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Australia could only manage 41st position in RSF's third annual index of press freedom, lagging behind some former Eastern bloc nations, including Slovakia (7), Czech Republic (19), Hungary (28), and Poland (32) Australia ranks poorly in global media freedom listing

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Authorities harass a blogger
Reporters Without Borders has condemned a bid to intimidate a blogger after the minister of internal security threatened to imprison Jeff Ooi, who runs the weblog Screenshots at the beginning of October 2004.
Ooi is accused of allowing an Internet-user to post a message insulting Islam Hadhari, a religious practice promoted by the government.
The international press freedom organisation called on Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi to see that no legal action was taken against Ooi. "A blogger cannot be responsible for a message posted by an anonymous contributor," it said. "The statement by the internal security minister is serious because it will force those running weblogs to use excessive censorship."
Jeff Ooi on 30 September 2004 posted an article on Screenshots discussing the contradiction between the values of Islam Hadhari and the corruption of the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). A contentious comment was posted a few hours later by someone calling himself Anwar. It said, "Islam Hadhari and corruption are like shit and urine". Ooi reacted quickly to this statement and replied online
• What you said affects and hurts me because you have twisted and hijacked my blog topic [ Reporters Without Borders ]
• · Liberation Online A look at Iraq's bloggers All my editors want is blood, blood, blood. No context. No politics. No Blogs
• · · Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Media freedom rankings
• · · · Don't be confused by the tide of contradictory voter surveys. The clear message is that Bush is in trouble Blogs Polling Truth ; [Blogger Used To Spam Google ]
• · · · · The Selfish Gene Web is obsessed with anything that spreads, whether it's a ebook, a blog or a rumor. And so the Spider loves memes; [The AP article discusses their research finding that people are searching for e-commerce more and sex less]
• · · · · · 101 years in 101 words Word birthdays - Beatnik (1958) ; [We live in a media-driven, commercial culture, where it's hard to escape the ever-increasing waves of advertising and infotainment. Meanwhile, our public spaces are eroding, and what were once safe havens – schools, museums, libraries, parks – are now awash in commercials Jessica Cutler gleefully published the graphic details of her sexual encounters with high-ranking DC insiders ]

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At an early stage in the Cold War, the governments of the Soviet Union and the United States formalized the cultural front as one of their primary theaters of conflict, embarking on a series of alternating cultural exchanges Rudolph Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War
The words that jump off the page speak of joy and wonderment and reckless, inebriated fun, of characters as wild and colorful as fireworks.
The book, On the Road, became an overnight sensation, a trophy, mantra and manual for the Beat Generation The author was Jack Kerouac, who died 35 years ago. He was 47
[He died with $91 in his bank account. His death was from alcohol. He was known to consume 17 shots of Johnny Walker Red per hour, washed down with Colt malt liquor. He helped us understand legislatures in America and Australia. ]

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Soren Kierkegaard Period
That extraordinary writer of stories about the "Christ-haunted" American South, Flannery O’Connor, was frequently asked why her people and plots were so often outlandish, even grotesque. She answered, "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you have to draw large and startling figures." I expect Søren Kierkegaard, had he lived a century later, would have taken to Flannery O’Connor and would have relished her affirmation of the necessarily outlandish. But then he would immediately be on guard lest anyone think that he does not really mean what he says, that he is anything less than utterly, indeed deadly, serious. He exaggerates for effect and witheringly attacks his opponents who suggest that his exaggeration is anything less than the truth of the matter. He writes, as he repeatedly says, for that one reader—the singular individual who has the courage to understand him—while at the same time describing in detail, and often with hilarious parody, the many readers who refuse to take him at his word. Kierkegaard was keenly (some would say obsessively) attentive to the ways in which he was misunderstood, even as he persistently and defiantly courted misunderstanding. This, as readers beyond numbering have discovered, can be quite maddening. It is also at least part of the reason why Kierkegaard is so widely read.
• If Kierkegaard was not to be given the privilege of literally shedding his blood, he would bear witness in other ways. He welcomed the derision of those surrounding him, recognizing in them the same crowd that surrounded the cross of his contemporary, Jesus Christ Kierkegaard for Grownups [Here-within-inside is a memo designed to cheer up the human race
Rosemary Woodruff . Those who just barely, gasping, made it from the Spanish-American War through World War I were then asked, with no respite to deal with the Roaring Twenties, Communism, the Depression, Hitler, World War II, Hiroshima, Cold War, television, Lunar landings, drugs, Hustler, cloning. No one was permitted to stand still.]
• · Faiza Guene, the 19-year-old daughter of Algerians who moved to France before she was born, has taken her experiences Growing up in public housing projects outside Paris and whipped them into a confection that is tender, funny and even wise [Destiny is misery because you can do nothing about it. My mother, she says that if my father left us, it was because it was written.]
• · · Monsignor Ignazio Sanna Christians Will Need to Be Mystics, Says Theologian ; [Popieluszko was abducted and killed by secret police on Oct. 19, 1984 His body was stuffed in a sack weighed down with stones and thrown into the Vistula River ]
• · · · My Own Private Library: A love of books. Okay, it is a form of madness. But a pathology that combines history, the aesthetic, and a desire to preserve knowledge can’t be all bad These books represent the person I once aspired to be; [Manners and Morals at the Strangers Dining Room: Why You Should Not Eat the Person Sitting Next to You {PDF version}]
• · · · · It’s haunting to read through the yellowed news clippings of the 1960s. The clock was winding down and no one knew how the story would end The Other Sixties ; [ Nothing To Watch In The 210-Channel Universe]
• · · · · · Suspicion, distrust, backbiting, smear tactics, simple loathing and sometimes extremely unliterary abuse have come to characterise A struggle that has been waged until now behind the closed doors of London's literary salons
[The only thing that really changes is the writers. The profession can often be wrong about what the readers wants, but then someone will come up with something different]

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It is hard to believe that 164 years ago St George area had a population of just 164 people. According to Brian Shaw, president of the local historial society, in 1840 the suburb was known as Gannons Forrest and the railway station which was opened in 1884 took its name from a local school called Hurstville - village on a hill in a forest. The topic is near to home for me as I was lucky enough to share for a number of years accommodation with a guru on history of Australian railways. Dr George Dorman whose uncle supplied rivets for the Sydney Harbour Bridge had a special soft spot for the preservation of the railway history. George was always a hungry historian, eating up railway stations and entire railway lines in large bites. George used my Nikon camera on a number of ocassions to capture his hunger for history. Even though George was recovering from the heart bypass operation, he still managed to sneak some snaps of the Hurstville station in its centenial glory. At our wedding, when George caught his breath we were fortunate to hear his favourite yarns about the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the colonial life in Australian towns. I also learned why Leo Schofield deserved to create a show around Sydney Harbour Bridge, as a nephew of George Dorman he is the closest artistic thing to the bridge.
If George was still with us I know that he would rush to get a copy of a historian Dr Ed Duyker who wrote this year a story called Citizen Labillardiere: A Naturalist’s Life in Revolution and Exploration (1755-1834). This is an adventure story about a great 18th century traveller and naturalist Jacques-Julien de Labillardiere who according to Duyker was more significant than Joseph Banks or Daniel Solander. Labillardiere’s landing place, Rocherche Bay in Tasmania is considered by Dr Duyker scientifically more important than Kurnell or Cape Solander in Sutherland Shire.
Coathanger; On the stroke of New Years Eve, people all over the world look to the Sydney Harbour Bridge

Art & History Across Frontiers: It`s all fun and games till someone has to pay for the phone call
Father John of St Patrick Church might identify with this story even the bishop find it hard to get passed the Sutherland gates...
An American decided to write a book about famous churches of
Australia. For his first chapter he decided to write about famous Sydney
churches. So he bought a plane ticket and made the trip to St Mary's Cathedral
thinking that he would work his way down the country.
On his first day he was inside the cathedral taking photographs when
he noticed a golden telephone mounted on the wall with a sign that
read "$10,000 per call".
The American, being intrigued, asked a priest who was strolling by
what the telephone was used for. The priest replied that it was a
direct line to heaven and that for $10,000 you could talk to God. The
American thanked the priest and went along his way.
Next stop was Star of the Sea at Waverley. There, at a very large
church, he saw the same golden telephone with the same sign under it.
He wondered if this was the same kind of telephone he saw at St Mary's
and he asked a nearby nun what it's purpose was. She told him that it
was a direct line to heaven and that for $10,000 he could talk to God.
"O.K., thank you", said the American.
He then travelled on through the North Shore and in every church he
saw the same golden telephone with the same "$10,000 per call" sign
under it.With his first chapter going well, he left Northern Sydney
and travelled to the Sutherland Shire.
Again, there was the same golden telephone, but this time the sign
under it read "10 cents per call." The American was surprised so he
asked the priest about the sign. "Father, I've travelled all over
Sydney, and I've seen this same golden telephone in many churches. I'm
told that it is a direct line to heaven, but in all the churches in
Sydney the price was $10,000 per call. Why is it so cheap here?"
The priest smiled and answered, You're in the Shire now son. It's a local call
• John Sullivan Parish Priest
• · Pittsburgh like the Harbour Bridge is all about steel: It is also the town of Slovak born Andy Warhola ... From Rust Belt to arts mecca
• · · Value of Stories; [Drowning In The Booker ]
• · · · Librarians were the first people in this country to stand up and resist the forces of ultra patriotism The Librarian reads like the back story behind today's headlines
• · · · · UK Government Tries To Turn Around Public Libraries
• · · · · · Now I want entire Ministry and Meyer Bureaucracy and the Royal Sons to Read it! (smile) Amazon - Remember When Just Having A Profit Was Good Enough For Cold River? ; [Erotic Muse: Sonnets About Sex by John Boase Virtual ‘Fessing Up]

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There's a difference between making a point and having an agenda. We don't have an agenda to change the political system. We have a more selfish agenda, to entertain ourselves. We feel a frustration with the way politics are handled and the way politics are handled within the media.
-Jon Stewart (thanks Tim)

The Blog, The Press, The Media: The Road to Nemesis
To Fisk or Not to Fisk?
So far over twenty light and sober responses are appended to the Road to Surfdom’s entry on why people blog. Nemesis started the blog rolling and Tim Dunlop being Tim happily returns to blogging virtual horses and dragons.
Barrista and I started gently with our fingers passing on emails and now the addiction has taken the entire arms (smile).
Tim Dunlop writes: I got into blogging accidentally and was mainly interested in it as a way of writing a diary of my time in the US. But I pretty quickly became interested in the democratic aspects of it--the idea of potentially having a way of participating in public discussion about politics and social issues--and so I started to linking to blogs and they started linking to me and pretty soon I was part of the blogosphere.
Two big events changed how Surfdom developed. The first was the Washington sniper. My posts about living here during that fun time made me visible to American blogs and brought me a readership amongst them and their readers.
Then I got caught up in the whole war-in-Iraq debate, which was probably the galvanising moment for a lot of bloggers, if not for the political blogosphere in general, even more so than 9/11.
The fact that I get quite a few people through these days is something of an amazement to me.
I write about and mention stuff that interests me with no attempt at all at being comprehensive in my coverage. I write largely because I think it is fun to write.
• And I see value in arguing, though I wish everyone just agreed with me ...; [Dina Musing about Blogging community ; Taxonomy: The Dreaded T-Word, Or, Why Doesn't Google Know How To Classify Blogs? ]
• · Dear Oprah More and more readers are leaving their newspapers on their doorsteps, unopened and unread. But Oprah's magazine might hold a few answers
• · · NYT's Okrent explains why he named a "coward" blogger ; [Schwenk: Naming me served one purpose -- to harm me]
• · · · Tim Porter: Even though Julia Sellers acknowledges that journalists just leave a bad taste in many people's mouths she still wants to fulfill her desire to be a reporter because as a journalist it is your responsibility to report the truth to the public ; [It is a daily struggle to get fair and balanced news Apologize? For What? ]
• · · · · It's the ultimate global marketplace, raking in billions of dollars and attracting thousands of new buyers and sellers every day. Kevin Airs explores the online bazaar of eBay What am I bid? Who am I? Imrich
• · · · · · You’re so vain, you probably think I’m talking about you-you’re so vain…Bombay Writers' Cafe I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again
[We're all Christ and we're all Hitler. We are trying to make Christ's message contemporary. We want Christ to win. What would he have done if he had advertisements, T.V., records, films and newspapers? The miracle today is communication. So let's use it.
-John Lennon '69 Ich bin ein Berliner: Herbert Kundler, 77, Cold War-era broadcaster in Berlin; Anthony Hecht, 81, was a formal poet who wrote about war, corruption, taking on society in the largest sense]

