BohemiAntipodean Samizdat

Monday, December 24, 2012

And That, As They Say, Is That

And That, As They Say, Is That After almost a decde, I've decided to put The Bohemian... on indefinite hiatus.

In 2002 there were very few blogs and very few literary sites, however, now there is a kaleidoscope of brilliant writers, librarians, publishers with so many authentic voices. I read their words and I wonder where they come from ... Time's Flow Stemmed "A title is always a promise." Derrida (1986)
CODA Sorces of Literary Wisdom and Lessons Learned Links to Literary Weblogs @ the complete review

Saturday, June 30, 2012


A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, so watch your step …

It is hard to believe that in June 2012 the Media Dragon turned Ten (10) a decade aka X It's also not difficult to argue that blogging has done more to spread knowledge and ideas than any other publishing innovation since the printing press. Here's a look at the most popular blogging platforms to help you get your ideas out there. It is all about picking bohemian culture's collective brain for bright ideas across art, media, technology, politics, science, sustainability, music and more: X - Stay-ay-ay just a little bit longer


There is an old Slavic YakcM saying – ‘Don’t approach a goat from the front, a horse from the back, or a fool from any side.’ Fools are plentiful around the world. Get your own free Blogoversary button!

Oscar Wilde famously once said, “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” LiteraryMinded was five in May

Be Fearless even at times of Controversial Confrontations Danger Room @ Media Dragon – Too Good To Be True

Everything you (n)ever wanted to know about the aftermath of cold war partying, and then some The past ten years have brought us many, many memories, some joy and some heartache, the move from Brissie back to Sydney. Everything that we have been through has caused us to grow into who we are today and I would not change anything … a difficult, middle-aged break up. My world was shattered, but not all was lost. You see, we can honestly say we are grateful for this experience as life has a way of surprising us with amazing grace and blessings ;-)

It is a curious aspect of human existence that tribes of people reserve their greatest hatred not for a truly foreign foe, living a great distance away. No – the nastiest contests are with your immediate neighbour, the bully at school or at work you really detest. You are likely to experience more of that in a big company than a smaller, founder-owned one. So one compelling reason why entrepreneurs win is that they are more efficient, wasting less energy on office politics. Like Kevin, we are big believers that having the focus to see beyond your fears can instigate change. When you take risks, embrace the unknown, and 'go for it', that is often when you get the breakthrough you've been looking for. Laugh at the theatre of the absurd performed by the truly rich and mad ;-) In a sane and truly fair-and-balanced, no-spin world, apologies combined with admissions of idiocy by Gina Rinehart would be a nickel a dozen. But, media-wise, we've got what we've got. A world in which Kerry Stokes’ son Ryan becomes in charge of the national library ...

Knowledge itself … turns out to be not only the source of the highest-quality power, but also the most important ingredient of force and wealth. Put differently, knowledge has gone from being an adjunct of money power and muscle power, to being their very essence. It is, in fact, the ultimate amplifier. This is the key to the powershift that lies ahead, and it explains why the battle for control of knowledge and the means of communication is heating up all over the world.

• Media Dragon is obsessed with Trivia - A mixture of news, analysis, rumour and links This blogger's mantra: Try eveything, even oysters at the Oyster Bar‎ ; Instances of instability are hard to predict, and carry with them the risk of becoming a self-fullfilling prophecy. However, the general characteristics described above and the indicators given at the end of this report can provide analysts with a better understanding of civil unrest and a solid framework through which the risk of instability can be incorporated into risk rating models Why people rebel: Analyzing the risk of political instability [ At the Huffington Post, Jason Linkins focuses like a laserbeam on the really important story; This is not HiaisPPPPenis]

• · This was the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown. “The censors were in full whack-a-mole mode Blacking Out 180,000 Candles; sparks - alchemy of ideas • · · The "big picture" blog showcases the best in visual storytelling from events around the world and has had more than 10 million page views. The most popular post? "Japan marks 6 months since earthquake, tsunami." Sacbee celebrates 4th anniversary of The Frame photo blog It’s a global village out there. Whether in New York or Mumbai, London or Bangkok, people are being exposed to the same news, music, movies, and products regardless of geography. Our increasingly globalize culture has sparked a counter change in behavior - people are choosing local, unique experiences over the Hiltons and Big Macs They shop at street markets, enjoy food at local restaurants and stay at independently run hotels. Staying With Local Media Dragons ; There's something about the future that makes people shudder. It's daunting, unpredictable and coming at us at warp speed. art beat

