Labor leadership live: Kevin Rudd returns

Returning Officer Chris Hayes said there was no spill for the deputy position, but Treasurer Wayne Swan, Craig Emerson, Joe Ludwig and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy are thought to have quit. Penny Wong has been elected as the new Labor leader in the Senate, a position previously held by Mr Conroy 57-45 Rudd wins by 12 seats

Akfak aka Kafka

"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
George Orwell, The Freedom of the Press and Media Dragon

Kafka created “obscure lucidity,” Erich Heller wrote in his book on Kafka. “His is an art more poignantly and disturbingly obscure,” he added, “than literature has ever known.” One thinks one grasps Kafka’s meaning, but does one, really? All seems so clear, yet is it, truly? A famous aphorism of Kafka’s reads: “Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.” Another runs: “A cage went in search of a bird.”Bohemian Kafka

Longest nights to celebrate June's and Jacob's birthdays

"Although he could put up with pain tolerably well he had always found boredom mortal."
Patrick O'Brian, The Ionian Mission

Ernest Hemingway’s typewriter heads to the auction block ...

"In reality there is perhaps no one of our natural Passions so hard to subdue as Pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself."
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

Outsiders

My ghoulish mind quite enjoys entering, every few days, a world where death is known to be close and where it stalks in the male version of the Belle Dame sans Merci, along the corridors. I don't think I have ever seen so many walking corpses.
These little people's understanding of being is almost simultaneous with their own death

Frame's writing simply endures, no matter the place or time. framed

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - JUNE 19: Maribel Verdu arrives at the Sydney premiere of "A Gun In Each Hand" on opening night of the Spanish Film Festival at Palace Verona on June 19, 2013 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Marianna Massey)Opening night’s film is a Catalan ensemble comedy-drama in the style of Altman’s Short Cuts, with intersecting storylines. “It’s a portrait of 40-something men and changing gender roles in modern Barcelona,” says Kelly. “It’s a great cast – Ricardo Darin, Eduardo Noriega, Javier Camara.” A gun in each Hand rocked those fat bellies

Eclipse of Delivery

A number of prominent Australians including captains of industry, politicians, philanthropists, developers, lawyers, accountants, criminals and entrepreneurs are set to become embroiled in one of the nation's most explosive tax investigations into devious offshore structures. the story of avoidance and other storms

Interactive database forming part of a cache of 2.5m leaked files has been launched by Washington-based ICIJ Application Steve jobs would approve of ...

Even if politicians back openness, there are doubts on whether they can deliver Isle of Man lets in sunlight but fog may yet obscure Cameron's tax triumph

Hurstville at Matraville: culture vultures kofi wine & humour

“It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami

Food and Friends

Gitka The Gem in My Life in Exile

. . . TO MY SISTER . . .

I'm blessed to call you sister,
I also call you friend;
You've loved me unconditionally,
And stood through thick and thin.
.
You've shared my joys and sorrows, My laughter and my adventures.
You've been my inspiration,
As we grew up through the years.

When we were little children
We laughed and played together;
Then growing up you stood by me,
Through good and stormy weather.

There's something God has given us,
That's more than a little country of bohemia,
He's placed a pillar in my life
And Deep down under in the land of never never
you went that extra mile
to ring to write to keep us connected no matter what ....


Happy birthday Gitka Margareta the teacher and the kindest soul on earth ;-)

Writing rivals swimming or ballet

“Writing rivals sprinting or ballet in its inegalitarianism. Many people simply do not have it. You can work your ass off every day and still be terrible. More likely, you will work your ass off every day and be serviceable, while some pretentious jerk with half your dedication can toss off something in 15 minutes that blows your shit away. Yes, you need to read a lot. Yes, you need to write a lot. Yes, you need to practice your craft. You can do all of that religiously and still suck. That’s life. It’s like Bad News Bears: you can love it but it doesn’t have to love you back. Sift around in your mind for awhile and find every spare concept like “unfair” or “should” or “deserves” and toss them on the fire. Those are liar’s words. They have nothing to do with adult life and nothing, nothing, nothing to do with writing. I don’t care what Malcolm Gladwell says; 10,000 hours of practice might be better spent playing Snood.kjThat's the gamble.”

-Freddie deBoer

CODA:Is there proof that literature makes us better media dragons? ~~~ Some writers tend to have crown or dollar signs in their eyes, rather than inspiration, when they write stories: Nothin’ but Blues Skies: “At its best, McClelland’s book reminds us of what has transpired in the heart of the country over the past 30 years and of the battering endured by hundreds of thousands of working-class families as global corporatism and federal trade policies gutted the middle class.” ~~~ROWING FOR HOME

Is the BBC afraid of the City of London?

General relativity is like Strauss — deep, dignified and graceful. Quantum theory, like jazz, is disconnected, syncopated, and dazzlingly modern...

