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NOTICE IN A PADDOCK:
The Farmer allows walkers to cross the paddock for free, but the bull charges!!!
[In this extraordinary time, first we had Man Bites Dog to Death--headline, Sydney Morning Herald, April 11; & today We Know We Left Those Scissors Somewhere... ]

Much Ado About Something: South Treasures Meet North
Three things succeed on the internet: shopping, as perfected by Amazon; searching, as perfected by Google; and blogging as perfected by thousands of creative fingers and linkers...
In keeping with the egalitarian nature of blogs, David Tiley of Barista fame is encouraging everyone to share small, but beautiful blogging treasures....
For my part, I suggested http://lakatoi.blogspot.com/
[Lakatoi by James Cumes:
Cross-cultural observations and reflections by a former Australian Ambassador and High Commissioner, Dr James Cumes:: James born and bred in Brissie is now based in Vienna where he devotes his time to charities, writing and leading Victory over Want http://VictoryOverWant.org]
· http://www.crosswords.blogspot.com/
[ (Southern Cross) Words;]
(Southern Cross) Words by Gregory Altreuter :: Cross-cultural observations and reflections by a former New Yorker on Sydney Australia, including philosophical musings, art, music, literature raves, political obtuseness, and anything else that comes to mind on the differences between life directed by the Pole Star and living beneath the Southern Cross.
· See Also The rise of Weblogging has been a cold shower for the complacent mass communication industries [Link Poached from Webdiary: Blogjam5]
· See Also Jeremy Zawodny on creative linking [link first seen at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/aggregator/ ]
· See Also P23;S5 MEmedia Dragon
· See Also Metadata librarian becoming cool: Was it due to Harriet Klausner, retired librarian and #1 Amazon book reviewer?

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The argument, in a nutshell, is that the contingency of natural endowments softens the hearts of the successful, taking some of the edge off meritocracy. Once our physical and mental capacities become a matter of choice, we enter a world in which people see themselves as deserving of all that they possess. It is a world of hyper-competition, and without charity.

Follow me, said the policymaker. And, tragically, we did
What's wrong with designer politicians, bionic athletes, and genetic engineering...Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we may soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may also enable us to manipulate our own nature—to enhance our muscles, memories, and moods; to choose the sex, height, and other genetic traits of our children; to make ourselves better than well... It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will
· The Case Against Perfection: Creative Destruction
· See Also But what of the press? Did newspapers ignore the lessons of history as well? As the public's watchdog, did we bark loud enough as Bush's plans took shape, or were we dozing?
· See Also Roadside drug tests are steering towards a legal minefield

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His only weakness is a lust for power—
And that is not a weakness, people think,
When unaccompanied by bribes or drink.
Sir John Betjeman, The Town Clerk’s Views

Federal Election Commission Auto-Commenters
Andrew Mollison of Cox News Service performed a statistical analysis on e-mail comments submitted to the Federal Election Commission in advance of a ruling on political committees, finding that roughly 48 percent arrived through a feature on the Bush-Cheney Web site, where users could sign and e-mail a pre-written message directly to the commission
· When will we learn that we're not going to end the mess in legislatures by getting bad guys? There are always new bad guys to take their place...

And let us bathe our hands in . . . blood up to the elbows, and besmear our swords. Then we walk forth, even to the market place, And waving our red weapons o'er our heads, Let's all cry peace, freedom and liberty!
- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
· See Also Blood Vote - The Consequences of Voting for George W. Bush...
· See Also Fixing The Election (by Steven Hill and Rob Richie): Ordinary people can ensure the 2004 presidential election isn't stolen
· See Also Election Could Tempt Attack by Terror Groups, Rice Says
· See Also Marian Sawer: Above-the-line voting: how democratic? (PDF Format)

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While on my way to the airport, I saw an ad for Wild Turkey bourbon, which said Anything less is a waste of good ice. I had that uneasy feeling that something was wrong, but I couldn't quite say what. Then it struck me that the claim was logically equivalent to Any worse, and it would be undrinkable.
Turkeys by John Quiggin