• · · · The slow motion train wreck that is the Euro is grinding relentlessly on. Commentators are smugly, if not gleefully, announcing the currency’s imminent demise, enjoying their triumphant occupancy of the moral high ground; Yet Bachelorette falls in love in Prague

a • · · · · Ever wonder what sorrow tastes like? How about happiness, anger or even a sneeze? The people at Hoxton Street Monster Supplies of London have created a unique range of seasoning salts collected from none other than human tears. Each of the five salts have a distinctly different flavour... The Taste of Media Dragon Emotions; Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about. In the actual use of expressions we make detours, we go by side-roads. We see the straight highway before us, but of course we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed. More speeches than you can imagine are doomed to fail by bad introductions...Instead of kindling fires of enthusiasm within the audience, the introductions lead to an epidemic outbreak of brain freeze.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Silicon Valley Marches


It is May Day, recognized worldwide as International Workers Day ... Is there anyone out there that has seen a May Day March or October Revolution Parades of Bohemian Humor? Ach all those childhood memories of theatre of the absurd are flooding back .. We in Australia like those living in Silicon Valley, do not live in an authoritarian society. But we have much to learn from this man who had spent his years as a dissident and a writer and overnight took over as president not because he wanted power but because, as he said, ‘You cannot spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have a chance to do it better, refuse to go near it. Vaclav Havek was creative not only in outsmarting the police when he could but also in living his life well in spite of all the pressures on him. There are thousands of stories of this … one that comes to mind here in this setting, is that, when he was in prison with the Archbishop of Prague, he organized chess tournaments – not, as the archbishop said at his state funeral, because Havel really liked chess, but because it provided a cover for Archbishop Duka to say mass under the ruse that the prisoners were just playing chess. Havel also laughingly told a s story of skiing up the high Tatra mountains Normalization by Czeslaw Milosz who used to ski the same snow at the High Tatra Mountains Like Cold War River, this happened long ago, before the onset of universal genetic correctness. Boys and girls would stand naked before mirrors studying the defects of their structure. Nose too long, ears like burdocks, sunken chin just like a mongoloid. Breasts too small, too large, lopsided shoulders, penis too short, hips too broad or else too narrow. And just an inch or two taller! Such was the house they inhabited for life. Hiding, feigning, concealing defects. But somehow they still had to find a partner. Following incomprehensible tastes—airy creatures paired with potbellies, skin and bones enamored of salt pork. They had a saying then: “Even monsters have their mates.” So perhaps they learned to tolerate their partners’ flaws, trusting that theirs would be forgiven in turn. Now every genetic error meets with such disgust that crowds might spit on them and stone them. As happened in the city of K., where the town council voted to exile a girl So thickset and squat that no stylish dress could ever suit her, But let’s not yearn for the days of prenormalization. Just think of the torments, the anxieties, the sweat, the wiles needed to entice, in spite of all.

Sunday, April 15, 2012


Havel believed that under communism and capitalism, people are threatened by what he described in his 1984 essay “Politics and Conscience” as “the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power—the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.”
When a genius dies, trouble ensues. Those charged with protecting the maestro’s legacy so very often screw it up. We know the story. Like Jozef Imrich, Van Gogh died having only sold one creation during his lifetime Afterlife of an artist
We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us. He might also have said: We shape our media dragons, and afterwards our dragons shape us World’s, Amerikan, Bohemian ongoing experiment in democracy and economic freedom is to endure

Cold War River : The Specter of Havel
Almost universally hailed today as an intellectual visionary and transformative political leader, Vaclav Havel actually struggled to live up to both of those expectations, an essay in honor of the man appearing in The Nation reminds us. He was something of a reluctant crusader, and took an approach rather nearer to postmodernism, preferring to critique “automation” by inverting maxims, dissecting social situations, and showing the absurdity of totalizing state power. His approach to philosophy came not out out of one easily-identifiable school but was more eclectic:

