Link Gallivanting

I came across this website entirely by accident and wonder how I didn’t know of it earlier: Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate. It’s a manually compiled and updated catalogue of “the most intelligent, provocative, and illuminating news stories, critical reviews, political essays, and commentaries published online” and is a service of the The Chronicle of Higher Education (US).

The site is updated six times a week and to someone who loves eclectic information, it’s a mine of still unexplored links, unread articles, new ideas, book reviews, loud opinions, and interesting insights. The sidebar of links to online mags and newspapers is very useful, though I wouldn’t recommend visiting this site if you do not have time to wastespend gambolling through the WWW.

Another addictive site, recommended by a friend a couple of days after I heard of it on the radio, is Ted.com, a collection of free lectures you can download and view at your leisure. Some lectures are 4 minutes while others are 30 minutes long, and the topics run from “life lessons” to physics to astronomy to the environment to music and design. I guarantee you’d find something interesting to watch on this site. If you have iTunes, the iTunes University has a ready link to Ted lectures, as well as a buffett spread of video and audio teachings direct from universities such as LSE, Yale, MIT. It’s a great site for part-time scholars and information-hoarders. Makes a great research tool if you manage to find the correct topics.

Filed under: Collectibles, Playing Favourites, Tech , arts and letters, ted.com, websites

Selamat Awal Muharram

It’s the last day of 1429Hijrah today, with sunset marking the start of the first day in the new year in the Islamic calendar, 1,430 years approximately after The Prophet’s and his followers’ migration (the hijrah) from the increasingly hostile city of Mecca to the more welcoming Medina.

This year, the new Islamic year coincides with the Gregorian New Year (2009), with Chinese New Year barely a month after. So it seems like a good time for fresh starts and new beginnings, for wiping slates clean, bringing closures to festering issues, discarding negatives and bringing forward only the good and beautiful.

New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday. 
Charles Lamb, an English essayist who lived in the 18th century and died in the 19th, and so could be forgiven for using the masculine to mean men and women
(Quote lifted from quotegarden.com)

Unfortunately, this new year is marred by violent attacks by Israel on the hapless Palestinians, on the heels of an inhumane siege. Hundreds of Palestinians will not be able to greet the New Year with their families while scores of others will be spending the new year in overcrowded hospitals where medical supplies are never enough. The reports from the newswires claim most of the dead and wounded are uniformed security officers of Hamas, but that’s impossible to believe, given that a hundred tonnes of bombs were dropped.

It’s a cruel end to 1429H/2008 and a ruthless start to 1430H/2009. Given that the international community did nothing to end the siege and have done nothing these past years, I don’t expect much but verbal protests. I shouldn’t be too surprised, after what I’ve observed in 2008, at unfortunately closer range. A lot of seemingly decent people perversely enjoy, or are indifferent to, other people’s sufferings (see Roman Holiday).

Let’s see how the New Hope of America (and the World, Mr. Obama, the World), Barack Obama, will deal with the latest development in Gaza.

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in.  A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. 
Bill Vaughan, American columnist (lifted from quotegarden, again)

The Muslims greet the end of one year with a prayer and welcome the new year with another prayer. The prayer for the end of the year seeks forgiveness and blessings for actions and deeds of the past, while the prayer for the new year seeks protection from all that is bad in the next twelve months.

That seems to be a good way to say Adios to the old and to seek help for what is coming.

So, Salam Maal Hijrah to all Muslims, and a Good New Year to all. 

God bless, to all the good people I know are still out there.

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.
Oprah Winfrey (ibid)

Filed under: Collectibles, Islam, Newsprint, Personal Note, World , doa, Islam, muharram, new year, palestine, World

Readers and Writers in Residence

I caught The Business Traveller on CNN today and was tickled pink by the segment which featured what must be a new career niche for writers: Bedtime Reader. A hotel in London is offering the live reading services of their Writer-In-Residence for customers who request for the service. That’s right. This writer will show up at a guest’s bedroom in his pajamas, and read from a book the guest selects. He’ll shuffle off when guests fall asleep, I guess. I wouldn’t be comfortable having a complete stranger read a book to me in a strange city, but it sounds like a wonderful way to earn money: getting paid to read and write. Hmmm.

