Blogging is about observing, life is about participating. Keep them in balance: Don't let logging-in for blogging satiate your desire for adventure; instead, let it stimulate your desire to find a corner of the world that's always had you curious.
-Jim Griffin

A blog is a slate and chalk -- a drawing board for sharing irony, stories, and great works of human imagination and truly weird pieces of history such as the story of Omai, the first Tahitian to visit England in 1774, five years after Captain Cook’s initial voyage to the Pacific.
Savages being à la mode, Omai was welcomed with great enthusiasm by the Royal Family and London’s high society—he was dressed up in western clothes and taught table manners and dancing by hostesses of the fashionable elite so that he was a perfectly presentable specimen at balls and parties thrown in his honor. After almost two years of tourism in the UK, Omai got a ride home from Captain Cook. Omai didn’t learn how to read and write so there is no diary on his legendary adventures and unfortunately he died soon after reaching Tahiti, carrying a container full of souvenirs from England and his English friends.
· Omai [Pacificislandtravel]

Election Editorial etiquete

Why Does Rupertos editor attack Democrats?...
Hillary the Other Sandy Woman in the Life of Bob Carr.
· The best of Election Stories [SMH]

Lesbian Japanese monkeys challenge Australian Axis of Sequins

I see females and government ministers competing for males all the time. I see males ignoring females that are desperate to copulate with them.
· Madam Sadam [BiNews]

Iron Curtain Checkpoint Charlie Square: Sydney Needs One Now

On the spot where the Soviet Union used to face the United States, on the very ground where communism faced the free market economy, today American historic symbolism and American entrepreneurship confront each other - the abstract and the concrete image of freedom.
· A disgrace: an attempt to play down the significance of the site, which stands for freedom for all citizens of the world. [FAZ]

Go North Families Sydney Beyond Realm of Possibilities

It is paying the price for "the failure of state government policy to effectively plan and ensure the adequate availability of infrastructure".
· City of Exiles & Migrant No More [SMH]

Swimming Coaching Coaches

The new movie Swimming Upstream is a reminder that truth, though not always stranger than fiction, often makes for better films. Based on his autobiography, this is the story of Anthony Fingleton, who survived a tough Brisbane childhood at the hands of a drunken, bullying father to become a champion swimmer in the early 1960s.
Speaking of champions czech out the coaching the coach for children program:
You have to teach every child to swim as if they're going to be an Olympian. Because if they're 80 years old (like Norman Mailer) and they're in a wheel chair you can chuck them in the pool and they can still swim like an Olympian but you can't run a marathon when you're 80.
· Mary Wood: National Treasure [ABCStateline]

Literature Charter 77 human rights manifesto

Czechs like to forget how few dissidents there were under communist rule. There was nothing "velvet" or easy about the lives and sacrifices of hard-core dissidents such as Hanzelka.
· A writer's sacrifices [Praguepost]

Mitteleuropean know too well that poetry can and should be an important part of our daily lives.
· Poems make us think about what it means to be a member of the subhuman race in times of crisis [Loc]

Incredible Links for Writers
A rich resource
· Writers will find useful links here [Clarityofvision]

I am not saying just oppose the war. Bush must be impeached.
—Terry McCann

People & Peace It is People ...

A career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca resigned his State Department post in protest. John Brady Kiesling noted, We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary.
· Casablanca: City known for smuggling of People [NYTimes]

Peace & War The fighting will begin in late March

Energy resources are at the heart of the world economy. The Promethean story of industrialisation has never been better summed up than by James Watt: I have that which all men seek – power. The reality of an entrenched, intolerable human destiny is summed up by Greek historian Thucydide You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
· Thucydide [Opendemocracy]

Left Left

Only a quintessentially American arrogance would lead leftists in a big country to think that leftists in a smaller country don’t matter. Iraqi socialists and leftists have endured Saddam’s Ba’athist terror long enough to know the left from the right in Iraq. And as our nation prepares to invade their country, more Americans, especially peace activists, should take the trouble to do the same.
· Big: Lie V Small: lie [LAWeekly]

Same old song

Over the last few years, a record number of telecommunications carriers have filed for bankruptcy protection and emerged, fully reorganized, debt-free and ready to jump back into the fray — a process accompanied by the all-to-familiar refrain of "It's not fair." You know how the tune goes. "Company A is stonewalling competition. Company B wants to access our network at rates that are below cost." And now this new verse: "Company C has come out of bankruptcy with a clean balance sheet and we still have debt … it’s not fair.
· Amerikan Godfathers [AmericaNews]

