Wednesday, May 11, 2011



Greg aka Grog, noted that by and large the coverage of the Australian Budget 2011 in the newspapers was very good. Unanswerable Prayers to be answered ... O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day. ~Psalm 119:97

Compared to some countries, just about every single person in Australia is rich beyond their wildest dreams. Compared to some suburbs in Australia, 95% of Australians are poor.


I am Rich that is a bit RICH



Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor—as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper.
— E.B. White, "The Art of the Essay" (Interview), The Paris Review1

Do something every day that you don't want to do;
this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
-- Mark Twain

The Story So Far: Truth in Reporting Can digital journalism be profitable? Skype Purchased by Microsoft for $8.5 Billion
What's making money, what isn't, and why?

A new report from Columbia University faculty members Bill Grueskin, academic dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and Ava Seave, principal at Quantum Media and adjunct professor at the Columbia Business School, addresses these questions about the financial state of digital journalism. The report provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the business challenges that for-profit news organizations face with their digital ventures. The report, The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism, is being issued by the school's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which is committed to the research and advancement of journalism on digital platforms."


The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism[Internetnews.com: communications provider Skype for some $8.5 billion in cash -- the largest acquisition in the company's history. The two companies said the deal was the result of an unsolicited offer from Microsoft and, if it passes regulatory hurdles, will make Skype a division of the software giant. The companies hope to finalize the purchase during the current calendar year. Microsoft sees the acquisition as key to its vision of a connected world which will have, the two companies hope, billions of users over time." Microsoft announced Tuesday that it is buying Internet ; Third parties, in particular advertisers, have accidentally had access to Facebook users’ accounts including profiles, photographs, chat, and also had the ability to post messages and mine personal information Facebook Applications Accidentally Leaking Access to Third Parties]
• · Truth in Reporting Tanner's media point proven...by media; LINDSAY Tanner has unwittingly given us an insight into federal Labor's political malaise. Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy
• · · The book is not a memoir, it is in fact much closer to George Megalogenis’ Quarterly Essay Trivial Pursuit, than it is some tell-all political autobiography Greg Jericho Grog's Gamut ; Google on Tanner
• · · · Like Jozef Imrich, raised in relative poverty, Geoff Dyer continues to live with little money and no sense of sacrifice – “a valuable skill, almost a privilege, for anyone wishing to become a writer” Whatever form it takes, your childhood always seems perfectly normal ; First, before we turn our attention to Stalin, to Soviet-era dissidence and to debates about Dmitri Shostakovich’s memoirs, listen: Shostakovich: party hack or secret dissident? Listen closely: Here is an ironist who scorned the Communist Party he submitted to What Shostakovich Was Really Expressing

"I have lately been reading both Joyce and Proust with considerable disappointment; they both seem to me very sick men, giant invalids who, in spite of enormous talent, were crippled by the same disease, elephantiasis of the ego. They both attempted titanic tasks, and both failed for lack of that dull but healthy quality without which no masterpiece can be contrived, a sense of proportion."
-Cyril Connolly, "Comment" (Horizon, May 1941)