Speaking of Writers in Residence, Shakespeare and Co, an antique bookstore in (where else) Paris, offers around six Writers-In-Residence places for aspiring writers. Among the warren of bookshelves the bookstore has sited six beds for wannabe (or present) writers and what is required of the writers in return is that they write (but of course) and read – yes read – a book a day. Sounds heavenly, if you don’t mind tourists and customers wandering in and out of your “bedroom” through opening hours (and sharing toilets)! Anyway, here’s a good, if dated, primer of more conventional writers-in-residence programmes in London.

The show also takes an enticing look at some of the world’s best bookstores. London’s most famous, Foyles, is listed among them but I remember this bookstore as being difficult to navigate, categorising books as it did then (in the 1990s) by publisher instead of author. From what’s written on their website, the store has had a huge transformation and now instead of housing books in overflowing, crammed quarters, the store has lifts, a cafe and even an art gallery. It even offers books for sale over the Internet. It’s good to know a century-old bookstore can keep up with the times.

You know, after watching Richard Quest and reading these articles, I am overcome by the urge to visit London and Paris…..

Filed under: Books, Collectibles, Writing , bedtime reading, bookstore, reading, shakespeare and company, writers-in-residence, Writing

60 Years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works.” Eleanor Roosevelt

10th December 2008 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since December last year, the Every Human Has Rights campaign has been running, with a different theme each month, and highlighting the various worldwide efforts to remind governments and individuals of the UN Charter, and to push/agitate for compliance.

If you haven’t yet, please, visit the website, read the Declaration, and give your pledge. There is even a plain language version, which strips away the legalese, and makes the Declaration understandable to children.

There is a good article on Malaysiakini, which revisits the human rights issue, and reminds us that:

…rights are universal. Rights do not depend on membership of a particular community or citizenship in a certain state. They are not derived from a social contract.

Rather, because rights are universal, they are attributes of all human beings. Indeed, they are part of what makes us human. Each of us may enjoy rights. Those who exercise power may do so only in limited ways. The limits are set by rights.

..the Universal Declaration marked a giant step forward, as the world’s governments – with abstentions from the Soviet bloc states, Saudi Arabia, and apartheid South Africa, but with no votes in opposition – agreed that rights should take precedence over state power.

Today, the most effective force promoting human rights is global public opinion, informed and mobilised by the large and growing non-governmental human rights movement, which, as in the recent war between Georgia and Russia, has focused international attention on violations of the laws of armed conflict that protect non-combatants.

There are many countries in the world, including the US, that continue to flout the Declaration they pledged in 1948. But, as the author Aryeh Neier reminds us, “without the legitimacy derived from the Universal Declaration and its role in promoting compliance, the non-governmental human rights movement could not have developed into a global force.“

So, head over to the Human Rights website, and give your pledge. To date, only 43,000 plus people have signed the declaration, a paltry number. What is happening to your brothers and sisters, either in your own country or outside, can happen to you, and nothing would hurt more than to have other people close their eyes to your pleas for help or even, God forbid, endorse as well as support the violations.

Filed under: Collectibles, Malaysiana, Newsprint, Personal Note, government , government, human rights, sticky post, UN, war

Non Sequitors

(Alternative Title: When You Are Low on Energy and Time, This is What You Post)

I found this months ago and while I am not a communicator per se, a number of the items listed below (bolded) strike a chord. From a communicator’s blog:

You know you’re a communicator when…

You put together a “you know you’re a communicator when…” list while sitting in traffic in a hot taxi cab.

You have this silly little grin on your face when you hear people say on the elevator: “that was an AWESOME speech (or e-mail) from the CEO”—because more than likely, you or one of your colleagues wrote it.

You’re willing to put your marriage on the line by continually correcting your spouse’s grammar.

After 10 years in the profession, your family and friends still don’t understand what you do.

There’s nothing better in the morning than your coffee and getting your news fix for the day.