This Season Our Economy Is Offering Debt and Casual Jobs
The United Nations has finally noticed that entrepreneurial economic activity is sweeping the globe. UN’s Commission on the Private Sector and Development issued its report, Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making Business Work for the Poor, in which the primary recommendation is, you guessed it, break down barriers created by governmental bureaucracy and get out of the way.
· Entrepreneurship as an strategy to reduce poverty [Link Poached from Anita ]
· See Also Harry Heidelberg: Dreams becoming nightmares
· See Also Global Slumlords
· See Also Max Uechtritz: From the ABC to Nine and back [ via Crikey ]
· See Also Eastern Europe productivity: Czech Republic and Slovakia becoming a regional cluster for the auto industry

A Passion for Poetry (and Profits)
When John W. Barr was a teenager, he walked into his family's living room and announced that he had decided to become a poet.
His father replied: That's fine, but go to college so people will think you're an eccentric, not just a beach bum.
· Deciding how to make use of a gift worth more than $100 million.
· See Also A good nose for a business opportunity: Aroma Tours, an Australian company, organises holidays to nice-smelling places

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David Tiley is standing in for Tim Dunlop for the next four weeks. He is a writer, script editor, teacher and occasional director who works in film and multimedia, particularly on documentaries, and has done his bit as an arts bureaucrat. His blog Barista tries to find humour in a deadly serious world... Nevermind the substantiated accussation of MEdia Dragon being the prince of the link...

NEXT TIME DON’T BLOG SO CLOSE: Faherty has a dirty, dirty, suggestion
Juile Faherty writes an article in today's New York Times about BloggerCon II. The article focuses on the business potential of blogs and advertising again rises to the number one position for revenue generation.
There is too much emphasis on advertising and blogs. I realize that Adwords and BlogAds have created the possibility of instant micropublishing. I realize that when mainstream media reports on our corner of the world that they are going to report from their perspective - newspapers and magazines create content and then sell advertising. I also realize that people are finding success and that makes a good story.
· ConBloggerII [ courtesy of A Penny For...]
· See Also Sadly, the last thing most bloggers (and not just guys) think about is their feet
· See Also Warning! The dragon monster demands a mate! Well, I don't really have a girlfriend but in my fantasies in which I'm having sex with my girlfriend, you're her
· See Also And they say romance is dead: A lot of my day's taken up with a soul-aching commute into the city, and that just feels like dead time
· See Also The Zen of Blogging
· See Also Blogrunner

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The Lords of Bakersfield, an in-depth investigative series that exposed public and private corruption in its community over several decades. The paper carefully considered the many ethical issues involved in reporting and editing the series, insulated the newsroom from any real or perceived conflict of interest raised in reporting on the activities of former staff and members of the current publisher’s family, and withstood efforts by the local district attorney to discredit the series following publication...

Preventing the Next (Sydney) Scandal ...
Powerful gay men. Vulnerable teen-age boys. Murder. For years, some prominent local men who led secret lives were rumored to be protected. Whispers surrounding another important man's death prompt the question:
· Is there really a conspiracy??? [ courtesy of Payne Awards for Ethics Honor 2004 Winners]
· See Also Abusing Secrets: The no-right-to-know White House
· See Also The Cost of Doing Business' Sierra magazine's Marilyn Berlin Snell breaks the story of how Denver-based Echo Bay Mines secretly paid upwards of $2 million in protection money to al-Qaeda-linked terrorists in the Philippines
· See Also Amerikan ABC News: 'Blood Money, report on Echo Bay Mines
· See Also $4.5 Billion For Mercenaries In Iraq: NY Times has an extensive report on the scope, costs and problems of the military's use of mercenaries in Iraq

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Opportunism is something for which intellectuals have especial talents because of their aptitude for managing vocabulary at the expense of thought.
John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner

Enter the village people to ringing applause
When the new Lord Mayor of Sydney led her team in at Town Hall, she might have been someone between Mother Teresa and Joan of Arc, wearing no mayoral chain but with rings sparkling from ears and fingers.
· Moore Villagish
· See Also Chainless with Arcs
· See Also ABC of Alan Jones