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Sexty (60) Minutes is a broadcasting institution. Amerikan 60 Minutes is the longest continuously running prime time TV program ever, watched by 16 million viewers every week. Not only has it been in the Nielsen top 10 for the last 23 seasons, it’s the only show ever to have the highest ratings in three different decades. 60 Minutes is the most honored TV series of all time, with 75 Emmy Awards. It’s also the most profitable, having earned CBS an estimated $2 billion. What’s the secret?
Before 60 Minutes debuted, in 1968, television news was terribly earnest—and terribly dull. It was also terribly unprofitable and was usually subsidized by a network’s hit comedies and dramas. Into this void stepped creator and executive producer Don Hewitt, a protegé of CBS legends Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. Hewitt, whose notions of journalism had been shaped by the classic newspaper comedy The Front Page, saw no reason why televised journalism couldn’t be entertaining. He conceived of 60 Minutes as a broadcast version of Life magazine or the Saturday Evening Post. Instead of dealing with issues, says Hewitt, we tell Cold River type of stories.
The show has produced some of television’s most powerful investigative pieces

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Life Beyond the Political Margins: A Blogger's Endorsement
PR blogger Steve Rubel has endorsed John Kerry for U.S. president. He made the pronouncement recently, in what I suspect is now a trend among bloggers to who make their views known and to influence others.
Do you care who a blogger on (predominantly) non-political topics endorses publicly? While I doubt Rubel will influence many of his readers -- if
any -- I can certainly envision other bloggers who do cover politics and current affairs and who have loyal audiences influencing their readers. Why shouldn't bloggers endorse, just as most newspapers do?
Well, I can see reasons for bloggers like Rubel to abstain from public endorsements. Because he covers a non-political field, his endorsement could turn off readers who swing the other way, and even lose him some of his audience. With most current-affairs bloggers, though, the audience knows which way they lean and doesn't need an endorsement to be
published to figure it out.
• Steve Outing (no link available received by email) [ Without saying a word, Jess Ventura gets behind Kerry ]
• · Personal and Confidential? Not on Google Search analyst Chris Sherman, currently finishing up his latest book, Google Power told me something remarkable. If you go to Google and search for
personal and confidential you'll get about 35,000 search results Well, it shows that too many people don't treat online security seriously [Amazon usually gets outsized attention for their quarterly earnings report, but today they are both overshadowed by Google's first-ever quarterly report and slighted by analysts who once again fear the company's growth is declining mirroring (sic) the sales of Cold River - Palm Digital seems to be a way to go for unknown writers in 2004]
• · · The ideals that my Slavic forebearers lived by, and the institutions that sprang from them, remain as strong, and as fragile, as ever. The virgin issue of The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy is out Great editorial on the what, the why, the how, and the for whom of inclusive democracy
• · · · On the idea of fairness and balance in journalism
• · · · · Markets are conversations. Markets are now becoming smarter, faster than the companies that service said markets. A good example is what happend with the dear old Kryptonite lock earlier this month (As a bicycle rider, you must have heard about this scandal? Ask any clued-up blogger and (s)he'll tell you). What is true for markets is also becoming true for Governments, as well: Russian by temperament and British by political fortune, Boris Johnson is blogging
• · · · · · Take this quiz to find out which file extension most closely matches your personality

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Whether the drink in your cup tastes more or less bitter, more or less creamy, is not so important in the end. It is what the whole experience does to your spirits and your sense of self that really counts...So the product - the taste, the colour, aroma of the coffee - matters, but arguably everything else matters a bit more. This was the possiblity that [CEO] Howard [Schultz] saw...
Howard saw an experience that could connect with people's lives at an emotional level. Starbucks tapped into the ritual around coffee and the community conversational relationship aspect of a third space
Evelyn Rodriguez asks: Is not blogosphere a sort of non-geographic third space too?
-A story of Starbucks - is told in a book called My Sister is a Barista

1894841069 Even my ISBN cannot help itself when it comes to the final double digit position. However, folks more positions 69 and other positions will appear in the new 13-digit ISBN which I have approved and plans are underway to transition to the new number industry-wide, world-wide by January 1, 2007 Lucky 13: ISBN’s Second Coming ; Speaking of positions and numbers, Media Dragon will post, flesh willing, the evil double entry 2 - 666 [scary!]
Neal Stephenson answers questions on Slashdot about his new book The System of the World, according to Bookslut

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: They Speak, but Why Listen?
With all due respect to the Naipaul view, it seems to me that the novel--or the writing of fiction--is in robust health. More people do it than ever did before, and while quantity is never a reliable measure of quality--especially when it comes to words, or yarn--telling stories is still a human passion.
• Vunku Varadarajan on why the novel isn't dead--and neither is the urge to be an oracle [As someone who has gotten some serious hell for shooting my marketing mouth off online, I admire the Bestselling author and biographer for Celine Dion Quirky Book Promotion: "Call Them All" Grassroots Contest... Will Librarians Heed the Calls? ]
• · Books are like companies. Their first and best function are as Idea Amplifiers, not commerce mechanisms. It's this utter belief in humanity and human potential that excites us. We humans want to believe in our own species. And we want people, companies and products in our lives that make it easier to do so. That is human nature Spread pollen and start conversations with all sorts of people. No different than blogging; [Take a nice, sensitive Bohemian male, drop him in Sydney, and in weeks he’s a sexist pig. His apartment’s a sty, he smokes unfiltered grass, drinks his Winston Hills spirits straight; Women Gain Power In Aussie TV ]
• · · Umberto Eco: What is aesthetically ideal in art? A Picasso, a Mondrian - or a Morava River? Our age enjoys an orgy of tolerance, and polytheism of beauty ; [Want to act like you've read Cold River and The Da Vinci Code when you really haven't? Or maybe you just want to spoil the ending for everyone you see carrying it around? Go to The Book Spoiler and start ruining endings; eBooks Web-based textbooks give students' backs a break and and encourages them to learn]
• · · · Imagine a revolution that ought to change all, but in the end leaves everything as it is, giving us easy comfort and normalcy. It’s The Da Vinci Code and Cold River
• · · · · Graham Green et al Great writers who want their memories honored but don’t like comparison can get bad writers for their biographies; ; [Rank and Vile Guiding Political Revelations Reviewed circa 1930s ]
• · · · · · Great works of art can stand the heat of spamming criticism It’s the almost great ones that, alas, caramelize under the fire of relentless discussion

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Booker Prize winner Mr Hollinghurst drew ahead only by the finest of whiskers when the chairman, Chris Smith, a master of political shepherding, proposed that the only vote for Mr Toibin be transferred to that judge's second choice.
Time, like a cold river, is a wheel of continuous movement: the present is the fruit of the past and the future is the fruit of the present. This week I exchanged an email with one of the Chinese dissidents I had a pleasure to meet at the office of the President of the NSW Legislative Council circa 1999. I am bragging again because most dissidents, unlike most novelists or politicians, tell the truth for the living ...
One of the great challenges for dissidents is to try to redress the potent cliche that history is written by the victors. Rumour has it that the Chinese censors forbid readers to access the fruits of my writing life. My escape across the Iron Curtain is considered a dangerous story - a tale that might dog totalitarians in China, Cuba or Korea. Yet, the Chinese underground is apparently learning how to live with that kind of censorship ... The Internet is an amazing creation!
Ach, Garry Maddox explains why so many Villawooders, filmmakers and actors, head to Hollywood: Aussiewood of my Villawood

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Triple Take on Kokoda Track
I am grateful to Dr George Dorman for exposing me to Fortunate Life by Facey. I am grateful to Dr James Cumes for sharing with me in the most amazing way the story of Kokoda Track. The story based on truth and nothing but the truth is entitled Haverleigh. James to me is the Antipodean Shakespearean who was born and bread in Beenleigh, a place to be found south of Brisbane. To sneak or not to sneak a place of your childhood into a title of your book was answered on the cover of James' book back in 1995. (To be or not to be - to have or not to have)
If you are a true Australian soldier you believe in compassion. James is a true Australian Soldier who now fights for Victory Over Want.
By some luck and coincident, I also came across another amazing army officer and pollie by the name Charlie Lynn in 1990s. In my fortunate exile, I even had the pleasure of having a chat over a coffee with Charlie and happened to be the first to introduce him to James. When time permits, Charlie takes restless souls on hellish walk along the Kokoda Trail. Charlie's victims include Kerry Chikarovski and my former PAC Deputy Chair, Peter Cochran. James is an amazing writer who has an ability to stir a new interest in the history of the WWII.
Over a school holidays, I read Peter FitzSimons bestselling story Kokoda and I must admit it complimented well the story written by James.
It is great to find out this week that another book on Kokoda is coming out in three weeks. The next book will have a perfect timing is it is launched on the Remembrance Day (11 November). This time Paul Ham draws his Kokoda account from diaries of both Australian as well as Japanese soldiers. As Peter FitzSimon explained the burst of interest as being due to the fact that the Australian soldiers fighting in New Guinea where fighting for Australia and won. At Gillipoli they fought for England and lost.
Australian filmmaker take a note and start knocking on James Cumes’ doors before some Austrian or American director put their hands on a story which deserves to be shot by the people living in the land so far away and down under. At Frankfurst and London book fairs James’ eyewitness story fuels great reviews. A signed copy of Haverleigh can be ordered direct from James Cumes at - cresscourt@chello.at
• James Cumes: The wisest and most compassionate person I know, a man who dedicates his life to helping people From page to screen: Haverleigh ; Haverleigh Links [James Cumes with Haverleigh and other titles - compliments of A9 ]
• · When the Iron Curtain came down, Europe gained more than 500 ski resorts Skiing or snowboarding in former communist countries is akin to being in a James Bond film without the technology; [If you fall in the Slovak river, nothing's gonna save you. The lower currents will pull you down, no matter what you do. I cannot swim, but what good is swimming [in such dangerous water]?; The alcohol is hard and straight, the surroundings are seductive, adventure and mayhem are on the agenda even the birth of Jozef Imrich Junior (smile); Unique Gothic River of Churches; Some Escapes are Sadder Than Others]
• · · A wealth of memories and a lifetime of reading are formed when you read with your children Writing itself is like being a 70s guitar hero, without the groupies [Paul Boutin]
• · · · Like the better known Prophecies of Nostradamus, the Prophecies of Paracelsus are exceedingly cryptic, filled with allegorical symbols and capable of being reinterpreted for any purpose It comes with 32 surreal woodcuts which seem to reveal additional details about each prophecy ; [Farther on still a bishop is shown immersed in water and surrounded by spears that prevent him from reaching the bank. Broking up all empires: Had thy pretended wisdom and understanding been thine own thou wouldst have been beyond disaster, and moreover other empires would have taken thee as a mirror ]
• · · · · I keep forgetting to link to the history of surrealism and great poster: Girls Who Say Yes 1960s anti-draft poster ; [USA Today spotlights the influence of the prizes on supporting emerging writers. Whiting Foundation program director Barbara Bristol comments: What we are trying to do is spot writers at a moment when they are at their most vulnerable, when they might give up. To say to them, 'Someone has noticed you.']
• · · · · · Emma Bovary took arsenic; Anna Karenina went under a train, Tess of the D'Urbervilles was hanged. But let's face it. These days women in modern societies don't die of adultery. It is not a hanging offence. Testing the Waters: From I Do to You Can not
• · · · · That Giant Of Reviewers, Robert Kuttner, comes up with an essay on faith, reason, terror, and democracy What Would Jefferson Do?
• · · · · · War and Evelyn Waugh His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free
[Maybe You Do not need to know, but if you do the NYT has named William Grimes as a regular nonfiction book reviewer (via a reliable source)]

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All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
-Ernest Hemingway, American author (1899 - 1961)

Bad politicians are like 17-year locusts: When they show up en masse, the public greets them with fascination and fear. The current prolonged infestation naturally provokes questions both analytic such as Why do they say what they say? and introspective such as Why do we let them do what they do to us?
Back in bad old Czechoslovakia I got used to seeing the rotten fruits sold at the markets by our political masters. However, even in Australia it is rare to come across fruits rich in political vitamins and democratic fibre. I was not suprised yesterday to read cynical observations in the letters section of the Sydney Morning Herald regarding federal-state-financial-dysfunctions. One bohemian writer employed hard-core irony and wrote: Bob Carr’s offer to trade power with Canberra is a step in the right direction, but why stop there. A merger of the NSW Parliament and Commonwealth parliaments would be real progress.
[Some MPs would be delighted to be called Senators...]

