart in conflict with itself. That's what makes fiction worth reading.
Time magazine said watching Game of Thrones ''is like falling into a gorgeous, stained tapestry … [that] takes our preconceptions of chivalry, nobility and magic and gets mediaeval on them.'' Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times's Mary McNamara wrote that the series ''finds that rare alchemy of action, motivation and explanation, proving, once again, that the epic mythology remains the Holy Grail of almost any medium''. McNamara has since qualified her enthusiasm with a call for the show's producers to ''tone down the tits'', feeling that much of the nudity in Thrones was becoming gratuitous.

None of it is gratuitous in Martin's eyes. Asked if Thrones and its companion novels are significantly darker than most fantasy, which trends as a genre towards wish fulfilment, he turns to the classics. ''If you go back and look at Tolkien, the master of them all, there's definite darkness in Lord of the Rings,'' he says. ''There's a sadness to it, the passing of an age, the elves are leaving, magic is dying, these kingdoms of men are fading. There's a sort of twilight sensibility … It's not all happiness and dancing in the moonlight. Things have been lost … I responded to those elements, even when I read it at 13.''

The author, who has been famously cursed with the title of the American Tolkien, has an instinctual distrust of conventional happy endings, and the banality of black-and-white characters.

''All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. I don't think I'm a misanthrope, or gloomy. I think love and friendship are very important parts of what make life worth living. There is room for happiness.

''But that having been said, there are some basic truths. One of them is that death waits for all of us at the end … Another is the existential loneliness that we all suffer. While we interact with other human beings, we can never really know them.
''I think these things, that we feel on some deep instinctual level, make us feel the resonances in fiction.'' hese are not mere words. Martin is hard on his characters and his readers. His books are a dangerous world where nobody, not even your favourite hero, is safe. The tragic looms constantly in his work and millions of viewers, unfamiliar with the books, have now been subjected to those signature George Martin moments when watching Game of Thrones, the moment when that character you have come to love and cannot possibly imagine being lost, dies horribly, screaming.
Tragedy, he says, has always got more respect than comedy

2011-07-29T19:56:00.001+10:00

They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.
-Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Book Cover Love)

Does Facebook spell the end of human interaction as we know it? Or is it just bad news for psychics, dating services, and women’s magazines? Henry Alford hopes some of Mark Zuckerberg’s romance-spotting superpower will rub off on the rest of us.

Get Outta River 'Where the River and Dogs Runs
It is no exaggeration to say that Trixie was the hand of God for Koontz. He recounts his difficult childhood, his dysfunctional father, and the many challenges that he had to overcome on the road to becoming a world-famous novelist. But with that fame came commercial caution: telling stories in the same old familiar way and a consequent dulling of his creativity.

Like all great writers, Koontz has the ability to transform the ordinary--his daily life with Trixie--into the funny, the moving, and the sublime. Trixie’s accidentally gashing him while they play fetch turns into one of the great set pieces of medical comedy as Koontz ends up in the emergency room with a lacerated hand. On another occasion Trixie’s saying “baw” for “ball”--straining to say it, but saying it nonetheless--becomes a memorable recounting of all of our attempts to communicate with beings from another species. And Koontz’s simply watching Trixie move, her lithe golden body shimmering and flashing in the sun, takes on the quality of the divine as he expresses what so many of us have subconsciously thought about our own dogs: “The more I watched her, the more she seemed to be an embodiment of that greatest of all graces we now and then glimpse, from which we intuitively infer the hand of God.”
Then came Trixie. With “baws” and balls, with warning him of fires and intruders in the house, with humor, with stoicism, and with unflinching love, she restored his diminished sense of wonder and impelled him toward taking new risks with narratives, themes, and characters, the very ones millions of us now enjoy.“Some dog, huh?” he says. “Some dog, yes,” we must agree, also concurring when he adds, “The only significant measure of your life is the positive effect you have on others.” For all of us who have had our lives made better by our dogs, or for that matter by any loving being, A Big Little Life is a welcome reminder of the power of love to turn our hearts into mirrors, reflecting compassion back into the universe--as Trixie most surely did for Koontz and Koontz now does for us.

• Trixie ; [Like Bessie of Cold River fame, Trixie is unique. She is a literary dog Two Girls ; Cold River tells the oldest story in the world, a story familiar to anyone who has read the Old Testament, Greek myths, or Shakespeare's tragedies. It's the story of full-force collision between an older generation's best intentions and a younger generation's intractable resistance ]
• · Faye Dunaway had a great line in the movie Chinatown. She said:
I don’t get tough. My lawyers do ; The economic blog Naked Capitalism has a fascinating post looking at some breathtakingly murky company business, in an investigation, via Panama, of New Zealand. We have known about New Zealand's role as a secrecy jurisdiction for some time, but have not yet researched it in any detail. That time will be coming soon enough. Before reading that post, take a look at this company registered at 9/22 Curran Street (pictured): Trillion Private Wealth Management Ltd. What does it offer? Well, for one thing, "protecting" your assets
• · · 10 Worst Horrible Movie bosses!; The death of News of the World is Rupert Murdoch’s current big trouble — but just the latest in decades of big trouble that haven’t noticeably harmed him. While his current scrape may look bad at first glance, chances are good he’ll escape unscathed yet again It's like Al Capone getting caught for extortion instead of tax fraud Welcome to the world of Nineteen Eighty Four: The U.K. scandal and Australia Is an independent inquiry and an independent regulator needed in Australia? In his brilliant novel Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell depicts a nightmare world of the future. The State is all-powerful
• · · · Simon Johnson, a leading U.S.-based intellectual, has written an excellent piece in the New York Times with the above headline. It concerns an issue we've written about several times in the past: that the tax system in many countries has encouraged a bias towards debt, rather than equity financing. The resulting indebtedness made the financial system more dangerous, and we are now finding out the consequences of this. The simple reason is that borrowing is, in many cases, tax-deductible, whereas equity financing is not. So instead of raising money through the stock market, say, they borrow it. And banks, of course, are among those over-borrowers. And this creates risks to society - a form of economic pollution. Johnson notes:
It is also ironic — perhaps even bizarre — that while we try to constrain how much banks borrow through regulation, we give them strong incentives to borrow more through the tax code ; What is your local or regional council doing?
• · · · · Inspiration ; Gooogle Loove ; Ah
• · · · · · I don’t know of any history of pulp fiction publishing in Australia in the sixties and early seventies 80s yes; The planet's booming population is a mega trend reshaping everything. Over coming decades our growing presence and rampant appetite for resources will shake up every form of life on earth. Writing for The Guardian, Robert Engelman paints a grim picture of what population acceleration means for the planet... Population Acceleration

2011-07-27T09:36:00.001+10:00

Money brings some happiness.
But after a certain point, it just brings more money.
-- Neil Simon

Tomorrow stared_ I can not afford to love Sydney
I give you private information on corporations for free, and I'm a villain ... Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money, and he's Man of the Year. Villain ; Man of the Year
- Julian Assange

Me fail? I fly! Read Annandale Blog Invest responsibly Hit the bottle of Cold River
Another great blog which deserves a wider audience in Annandale, Sydney Australia the world ….
Antony Beevor visited Sydney for the Writers’ Festival in 2007. His talk was interesting, and it evoked high-quality audience questions that came from a whole world of War History geekiness previously unknown to me. Although he’d recently published a book about the Spanish Civil War, it was Stalingrad that generated the serious senior fanboy passion.

We bought the book not much later, but didn’t start reading it until July 2008. Now here we are, in mid 2011 and it’s done! Notice I said ‘we’. The reason I took longer to read the book than Anthony Beevor took to write it is that I read it exclusively on long car rides, aloud to my regular driver, usually known on this blog as The Art Student. Apart from the reading being disrupted by our lamentable failure to do much travelling by car in the last three years (two return trips to Canberra, perhaps one southward, and just now north to Red Rock and surrounds), it was an excellent way to read this book.
The wonderful Barbara Ehrenreich said on her blog recently, ‘War has been, and we still expect it to be, the most massive collective project human beings undertake.’ Having just read about the sheer logistics of attack and counter-attack, siege and counter-siege at Stalingrad, I can only say, ‘True, that!’ ‘But,’ Barbara Ehrenreich continued, ‘it has been evolving quickly in a very different direction, one in which human beings have a much smaller role to play.’ If that’s so, we can only be glad of it. The human participants in Stalingrad endured almost unbelievable extremes of cold and hunger: men literally dropped dead from hunger, wounded soldiers froze to death by the cartload. They performed acts of understandable but almost unimaginable cruelty and callousness:

• Jonathan Shaw ; A tribute to a character who was a gracious presence in Annandale, and created a good bit of the visual environment for generations of Australians. Arthur Boothroyd [ Popular ; Media; Search; News ]
• · When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress - The potential of human action to do good and evil is larger than it has ever been before. We might even be able to change human nature itself Perfection Is Not A Useful Concept ; I've worked with some serious slackers over the years. People who just could not, or would not, concentrate on the job they were being paid to do How Low Could Adrian eLBow?
• · · RARELY has Somerset Maugham's description of Monaco as 'a sunny place for shady people' seemed more apt ..." Ach, like many other Australian sport stars: Bernard Tomic will make a move to the fiscal paradise of Monaco … Tax havens are an affront against our sense of justice. It is unconscionable that the European Union accepts open tax dodging within its borders. Politicians are, at best, resorting to hand wringing. The highly publicized resolution of the G20 nations in 2009 has barely scratched the surface. Fairness is the most important and most elusive quality of taxation. Tax evasion is a clear breach of solidarity … and it was solidarity that brought down the elite monoculture, Berlin Wall … Iron Curtain Tennis ace Bernard Tomic seeks shelter in luxury tax haven ; FOR Pat Rafter it was Bermuda, and for Lleyton Hewitt it was the Bahamas, but could it be the Mark Philippoussis precedent Bernard Tomic is choosing to follow, along with his big cheque? Not by remaking the Poo's reality show, The Age of Love (there's some magic that can't be recreated), but by setting up camp in the tax haven of Monaco Slice of (tax) Haven
• · · · Chances are if you were born in the city you're not going to handle bad vibes as well as someone who hails from the country, according to a recent study. Get Outta Town; Liu has made an art form of disappearing by painting himself from head to toe so that he blends into his surroundings Hiding in the City
• · · · · The Prime Minister has today committed to publishing key data on the National Health Service, schools, criminal courts and transport. This represents the most ambitious open data agenda of any government anywhere in the world ; Search Glory of Media Dragon: the isveryimportant attribute Alexa the God of Search
• · · · · · We examine the international propagation of the financial crisis of 2008, and compare it with that of the crisis of 1931. MCMXXXI and MMVIII; An apology to Alastair Crook (sic) - A blog by Melanie Phillips posted on 28 January 2011 reported an allegation that Alastair Crooke, director of Conflicts Forum, had been expelled from Israel and dismissed for misconduct from Government service or the EU after threatening a journalist whose email he had unlawfully intercepted. We accept that this allegation is completely false and we apologise to Spectator makes spectacle of Mr Crooke

2011-07-23T23:19:00.009+10:00

We are lucky We are We. We are lucky to come across people like Dr Cope ...

Dr. Seuss has written a sweet poem called Did I ever tell you how lucky you are?

Anytime we start thinking that our job doesn’t pay us enough, our leg’s aren’t long enough, our house isn’t big enough, the town we live in isn’t exciting enough, our boss isn’t forgiving enough, our spouse isn’t rich enough…
You’re lucky you have a job, and legs, and a house. you’re lucky you have people in your life that care about you and want to see you succeed. you’re lucky you have free will; and the ability to mold your life the way you want it to be. you’re lucky you have people to encourage, friends and family to love, and a life to lead.

You’re lucky You’re You.
Acknowledging the things you’d like to address or fix in your life is healthy. changing the things you have the ability to change is even healthier.
but complaining or wishing for things which are completely out of your control,
is just plain silly.
You’re lucky You’re You.

As the friendliest and considerate President in my time in NSW Parliament, Johno Johnson, noted: In 1991 Dr Russell Cope, the Parliamentary Librarian, concluded 40 years of meritorious service Dr Cope is one of those living treasures that few institutions have ... Happy Birthday, Dr Cope

The Wisdom of Dr Cope, June and my parents is reflected in the story about Robert Redford who turns 75 next month. The all had the wisdom and courage to handle the truth! He still directs, only occasionally performs and remains, as always, protective of his private persona. One of the slogans I remember when I was a kid was, 'It doesn't matter how you win or lose it's how you play the game'," he says. And I realised over time that that was a lie and that in this country everything was about winning. That's when I was able to make my own films and concentrate on the subject of winning and how that affected human beings." In Surratt's instance, the effect was a seemingly unjust death after a trial in which her guilt or innocence was not truly tested. Redford points to Stanton's contravention of the US Constitution as his win, achieving what he thought would save the union at a fragile moment in its formative years.
"The fact that the rule of law was the only thing we had to hold this country in place morally I found an interesting story," Redford says. "This was an example of how the Constitution was rearranged to satisfy political interests at that time." The contemporary parallels are obvious but Redford invokes them anyway, pointing to the "constant threats" to the US Constitution through some "pretty big events in American history that were threats to the moral standing of our country", including McCarthyism, the John F. Kennedy assassination, Watergate and the Iran-Contra affair.
You have these patterns that have repeated themselves over time. And it's usually the same people, the same mentality, the same personalities that threaten that. . I find that interesting because I suspect that if we as Americans had a better value of history we wouldn't be repeating these things but I think we have a short-term memory.

