Friday, January 15, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN (Friday, January 15, 2010)
(9)- WHAT'S YOURS IS MINE -- A gang armed with kalashnikovs rifles and explosives has stolen several million euros from an armoured van which was transporting the cash to a bank in the French village of Gemenos, near Aubagne.

(1)- OOOOOPS! -- A Bavarian police officer is suspended after he was caught ringing in the New Year with a quickie in a Baroque church during the morning prayer service. Congregation members heard sinful noises coming from the organ loft in the 18th-century church.

(2)- THRIFTY ECONOMISTS -- Some of the world's most famous economists were famously frugal. Milton Friedman, the late Nobel laureate, routinely returned reporters' calls collect. In a new book children of economists recall how tightfisted their parents were.

(3)- WAY BACK WHEN -- Two neuroscientists say that a now-extinct race of humans had big eyes, child-like faces, and an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens.

(4)- DEGREE WOES -- What almost no prospective graduate students can understand is the extent to which doctoral education in the humanities socializes idealistic, naïve, and psychologically vulnerable people into a profession with a very clear set of values.

(5)- DUBAI -- Until 2009, all a global citizen really needed to know about Dubai, it seemed, was a statistic about construction equipment. According to nobody in particular, 25 per cent of the world’s tower cranes resided in the booming emirate.

(6)- CLICHES -- We've witnessed the emergence of a whole new cache of them: some just catching on and some that have passed their sell-by date and should be cashed-out now that the decade is closing down. And one that I will nominate as the catchphrase of the decade.

(7)- BARBARA EHRENREICH -- In Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, she accuses positivity freaks of corrupting the media, infiltrating medical science, perverting religion, and destroying the economy.

(8)- JARON LANIER – He is best known as a pioneer of virtual reality and an early star of Wired magazine. He was the guy with the dreadlocks and the giant V.R. goggles perched on his forehead, the epitome of the hippie-shaman-guru strain in tech culture, who now laments the web.

(9)- MAN OF ALL SEASONS -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in 1533 was a genial man of no officious piety; a dutiful mayor of Bordeaux, unaggressive lord of his modest Périgordin manor, and a courtier without grand ambition. His essays advocated good-humoured acceptance of life's vagaries.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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