KIDS AND STUFF
G'day guys,
Time for some light relief. Today I present some photographs of kids and animals taken by some very clever people. Some might make you smile.
I'm ...
Think about this!
25 February 2014 - ERICA JONG
.gif)
ERICA JONG
G'day folks,
Welcome to a post about a well-known author and poet - ERICA JONG.
Erica Jong is an American
author of fictional writing and a well-known poet. She was born on 26th of
March 1942 in New York. She was the middle child of Seymore Mann, a businessman
of Polish Jewish ancestry and Eda Mirsky who was a painter and a textile designer
by profession. Erica married four times. Her personal life reflected in many of
her works including ‘Fear of Flying’ in which the narrator seemed very much
similar to that of her second husband. Her marriage was depicted in her novel
‘How to Save Your Own Life’. She is currently in a marital relation with
Kenneth David Burrows, who is a litigation attorney. Her existing matrimony was
illustrated by her in Talk magazine.
Jong went to the prestigious New York’s public High School of Music and Art in the 1950s; her main subjects being art and writing. She had a profound interest in reading, especially Russian novels, and writing poems. After completing her studies at Barnard College, Jong had wanted to become a doctor, “to support herself while she wrote on the side, ‘like William Carlos Williams’ she mentioned in a New York Times Book Review article. However she majored in writing and literature, studying with biographer James Clifford and poet Robert Pack. She received her Master’s degree in 18th century English Literature from Columbia University in 1965. Displaying her distinctive, ultimate energy for the arts, Jong also edited the Barnard literary magazine and created poetry programs for the Columbia University campus radio station.
Erica Jong used her strong writing skills to give women an authoritative and rational voice, portraying the female sensuality with an audacious manner, something that no woman author had ever done before. Her first novel, ‘Fear of Flying’ created frenzy among the general public as people were not used to such display of the women’s sexuality. Her main character Isadora Wing also plays a vital part in three successive novels—‘How to Save Your Own Life’, ‘Parachutes and Kisses’, and ‘Any Woman’s Blues’. Her mastery of eighteenth-century British literature is exhibited in three of her renowned novels; ‘Fanny’, ‘Shylock’s Daughter’, and ‘Sappho’s Leap’. Her latest book, an account of her life as a writer, ‘Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life’, was published in March 2006 and became a national bestseller the world over.
Her total publications are twenty which include 8 novels, 6 volumes of poetry and 6 non fictional books along with several articles written for various magazines like New York Times, the Sunday Times of London, Elle, Vogue and the New York Times Book Review.
Erica Jones has not always been appreciated by the critics because of the bold nature of her writings but Jones is more than satisfied with her life. “What I have fought for in my life,” Jong writes in her book ‘Fear of Fifty’, “and in my books — irony, the double vision that sees good and evil as flip sides of the same human coin, the integration of body and brain, sensuality and spirituality, honeyed voluptuousness and philosophical rigor – these are the things most endangered today.” Jones believes in revealing the needs and desires of women. “I’m always asked in seminars to stand for contemporary womanhood,” she told the Washington Post. “And I’m glad to do it.”
Jong went to the prestigious New York’s public High School of Music and Art in the 1950s; her main subjects being art and writing. She had a profound interest in reading, especially Russian novels, and writing poems. After completing her studies at Barnard College, Jong had wanted to become a doctor, “to support herself while she wrote on the side, ‘like William Carlos Williams’ she mentioned in a New York Times Book Review article. However she majored in writing and literature, studying with biographer James Clifford and poet Robert Pack. She received her Master’s degree in 18th century English Literature from Columbia University in 1965. Displaying her distinctive, ultimate energy for the arts, Jong also edited the Barnard literary magazine and created poetry programs for the Columbia University campus radio station.
Erica Jong used her strong writing skills to give women an authoritative and rational voice, portraying the female sensuality with an audacious manner, something that no woman author had ever done before. Her first novel, ‘Fear of Flying’ created frenzy among the general public as people were not used to such display of the women’s sexuality. Her main character Isadora Wing also plays a vital part in three successive novels—‘How to Save Your Own Life’, ‘Parachutes and Kisses’, and ‘Any Woman’s Blues’. Her mastery of eighteenth-century British literature is exhibited in three of her renowned novels; ‘Fanny’, ‘Shylock’s Daughter’, and ‘Sappho’s Leap’. Her latest book, an account of her life as a writer, ‘Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life’, was published in March 2006 and became a national bestseller the world over.
Her total publications are twenty which include 8 novels, 6 volumes of poetry and 6 non fictional books along with several articles written for various magazines like New York Times, the Sunday Times of London, Elle, Vogue and the New York Times Book Review.