Dodd-Frank - What If the Federal Reserve Can't Pull Any More Tricks From Its Sleeves? The Financial Printer Diaries: Tales of an Era Gone By - Part 1
A few months ago, I blogged a "Farewell to Bowne" and posted a poll about "your favorite financial printer moment." In response to the poll, 69% responded that free food was their favorite (no surprise!); 41% said tedious arguments over commas and periods; 19% said brushing up on proofing; 5% said good facetime with partners and 10% said sleeping in the bathroom.

In addition, I received many emails with specific memories, some of which are repeated below - please keep them coming and I will only blog them if you give me permission:
- My favorite memory is an experience done a hundred times melded into one memory: the clearing of the blue line, just before printing the final prospectus (you know, when nobody is left at the printer other than a couple of lawyers and accountants with sometimes a guest appearance by the junior analyst from the investment bank to make sure their name is spelled correctly on the cover of the 424). Ah, peace.
- My favorite story involves the hubris of a first-year associate from a large, very prestigious firm that shall go unnamed, in the early-ish days of constant cell phone use. This was about a decade ago, in mid-2000 or so, and it was dinnertime after the deal ended and I was having a brief meal before heading home, and he was having a few beers with a colleague before heading out, and we overheard him calling the front desk on his cellphone from the lunchroom and attempting to order a car, and totally confounding the front desk since he wasn't walking a few doors down to ask for the car or calling on the printer's phone, but using his cell phone. And he was a little tipsy. In the end, it devolved down to a "do you know who I am" moment on his part, after which he stated very loudly "I am a ____ associate", as if it was time for whoever was on the other line at the front desk to bow down to him and call that car - fast. That was an iconic moment, a classic "I don't want to be that entitled person" story.
- I spent many long hours at Bowne of Dallas, which had nice cushy chairs, a huge projection TV and free Pac Man and Ms Pac Man game tables (now that gives you the timeframe). Good BBQ for meals, too.
- I sure have a lot of good memories of lawyers, accountants and bankers working nights shoulder-to-shoulder at the printers in the '70's and 80's. In Cleveland, our printer was originally known as The Judson Brooks Company, which was later acquired by Bowne. We all knew some of the owners and most of the staff like family. They had a couple of cots separated by curtains in the back where you could catch a few hours' shut-eye before leaving for the dawn flight to DC with the SEC filing package. We did the red-lining on the plane. Many the nights I called my wife to let her know I would be working late and spending the night at "The Judson Hilton."
- Going to the printer was one on the best things about being a securities lawyer. Unlike everyone else in the world, financial printers loved lawyers and would do most anything to make them happy. I love you.

• Going to the printer was one on the best things about being a securities lawyer ; A Dearth of Whistleblower Complaints? ;
Link to WSJ List of Top 50 U.S. Banks: KeyCorp's CEO Beth Mooney; Worldwide financial meltdown or note women rule KeyCorp's CEO Beth Mooney ;
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was signed into law one year ago today. Many significant provisions become effective today. Many more aspects of the law remain to be implemented through regulation. Happy Birthday, Dodd-Frank!
• • The Federal Register version of the final regulation identifies comments -- both pro and con -- which have been received by the OCC in response to the proposed regulation issued May 25, 2011.
Key points:
* The preemption shield has been eliminated for operating subsidiaries of national banks as well as op subs of federal savings associations.
* Federal thrifts can no longer avail themselves of "field preemption." Their preemption standard is the same as that for national banks.
* The OCC removed language from its 2004 regulations which differed from that articulated in the Dodd-Frank Act and in the Barnett Bank of Marion County , N.A. v. Nelson case (rejected language called for preemption of state laws that "obstruct, impair, or condition a national bank's powers) and substituted the language from Dodd-Frank and Barnett: calling for federal preemption of any state law that "prevents or significantly interferes with the exercise by the national bank of its powers."
* The OCC still contends that, although it is changing the language of its regulation, it did not need to repeal the 2004 regulations that were essentially "gutted" by Dodd Frank. The OCC opines that all the prior preemption determinations remain in effect because the Dodd-Frank standard is not limited to the "prevents or significantly interferes" standard, but rather encompasses all the reasoning of the Barnett case and the OCC's interpretation of that case, which OCC says remains unchanged. This is sure to provoke controversy.
* The OCC also contends that the existing categories of state laws that are preempted remain valid because they represent the OCC's review of the impact of each law. The OCC says that the Dodd-Frank requirement for "case-by-case" preemption determinations will only affect future preemption determinations.
* The final regulation revises the OCC's 2004 visitorial powers rule to conform to the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Cuomo v. Clearing House Association, L.L.C. The new OCC regulations follow the Dodd-Frank provisions that make it clear that a state attorney general may bring an action against a national bank in a court of appropriate jurisdiction to enforce applicable laws. ; Several people asked what I thought about humor in legal writing, a topic I touch on in my Academic Legal Writing book. Here’s my thinking on the subject:
Humor can be valuable: It can keep the reader interested, put the reader in a good mood, and make the reader feel something of a psychological link to the author. Humor in article titles can also help the article be more eye-catching and more memorable. I still remember an article title I saw in the early 1990s, “One Hundred Years of Privacy”; this both communicated the article’s essence (a look back on the privacy tort a century after Warren and Brandeis first proposed it), and humorously alluded to the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Humor in Legal Writing
• • • The "ostrich defense," "idiot defense," or "Sergeant Schultz (I know nothing, I see nothing, I hear nothing) defense" is being asserted again -- this time by Rupert Murdoch in his testimony before the U.K. Parliament's Culture, Media, and Sport Committee yesterday. The "ostrich defense," "idiot defense ; Norwegian Terror Suspect Arrested Motives May Be Nationalist and Anti-Islamic
• • • Mary Lou Byrne is the project coordinator of Mosman Library's new interactive, online visual history project, Mosman Faces. The project will be launched next week as part of Library and Information Week Big day for book lovers at library ; Digital Librarians

2011-07-17T22:38:00.000+10:00

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but reading Murdoch’s apology will never hurt you

Murdoch apologizes

Ruper Murdoch is about to sell The Times' (No, he isn't) Dynasties - Murdoch;

The Salt of Media Life RIP News of the World: Adelaide -October 1843 – Global Cities - July 2011
Rupert Murdoch's News International empire in London is in crisis. The story, originally broken earlier this week by Vanity Fair, had the added benefit of steering the focus towards Mr Coulson who resigned as NOTW editor in 2007 when his royal reporter and a private investigator were jailed for phone hacking: he was rehabilitated last year by Mr Cameron as the prime ministerial communications director; Mr Coulson resigned early this year as new claims were made. Andy Coulson, the former aide to the Prime Minister, was editor of the News of the World when the newspaper paid police for information..."

Having been jailed in 2007 for hacking phones on behalf of the News of the World, Glenn Mulcaire this week pleaded for understanding. “I knew what we did pushed the limits ethically,” the private investigator told The Guardian. “But, at the time, I didn’t understand that I had broken the law at all.” Revelation piles pressure on Murdoch executive whilst advertisers boycott News of the World as scandal grows.
The focal point is the News of the World — now facing a spreading advertising boycott — and the top executives of its parent companies: Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, and her boss, media potentate Rupert Murdoch

• Gotcha! The News of the World bites the dust. ; Fox News won't touch Murdoch story with a "ten foot turban Durbin [ RIP ; Rupert Murdoch-approved "journalism. 7 -7; ABC of Kremlinology ]
• · Crisis deepens at News of the World as police begin to review all high-profile child murder cases ; The day the prime minister was forced to act on phone hacking In media scandal, British debating how far is too far
• · · Tabloid 'hacked families of war dead' -The families of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan could have had their phones hacked by an investigator working for Rupert Murdoch's News of the World tabloid, according to reports this morning. Report: Rupert Murdoch's UK paper hacked into London 7/7 bombing victim's phones ; Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by the paper, in the days following the 2005 London bombings will heap further pressure on the title's owner, News International
• · · · Kremlinology with Rupert Murdoch: what do the Times paywall numbers mean? News Corp Kremlinology ; Back in 1995 Fry and Laurie parodied It's A Wonderful Life to show us what a world without Rupert Murdoch might be like. ..... The World without Murdoch as seen in 1995 - Boing Boing
• · · · · It’s hard to look at the news photos of Rupert Murdoch this week. Where once was a titan filled with jouissance now there is an unsteady old man reeling from a week of up-ending headlines and revelations. Even though the collapse only began a week ago, it seems like we can hardly remember the globe-girdling empire builder. Who Stripped Rupert Murdoch of Power? Social Media ; Like a getaway bandit trying to lighten his load, Rupert Murdoch keeps making frantic sacrifices in hopes of containing the phone-hacking scandal that’s now consuming his News Corp media empire.
• · · · · · According to a report by ProPublica and the Guardian, key members of the family that controlled The Wall Street Journal now say they would not have agreed to sell the paper to Rupert Murdoch if they’d known about the phone-hacking underway at the time at News Corp’s News of the World. “If I had known what I know now, I would have pushed harder against” the Murdoch bid, said Christopher Bancroft, a member of the family that controlled Dow Jones & Company publishers of the WSJ ; As the metastasizing phone-hacking scandal engulfs the senior-most reaches of News Corp., the Murdoch family, and the British government, a winner may yet emerge from the corporate wreckage: Roger Ailes In the Murdoch Hacking Scandal, Roger Ailes Stands to Gain

2011-07-16T22:02:00.012+10:00

If two men on a job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, then both are useless.
–Daryl F. Zanuck

Let’s clear up something about success. We focus too much on success – and not enough on the real meat of the story – failure – the other F-word that nobody wants to talk about... Some of you might not know who Brian Tracy is… but most have heard of Jack Lemmon: “Fear of failure will absolutely destroy you. You walk down the middle of the street. You never take any chances. You never go down the little side streets. You look at them and say: That looks interesting. But I don’t know that street. I’ll stay right here and just walk this straight line Designing in uncertainty ; The F Word: Failure makes better leaders. But no one goes looking for it, especially now The F Word:

Memoirs of Many in One I think--perhaps wrongly--that I have a gift for friendship
Contrary to Pascal's saying, we don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
-Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America‎
To write fiction is to challenge the most basic of human facts: that we don't have access to other people's minds. Authors are more able than most to ignore the audacity of occupying other selves, though—it's in their job description. And what's a more obvious challenge than assuming the consciousness of the opposite gender?Gender Troubles

So you want to write a book. It will be a lonely, frustrating slog. Maybe a few thousand people will read it, on its way to the remainder shelf. Why bother?...
There was exciting news last month among the Twitterati. Brian Stelter, The New York Times prodigy and master of social media, announced to his 64,373 followers that he is going to write a book. The obvious question: What’s up with that?
Ah, time for the writer to start writing. But wait: Are my pens facing north? What’s that funny noise? My fingernails need cutting. Off-putting behaviour

• Let’s Ban Books, Or at Least Stop Writing Them ; [If writing makes you a miserable wretch, and reading capaciously hasn’t been a source of moral uplift, you’re hardly alone. The literary life tends to arouse dissatisfaction and antisocial behavior.. Writing is bad for you ; The Internet’s early cheerleaders – anti-Hobbesian, hippie utopians, mostly – envisioned cyberspace as an unregulated public square. It’s more like a private mall... ; Bribery is an art, and the art business in China – rife with forgeries, crooked scholars, corrupt auction houses – is brush-stroked by bribes... The Chinese art of elegant bribery]
• · Some guys just don’t know when to shut up. Consider the chronically garrulous Tony Kushner and his tendency to drown his characters in a sea of verbiage.. ; Melancholic, tormented, debauched, or otherwise awry, our poets must be lunatics, we insist. The results are both sensational and boring... I Thought You Were a Poet
• · · “It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the” News of the World.; The average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit encapsulate[d] the thesis at the heart of his unforgiving novel ; Lip-syncing at his workstation on an Army base in Iraq, the Wikileaker downloaded top-secret data onto a CD marked “Lady Gaga” How a lonely, five-foot-two, gender-questioning soldier became a WikiLeaks hero, a traitor to the U.S., and one of the most unusual revolutionaries in American history
• · · · May we suggest that the following would have been appropriate: Glenn Mulcaire and Paul McMullan are watching you; Closing the News of the World is a proportionate response, but it should not draw a line under the whole scandal
• · · · · “Humans aren’t perfect. We all make mistakes. We’re all in a state of training, a state of becoming – becoming a better worker, a better student, a better parent, a better spouse, a better friend, or a better person. When we stop making mistakes, we stop learning and growing. Mistakes are the process through which we in turn create success. Mistakes create the foundation for our life. That foundation is experience, which in turn creates the light that leads us into our future. That light is called wisdom.” Wally Amos (aka Famous Amos – once the king of the chocolate chips cookies) When Wrong Makes Right: The Upside of Failure If you haven’t achieved the success you thought you would by now, blame failure—or, rather, the lack of it
• · · · · · Quarry of the latter-day hunter-gatherer: old typewriters, vintage dolls, Bakelite jewelry. The one thing you must never ask a collector is “Why Favourite things ; Every metaphor starts out as a wild beast, waiting to be tamed by usage, writes Carlin Romano. Even the word “metaphor” is a metaphor. What's a Metaphor For?
• · · · · · Benjamin Franklin recounts in his Autobiography that during his years as a printer’s apprentice he developed a “bookish inclination” and a fondness for “the arts of rhetoric and logic.” He writes: About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. The era of the nonspecialist intellectual is over. These days, aspiring Irving Howes need to master monetary theory. What Are Intellectuals Good For? Essays and Reviews ; Bobby Fischer had much in common with Newton: Both were fear-addled egomaniacs who grew into their gifts by playing games with themselves... The Trouble with Genius

2011-07-13T20:55:00.013+10:00

Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there's not much left except the will to win.
-Martha Stout (quoted in Jon Almond, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry)

Most Touching Songs Ever ... Tujh Mein Rab Dikhta

You (Malchkeon) are my world, my heart's desire, you lighten my heart you reside in my heart, you are my life, you cool my warm eyes... teri ore full song singh is king In you (malchkeon) I see God ; Cold Rivers of Babylon

Christopher and Lidka are celebrating their Aloha birthdays with The Bonnie M of MMMWWWWAlchkoen - Music Bloggers Hack Record Industry by Launching Indie Labels For Tom Krell, his latest record is extremely meaningful

A bona fide genius seen as a bit of a laughing stock O'Farrell Must Reform or Become the Latest NSW's Askin
Kelly letter supports Bondi plan by Currawong owners - ON THE day former planning minister Tony Kelly signed and backdated a letter involving the sale of Currawong, he wrote another one notifying Waverley Council he was taking a controversial Bondi development from the council and referring it to a government planning authority. Documents obtained by the Herald reveal that the same developers who sold Currawong to the government, Allen Linz and Eduard Litver, were involved in the development Mr Kelly was removing from council control.

