August 2012
104 posts
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Eventually Armstrong climbed down the lunar module’s ladder and set foot on the surface, a step guaranteed to put his name in every history book ever. And then he said either “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” or “that’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” The transmission was not clear and we were not sure we heard the word “a” before the word “man.”
Now we had problem and no time to think about it. Clearly, this was to be one of the most famous quotations in history and we had to get it right. More important at the moment, we had to be consistent. We could not have one news service say one thing, the other two something else, or have the New York Times have one version and the Washington Post another. Forget history, we had to deal with editors.
” —Neil Armstrong’s moon-landing quote: Did he say one small step for “a” man? - Slate Magazine
“…for the next 11 days, as we cheer Ellie Simmonds and Sarah Storey, learn the rules of goalball and boccia and sitting volleyball, watch blind people playing football by ear and touch, enjoy the visceral thrill of the wheelchair races…”
—Paralympic Games: opening ceremony brings Britain back to life
THE VEGETARIANA: Notorious spymaster becomes a dissident. →
nyr.kr
The most outspoken of the high-level “dissidents,” such as Yuval Diskin, who was the head of Shin Bet from 2005 to 2011, accuse Netanyahu and Barak of behaving with “messianic” fervor. “I have no trust in the current Israeli leadership,” Diskin told a public gathering recently, warning that “one of the results of an Israeli attack on Iran could be a dramatic acceleration of the Iranian program.” Earlier this month, Aharon Ze’evi Farkash, a former head of military intelligence, told the Jerusalem Post that an Israeli attack would lack legitimacy, unite a fractured Iranian leadership, and make it “clear that they need a bomb now so that we cannot attack them again.
in all my life, I have never encountered such an astounding act of trolling as the time I spent an hour and a half downloading what I thought was a Good Omens fanmix and then discovering that it was a Best of Queen album.
BBC Great Lives: Juvenal →
bbc.co.uk
Matthew Parris invites writer and comic Natalie Haynes to explain why her nomination for a Great Life is a Roman poet about whose life we know very little. Dr Llewelyn Morgan of Brasenose College Oxford helps her explain the enduring appeal of this scurrilous writer.
On the face of it, Juvenal’s life is hard to defend as a Great one. In the first place - as Dr Llewelyn Morgan, lecturer in Classical Languages and Literature at Oxford, confirms - we know very little about his life. He may have been a first-generation Roman from a Spanish family; he may have served in army; he may have been sent into exile. None of this can be confirmed. What we do know is that he uses his Satires to rant and rail against women, foreigners, gays and the upstarts who are all ruining Rome - which might make him hard to love. But Natalie Haynes, veteran of the stand-up circuit and now a writer and critic, finds Juvenal an indispensable part of her life and is very happy to explain why.
New Griffin boss wants the world as her stage →
smh.com.au
Lewis has been outspoken in calling for more ethnic diversity on main stages, once labelling Sydney theatre ”reprehensibly white”. She said yesterday it was still very much an issue, although things were shifting slowly, and she wanted to address it.
New artistic director for [Sydney] writers [festival]
THE events director of the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris has been appointed the new artistic director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
Jemma Birrell, 36, a former publishing assistant at Allen & Unwin in Sydney who takes up her new job at the end of this month, said she welcomed the opportunity ”to help celebrate one constancy in our lives, the magic of storytelling”.
Ms Birrell left Sydney in 2004 to work for French publishers before joining Shakespeare and Company in 2005, where she has been a co-director of its biennial literary festival, FestivalandCo, whose participants have included Alain de Botton, Will Self, Martin Amis, Beth Orton, Jeanette Winterson and Charlotte Rampling.
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There are mounting concerns that African and Muslim communities in Australia’s biggest cities are being targeted by over-zealous police.
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Police in Melbourne are stopping and searching young men of African background, sometimes several times a day.
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Ms Hopkins says police themselves may be breaking the law. “If you have a police officer treating people differently because of their skin colour, they are engaging in racial discrimination and that is unlawful under the Federal Race Discrimination Act,” she said.
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Mr Houda says the Muslim community’s relationship with police is in tatters.
“I spoke to a very, very senior police officer who told me many years ago, they couldn’t get recruits out at Bankstown, but post-September 11, all the recruits wanted to start going to Bankstown,” he said.
“So you’ve got people who think they’re out there doing God’s work - zealots, if I can sum them up in a word.
“From my experience, police officers, a lot of them out at Bankstown are just completely out of control.
“They’re quick to issue press releases that they’ve come across a wall of silence with the community in investigating crimes, but you know what, it’s entirely their fault in the way they deal. But, members of the community in the Canterbury-Bankstown region don’t trust police.”
” —Police ‘zealots’ accused of targeting Africans, Muslims | ABC News
“I don’t know if they intended this magnitude of destruction; you can’t engineer a riot necessarily, but you can put people in an environment where having one will be more rewarding for everyone.”
—Dan MacKinlay | RealTime Arts - Magazine - issue 110 - the time bomb ticks
“Some of the statements illustrate the disjunction between the Israeli military and Palestinians. One soldier said: “You put up a checkpoint out of boredom, sit there for a few hours and then continue on. Once I saw kids passing, and one of the guys, a reservist who spoke Arabic, wanted to ask them what they study. He didn’t mean it in any bad way. Then I saw how the kid nearly peed his pants as the guy tried to kid with him, how the two worlds are simply disconnected. The guy was kidding and the kid was scared to death.”
—Former Israeli soldiers disclose routine mistreatment of Palestinian children
Vice chancellor flees uni mob via underground tunnels →
abc.net.au
The Vice Chancellor of a Melbourne university has escaped a student protest ambush by using an underground tunnel network at the campus.
Latrobe University students were protesting against funding cuts to arts courses as Vice…