Julian Burnside shares with Czechoslovak born Tom Stoppard the view that we are all born with an instinct for justice. In Professional Foul, one of his characters tells of the child who in the playground cries “It’s not fair” and thus gives voice to ‘an impulse which precedes utterance’. Our perception of justice may be blunted by exposure to its processes. At the start of a career as a law student, we see law and justice as synonymous; later we fall into cynicism or despair as clients complain that Law and Justice seem unrelated. We might remember the observation of Bismarck, in a different context, saying “He who likes sausages or law should not see them in the making” be it in the NSW Parliamentary Library or the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

Yet there are a number of MPs who have done their bit to preserve my sense of my faith in politicians on both side of the Parliament and almost one and all independent. I view the suggestion made by Miranda Devine yesterday as rather exaggerated. In her article, entitled Headaches All Around at Town Hall, (a great title for a rock song) Miranda wrote that Clover Moore is creating a royal court of servants by expanding her personal staff by a third because she is not coping with her work.

Clover is a capable politician and an amazing person as is the former chairman of the PAC Andrew Tink. As an insider’s insider’s insider I saw the stone of the fruit and I just wish we had more politicians who come to Parliament after having a real career, real family lives, real interests outside politics and real appreciation what democracy mean...

Czech out the thoughtful contribution by Andrew Tink. I gather that most library newsletters and journals in Australia and even overseas are liberal with extracts from this brilliant speech. This speech was written even before the journal New Matilda saw the light of the publishing day.
Public language is not decaying under a death sentence as proclaimed by Don Watson on the front cover of his latest book.
Rather it is being used as it always has been by those in power, those seeking
power and their critics to attack, defend and criticise.
At the very beginning of his book, Mr Watson accepts this by quoting Primo Levi’s description of public language as ‘an ancient repressive artifice, known to all churches, the typical vice of our political class, the foundation of all colonial empires.
If the title to Mr Watson’s book ‘Death Sentence The Decay of Public Language’is correct, then the decay of public language is something to celebrate: (PDF format) Attack and Defence: Public Language Across Four Centuries

Repeating History Classes: Towshend puts Lord Sydney in shadows
The fact is that few Sydneysiders know exactly who the city was named after and even fewer could tell you what was his non-aristocratic name. New South Wales parliamentarian Andrew Tink laments how little honoured is Lord Sydney in his own backyard:
'The 1780s were arguably the most important period in the history of the English speaking world and Lord Sydney was right in the middle of it. 'How many people have cities on two continents named after them and can say they directly influenced the futures of Australia, Canada and the United States as well as his own country Britain.'
Tink, who has made himself almost a lone Australian expert on Lord Sydney through painstaking archive searches, recounts his hero's achievements and the part they played in the history of the English speaking world.
In appreciation of Lord Sydney's efforts, the loyalists named Sydney in Nova Scotia after him. Tink argues that it was Lord Sydney's support for the loyalists that was a key reason why the English of Canada went on to dominate the country over the country's French settlers..
It was a grateful captain Arthur Phillip, unlike Tommy Townshend, revered by Australians of all ages, who named the new settlement after Lord Sydney.
Born in 1733 as the son of aristocrat Lord Townshend, and later to become an aristocrat in his own right as Lord Sydney, Tommy Townshend graduated from Cambridge University with a Bachelor of Arts when he was just 21.
He went almost immediately into politics, holding a number of key parliamentary posts before taking on his colonial roles
• Andrew Tink: the Lover of History [Andrew Tink ]
What do Andrew Tink - historian politician, Andrew "Boy" Charlton - Swimmer, Banjo Paterson - poet/writer, David Gonski - Coca-Cola chairman, Baz Luhrman - film director and Malcolm Mackerras - Psephologist have in common SGS
• · Even Sydney's Charms Cannot Save the Politician who Angered a Poet
• · · PDF Words that Haunt Sydney
• · · · Speech can stop people being afraid or sorry; it can promote happiness and increase feelings of pity. Speech is a ‘powerful ruler’ because, though invisible, it achieves superhuman results

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Iraqi kidnappers who threatened to kill an Australian journalist checked his work by "Googling" his name on the net before freeing him. Now Google Even Saves Life of a Journalist: Kidnappers 'Googled' journo before freeing him
[If you want to survive these days as a journalist become a Pajamahadeen]
The New York Press more on the worst political reporters

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Web of Altruistic Intrigue: Connecting the dots
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web but he had something bigger in mind all along. Now he's working on Internet 2.0.
Berners-Lee's invention was based on an information retrieval program called Enquire (named after a Victorian book, Enquire Within Upon Everything), which he wrote in 1980 while working as a programmer at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. In part, the lack of riches is because Berners-Lee did the unthinkable when he finished writing the tools that defined the web's basic structure more than 10 years later: he gave them away, with CERN's blessing, no strings attached.
• Mark Frauenfelder reports Berners-Lee did the unthinkable when he finished writing the tools that defined the web's basic structure: he gave them away with no strings attached [While Moore chips and tiny fish are on the menu, some are Selling technology down the river]
• · Sifry's Alerts State of the Blogosphere: Corporate Bloggers; [Blair’s Alert]
• · · The head of Australia's competition watchdog has cautioned that it may not be all smooth sailing for the Federal Government's proposed media ownership changes Mr Samuel said definitions that differentiated TV, radio and newspapers were blurred, and regulations were outdated ; [Sunday Channel 9: Graeme Samuel has a tough job as chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Graeme Samuel on the job]
• · · · Bloggers should care about the government jailing Judith Miller. You uphold the public's right to know and citizens' right to challenge authority. What happens to Miller and other journalists happens to you and me. The government’s growing attack on freedom of speech and the free press I love this blog world--you make a general statement and then some people write a book for you about it. I am totally persuaded and will now stop pruning my garden, leaving behind my old fashioned notion that editing and flowering areare necessary partners Whose economy is it?; [Freddy Kreuger: The printer's devil Crikey & Newspaper circulation figures]
• · · · · Surveillance and Society
• · · · · · Tracing the Evolution of Social Software ; [David Hills is the new CEO of LookSmart via Search Engine Watch Blog]

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The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.
- William Hazlitt

Until death do us part yet in Hollywood a marriage is a success if it outlasts milk.
In the dream we are sitting together after all those years pulling memories and photos together. Indeed, my life with Lauren has been nothing but a dream!
After two decades, exactly today, I know why Lauren loves cooking with wine. Sometimes she even puts it in the food.
On the Saturday when the Sydney Opera House celebrated its birthday, I had an engaging encounter with Lauren in front of the altar.
Christopher was there with his Polish hangover and two golden rings from the discounted counter of the Berkeley International Diamonds.
Speaking as a rough diamond and the black sheep of the Imrich family, I know too well that stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But to watch the polished walk of the Australian Academy of Ballet dancer during the Wedding March is a pure ecstasy.
Some men suggest that all marriages are happy. It's the trying to walk together afterwards that causes all the problems.
While some women swear that before marriage, a man will lay down his life for you; after marriage he won't even lay down his newspaper.
We agree on so many things such as if marriage is your object, you'd better start loving the subject:
Men are from Earthy Central Europe. Women are from Earthy Australia. Deal with it.
Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of cheques.
Recognise that what goes around, comes around, and that there is nothing new under the sun.
I swear that not every marriage is a three ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring and suffering.
Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all trends and indicators it is as perennial as the grass. In some mysterious ways, happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length

Marriage vows in an objectivist church would probably run along the lines of "Do you promise to attempt to dominate and subdue this woman until such time as you grow bored?" "Maybe." "Close enough. And do you promise to applaud this man`s production until such time as you find someone with a bigger ... corporation?" "Whatever." "By the power vested in me by having scammed you guys out of a marriage license fee, I now pronounce you man and appendage. May you be unencumbered by small persons.
-Rob Slade, reviewing Atlas Shrugged

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This past June, when Patricia Worth, and her husband, Gary, who works as a graphic designer, opened River Reader Books in Lexington, Missouri, Patricia left a 16-year career as a contractor to become a full-time bookseller, and, since the new bookstore has a cafe, a barista, too. No sense in learning one new trade when you can learn three or four The Worths Build a Business: River Reader Books

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is
In this blog I have been bitching - some say endlessly - that we need new marketing ideas and ways to attract more readers to more authors.
To that end, I'm starting an experiment. A new blog called Backstory.
Each week a different author will answer the single most common question novelists get from readers is: "Where did you get the idea for your novel?"
In other words, what's the backstory? What are the secrets, the truths, or just the illogical moments that sparked your latest novel?
In the upcoming months all kinds of wonderful authors have agreed to post their backstories including: Katherine Neville, Lee Child, Tess Gerritesen, Chris Mooney, Jason Starr, Robert Ferrigno, Marcia Talley, Gayle Lynds, Laura Lippman, Caroline Leavitt, Lev Rafael, J.A. Konrath, Doug Clegg and more and more.
• MJ Rose of Buzz Balls Hype Think of it like an magazine article that has no end [EL Noel (Lynn) ]
• · Nicholas Clee, Editor of The Bookseller is to leave the position this autumn Farewell
• · · Brain battle provides insight into consumer behavior Why Instant Gratification Wins ; [Professor the 5th Earl (Conrad) Russell observed when I was an undergraduate I think women could afford to say 'no' when they meant 'yes'. Now they can't. The more freedom a woman has, the plainer her sexual signalling has to be.]
• · · · It may be a shocking dilution of academics - or an ingenious way to hook reluctant readers. 'Hamlet' too hard? Try a comic book; [It's a typical story in the murky and dangerous underworld of small, independent publishing: Screwing a book for its cover]
• · · · · Drenka Willen publishes books in translation. Her ability to succeed despite the trends and the odds makes her one of this country's most valued cultural gatekeepers. She writes very concise questions in the margin, and it is done so firmly that even if you erased them, they would still be there Found in Translation ; [Sir Antony Sher, the actor, writer and artist, yesterday launched a bitter critique of the exclusivity of the literary world ; Cold Revenge by Sir Jozef Imrich Is Simon & Schuster up for sale?]
• · · · · · Speech is a ‘powerful ruler’ because, though invisible, it achieves superhuman results Speech can stop people being afraid or sorry; it can promote happiness and increase feelings of pity. [Counting the Errors of My Ways
Quiz: How Spiritual Are You? ]