John Gerathy, the solicitor who represented Mr Kelly at the recent ICAC inquiry, is the long-term business partner of Chris Cheung, the owner of the Coogee Bay Hotel. Mr Gerathy is also the business partner of former resources minister Ian Macdonald, who quit Parliament last year over allegations that he had rorted his travel expenses. The month following Mr Macdonald's departure from Parliament, the pair set up Resource Image, which is hoping to foster trade in the wine, equipment and resources sectors.
In early March, Mr Kelly also sought to bypass the City of Sydney council over an
application to redevelop the Elizabeth Bay marina, in which the family of a fellow MP, Eddie Obeid, had an interest. He recommended it be dealt with by a joint regional planning panel, despite its not having jurisdiction. He also removed the controversial $150 million development of the Coogee Bay Hotel from the control of the local council. Mr Gerathy has also been associated with colourful entrepreneur Paul Makucha, who was found by ICAC to be corrupt in his dealings with Sydney Water. The corruption watchdog has recommended that the Director of Public Prosecutions consider whether criminal charges should be laid against Mr Makucha.

• Odd extremists [A VETERAN crime fighter is saddling up for one last campaign. Evan Whitton, an expert on the history of organised crime in Australia, wants the state government to introduce an American law that has had a devastating effect on organised criminals in the US but sits uneasily with our legal system Coogee Bay Hotel and Brown Matters ; Push for law to blow organised crime apart ; Corruption risks are heightened when the lobbying of politicians is combined with the lobbyist or the lobbyist's client making donations to the politician or the politician's party or engaging in fund-raising for the politician Democracy for sale ]
• · Inquiry windfall for ATO; Australian Financial Review, 13/07/2011, page 8 By: KATIE WALSH - The federal government's $300 million Project Wickenby tax-evasion inquiry has raised more than $1 billion in tax bills, sent 18 offenders to jail and charged 62 with serious offences. The Australian Taxation Office has undertaken 2100 audits and 23 criminal investigations. One source went so far as to describe the stem Wickenby message of the compliance program as Dante-esque It's like there's a layer of hell reserved for Wickenby offenders; A massive SIX MILLION Britons have no savings at all An astonishing six million Britons are living on a knife edge without a single penny stashed away to protect them against redundancy or sudden jumps in living costs. Soaring prices across the country - where the average prices have jumped 5.2 per cent in a year (RPI) - have made it impossible for many families to save and forced others to raid their pots to stay afloat. UK Living on a knife-edge at Wickenby Towns
• · · Reuters news has this report buried among other news. A Diversion for a Look at Obtaining Some Benefits of Offshoring Onshore (6/28/11)
While it is fun and sometimes profitable to dump on offshore tax havens for their secrecy, we should remember that some of the secrecy benefits of offshoring can be achieved onshore. See Kelly Carr and Brian Grow, Special Report: A little house of secrets on the Great Plains, Reuters 1/28/11. To quote the well known commentator on the human condition: "“Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” John 8:7. ; Over more than three decades, no one dared question the perversion of politics by and for Rupert Murdoch It’s worth quietly noting this morning that when the Guardian first began its campaign to reveal corruption at the News of the World the Murdoch empire struck back, saying the Guardian was misleading the public. It wasn’t. It was undertaking absolutely vital, first class investigative journalism of corruption. The world is in its debt today. I think that should be acknowledged. I’m not usually much of a fan of Henry Porter but this is too appropriate to ignore: It is now time for HMG to go after Murdoch and perhaps this is the moment to investigate the complex web of tax havens and offshore accounts that News International has used to avoid paying full tax in the past. I’d bet a month’s salary that while NI papers have been urging austerity measures on the UK, the company has used every trick in the book to avoid its proper tax burden. He’s right. But remember to add in Microsoft, Apple, Google, Cisco, big pharma, the extractive industries in general and many more whilst about it. Oh, and perhaps the Telegraph needs a look. Hacking Tax Havens; News Corporation: time to go - Phone hacking, breaching every article of the journalists' code of ethics, Newscorp's time is up
• · · · Some pepper for Bernard Salt: A Generation Y response to writing and saving the planet - The media encourages younger generations to get involved but when they do they are often dismissed for old men, nude pictures, and ‘hotness delusion syndrome’. Berrnarrd ; Genius (plural geniuses[1][2]) is something or someone embodying exceptional intellectual ability, creativity, or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of unprecedented insight. Microsoft’s Android Plan: Evil Genius Or Just Evil? ;
• · · · · It Takes All Kinds to call for reflection and writing A guide to writing hyperpanofiction / Tony Nolan, Emily Nolan ; From the Hon. Librarian ; I talk to my fellow members of Mensa or the High IQ groups ; It takes all kinds to make a world... including the kinds who think only their kind belong in it; Exploit Humanity with All Kinds of Causes

2011-07-09T16:33:00.001+10:00

The new Premier has barely had time to pause for breath, writes Sean Nicholls. Barry O'Farrell looks exhausted. In shirtsleeves, having rushed from a flying morning visit to the Blue Mountains to inspect damage wrought overnight by gale-force winds, the Premier apologises for being late but cannot suppress his irritation when told he is to be photographed. Releasing a sharply delivered expletive, he calls for a jacket, which a minder indicates is on its way.
O'Farrell runs a quick hundred: ; Sympathy for shooters tops O'Farrell '100 days of failure - Time to started to focus on the problems that affect people in this city and across this state, instead of these cheap tricks ; Barry O'Farrell has promised to stop the flow of donations from corporations and trade unions, but there has been no sign of the legislation during the Coalition's first 100 days in power Roll Out the Centennial Barrel

A spectre is haunting Australia—the spectre of Russian Dragonfia The Sale, Like Love, Had to be Unconditional
The truth is emerging about the mysterious Currawong sale Eduard LITVER ranks as one of the big wheeler dealers in this city's property circles , not that he would welcome the attention which comes with being named in this week's Independent Commission Against Corruption hearings over the controversial sale of the Currawong holiday retreat to the former NSW Labor government. Litver and his business partner Allen Linz pocketed more than $2 million profit courtesy of the taxpayer, but that's not Russian-born Litver's only deal which has raised eyebrows. Litver has been renting out one of three Darling Point harbourside mansions he and wife Adriana own on Eastbourne Road to the producers of MasterChef to house the show's contestants, and for a very pretty penny. The Litvers have been charging $6500 a week on top of a $39,000 bond for around six months during the show's filming schedule.

n early 2007, the Herald broke the story that Currawong had been sold to developers Allen Linz and Eduard Litver. The executive committee of Unions NSW then met to unanimously endorse the sale. This was a token gesture as land title searches show that Linz and Litver's company, Eco Villages, had lodged a caveat on the title just before Christmas in 2006. At the time, Michael McGurk, who was representing developer Ron Medich, the man later accused of masterminding his murder, began creating a fuss. He had offered twice the $15 million amount that Linz and Litver had offered.
Replying to McGurk's criticism, John Robertson, who as unions boss had handled the sale, said crankily: ''We wanted a sale but he kept saying he wanted this changed and that changed. But we were adamant - the sale had to be unconditional.''

• Allen Linz and Eduard Litver and their Labor Party mates are fast becoming the loneliest people in NSW The Specter of Scotsman McGurk is Haunting Bearpit; The late standover man, Michael McGurk, and the property developer who is now accused of his associate's murder, Ron Medich, had offered $30 million. Macquarie Bank had offered $25 million Noble intent lost in a deal that cost public millions [Allen Linz and Eduard Litver oversee a tangle of companies ; Twisted plot of a Labor obsession; ACTOR Shane Withington was, until last year's state election, a True Believer . Italian Australian, Frank Sartor, also nicknamed as Mayor for a Russian Harry Tribugoff, has removed development approval from Pittwater Council and declared Currawong a major project, placing it under his sole authority Pirates turn a paradise into Labor's Skull Island ; Michael McGurk's final hours in Kings Cross ]
• · It's not exactly new to see Russia as a rentier economy in which government officials, oligarchs, regional strongmen and criminal bosses fight over the spoils of the oil, gas and metals industries. Back suppliers of domestic goods and services, or, as Citigroup says ‘stick with oligarchs who are successful at accessing rental flows’. Choose Russia's oligarchs with care ; Freed from the shackles of communism in the 1990s, Russia seemed to be entering an era of rebirth. But as is often the case in that country, history unfolded harshly. For the majority of Russians, the transition to a market system was painful and chaotic - and anything but democratic. Amid the confusion, a few shrewd and ruthless businessmen exploited the loopholes in the Soviet economy; Is this a pattern? Here are a series of similiar photos of Tony Abbott and Vladimir Putin. They like going bare-chested… Spot the difference: Mad monk or Russian oligarch
• · · The approval to explore for gas allows Shell Australia to drill an exploration well 50km west of the boundary of the marine park. Approval for drilling off Ningaloo Reef ; Ningaloo Reef is considered a natural wonder, sprawling some 260km along Australia's west coast and teeming with hundreds of tropical fish and coral species Ningaloo Reef: Playing Russian Roulette ; For giant oil companies like BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell, an eventual shift away from petroleum will have massive economic consequences Casualties of the energy wars ; The punishing effects of the global financial crisis, political instability, natural disasters and growing poverty in many countries create a fertile ground for corruption Gifts or bribes: UK act means companies need to make decisions fast
• · · · Good news amid the gloom: Some people sponsor a tree, others pull up weeds but when Chris Turnbull and Len Gervay wanted to do something for endangered plants they decided to run 900 kilometres. The two men set off from Sydney a week ago, following the Hume Highway to Melbourne, raising thousands of dollars for the NSW Seedbank on the way. The seedbank is part of the Millennium Seed Bank, a global effort to protect the world's plants from extinction by collecting and studying their seeds Marathon men sow seeds of history ; Today I want to get out of the gloom and focus on three pieces of good news. Australia isn't renowned for having a thriving home-grown electronics sector ... Good news amid the gloom
• · · · · Humpback whales breaching off Dover Heights Tall tails and true as season kicks off ;A new record was set yesterday with 103 whales recorded by volunteers sitting on the cliffs of Cape Solander at Botany Bay. Survey shmurvey, we say! Migrating whales set a massive record
• · · · · · New World Heritage: Kenyan Lakes, Australian Coast, Japanese Islands‎ Extraordinary natural areas in Kenya, Australia, Japan and Germany that deserve the highest level of protection have been added to the UNESCO World Heritage List by an international panel of government representatives at its annual meeting in Paris. A World Heritage forest site in Eastern Europe was expanded to include Germany Extraordinary natural areas ; Swim with whale sharks: Ningaloo Reef

2011-07-07T19:27:00.003+10:00

Truth is the safest lie.
-- High Tatra Mountains Gural proverb

What is Cold River because it tells you how to read history. You'll never read a history book in the same way again. On 7 – 7 – 1980, VII – VII – MCMLXXX, Bessie became the only dog, animal ever, of the Cold War era to receive a political asylumn - Vienna, Austria . Since that symbolic date I am trying to figure out two very simple things. How to live, and how to die. Period. That’s all I’m trying to do, all day long. (7-7) a symbolic Kabalic reference - First and Only dog ever granted political asylum

Sydney is a city of Agape and Botany is where this city's love for creative antipodean life and food was born ... While it is always difficult deciding which are the top ten restaurants in Sydney, I discovered an amazing one, Agape, where I ate a meal so fine that I could easily have closed my eyes and imagined myself at a table in my Mother's house ... 1387 Botany Road Botany NSW 2019 +61-2 8668-5777 Agape: Organic Blessings

Braving sub-zero temperatures, she has thrown caution — and her clothes — to the wind to tame two beluga whales in a unique and controversial experiment. Natalia Avseenko, 36, was persuaded to strip naked as marine experts believe belugas do not like to be touched by artificial materials such as diving suits. The skilled Russian diver took the plunge as the water temperature hit minus 1.5 degrees Centigrade. Cold River Diver ; Natalia - Experienced or not, how do you swim naked in sub-freezing water and live?

Charter 77 - Publishing 'Cold River' Against All Odds Civilization: The West and the Rest
Ferguson’s contention is that the rise and decline of a given civilisation does not obey a decipherable or predictable rhythm in the way thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Marx and Spengler have postulated:
What if history is not cyclical and slow moving but arrhythmic—sometimes almost stationary, but also capable of violent acceleration? What if historical time is less like the slow and predictable changing of the seasons and more like the elastic time of our dreams? Above all, what if collapse is not centuries in the making but strikes a civilization suddenly, like a thief in the night?

