Tuesday, May 01, 2012

High Tatra Mountains


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

Thursday, March 08, 2012



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

Tuesday, February 07, 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

Friday, January 06, 2012



Here's to a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year, to all media dragons! I thought it would be difficult to decide what to write for my first blog entry. I thought it would need to be original, witty, unique, and somehow perfect. Yet, I don't have a perfect track record when it comes to new years resolutions, so this year MMXII I am not even planning to change the world for the better. The reality is that in 2012 Media Dragon is 10 years old and how the decade just flew. My daughters will be both in their twenties and how I managed to get grey hair is beyond me ... I might be older, yet the mind and idiosyncrasies of women and computers are still a foreign language to me. I must have done something strange in my previous lives to be blessed with four sisters, two daughters etc ... ;-) New Year's Resolutions I've Already Broken.

There's been a dramatic end to New Year's Eve celebrations in Melbourne, with the iconic Arts Centre spire catching fire - (hat tip to MT iphone).

Spire
Tens of thousands of revelers filled Melbourne Streets, while we watched George Cluney in the Descandants, to ring in the new year Saturday night. Counting backwards from 10, the crowd cheered as the clock struck midnight and fireworks even peppered Catholics at St Kilda

Wishing one another a happy new year, many people shared a kiss with a significant other, while others traded high fives and hugs. May this new vintage be a bit more than peppered with good intentions ;-) Happy New Year to media types everywhere

If your conscience is clear, you've nothing to worry about. Your innocence will be proved, but you have to fight for it! I believe that if one doesn't give way, truth must always come out in the end. Maria in Václav Havel, Vyrozumení (The Memorandum) (1966)

-In certain countries, theatres do not merely hire half-starved performers to act out the writings of half-starved writers. They also launch (escapes and)revolutions! Absurdity and truth: the passing of Václav Havel

The Joy of Quiet: Happy New Year to Quiet Douliae types everywhere Gabbie Melbourne Gal: Out with the Old, and iN with the New
When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

I never ... watch TV ... Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”


Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.
Has it really come to this?
In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.


• · Hat tip - Gina F The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages [A Variety of New Year's Resolutions
‎ - 666 Pure Vodka run a workshop in NY where Sam Ross (former Melbourne bartender, now manager of Milk & Honey in New York and recently awarded American Bartender of the Year at the 2011 Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards) described his bartending philosophy and shared various cocktail techniques to a mostly industry-only crowd. It was a really interesting session (I took lots of notes, nerd that I am) Melbourne Gal in love with her city - Milk & Honey ; Chichi Bella and her recommended readings Divine Simplicity of Life in Melbourne; Gabbie and her How to do stuff sites Crafts]
• · · Melbourne erupted in a blaze of colour and light at midnight as Australia ushered in the new year in style Melbourne Arts Centre set ablaze during fireworks ; Sydney turned on a dazzling display of fireworks on the harbour that cost $6.5 million and lasted 12 minutes Cities of light deliver hope in darker times
• · · · Happy 2012 for all crossworders ... ... but may it be a bad year for the crossword gremlins; Metropolis
• · · · · Sydney and Hong Kong set the standard with glittering extravaganzas, while London geared up for a firework display over the River Thames to usher in a year in which it will host the Olympic Games World rings in New Year in blaze of fireworks ; The NSW Minister for Planning has asked two lawyers and ex-State Government ministers - Tim Moore and Ron Dyer; one Liberal, the other Labor - to review the NSW Planning System. Into the swamps of the current system, or a clear view of where to go?
• · · · · ·In announcing the end of the Iraq War, President Obama ignored its horrors, so as not to further upset its still-powerful supporters. But his silence removed the context for Pvt. Bradley Manning's moral decision to expose these crimes of war. Bradley Manning: traitor or hero?; Apocalypse now: caught in the Web of Revelations - In Hell there is nowhere to hide. It's official: we've all gone to hell

Wednesday, December 21, 2011



R.I.P., Vaclav Havel A hero of mine has died. Another great intellectual light has left the planet. The Czech National flag and two black flags wave in front of Saint Vitus Cathedral

I only met Havel twice and wouldn't pretend to know him well. But he mattered as much to me as my father ... I met him once in Prague after he signed the Charter 77 and again in 1995 when Johno Johnson, President of NSW Legislative Council fame, invited me to luncheon in Sydney Parliament House. But I really first met Vaclav Havel at my sister Aga’s deathbead in 1975 when I first came across his classic play, Vyrozumní (The Memorandum). He was something of a bohemian George Orwell. Like Orwell, Havel satirised the 'doublespeak' of the official bureaucratic language of the communist regime …
In 2003 I wrote a short tribute to my hero who even inspired me to grow moustache after the military service in Czechoslovakia circa 1977 to 2003 when I shave my moustache as Havel’s political era was over Today I Farewell My Teenage Hero: Vaclav Havel
The Cold River: A Tale From My Heart
Message from Vaclav Havel





We are all hugely diminished today by the passing of a man, small of height but towering in moral stature and courage over those he called the "professional rulers" ; Cold River: The Cold Truth of Vaclav Havel’s Freedom

