Monday, February 13, 2012



Wallace Stevens sold insurance, William Carlos Williams was a physician, T.S. Eliot was a banker, ‎ Steve Jobs distorted reality , Jozef Imrich slaved in the NSW parliamentary library. If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made To hell with starving for your art

BYZANTINE SECTION NUMBERING
The Income Tax Assessment Acts (mainly ITAA 1936) and the Taxation Administration Act 1953 are replete with examples of what might be loosely called "creative" section numbering eg s 8AAZLE (treatment of payments etc and RBA surpluses), s 102AAZBA (Modified application of CGT - change of residence), s 159GZZZZG (Rebate election re tax-exempt infrastructure borrowings), etc.
In a December 2011 Federal Court decision ( DCT v Brilliant Homes Management Pty Ltd [2011] FCA 1539) involving the winding up of a company due to a running balance account (RBA) deficit debt (Part IIB of the Taxation Administration Act 1953 deals with RBA statements), Rares J lamented the use of convoluted section numbering as follows:
The unfortunate Byzantine modern tendency of Commonwealth Parliamentary drafters to include amendments to legislation that have a series of letters after them makes the explanation of these provisions more difficult and hard to comprehend. Re-enactment of legislation with appropriate renumbering of provisions such as s 8AAZJ would simplify the comprehensibility and explanation of legislation. The absurd use of such lettering was also found in the criminal cartel provisions in ss 44ZZRF and 47ZZRG of the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) that was misleadingly retitled, but not comprehensibly structured, as the Consumer and Competition Act 2010 (Cth). These are the central provisions that will have to be explained to juries, using two numbers and four letters, each time the section is mentioned in argument either to the judge or jury Mildly amusing
Czech Out House of Lords Debate on Tax Avoidance

We are the 99% How most Media Dragons and Their readers can navigate the blogosphere
A born freelance. John Leonard’s prose--breezy, pun-filled, playful--was never ponderous or self-important. No one wrote cultural journalism quite like him. If you consider a collection of John Leonard’s essays and reviews as a lifelong accounting, you will have a good idea of what went on of significance in the latter half of the American twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first. Though reviewing literary work was his calling, it did not box him in. He was a born freelance, going wherever that tenuous life led him, from the monuments of high culture that he was inspired to celebrate, to the commodities of the low, from which he would take gleanings where most of us would find none. It is difficult to understand how, with his immense reading and the sustenance his mind sought, he could have sat himself down year after year to examine the products of television. Yet there he was, considering what it meant when sitcom settings moved from the kitchen to the living room, and the family characters sitting on the living room couch, and presumably watching their television, seemed to be watching him.

Did not Eliot return to dead cultures, ancient languages, and the Legend of the Fisher King? Did not Yeats sustain himself on the Irish folklore? Did not Lawrence traipse across continents to Mexico, seeking the meaning of the Aztecs, the wisdom of primitive man?… Yours is a motel civilization…. Your art makes no sense and your music is too loud.”


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• · · · · The Penny Hoarder - Buying housing used to bestow multiple blessings, but their flow has now dried-up Housing fundamentalism fails
• · · · · · She was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the drawer and bullets in a tin of Pledge.” And you thought you had mommy issues Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Elderschadenfreude, explains Sandra Tsing Loh, is the secret pleasure of hearing about aging parents who are even more impossible than yours. Prepare to experience it Daddy Issues