Sunday, August 28, 2016

Laziest Sunday of All Drones: Why Sleeping Naked Is Good For You

Michael Gunner, the Alice Springs boy who grew up in public housing, says his rise to become the Northern Territory's chief minister is proof that it's the land of opportunity
~Bathroom quote at 4 am 28-8-2016 AD

Way back when wild wild Polish Party featured Chris, Lidka, Slavek, Iza and that exiled past - sweet memories featured videos  last night which brought a sea of quotes and links for Sunday morning :-) ....
The former PM ChurcHill once remarked “Dinner would have been splendid…if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess.” Why Housing demand in Sydney is so strong everyone wants to enjoy low interest rates and hot dinner in the city of exiles

For most of human history, technological progress was achingly slow, especially when it came to agricultural productivity. Unable to boost yields, populations couldn’t expand unless additional farmland were brought under cultivation. There were about as many people alive on Earth in the age of Caesar as there were more than a thousand years later. When that finally changed, farmers moved to urban factories and joined the proletariat. Richard Koo’s chart to explain MEdiaDragon's 200 years on Blogger  FT Alphaville

Why Sleeping Naked Is Good For You

It’s hard for me to express what this means to me and scholars of my generation. (I apologize in advance for this trip down memory lane. As I said on Facebook the other day: the earth belongs to the living, this moment belongs to today’s grad student, not yesterday’s) Honey, I’ve been slowly boring hard boards longer than you’ve been alive Corey Robin*

A 14th-century Egyptian bureaucrat’s compilation of human knowledge includes the price of chickens, an encounter with a lion, and formulae for enlarging the p****... Walking like Egyptians 



New study provides more evidence caloric restriction slows aging Business Insider 

*Here’s everything scientists know about how to avoid ageing

…the Amish impulse is one to watch…” (Ross Douthat, NYT)

You Can Now Get Paid To Travel Europe And Drink Gin...

As Baker Brothers Switch From Bottling Water To Bottling Bourbon 

The Disastrous $45 Million Fall of a High-End Wine Scammer Bloomberg

Why can’t we see that we’re living in a golden age? If you look at all the data, it’s clear there’s never been a better time to be alive

We all know John Oliver’s shtick. Each Sunday he goes on HBO to inveigh against some progressive bogeyman — DC lobbyists, big bankers, Donald Drumpf, etc. — replete with out-of-context clips, snarky rebuttals, and lots of F-bombs. And the left-leaning press heralds his brilliance with viral videos insisting he “destroyed,” “eviscerated,” and “disemboweled” his quarry. But last Sunday, he took a break from snarking on the rich and powerful to focus on a new target: kids who attend charter schools. On the most recent episode of “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver took on the 6,000 charter schools in the US and everyone involved with them. (Content warning on that link, natch John Oliver Destroys Underprivileged Students

Jozef Imrich and Donald Trump Used Campaign Donations to Buy $55,000 of Their Own Doorstoppers  Someone Houltish is Dobbing Us in To that Bestia - Beath of Daily Beast 

Harry Fox (Killian Scott, Love/Hate) seems to have it all, the luxury apartment, the fancy car, but when the company he works for goes bust it looks like he will lose everything. A solution is offered by Vernon Stynes (John Bradley, Game of Thrones) who has masterminded a diabolical, all-or-nothing scheme based in the Deep Web, called Trading. Two strangers empty their banks accounts, sell their assets, and put their entire worth in cash into a green sports bag. They travel to a remote location and fight to the death. Winner buries the loser and walks away twice as rich. Vernon believes Trading is a no-brainer for anyone who wants to get rich quick. Can Harry resist the lure of such a high risk gamble? It’s dangerous. It’s illegal. But it could solve all his problems.
TRADERS

Whiskey’s Next Wave Is Lighter, Mellower, Made for Millennials 
Best dancers at the NSW Parliamentary Press Parties - Ross Coulthart and Nick Farrow win Gold Walkley
… Swimming in the ‘Drowned River’ of Contemporary American Poetry
 
NPR's 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900

Best films of the 21st century?  Mostly a good list, though as usual it is not reliable at the very top

Sydneysiders quitting the city to find new lives (China Invasion on a large Communist scale ;-) We are F******d ;-)
Back to The Sydney Morning Herald Life beyond the big smoke – regional centres on the up and up

A mood, a tint, a taint, danger, virility, possibility, royalty, beauty: parsing the many meanings of blue, that most popular of colors ... A history of what may be the world’s most beloved color



cas on gangway links
Lazy Mishas and Divias on Lazy Roads and Bridges
Even the first person to read “The Road Not Taken” first understood it the way generations of schoolteachers have explained it; Frost himself had to explain (several times) what he meant. Other readers have taken the poem to be a parody of the lofty individualistic sentiments of the interpretation we learned in grade school. David Orr takes apart both those readings, and provides alternative 
versions of the poem that would actually fit them, to highlight what Frost actually did write You’re Probably Misreading Robert Frost’s Most Famous Poem

I Love You, But Our Happiness Doesn’t Fit My Personal Brand’s Narrative Strategy. “My market research shows that nihilism is hot right now. Malcontent millennials tend to share posts significantly more if they contain phrases like ‘I’m dead inside’ or ‘I’m am consumed by despair.’ So, while I do love you and love the life we share together, expressing that joy on social media would undo all the work I’ve put into carefully crafting my personal brand’s ‘voice.’ It’s called strategy for a reason, babe.” 