Ignoring the Alarm

Long before the rapacious schemes of so many corporations came to light, and before Wall Street's duplicity became the stuff of subpoenas and congressional probes, here was BusinessWeek unmasking the whole scam, in language so forceful and clear a child could understand it. Another early prophet was Michael Siconolfi of the Wall Street Journal.
· Congressional probes [AJR]

It's said there were only two shades of opinion in Robert Carr's caucus: yes; and yes, Bob.
- Anonymous

Elections Bob & John Up Close: a deceptive brew of reality and myth

This is not how it was perceived in sections of the Liberal Party or the general political establishment, where it was said that Mr Brogden had gone beyond the line dividing the political (which is public) and the personal (which is private).
Mr Carr has handled his image building with the consummate skill of a master propagandist - he has spent $40,000 on eight full-colour pages in The Australian Women's Weekly, readership 1million, to advertise Bob & Helena Up Close.
· The Maestro of switching to trivia or vaudeville [SunHerald]

NewMedia Into the blog

The digerati gather to discuss life as seen through their laptops.
· Diggeratis [LATimes]

Taxes Achewood Looks

Blllllluce just looks at you and he knows that you lied.
· Death Humour [Cartoon:Achewood]

War & Peace Weapons are news but news are also weapons of war

Has East Timorese Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta, become a useful puppet for Bush-Blair Propaganda? Even right-wing lickspittles like Tim Blair suddenly quote Marxist freedom fighters at length. Strangest bedfellows, indeed...

It may be years before we hear the true voices of survivors, undistorted by propaganda or drowned out by accusations that it is propaganda. If and when we do, the tales will include ones like this (from a second world war Belgian resistance fighter tortured by the Gestapo, included by W.G. Sebald in his Natural History of Destruction):

I was raised with the chain until I hung about a metre above the floor. In such a position, or rather, when hanging this way, with your hands behind your back, for a short time you can hold at a half-oblique through muscular force. During these few minutes, when you are already expending your utmost strength, when sweat has already appeared on your forehead and lips, and you are breathing in gasps, you will not answer any questions. Accomplices? Addresses? Meeting places? You hardly hear it. All your life is gathered in a single, limited area of the body, the shoulder joints, and it does not react; for it exhausts itself completely in the expenditure of energy. But this cannot last long, even with people who have a strong physical constitution. As for me, I had to give up rather quickly. And now there was a cracking and splintering in my shoulders that my body has not forgotten to this hour. The balls sprang from their sockets. My own body weight caused [dislocation]; I fell into a void and now hung by my dislocated arms which had been torn high from behind and were now twisted over my head. Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What a visual instruction in etymology!
· Torquere [ABC(Spain)]

Spies Brotherhood: MI6 and CIA: the new enemy within

Britain and America's spies believe that they are being politicised: that the intelligence they provide is being selectively applied to lead to the opposite conclusion from the one they have drawn, which is that Iraq is much less of a threat than their political masters claim. Worse, when the intelligence agencies fail to do the job, the politicians will not stop at plagiarism to make their case, even "tweaking" the plagiarised material to ensure a better fit.
· Ring A Ring O' Roses: Spy Agencies' Dance of politisation [Independent]

Europe A Different View of Euro-Sclerosis

According to the conventional wisdom, Europe has been growing more slowly than the US for 20 years as a result of
structural rigidities. European Union leaders have themselves signed up to reform declarations, starting with one at Lisbon in 2000.
· What's Wrong with Europe's Economy? [The Financial Times]

Europe's Anti-Americanism

Anti-Americanism is spreading to Europeans who oppose a U.S.-attack on Iraq. But Nobel Peace laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, after meeting with President George W. Bush at the White House on Thursday urged Europe to confront Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
· I believe it is the moral duty to intervene when evil has power and uses it [CommonDream/NewsYahoo]

Political Appeasement Metaphor

In the 1930s, Germany had violated many aspects of the Treaty of Versailles, their WWI surrender agreement. They had built a huge, technologically- advanced army and taken over/merged with Austria. In 1938, Adolf Hitler demanded that Germany be given the Sudetenland, big chunk of Czechoslovakia. If Germany got this land, they would stop their efforts for expansion. If they didn't.... In order to prevent war, Britain and France agreed to give the Sudetenland to Germany (Czechoslovakia had no say in the matter). Britain and France cheered that they had achieved peace, and then Hitler conquered the rest of Czechoslovakia. With 60+ years of searing 20-20 hindsight, it is commonly agreed that Appeasement was one of the stupidest foreign policy moves ever. Because all of us 21st century folks know that you shouldn't trust Hitler, Britain and France of the 1930s should also have known not to trust Hitler.
· I don't see how someone who can't read French and German newspapers can possibly be informed on this matter (smile) [StrayBulletins]