On March 7, 1989, thirty-two-year-old Winfried Freudenberg’s makeshift balloon crash landed, securing him the posthumous honour of last person to die escaping across the Berlin Wall. A month before, on the night of February 6, Chris Gueffroy, aged twenty, was shot ten times in the chest while attempting to flee East Berlin in the vicinity of the Britz district canal. All four East German soldiers involved in the murder of Gueffroy were duly presented with a GDR medal and 150 East German marks. What brave souls like Gueffroy and Freudenberg did not know—and, according to perhaps the most important thesis in Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest, could not know—was that eight or so months later, on the night of November 9, 1989, an opening would miraculously appear in the Wall.

• Superior but Brittle [The history of children of freedom fighters is a long story of children on some level resenting their parents, feeling their parents have given themselves over to a cause while neglecting their roles as parents. But your book is very much a love letter to your father and mother. Even at the points of greatest tension in your parents’ lives, they’re teaching you and your sister how to ski and comforting you when you’re sick. But is there a part of you then, or at anytime of your life, or now, that resents your parents for putting themselves at so much risk, thus risking you growing up without parents? ; George Orwell never thought that his work would outlive him by much Orwell endures, and I am not sure that this is a good thing ; ]
• · In a lecture, Peter Hennessy recently described the historian's craft as akin to the cryogenic trade – warming up the frozen history of the archive until it began to talk. Such a delicate procedure is usually best performed by hand Online is fine, but history is best hands on ; WEB EXCLUSIVE How Much Did Social Media contribute to Revolution in the Middle East? ; How Julian Assange was captured y his own persona International Man of Mystery
• · · I gather that is why Jeff Bezo's Amazon is matching the BD's prices of Cold River now ... The Book Depository will have made an attractive proposition to Amazon, as it had operating profit of £2.3m on sales of £69m in the year to June 2010, and those profit figures are thought to have gotten even better. It has also located much of its business in Egypt where operating costs are cheaper. The Book Depository will have made an attractive proposition to Amazon, as it had operating profit of £2.3m on sales of £69m in the year to June 2010, and those profit figures are thought to have gotten even better. It has also located much of its business in Egypt where operating costs are cheaper. It wants to sell "less of more" rather than "more of less," deliberately avoiding front-loading with bestsellers in order to attract custom. Books are available to buy at such low prices online they make Waterstone's staple 'three for the price of two' offer look somewhat dog-eared; Amazon plot thickens in Book Depository buyout ; Amazon's decision to acquire The Book Depository
• · · · Amazon plot thickens in Book Depository buyout ; Book Depository
• · · · · Mark Twain never met an idea he could not reduce to a joke – including, it seems, the conventions of autobiography.
A Memoir of Lust Without Reason ; Virginia Woolf knew well the tedium of the literary critic. “My mind feels as though a torrent of weak tea has been poured over it ; Like Bessie of Cold River fame, Bo Hoefinger is unique. He is a literary dog who doesn’t run with the pack when it comes to keeping secrets. He’s written a blog, and now a book, Bad to the Bone – Memoir of a Rebel Doggie Blogger. My dog, Charity Marie, read Bad to the Bone and immediately hid it. That’s how I knew this was a book that screamed to be read Bad to the Bone ; Oprah, Amazon, and The Rise of Therapeutic Fiction: Timothy Aubry’s Reading as Therapy
• · · · · · This is the puzzle motivating English professor Timothy Aubry’s new study of American reading habits, Reading as Therapy. And it’s a good question. After all, everyone knows that America has a dead or dying literary culture, yet novels—including “literary” novels—continue to be written at a record-setting pace Principles of Uncertainty Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World); Cold war ; Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Cold River ; It seems so much like Soviet-style media control that at times I feel like I'm reading an account of a Western journalist in Cold-War era Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in MEdia Dragon

2011-07-04T19:07:00.001+10:00

In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation.
-Stéphane Mallarmé

It's one of the most difficult to get into -- it publishes under 1 percent of what's submitted. Poetry Magazine, November 2005The Poetry Foundation opened its new home in Chicago last weekend. As it celebrates this achievement, we decided it would be fun to ask for people's stories about being rejected from the foundation's time-honored literary journal, Poetry magazine. If you're a writer and you've sent out work to journals, you know the feeling

Cold River of Screenwriting Resources

Reading Chinese Corruption as Literature or as Cold River Where Corrupt Chinese Hide Their Cash…and Themselves
Investigation by People's Bank of China finds more than $120bn has been smuggled out of country since mid-1990s. Corrupt Chinese officials and executives absconded overseas with roughly $120 billion from the mid-1990s to 2008, and the United States was the most popular destination, according to a report from China's central bank. Where Corrupt Chinese Hide Their Cash…and Themselves Dev Kar, Lead Economist, Global Financial Integrity wrote:
Nice article. It could have noted that according to several studies at Global Financial integrity, China ranks number one in terms of the volume of illicit financial flows from developing countries. According to our most recent study, China lost US$344 billion through illicit outflows in 2008–mostly through trade mispricing (which includes abusive transfer pricing by multinationals).

A transfer price is what one part of a company charges another part of the same company for goods or services. In the excerpt from Casablanca, Rick Blaine apparently loaned Signor Ferrari 100 cartons of cigarettes for which he was never repaid. Now that Ferrari owns both the Blue Parrot and Rick’s Café, he jokes about the fact that what was previously a debt that he owed to Rick, is now a “debt” from one nightclub that he owns to another nightclub that he owns. If Ferrari continues to transfer cartons of cigarettes between the two clubs, he might wish to establish a “transfer price” for cigarettes, but knowing Ferrari, he won’t bother. (Eventually, Rick helped an idealistic Czech resistance fighter escape with the woman Rick loved - Rick helped his former lover, Lois Meredith, flee to safety with the Czech refugee Victor Lazlo being pursued by the German agent Strasser. - Trivia Everybody Comes to Rick's is an unpublished play which was the basis for the movie Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. )

• Report reveals huge scale of corruption among Chinese government officials; Forbes [The reports said the study was posted to the website of China’s central bank. While the PDF document remains widely available in Chinese cyberspace, the report – dated June 2008 and identified as “confidential” – no longer appears on the People’s Bank of China website. The 67-page report from China’s central bank looks at where corrupt officials go and how they get their money out. Wall Street Blog: Corrupt Chinese Officials Take $123 Billion Overseas; Report corruption, collect commission – Who says crime doesn’t pay? ; Offshore Watch ]
• · Bill Keller, New York Times Boss, Still Not Loving WikiLeaks, Twitter ; The author of The Cult Of The Amateur argues that if we lose our privacy we sacrifice a fundamental part of our humanity Privacy is passé - if not dead. Confessional tweets, narcissistic status updates: We are the Wikileakers of our own lives Your Life Torn Open, essay 1: Sharing is a trap
• · · Julian Assange and his controversial whistle-blower forum, WikiLeaks, have received support from the majority of voters who participated in an online poll conducted by Essential Research and published by Crikey in December last year. The poll discovered that 80 per cent of Greens voters unreservedly approved of WikiLeaks with only 30 per cent of voters across the political spectrum saying they were against the organisation. Popularity of WikiLeaks boosted by News Corp's sloppy journalism; The WikiLeaks cables read like good literature. Both diplomacy and fiction, after all, feature plots, moral ambiguity, and casual deception Reading WikiLeaks as literature ; Wikileaks represents a new type of (h)activism, which shifts the source of potential threat from a few, dangerous hackers and a larger group of mostly harmless activists – both outsiders to an organization – to those who are on the inside. For insiders trying to smuggle information out, anonymity is a necessary condition for participation. Wikileaks has demonstrated that the access to anonymity can be democratized, made simple and user friendly. You Have No Sovereignty Where We Gather – Wikileaks and Freedom, Autonomy and Sovereignty in the Cloud; Glencore in vow to come clean on details of tax payments around the world;
• · · · Maligned as a gold digger, Wallis Simpson in fact never wanted Edward VIII to abdicate the throne. She wasn’t even in love with him The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science; Pity modern man. College-graduation rates, sperm counts, and testosterone levels are all down. “Emasculation is a national blood sport” n Pity modern man. It's Raining on Men: Balls Deep at the Conference on Male Studies
• · · · · What used to be seen as a last resort is fast becoming the most successful trend in writing. Alison Flood talks to the authors doing it themselves How self-publishing came of age - Self-Publishing Takes Off ; It used to be the rare judge who would go for rim shots from the bench Court Jesting: These Sentences Don't Get Judged Too Harshly ;
• · · · · · It’s quite hard to know where to begin, reviewing The Stranger’s Child. As I finished it, and was heard making bloody-hell-this-is-good noises, two people asked me: ‘What’s it about?’ That, as it turns out, is a very good question Golden lads and girls ; Non-writers who have bailed on novels and short stories often say they've exhausted their patience for flagrantly 'untrue' narratives. One blogger explained it thus: 'I put it down to having experienced enough real life narrative and drama such that made-up stories no longer appeal I've stopped reading fiction; The Kafka that many of us read for the first time was in part a construction of Edwin and Willa Muir. Readers on the whole worry little about it, being grateful for access to foreign goods. Nevertheless, I often wonder what people mean when they say they like the way that, for example, Haruki Murakami writes. Or Imrich

2011-07-01T19:31:00.001+10:00

“To thine own self be true,” said Polonius. Timeless advice, but who are you, really, other than an enigma to yourself?...

Outrageous revenge plots when love between astronauts or a puritanical judge and his siren-like sister-in-law went wrong. The public humiliation of a bit player in the Clinton impeachment circus. A lurid misery memoir exposed as fiction. Do we gain anything from reading narratives of these personal unravellings apart from (guilty) pleasure at the pain of others? We might, but not by reading this new book on scandals Who put the Moravian born Freud into Schadenfreude?

The creation of a Southern Silk Road Prime Time for Liberty: Marx of the Media Age
The early bird gets the worm,
and the early worm gets eaten.
I duped the despot by crawling like a snake,” wrote Adam Mickiewicz. No one survives in a dictatorship without being compromised... In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe

There were moments reading this book when I was forced to shut it closed, an experience utterly alien to me. Like any reasonably historically-aware individual, I considered myself familiar with the carnage that overtook Europe in the earlier half of the 20th century: the gas chambers and the gulags, the mass shootings and show trials, the wanton disregard for human life and the heinous ideas which compelled people to, actively or passively, play a part in the deaths of tens of millions of fellow human beings. Reading about this period, there comes a point when the sheer scale and horror of the events which took place — the instant incineration of tens of thousands of civilians, for instance — desensitizes one from appreciating the sheer terror and physical pain that individuals endured.

• The Butchery of Hitler and Stalin [Empty trash. Buy milk. Forge history; Dangerous minds Criminal Minds; Paul Theroux loathes luxury. He set off 50 years ago in search of miserable, difficult places; forbidden cities; and back roads...;
As a young girl, Arundhati Roy once raided her teacher’s garden in her native village in Kerala, the lush tropical state in the south of India. She dug up the carrots, removed the edible orange roots, then carefully replanted the green tops in the soil. It took four days for the greenery to wither and the crime to be discovered. The culprit was never identified There is romance in their resistance]
• · TWO MILLIGRAMS OF The Big B, the doctor will say not so long from now after you have come in for relief from the Theme Park Adventure that is your life. It will cure what ails your restless iPodded, iPadded, and Kindled existence. Boredom, which begins, as Walter Benjamin put it, when “we don’t know what we’re waiting for,” is now a solution, not a problem. The Uses of Tedium; Last requests. In death, John Ross wanted his ashes mixed with pot, rolled into a joint, and smoked at his funeral; Hard to say what’s more ridiculous: reading Ayn Rand or sitting through a three-part film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. Pick your poison
• · · Humans are natural-born storytellers, so lying is in our blood Lying and art spring from a common impulse: to escape reality. Art is in fact a kind of lying, and lying a form of art... If you can lie, you can act - Promiscuous with his enthusiasms; Among the countless pleasures of profanity is versatility. Noun, verb, adverb, or adjective, four-letter vulgarities are indispensable Adverb; “The only way to write is well,” said A.J. Liebling, “how you do it is your own damn business.” Unless you’re Jozef Imrich... Heavy sentences
• · · · Marshall McLuhan is the Marx of the media age. But his Catholicism was no deadening opiate. It made him more ambitious and far-reaching...At the turn of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth there was Darwin in biology, Marx in political science, Einstein in physics, and Freud in psychology. Since then there has been only McLuhan in communications studies. Marx of the media age; Peter's classmate Greg Hywood; Where should the ABC sit within the changing media landscape? The Place Of The National Broadcaster
• · · · · The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning ... Saroeun with Sister; The story of the families who fled the killing fields of Cambodia to find safety in Australia, revisited nearly 25 years on. What are they doing? Did they find a home? And what does their experience tell us about the current debate over refugee arrivals? Where Are They Now?
• · · · · · China has been buying-up Australian farming land and mines. Does this represent a national problem? Selling off the farm?; China is not only Australia's largest trading partner, but is also an increasingly important supplier of capital. Indeed, Hong Kong aside, Australia is now China's top foreign direct investment destination. Chinese perspectives on investing in Australia; Southern silk road: Turbocharging "South-South" economic growth

2011-06-30T20:26:00.003+10:00

The law, sir, is like a net. Little fish slip through it.
Great fish crash through it. And all the rest are hopelessly
entangled in it.
-Media Dragons

It is the end of another financial year and what a creative year is has been Making a film about Certainty in life ; A year in Review and Ahead

David Slavitt’s “Youth, Age, Life, and Art” (Rounding the Horn, 1978):

Innocent, young, I wove syntactical nets
to snare moments of joy, but when one gets
older, the trick is reversed, and, late at night,
to fend the beasts off—fear, rage, and despair—
that prowl the dark or hover in the air,
I sit in my circle of lamplight and I [blog].