“I approach philosophy somewhat the way we approach art,” Havel once confessed. Despite his lack of method, he took a reading of Heidegger and a handful of homegrown metaphors and set forth in his writing powerful ideas about politics, truth and human nature. Havel believed that under communism and capitalism, people are threatened by what he described in his 1984 essay “Politics and Conscience” as “the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power—the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.” This did not make him nihilistic or even anti-traditional, though his sharp eye for linguistic laziness and intellectual deception did impart a sort of existentialist tinge to his faith. It also led him to support a nonideological, bottom-up ‘antipolitical politics’:
The last horizon might be called God, though Havel didn’t insist on the word. He did, however, insist that “responsibility establishes identity.” Responsibility is “the knife we use to carve out our own inimitable features in the panorama of Being,” he wrote. In Havel’s case, he came to a critical sense of responsibility through the ambiguous letter he wrote in 1977, appealing for release from jail. The authorities had claimed that it represented an abandonment of his dissident commitments, and although that hadn’t been his intention, after long self-questioning he nonetheless acknowledged the failure as his own. “We all tried to talk him out of it,” one friend later recalled, but as another explained, once Havel was convinced that the error was his, he set out to “provoke the police to arrest him again,” which they did. Much of his special charisma in the dissident movement stemmed from this decision to get rearrested. He acted as if such a sacrifice—in atonement for a failing that few people blamed him for—held meaning, thereby reclaiming the power to determine the meaning of his life, even in his errors. “Whether all is really lost or not,” Havel explained in one of his letters to Olga, “depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.” He meant the proposition to be true of everyone. He believed that change would come to Communist Czechoslovakia when ordinary people across the country began to insist, as he did, on living fully human lives. His faith in the effect of this “antipolitical politics” was like his faith in art; though such a politics is “hidden, indirect, long-term, and hard to measure,” he was sure it would prevail.

Whether all is really lost or not ; It wasn’t meant as a compliment. But Vaclav wore it like a badge of honor Hidden, indirect, long-term, and hard to measure [ Václav Havel's enduring ideas about politics, truth and human nature ; Rise of the gutless novelists. Where is today’s Tagore or Orwell? Wedged too tightly behind their laptops, have literary writers given up on politics? Kundera's novels are a magnificently rich blend of philosophy, psychology and politics relating to Czech Republic and France Why are English and American novels today so gutless? ; Havel tackled free will, Tolstoy the meaning of life, Imrich practiced what they preached. We all need to acquire a knack for finding beauty and charisma in the ordinary and familiar. Start reading Cold River on your Kindle in under a minute ; Criticism of a book is criticism of its author. The sting can linger for years. Kingsley Amis, however, took it in stride. A bad review could spoil breakfast, he said, but not lunch; Should Writers Reply to Reviewers? - Keith Ash]

• · To be first is everything in science and art. Immortality is at stake. Nobel Prizes, too. Originality is a grand, ignoble, fruitless pursuit... Patrick Victor Martindale White - first shot in the culture wars in The Wonderful Land of Oz; Robert Caro has spent thirty-eight years writing the biography of one man. Pencil-stained perfectionist. Robert Caro’s is a productive, wonderful mania, his epic biographies a window into how publishing used to work The Big Book ; The Titanic is about more than morbid fascination: technological hubris, race, class, gender. Our obsessions were in place long before she set sail. The magnificence, the pathos, the enthralling chivalry—Benjamin Guggenheim putting on white tie and tails so he could drown “like a gentleman”—and the shaming cowardice, the awful mistakes, the tantalizing “what if”s: for me, there was no better story The three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Cold War, and the Titanic
• · · The world’s most typical person is a 28-year old Han Chinese man with no bank account who earns less than $13,000 a year. Marx would not be surprised. About much else, he’d be shocked... Kapital Style is substance ; Fifty years from now, there will be only 10 universities in the world delivering higher education. Sebastian Thrun explains The Stanford Education ; However, good slavicintoxication is making a comeback. Ecstasy and LSD treat PTSD. Pot shrinks tumors. Mushrooms relieve depression. Why the change?. Oscillatory zeitgeist
• · · · Have fiction and philosophy parted ways? Novelists used to take abstract questions and make them real. Now, it seems, writers don’t even try. What’s the big idea? ; If we are among the romantic who are longing to hold the magnificent philosophical novel in our hands and our hours, it is possible that we will, like Miniver Cheevy, miss it.; From “Aaron’s rod” to “zydeco,” the DARE is a monument to a man who had the temerity to undertake a gigantic task – and not worry why... Native Tongues
• · · · · Margaret Fuller was brilliant and obsessive and dreadful company. “The upper lip habitually uplifts itself,” Edgar Allan Poe said of her, “conveying the impression of a sneer” A Double Inheritance: On Margaret Fuller ; From psychoanalysis to neuroscience, Eric Kandel has been driven to ask: How could people listen to Mozart one day and beat up Jews the next?.. he Age of Insight
• · · · · · As the national economy continues to struggle toward recovery from the Great Recession, 2011 was a year of grim headlines.. The federal Library of Congress lost about 9% of its budget and 10% of its workforce ; Libraries are transforming lives by providing patrons the tools needed to compete and thrive in a 21st century market place You belong @ your library as libraries transform lives through technological literacy: ; FTC - April is Financial Literacy Month News release: "April is Financial Literacy Month, and the Federal Trade Commission, the nation's consumer protection agency, has information to help you make the most of your money whether you're a student, young adult, parent, older person, or military service member Financial Literacy

