Tuesday, March 01, 2016

Antipodean Autumn is in the Air

“Full fathom ( six foot) five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange. . . 
~ Bill never quotes MEdia dragon

Shouldn’t you be busy writing? Here’s an illustrated guide to some of the common anxieties many of us feel when we’re not writing.




Guru Gladys: "When I left the Transport portfolio, there were 2000 fewer back office staff in Sydney Trains and NSW Trains than there were in RailCorp when I arrived," the speech says. "At the same time there were well over 1100 extra services and customer satisfaction had increased." Gladys Berejiklian flags significant cuts to NSW Government agencies



*I Might Have Found the Next ‘Xero’ at Europe’s Best FinTech Conference – Money Morning

The Changing Landscape of Tax Service Providers: Instruments to Strengthen Tax Compliance (joint OECD-IOTA workshop)
The workshop brought together 23 tax officials from 13 countries dealing with tax treatment of SMEs as well as with tax intermediaries (tax advisors, tax preparers and other tax service providers) to explore the business developments in the domain of  SME’s and tax service providers and to share experiences in developing strategies to make cooperation with tax service providers a part of broader SME compliance approach. 

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Oscars 2016: Spotlight wins Best Picture The Verge. Spotlight was the best American film I saw in 2015, precisely because it just wanted to tell the story it was telling, with a modicum of frills or bombast. The best film I saw overall was A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, which is almost indescribable.

Undoubtedly Unexpected: A New Goat Cart Record Isidor’s Fugue

Thirteen Bald Eagles Mysteriously Drop Dead in Heavy-Handed Symbolic Performance Gawker 

How To Run A Secret Agent 
elephants linksThere is a new quirky book Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloane. A story of a peculiarly narrow bookshop situated next to a strip club and with an odd assortment of coded volumes for sale to the shop’s extremely small client base, centuries old mysteries require unravelling by techniques new and old. The story, to paraphrase from the novel, exists in the space where technology and books intersect...

Use This One Little Word In Your Thriller Title To Turn It Into A Bestseller



“There’s this sort of shorthand that if it has ‘girl’ in the title, then I know what to expect.”

NPR 



Checking out Poison Season by Destroyer this past weekend I came across the following lyric in “Sun in the Sky

Tender is the night
That sweeps us up in its folly
I left my keys on the kite
And my violin on the trolley
The rising price of insulin RxRights “It looks like we have a classic example of pharma executives raising drug prices just for the hell of it!”


U.S. test-fires ICBMs to stress its power to Russia, North Korea Reuters How is this a show of strength? Everyone knows we have them. Do we really need to prove they work?