---

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.
- William Hazlitt

Until death do us part yet in Hollywood a marriage is a success if it outlasts milk.
In the dream we are sitting together after all those years pulling memories and photos together. Indeed, my life with Lauren has been nothing but a dream!
After two decades, exactly today, I know why Lauren loves cooking with wine. Sometimes she even puts it in the food.
On the Saturday when the Sydney Opera House celebrated its birthday, I had an engaging encounter with Lauren in front of the altar.
Christopher was there with his Polish hangover and two golden rings from the discounted counter of the Berkeley International Diamonds.
Speaking as a rough diamond and the black sheep of the Imrich family, I know too well that stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But to watch the polished walk of the Australian Academy of Ballet dancer during the Wedding March is a pure ecstasy.
Some men suggest that all marriages are happy. It's the trying to walk together afterwards that causes all the problems.
While some women swear that before marriage, a man will lay down his life for you; after marriage he won't even lay down his newspaper.
We agree on so many things such as if marriage is your object, you'd better start loving the subject:
Men are from Earthy Central Europe. Women are from Earthy Australia. Deal with it.
Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of cheques.
Recognise that what goes around, comes around, and that there is nothing new under the sun.
I swear that not every marriage is a three ring circus: engagement ring, wedding ring and suffering.
Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all trends and indicators it is as perennial as the grass. In some mysterious ways, happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length

Marriage vows in an objectivist church would probably run along the lines of "Do you promise to attempt to dominate and subdue this woman until such time as you grow bored?" "Maybe." "Close enough. And do you promise to applaud this man`s production until such time as you find someone with a bigger ... corporation?" "Whatever." "By the power vested in me by having scammed you guys out of a marriage license fee, I now pronounce you man and appendage. May you be unencumbered by small persons."
-Rob Slade, reviewing Atlas Shrugged

---

This past June, when Patricia Worth, and her husband, Gary, who works as a graphic designer, opened River Reader Books in Lexington, Missouri, Patricia left a 16-year career as a contractor to become a full-time bookseller, and, since the new bookstore has a cafe, a barista, too. No sense in learning one new trade when you can learn three or four The Worths Build a Business: River Reader Books

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is
In this blog I have been bitching - some say endlessly - that we need new marketing ideas and ways to attract more readers to more authors.
To that end, I'm starting an experiment. A new blog called Backstory.
Each week a different author will answer the single most common question novelists get from readers is: "Where did you get the idea for your novel?"
In other words, what's the backstory? What are the secrets, the truths, or just the illogical moments that sparked your latest novel?
In the upcoming months all kinds of wonderful authors have agreed to post their backstories including: Katherine Neville, Lee Child, Tess Gerritesen, Chris Mooney, Jason Starr, Robert Ferrigno, Marcia Talley, Gayle Lynds, Laura Lippman, Caroline Leavitt, Lev Rafael, J.A. Konrath, Doug Clegg and more and more.
• MJ Rose of Buzz Balls Hype Think of it like an magazine article that has no end [EL Noel (Lynn) ]
• · Nicholas Clee, Editor of The Bookseller is to leave the position this autumn Farewell
• · · Brain battle provides insight into consumer behavior Why Instant Gratification Wins ; [Professor the 5th Earl (Conrad) Russell observed when I was an undergraduate I think women could afford to say 'no' when they meant 'yes'. Now they can't. The more freedom a woman has, the plainer her sexual signalling has to be.]
• · · · It may be a shocking dilution of academics - or an ingenious way to hook reluctant readers. 'Hamlet' too hard? Try a comic book; [It's a typical story in the murky and dangerous underworld of small, independent publishing: Screwing a book for its cover]
• · · · · Drenka Willen publishes books in translation. Her ability to succeed despite the trends and the odds makes her one of this country's most valued cultural gatekeepers. She writes very concise questions in the margin, and it is done so firmly that even if you erased them, they would still be there Found in Translation ; [Sir Antony Sher, the actor, writer and artist, yesterday launched a bitter critique of the exclusivity of the literary world ; Cold Revenge by Sir Jozef Imrich Is Simon & Schuster up for sale?]
• · · · · · Speech is a ‘powerful ruler’ because, though invisible, it achieves superhuman results Speech can stop people being afraid or sorry; it can promote happiness and increase feelings of pity. [Counting the Errors of My Ways
Quiz: How Spiritual Are You? ]

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Political bloggers to duel in live forum. The scribes known as Wonkette, Kos and Hindrocket will appear at Moravian College
Indymedia was taken offline on 7 October when an unnamed United States government agency went to court on behalf of an unnamed foreign power and seized two computers from the United Kingdom. Rackspace: If this is possible, can independent media survive?

The Blog, The Press, The Media: A new patent blog
And no sooner do I publish my column on IP blogs than a new one comes along: Patent Pending. Its author, patent attorney Robert Shaver, says it is more entertainment for inventor and technology fans than it is legal postings. "I post what I am interested in," he says, "which is old patents, new technology, ancient inventions and technology, and historical patents. There is some patent and copyright law in there too." Bob is at the Boise firm Dykas, Shaver & Nipper, also home to blogger Stephen Nipper. Come to think of it, that means that half the attorneys in the firm have blogs. Must be some sort of record.
• Patent - Inventions and Technology Updates; [GetNetWise is a public service brought to you by a wide range of Internet industry corporations and public interest organizations. The GetNetWise coalition wants Internet users to be only "one click away" from the resources they need to make informed decisions about their and their family's use of the Internet ]
• · America Votes A Public librarian was responsible for uncovering the America Votes scandal; [Stereotyped Librarian Spinster's will sees charities, church and cats share £2.1m ; A sad sign of the time The Sad Irony Behind Rejection of the Horniman Museum ]
• · · Communications Minister Helen Coonan: A major shake-up of Australia's media laws could help a third force emerge alongside industry moguls Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch
Exclusive, Scoop via Insiders Czech Whispers: MEdia Dragon the third media mogul Down Under; [Gee, They Always Say Such Nice Things About You: Somersault Some Shares: Note Insider Trading is Illegal in Australia and Amerika ...]
• · · · Artistic bridge Is your mouse an expression of your personality?
• · · · · Blogging is not democratic only because it gives each person a place to publish -- it is also democratic because it is a body of practices that help each person invent something worth reading Blogging, Invention and Freedom - Dennis Kennedy ; [via Bill Ives Of Portals and KM fame; Mainstream Media Use of Blogs ]
• · · · · · Poor librarians were soon to go the way of blacksmiths and town criers, their chosen field made obsolete by Internet search engines and self-perpetuating electronic databases 'The Librarian': The Fog of Facts; [Lawyers In Google We Trust?]

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The Scots have confirmed what I have suspected for a long, long, time. I am right. Flamers note that I am always right. Imrigh \Im"righ\, n. [Scot.; Gael. ?un-bhrigh chicken soup.] A peculiar strong soup or broth, made in Scotland. [Written also imrich.]
Why I'm writing a book ... The Chaotic Age is upon us. We are scared. Damn right, we should be scared. But out of the terror comes the amazing opportunities for us to expand both on the material and spiritual level. The fewer safety nets there are to save us, the less choice we have to be anything other than ourselves, the less choice we have besides doing what is meaningful to us. And finding ourselves, doing what matters, becoming the person we were born to be, this is what God put on this earth to do.
We live in amazing and interesting times. I intend the book to do a damn good job proving it.

Literature & Sport Across Frontiers: My Master Plan for World Domination & Soul Soup
Since the dawn of the film industry, it has been common practice for writers to send scripts and pitch stories to movie executives and producers. And for almost as long, scores of writers have sued the studios for stealing their ideas, only to have suits, filed on hard-to-prove copyright infringement grounds, which are dismissed or quietly settled. But a recently published opinion from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in Jeff Grosso v. Miramax Film Corporation, may soon shift the balance of power in this age-old tug of war.
Every successful movie ever made has had a raft of crazy lawsuits.
• What? We Can't Steal Your Ideas? [Is Canada Really Stealing Hollywood Productions? ; Can you win over the same folks who read People magazine without turning off the so-called serious reader? Stand-alone book magazines ride choppy seas to celebrate the promise of the written word: Bookmarks]
• · Exhibitionists who like to feel more than the wind in their hair rejoice - nude cruises are coming to Australia The Bare Necessities of the Maiden Voyage (Boat People); [ It's Maiden Book Blitz Week at Slate ! ; Maiden high-tech security: Vatican: It is home to 1.6 million books, centuries-old manuscripts and the oldest known complete Bible]
• · · A few months ago Hollie Andrew was collecting tickets at a Sydney Dendy Cinema at Circular Quay. Now she is nominated for an AFI award: her movie Somersault premiered at the Sydney Film Festival What a Somersault of Artistic Life; [Snakes hit the beach; and may Gianna’s Novel-in-progress Hit #1]
• · · · Why Authors Should Blog ; [The sexual memoir has been gaining steam (no pun intended) as a literary form in recent years, and far from being near-porn, many of the books read like throwbacks to an age when sex was allowed to be beautiful, and not simply an animal act. Literature Regains Its Sex Life: sexual writing aims... to demystify and de-emotionalize sex — to reduce it to a physical and hormonal process not much different from, say, scratching an itch ]
• · · · · Leisel Jones' and our old coach, Ken Wood, has seemingly re-opened the rift between her and Brooke Hanson by playing down the Victorian's record-breaking feats at the world shortcourse swimming championships; [The allergy is now under control thanks to her switch from an indoor pool to an outdoor one at Sutherland, where she trains under the guidance of Ian Thorpe's coach Tracey Menzies. Kirsten Thomson ]
• · · · · · Elfriede Jelinek has been pilloried in Austria as a Nestbeschmutzer, someone who fouls her own nest by exposing the seamy side of her country of birth to the outside world. She's very adventurous. She's a playwright and poet too and is always doing crazy and wonderful things with the form of the novel. While the form taken by her writing constantly shifts, however, its fundamental purpose appears to be to disturb. And she does so, in the academy's words, by demonstrating how the entertainment industry's cliches seep into people's consciousness and paralyze opposition to class injustices and gender oppression ; [Reports of the Death of the Printed Word Have Been Exaggerated]

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Imrigh \Im"righ\, n. [Scot.; Gael. ?un-bhrigh chicken soup.] A peculiar strong soup or broth, made in Scotland. [Written also imrich.]
Why I'm writing a book ... The Chaotic Age is upon us. We are scared. Damn right, we should be scared. But out of the terror comes the amazing opportunities for us to expand both on the material and spiritual level. The fewer safety nets there are to save us, the less choice we have to be anything other than ourselves, the less choice we have besides doing what is meaningful to us. And finding ourselves, doing what matters, becoming the person we were born to be, this is what God put on this earth to do.
We live in amazing and interesting times. I intend the book to do a damn good job proving it.

