Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
Chicken Little epidemic
Our streets appear increasingly aswarm with Chicken Little financial savants.
All around the world, it seems, a hard rain is about to fall. The sky is gravid with precipitate disaster, and quite a few people are reviewing plans to build financial arks, many of these latter-day Noahs figuring they’ll build their boats of gold.
And good luck to them. One advantage of being a starving writer in a state of perennial penury—blessed with a principled resistance to … Read more
* PRE-OBITS. P.J. O’Rourke has recently suggested a way to help draw readers back to newspapers.
“No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism,” he suggests. “You can still buy a buggy whip, which is more than can be said for a copy of the Rocky Mountain News, Cincinnati Post, or Seattle Post-Intelligencer.”
What’s needed, he suggests, is a new kind of feature: “What I propose is “Pre-Obituaries”—official notices that certain … Read more
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” (reported by Boswell, in his Life of Johnson)
Attributed to Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the renowned author and lexicographer, that’s one of the most famous writerly aphorisms in the English language.
Others have seen things differently.
Arthur Schopenhauer, for one (1788-1860), had this to say about the matter:
“There are above all two kinds of writer: those who write for the sake of what they have to say and … Read more
It was all foretold in Finnegans Wake. It could have been, anyway.
There’s just no end to human ingenuity. Now you don’t even have to buy an e-book reader to suffer Internet interconnectivity. Ubimark has developed a way for readers to evoke Web connections from a print book by way of cellphone camera and browser. Have a look at the following item (short article & video), “Putting the Web inside the printed book.”
Ubimark, iPads and Vooks … Read more
This is Jack Shackaway. I’ve been invited on another junket, a liveaboard dive trip in the Andaman Sea. We’re setting out from Phuket. I don’t make a lot of money but, hey, I’m a freelance writer, eh? I don’t need a lot of money.
I’m a writer and freelance journalist. Sometimes I’m a hack. A two-bit panderer to any passing proposition. But in my own head I’m a full-fledged author, never mind I never have time to write anything. Not … Read more
“Thinking about boredom,” Jack tells me, “and the subjective time dilation effect, and thinking I may then live forever, I’ve decided to move to Ontario.”
Other advice on stretching time.
Website dedicated to diversions for the bored.
More fun with boredom; visit Noteable Quotes.… Read more