Wednesday, January 12, 2005



I had the guilty pleasure of being able to walk for 20 km with my daughter Gabriella yesterday along the beaches of Cronulla. We treated ourselves to the most amazing views, even the green algae among the sculptured rocks peppered with honey cones looked rather stunning in the golden light. In a great place like Sydney, with thousands upon thousands of parks and beaches, it is extremely uncommon for any single place to stand out from the crowd. Cronulla is a rare paradise, a feast for your eyes. The waves are renowned for creating fine surfers. The name comes from an Aboriginal word meaning 'place of pink seashells', but it's mainly sand that you'll see here enormous dunes that stretch away to Kurnell in the north-east. The surpassing power of pictures ...


The Holiday Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Time Is a Weapon: The next bad cover
Former CIA officer Lindsay Moran has written a damning account of her time with the agency, which is, she says, chauvinistic, blinkered and has learnt no lessons from September 11. Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy could not have a worse cover ...

Although it was approved for publication by the agency's review board, the book has been savaged in print by some of the CIA's old hands. The main charges levelled at Moran, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in English literature, are that she was guileless and opportunistic. One critic labelled the book "Nancy Drew Joins The CIA"; another suggested the jacket sleeve should say: "Read how a spoiled Ivy Leaguer tried the spy game for a laugh".


No way to run a war on terror [Knowing the Beauty of a Book by its cover ]
• · A 20-year-old US man is selling advertising space on his forehead to the highest bidder on website eBay http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4161413.stm [What a fool does in the end, the wise do in the beginning. Proverb, Spanish]
• · · [A friend to everybody and to nobody is the same thing. Proverb, Spanish] No Picture Tells the Truth. The Best Do Better Than That [Flattery makes friends and truth makes enemies. Proverb, Spanish]
• · · · [Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you. Proverb, Spanish] Jared Diamond, author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse," says that if America doesn't change its ways it'll go the way of the Cold River
• · · · · Distilling dialogue for movie subtitles challenges translators
• · · · · · Scientists in Germany say the secret to a long life is ... laziness. It took them over 10,000 years to tell us you can sit on your backside and do nothing. Do nothing, live longer [As Fred Allen rightly observed: I don't want to own anything that won't fit in my coffin.]