Literature & Sport Across Frontiers: My Master Plan for World Domination & Soul Soup
Since the dawn of the film industry, it has been common practice for writers to send scripts and pitch stories to movie executives and producers. And for almost as long, scores of writers have sued the studios for stealing their ideas, only to have suits, filed on hard-to-prove copyright infringement grounds, which are dismissed or quietly settled. But a recently published opinion from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in Jeff Grosso v. Miramax Film Corporation, may soon shift the balance of power in this age-old tug of war.
Every successful movie ever made has had a raft of crazy lawsuits.
• What? We Can't Steal Your Ideas? [Is Canada Really Stealing Hollywood Productions? ; Can you win over the same folks who read People magazine without turning off the so-called serious reader? Stand-alone book magazines ride choppy seas to celebrate the promise of the written word: Bookmarks]
• · Exhibitionists who like to feel more than the wind in their hair rejoice - nude cruises are coming to Australia The Bare Necessities of the Maiden Voyage (Boat People); [ It's Maiden Book Blitz Week at Slate ! ; Maiden high-tech security: Vatican: It is home to 1.6 million books, centuries-old manuscripts and the oldest known complete Bible]
• · · A few months ago Hollie Andrew was collecting tickets at a Sydney Dendy Cinema at Circular Quay. Now she is nominated for an AFI award: her movie Somersault premiered at the Sydney Film Festival What a Somersault of Artistic Life; [Snakes hit the beach; and may Gianna’s Novel-in-progress Hit #1]
• · · · Why Authors Should Blog ; [The sexual memoir has been gaining steam (no pun intended) as a literary form in recent years, and far from being near-porn, many of the books read like throwbacks to an age when sex was allowed to be beautiful, and not simply an animal act. Literature Regains Its Sex Life: sexual writing aims... to demystify and de-emotionalize sex — to reduce it to a physical and hormonal process not much different from, say, scratching an itch ]
• · · · · Leisel Jones' and our old coach, Ken Wood, has seemingly re-opened the rift between her and Brooke Hanson by playing down the Victorian's record-breaking feats at the world shortcourse swimming championships; [The allergy is now under control thanks to her switch from an indoor pool to an outdoor one at Sutherland, where she trains under the guidance of Ian Thorpe's coach Tracey Menzies. Kirsten Thomson ]
• · · · · · Elfriede Jelinek has been pilloried in Austria as a Nestbeschmutzer, someone who fouls her own nest by exposing the seamy side of her country of birth to the outside world. She's very adventurous. She's a playwright and poet too and is always doing crazy and wonderful things with the form of the novel. While the form taken by her writing constantly shifts, however, its fundamental purpose appears to be to disturb. And she does so, in the academy's words, by demonstrating how the entertainment industry's cliches seep into people's consciousness and paralyze opposition to class injustices and gender oppression ; [Reports of the Death of the Printed Word Have Been Exaggerated]

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Nostalgia used to be something that obsessed my generation born at the end of baby boomers. But a new generation is discovering a fondness for its youth. It's hip to be so five years ago when you left the NSW Parliament
James Cumes of VOW and Lakatoi fame shares with the blogosphere via Jeffa the Good News
James Cumes is the author of Haverleigh and other great books are filled with grace, style, honesty and wit. Read James’ master pieces for sheer history, beauty and charm. Nothing new even comes close. Austrio-Czech Jelinek is great, yet Austrio-Australian Cumes is greatest of the all... I think life is too short to waste it on mediocre wine, artificial flowers and meaningless books. Obey my orders taste James word and you will never look back!

Tracking Trends Great & Small: Can You Name That Supertitle?
Businesses spend millions to create a catchy tagline for their products. Too bad consumers don't remember most of them ....
Quick -- what's the title of Jozef Imrich’s book? How about Kmart's (KMRT )? And Buick's (GM )? If you don't know, you won't advance in Jeopardy! when the category is advertising. But you won't be alone.
Like Cold River, contemporary catch-phrases just crumble into dust.
• Obey your reading thirst; [Yellow brick road to righteousness: More people gain their philosophy of life and spiritual values through musicals than by going to church, says a new book. So what life lessons can musicals teach us? My Mamka Maria taught Do-Re-Mi while My Tato Jozef taught me Guralu Ci Ci Nezal; ]
• · Good news for men everywhere: the more sex you have, the better your sperm quality Superman 2004
• · · There is, of course, a Sod's Law factor to the equation. If you judge your ratings wrongly, you might become too optimistic - and calamity will strike A new mathematical formula has proved Murphy's Law really does strike at the worst possible time ; [Having the blues lifts the Imrich’s heart It's not always easy feeling blue ]
• · · · Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial
• · · · · More wonderful things on the blog include a comment about how women have much more influence on the Net than people think as they tend to be the emailers and listserv supporters, spreading the stories that need to be spread
• · · Value your life! Superior protection Phil Harvey sells sexual excitement to the rich, then helps the poor
• · · · · · Czechs and Aussies take a sip: A report finds not all beers are created equal; [ Coke versus Pepsi: It's all in the head ]

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Six online journalists and webloggers have been arrested in Iran recently in a crackdown on dissent on the internet Iran cracks down on blog protests
Evan Williams, founder of Pyra Labs, who allowed me from time to time comment on his blog is the man who launched extraordinarily popular Blogger service in 1999. I linked to his blog entry about his depature last week, but I only came aware of this entry in Motley Fool the traders behind Media Dragon shares today (thanks a million Jeff Myers). Evan is being sued by my family and friends (did I say friends - smile) for the blogging addiction which affects nearly one in a million of adults in the world Evan Williams at Bali or Nepal? Hardly!

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Well, that was a real snooze-a-thon
Czech out Blogging at the end of the earth exclusive for Perth and Yobbo Bloggers
• Bob Novak: View from the right
• Paul Begala: View from the left
• Jessi Klein: The Lighter Side
Bush didn't pee his pants or kill anyone, so my guess is that people will say it was a tie. Kerry was solid, in his usual, uninspired, A-student-that-memorized-the-text-book sort of way.
The most fun part was at the end when the families had to come up onstage and try to look all huggy and "normal," which tends to fail, since, like every family, both groups are clearly totally dysfunctional.
But after the kisses and handshaking they all kind of got in a line and waved to the crowd. It looked like the final bow at a mediocre community theater production of "Godspell." But that's basically what it feels like our country has turned into, so I guess that's appropriate. I don't mean to sound so pessimistic.
• CNN Blog ; [Blue reporter and Penn State senior Adam Smeltz was recruited by the Centre Daily Times' parent company, Knight Ridder, to cover the campaign trail. He reported on both national conventions and will follow the politicians through the Nov. 2 election Check out his blog - Centre Daily Times]
• · Richard Byrne: How the broadcast news organizations -- and their viewers -- went astray Books on the media
• · · Female Fox coworker details lewd behavior of cable TV star Bill O'Reilly is hit with a sexual harassment suit ; [A UCLA student's online journal is used in bid to discredit her claims that she was raped by a football player ]
• · · · NAOMI KLEIN Proposal to Assist the Government of Kuwait in Protecting and Realizing Claims Against Iraq James Baker's Double Life
• · · · · A million thanks to: Google Desktop Search - Beta Version ; [Where To Submit My RSS Feeds And Weblog URLs To Get More Exposure, Visibility And Reach]
• · · · · · A freelance journalist, Richard Sleeman, was awarded $434,000 in damages today over an article in The Australian newspaper about a story he wrote on Olympic swimming champion Ian Thorpe The Water God

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Farce is higher than comedy in that it is very close to tragedy. You've only got to play some of Shakespeare's tragedies plain and they are nearly farcical. All gradations of theatre between tragedy and farce—light comedy, drama—are a load of rubbish."
Joe Orton (quoted in John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton)

Because there are over 175,000 books published a year and they can't all get reviews in the NYTBR. Authored by M.J. Rose, Superwoman (2004)
Psychologists call it the Proustian phenomenon. Specific odours can spark a flood of reminiscences. The first time I walked inside the David Jones Glorious Food Hall all I could smell was Vrbov everywhere the Vrbov of our baker Mr Zummer: Supersmell (1980)

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Water's water everywhere
SSometimes I wonder why nobody reads philosophy. It requires, to be sure, a degree of hyperbole to wonder this. Academics like me, who eke out their sustenance by writing and teaching the stuff, still browse in the journals; it's mainly the laity that seems to have lost interest. And it's mostly Anglophone analytic philosophy that it has lost interest in. As far as I can tell, 'Continental' philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Heidegger, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Sartre and the rest) continue to hold their market. Even Hegel has a vogue from time to time, though he is famous for being impossible to read. All this strikes me anew whenever I visit a bookstore. The place on the shelf where my stuff would be if they had it (but they don't) is just to the left of Foucault, of which there is always yards and yards. I'm huffy about that; I wish I had his royalties.
• For water to be necessarily H2O is just for water to be H2O in every possible world [Sometimes when you read Updike you laugh outloud, other times you are going 'wow'. Like yesterday in 'Couples' when they described the local fire chief as the most neurotic man in town, he had a phobia of fire, water and dogs!
From what I can make out Updike is always struggling, always experimenting with the idea of 'the good life' or 'the best life'. Only this struggle does not begin when we are 15 and end when we are 18. No, for Updike it begins the day you are born and it ends the day you die, or maybe you are lucky if you even find an answer by the day you die. Books Of Note]
• · Book distorts history by omitting crucial facts, including an important link to the Czech Republic Not Everything Is Illuminated [The real-life hero of the movie might be actually found in the Czech Republic]
• · · The first thing you notice about alumnus Matt Mankins, SM ’03, is that he doesn’t look like the Lone Ranger or Don Quixote Being Book Smart
• · · · Dion Painter and blogger of Artnews; [One in three people believes in angels and one in five believes they have been helped by one ]
• · · · · A farm is about to be overwhelmed by a bushfire. The oldest son keeps pigeons, and he lets them go The fire of the truth [A fiction-like form gives this story its entertainment value. But it is the truth that gives it power]
• · · · · · Fact v Fiction
[Elfriede Jelinek gave an interview to Profil (Austria's top weekly).
The interview headline shouts: "Habe gebetet, dass ich ihn nicht bekomme" (I prayed I wouldn't get it)
Die Kinder der Toten ist sicher mein wichtigstes Werk. Es enthält alles, was ich sagen wollte; es hätte eigentlich genügt, dieses eine Buch zu veröffentlichen.
(Die Kinder der Toten ('The Children of the Dead') is certainly my most important work. It contains everything that I wanted to say; it would have sufficed to publish just that one book.)]

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In a terribly earnest age, it's gotta be comforting to Gen-X'ers that irony is making a comeback. It's like rock-paper-scissors. Ironic beats earnest; cute beats ironic. Filthy Linking Rich tell me more about it ... Making It to Page One

The Blog, The Press, The Media: We Are All in This Together
I still like to think that I am, as the late novelist Irwin Shaw famously said, a storyteller in the bazaar, telling the world about itself, sharing my experiences with unknown readers out there.
I like to think that there are readers out there who want us to circumvent the sensational and serve up analyses and reflections. I like to think that by helping others understand our complex world better, journalists also help people understand themselves and their cultures better.
I know that focus groups in many countries are telling editors that they don't much care for the news, and certainly not for longish dispatches. But I haven't heard of any focus groups saying that they'd ignore rich, compellingly written stories about the daily dramas of our collective lives...
The most enduring lesson that Mr Rosenthal - now 82 - taught me was that in the pursuit of truth and fairness, no price is too high to pay. He always said: Make that extra call, take that extra trip, visit that additional source - then do it all over again until you are truly convinced that your story is as accurate, as fair and as thorough as humanly possible.
My other great teacher was Mr James Michaels, the man who created the modern-day Forbes Magazine. His lesson? You've got to be a bulldog in the journalism business: You mustn't let go of a story once you've sunk your teeth into it. Don't allow yourself to be bullied. And don't allow yourself to be bought.
• Hard questions to answer [Firedragon Guys with mustaches are switching to Firefox ]
• · Progressive Blogs by State: a directory from American Street
• · · A9.com: Amazon's search engine, now out of beta. Lots of cool features remember and categorize your searches. If you sign in with your Amazon ID you get a discount for using A9 - Cold River so Hot @ Amazon
• · · · Who's Buying Up Expired Domains? ; [Who2 is a good biographical resource. They've added several compilations, including a list of 'celebrities mauled by lions' and killed in cars, serial spouses ]
• · · · · Slashdot Politics: see what the techies have to say
• · · · · · SearchEngineWatch Blog ; Search Blog ; Search Engine Guide ; SE Low Down

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It turns out Dick Cheney got more wrong than just the name of the website factcheck.org during the vice presidential debate Tuesday.
Just The Facts, Ma'am - Websites Clarify Campaign Errors Spinsanity.org and other sites profiled
Ach, Hack Watch suggests that the search for Australia's worst campaign journalist has ended, while in Amerika it just begun

