Tuesday, June 21, 2016

The Sense of an Ending: The End of Holidays

 “I aint got all that many regrets. I could imagine lots of things that you might think would make a man happier. I think by the time you’re grown you’re as happy as you’re goin to be. You’ll have good times and bad times, but in the end you’ll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I’ve knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.”
~ Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men ( TWITTER IN FOUR SENTENCES )

#Journalism is printing what somebody else does not want printed; everything else is public relations:
Not giving uphttp://www.michaelwest.com.au 
At the time, West tweeted: “Last day today. Told my skill-set not aligned with Fairfax strategy going forward. ”.
Former Sydney Morning Herald investigative business journalist Michael West has signalled an intention to go out on his own, publishing investigative pieces on his own website which is set to launch after the Federal election. West was one of an estimated 30 forced redundancies made by Fairfax Media this month, which saw the likes of AFR media editor Dominic White, economics editor Alan Mitchell, international editor Tony Walker, cartoonist Rod Clement and property editor and associate editor Robert Harley depart the publishing company Coming Soon in July Investigative Journalist MichaelWest.com.au

I’LL GET TO IT LATER: 5 Reasons Why People Procrastinate

The Ghosts of Fukushima New Republic 

Can You Train Yourself To Need Less Sleep? Mostly, I think you can train yourself to ignore the symptoms of less sleep. That’s not the same thing.

RIP: Anton Yelchin, Chekov in the new Star Trek movies, dies in freak accident aged 27 after being run over by his own car.

Beijing (AFP) - China accused Indonesia Sunday of firing on its fishermen and injuring one of them, in the latest flare-up of tensions between the two nations in the South China Sea Cold War Rivers and Seas ...


Rearviewmirror: Thank you for your inquiry into whether or not I check my email messages and care enough to respond My Outlook Out of Office Email message: other than contact MT

"Merrick Garland tells 5th-grade graduates to work hard: 'Dreams don't come true by magic.'"Perry Stein of The Washington Post has this report.
And The Associated Press reports that "Garland speaks at school where he tutors kids."

"Supreme Court Nominee Leads Ceremony for School Where He Tutors": Mark Walsh has this post at the "School Law" blog of Education Week. The publication has also posted on YouTube this video of the U.S. Supreme Court nominee's remarks And on yesterday evening's broadcast of NPR's "All Things Considered," Nina Totenberg had an audio segment titled "Merrick Garland's Advice To 5th Graders: 'Be The Brave One.'"

"A dysfunctional Supreme Court: Get used to it."Law professor Herman Schwartz and William Yeomans have this essay online today at Reuters

“The evidence suggests that reading to a dog such as Bessie may have a beneficial effect on a number of behavioural processes which contribute to a positive effect on the environment in which reading is practiced, leading to improved reading performance” Pacific Standard 


“Lisa McInerney, who started her career as a writer with a blog about life on a council estate in the ‘Arse End of Ireland’, has won the Baileys women’s prize for fiction with her debut novel” – The Glorious Heresies – “beating Man Booker winner Anne Enright [The Gathering] and bestseller Hanya Yanagihara [A Little Life] to the £30,000 award.” The Guardian 



Think Less, Think Better New York Times. Not keen re framing of the argument. It’s effectively against multi-tasking, but it argues instead for “creative” thinking, implying that that is productive. At the end, he does talk about aesthetic appreciation, but that almost seems to be touting how well he has trained his mind, as opposed to an indicator of what we lose with overstimulation.

World’s Richest Prize For A Single Novel Goes To Akhil Sharma 

“Sharma’s Family Life, a mostly autobiographical novel that tells of how a family moves from Delhi to New York, where the older brother has an accident that leaves him brain-damaged and in need of 24-hour care, was named winner of the [€100,000] International DUBLIN Literary Award on Thursday.” The Guardian 

For Shostakovich,
to be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment … but to be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime. You couldn’t ever relax. You had to anticipate the next occasion when you would have to make excuses for yourself, dither, cringe, reacquaint yourself with the taste of rubber boots and the state of your own fallen, abject character.
He could not live with himself.’ It was just a phrase, but an exact one. Under the pressure of Power, the self cracks and splits. The public coward lives with the private hero. Or vice versa. Or, more usually, the public coward lives with the private coward. But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they – and he – had once fitted together.
The Sense of an Ending

“Well. Now I may have to send that ‘not sure there’s a market for a book about (the Iron Curtain and) Soviet composers’ email back to a certain agent.”  

Fiona Sampson’s ‘Drowned Man’ consists of six short four-line verses describing a couple’s dreamy movements in bed:  
Look how they sleep first he turns
away and then she turns
after him or now she turns
her back and he follows


INK BOTTLE“Most people in my day went on stage to annoy their parents.” ~
Robert Newton / currently the Youngest Daughter, Gabbie, is in New York taking the world on a SITI company stage...

Bill Middleton, President, Corporate Capital Group, Inc. Greatest Game


study by researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands, published today, has shown that undertaking aerobic exercise four hours after a memory challenge improves memory retention. In a strange but interesting twist, exercising immediately afterwards doesn't seem to show any benefit The key to memory retention is exercise but not straight away ...


High-end trusts and estates lawyers ... have some of the most fascinating practices in Big Law, with client lists packed with entertainment stars, business moguls, Internet entrepreneurs and reclusive billionaires. While drafting wills, setting up trusts for wayward children, crafting prenuptial agreements for third wives and structuring complex vehicles to reduce taxes, they're privy to the intimate personal and financial details of the lives of the creative and the ultrawealthy. ...

"The Hatch Valley may be to chiles what the Napa Valley is to grapes." So begins an interesting opinion that Circuit Judge Neil M. Gorsuch issued today on behalf of a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
The opinion's first paragraph makes me look forward even more to my visit this September to Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos, New Mexico. And because Judge Gorsuch wrote the opinion, you can be sure it's an entertaining read.

NAB using Veda to track disloyal business customers going to rival banks