POPULAR: Brew Your Own Beer In Just 24 Hours
The WHYM is a DIY brew kit that lets you add custom flavors to your alcoholic beverage at a fraction of the usual time
 
Seriously old style beer just like MEdiaDragon: Craft Beer Made With Prehistoric Yeast Is T-Rex Approved

What Men & Women Want In Marriage, 1939-2008

On dating men with “potential” Medium

The admirable ArtsJournal site, which recently got a nice write-up in The New York Times, has added a few blogs to the site: see ArtsJournal Blogs Central for a full run-down and links. For now there are four blogs:
       In addition, there are threats of additional blogs -- one from somebody named Jan Herman is due up next, apparently.
       All this is well and good, and some of these sound like they could be of some interest. Still: what about literary coverage ?
 
… The Ugly Truth: An Advice Column for Nonfiction Writers | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog

How will our lives and our poems be judged? By meter, rhyme, cleverness, and humor....Who Judges the Judges ...

Anecdotal Evidence started as a benignly metastasized commonplace book. I’ve always collected the good parts of what I’m reading, not so much for the information they contain as for the memorable way such information is phrased. By “information” I mean not just vital stats – birth and death dates, the capital of Burkina Faso – but artful wording and moral insight. Sometimes this meant heavily marked, annotated and indexed books. My Ulysses is swollen and can no longer close, with pages of notes taped into the text, and more text than not is underlined in my Rasselas and Daniel Deronda. And then it meant notebooks, physical and digital. My first impulse with the blog was to share the nuggets I had panned from the river, but that wasn’t sufficient for my purposes. I found I wanted to assay the ore, forge alloys and share the wealth. You do not need many books


 Solitary Praxis: Ted Hughes and poetry as the "voice of pain".

Not every poet leads a life as operatic as Hughes's.

Figurines by the teenage Colleen
Were censored and labeled obscene.
Though they did land a show,
The young artist can’t go;
Seems her work’s too “adult” and “unclean.”

Never ever on SUNDAY:
At the end of their sexual bout,
She noticed her lover’s self-doubt.
“Don’t worry,” she said,
As she rose from their bed.
“I’m accustomed to doing without.”

Do Greenland sharks live for 400 years?  And it seems they don’t reach sexual maturity until 150, and their age is dated with reference to the “golden age” of nuclear bomb testing

How Clean Energy’s Rising Tide Can Lift All Boats Breaking Energy

Karol Markowicz: Who Says Being Single Beats Married Life?

Shot: “Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.”
― British poet Philip Larkin, “Annus Mirabilis,” 1974

Chaser: “Goodbye to sex: a short and heartfelt eulogy:”
Born in 1963, died 2016 – alas poor Sex. We knew you well. Well, not WELL. We knew you. Slightly. That was a good summer.
But it was with great regret and some tears that last week we learned of your death. All of us will remember where we were when we heard, of course – we were not having you. We were sitting on sofas, TV on, loungewear on, jointly scrolling through our phones for more updates on what the millennials are thinking, eating Doritos.
* * * * * * * *
But why? Why have young people stopped having you? Why have they stopped building their lives around you, the peg their tents were tied to, the mistakes they yearned to make? Why have you died just when, some would argue, we needed you most?
—Eva Wiseman, the London Guardian, yesterday.
Hangover: The Unsexy Truth About Millennials: They’re Poor: If you’re wondering why millennials don’t have much sex, and don’t buy cars, forget social theorizing: the harsh truth lies in their near-empty wallets.
—The Daily Beast, August 5th

Make no mistake: Drones are coming, and they’re going to change a lot of things about how we shape our lives. So why shouldn’t we change how we shape our buildings to get ready for them?
“Large balconies are always welcome in swanky condos, but they could be so much more if they obliterated your need to use the stairs or elevator, or to even get in a car or subway to reach your office tower.” It’s Time for Fancy Apartments to Offer Balconies for Drone Landings

The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Füst Milán's 1942 novel, The Story of My First Wife: The Reminiscences of Captain Störr

  The American White House has released The President's Summer Reading List -- five books President Obama is apparently reading this summer.
       The only one of the five titles under review at the complete review is Neal Stephenson's Seveneves -- noteworthy because it was also recommended by former Microsoft man Bill Gates earlier this year.
       A solid little list -- but only five books for summer reading ? Come on !


       They held the International Conference on the Short Story in English -- in Shanghai -- on the theme of 'Influence and Confluence in the Short Story: East and West'.
       At ShanghaiDaily Xu Qin reports on the proceedings, in Story event a tale of literary exploration -- and with the impressive list of participants it sounds like it was quite interesting.

The human brain is capable of 1016 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any computer currently in existence. But that doesn’t mean our brains don’t have major limitations. The lowly calculator can do maths thousands of times better than we can, and our memories are often less than useless — plus, we’re subject to cognitive biases, those annoying glitches in our thinking that cause us to make questionable decisions and reach erroneous conclusions. Here are a dozen of the most common and pernicious cognitive biases that you need to know about. Rationality

Why Women want to Change Rich Bohemian Men - Amen!

Family holidays lead to divorce: research

 An Interview With Olympic Champion Katie Ledecky on Her Catholic Faith | Daily News | NCRegister.com

Let us take, for our point of departure, the supposition that man, and man alone, is what makes the universe very interesting; that he remains, as it were, “the measure of all things” in the ancient sense. We may, if we try, dismiss this as a grand tautology, but it is falsifiable.
Until someone is able to demonstrate the existence of a comparable or superior biological life form, anywhere, the fact stands. It makes sense on the basis of all current knowledge; the contrary can only be supported on the basis of wild speculation, unmoored to demonstrable facts.
 
TRUMP DOING BETTER THAN PEOPLE REALIZE BECAUSE OF ‘UNDERCOVER VOTERS.’


A new app aims to help stop sleepers from disturbing their partners with nighttime noise

They’re not saying it’s aliens – but it’s aliens