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Pranay Gupte: old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism
Tim Porter of First Draft Fame writes: Warning: This post may induce dyspepsia in critics of Mainstream Journalism
If you are starting out in journalism or thinking about it, listen to an old hand tell why it is still worth the while. Pranay Gupte reflects on a life well spent on good, old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism and says that while the focus of journalism may change, its values must remain inviolate
IN ALL probability, this is for me the last innings in a newspaper career that has stretched four decades over two centuries in several continents and may well end in Singapore.
Daily journalism everywhere is changing so speedily that it's become hard to tell fact from fiction, education from entertainment, and information from ideology. Reckless opinion masquerades as analysis, and character assassination postures as legitimate portraiture. Even the sanctity of news columns often doesn't seem to matter: some of India's major newspapers, for example, openly offer their editorial space on Page One for sale - and they have to turn away takers.
• Why journalism is still a job worth doing [Oregonian editor Sandy Rowe says printing the allegations against David Wu, who is running for a fourth term representing Oregon's 1st Congressional District, "was a difficult decision, raising serious questions about how far the news media should go in examining a candidate's background ]
• · Here are 10 policies to fix our media
• · · Program enjoyed by Gabriella the Behind the News (BTN), the ABC's long-running news program aimed at school-children, will return next year [The Daily Terror and Channel Ten replaced BTN with TTN]
• · · · Discourse at the Boundary between Conversation and Publication; [Blogjam Last Trainspotting ]
• · · · · A Possible Example of Old Media Journalism - Blog Co-Existence ; [From small-town reporter to waitress She's treated
shabbily now: My Turn: Can I Get You Some Manners With That? ]
• · · · · · Mark (Human) Steyn’s column which argued that all future hostages like Kenneth Bigley should be written off to reduce the incentive to take more hostages was cancelled Today, for the first time in all my years with the Telegraph Group, I had a column pulled ; [Nine Japanese were found dead on Tuesday in two rented cars with the windows sealed and charcoal burners at their feet in pacts End of the road facilitated by Internet suicide sites ]

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Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity
Charlie Mingus, jazz bass player

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Blogosphere
The great appeal of blogging for many is, as Dissident Frogman put it: the perspective of a private space offered to a wide public viewing, where one can voice his opinion, keeping at bay the hassle of constant interruption by the Know-Better and the Nay-Sayer, while maintaining a direct channel open between people worth arguing with. Tim Dunlop jokes that the appeal is that it turns everybody into Rupert Murdoch. A very small and poor Rupert Murdoch, but a Rupert Murdoch nonetheless. Sheila O’Malley says that every day is a lively conversation, a point echoed by Anne Cunningham: The main appeal is finding interesting people I would never have met otherwise; and I particularly like that you get to know them through their ideas. Norman Geras reflects, It helps you to think things
through which you otherwise might not, in order to be able to post sensibly about them. Kevin at Boots on the Ground writes that it’s like a journal where people can see what’s happening, and how they are perceived by many soldiers.
A few bloggers, however, were not sanguine about blogging’s effect on the mainstream media. Dissident Frogman said that he did not think
there would be any impact on the French media, which thinks itself such an untouchable caste of superior and faultless beings, deaf and immune to any external challenge, which due to what he called a collusion between the state, the unions and the press created a very effective way to control what’s being published. For blogging to have any possibility of impact, he said, it would require a change on a much deeper scale in the French landscape, and the emergence ... of a truly diversified press which is non-existent at the moment.
• If You have the drive to write guides to local caravan parks—blogging is a natural move!
• · Page: The people keeping paper alive are from my generation
• · · All three episodes provided grist for partisan bloggers to weigh in on media bias Critic: News orgs more vulnerable than ever to bias charges
• · · · Brian Lamb The best introductions to wikis that I have seen
• · · · · FBI & Indymedia, a democracy where the government have the 'freeeeeeeeeedom' to shut down an independent media outlet US seizes independent media sites

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In honor of all the little witches and ghosts out there here is a tribute to Halloween ... Might as well include the articulated Biff Mitchell who is running a promotion on eBay in which he is auctioning off the privilege to be a murdered character in next novel. (He has 16 bids and is up to $330.01) Also Czech out Notes From Underground -- A film by Gary Walkow I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. With those terrifying words begin one of the masterpieces of world literature ... Healthy writers take time out from books to blog

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Long River: A Brief History Of Supertitles
In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.
Amazon created the Touching the Void phenomenon by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book.
This is not just a virtue of online booksellers; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power.
• Now Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air more than two to one [Amazon Interest soars for books by new Nobel laureate ]
• · What Good Is The Nobel? Certainly, great writers deserve wide recognition, but does the Nobel Prize for Literature really come close to delivering such immortality? The Nobel Prize, currently under fire - Some books and writers you just can't believe existed - Jaroslav Seifert (1984)
• · · You read it here first! I could not resist the urge to dwell on why certain Pictures and Names Matter, Even On Double Dragon ; Ach, the Dangerous Double Full Monty Exclusive to Media Dragon Grazers; [ Truth Is Almost As Strange... Code River v Cold River - Scholastic has announced a big 100,000-copy second printing of Cornelia Funke's DRAGON RIDER, published last month, with 250,000 copies in print]
• · · · Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick's classic political satire of the nuclear age, has aged well, and the hilarious yet terrifying premise of the film - that a wacky collection of incompetent statesmen and insane warmongers could destroy the world in a fit of pique may be the most potent reminder we have of the uncertainty of Cold War reality
• · · · · Lionel Trilling made his reputation as a critic at the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet. Whatever you can do as a man, you can win no wars as an artist. In The Prague Orgy (1985), Zuckerman traveled behind the Iron Curtain in pursuit of a manuscript of Yiddish short stories, and, once there among the writers and political dissidents, rejected the sexual advances of Olga in favor of listening to the story of her life - I am only ears Philip Roth and his History Lessons [That our political leaders have failed so thoroughly to imagine a solution only compounds the problem; yet this failure creates an opening, as well as a series of pitfalls, for the novelist brave enough to take our political dilemma on.]
• · · · · · Miralles in Wonderland Before he died, Spanish architect Enric Miralles designed Scotland's brash new parliament building

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Music gives us alternative imaginative geographies for the places we inhabit. I would argue that all music is world music, that is, music opens a world. At its best, music lets us imagine another world, a better world. It is here that music touches on politics, whether giving noisy Clash-like voice to anger, rage or injustice or directing the demand that things be otherwise through humour, irony or Morrissey-esque comic subersion: I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving/ England is mine and it owes me a living.
- Simon Critchley

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Do Something!
In her blog, Maud Newton has written a sad, all too true and extremely well thought out rant about the state of fiction in publishing: Self-fulfilling prophecy: is fiction really dead or are publishers killing it?
She starts out by saying The U.S. publishing industry pumps out a new work of fiction every 30 minutes – an unprecedented pace – but this summer a National Endowment for the Arts study revealed that Americans, particularly teenagers and college students, are far less likely to read literature than they were twenty years ago. Blame for disinterest in literary reading is often placed at Hollywood’s doorstep. Runner-up targets are television, the Internet, and video games.
• It’s as if our publishers are helping us commit professional suicide [Why are thy songs so short? a Czechovian bird was once asked. Is it because thou art so short of breath? Short Stories with Long History ]
• · The Education Department this summer destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history after the office of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife complained that it mentioned the National Standards for History, which she has long opposed a booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history after the office of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife complained that it mentioned the National Standards for History, which she has long opposed.
• · · Suppose a drug could hand us total happiness. Pangs of conscience gone, the miseries of failure or grief reduced to mere pathologies But what then of personality... [The idea of being better than normal (Michael Jackson) may prove a bigger flop than the Edsel]
• · · · The question has been asked: Was Franz Kafka human? He seems to have had doubts himself. Many of his most persuasive and most affecting literary representatives are animals: a burrowing mole, or Jozefina the mouse singer, or poor Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find he has been transformed into a cockroach: The creator of these changelings was himself an amorphous creature

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Where do you turn when the all-knowing oracle fails you? You could try posting a message on Can't Find On Google
Bloggosphere is linking speedily to an article on the State of Ohio setting up ebooks for all the public libraries

The Blog, The Press, The Media: What Matters
What matters is that journalism survive, that the craft of speaking truth to power with factual care not be snuffed out. Chris Satullo, editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, embraces blogging as enlarging the circle of civic conversation
• A dynamic expansion of things newspapers have long done to aid democratic dialogue To help journalists and others sort fact from fiction, there's now the brand-new FootnoteFahrenheit.com ; Amazon Light
• · Google founder Sergy Brin put up a shingle in Ireland. The Age: we did not go with the lowest taxes but the access to young and talented people is what made our decision, to open the centre in Dublin; [Guardian Proudly Uses the 'W' Word: Debute of an extensive collection of webfeeds; What's Blogger? It may be the subject of endless debate, but this definition states a group of nontraditional, make-your-own-rules-as-you-go journalists]
• · · It is getting harder and harder these days to tell the difference between books of history and books of journalism ; Tim Porter Secrecy and Sources; There is no way to convey two hours' worth of discussion in 500 words]
• · · · A warning: Orwellians in the mist. Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes Rosen: Journos should be cheering bloggers During campaign cycle
• · · · · A slip of the tongue by the vice president during Tuesday night's debate with Sen. John Edwards led Web surfers to a site run by George Soros, a billionaire who makes no secret of his opposition to the Bush administration Fact Czechs send Traffic to Soros causinf Cheney much sorrow ; FactCheck.com redirecting to GeorgeSoros.com

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[Media Dragon] who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

They say all politics is local but in the end all politics is actually personal. On a day after the election it is important to be superstitious about the elections as myths add something interesting to political life. We need to admit that politics and literature are really the same coin and like success and failure there is a fine line between the two sides. Politics is the dragon head while literature is the dragon tail. Literature is all about our personal emotional tales and reading someone else’s obituary or memoirs helps us to remember our own memory of childhood; our own identity and the identity of the significant others; but most of all literature helps us to explore the myths and realities of global village and the oddness of the neverending political number crunching. If maintaining awareness of myths has any use in society, it is that it keeps in mind the human capacity for belief. As Bertrand Russell said: Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
Pundits pouring over the election results should consider reading this educational story about some strange social-psychological truths.
Mark Latham represented the capacity to believe via our hearts while John Howard represented our need to believe through our heads. As you do, sometimes we let the heads to win. Central Europeans tend to read so much into the symbolic game played on the Anzac day. The two-ups was so foreign to me at the Winston Hills Hotel where I first met Lauren all those years ago ... In many ways, the Australian elections are really a legal game of two-ups.
The papal literary bed is not made but come on down and explore words of Pope John Paul: Communism was a necessary evil that God allowed to happen to create opportunities for good after its demise. As Pope observed: The full extent of the evil that was raging through Europe was not seen by everyone, not even by those of us who were living at the epicentre. We were totally swallowed up in a great eruption of evil.