Erica Jones has not always been appreciated by the critics because of the bold nature of her writings but Jones is more than satisfied with her life. “What I have fought for in my life,” Jong writes in her book ‘Fear of Fifty’, “and in my books — irony, the double vision that sees good and evil as flip sides of the same human coin, the integration of body and brain, sensuality and spirituality, honeyed voluptuousness and philosophical rigor – these are the things most endangered today.” Jones believes in revealing the needs and desires of women. “I’m always asked in seminars to stand for contemporary womanhood,” she told the Washington Post. “And I’m glad to do it.”
Clancy's comment: Well done, Erica! I just love women who are right out there.
I'm ...
Think about this!
24 February 2014 - WHALES
WHALES
G'day folks,
today I feature another wonderful species - WHALES. Believe it or not, one of the few things on my bucket list is to be up close and very personal with some whales - camera at hand of course. Anyway, here is some interesting information on these amazing mammals.
Whales are large, intelligent, aquatic mammals.
They breathe air through blowhole(s) into lungs (unlike fish who breathe using
gills). Whales have sleek, streamlined bodies that move easily through the
water. They are the only mammals, other than manatees
(seacows), that live their entire lives in the water, and the only mammals that
have adapted to life in the open oceans.
Like all
mammals:
- Whales breathe air into lungs,
- Whales have hair (although they have a lot less than land mammals, and have almost none as adults),
- Whales are warm-blooded (they maintain a high body temperature),
- Whales have mammary glands with which they nourish their young,
- Whales have a four-chambered heart.
SIZE
The
biggest whale is the blue
whale, which
grows to be about 94 feet (29 m) long - the height of a 9-story building.
These enormous animals eat about 4 tons of tiny krill each day, obtained by filter
feeding through baleen. Adult blue whales have no predators except man.
The smallest whale is the dwarf sperm whale which as an adult is only 8.5 feet (2.6 m) long. |
TWO TYPES OF CETACEANS
Cetaceans include the whales, dolphins and porpoises. There are over 75 species of Cetaceans. Whales belong to the order Cetacea (from the Greek word "ketos" which means whale).
SWIMMING
AND OTHER WATER ACTIVITIES
Whales
have a streamlined shape and almost no hair as adults (it would cause drag
while swimming). Killer
whales and
Shortfin Pilot whales are the fastest, swimming up to 30 miles per hour (48
kph).
|
MIGRATION
Many
ceteaceans, especially baleen whales, migrate over very long distances each
year. They travel, sometimes in groups (pods), from cold-water feeding
grounds to warm-water breeding grounds.
|
SOCIAL BEHAVIOR
Cetaceans have very strong social ties. The strongest social ties are between mother and calf. A social group of whales is called a pod. Baleen whales travel alone or in small pods. The toothed whales travel in large, sometimes stable pods. The toothed whales frequently hunt their prey in groups, migrate together, and share care of their young. Cetaceans give birth to live young which are nourished with milk from their mothers - they don't lay eggs. Cetaceans breed seasonally, usually in warm tropical waters, and females usually have one calf every 1-3 years. The gestation times range from 9-18 months. Whale calves can swim at or soon after birth. Mother whales care for their young for an extended period of time, usually at least a year, feeding them milk and protecting them.
WHALE SONGS
Complex whales songs can be heard for miles under the water. The humpback's song can last for 30 minutes. Baleen whales sing low-frequency songs; toothed whales emit whistles and clicks that they use for echolocation The songs are thought to be used in attracting mates, to keep track of offspring, and for the toothed whales, to locate prey.
Now, you might like to watch an amazing video, captured by the Great Whale Conservancy. Some guys save the life of a humpback whale that is trapped in fishing net:
Clancy's comment: Truly amazing mammals, eh? Gotta get near them and take hundreds of photographs before I head to the big library in the sky.
I'm ...
Think about this!
23 February 2014 - BOOKS YOU WANTED
BOOKS YOU WANTED
G'day folks,
Welcome to a feature post from David Streitfeld, courtesy of The New York Times - BOOKS YOU WANTED.
"Anyone can publish a book
these days, and just about everyone does. But if the supply of writers is
increasing at a velocity unknown in literary history, the supply of readers is
not. That is making competition for attention rather fierce. One result:
ceaseless self-promotion by eager beginners.
Another consequence is
writers’ thirst for more data on how they are being read, so they can shape
their books to please their readers more. This is something novelists have
always done, using sources like fan mail, personal appearances, reviews and
sales. Technology is starting to give them data that is much more precise, and
thus potentially more helpful.
“If you write as a business, you have to sell books,” said Quinn Loftis, a very successful self-published writer for teenagers. “To do that, you have to cater to the market. I don’t want to write a novel because I want to write it. I want to write it because people will enjoy it.”
But my article last week outlining how the digital book subscription services Oyster and Scribd plan to collect and share data with writers like Ms. Loftis resulted in little enthusiasm, at least among potential readers. Nearly all the comments on the article expressed dismay about where the trend could go.
