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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].

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 ...

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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

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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