Friday, January 8, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN (Friday, January 8, 2010)
(1)- RECORD FLIGHT -- Only one man — Japanese paper airplane virtuoso Takuo Toda — has ever come close to breaking the 30-second barrier. He set a world record for a hand-launched plane made with only paper, but fell short of the 30-second mark.

(2)- FRENCH RESISTANCE -- There is a prevalent misconception that the French exaggerate their glorious Resistance exploits-everyone claiming a "resister" in the family-in order to gloss over the darker aspects of the Occupation.

(3)- JOHN MACKEY – He's the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market. The right-wing hippie is a rare bird, and it’s fair to say that most of Whole Foods’ shoppers have trouble conceiving of it.

(4)- IT IS WHAT IT IS -- There are good reasons to expect that bosses can't help but be incompetent - adrift on a sea of troubles they neither understand nor can control. Better to take pity on the poor souls...

(5)- BLYTON -- British children had been devouring Blyton’s work since the early 1920s. A poll identified Blyton – who produced more than 700 books and 5,000 short stories during her 45-year career – as Britain’s most beloved writer of all time.

(6)- WINE THOUGHTS – Roger Scruton writes a mostly light-hearted book about his insistence that wine is historically and morally one of the foundations of civilization and gives a new meaning to the term “serious drinker”.

(7)- BOOK REVIEW -- Drawing on a knowledge of musical history distinguished by both depth and breadth, Daniel Snowman manages to keep four kinds of analysis going in a mutually supportive way: political, social, cultural and financial.

(8)- CONSIDER THIS -- Every ten years or thereabouts, the scholar of velvet revolutions, Timothy Garton Ash, collects between hard covers his essays and analytical reportage of the previous decade. Facts Are Subversive is the latest.

(9)- DARWIN SHOW -- It has been history’s biggest birthday party. On or around 12 February 2009 alone – the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, ‘Darwin Day’ – there were more than 750 commemorative events in at least 45 countries...

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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