You ponder for hours the irony of the phrase “elevator speech,” given that most of the time in and around elevators, no one says a word or make a sound.

You still get nervous anytime you have to launch a company-wide e-mail.

You start a family newsletter, quit doing it after two months…then start it up again a few months later. It’s a continual cycle.

You take the photos that “supermom” e-mails to all the preschool parents and create a video slideshow with background music and cool transitions and send it back out to one-up her.

I will also add the following:

• You get excited at finding typos in published novels and magazines 
• You don’t notice scenery or graphics but instead keep your eyes peeled for errors on roadsigns and notices
• You evaluate the worthiness of an organisation based on the grammatical correctness of its written materials
• You are always, always finding text to amend on written copy, and get near heart attacks when typos and errors slip through (and they usually do, slippery eels that they are)

Well, there’s always room for Grammatical Correctness, one hopes, as Political Correctness gets shooed out of society’s doors.

Anyway, before you heave a sigh of relief, this entry is not done yet as I have to make up for lost posts (ideas swirl in the head, indignant narrative spurt out of the little grey cells, but unfortunately not when the fingers are on the keyboard).

Ms Bibliobibuli Sharon, already an enticing read, had to reel me in further by posting a link to this fun tool called The Typealyser which will read your blog and decide which personality type it belongs to. All you have to do is to type in your blog URL. Go on, try it. I did, several times, and each time, got The Haberdashery classified as:

INTP – The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications. They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

As I said, The Typealyser is a playful vanity outlet for bloggers and their blogs, though am not sure if The Haberdashery agrees to the above, or if she can preen with it.

Filed under: Collectibles, Personal Note , communicator, fun, grammar, language, personality types, typealyser

A Couple of Quotes

Najah’s latest post is making me revisit these quotes below, which have been sandwiched in between the pages of my moleskine for months. While the situation in the news clipping is of indifference to tragedy, the quotes below are a good reminder of the danger of indifference.

A quote attributed to ”The Winslow Boy” (1948):

“Once allowed through indifference, one act of injustice, the slow poison of indifference, by being convenient, may cripple our rights and liberties.”

and one by a well-known survivor of the Holocaust:

“For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

What’s worse than indifference, though, is when pleasure is derived from someone else’s pain, even when there is knowledge that the pain was deliberately and wrongfully inflicted. Would that make bystanders, willing accomplices?

Filed under: Collectibles , quote

Office Humour

When there’s nothing much to smile about, at work, I turn to:

Dilbert.

 

A creation of Scott Adams, the history of Dilbert could serve as a sort of inspiration to cubicle inhabitants everywhere. Essentially, Dilbert was created by Scott when he himself was a cubicle-ite, and was an amalgamation of his co-workers. He used Dilbert for his work presentations then was encouraged by the response to try Dilbert for syndication. United Media signed him up and in 1989, Dilbert was launched. Scott still held his day job until 1995, and his work experience (he worked from 1979 to 1995), I believe, is what makes Dilbert and his experiences immediately recognisable to office workers all around the world. So who says all that nastiness you endure at work can’t translate to money, huh?

Dilbert now appears in 2,000 newspapers in 70 countries, and the Dilbert web site, which is fantastic by the way, was the first syndicated comic strip to go online in 1995.

Our Star carries Dilbert in its tech section on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but in black and white. A pity.

At any rate, while you laugh at Dilbert and co (and many times thank the Lord that you do not have a Boss like his), some of his characters and stories will eerily remind you of real life. There is truth in art. And actually, this Dilbert comic strip below is based on a true story:

This guy got fired for posting a Dilbert strip that described managers as “drunken lemurs”; Scott Adams knew about it and created a series of strips around the incident (as above). Not only that, Scott also posted the guy’s resume on his blog, and voila – the guy has now found a new position with one of Adams’s fans. The article quotes Adams as giving this advice though:

“Stick with ‘Garfield.’ No one ever got fired for loving lasagna.”

Heh. I shall continue loving my Daily Dilbert.

Filed under: Collectibles, Playing Favourites, Reads, Work & Productivity , humour, office humour, work