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Google playing dirty with employees.
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Say my religion is peaceful or I will kill you.
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Sugar has long been a popular drug consumed and even sold in schools world-wide. But concerns over health, obesity and the risk of diabetes have led some schools in California to institute a ban on sugary snacks. In response to these candy sales bans, some students are starting to deal candy bars on the “underground market” at a marked up price. . .
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Writing and Rebellion is the title of this piece from Ward Six:
That is, writing as a form of rebellion. All three of us seemed to regard it as such, although for all of us the sentiment appeared personal, rather than as a kind of doctrine. One of us grew up in a religious southern black family; another in working-class Spanish Harlem; another in white, middle-class suburbia, and in a way, each of us, in our work, was and is reacting aggressively to the world around us.
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A Chinese ship docked in Durban harbour late on Wednesday carrying three million rounds of ammunition for small arms, 3,500 mortar bombs and mortar tubes, as well as 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades. All destined for Zimbabwe. This at the same time as the Zimbabwean government has accused the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, of treason by plotting with Britain to overthrow the President, Robert Mugabe.
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Rudyard Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907. I have many problems with the recipients of this prize and not least with Kipling. This man who insisted that his fragile young son serve in World War I; and who became known as the poet of Empire, was not best fitted to become [...]
Poet Robert Peake muses on breaking through the barriers that keep a poem less than 40 lines in length:
The stand-up comedian Billy Connolly is a master at delivering humor through seemingly endless digressions. When he finally comes back to the main topic, long since forgotten in the audience’s mind, he earns not only laughs but [...]
In this piece from Dick Jones Patteran Pages he responds to a grim physical illness and the prospect of the debilitating effects of powerful immunosuppressants:
And yet, for all my hopes for future endurance, I need powerfully to disengage myself from both past and future as the principal determinants of present functioning. I need to locate [...]
There are many photographs of Chekhov, but I’ve never come across this one before.
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Further In
On the main road into the city
when the sun is low.
The traffic thickens, crawls.
It is a sluggish dragon glittering.
I am one of the dragon’s scales.
Suddenly the red sun is
right in the middle of the windscreen
streaming in.
I am transparent
and writing becomes visible
inside me
words in invisible ink
which appear
when the paper is held to the fire!
I know [...]
Sam Smith thinks jazz is cooler and cheaper than war. He describes an instance of enlightened American foreign policy known as the Jazz Ambassadors program. During the 1950s, the State Department sent a variety of musicians abroad to show the world something of America:
In 1958, (Dave) Brubeck visited 12 countries, including Poland, Turkey, East [...]
Dick Jones offers us a poem and talks about the poet, David Harsent author of the collection, Legion.
I think of Akhmatova’s famous encounter with the starved woman in the queue outside a Russian jail during the terror. The woman recognised Akhmatova and said: “Can you describe this?” When Akhmatova said, “I can”, a ghost [...]
It is a chintzy kind of place but I force myself to go in there from time to time because the coffee is good and they put together an almost fat-free breakfast. They have a painted pelmet which circles the room half a metre below the ceiling, where they line up sparklingly clean old teapots. [...]
Invitation reluctantly refused.
Continually anchored here.
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