2011-06-29T18:54:00.003+10:00

Perhaps, after all, there is something in the theory that only the ultra-busy can find time for everything.
-James Agate, Ego 4 at June's 87th Birthday Party

Wagons is a rock band made up of Henry Wagons (on lead vocals and guitar), Steve ‘Harmony’ Hassett (bass and backing vocals), Richard Blaze (lead guitar), Mark ‘Tuckerburg’ Dawson (drums and percussion), Si the Philanthropist (on washboard and drums), and Matty ‘Soft Moods’ Hassett (on keyboards). Wagons grew up in Melbourne's outer-eastern suburbs. Henry's first band were a pretentious noise slavic group called Dworzec Henry Wagons love for performing is electric, he leads the crowd to a sing-a-long that blows the roof off, the absolute apex of the gig. During the encore Wagons' jumps off stage and prowls through the crowd that he has thoroughly seduced. This triple-bill - Adelaide Boy, Gin Club, Wagons- saw a music-loving Saturday night crowd pack out the Gabbie's godmother's hotel, shuffling in to see what the fuss was all about. Henry Wagons was likely out of his mind on Saturday night at 11th birthday of Gwynne's Annandale Hotel and he was determined to jar you right out of yours, MTs, Malchkeon, and Mine ;-)

Conjuring up images of Jack Black The big and bloody hearted men of Larsson calibre
Always providing you have enough courage--or money--you can do without a reputation.
-Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
No one knew the enigmatic author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels as well as Eva Gabrielsson, Stieg Larsson’s partner of four decades.

In an adaptation from her memoir, she shares the shock of his death, and the code that shaped his life.

Turn off your cellphone,
Start powering it down.
Turn off your cellphone
Or your fellow men will frown.
If it rings at the end of The Crucible,
All the ushers will treat you as gooseable.
If you chat when you ought to be si-o-lent,
Then assume that your date will get violent.
We're all sick of the buzzing and ringing
That detracts from the acting and singing.
Turn off your cellphone
Or get out of town.

• Stieg Larsson’s Long Good-Bye [Though all the religions of the world teach love, preach sympathy for others and encourage Man to exercise utmost self-restraint and have most profoundly been a source of inspiration for the highest good of mankind, the world today is torn by conflicts, enmity and religious hatred. Guru Granth Sahib: A Model For Interfaith Understanding; When Imre Kertész, the Hungarian-Jewish novelist and Auschwitz survivor, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002, the Swedish Academy understandably cited his "writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history," even as Kertész, the first Hungarian to win the prize, expressed hope that it might more generally shine light on the "ignored literature of Hungary Here There Is a Why: Primo Levi, Humanist ]
• · David Perry, our EVP/Head of TV Production at Saatchi & Saatchi NY, was recently polled with a bunch of other ad people for an item by Shoot, a hot hub on all things production. David is a veteran, a director and producer par excellence who's tasted it all, and cut to the chase with some clear insights and advice... Straight Shooting ; One that feels ironic is a Chilean volcano unleashing a global cloud of ash just two days after Apple launched its iCloud suite Crazy Clouds
• · · Kiss in Just a Kiss ; Lying and art spring from a common impulse: to escape reality. Art is in fact a kind of lying,.. and lying a form of art.
• · · · The only way to write is well, said A.J. Liebling, how you do it is your own damn business Unless you’re Jozef Imrich... Heavy sentences of note; Steve Rubel very publically erased his blogging history and jumped to Tumblr to start afresh. As he mentioned to Mathew Ingram at GigaOm the idea to to not confuse Google with old content that does not in his view reflect his social signals appropriately. The shift to Tumblr is a choice that is his and no issue there. Although I found these stats interesting, with nothing particularly anti social about my choice, WordPress. The big surprise for me is the demise of Google’s blogger – it is all but dead Has the thought leader out-thought himself?; Companies have been focussed on a very narrow definition of profit and value creation. The New Capitalist Manifesto
• · · · · At least 60 members of Congress currently hold stock in several news companies across the country, according to a story released by opensecrets.org, The Center for Responsive Politics last week. The story exposed these congressmen as hidden investors in media companies, questioning their motives and the impact that this may have on these newsrooms. Many members of Congress actually have a vested interest -- beyond just their political careers -- in the performance of the same organizations that are… ; GAO Investigative news; IRS in the dark about number of tax shelters and avoidance schemes
• · · · · · Why are women attracted to rich men who just want one-night stands? Because they want to change them ...The smug-looking guy with the expensive sports car and the smirk that says 'I'm rich,' is obviously trying to impress a woman with his display of wealth. Jozef Imrich ; Peter Griffin, Family Guy Al Bundy probably would have traded his kids for a cold beer. Top 10 Worst Fictional Fathers

2011-06-19T13:37:00.000+10:00

Our lives improve only when we take chances - and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.
-Walter Anderson

Chances are when you're wandering around your local store doing your weekly grocery shop there are brands you gravitate to. BBC food journalist Alex Riley recently dug deep into the emotional connection we have with our favorite food brands, and with two simple experiments he confirmed what we've known for some time... Familiar Faces

Lisa Lindblad is the au courant specialist to watch with one foot in the world of rarefied media dragons and the other in that get-there-first travel adventure as Linda is the source of amazing ideas and resource for the authentic, surprising experiences every sole survivor wants these days … Willing Foot: I am the Cold River, You are the Sea

Google for Media Dragons Giant Leaps for Mankind
So if you're hungry, don't just grab food, grab a book and chow down with Books & Nooks At Books & Nooks we have paired our two favourite pastimes ‘reading and dining out’ to bring you a delicious new book club experience.

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to read more, then Books & Nooks could be your literary lifesaver. This is a book club like no other: they’ll deliver a beautifully wrapped title to your door and then tempt you to actually read it with the promise of intelligent discussion in fabulous surrounds with top food and the odd cocktail. Books are like children: after all the love and attention, they swim or fly the coop and have independent lives

Coda: Mirek saw a rather odd t-shirt stating – I do not need to google as my wife knows everything!
• odd cocktail ; NASA is an ideas factory Giant Leaps for Mankind [If It Is Too Inconvenient, I'm Not Going After It: Research Links ; Convenience as a Critical Factor in Information-seeking Behavior ]
• · This is a series of posts highlighting people and projects that we encounter during our travels that are doing the hard work of changing the world for the better. Tash on her Publishing Journey: I am the Cold River, You are the Sea; Be the Change: Malachi Leopold and his story of reunited love; From Twitter to Facebook, from blogging to YouTube, his company is responsible for making sure the campaign maintains a. high profile on the Internet
• · · The US immigration story is different from Australia's but some political challenges are the same Immigration: the political elephant in Canberra and Washington; The population problem won't be solved until we break the capitalist paradigm Dick Smith on growth; emphatically yes...and no
• · · · "Information taken from this site should be cited as Alvaredo, Facundo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, The World Top Incomes Database, dd/mm/yyyy. We advise making explicit reference to the date when the database was consulted, as the statistics may change. The specific country chapters and papers should also be cited. (Select Countries, Select Years, Select Variables - populated as choices are made): The World Top Incomes Database; Kristinn Hrafnsson opened the case for the proposition ''WikiLeaks is a force for good' …. Suelette Dreyfus, a University of Melbourne academic who wrote Underground in collaboration with the website's founder, Julian Assange, said WikiLeaks was a necessary addition to the array of checks and balances on power. The evidence has shown that the watchdogs and the agencies of democracy aren't enough on their own The debate is over: we heart WikiLeaks as force for good; The WikiLeaks News & Views Blog -- Special Weekend Edition!
• · · · · In a catch-me-if-you-can explanation of why it has targeted the likes of Sony, the US Senate, an FBI affiliate, and online porn sites, the LulzSec hacking group says it plans to keep having fun until it gets caught 4 Things WikiLeaks Taught Us About Document Security ; The hacking free-for-all continued this week as Sega apparently became the latest victim of a network breach and none other than hacking group LulzSec offered to help the game company by taking down the responsible parties After Sega gets hacked, LulzSec offers to seek revenge; LulzSec leaks 62,000 emails and passwords ; Miller said that companies were rushing to put all of their information into the internet "cloud" without understanding that by connecting their databases to the internet they were exposing themselves to risks of serious attacks
• · · · · · There's no doubt that the ground is shaking underneath what we used to think of as journalism. The politics of literary boycotts; There's a thin line between sex and politics Journalism Shedding Its Old Mass Media Skin ; In fact, there are serious doubts as to her location and even identity, and many are suggesting her entire persona as an American-born Syrian blogging live from the revolution was an elaborate hoax. Male lesbians: just one type of creepy online fakery

2011-06-12T16:48:00.010+10:00

Heath Aston interviews Bruce Hawker who believes O'Farrell's team underestimates Secord at its peril: I think he will be a real front-footer. He's a big man but he's highly energetic. I'd be surprised if he didn't find his way into the shadow ministry very early on. Robbo and co. will be listening to what he has to say because there was no one better at dealing with the press gallery than Walt

He was creative, says Hawker. He could always muster up a [positive] story from virtually nothing. You need someone like that in government. He had the energy to trawl through the Government Gazette and find things others had missed. The Trolley of Truth; Patrick Low, the former press secretary to Education Minister John Aquilina, told the commission he was pressured by Mr Carr's press secretary, Walter Secord, to shore up a rumour the 15-year-old had access to a gun because it would make a better
story.

Who Feeds the Watchdogs: The Power of the Crowd Sources of Truths & Pravda: Crisis what crisis?
We need to keep the press from being absorbed into The Media. This means keeping the word press, which is antiquated. But included under its modern umbrella should be all who do the serious work in journalism, regardless of the technology used. The people who will invent the next press in America--and who are doing it now online--continue an experiment at least 250 years old. It has a powerful social history and political legend attached.

Mark Pearson and Roger Patching of Bond University have published a literature review, "Government media relations: A 'Spin' through the literature", a terrific resource for researchers and students interested in what, unfortunately, have become the dark arts of access to, and communication of, government information.

• Dark arts of spin and related topics; Rosen's presentation bemoaned the fact that professional journalists are not harnessing the power of the crowd [ The perpetual development in technology creates a plethora of jobs for us media folk; the problem arises when we, as first years, must choose just one. So, after much deliberation and a bit of guesswork it appears I’m following in the family footsteps and choosing a career in Public Relations. Government media relations: A 'spin' through the literature; If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on Public Relations]
• · Media Advisers - Shadow players in political communication; Crikey ; How does Wikileaks effect journalism? Crime ethics;
• · · When I say a huge army, I mean a really massive number of them. It feels like there are at least 50 PRs to each journalist; At first glance, I’m surprised anyone would question the value PR professionals provide for journalists. Do Journalists Need PR Professionals Anymore?
• · · · Journalists will always highlight the wrongdoings of anyone else in the society, but when it comes to their own community, they unite and act as mafia.; Media Coverage of Corruption
• · · · · New Manual; Wendy Bacon, a former journalist with Fairfax and now a professor of journalism, admitted in The Australian (24 January 1999) that Jim McClelland confessed to her and others that the late Lionel Murphy, Labor Party hero and High Court Judge, had been corrupt. Media lies and corruption
• · · · · · Investigative journalism; “Crisis what crisis?” was Fifa President’s reaction to a journalist’s question at a press conference called by the football’s governing body yesterday. Crisis what crisis?

Coda: Most people (even many who work on the brain) assume that what you see is pretty much what your eye sees and reports to your brain. In fact, your brain adds very substantially to the report it gets from your eye, so that a lot of what you see is actually "made up" by the brain. Seeing more than your eye does
20 Beautiful Photographs Created With Pinhole Camera

2011-06-11T12:37:00.001+10:00

The prize is awarded annually to a journalist whose work has "penetrated the established version of events and told and unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or 'official drivel', as Martha Gellhorn called it." Julian Assange wins Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism

Here’s a hot shot of inspiration: The New York Times deputy national editor Adam Bryant could be described as the "CEO whisperer." Bryant conducts regular interviews with CEOs and other leaders for his weekly Sunday Business feature called Corner Office. Among the many lessons Bryant has gleaned from top executives such as Gordon Bethune, Howard Shultz and Eduardo Castro-Wright is they tend to get misty-eyed when they speak about certain employees who exhibit a quality Bryant calls "fearlessness." Who are the fearless? They are rebels who refuse to accept the status quo when things are merely "fine." They advocate turning the system upside down and even breaking it in order to make it better. The fearless are also those who have made non-traditional and often risky career choices. According to Bryant, CEOs appreciate people who value experience and want to broaden their base of skills instead of simply climbing the ladder. every single day I try and do something that’s out of my comfort zone and I think that’s just a good rule for living

River of Shadows: And I mean it
My personal life, Ayn Rand says, ‘is a postscript to my novels; it consists of the sentence: “And I mean it.”’

If you try to find out about the legacy of Ayn Rand, your search engine will probably direct you first to aynrand.org, a website run by the Ayn Rand Institute in California. The ARI was founded in 1985, three years after Rand’s death, by Leonard Peikoff, her friend and heir. It runs a newsletter called Impact and, via the Objectivist Academic Center, undergraduate courses in the Randian world vision.