Saturday, March 17, 2012



In Kezmarok and Vrbov there is a reference to an Irish based confirmation name so may the green colours fly everywhere on St Patrick's Day and may the left side of the mind rules;-)

'Life is trouble,' Zorba continued. 'Death, no. To live--do you know what that means? To undo your belt and look for trouble!'
-Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

How does a fatalistic, damaged man cope after surviving a massacre? By embracing satire, and flashing a smirk at the absurd... Black & Cold Irony of life

Middle age has its cold consolations, one of which is the knowledge that you're not nearly as important as you thought you were, or hoped someday to become. I used to save copies of everything I wrote

High Tatra Mountains, once a byword for soviet ski sanitarium, has been transformed into a welcoming tourist destination. The section on High Tatra Mountains in my local bookshop Brelelouw in Sydney is not promising, not even Ariel is able to oblige. Other countries offer travelogues with evocative titles – Italy, for example, has Under the Tuscan Sun, Spain has Driving over Lemons and France has Return to the Olive Farm. Old Czechoslovakia, by contrast, has My Cold War River, The Trial (Der Prozess), The Castle (Das Schloss), Amerika and The Metamorphosis . All of which have rather less of a holiday feel to them. The only certainty in some parts of the old Czechoslovakia is the way words are formed entirely or mostly of consonants, such as the term for the certainty in life Death which SMRT.

Soeaking of death, If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

Slov-what-ia? Aren’t they at war? Ok, so wee, peaceful Slovakia isn’t among the most-touted destinations. Big mistake. Here, you can climb alpine peaks in East Slovakia like the High Tatras, explore a clifftop castle in Trenčín, ski in Malá Fatra National Park and sit in as many old-town cafés as your rear can stand in Bratislava. Having emerged from its frumpy, communist-era chrysalis in time to welcome a horde of low-cost carrier junkies, the increasing numbers of flights and EU membership have pushed costs up in the capital. Outside the city and you’ll find traditional villages, terrific trails and prices a fraction of those in Western Europe. The High Tatras is the highest mountain range in Central Europe outside of the Alps. There is also a high density of bears in the region. The Tatra is also the name of a Czech vehicle manufacturer
-Lonely Czech Mates
Freinds read all about Freud Born and Bread along the banks of Morava River

Want to understand the states of the former Soviet Union? Scrap political science and get acquainted with Gogol, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky... and Imrich, the “broken-windows” theorist

Extreme skiing: Quelle catastrophe! In High Tatra witches too came to dance and play their pranks
The Tatras are the highest part of the Carpathian range of mountains that sweep through Central Europe. They run for 53km along the boundary between Poland and Slovakia, although the majority of the range is in Slovakia. The Tatras are not that high and only cover a relatively small area, but in terms of the beauty and diversity of the landscape, they are hard to beat...
In a letter to a friend, Windham spoke of sheer drops “terrible enough to make most people’s heads turn”, of bottomless crevasses, ice blocks “as big as houses”, and of witches who came to dance and “play their pranks” on the ice.


That letter, and its evocation of a landscape that was thrilling and threatening in equal measure, helped change our relationship with the mountains for ever. When published in London, it sparked a fascination with the Alps and made them an essential stop on the Grand Tour. Soon, artists and poets, including Byron, Wordsworth and Goethe, were flocking to Chamonix. Mary Shelley was so impressed by the Mer de Glace she used it as the “awful and majestic” location where Frankenstein meets his monster. Her husband Percy described the edge of the Bossons glacier as “the most vivid image of desolation that it is possible to conceive”. In his poem “Mont Blanc”, he looked up past the glaciers, creeping “like snakes that watch their prey”, to their source in the high peaks, a “city of death, distinct with many a tower, and wall impregnable of beaming ice”.