Eye on A Road More Travelled and Mutual Surprise: Has Australia and Afghanistan Missed Their Date with Destiny? The First Two Global Elections
I can’t think of a better example of a more internationally watched election results than the Saturday election Down Under. H.L. Mencken once suggested that in a well-run universe, everybody would have two lives, one for observing and studying the world, and the other for formulating and setting down his conclusions about it. This is more or less the way that the Liberal Party has contrived to arrange things. On the state government level the liberal party members are studying how not to deliver local services or run state schools, hospitals or railways.
While on the federal level the party is implementing their own policy conclusions about the realities of daily family lives. Alas, much of Howard’s achievement is married to the failures of the state governments, especially the lesson they have learnt when John Fahey lost the unloseable election in 1995. Privately a number of people who were close to the Paul Keating’s camp admit that it is unlikely the federal election would have been lost if John Howard was the Liberal Premier in 1996. The trick is to keep the Labour Government in power at the state level especially in NSW where 50 out of 150 seats happen to be
• Why has the economic development-first myth prevailed? ; [ A country in Howard's image: The kitten games of syntax and rhetoric; The Flag of Fairfax the SMH Provides a Coverage of the Day After the Election] [I gather that this week the New York Times will be assessing its own attitude to editorials on elections. Will the NY Times follow the extraordinary example set in concrete by the Sydney Morning Herald last week in relation to the impartial editorial advice during the election campaign?]
• · Google is launching a new search engine which would allow anyone to search the content of books online, from Cold Mountain to Cold River, and observers are saying that the move could help touch off an important shift in the balance of power between companies that produce books and those that sell them. GoogleLit On The Way ; [Sergey Brin and Larry Page know too well that you only live twice and as a result Frankfurt witnesses yet another pioneering debut. My story made its first International Debut at Frankfurt last October (Thanks to James Cumes) Cold River & Haverleigh: Giving Survivors Voices; Ach, Southern Star International is making another film history, Australia's most popular family drama series, McLeod's Daughters, has cracked the all-important US television market: Our Birriga Road next door neighbour of Seven Years; Sonia Tod ]
• · · You don’t need the bullet if you got the ballot What happens when we vote? Czech Out Jana Wendt Greens smiling, despite Coalition win ;
• · · · The ancient world is on a Hollywood roll. First Gladiator, then Troy, and now Alexander the greatest
• · · · · Social Justice and Democracy: Investigating the Link. Democracy and social justice, defined as the just distribution of opportunities and life-chances, go together ; [Czech Out Mark Riley]
• · · · · · It is quite amazing what our emails hide when we dare to open it. Last week I came across an email from Jozef Vernic (translating into Slavic as Believe Nothing) which included ny.com in the email address. I was suspicious, however, since it had the subject title Cold River I opened it. It was not a spam. In fact, Jozef read my story and related to me his story of the escape across the Iron Curtain. Yesterday I also hesitated whether to open an email with Cold River in a subject title and this time Rick from Texas included this rather odd link: Cold River was code word for execution
[I did not know it was possible to be so miserable & live but I am told that this is a common experience.
Evelyn Waugh, letter to Harold Acton]

Eye on the Big Ones: the Fearless Bathurst and Bohemian Woman Bathurst - Ford v Holden; Stockholm - Far-Right v Jelinek and her musical flow of voices and counter-voices
Until this morning, not many Australians knew that a woman called Elfriede Jelinek existed. James Cumes being one of the rare exceptions as he is aware of her ability to reveal the absurdity of society’s cliches and their subjugating power.
Elfriede Jelinek, is an avant-garde Austrian author and dramatist known for politicized prose that stabs at social convention and sexual oppression.
Jelinek means a Stag a Deer in Slavic. Erika Kohut
Without any doubt the Nobel Prize for Literature is considered the highest accolade to which a writer can aspire. In her home country, Elfriede Jelinek is a controversial figure who sharply criticized the 2000 government that included the far-right Freedom Party. Austria was slapped with European Union sanctions for seven months because of the party's inclusion in the government.
At the time, she banned performances of her plays in Austria. She said of the rise of the rightists:
I tried to work against it as soon as I saw it. But thank God, the rightists are not as strong any more.
Although her plays once again can be seen in Austria, Jelinek said she had mixed feelings toward her homeland.
It's a love for Vienna and for a few other places. But I have no patriotism for this country.
The prize includes a check of more than $1.3 million, which Jelinek said would give her peace to work.
The biggest luxury is simply to write what one wants to write.
Jelinek, a translator by trade, conceded her works are very difficult to translate because of her use of musical alliteration and might be difficult for foreigners to understand. But all her work, she said, is focused on revealing truth.
I am trying to demythologize. I try to give things their history back, to not tolerate hypocrisy, to force the language to tell the truth.
Google has over 600 links to Reclusive Austrian-Czech writer is awarded Nobel Prize
Elfriede Jelinek’s heroine Erika Kohut (Kohut means Rooster in Czech) in The Piano Teacher takes a fall because she has not been able to develop emotionally and looks at relationships only in physical terms. This is not a relevant point, not least because the reason for Erika’s trauma is the emotional content lacking in her relationship with her mother; it is not begotten of her voyeurism or the sex shops she visits. The problem lies not in the act of watching pornography but in a troubled life that forces her to look at pornography in a certain way. In Erika’s case, pornography and physical gratification assume a primary function simply because something else has happened that should not have happened.
Jelinek described Erika's as the story of the unraveling of one of the women who carry on their backs, who carry to term, the high culture that Austria so idolizes. The unlived sexuality expressed in voyeurism: a woman who cannot partake in life or in desire. Even the right to watch is a masculine right: The woman is always the one who is watched, never the one who watches. In that respect, to express it psychoanalytically, we are dealing here with a phallic woman who appropriates the male right to watch and who therefore pays for it with her life.

River as a Metaphor

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My Amazon Light and the Herald Sun suggest that politics is not the hottest game in town: Lindsay's so hot
The world still has millions of mystics, and the most mystical human beings are often among the most practical as well ... One of New York's hottest young artists portrays her circle of friends, her fellow artists and her favorite icons My Bohemia

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Publisher Encourages Students to Participate in Democratic Process by Awarding Grants
In celebration of the new book "D is for Democracy," publisher Sleeping Bear Press, a Thomson Gale imprint, is encouraging students in grades 3-8 to play an active role in our democratic process by developing their own volunteer project. Sleeping Bear Press will award five $1,000 grants to fund the winning student projects.
The Grassroots Volunteer Campaign is a way to encourage kids to develop volunteerism, one of the cornerstones of our democratic society. This election year is a great time to learn about democracy through 'D is for Democracy' and to participate in the process through the Grassroots Volunteer Campaign.
• This type of activity makes learning fun, encourages creativity and will help those in need -- a winning combination [The poorest poet who could not sell words for money has given humanity far more than busloads of best sellers with private foundations All of civilization rests on symbolic giving: Real writing is a gift beyond measure - It's only the counterfeit stuff that needs to be laundered; To blog or not to blog: More authors keeping online journals ; Matt Liddy's Poll Vault Weblog: How our political leaders speak ]
• · We are endlessly caught in the movement of our desire like a fish in a net of its own making. 32 keys and their music puts the devil to flight…and he whom no force can overcome is overcome by harmony The universe is harmonious for it is the work of God and musical harmony is the human key to the divine harmony. Far from having all the best tunes, the devil abhors harmony (Simon Critchley -This essay is the text of a talk given at The Sydney Opera House on 23 August); [ Paolo Totaro reviews Giuliano Montagna’s autobiography My Father Giovannino Guareschi – from the Po to Australia chasing a dream (PDF version) The odyssey of a lost, loving son]
• · · Liz Else, Alun Anderson complaining about sloppy thinking, logical errors, fallacies and muddles Your beliefs are like your wardrobe. How dare anybody question your style? Your ideology is your own. As for evidence
• · · · Rules of debate. You have Buckleys in NY. You may not stick fingers in your mouth pretending to vomit while your opponent speaks. Do not use the terms girlie-man, frog, or bozo. Elevator shoes are strictly forbidden Mr Christopher Buckley
• · · · · The story of Czechoslovak Oskar Schindler was not something Thomas Knealley found. Rather, it found him. He was looking for a briefcase.
• · · · · · The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea. The River ; The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course. The Cold River [This doesn't always work. Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall. Then I do the same thing the river does: backtrack. At one point in this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. I had to go back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction.]

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One soulful Antipodean hits the spotlight on google searches this week as Counterpunch links to Antony Loewenstein Rupert Murdoch and the Marginals: "Personally Creating Outcomes, while another souldful Amerikan says goodbye to Google ...

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Farewell Ev! The Blogger Boy from Nebraska
Without any doubt, Ev sings in more Slavic accent the word Wooshka and with a much better gusto than Mark Latham managed during the Australian political idol policy launches (smile).
It's been almost six years now since I started working on what became the company I sold to the company we started talking to two years ago because of the product we launched five years ago.
Six years is a long time. Or a little. Depending.
For me, it's a little under 20% of this life on Earth. And it's the time when I find myself thinking a lot about a particular question: What should I do next?
I'm not sure what the answer to that question is, but I've decided it's something different than I do now. And I need some perspective to answer it. So, I've to move on. I.e.: As of this Friday, I will no longer be employed by Google.
Yes, I'm leaving my baby (or is it an adolescent by now?), in the hands of an awesome team we've compiled over the last few years. And I'm taking some time off to think. And...who knows?
Gosh, what else to say about that?
Necessarily, I must express that it's been an amazing, thrilling, life-changing, difficult, rewarding, surprising, and lucky ride I've been on. And "life-changing" is such an understatement. As I said on Blogger's fifth birthday, for doing the "same thing" for five years, it's amazing how drastically my life has changed. Not just my life, but me. I'm just a simple farm boy from Nebraska, after all.
• Evan Williams The Young Godfather of the Blogger Family [Ev might care to tackle Search engines which are unreliable tools for research that aims to reconstruct the historical record ... ]
• · May the blogging wars begin! Shooting for top dragon in cyber town Dragon Digeratis
• · · : On Thursday night, the president forgot himself. After years of being protected from anyone who doesn't flatter and cajole, he let his mask slip when confronted with someone who didn't fear his childish retribution or need anything from him. Many members of the public got a good sharp look at him for the first time in two years and they were stunned. Like that black and white image, the dichotomy of the real Bush vs. the phony Bush is profoundly discomfiting Two Faces. One Public, One Private. One Phony, One Real

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Compilation of the trends deep inside blogging community BlogOn
Election creates an atmosphere where human nature can be studied in depth Ole of Election Spin [Dodgy journos to blame for all the secrecy
[by] Grahame Morris]

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Now What:
Have you ever told a little white lie about having gone to Woodstock, or the Ice Bowl, or one of the political conventions, or heck, to the ball game the night Bonds hit his 700th? Come on. Fess up. Somebody will be talking about how great it was, and you’ll be like, Oh yeah, I was there. Dude, it was awesome. Only, you weren’t even born yet. Or you were waxing your car. Or you couldn’t get tickets. (Or then there is the slight possibility that you are a pathological liar.) You just want to belong.
Today, any Memphis teenager with some ability to do math is trying really, really hard to not belong. A CDC-funded study tallied responses from nearly 75 percent (Yes, three-fourths! Holy cow!) of all students in grades 9-12 to questions about sex, drug use, violence, and suicide. The study found that more than 60 percent of the kids have had sex, and that a third of them have had four or more sexual partners. While the data suggests higher-than-average sexual activity compared to national statistics, what’s striking is the sheer volume of responses — the thorough penetration of the potential survey responders. Three out of four.
• [New Political Blog Features Unique Viewpoint
Politopics, a new political blog by journalist and bestselling author Angela Winters, focuses on a Centrist African-American viewpoint.]
• · Blog enthusiasts are excellent evangelist candidates. They're early adopters. Often, they're serial buzz spreaders, and they can funnel waves of others just like them toward your blog and your organization Seven Reasons Why Businesses Should Blog Now [Nick Galvin: Politics schmolitics Icon has scanned the online world for a few of the sites that delight in pointing the finger at politicians and sniggering childishly]
• · · If his newest blog has even a drop of the popularity of its subject matter, former Milwaukeean Jim Romenesko will be a Venti-sized success Baristas: Web habitues take comfort in dissecting nuances of Starbucks life
• · · · I blog, you blog, we blog ... Young and Young at Heart: Blogs Across Amerika; [It's a Young Man's World Blog publishing poster child Nick Denton is once again in the news -- his Gawker empire is launching three new blogs ; 18-24 Advertising Demands]
• · · · · Good Blogons and blogs can come from anywhere: sure, a lot are in New York, Sydney and Vrbov, that being where the world's most net-happy people live, so why not Albury-Wodonga? Blog Leaders of the pack
• · · · · · Dutch Minister's World Revealed in 'Blog'; [Least gains most Hot Air in Media Balloon: Sympathy goes out to singer and former Communist Party tool Karel Gott, a shoe-in for the Castle ]

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We are all Christ and we are all Hitler. We are trying to make Christ's message contemporary. We want Christ to win. What would he have done if he had advertisements, T.V., records, films and newspapers? The miracle today is communication. So let's use it.
-John Lennon '69

<.b>In 1969 Czechoslovak youth communicated to the world the message of our birth right through characters like Jan Palach who took a certain Slavic saying literally: If you want to set something afire, you must burn yourself. By setting himself alight in Wenceslas Square, Jan Palach ignited an unprecedented underground movement against the Communist Government of Czechoslovakia. Bohemian boys, like Balmain boys, rarely say intimate things. Although we hardly ever do; somehow under the surface we are helpless at fighting the huge iceberg of emotional energy which even rips Titanics apart. Some of us identify ourselves with courageous acts no mattter how crazy and in those rare moments we are not ashamed to be true to our man-childhood feeling. The rare moment takes place when one least expects it so you find choking your throat with anger and tears, but somehow the feelings displayed by others become a kind of badge of binding honour. Simone Weil, who like George Orwell knew what it meant to live under communism, observed in her book The Need for Roots that truth is a need of the soul. She went on to say: The need for truth is a need more sacred than any other need. Yet it is never mentioned. One feels afraid to read once one has realised the quantity and monstrousness of the material falsehoods paraded in even the books of the most reputable authors. Thereafter one reads as though one were drinking from a contaminated well. Anything we read about the reasons for Jan Palach from the poisoned pens of authors sponsored by the Secretariat was a big lie.