• Your Voice in My Head, As Astonishing as Ayn ['m rather interested in the idea of reviewing nonfiction. Like, how up to the task should the reviewer be? How knowledgeable, how willing to call someone on their bullshit? (I obsess over this a little bit, actually, since I've been reviewing nonfiction exclusively at my books column for the Smart Set. One 60-ish man, a former Fortune 500–company administrator, bragged, Sergeant McKee says, that his retirement plan consisted of having sex with as many prostitutes as possible Smart Set ; We periodically have to give thanks for the existence of Rebecca Solnit, for pieces like "Men Explain Things to Me." And now, her piece on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, asking why the storyline has to be so goddamn obvious, so metaphorical.
What makes the sex scandal that broke open last week so resonant is the way the alleged assailant and victim model larger relationships around the world, starting with the IMF’s assault on the poor. That assault is part of the great class war of our era, in which the rich and their proxies in government have endeavored to aggrandize their holdings at the expense of the rest of us. Poor countries in the developing world paid first, but the rest of us are paying now, as those policies and the suffering they impose come home to roost via right-wing economics that savages unions, education systems, the environment, and programs for the poor, disabled, and elderly in the name of privatization, free markets, and tax cuts.]
• · Global Wealth Continues Its Strong Recovery with $9 Trillion Gain, but Pressures on Wealth Managers Persist ; FRANK Lowy is known as one of Australia's most successful businessmen, having co-founded the Westfield group and turned it into a global shopping centre empire. Mirja and Kevin Denlay, are said to be clients of LGT and Mr Kieber passed on their names to the tax office
• · · Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later Blogs Will Change Your Business ; We believe transparent government is better government. Twitter enables real conversation between lawmakers and voters, in real time. Find your representatives in Congress Twitter ; TweetCongress.org ; For many politicians, Twitter represents a Rumsfeldian "known unknown," an expansive tundra of technology that simply exists and is filled with strange language, bizarre communication concepts, and millions of fans of some child named Justin Bieber. The Ultimate Twitter Guide for Politicians & Other Really Important People
• · · · Ever wondered what goes through your mind when you choose where to sit on the train? Or in a waiting room? An interesting study by researchers for the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin has an interesting take on it all. Sit Still ; Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
• · · · · Each year media heavyweights like Monocle, Forbes and The Economist publish a list of the world’s most liveable cities – the very best places to live in the world ; Vancouver is Hollywood’s urban body double. It is famously the stand-in for New York, LA, Seattle and Chicago, employed when those cities just get too tough, too traffic-clogged, too murderous or too bureaucratic to film in Liveable v lovable
• · · · · · Leaders talk about holding large-scale public conversations, but they won't succeed if the methods are unsatisfying for participants, if an authentic conversation occurs at all. In this paper, Lyn Carson presents the World Café method, a viable way of involving large numbers of people in a meaningful, conversational exchange. She describes how a particular World Café event was designed, and then explore the value of the World Café method as a means to achieve social change. Professor Lyn Carson from the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney talks about using deliberative democracy to solve the world's 'wicked problems' Designing a public conversation using the World Café method ; World Café ; Sydney Film Festivals and Cafes

2011-06-07T07:07:00.001+10:00

I wish to goodness my life were not always a circle. I wish I were not always resting beneath the umbrella of my own personality.
-John P. Marquand, The Late George Apley

The whole lucky 13th floor was bushed out, and time fell away when I read this improvised way of looking at working life, though not because my working life is in any way behind the times:
I feel like I am hiding Anne Frank!
I feel like I've been told the secret but have sold it for a ride on Khassogi's yatch.
I feel like I have discovered the best icecream shop in Melbourne, but cannot share it with my friends
The burden of knowing this dark, tempting secret is prematurely ageing me (is their face-lift leave in the new agency agreement?).
I hold your career in the palm of my hand and it is a quivering dove.
What to do, what to do?
Misguided Hope of Literary Intelligence Analyst

Seekers Lovers Keepers of Poetry Poetry She Wrote
Smile, like you've got nothing to lose,
No matter what you might do
There's always someone out there
Cooler than you

I know that's hard to believe
But there are people you meet
They're into something
That is to big to be expressed
Through their clothes
And they'll put up
With all the poses you throw

And you won't even know
That they're not sizing you up
They know your mum messed you up
Or maybe let you watch
Too much TV
But they'll still look in your eyes
To find the human inside
You know there's always something
In there to see
Beneath the veneer
Not everybody made the list this year
Have a beer

Make me feel tiny
If it makes you feel tall
But there's always someone
Cooler than you

Now that I've got the disease
In a way I'm relieved
'Cause I don't have to stress about it
Like you do

I might just get up and dance
Or buy some acid-washed pants
When you don't care
Then you've got nothing to lose

And I won't hesitate
'Cause every moment
Life is slipping away

Make me feel tiny
If it makes you feel tall
But there's always someone
Cooler than you

No One is Cooler Than MEdia Dragon ;-) by Gannon TM © 7 June 2011 (Non Nag)
• Publish Away - Diary as Sin ; [ Non Nag Family Tree on the Largest Island; Why poets and writers like treasure islands ]
• · Forget Facebook – our cognitive capacities max out at three to five intimate friendships. Time to shrink our social networks? ; Lying and art spring from a common impulse: to escape reality. Art is in fact a kind of lying, and lying a form of art. Truth Telling
• · · Ours is the age of the meme, in which information spreads faster and farther than ever before. But who’s in charge, us or our memes? Ideas, fads, hoaxes; Tina Fey has turned superficial self-deprecation into shtick. The lesson for female comics: Be unthreatening and men might let you join the show.. NEUROSIS AND COMEDY make a natural pair. The former is often a type of pathological self-awareness, and nothing breeds a sense of comic irony like obsessive doubt and social maladjustment. Woody Allen, Richard Lewis, Larry David: all Jewish men from whose brains you can almost hear the constant whir of anxious introspection The Neurosis Racket; >; By day, Stephen Griffiths pursued his doctorate in homicide studies, writing a dissertation on 19th-century methods of murder. By night, he employed 14th-century tactics on his victims Murder Most Academic
• · · · Paul Theroux loathes luxury. He set off 50 years ago in search of miserable, difficult places; forbidden cities; and back roads The places in between ; Poverty deepens and inequality grows. But the rich, says Deirdre McCloskey, are blameless: “Success in a commercial society is a victimless crime. The success of capitalism and the failure of central planning in improving the lot of ordinary citizens have not, however, diminished the clerisy’s attraction to government planning or its disdain for the market. Instead, the clerisy has claimed that the wealth of some in a world where others are poor is a sure sign of the sinfulness of the former and the innocence, if not sainthood, of the latter. An Obvious Secret
• · · · · From recruitment to employment law and from leadership development to career moves, HR covers the gamut ; Count on this blog to learn more about workers’ compensation, risk management and more ; There is no joy in saying "We told you so," when the price being paid is so high. This week's economic news of lowered growth forecasts, record housing lows, and increasing unemployment claims is truly tragic. But the silver lining is that this continuing evidence of the failure of Big Government is driving more and more people to think again. Prime Time for Liberty
• · · · · · Trefis breaks down the most important aspects of the LinkedIn IPO. Providing answers to pressing questions, this report not only helps investors determine the true value of LNKD, but can also serve as a guide for how to approach other splash IPOs, like Groupon’s impending offering. LinkedIn: 10 Things You Should Know Before Investing; Despite long professing the benefits of understanding happiness, the father of the positive psychology movement now believes it's overrated. According to Dr Martin Seligman's new book Flourish, happiness is just one of the components of true well-being. It’s Time to Flourish ; Museums by Google

CODA:
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
— Steve Jobs, June 2005

Tash the master/mistress photographer of the soul and character of individuals of diverse classes and callings is off on a foto - publishing journey of a lifetime Lens and Pixel e

2011-06-01T20:26:00.009+10:00

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques. Winston Churchill have mastered language more than any other statesman. Even so, when he wanted to rally the British people during the Second World War, he didn’t speak like a scholar. He said—so basically that anyone could understand—“You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs—victory in spite of all terrors—victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.”

On a micro level, The Tree of Life, set primarily in the 1950s in Waco, Texas (Malick’s hometown), tells the story of a boy, Jack (Hunter McCracken), the oldest of three sons, struggling against the rule of his authoritarian father (Brad Pitt); on a macro, the film takes on nothing less than the beginning of the universe. Meteors erupt, lava flows, dinosaurs roam the earth; the whispery voice-over of Jack’s beatific mother (Jessica Chastain) implores Help each other. Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive

Louder Than Words: Depraved, Baroque, and Mostly Offbeat The Tree of Life
IT’S A BIG TRAP to think that living in another time would be better. At its best, each generation collapses past, present, and future setences ... IT’S NOT THAT I DON’T LIKE WORDS, There’s sometimes no need for words ... The Mystery of Reading Backwards:

Don't nod
Dogma: I am God
Never odd or even
Too bad – I hid a boot
Rats live on no evil star
No trace; not one carton
Was it Eliot's toilet I saw?
Murder for a jar of red rum
May a moody baby doom a yam?
Go hang a salami; I'm a lasagna hog!
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!
A Toyota! Race fast... safe car: a Toyota
Straw? No, too stupid a fad; I put soot on warts
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?
Doc Note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod
No, it never propagates if I set a gap or prevention
Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna
Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus
Kay, a red nude, peeped under a yak
Some men interpret nine memos
Campus Motto: Bottoms up, Mac
Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
Madam, in Eden I'm Adam
Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo
Ah, Satan sees Natasha
Lisa Bonet ate no basil
Do geese see God?
God saw I was dog
Dennis sinned

• Words like LIVE and STRAW (which read EVIL and WARTS backwards) are not themselves palindromes but the "phrases" LIVE EVIL and STRAW WARTS are. "semiordnilap" [a term coined by Lewis Caroll, by reversing the word "palindrome"!CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER, said Alice, although I can’t remember exactly where [Understanding Dyslexia ; Herbert von Karajan conducts the first movement of Verdi's Requiem at La Scala in 1967. The soloists are Leontyne Price, Fiorenza Cossotto, Luciano Pavarotti, and Nicolai Ghiaurov Suggestions of madness, passion, obsession; Tens of thousands of opinionated academics around the world have become internet bloggers while universities are increasingly establishing blogging sites on their web pages. Blogging has moved from being a nerdish undergraduate pastime to an accepted communication medium within the academic community ]
• · · Kevin, like Malchkeon, is an avid believer in the power of the senses. New York magazine recently featured the perfume world's Willy Wonka, Christopher Brosius' quest to create the invisible scent. A perfume only cer tain people can smell, something that smells so good, you can't smell it at all... Scent From Heaven - Les Must De Cartier Vintage;The first Cartier fragrance that broke
with the traditions of perfumery. For the first time, the very green note of
galbanum in an Oriental, an incomparable freshness...like ice cubes thrown into a fiery concentrate. Les Must de Cartier
• · · · It took more than two years for Michaelangelo to carve his famed David, but now you can have a mini-masterpiece of your own in a matter of moments. At a kiosk in the heart of Barcelona, if you stand briefly, a machine will produce a statuette replica of your pose... A lasting memory ; We are known by the trail of 0’s and 1’s we leave in our wake. Who owns that information? Is sharing it – creating a data commons – a civic duty?. Carving Data
• · · · · Playing and Traveling Light; LIKE A BOOMERANG hurled across three-plus decades and carrying today’s viewer back with it to that fervent, hard-edged but oddly innocent downtown moment when the free-for-all 1970s (free because no one had or was willing to admit to having money) gave way to the more practical and materialist ’80s, Ericka Beckman’s Super 8 “Piaget Trilogy” (1978–81) arrives on the Anthology Film Archives screen
• · · · · · Is a diary supposed to be read by anyone other than its writer? ; I am about to start reading Elizabeth Gilbert's second best selling memoir: Committed. It is hot on the heels of Eat, Pray, Love. Two memoirs on the best seller list from the same author is amazing, I think. Blogging and memoir--is there synergy? ; My favorite memoirs; This blog contains essays, book reviews, interviews, tips, techniques, and writing prompts for anyone interested in reading and writing memoirs Revealing Death and Other Courageous Acts of Life

2011-05-31T21:38:00.001+10:00

This is a story that could have come straight from the pages of the US literary superstar Jonathan Franzen.It involves an Australian sporting legend, a dead and overlooked Australian author and Franzen himself. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has weighed into a stoush in Watsons Bay in which residents are fighting plans by the Socceroo goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer for his 1880s harbourfront house Boongarre, also known as the Stead House 14 Pacific Street was the childhood home of the author Christina Stead

IT was a two-year fight between a property developer and a Hollywood director over a timber deck and two palm trees at a $28 million home on one of Sydney's most prized beachfronts. In one corner was Mad Max director George Miller; in the other real estate guru and former commodities trader Vaughan Blank George Miller versus Vaughan Blank: War on the Sydney waterfront

2011-05-30T19:42:00.006+10:00

Payback might be a bitch, but the urge for revenge, rooted in biology, is universal, as well as the stuff of great drama...

Primo Levi has been placed in a box labeled “Holocaust writer,” but his humanism and moral clarity resonate everywhere people are not free... Here There Is a Why: Primo Levi, Humanist

Winners, losers - and revenge The stuff of Bohemian Drama
Forgive everybody everything. So say the self-help gurus. Maybe they’re right. But should forgiveness be reduced to something passive and empty, a sanctimonious way of simply moving on?

In his grand and gloomy book Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud identified the tenacious sense of guilt as “the most important problem in the development of civilization.” In fact, he continued, it seems that “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.” Such guilt made for an elusive quarry, however. It was hard to identify and hard to understand, and even harder to counteract, since it so frequently dwelled at an unconscious level and could easily be mistaken for something else.