Ice of Tatras is a world unto itself - Upon death, Christopher Hitchens was greeted by Orwell. Hitchens didn’t believe his eyes. “This is all a delusion, my dear boy,” Orwell told him, “but enjoy it while you can”... 'I know myself,' he cried, 'but that is all.' [The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. The debate about promoting democracy should be a practical one, so here’s the practical reality: Policy makers and scholars don’t know what they’re doing... ; Am I or am I not going to have a martini?” Charles Murray will have a martini. Wine, too. Why not? Sobriety isn’t a “founding virtue”Jozef Imrich Will have a Martini too ]
• · The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books. One day an ebullient and prolific hacker vanished from the Web. Blog, Twitter feed, open-source code: gone. It’s called infosuicide ; Quelle catastrophe!, Beckett’s wife exclaimed when she learned that her husband had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She knew her man... Quelle catastrophe! ; Jeanne Proust was a nice lady, polite to her son. But she could also be niggling, infantilizing, and passive-aggressive. Yes, Marcel had mommy issues...
• · · So you want be a historian and reach a wide audience? Be like Barbara Tuchman and skip grad school–which would ruin you as a writer.. Media Dragon of Popular His Story ; Our mental lives depend on the brain, says Anthony Gottlieb, but our behavior is not best understood by looking inside it. NEURONS V FREE WILL
• · · · If art, culture and wisdom have taught us anything over the millennia – and cinema over its short, spectacular century – it is that we are all bewitched by what we shouldn’t be bewitched by. The attraction of human beings to the forbidden was established in the Garden of Eden and has thrived ever since. Look at us mortals today. Loving a safe and peaceful life, we look for the vicarious experience of danger and violence. We don’t want crime or murder in our lives, yet insist on them in our stories and movies. We hate or fear air travel, but thrill to screen stories about doomed airliners. Or doomed travel of any kind, including that by land or sea. Coming Soon ... ; For a moment, film criticism excited, surprised, and astonished. Think Ebert and Kael, both learned, literate, and smart, but never academic... When Critics Mattered
• · · · · · Everything can be bought and sold. As a result, society is more affluent – and more debased, says Michael Sandel... What Isn’t for Sale? ; Sales of two cities: how attitudes to buying and selling property vary in London and New York Sales of two cities ; The second last straw in affordable housing market rankings worldwide. Perhaps most remarkable has been the shift in Australia, once the exemplar of modestly priced, high-quality middle-class housing, to now the most unaffordable housing market in the English-speaking world Sydneyrella ; The choices that you make
Aren't all that grim.
The worlds I'll never see
Still will be around,
Won't they?
The Ben I'll never be,
Who remembers him? Overheard in Sydney
• · · · · · · Every week, Martin Kemp hears from people convinced they’ve found a lost Leonardo. One day someone really did. “I experienced a frisson”... Leonardo da Vinci ; The moral significance of people eating people. Cannibals are mental deviants, revolting curiosities. But they were once central to views of human nature. People who Eat People - Who is in 21st century cooking human flesh? The killing graph. A 46-year old statistician’s ability to quantify mass atrocities has launched a data revolution in the human-rights world.. The Body Counter

Monday, March 12, 2012



First day of autumn in Sydney and we are at an inflection point in history, a shift not just in our politics but our consciousness. revolutions

Many of us would admit that we spend too much of our time in cinemas watching French Film Festivals … Most of us would prefer to find a more efficient way to manage our time in life, but we love the way time passes while we watch others showing us how to live, laugh and lament …. During a time where cinema is focused on being bigger and louder than ever before, it's refreshing to come across a film like The Artist where telling a great story remains at the heart. Director Michel Hazanavicius stripped the film back to basics, preferring to film in black and white to 3D; using music to tell the tale in place of dialogue and sound effects… The Art of Storytelling The war of the Buttons; Presumed Gulty; A separation

Someone Like You Challenges for Real Bob Carr
Wiping clean and reinventing his personal slate is just the first of the tasks foreign minister Bob Carr must undertake.