“This generation will get to read the books they really, really like,” wrote A. Raja Hornstein of San Rafael, Calif. “Any thinkers who are unpopular or outside the box or, well, creative, won’t be read. The next generation will get to read the books written by the vapid, money-hungry writers of this generation who never read any creative works. In a few generations, there will be no new ideas, only popular ones. But there will be lots of new problems and nobody smart enough to solve them. Way to go!”
Another commentator quoted the poet Joseph Brodsky, who wrote that “in cultural matters, it is not demand that creates supply, it is the other way around. You read Dante because he wrote ‘The Divine Comedy,’ not because you felt the need for him: you would not have been able to conjure either the man or the poem.”
Brodsky was a Nobel laureate who famously said, as he was being tried by a Soviet court for being a “parasite,” that his gift for poetry came from God. That comment helped get him sentenced to five years of hard labor. Like most poets, even prize-winning ones, he never had many readers, and could not have conceived of them influencing his work.
But now it will be a matter of public knowledge exactly how devoted your readers are. In data shared by Oyster, which started this fall, Mark Helprin’s 1983 novel, “Winter’s Tale,” was finished by 60 percent of its readers. His latest novel, the less rapturously received “In Sunlight and in Shadow,” is finished only 24 percent of the time.
An Oyster spokeswoman said,
rather surprisingly, that the service was discovering that “everyone is
nostalgic about the classics from A.P. English, but no one actually finishes
them.”
“The Last of the Mohicans” and “Pride and Prejudice” are both among the most opened books on Oyster but are finished less than 1 percent of the time. This is easy to believe with “The Last of the Mohicans,” but not with “Pride and Prejudice.” Maybe men look through Jane Austen before going on dates but never reach the end.
Or maybe with most books, even works of fiction, a taste is enough. “The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll,” a major work by the 1972 Nobel laureate from Germany, has been started by over a hundred readers on Oyster but has yet to be finished by any of them.
KAsdo, a reader from Texas, might have been thinking of writers like Böll when he commented, “I can imagine how discouraging it must feel to be an author who is not being read. It makes a lot of sense for those unread authors to migrate to a system like the one described in this article. It enables them, perhaps, to understand both the weaknesses and strengths in their own writing, both of which can only help them to write better.”
“If you write as a business, you have to sell books,” said Quinn Loftis, a very successful self-published writer for teenagers. “To do that, you have to cater to the market. I don’t want to write a novel because I want to write it. I want to write it because people will enjoy it.”
But my article last week outlining how the digital book subscription services Oyster and Scribd plan to collect and share data with writers like Ms. Loftis resulted in little enthusiasm, at least among potential readers. Nearly all the comments on the article expressed dismay about where the trend could go.
“This generation will get to read the books they really, really like,” wrote A. Raja Hornstein of San Rafael, Calif. “Any thinkers who are unpopular or outside the box or, well, creative, won’t be read. The next generation will get to read the books written by the vapid, money-hungry writers of this generation who never read any creative works. In a few generations, there will be no new ideas, only popular ones. But there will be lots of new problems and nobody smart enough to solve them. Way to go!”
Another commentator quoted the poet Joseph Brodsky, who wrote that “in cultural matters, it is not demand that creates supply, it is the other way around. You read Dante because he wrote ‘The Divine Comedy,’ not because you felt the need for him: you would not have been able to conjure either the man or the poem.”
Brodsky was a Nobel laureate who famously said, as he was being tried by a Soviet court for being a “parasite,” that his gift for poetry came from God. That comment helped get him sentenced to five years of hard labor. Like most poets, even prize-winning ones, he never had many readers, and could not have conceived of them influencing his work.
But now it will be a matter of public knowledge exactly how devoted your readers are. In data shared by Oyster, which started this fall, Mark Helprin’s 1983 novel, “Winter’s Tale,” was finished by 60 percent of its readers. His latest novel, the less rapturously received “In Sunlight and in Shadow,” is finished only 24 percent of the time.
“The Last of the Mohicans” and “Pride and Prejudice” are both among the most opened books on Oyster but are finished less than 1 percent of the time. This is easy to believe with “The Last of the Mohicans,” but not with “Pride and Prejudice.” Maybe men look through Jane Austen before going on dates but never reach the end.
Or maybe with most books, even works of fiction, a taste is enough. “The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll,” a major work by the 1972 Nobel laureate from Germany, has been started by over a hundred readers on Oyster but has yet to be finished by any of them.
KAsdo, a reader from Texas, might have been thinking of writers like Böll when he commented, “I can imagine how discouraging it must feel to be an author who is not being read. It makes a lot of sense for those unread authors to migrate to a system like the one described in this article. It enables them, perhaps, to understand both the weaknesses and strengths in their own writing, both of which can only help them to write better.”
Clancy's comment: Many thanks, David. So, what influences you with books? Do you finish the ones you start? Guess what I do when I read a great book? I pencil the date on the inside cover and give it a star-rating. That way, next time I rummage through my study looking for a good read, I know what is worth reading, and how long since I last read it. Any book that does not warrant a star-rating goes out!
I'm ...
Think about this!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)