Taxing Times of Mental Jargon at school and work

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  THE BAD BOY

  The Line of Beauty: The worse they are, the better we seem to like them. Matthew Sweet sorts the naughty, the filthy and the unruly from the just plain wrong Free to be bad

Bre(n)t, the character played by Ricky Gervais in sitcom The Office, regularly used meaningless phrases to try and hide his ineptitude. Earlier this year a survey found that nearly a quarter of workers consider office jargon to be a “pointless irritation”.A campaign group claimed that overused jargon could be holding British businesses back. 'If they use these words, don’t buy their shares'  Steven Poole, who has written a book on "unbearable office jargon" told Radio 4's Today program that office jargon can sometimes have sinister undertones: "it’s all about obscuring the violence of what the bosses are actually doing to people so they can carry on with a clear conscience." Mr Poole said that office jargon became very popular during the dotcom boom and has stuck around in boardrooms across the country. Office trail

I  spent six years of my life at a private girl's school surrounded by classmates, many of whom exhibited varying degrees of Ja'mie-ness. Lilley has described Ja'mie as "completely self-absorbed, out of control and outrageous".I envy the proportion of the population who can view Ja'mie as satirical, because I certainly cannot. To me, Ja'mie is not outrageous - she is real and can be found at a school near you. 

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Jamie is only too real

The uncertainty, as when watching a one-armed juggler, makes for an uneasy experience. The set pieces – a theatre visit, a weekend in Marrakesh – are vivid but, again, overextended

A number of businesses, including Home Swap, Love Home Swap and Homeaway, allow people to holiday abroad without charge if your destination matches with another user who is prepared to stay in your home.

The act of sharingUncertainty

Far, far from reality

Architects have been designing houses capable of surviving extreme bushfire conditions for 30 years - the proof is their survival. My interest in this subject was sparked in 1983, while researching my book Leaves of Iron on Sydney architect Glenn Murcutt. He constructed a dwelling for the painter Sydney Ball at Glenorie in a highly fire-prone section of bush on the ridge with a valley running up that would act as a natural chimney for fires. Murcutt designed water storage tanks with a diesel generator and pumps connected to agricultural sprinklers on the apex of the round corrugated roof. The house was built with steel framing and a corrugated iron exterior so it could be drenched in the event of a firestorm. Living in the bush

Heads in the Clouds

Dorrigo (italian aborigines called it Don Dorrigo "stringy bark") the Antiopodean Ikaria just judging by the purity of the mixed sea and moutain air. At the top of the mountain one discovers a cosy retreat called the Clouds End which overlooks Belingen River National Park. This is all part of bigger landscapes as you will find that the  Great Dividing Range also harbours DieHappy State Forest (no pun intended). 

"As the name suggests, Clouds End really is like being at the top of the world, with sweeping views of uninterrupted forest cover stretching to the coast. The area is ringed by a chain of national parks and state forests that offer great potential for bushwalking and sightseeing. Clouds End is owned and operated by Beth and Kelvin Henwood, who bought the property 33 years ago "because we fell in love with the view", says Beth. The Henwoods built a residence out of second-hand and new bits and pieces and raised their children there. 

You will find a sense of humour peppered throughout Henwood's amazing garden.  Inside is a picture of Noah Ark with the purest lamb reminding observers of a spiritual cloud. There used to be a hen or chook run at the end of the garden where electric fence and the woods meet. On the edge of the woods or forest one spies 80 or so Angus beef cattle.  
Antipodean Tuscany at Home

The end of mists ~ Belle home ~  Kampen images

Daunting to pick up - impossible to put down - For those unfamiliar with the Czech anthem, the very first words are "Kde domov můj?" which translate to "Where is my home?" This idea of rootlessness, this constant insecurity about what one may call his or her own, is one of the fundamental themes of this show. It attempts to show this age-old characteristic of the Czech psyche in a contemporary light. Where is my home?

Going to Boonah

''Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it," wrote Hannah More to her sister in 1777

‘We have an obligation to imagine’ … “This is an edited version of Neil Gaiman’s lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday, October 14 at the Barbican Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

"The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Poet at the Breakfast Table

Out of Control

Covered in smoke ... The scene in Sydney via SMH Picture: Damian Shaw

Raging Fires

Freud's Archivists: Janet Malcolm was born in Lidka's Prague

In the Freud Archives tells the story of an unlikely encounter among three men: K. R. Eissler, the venerable doyen of psychoanalysis; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a flamboyant, restless forty-two-year-old Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst turned virulent anti-Freudian; and Peter Swales, a mischievous thirty-five-year-old former assistant to the Rolling Stones and self-taught Freud scholar. At the center of their Oedipal drama are the Sigmund Freud Archives—founded, headed, and jealously guarded by Eissler—whose sealed treasure gleams and beckons to the community of Freud scholarship as if it were the Rhine gold. In the Feud archives

Janet Malcolm's Journalistic Relationship With Analyst Jeffrey Masson Seemed as Intimate as Romance. No Wonder Their Libel Trial Felt Like a Divorce Till Death Do Us Part ~ Janet Malcolm

In a fascinating but anecdotal (and probably ultimately pointless) experiment, psychologists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland averaged the faces of young women from around the globe to create "averaged" faces of various nations.