Bob Carr will not only need to bridge the yawning chasm that opened up between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd and their respective offices, but he will alsoface a number of major and immediate challenges.
In trying to reconcile his blogging “baggage” with Labor’s formal foreign policy, Mr Carr should resist the temptation to emulate the Hawker Britton style of political spin and distraction that he mastered during his time as NSW Premier.
Already Mr Carr has sought to airbrush from history a number of his now rather inconvenient views. His description of the Dalai Lama as a “cunning monk”, and his warning that Australian politicians should not be intimidated into meeting “this theological politician” on his “too frequent visits”, have been removed from his website.
Mr Carr has also implored us to ignore his strident criticism of the Libyan intervention, considered by Prime Minister Gillard and former Foreign Minister Rudd to be among their finer foreign policy moments. His opinion that it was a “wrong headed amateur-hour intervention” of “towering stupidity” is now replaced by an admission that he was “completely wrong”.


Only time will tell - The Carr coup [Carr felt qualified to talk about everything from National Gallery exhibitions of Renaissance art to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks ; Citizens and journalists are concerned about the prevalence of misinformation in contemporary politics, which may pollute democratic discourse and undermine citizens’ ability to cast informed votes and participate meaningfully in public debate. Academic research in this area paints a pessimistic picture—the most salient misperceptions are widely held, easily spread, and difficult to correct. Misinformation and Fact-checking: Research Findings from Social Science; Maria and I sang; danced at National Gallery during the Renaissance Appoggiatura ]
• · Scars and Stories is, at once, a beautiful and intensely irritating record. This music can be gorgeous, human, haunting, and affecting – and it can also be first class, self-indulgent nonsense Scars and Stories ;Poverty. It's a word at the root of much debate. What causes it? Who's accountable? How can we solve it? Now after twenty years of research, scientists are suggesting that 'toxic stress' in early life may be to blame, and preventing poverty may be as simple as giving a child a hug... HUG ;
This fraud begins around the birth of Charter 77. In 1977 a litre of diesel was free in the army of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (Mark V also did not pay anything for his diesel or petrol in the hottest spot on earth the army barracks of Townsville) , "Star Wars" opened in theatres across the US, the maiden Apple II computers went on sale, a 25-hour black out occurred in New York City and 365 day blackout continued to place in Soviet Union. And, according to a SeattlePI.com article, that also was the year two men were in a bar fight in Baltimore, Maryland – and one man stole the other's wallet. He then proceeded to use the man's identity for the next 30 years. So, one guy stole another guy's wallet 30 years ago. You may ask: "How bad could it be?" Pretty bad, when you think that the victim's identity in this case is now tied to that of a career criminal Man who lived, committed crimes under stolen ID for 30 years sentenced
• · · In From Carr to Keneally respected experts analyse the four terms of Labor government in NSW: the premiers and their ministers, the political parties and their electoral fortunes; the role of independents; policies in all key areas; and changes in the bureaucracy, cabinet and parliament. From Karr to Keneally ; edited by David Clune ; Welsh heritage of Russell Grove Clerk Emeritus of the Legislative Assembly of NSW ; AS Barry O'Farrell approaches the first anniversary of his election victory, one thing appears to have survived the discredited Labor government: a political culture in which the loyalty of "mates" to each other trumps the public interest The casino scandal that blackens the Premier ; It has been a bruising week for the New South Wales Government as it approaches the anniversary of its first year in power The curious case of the Casino affair ; Questions about the characteristics of Members of Congress, including their age, education, previous occupations, and other descriptors, are of ongoing interest to Members, congressional staff, and constituents. Some of these questions may be asked in the context of representation, in efforts to evaluate the extent to which Members of Congress reflect their constituencies and the nation at large. In other instances, questions arise about how the characteristics of Members have changed over time, which may speak in part to the history of Congress. Representatives and Senators: Trends in Member Characteristics Since 1945
• · · · Ms Hesford helped write a book called NSW Legislative Assembly Practice, Procedure and Privilege and is regularly on hand during parliamentary debates to advise on procedure Procedural matters; The Rise and Fall of Nick Petroulias St Michael Investigations ; Ms Lorbek, the former lover of the disgraced Tax Office lawyer Nick Petroulias, had requested about $2000 in government child support this year. Instead, she received $2 million. And she spent it. Love child ; Other Scandals • · · · · · The suggestion that the best seller from Hornsby is based on former or current officers of the Crown is widly exaggerated ; Not a good look - Women keep looking in the 'wallpaper' and it is turning them off! Connecting the dots



Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened.
- Jennifer Yane

Wishing you your happiest birthday yet
A birthday too special To ever forget Yullis.
So many wishes
So many smiles
Too many memories
Too few words
Like that ad in the FrenchFilmFestival - No wonder the world stops after all it's the golden age of French cinema ;-) To the world, you may be one person. But to me, you are the world ; Happy birthday to a person who is smart, good looking, and funny and reminds me a lot of myself ;-) Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time. To the nation's best kept secret; Our true age because we identify with the kids who are crafty and retro-adorable, the morals sound and the rural nostalgia impeccably groomed in War Of The Buttons (La Guerre des boutons) a harmlessly old-fashioned tale of youthful rivalries between two Slavic and Sikh villages in the 1960s. War Of The Buttons



Wrap Text around Image

Only in High Tatra Mountains - Is this the ‘coolest’ cinema in the world




Wrap Text around Image

Is this the ‘coldest’ story in the world?


CODA for Malaysian, German and British - Sharm: [By Peter FitzSimons aka THE FITZ FILES] Last year, TFF's cousin, Andrew Tink - the former parliamentarian who triumphed over throat cancer - told his wife, Kerry, that he was going to dedicate his new book Lord Sydney to her. She replied: ''That's very nice but I'd rather have a diamond.'' This year, when the book began selling very well, he told her the dedication would most likely outlast us by many years. Her reply was: ''That's still very nice but I'd still rather have a diamond.'' So at the launch at Parliament House on Thursday - with those present including the Governor, Marie Bashir; ministers Hazzard, Berejiklian, Souris, Smith and Parker; the lord mayor, Clover Moore; and Andrew's old sparring partner Paul Whelan, who drove down from near Maitland in atrocious weather - he presented her with a diamond. And she was gracious enough to say that she didn't need to put on her glasses to be able to see it. A rare jewel
Lord Of Sydney - Book Launch in Chatswood

Saturday, February 11, 2012



... the earth is full of thy riches.
So is this great and wide sea,
wherein are things creeping
innumerable, both small and
great beasts. Psalms 104: 24-25

It is the path of least resistance that makes rivers and men crooked Time Waits for No Man



Media Dragons Googling Dickens



A Few snowflakes, appropriately, fell around the parish church of Portsea yesterday in Hampshire as hundreds gathered inside to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of its most famous son, Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens turns 200 on Tuesday 7 February 2012. There's no sense singing “Happy Birthday” since he died in 1870 and the song was written decades after that Do we really need to make such a fuss about Karol?‎; A global Dickens appreciation, and a modest proposal - It's part of a marathon celebration of Charles Dickens's 200th birthday – the Global Dickens Read-a-thon Google on Dickens ; Charles Dickens was one of our finest ever writers and it is right and proper that so many people worldwide have been paying homage to the great man this week on his 200th anniversary Dickens would have loved being on Twitter; What is the connection between the great 19th century English novelist and the best-loved Czech literary anti-hero? The answer is, surprisingly enough, that without Dickens we quite possibly wouldn’t have Švejk at all. David Vaughan looks at this and some other Czech links with Dickens in this week’s Czech Books. Dickens and the Good Soldier Švejk ; Karol Dickens was long fascinated by Australia and there is a Charles Dickens statue at Centennial Park, Sydney – Down Under Great southern expectations Dickens based many of his characters on real people and Dickens at 200: still the best we've got on being poor Imrich Not - Like Cold River, Dickens was always a struggle

A Tale of A Decade Old Media Dragon in the Year of the Dragon - I don't want to die without scars Because the truth needs to be told … Everything is but a dream within a dream
Does time exist? Is our perception of the world different from its true reality? Is our concept of time fundamentally flawed? These are the central questions raised by KILLING TIME, a provocative documentary that explores the nature of time.


