this is life . which means somebody is always going to lose. make sure it's not you . lao tzu on life: on greed ... you leave your cow and you run after a snake for meat on integrity ... what you do in black hair you will eat in white hair on looking for “signs” ... a night without roosters will still end on discretion ... where there are many chickens, do not spill maize on bragging ... the escaped snake is always the one that the hunter sa...
... things that need to be banned in order to achieve peace : newspapers no journalists to stir the pot. yeah. that’s the answer. don’t let us see it coming. that will fix the problem. movies what ?. well, they were decent enough to delay releasing a big-budget bomb flick after 9/11. and nobody actually imitates all that stuff anyway, right ? although, there was something to be said for the ‘good old days’ (back when award winning actors and world leaders w...
by stefanie olsen. staff writer, cnet news.com . Link software developer dave winer disabled roughly 3,000 web logs from his former company this weekend, a move that drew sharp criticism from some people in the publishing community. winer, a champion of blogging and the publishing format really simple syndication (rss), said in an interview that he had to move the web logs, or blogs, to his personal server from userland, a software company he founded in 1998 and left two years a...
as much as i am all for allowing anybody at all to have their say, i draw my personal line at seeing genuine articles getting spammed out of the forums by 6 or 8 straight posts from an overzealous biznet promoter or a dodgy ‘importer’. i just scanned the first (full) page of the ‘business’ forum, and we have a courier service, a ‘trade guru’, a ‘make money online for no investment’, a ‘usa import/exporter’ and fourteen posts from the same biznet marketer. there are articles in t...
slightly off-centre of the city of sydney lies a bustling residential suburb named ‘ camperdown ’, which is also home to a large university and public park. somewhat ironically, it is here that elders of australias indigenous population have established a “tent embassy” as the base of a “sovereign government " planned to 'take over the ruling of australia'. sydney lord-mayor clover moore allowed the establishment of the "embassy", believing it's aim was to draw peaceful attention t...
ok, to distract us from the more serious goings-on, this 'friday five' will be a way for us to dream about who we might have 'been' once life is all over for us. i know it sounds a little kooky, but bear with me. i don't mean 'get all morbid and melancholy', i mean imagine the time, whenever it is, and dream for a moment about where you'd like to 'be' as a person by then, and what you'd hope to have inspired in those you leave behind. imagining a confronting thing in an enlightening ...
part of a recent article of mine briefly touched on how many points it is possible to accumulate via launching a deliberately 'toxic' or 'inflammatory' post, then sitting back to watch the score go up via a hundred outraged people promptly arriving to announce that the post is offensive/stupid/racist/sexist/blah blah. it was discussed that, instead of adding fuel to the fire in a 'toxic' post and rewarding it with points at the same time, we could simply bypass it and go instead to the 'n...
the 'personals' section in my local newspaper is a guilty indulgence of mine. i don't feel guilty because i read it mind you. i feel guilty because i laugh at it . ok, not only do i laugh at it, i often find myself gripped in uncontrollable honking spasms of mirth that threaten to result in me peeing myself. or puking. or possibly both . some months after i moved here, i chatted casually with a clever woman around my age in the grocer. she happened to mention that she was single,...
the world needs a suggestion box. i figure here is as good a place as any to start one up. so, unfold your torn half-sheet of scrap a4 paper and scrawl down a message to the world. the idea being to blame nobody in particular, just give the world a hint at what it might do to sort things out. i'll go first ... dear world, i think it would be wonderful if everybody living in you saw each other as part of the one giant family (i warned you. first stop, idealism central). ......
i have been giving some mental airplay to my "failures" lately. i find it strange how we all tend to carry around a big bag of 'regrets' that is full of our 'mistakes', our 'miscalculations', the chances we didn't take, the words we didn't say ... our 'what if's' now imagine for a moment that you didn't have them. any of them. you never did anything 'wrong'. you always knew exactly what to do. hindsight was yours, and it never failed you. you lived your entire life, and you nev...
i have been giving some mental airplay to my "failures" lately. i find it strange how we all tend to carry around a big bag of 'regrets' that is full of our 'mistakes', our 'miscalculations', the chances we didn't take, the words we didn't say ... our 'what if's' now imagine for a moment that you didn't have them. any of them. you never did anything 'wrong'. you always knew exactly what to do. hindsight was yours, and it never failed you. you lived your entire life, and you nev...
sick of difficult self-help books that expect results ?. (nasty concept, that ... reward for effort) ... well, never fear, mig is here, and failing is easy . anybody can do it. i've done it heaps of times in the past, so i thought i'd save you the time and show you how to do it step-by-step. ... ready ? ... ok, these were my top 10 life mistakes ... (or) 'how to be a failure': 1/ have your entire emotional existence tied to something as unreliable as anoth...
i used to have a really cool job. but rather than whine over that, i’ll instead share one of the better experiences i had back when i was a card-carrying member of the human race ... i had the pleasure of meeting an amazingly talented young australian band, and since they were just finding their feet, they actually had some time to make friends with l’il ol’ me !. (fancy that !). as is my way, i interfered in their stuff (and they didn’t even mind !). they let me help write a little sto...
we have the, er, honour of living some 20 minutes away from russell crowe. this was something i actually did not know when we moved here. it did not, however, take me long to find out. just weeks into our residence here, my (visiting) mother ran shrieking at me, local paper held aloft like a trophy , gesturing wildly towards the opened 'entertainment' section and making loud noises about "seeing russell's band". needless to say, this excursion did not happen. it's not that i have anythi...
the following five statements are amongst those i read/heard in the media this week. taken out of context this way, they represent questions all of their own. so, would you say the following statements are TRUE or FALSE, and why ? 1/ abortion should remain a womans' right 2/ war is wrong regardless of the circumstances 3/ prison is the best solution for the rehabilitation of career criminals 4/ any couple who are in love should have ...