Do you know, my story is the saddest and the silliest you would ever hear, Alan Sheriff, the hero of Thomas Keneally's latest fiction, The Tyrant's Novel confesses to his visitor at a detention camp for refugees.

In Vienna young exile men wore cheap John Lennon’s specs and pretended leather jackets ... spent disproportionate amounts of their time looking for dreams to come true. When I first came to Australia the limited English words I possessed in my vocabulary generally came from the Beatles songs. In 1980 the roof of the world kept falling on top of me wherever I went. Just like I never forget the day I learnt about the death of Jan Palach, or the fateful crossing of the Iron Curtain, I will never forget the day I learnt about the pointless fatal shooting in New York. It was incomprehensible that the John, the one we were forbidden to admire in the Eastern parts of Europe, was gone. Unfortunately, the death of John Lennon defined not just my six months in exile, but also many decades after!

John Lennon’s song that is seared in my memory eerily opens with the words : ‘I magine there is no heaven and it is easy if you try ... Imagine there’s no countries, it is not hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.’ It is not hard to feel all this confusion, all this loneliness, all this heartache, all this struggle, it's not hard to figure out how any Central European without a family feels in a city of exiles where snow never falls at Christmas or any other time. Like Lennon, I would learn that monsters exist in all our cultures not just communist so as homeless wonderers many of us just had to learn how to side step them and sometime even face them. Refugees and migrants depict the side tourists seldom see, milk-crates as furniture, eating alone tinned baked beans for brekky, lunch and dinner, second hand rags inside a broken plastic bag rather than souvenir bag. We are all like the characters in the movie Titanic who at the first seven minutes of the movies boldly proclaim: We have nothing. So we have nothing to lose!?! Unlike tourists, we dare to explore the darker streets of the Kings Cross and be fearless when it comes to embracing the waves at Bondi. There are no three or five star hostels we are all equal under the axis of exile. We are irresistably charmed by every little miracles donated to the Salvation Army and St Vincent De Paul. We learn that, for us, there is no right thing to say or write. So we write and say what others whisper in private. Tears, like water, provide the glue that turn the raw material of exile into useful concrete of collective survival. John Lennon was the strongest cement there ever was for many Czechs who felt part of this fragile universe during the Christmas of 1980.

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.
Philip Roth

The cementing for me took place inside a little remote Czech club in Campbelltown area. Just like in the Slavic pub in Cabrammatta, inside this (poor cousin of the Czech Sokolish French Forrest club) Campbeltown club most of us were without families and John Lennon was our symbolically mourned brother. The world was separated by one degree that night even the beer had a personality. It is said that beer evolves into an art form during wakes. I became a Bohemian Crocodile-Dundee who put to practice my nights behind my cousin Gejzo’s bar. As you do, I jokingly challenged the Moravian barmaid with angelic high cheekbones by saying: Call that a head? That is not a head; this is a head! Home grilled Christmas carp and Silvester mackerel are tasty miracles which represented the distilled essenceof all that is wonderful about Czech adoption of a melting pot recipe. Like most Slavs, I tend to drown my heart, one heady beer at a time, with a Janosik-Tarzan cry and a loud splash. It is amazing to discover that even in Campbeltown, at the edge of the habitable world, (irony-intended) intoxicated lifelines are impossible to resist like the unexpected and unconditional taste of Silvester night kisses layered in spine-arching poetry of Slavic folk dance! And then we went to her place to listen to John Lennon.

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Lennon fans threaten his killer as release looms
Mark Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon, could be released from jail next month in a move that has sparked fears of retribution from Beatles fans.
Chapman will have a parole hearing in the week beginning 4 October, officials at the New York State Parole Division said. It will be held behind closed doors. However, one official said they had 'no idea' what the outcome of the hearing would be.
• My Surreal Christmas Without Snow and without John Lennon [link first seen at My Surreal Vienna]
• · Angela Bennie examines the dynamic state of the art. Our home-grown talent is winning acclaim overseas, but has acting in this country evolved into a recognisable generic style? Australian thrall
• · · Sheriff is a writer in limbo; he can neither expect adoption by his new land nor return to his homeland, an unnamed, oil-rich dictatorship The Tyrant's Novel
• · · · Philip Roth immersed himself in literature from behind the Iron Curtain. He went every week to a little college on Staten Island to attend Antonin Liehm's classes on Czech culture and edited a series of eastern European fiction for Penguin. My life in New York after Portnoy was lived in the Czech exile community - listening, listening, listening. I ate every night in Czech restaurants in Yorkville, talked to whoever wanted to talk to me and left all this Portnoy crap behind. That was idiotic, this was not idiotic. I lived up in Connecticut, where Philip Guston was my friend, and had my east European world in New York, and those were the things that saved me. I think that's why Hemingway lived in Key West; he liked to be in a world that had nothing to do with what he did all day. Fame is a worthless distraction
• · · · · Lyn Tranter and Greg Hunter will be knocking on doors of Frankfurt Book Fair promoting a biography of Ian Thorpe, the complicated swimmer (Germans love dogs and a photo of Ian and Max might stimulate an interest in a kind of Antipodean Labrador Rex imaginary - smile ) Lyn’s partner, John Tranter is the founding editor and publisher of the free quarterly Internet literary magazine Jacket
• · · · · · The board and officers of the American Nudist Research Library did not attend the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony at Harvard University this past week. None of them, apparently, could find a thing to wear. Honors for Nude Lit, Fish Tarts

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Some bloggers may take a different personality on their web logs. Others may simply show their true colors ; via Brilliant Boynton

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Spread the Word Far and Wide, According to Soros Wishes
On Tuesday I delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington explaining why I am involved in this election. In the coming weeks, I will be traveling the country to speak with more Americans about why I believe President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests and undermining American values. I have started this website and this blog to hear from you. I am eager to engage in a critical discussion about this election because the stakes are so high, and I welcome your opinions here and on your own blogs. I am looking forward to responding to the many comments that I have already received in the days ahead. Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you.
• Words fail me as I never thought George Soros would ever have the time to blog. On the other hand, I never thought the Iron Curtain would come down in my LIFETIME! George Soros joins the blogosphere ; [Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush]
• · Tim Porter: What do we need to do to move forward? How do we attract new readers? Editorial Pages: Pizza vs. Finger Bowls
• · · Tim Porter Puts stop to blogger bash thing: Carry My Notebook, Please
• · · · Lawrence Henry: Oh, the blogosphere is crowing, carrying Dan Rather's head around on a pike, as Keith Olbermann complained bitterly a couple of weeks ago What Blogs Can’t Do
• · · · · Today 2 Million People are blogging in Amerika: Before Applying, Check Out the Blogs
• · · · · · Naomi Klein: You Can't Bomb Beliefs

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How Many media dragons, bloggers, googlers really exist?
In just over one month since going public, shares in the Internet giant Google Inc. reached an all-time high, recording their largest percentage rise in a single day yesterday. The stock finished trading for the day at US$126.86, a rise of almost 7.3 percent- or US$8.60- and almost double the company’s initial price of US$85. Google Surges As Wall Street Says Buy

The Blog, The Press, The Media:
I honestly do not understand how Bob Novak, with all the slimy stuff he's done over the years, is still not only on the air with CNN, but one of their main players, says Vanity Fair columnist and blogger James Wolcott. I think it's an inside Washington thing. It's an elite thing, he's been there forever. They all take each other for granted. They don't see how corrupted they've become. And how sleazy things are. To have Novak sitting on Crossfire when they're actually discussing the Valerie Plame case!
• Wolcott wants to know why Novak is still working for CNN; [It seems every political blogger secretly believes he's James Carville]
• · Prof Jane Kirtley tells Adam Liptak: Every time I hear about one of these reporters going in to speak about their sources, my stomach drops to my shoes. We're in a crisis on this Media ethics prof is worried about CIA leak probe subpoenas; [Boing Boing Too bad the WSJ doesn't allow this reporter to write these kinds of stories for the paper
• · · Journalists have to give up certain things for the sake of their job What limits should there be on political activity by journos?
• · · · Politicians with Skylights Political Blogging in Practice; [Warning!!! Lileks gives the honest political breakdown of your average newsroom: Oh, let me tell you about Nick Coleman! ; Nick Coleman’s essay on political blogging ]
• · · · · First Open News Aggregator Standard New Bloglines Web Services; By relying on algorithms, Google News completely automated the news-gathering process Google Backroom
• · · · · · Mobile iMrich and his iMac How much mobility is there in the blogospheric ecosystem?; [Media Dragon Awards Politics and Elections Readers Choice Awards]

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There is a simple law governing the dramatization of novels: if it is worth doing, it can't be done; if it can be done, it isn't worth it. Trash can be just as trashy on the stage as in an armchair, but when an artist has conceived of something as a novel, let those who think they know a reason why his matter should not be married to his manner forever hold their peace.
John Simon, Acid Test

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: How To Lose Your Money And Waste Your Time
The Washington Post this weekend published a ridiculous article in their little How To section. Yep, it was all about How To Publish Your Own Book and the piece couldn't have held more lies and half-truths had it been written by a con artist and published on the web. How do you get your tome flying off the shelves at Borders? the article asks. Not this way!
• Samizdat: Move Under Ground and Punish Yozef [ How To Publish Your Own Book ]
• · Surprised people think it's strange, my down to earth Canadian publisher knows that life on the streets feeds people's desire to escape and books are as comforting to hookers, addicts and homeless people as they are to Oprah Winfrey: Vancouver hooked on Sex Gates by DDP
• · · Welcome to New Blog and the maiden rant: Ach, the possibilities for anonymous complaining! So much to say, so little time. ; [BookBuz]
• · · · There shall not be found among you anyone that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter or a witch ...Deuteronomy 18: 10-12 J.K. Rowling: Speak of the Devil, here's Harry ; [Banned: Alice vs. Harry: Who's More Dangerous? ]
• · · · · Mary Watson reads a whole lot of responsibility into book clubs Literary criticism for dummies; [How To Make Love Like a Porn Star]
• · · · · · Thin is not in at Amazon Fat Cold River gets a bounce ; [Canadian publisher DDP has added another two imprint to its growing business with Dragon's Heart Romance (
To inspire people all over the world to fall in love, one book at a time) and Dragon Tooth Fantasy (Bringing the imagination back into your life!) Canadian Publisher Keeps On Growing in the ebook niche]