• The Moral Economy of Guilt [On the plains of New Mexico, a band of elite marathoners tests a controversial theory of evolution: that humans can outrun the fastest animals on earth.Forgive everybody everything. So say the self-help gurus. Maybe they’re right. But should forgiveness be reduced to something passive and empty, a sanctimonious way of simply moving on? Fair Chase - new explanation of how humans became hunters; Music hits the brain like sex. So can neuroscience distinguish between hearing an organ played and having one’s organs played with?Striking a False Note ; Every year, Washington swells with 20,000 interns. They fetch coffee, drive down wages, and add yet another sexual frisson to the halls of power]
• · · Bernard-Henri Lévy, moral philosopher and vain gadfly, has taken many admirable stands--on Communism, Bosnia, Darfur. So why is this well-coiffed adventure seeker so hated The Strenuous Life ; World War II revisionism – Churchill as war criminal, Allied bombers as terrorists – is often crude, but not without value. It adds complexity to our view of the past. Adam Kirsch explains... Is World War II Still ‘the Good War’?
• · · · We are known by the trail of 0’s and 1’s we leave in our wake. Who owns that information? Is sharing it – creating a data commons – a civic duty?; Harvard has lost faith in itself. Tradition has been abandoned, says Harvey Mansfield, and all that remains is prestige. Harvard will hold on to that, because somehow it can be used to deflate its pretensions
• · · · · At MIT, everyone is eccentric – and it certainly pays. Alumni have founded 25,800 companies, which generate revenues of about $1.9 trillion...; Literature and law. At the Supreme Court, Hemingway and Wittgenstein loom large. Not so the scribblings of legal scholars, which are of no use and no interest to Chief Justice Roberts... Keep the Briefs Brief, Literary Justices Advise
• · · · · · To some, the tension between security and privacy melts away with a simple retort: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” But it isn’t true. Even upstanding Arts & Letters Daily readers have things to conceal.. Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide' ; Word processors were going to liberate us from paperwork: “Machines should work, people should think.” But neither ideal is often enough the case. Now what?.. Paperwork Explosion
• · · · · · Veteran journalist Stuart Washington Google Australia's real strength is in services, not sales; Light-footed Google in $4.6bn tax dodge ;BusinessDay's Stuart Washington yesterday won the $5000 Australian Council of Superannuation Investors media award for his coverage of the collapse of the Albury fund manager Trio Capital, in which investors lost $125 million. He gave this acceptance speech at the award ceremony. Using elaborate corporate structures in exotic Caribbean tax havens, Astarra Strategic spirited away about $125 million, with ASIC eventually finding a lawyer based in Hong Kong, Jack Flader, playing an instrumental role. Astarra Strategic spirited away about $125 million

2011-05-25T22:11:00.000+10:00

People with a scarcity mentality tend to see everything in terms of win-lose. There is only so much; and if someone else has it, that means there will be less for me. The more principle-centered we become, the more we develop an abundance mentality, the more we are genuinely happy for the successes, well-being, achievements, recognition, and good fortune of other people. We believe their success adds to...rather than detracts from... our lives.
-Stephen R. Covey on recognition

The rewards go to the risk-takers, those who are willing to put their egos on the line and reach out to other people and to a richer, fuller life for themselves.
-Susan RoAne

2011-05-24T21:20:00.002+10:00

From the School of Working Life I've often said there a few things more insulting than false modesty and Media Dragon I have no intention of insulting you with it ;-)
-There’s so many sides to Media Dragon, we are round

US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously opined that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Yet even the liberal democracies have claimed that sometimes they require a place in the shade – condemning Wikileaks for publishing their confidential information. Many people are convinced that Wikileaks is a force for good; others condemn it as being equivalent to a terrorist organisation that detonates explosive information rather than bombs. Are governments justified in their condemnation of Wikileaks and merely being responsible in protecting their secrets? Could the world really survive an unbridled commitment to transparency?
For: Professor Stuart Rees
Against: Alexander Downer
-Thursday 16 June 2011 Wikileaks is a force for good City Recital Hall Angel Place

Silver Screen L&C/C&L: Cover to Cover After the Prague Spring
To make progress, you have to make a mess
-Peggy Lee (quoted in George Simon, "Hooray for Love!," Metronome, December 1948)

If one simply wants to make a living by putting words on paper, then the BBC, the film companies and the like are reasonably helpful. But if one wants to be primarily a writer, then, in our society, one is an animal that is tolerated but not encouraged--something rather like a house sparrow--and one gets on better if one realises one's position from the start.
-George Orwell, "The Cost of Letters" (Horizon, September 1946)

When you’re in a consumer society, one of the ways to make yourself feel better is to spend. When that doesn’t feel right any more, or isn’t possible, you look for other outlets. It’s not just about mental wellbeing or self-help; it’s about cultivating your mind — but without being snobby or pretentious. The most popular talks, she concedes, are always on the topics of love and work, but the approach is anything but Bridget Jonesy. A recent workshop may have been titled “How necessary is a relationship?”, but the conversation took in the poet David Whyte and the psychologist Anthony Storr’s book Solitude.

• Living Well [The School of Life has been described as a Chemist for the mind ; “The rose,” says Umberto Eco, “is so rich in meanings that it hardly has any meaning left.” Not so. The bloom remains potent with symbolism The tale of the rose]
• · Travel can be madly exasperating, especially if you write for a living. One of the reasons why Mrs. T and I tend to gravitate to familiar lodgings when on the road is that, like most writers, I prefer to work in familiar surroundings. From ocean to ocean, forever ; Forgive everybody everything. So say the self-help gurus. Maybe they’re right. But should forgiveness be reduced to something passive and empty, a sanctimonious way of simply moving on? The Moral Economy of Guilt
• · · The mixed fortunes of Prague's 'European Hollywood' What began as the joint dream of two Prague brothers has become one of the most important centers of filmmaking in Europe: Barrandov Studios Barrandov Studios at 80 ; “The average international gross per Pixar film is more than $550 million” according to the new article in Wired this month. I am a huge fan of Pixar films, and find the emotion that is baked into their animated films breath-taking. One of the secrets of Pixar’s blockbuster success ; Often spot-on, sometimes creepy, David Thomson’s masterwork is the most influential book ever written about the movies—and the most infuriating. My Villawood Love Story ; Drama on Sydney Harbour Bridge and Lockdown
• · · · Jupiter lined up with Venus, Mercury and Mars in a celestial dance early in the morning Down Under. The alignment of the four planets happens only once every 50-100 years, and very rarely on Friday the 13th. The planets align over Sydney; "There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say." Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave Planets cluster for once-in-a-lifetime viewing; Sunday, May 22, 2011 is going to be a very bad day for people who are not good Christians, because at 6pm on Saturday, May 21, the Rapture is going to happen:-)
• · · · · Shortly after I began my working life, on the edge of the Westminster jungle, I landed a job with a political ‘big beast’; an alpha male, in very much the same mould as Dominique Strauss-Kahn: silver-haired, heavy-set, charismatic. Bear Pit ; Book titles are a touchy subject for writers. It’s not rare to hear an author complain in private about one of his or hers, and ache to reach back in time to swap it for something else. A different title for a fizzled book might have meant a different life for it. A Graphic Memoir That Earns the Designation
• · · · · · Despite the lack of food, there was a sense of optimism in the air. People discussed politics with intensity – a fervour that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, the Russians I met told me. My perestroika generation ; There’s so many sides to Bob Dylan, he’s round Planet Dylan

CODA:

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
-John Burroughs

2011-05-17T21:42:00.002+10:00

Happy Silver Wedding Anniversary Christopher and Lidia

Back in 1986 when Sylvania Waters was not even a twinkle in the Sydney real television eye there was one wild wild party in the background ;-)

Married couples who love each other tell each other a thousand things without talking.
-Poet Cieslak

The Japanese have a word for it. It's Judo -- the art of conquering by yielding. The Czech or Polish equivalent of judo is, Yes, dear ;-)

All traditions to be thrown out the window at the Polish club on 21 May ...

2011-05-15T22:52:00.001+10:00

On Gabbie's and Dragon's birthday, I think I’ll take this advice and forgive all who have oppressed media dragons. Not forever, just for today. To forgive the oppressor is the medicine that heals Happy Latin Amerikan Birthday Gabbie

2011-05-13T21:32:00.000+10:00

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
-W.H. Auden, "Epitaph on a Tyrant" (courtesy of Peter W and Larraine; Bob and Sue; Irma and Garth)

OK, OK, I know: both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are cultural inventions, full stop. But I’m nonetheless gonna lay a bit of biology on this, for the same reason famously given for why climb Everest … because it’s there

Yes, I am still alive ;-) No, I didnot have a writer's block. I decided to take a sabbatical leave, that is all. Who says only professors can take a sabbatical leave?

Because It Was There We can’t help believing what we read. Spinoza said as much 400 years ago
Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude.
-Hugh Kingsmill, The Progress of a Biographer

Washington Post publisher Philip Graham famously described journalism as the “first rough draft of history” in a speech to Newsweek correspondents in 1963 — but as a new research paper from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism notes, that role is increasingly being played by social media such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. The latest example is the coverage of the Osama bin Laden raid, which triggered questions about whether the person sharing news via social media was a journalist or not

• How Social Media Creates a Rough Draft of History [ A Canadian blogger has announced his own death in a heart-wrenching entry written before he succumbed to cancer posted on the day he died.Derek Miller,41,chronicled his battle with the disease since diagnosis in 2007,winning thousands of loyal readers. - You imagine it can't happen to you, and then it does. Life and Death ; What your literature professors tell you is true after all: reading narrative fiction helps make you more socially skilled. You become a better reader of other people’s minds and better able to navigate your complex social world. On the other hand, reading non-fiction does not seem to improve your social abilities]
• · Sohaib Athar, the Pakistani programmer who earned Internet fame on Sunday by inadvertently live blogging the U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden, is handling his 15 minutes -- and a never-ending barrage of media requests -- with uncommon good humor.
Bin Laden raid blogger enjoying his new-found fame Sohaib Athar ; From blogger to published author is the goal of many a blogger Kerri Sackville - How did you do it?
• · · A prominent blogger is planning a book exposing philandering politicians to coincide with the election. Blogger Cameron Slater plans to dish the dirt on male and female MPs from across the political spectrum. He said he had kiss-and-tell stories from women who claimed to have had affairs with male politicians, including one who said she had slept with three past and present ministers. Other sources included drivers and security staff. If you're an MP and you're partying, it's game over. The benchmark will be unethical behaviour.; NOTHING appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. The soldan of EGYPT, or the emperor of ROME, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion
• · · · With over 10 million users, Blogger is significantly more popular than WordPress, the second on the scale of in-demand blog-hosting services. That may be because Blogger was established well before Google purchased the company, earning the early trust of the blogosphere Google’s Blogger Gets Geo-Location ; "If you've got nothing to hide," many people say, "you shouldn't worry about government surveillance." Others argue that we must sacrifice privacy for security. But as Daniel J. Solove argues in this important book, these arguments and many others are flawed. They are based on mistaken views about what it means to protect privacy and the costs and benefits of doing so. The debate between privacy and security has been framed incorrectly as a zero-sum game in which we are forced to choose between one value and the other. Why can't we have both? If you've got nothing to hide
• · · · · THANKFULLY, there's no law against bullying on the floor of the NSW Parliament. The first week of Parliament saw Labor get exactly what voters prescribed in March – a black eye Barry O'Farrell happily played bully-in-chief ; The Premier's trust-building agenda is being undermined by mixed messages ; Taste of Shallowness ;Using platitudes like “remarkable” and “dazzling” in flap copy is forgivable, but calling a book “funny” when it is anything but is a much worse crime Premier's list shows who's in and who's out
• · · · · · How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex The Pleasures of Imagination ; Playing the game in China: The Mafia versus the Prince and his Ministry of Truth

2011-05-11T21:49:00.010+10:00

Greg aka Grog, noted that by and large the coverage of the Australian Budget 2011 in the newspapers was very good. Unanswerable Prayers to be answered ... O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day. ~Psalm 119:97

Compared to some countries, just about every single person in Australia is rich beyond their wildest dreams. Compared to some suburbs in Australia, 95% of Australians are poor.

I am Rich that is a bit RICH

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor—as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper.
— E.B. White, "The Art of the Essay" (Interview), The Paris Review1

Do something every day that you don't want to do;
this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
-- Mark Twain

The Story So Far: Truth in Reporting Can digital journalism be profitable? Skype Purchased by Microsoft for $8.5 Billion
What's making money, what isn't, and why?

A new report from Columbia University faculty members Bill Grueskin, academic dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and Ava Seave, principal at Quantum Media and adjunct professor at the Columbia Business School, addresses these questions about the financial state of digital journalism. The report provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the business challenges that for-profit news organizations face with their digital ventures. The report, The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism, is being issued by the school's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which is committed to the research and advancement of journalism on digital platforms."

• The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism[Internetnews.com: communications provider Skype for some $8.5 billion in cash -- the largest acquisition in the company's history. The two companies said the deal was the result of an unsolicited offer from Microsoft and, if it passes regulatory hurdles, will make Skype a division of the software giant. The companies hope to finalize the purchase during the current calendar year. Microsoft sees the acquisition as key to its vision of a connected world which will have, the two companies hope, billions of users over time." Microsoft announced Tuesday that it is buying Internet ; Third parties, in particular advertisers, have accidentally had access to Facebook users’ accounts including profiles, photographs, chat, and also had the ability to post messages and mine personal information Facebook Applications Accidentally Leaking Access to Third Parties]
• · Truth in Reporting Tanner's media point proven...by media; LINDSAY Tanner has unwittingly given us an insight into federal Labor's political malaise. Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy
• · · The book is not a memoir, it is in fact much closer to George Megalogenis’ Quarterly Essay Trivial Pursuit, than it is some tell-all political autobiography Greg Jericho Grog's Gamut ; Google on Tanner
• · · · Like Jozef Imrich, raised in relative poverty, Geoff Dyer continues to live with little money and no sense of sacrifice – “a valuable skill, almost a privilege, for anyone wishing to become a writer” Whatever form it takes, your childhood always seems perfectly normal ; First, before we turn our attention to Stalin, to Soviet-era dissidence and to debates about Dmitri Shostakovich’s memoirs, listen: Shostakovich: party hack or secret dissident? Listen closely: Here is an ironist who scorned the Communist Party he submitted to What Shostakovich Was Really Expressing

"I have lately been reading both Joyce and Proust with considerable disappointment; they both seem to me very sick men, giant invalids who, in spite of enormous talent, were crippled by the same disease, elephantiasis of the ego. They both attempted titanic tasks, and both failed for lack of that dull but healthy quality without which no masterpiece can be contrived, a sense of proportion."
-Cyril Connolly, "Comment" (Horizon, May 1941)

2011-05-07T23:11:00.007+10:00

In the center of Prague is a statue of the early 15th-century Czech church reformer Jan Hus that bears the motto: “Truth will prevail.” Thanks to Kovály’s memoir that motto, at least as it pertains to the 20th century, is being borne out.