Averaged faces

Putin's librarian

The Mitrokhin Archive is a collection of handwritten notes made secretly by KGB Major Vasili Mitrokhin during his thirty years as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate. When he defected to the United Kingdom in 1992 he brought the archive with him Mitrokhin Archive

Disillusioned Soviet archivist whose extraordinary diligence revealed nearly 70 years of KGB secrets to the west ~ Vasili Mitrokhin is that rare creature like john hatton and Vaclav Havel who believe that truth matters and sunshine is thebest disinfectant Putin's archivist

IN DECEMBER 1992, MI6 ran a secret undercover mission to spirit a former KGB officer, Colonel Vasili Mitrokhin, and his wife out of Russia. MI6 was skilled at this. The former London KGB station chief Oleg Gordievsky had been brought out in the boot of a Saab by MI6 in the 1980s.

But the defection was hampered by the need to bring six large trunks buried in the garden of Col Mitrokhin's dacha outside Moscow. MI6 officers, including renegade officer Richard Tomlinson, posing as workmen loaded them into a van. Mr Tomlinson was jailed two years ago after attempting to publish a book about his secret service exploits. He was released in April last year.

Spy Scandal behind Mitrokhin archive : how MI6 stole details of KGB plots

The Boom Towns and Ghost Towns

How the recession changed our economic geography ~ New York, Houston, Washington, D.C.—plus college towns and the energy belt—are all up, while much of the Sun Belt is (still) down. Mapping the winners and losers since the crash. Survival of the fattest

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography

"The congregation does not believe one thing; we believe a multitude of hazy, crazy things," he writes in "The Three Ecologies of the Holy Desert," the final effort here. "Some among us are smart; some serene; some feeble, poor, practical, guilt-ridden; some are lazy; some arrogant, rich, pious, prurient, bitter, injured, sad. We gather in belief of one big thing: that we matter, somehow."
~ Richard Rodriguez’s Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography

Cinema is too sacred a Humanity for us to leave in the hands of passionless, creativity-killing, corporate bottom-liners. Who we are as a culture is at stake. Humanity

Because it makes the world seem just. If the strongest win all the battles, there’s no hope for the rest of us, is there? If the same people who have all the power and all the money and all the authority are also going to win every contest, what’s the point of going on for the rest of us? So the underdog story gives all of us who are not on top hope. Story of Our Lives

Clerks of Parliament

“My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.”

- Anton Chekhov

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When Fires Came to Olympic city of Sydney

"I have no desire to prove anything by it. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance."

~Fred Astaire, Steps in Time

Sweltering one minute, cold the next. A wild fire, with flames as high as a ''power pole'', ripped through a car park in Sydney's Olympic Park on Sunday, destroying more than 40 cars that were heard exploding, causing authorities to evacuate more than 1500 people from the aquatic centre in Homebush. Homebush Fire

A perfect critic looks at every poem on its own terms, but not all terms are equal."

~ William Logan, "Against Aesthetics" (The New Criterion, Sept. 2013)

Terry has  a peek at two short excerpts from the libretti for The King's Man and Danse Russe, my two most recent operatic collaborations with Paul Moravec, which are being produced as a double bill in Louisville this weekend by Kentucky Opera.

The first number, "I Was Born on a Sunday," is an arietta from The King's Man that is sung by Benjamin Franklin, who is attempting to explain to William, his illegitimate son, why he is at one and the same time a "Puritan prig" (in William's contemptuous phrase) and a carefully discreet sexual libertine:

FRANKLIN I was born on a Sunday 

In the shadow of an angry God, 

Baptized on the day of my birth 

Into a gray, Puritan life 

To save me from the fires of hell. 

They believed that a child born on a Sunday 

Must be a child of Satan. 

This was my youth, 

From the Puritans of Boston 

To the Quakers of Philadelphia: 

From same to same, 

Gray to gray, 

Hard work, cold baths, 

Hatred of the joys of the flesh. 