Havel’s talent for the theatre of the absurd, when read in the context of the communist experience, is just mind boggling

Old Mate! In the gusty old weather,
When our hopes and our troubles were new,
In the years spent in wearing out leather,
I found you unselfish and true —
I have gathered these verses together
For the sake of our friendship and you…

Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.
- Vaclav Havel

Bells ring across country to commemorate Václav Havel Vaclav Havel: Living in truth A man for all seasons on behalf of liberty
Vaclav Havel's death is a reminder of something which parts of modern world are in danger of taking for granted, at best, and, at worst, of forgetting altogether.
Candles are placed at the Venceslav Square to commemorate the death of former Czech president Vaclav Havel, in central Prague, Czech Republic, December 18, 2011


How good a dramatist was Václav Havel? Undeniably one with a wry, sceptical, highly original voice. But he defied the easy labels we love to slap on writers. Just as Latin American novelists often claim that what we term "magic realism" is for them a truthful picture of life, so Havel made nonsense of the "absurdist" category to which he was sometimes consigned by critics. His plays are not a cry of protest against a meaningless universe. "The ultimate aim of Havel's plays," as translator Vera Blackwell wrote, "is the improvement of man's lot through the improvement of human institutions."


YOU could hear Vaclav Havel coming down the corridor of the palace a few minutes in advance. Clip-clip, clip-clop: the accelerated walk of a short-legged man in a hurry. And always the loud chatter of his political advisers, their competing voices like birdsong at dusk. Then came the whiff of cigarette smoke, and with a flourish, the man himself - a theatrical entrance for a playwright-turned-politician. As early as 1988, Havel had hatched the idea of a play about power and integrity. Then the world changed and for 13 years he was head of state, first of united Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic. He moved from being a Velvet Underground fan, to being the architect of the Velvet Revolution and a reluctant co-negotiator of the Velvet Divorce from Slovakia.


• Vaclav , shy and bookish, with a wispy mustache ...Vaclav Havel's Lasting Words ; Google on Havel [The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less Quotes ; Cold War icon Havel dies ; To lose either Christopher Hitchens or Vaclav Havel would be burden enough to bear but to lose them both in the same week is cruel punishment, indeed. ; His home village of Hrádeček Images of Vaclav; As a practical politician and playwright, late former president Vaclav Havel would most probably carefully watch who will come for the funeral ]• · The dissident playwright who wove theatre into politics to peacefully bring down communism in Czechoslovakia and become a hero of the epic struggle that ended the Cold War ; Vale Václav Havel ; Czech pay tribute to revolution icon Vaclav Havel ; Havel, a playwright, spent a ton of time in jail for his political writings
• · · Twenty-two years ago, almost to the day, thousands in Prague's Wenceslas Square roared, "Havel to the Castle." Days later, like a house of cards, Moscow's puppet government collapsed. On December 29, 1989, Vaclav Havel, the dissident artist who had begun the year in prison, took the oath of office as president of Czechoslovakia We will live in an indifferent, demoralized and undemocratic society ; The surrealism of encountering Mr. Havel and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright at the tiny Brick Theatre will NEVER leave my mind.
• · · · Vaclav Havel personified the “power of the powerless.” He understood — as John Paul II understood – the value of integrity, the value of truth. Vaclav Havel: I Was Told in 1968, "You Must Become President"*; When Václav Havel and 241 others signed Charter 77 during the Cold War in 1977, they were denounced by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia as "traitors and renegades" and "agents of imperialism." Such were the epithets by which some of the most courageous Europeans of the 20th century were known
• · · · · In the spirit of the season, and in honor of Vaclav Havel, who died Sunday (and whose life I’ve remembered in another post), what follows is a top-ten list, the first entry being Havel’s greatest hits, and the rest books and writers whom Havel admired—contemporaries or near contemporaries who lived in the same region and under similar regimes. (I am sticking here to non-fiction prose.) They, like Havel, are men and women who lived, and wrote within the truth ; The more platforms we invent, the more stories we need. Stories are critical to winning in the "Lifestream" we are in. When you're a marketer with an annual sales target to hit, stories are your best friend for connecting with consumers. Stand Up The Storytellers - New Havels Wanted Openness is fundamental to representative government. Yet the congressional process is replete with activities and actions that are private and not observable by the public. How to distinguish reasonable legislative secrecy from impractical transparency is a topic that produces disagreement on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Why? Because lawmaking is critical to the governance of the nation. Scores of people in the attentive public want to observe and learn about congressional proceedings. Openness is fundamental to representative government
• · · · · · Organised crime has long been big business in the country. But are mafiosi now enjoying protection by the state Who runs Russia? ; News of the deaths of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong Il hit Burma at high speed this week, and many Burmese rushed online to share their thoughts about the leader of the Czech people, who they admired, and the oppressor of the North Korean people, who they disdained. Kim Jong Il and Vaclav Havel: Two leaders a world apart = Farewell to a Revolutionary, Good Riddance to a Despot

Every man should have a fair-sized cemetery
in which to bury the faults of his friends.
- Henry Brooks Adams