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I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
– Barbara Kingsolver Who's reading what? Laura Bush asked for preferences

The nature of meaning in the age of Google
Google may index billions of Web pages, but it will never exhaust the store of meaning of the Web. The reason is that Google's aggregation strategy is only one of many different strategies that could be applied to the semantic objects in public Web space. Hidden in the 'dogs' retrieval set of 14.5 million are special, singular, obscure, unpopular, etc., Web pages that await a different aggregation strategy that would expose their special meanings. To charge that Google has a bias against obscure websites... is to expect Google to be something other than Google. Google finds the common meanings. Many other meanings exist on the Web and await their aggregators.
· The culture of lay indexing [Link Poached from a paper by professor Terry Brooks]
· See Also This would be the time to say thank you to your local librarian
· See Also Luring readers with tacos: Reading nourishes the soul, and this week it satisfies the stomach, too

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I was repining at the thought of my slow progress—how few new ideas I had or picked up—when it occurred to me to think of the total of life and how the greater part was wholly absorbed in living and continuing life—victuals—procreation—rest and eternal terror. And I bid myself accept the common lot; an adequate vitality would say daily, 'God, what a good sleep I’ve had,' 'My eye, that was dinner,' 'Now for a fine rattling walk'—in short, life as an end in itself.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Frederick Pollock, 1919

I Can tell that we're going to be enemies: MEdia Dragon (TM) has dreams of blogging all about it
What dragon's blog would be complete without displaying something with a lot of dragonanger?
Weblogs have revolutionised the media. But are they more than just vanity publishing? And if so, what kind of content is best? Leading bloggers Salam Pax, Rhodri Marsden and Gregor Wright debate the issues. Via email, naturally ...
BTW, come and listen to a young man from Iraq with the pseudonym of Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger, @ Sydney Writers' Festival, May 17 - 23, 2004
· Being a Spy and a MEdia Dragon is a Conflict of Interest
· See Also Jungle Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness
· See Also Amazon: More Rain Forest... Criticism and Elitism [ The books Amazon natives are talking about now Buy this book, it's amazingly good ]
· See Also DID YOU SEE?: Blogs are all effectively Did You Sees, one person's effort to boil the news of the world down to a handful of salient items
· See Also Here's a word that will interest editorial page editors: No Word Is Mightier Than the Pollutocrat

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She gave him a gift that would be useful for the rest of his life...
I didn't care how God wanted to work, I wanted a result. In his better moments since Jenny died three months ago, when his grief is less overwhelming and he can contemplate just what it is he really believes, Cain has had to deal with what theologians know as "the problem of evil": either God is loving and just, but not powerful enough to prevent evil; or God has the power, but does not love us enough to stop bad things happening.
Cain, who turned 50 last month, does not believe in a God who manipulates all that happens in the world. He describes life as "risky", and accepts that the creaturely life humans live is finite. But Jenny's death hurts and he daily confronts feelings of abandonment...
Beyond Good And Evil: There is a contradiction about God!

Rwanda
Ten years ago the world watched as one of history’s greatest crimes unfolded.
The tiny African state of Rwanda became a slaughterhouse when the majority Hutu rampaged against their Tutsi neighbours. In 100 frenzied days, an estimated 800,000 people were murdered. The international community stood by and did nothing as Rwanda joined the list of 20th century genocides…
· Bosnia, Cambodia, the Holocaust, Armenia [ via Tribute to Des Horne, much-loved Four Corners editor]
· See Also Murdoch: Well look at the power of radio, look at your power, you’ve got more power than I have at the moment. Jones: Oh cut it out...
· See Also Jones and Cash for Comment – Mark 2 Media Watch: Everybody loves it until they're on it - and then they sometimes hate it

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Building is a little like war. Once you get in it, you have to go all the way...
Architect James Polshek

Fatal Errors: Rotten to the Corps
It is clear that the Australian intelligence community is unable to identify reality in a timely manner or convey its significance to the Government
· No sweeping of the matters under the carpet [ via Sunday ]
· See Also Shadow Defence Minister, Senator Chris Evans
· See Also Soldiers And Fortune: Who's calling the shots in Iraq? And who pays his salary? (By Barry Lando, a former CBS producer of 60 Minutes)
· See Also Anti-Bush Sentiment Busts Out All Over: & it's not just the usual suspects taking shots. The fire is coming from feature film, theatre and TV

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According to Not much, last week EU officials moved to end Czech Republic's gladiator fight clubs ...
Letter from Prague suggests that Czechs are among the most liberal nations in the world with regards to issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and infidelity.