Deb Richards has worked as a reporter, producer and executive producer on some of the most prestigious programs on Australian current affairs television, including ABC's Four Corners, Lateline and Media Watch programs as well as SBS-TV. She is a multi-award winner, and in 1999 she was joint winner of the Gold Walkley -- Australia's top award for excellence in journalism Gold Walkley The selling of journalism Cash for Comment

There is only one rule. Astonish us! Here’s a test: You now have thirty seconds to recommend a single book that might start a serious student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the 20th century. What book would you choose? Of course, half a minute doesn’t leave much room for reflection—once you’ve arrived at the end of this sentence, your time is all but up. Still, I doubt that most readers of The American Interest will have had much difficulty coming up with several classic works before the clock ran out. ;-) Jozef Imrich's Cold River :-) and Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago would be prime candidates to capture the Soviet side of the horror; Victor Klemperer’s secret diaries published in two volumes as I Will Bear Witness document in deep detail the Nazi side of the totalitarian coin. That Heda Margolius Kovály had to write a memoir about life under Nazism and Communism is a horror. That she did it so well is a gift

Mussolini conceived it, Hitler commissioned it, Stalin perfected it, Saddam obsessed over the design of it: Totalitarian Art of Barry O'Barrell

Structure, rhythm, precision – any good sentence is good in its own way. The best ones can move peoples’ souls.. Mighty River Mighty Pen

2011-05-05T21:54:00.012+10:00

A diplomat is one who thinks twice before saying nothing.
-Jozef Imrich

It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
- Mark Twain

NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell will have to debate the controversial Barangaroo development in Parliament now that protesters have amassed more than 10,000 signatures opposing the Sydney project. Independent MP and Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore was formally presented with the signatures today, the first working day of the new Parliament. There is significant concern across the community about the future of Barangaroo - a very important public site, adjacent to our city and on our precious harbour, Cr Moore said at the presentation outside State Parliament Barangaroo

Mr Keating chairs the Barangaroo Design Excellence review panel and has taken aim at Ms Moore's support for a review of 22-hectare development in Sydney's East Darling Harbour precinct Keating unleashes the lip on 'muesli-chewing' Moore

CODA: All the world is mad save for me and thee, and sometimes I wonder about thee: It’s always nice when former Prime Minister Paul Keating chimes in with an opinion on Australian politics, isn’t it? In a world where nothing is certain, at least you can always count on his sharp tongue to deliver a verbal whipping that is both insightful and reflecting the state of his mind Mad Bastard with bleeding heart
In the race of life always back self-interest…at least you know it's trying G'day scumbags: I have never killed a man but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure
-A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory. He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up. - Paul Keating, a gentle needle A negative impression of Ramrods' manager
Paul Keating lives with his mum in Potts Point and he is dating actress Julieanne Newbould who I always knew as Jules. Jules

Everyone has the right to be stupid but you're abusing the priviledge. -- Keating sees red over charge and wins the day

Ironically, Laws and Keating might also be connected in the Cash for Comment inquiry. We have to consider people like pork and exploit them to the max -- Mr Constantinidis's lawyer, Philip Beazley, said his client was too unwell to appear in court and entered guilty pleas to three charges under the Taxation Administration Act on his behalf Achillies ''Big Al''Constantinidis

PS: It was a cold winter day. An old man walked out onto a frozen cold river, cut a hole in the ice and dropped in his fishing line. He was there for almost an hour, without even a nibble, when a young boy walked out onto the ice, cut a hole in the ice not far from him. The young boy dropped his fishing line and minutes later he hooked a Largemouth Bass. The old man couldn't believe his eyes but chalked it up to plain luck. But, shortly thereafter, the young boy pulled in another large catch.
The young boy kept catching fish after fish. Finally, the old man couldn't take it any longer. "Son, I've been here for over an hour without even a nibble. You've been here only a few minutes and have caught a half dozen fish! How do you do it?"
The boy responded, "Roo raf roo reep ra rums rrarm."
"What was that?" the old man asked.
Again the boy responded, "Roo raf roo reep ra rums rarrm."
"Look," said the old man, "I can't understand a word you're saying.
The boy spit the bait into his hand and said, " You have to keep the worms warm!

2011-05-01T11:04:00.000+10:00

It's 2011. Volatility is the new normal.

What’s the Difference: Early Adopters vs. Laggards Your greatest danger is letting the urgent things crowd out the important

The Learning Decade Swimming outside the flags
Four hundred years ago , British philosopher Francis Bacon declared that “Knowledge is Power.” And, until recently, many corporate leaders would have wholeheartedly agreed with him.

But, today, as we struggle to cope with an uncertain economy, complex globalization, and unprecedented technological transformation, executives on just about every continent increasingly believe that “Knowledge is Survival.” Companies around the world responded to the Great Recession by cutting and controlling costs to reap new eficiencies. The next challenge is growing the global economy; and corporate and government leaders now realize that learning-driven innovation is the most promising way to generate much-needed top-line revenue and the jobs that result.
Indeed, learning has gained new prominence as a critical lever for performance. And it has seeded new strategies that are creating competitive advantage and diferentiation in boardrooms, conference rooms and work environments all over the world. To be sure, not every company is a learning company; but more and more organizations recognize that learning can help solve the most vexing economic and #nancial problems of the day. As a result, we predict that the years leading up to 2020 will be known as “The Learning Decade.”

• Critical lever for performance [The Wall St. Journal suggests that more kids are their own boss in this tough economic climate. At a time when it’s hard for high school students to find the typical jobs that see them through the summer, many are opening up shop, commercializing the proverbial lemonade stand and taking it to new levels... Who’s the Boss? proverbial lemonade stand ; You could be forgiven for thinking that the cold Spring of 2011, with its cutbacks, closures, price hikes and app-frenzy is not the best of all possible times to launch a new magazine, writes John L. Walters. Especially a beautifully printed quarterly targeted at affluent, stylish city-dwellers. Yet here comes Port, an independently financed start-up spearheaded by two art directors and an editor, brimming with confidence, big pictures and long articles. Port]
• · Success is coming down to how comfortable we are with endings, Henry Cloud in Necessary Endings; Crime stories are a ghoulishly satisfying reminder that although murder is possible, it hasn’t yet happened to you.. Murder most entertaining.
• · · In 1896, the Cambridge don Solomon Schechter climbed behind a wall in a Cairo synagogue and discovered the detritus of an entire civilization ; Over-stressed parents, Bryan Caplan has some advice: Stop trying so hard. Have more kids Pay less attention to them
• · · · Bold Innovation Bold: How to Be Brave in Business and Win ; The least Indian of Indian leaders”: V.S. Naipaul's astute assessment of Gandhi, whose social conscience was forged reading Tolstoy in South Africa..; The best ideas prevail. Well, maybe not. We’re hard-wired to reject evidence and views that contradict our beliefs – these days, more than ever
• · · · · For an economist like Peter Orszag, two career paths beckon: public intellectual or Wall Street mandarin; Stiglitzism or Rubinism ; Biblionecrophilia: The conversation about print’s demise has been consumed by nostalgia. As if Amazon will forgo e-profits after recalling the tactile thrill of curling up with a musty paperback..
• · · · · · Selfless behavior has long baffled evolutionary theorists. But E.O. Wilson now claims that he can explain altruism. The response has not been kind... ; The Bible brims with contradictions, says Timothy Beal, but no matter: The Good Book is best read as a catalog of questions, not answers

2011-04-28T09:48:00.000+10:00

In the weeks since the [Inspector General]’s flawed and narrow vision of our diplomatic mission, people of good will in the middle ranks of our Department have seen it as their calling to strictly enforce it. As a consequence, my voice has been prevented from speaking; my pen has been enjoined from writing; and my actions have been confined to the ministerial. You deserve better, but until these rigid, and rigidly narrow, perspectives are overcome, you and the President are being deprived of the intelligent insight of much of your Embassy’s work.
– Douglas Kmiec, noted constitutional law scholar and former Catholic University law school dean, tendering his resignation as U.S. ambassador to Malta to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Above the law

Outcry over spy phones Start Another Fire and Watch It Slowly Die: The Aftermath of Regime Change
Adam Curtis , a documentary filmmaker, traces a loose history of the modern concept of humanitarian intervention in the West and its philosophical underpinnings - punctuated, unsurprisingly, with several compelling documentary film clips.

While historians may quibble with certain aspects of his rendition, there was one passage that stood out:
The movement had begun back in Biafra because a group of young idealists wanted to escape from the old corrupt power politics. To do this they had simplified the world into a moral struggle between good and evil.
They believed that if they could destroy the evil - by liberating victims from oppression by despots - then what would result would be, automatically, good. But the problem with this simple view was that it meant they had no critical framework by which to judge the "victims" they were helping. And the Baghdad bombing made it clear that some of the victims were very bad indeed - and that the humanitarians' actions might actually have helped unleash another kind of evil.

• Might actually have helped unleash another kind of evil [ ; ; ]
• · Amid rising scrutiny of their practices, Google Inc. defended the way it collects location data from Android phones, while Apple Inc. remained silent for a third day Google Defends Way It Gathers Phone Data; I do not care if Apple and Google know where I am. The revelation that Apple's storing location data and keeping it for a year or more on my iPhone and my computer has shocked many, but not me. Hey, everybody, this is exactly where I am and what I'm doing right now Location Is Not a Four Letter Word ; Google (GOOG) Android phones also collect location information, although according to a report in github, those files are regularly pruned, leaving only the most recent data. Track your own iPhone; How Much Should You Freak Out About Apple and Google Tracking Your Location ; Google Links
• · · 14 favourite applications ; Mobile Madness Global mobile traffic nearly tripled for the third year in a row in 2010 ; This work should serve as the final salvo in the long battle between those who are still in denial regard ing KGB espionage in America in the 1930s and 40s and those who assert that this story must be told Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America
• · · · Above the Law – This blog refers to itself as a "legal tabloid" and offers amusing commentary on the latest in law.
Law blogs, also known as blawgs, are plentiful these days. In fact, there are probably thousands to choose from and more appear each week. For that reason, it may be difficult for you to narrow down which ones are worth a regular read. Whether you are a lawyer, law student, or merely interested in the subject, we’ve attempted to cut through the chaff and provide you with what we regard as the top 100 law and lawyer blogs listed below. It was very difficult to choose only 100 blogs from the myriad of successful law blogs. In an effort to remain fair, you will find a variety of subjects covered with the following blogs. Not only are high-profile general law blogs included, niche blawgs are also offered for your consideration. Since it would be impossible to rank them according to importance, they are categorized according to subject and then alphabetized. According to our research, here are what we consider to be the top 100 law and lawyer blogs ;
Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on April 4, 1968. I was five years and three days old. One can kill a person, but cannot kill an idea. Our present world is at a critical crossroads where many people stick their necks out for social justice and other social good (unfortunately including those causing severe social damage while seeking well-intentioned goals -- MADD comes to mind, for instance ), while too many others look out solely for number one, and while many others tread sometimes inconsistent paths somewhere in between. Everyone can improve. Nobody stays the same, just as a river constantly changes; the water molecule that is in front of us in the river at this moment will be miles away later today, and the riverbanks will continually be changed by the river. Few people are a**holes, even though most people sometimes or more often than that act like a**holes Compassion and kindness are a two-way-street ; It has been more than six months since I was forcibly removed from my old job as a deputy prosecutor. Since then, times have been extremely tough. Unemployment is not a way to survive; it is a way to suffer. I can only barely make ends meet at this point, and I grow ever more desperate each day. Everyone says that it is not my fault, and that I should blame the economy for my inability to find gainful employment. But I have no desire for excuses. I want to work again; I want to help people again. All that said, I feel it is time for me to make my own plea for help Facing Reality
• · · · · Home value chart updated 1890-2011
Case Shiller 100 Year Chart (2011 Update), By Barry Ritholtz - April 13, 2011: "In 2006, just as the Housing market was peaking, the NYT ran this graphic of the 100-year Case Shiller chart. It showed how radically overvalued Housing had become. Two years later, TBP [the Big Picture] reader Steve Barry updated that graphic, including the projected Home Price mean reversion ; A land value tax will solve the problems of escalating house prices. Property supply magic ; Kevin received a warm thank-you from Yvonne Adele, the inventor of a global overnight brainstorming service called Ideas While You Sleep While You Were Sleeping
• · · · · · The best tips for cleaning and organizing your home including garages, closets, kitchens, bathrooms, This Too Shall Pass ; at Real Simple

2011-04-27T13:36:00.001+10:00

How does that spark of creativity find its way to the canvas, the page, the dinner plate, or the movie screen? Inside the messy, maddening, and mysterious process of creating something new Great art begins with an idea