Damn it all! 

God damn it all! 

No God of love 

Would make such a place, 

Cold as ice, 

Sharp as a knife, 

No joy... 

No life.

PS: Media Dragon reached half a devil posts many swelting posts ago this is number 4444 so another 2222 posts and we will reach that dangerous number of biblical proportions. However, whatever you do do not mention Cold Water in front of people where Cold Rivers meet - SnowTown.

Popping the Question

“The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.”

― W.E.B. Du Bois

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Some proposals are perhaps better forgotten. The following unromantic, bizarre, poorly delivered or conceived proposals elicit reactions less like Molly Bloom’s orgasmically affirmative “Yes I will yes I will yes!” and more like this underwhelmed response to a lackluster offer in David Stacton’s A Fox Inside: “You might at least pretend…that I’m a person. After all, I move and talk like one the best way I can.” A Survey of Literature’s Non-Traditional Marriage Proposals

"It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style."

~Dashiell Hammett (interview,Washington Daily News, March 1956)

Mariana Mazzucato Stirring Ideas about Incentives

This is going to sound completely heretical to everything Forbes has stood for over 96 years (and The Economist for a few decades longer than that) but here goes: The real innovation engine in the global economy is not the entrepreneurial class blazing capitalist trails through the thicket of government red tape and taxation. 

No. The real engine of innovation is government.

That’s crazy, you say. One Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs is worth ten suits in D.C. or Brussels. If we left investment and risk capital to the state, all we’d get are bad bets such as Solyndra, Fisker Automotive and the Concorde.

Wrong, says economist Mariana Mazzucato, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex. In her new book. The Entrepreneurial State (adapted into a rousing TED talk delivered this week in Edinburgh), Mazzucato argues that long-term, patient government funding is an absolute prerequisite for breakthrough innovation.  

Critics would say that one shouldn’t create direct returns to the state because it is already getting its money back in taxes. But that argument, says Mazzucato, ignores the fact that tax avoidance and evasion are common and only getting worse. Recent research in the U.K. suggests that the country’s tax gap, or income not collected, is 120 billion GBP, roughly the same size as its national deficit.  Forbes at its best

 The only way to make growth ‘fairer’ is for policy makers to have a broader understanding of the role played by the state in the fundamental risk-taking needed for innovation. Entrepreneurial Sate

Beneficiaries of these investments include Apple: “The armed forces pioneered the Internet, GPS positioning and voice-activated ‘virtual assistants.’ They also provided much of the early funding for Silicon Valley. Academic scientists in publicly funded universities and labs developed the touchscreen and the HTML language. An obscure government body even lent Apple $500,000 before it went public.” They also include Google, which received early funding from the National Science Foundation. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies benefit from the $30 billion in annual funding for biomedical research from the National Institutes of Health.

A recent article in The Economist, reviewing a new book entitled “The Entrepreneurial State,” by Mariana Mazzucato of Sussex University in England, makes this explicit. And nowhere is this investment activity more influential than the United States, supposedly the cradle of unbridled individual enterprise.

Orange the Town of Many Colours

“Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.”

- Tom Clancy

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Shock reverberates through the writing and reading communities at the news of Tom Clancy’s death. Certainties of LifeRe ading literary fiction will make you more socially potent. It will. Studies show I know how you are Feeling as I read Imrich & Chekhov
Buzzfeed celebrates 14 books that probably rattled you as a child. Bohemian Child



Have I got a tax for you! Certainty of Taxes & Comedies

Even Bees Make Us Think

Before he retired to his room, “not to sleep, but to howl to myself in the silence of horror,” he said: “How everything has crumbled, how everything has dissolved, how all the reference points have shifted, how all fixity has moved, how nothing exists anymore, how nothing exists, you see, how all the religions and all the irreligions and the protracted absurdities of all forms of worship have turned into nothing, nothing at all, you see, how belief and unbelief no longer exist, how science, modern science, how the stumbling blocks, the millennial courts, have all been thrown out and ushered out and blown out into the air, how all of it is now just so much air … Listen, it’s all air, all concepts are air, all points of reference are air, everything is just air …” And he said: “Frozen air, everything just so much frozen air …”
~ From non fiction Cold River courtesy of Thomas Bernhard’s novel Frost Self-Portrait as Catastrophic Success

Take bees, for example. If bees die out, we’ll see die-outs in plants like apple trees and onions that depend on bees for fertilization. Animals that eat the plants that bees fertilize might also go extinct. So famine isn’t just about humans going hungry for a season — it’s about food webs getting frayed, and the network effects of species loss. What writers need to know-about mass extinction