While dragons of Beijing Evening News stature told a shocking story of American hubris: Congress was behaving like a petulant baseball team and threatening to bolt Washington, D.C., unless it got a new, modern Sydney Opera House building, complete with retractable roof...

Great Amerikan Business Leaders Database
The database was compiled over a two-year period in an effort to identify and chronicle the lives of individuals whose business leadership in the twentieth century shaped the way people live, work, and interact.... Note: only a portion of the database is available on this website.
· Only in, kan do gud, Amerika
· See Also What Great American Leaders Teach Us
· See Also Drawing Baseball Fans: runs scored and high-salaried player, not wins, were the most significant factors in drawing fans to ballgames
· See Also Watching Justice: (Gara LaMarche) A new website launched by the Open Society Institute to focus public and media attention on the many ways in which the U.S. Department of Justice and related federal entities affect our lives
· See Also Best Reference Sources 2003: Amerika & the world had many reasons to worry in 2003. and Australia & James Russell

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Wisdom of Antipodian waterhole BUNYIP: a cross between a dog and a (MEdia) dragon ...Mother dragoness retaliated by causing the waters of the lake to rise until the whole countryside was flooded and the baby floated back to her.
The town of Bunyip is named after a mythical creature from Aboriginal storeytelling which was said to inhabit swamps and billibongs. The town itself is located on the Gippsland railway line, 77 kilometres east of Melbourne.

Sydney: Rich city, poor kids
Lawless street gangs in an inner-city suburb reflect deeper tensions between the have-nots and the haves...
As its population booms, Sydney will create a whole new city on its fringe, not just more suburbs. And there are riches to be made
· Bones of Sydney
· A City from scratch
· City of HypoCrites: Thinking inside the Harbour

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Occasionally, reckless use of a search engine uncovers something interesting. Even things like why Jozef Imrich just wants to be humiliated. Over and over again. Mortification: a collection of writers' most humiliating moments:
`Reading Canceled,' or three chairs occupied by people released from mental institutions and not thought to be violent; People who would much rather be gluing seashells to flower pots; Most frequently, though, no one shows up...

I didn't ask if blogging is journalism: If your mother says she loves you, czech it out.
Let's start with the basics. When a journalist writes a story, she calls a bunch of experts, and writes down what they say. Then the reporter thinks about what all this means. Maybe she interviews more experts. Maybe she interviews The Man on the Street to find out what it means to The Average Person. And then in the end, she strings together the quotes to make a story. This is an act of journalism. I think we all agree.
Enter the weblogs. They make it possible for the experts to go direct, without any intermediaries. A person who wants info can now find out what people think without going through the reporter. This is revolutionary
· This is what the Internet does to everything it touches [Link Poached from j's scratchpad ]
· See Also This is a draft of Chapter 9: Trust's Boundaries of my upcoming book, Making the News
· See Also Stories are generally about people in the last stages of physical, moral and social decrepitude, which explains the reflective and occasionally melancholy undercurrent in many of the tales
· See Also An excellent directory of library weblogs
· See Also A Novel Approach to Legal Research
· See Also OpentheGovernment.org: Ten Most Wanted Documents for 2004
· See Also Search Congressional-Research-Service Reports

Excellent roundup from Chris Sherman, a must read to keep up to date with what is really going on in the world of secret warrants & searches, Search Engine Milestones for March 2004 [ Google still has 40% of search referrals, Yahoo has 27%, MSN 19%, then there's the rest of the engines bringing up the rear]