Amid all the global noise now about tax havens, the BBC remains a timid follower of the story, at best, raising serious questions of the extent to which the BBC is fulfilling its mandate to be, in the words of its Director General, ‘unflinching in holding power to account.’ Is the BBC afraid of the City of London?

The unstated story about Apple and taxes (How one Irish woman made $22bn for Apple, 29 May) is the problem of determining where value accrues in a digital transaction. If I import a novel in a country that charges duty, VAT or sales tax, the postal service may intercept it and charge me the taxes R&D; Trading in 61 stocks described as "empty shells" was shut down Monday, as part of regulators' aggressive plan to sweep away dormant stocks often targeted by fraudsters Shelf companies ripe for fraud

If you're under attack, create a diversion. David Cameron and Nick Clegg have been floundering as the spectre of Westminster sleaze has returned to haunt them. Four years after the MPs' expenses scandal engulfed British politics, yet another alleged scam has been exposed. First a Tory MP and then a clutch of greedy peers were caught on camera apparently agreeing to take cash from journalists posing as representatives of foreign companies. "Make that £12,000 a month," grinned Jack Cunningham, Tony Blair's former "enforcer". Born to Party; Power and the ego of certain misleaders is beset by a paradox that remains as mysterious today as it was a century ago the depth of World Bank corruption

Power Switches Connected to Long Weekend

I would rather have flowers on my table than diamonds on my neck
~ Our place is filled with flowers and now I need to act on Malchkeon's philosophy that time needs to slow down right now ;-) MMXIII AD

In this recent time of reordering our lives, we find one of our desires is to live more simply. Too much possessions and consumer thinking is the root of evil. Consumerism is a never-ending path. You never arrive anywhere, you just keep going and going! Meanwhile, your money does run out and time with loved ones runs out, too. Its strange to ask yourself, "What are the most basic things I want for my life?" For us two of those things are living more naturally and living more artfully. It seems those two things go hand-in-hand.

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up & get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part & a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you."
~ Chuck Close

This blog of fun and vertical joints chronicles a journey of one colourful family in the land of the Queen who are renovating their home. Every weekend not just Queens Birthday weekend they are trying to turn sow's ear into a silk purse Power to the Collectors of things and creatures great or small Everything you want is on the other side of fear and Sydney is peppered with its very own creative fear ~~~ Meet Me At The Library or the Berkelow Bookshop Abigail rocks

Tracking The Red Center

P&L Pty Ltd, wide-eyed wonders, are exploring the heart of Antipodean soil and soul

They are hardly competing for parKing spaces with Many nomads or invaders

Goodness of Meeeedia Egos and Dragons

"Show interest in her goodness--for no one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand."
Bertolt Brecht, The Good Person of Sezuan

What’s missing from our classrooms and our culture is discussion of the literariness of literature, of what makes a poem different from a stop sign, or a novel about grief different from the account of grief in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. As an English professor might say, we’re good on content, not so good on form. We go straight for what the play says, and ignore how it says it.
Like literary analysis, literary evaluation must be learned through practice. Taste can justifiably prefer peaches to pears. But “there comes a point at which not recognizing that, say, a certain brand of malt whisky is of world-class quality means not understanding malt whisky.” To reach that point, you have to learn the public criteria for what counts as excellence – you can’t just make up criteria, for fiction no less than for Scotch – and you have to practise those criteria in public, testing and adjusting them against new books and other judgments. We learn how to understand and appreciate literature through public practice, whether in a book club, a classroom, or the set of social practices known as literary criticism. Our histories me myself and I

If Dickens and Derrida couldn’t save the world, five-page readings of the opening sentence in Cold River aren’t likely to do much better about our perception of time. Time is like a river, you can never touch the same water twice because the flow that has gone by will never go by again. Enjoy your life today, because yesterday is gone and tomorrow may never come ... Time is like a River!. John Richardson, 89, won’t finish his multivolume biography of Picasso. The problem is not his age. “I know too much. I know where the bodies are buried”. . .

"To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated."
Bertolt Brecht, "Notes on Philosophy"

Labe aka Elbe & Vltava Rivers Raging

Terrifying floods which have left 11 people dead and resulted in thousands feeling their homes have left swathes of Prague and Melnik under water today  -  with the deluge now moving towards Germany Lidka's and Eva"s Prague is in the middle of Cold rivers Vltava and Labe

Rebel with a Cause: Octogenarian John Hatton

The advantage of being eighty years old is that one has many people to love.
- Jean Renoir

You have to change your ID, because they made a mistake. You are not 80...You are just a 40 year old with 40 years of experience...

THERE was no holding back for former independent State Member for the South Coast John Hatton when he agreed to have a biography written about him. The title, Stench in the Parliament, indicates this authorised biography, written by former Bomaderry resident Ruth Richmond, is going to be hard-hitting.hard- hitting Hammondville In Parliament, John Hatton was very good value. We need a few more like him. In art, John is creating ripples in all kinds of rivers and landscapes The man who makes a difference wherever he goes

climbing the punjabi mountains