The film centers on the work of Julian Barbour, a prominent Theoretical Physicist, who gained notoriety with the publication of his landmark book, "The End of Time" (1999). In it, Barbour presents the concept of time as a human construct, not as a separately existing dimension. In a series of interviews, using nothing more than a Polaroid to snap random pictures, Barbour illustrates the development of his radical theory. He explains that physics has always been grounded in Sir Isaac Newton's conception of time as an invisible river that exists and flows independently of the objects in the world.
However, through his work with collaborator Bruno Bertotti, and his own attempts to reconcile the conflict between Quantum Mechanics and Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Barbour came to the conclusion that Newton was wrong. Barbour posits that time is, in fact, an illusion - a measure imposed on the world by humanity. He explains this with the concept of a 'now', which he describes as a snapshot in time - a completely frozen, self-contained instant (much like a Polaroid photograph). Time is simply the measure of the space between two separate and unrelated 'nows.'


• Well, like this river, time seems to flow endlessly from one moment to the next. KILLING TIME ; The truth is the light and light is the truth in the River Town To blog or not to blog …; [As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing /Philosophy/ ; There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything. There’s Only Enough Room in the Blogosphere for the 144 Million of Us ; Top of the Blogs; Trends ; Social media has gone from being a pastime to a necessary component of any brand and business. Ten Media Dragons to follow in the year of the dragon ;]
• · Our home planet is about 4.5 billion (4,500 million) years old. how-it-works-amazing-answers-to-curious-questions ; The universe itself is expanding, but not in the way a balloon expands. The expansion is taking place throughout the universe, where space-time itself is being stretched outwards. Whereas a balloon pushes its edges out as it expands, the universe is also pushing its insides outwards as well, but there is no centre of the universe, so everything is moving away from everything else. It’s a bit like baking a ball of dough; the entire dough expands and grows, not just its edges. However, based on our knowledge of how old the universe is, roughly 14 billion years, we can observe a theoretical ‘edge’ of the visible universe about 14 billion light years away from us. howstuffworks.com It’s a bit like baking a ball of dough; the entire dough expand s and grows, not just its edges.
• · · I'm interested in bending the edges of the spectrum to make the abstract and the concrete hit one another more directly www.howitworksdaily.com ; The Frozen River, deals with the question, "Does time flow?" One of the key points in this chapter deals with special relativity. Observers moving relative to each other have different conceptions of what exists at a given moment, and hence they have different conceptions of reality. The conclusion is that time does not flow, as all things simultaneously exist at the same time The Frozen River; It is said that writers are people who, as children, did not receive sufficient rejection either from adults or peers and so are compelled to seek it relentlessly in later life. Dickens put Cold River on the literary map
• · · · True time would never be revealed by mere clocks--of this Newton was sure Time Waits for No Man; When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free--free to think, to express my thoughts--free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination's wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself . . . I was free! Googopoly
• · · · · How does a newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Blog lets readers interact with characters from book: Fallen Lake; Dickens wrote about social issues that still resonate today ... Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot, and it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash! Be water, my friend. Will Inequality Keep Getting Worse?
• · · · · · Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion. Newton, forgive me;" Einstein wrote in his Autobiographical Notes ; The general idea for Michelson Morley type experiments is that it is faster to swim a return journey across a flowing river than it takes to swim an equivalent distance upstream and back. If you do the maths it is quite easy to verify this. We have to substitute the swimmer for light and the river for the aether, and then build our testing apparatus accordingly. Invisible river that flows uniformly for ever irrespective of how fast the boat is being rowed the ripples from the oars will travel across the water with the same speed
• · · · · · From The Atlantic - 150th Anniversary Edition - The Duty to Think "On the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, we present this commemorative issue featuring Atlantic stories by Mark Twain, Henry James, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and many more." James Bennet editor of The Atlantic: "It is possible, in these pages, to enter into both the humanity of figures consecrated or condemned by history and the uncertainty the writers must have felt during the rush of events...It seemed to us that these Atlantic pieces have a way of conversing across the decades. And so in this issue, one finds Garry Wills’s account from 1992 of how Lincoln used the Gettysburg Address to reinterpret the Constitution and thereby “revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.” And then, equipped with that explication of how Lincoln purified the nation’s meaning, and with President Obama’s summation of what that meaning is, the reader can then encounter, with fresh appreciation, Lowell’s epitaph for Lincoln: New birth of our new soil, the first American The Duty to Think ; This year the media will gather in Berlin from March 6th 2012, on the eve of ITB Berlin, as the world’s leading travel trade show devotes the day entirely to the sector for the first time. Duty To Meet with Journalists