Sunday, November 7, 2021

Things that have passed through my hands...

 

In our short lives we form relationships with people and things, (real estate) that we move on from.  Later in life the significance of those relationships becomes apparent and the losses are understood.




 



"The measure of intelligence is the ability to change."

- Albert Einstein



Kathleen Battle - 5 Japanese Love Songs




 

https://youtu.be/Noqn1Qo4LFA



Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Tips for Journalists that Never Go Out of Style



40 Time-tested Tips for Journalists that Never Go Out of Style

By Jezzamine Andaquig on October 10, 2017



1. Always get the name of the dog.

2. Better to get it right than get it first.


3. Trust is our most important asset.

4. Endure the awkward silences in interviews.

5. Avoid clichés.

6. Pick up the damn phone.

7. And get out of the damn office.

8. Only quote when paraphrasing doesn’t do a better job.

9. With multimedia: complement, don’t repeat.

10. Know your equipment before you hit the field.

11. Give credit and thanks for user submissions.

12. Follow the money.

13. Ask open-ended questions.

14. Keep asking yourself: what is the story REALLY about?

15. Get good natural sound.

16. Experiment and take risks.

17. Capture more b-roll than you think you need.

18. When the eye and the ear compete, the eye wins.

19. Better to coach writers than fix broken stories.

20. Reports are about information; stories are about experience.

21. Arrive early, stay late.

22. Don’t let the powerful answer in the passive voice: “Mistakes were made.”

23. The best quote often comes after the reporter closes the notebook.

24. Journalism is a discipline of verification, not assertion.

25. Good writing is not magic, it’s a process.

26. Great journalism comes at the intersection of craft and opportunity.

27. Take responsibility for what readers know and understand.

28. Each reader brings an autobiography with them to a story.

29. In a nut graph, it’s not the graph that’s important, but the nut.

30. Place the emphatic word in a sentence at the end.

31. The antidote to procrastination is rehearsal.

32. Show AND tell.

33. Get a good quote high in the story.

34. Express your most important idea in the shortest sentence.

35. The most powerful form of punctuation is white space.

36. Write early to learn what you still need to learn.

37. Tell the audience what you know—and how you know it.

38. Don’t just interview the boss, talk to the mechanic.

39. To find stories, take a different route home.

40. If your mother says she loves you, check it out.





Source: https://www.poynter.org/40-time-tested-tips-journalists-never-go-out-style



 

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Information Overload is the Bane of my Life



My daily struggle is to understand what is important, to my situation, in the constant barrage of information on the Internet, newspapers and cable news.


What can and should be ignored?

Is my purpose to seek distraction, novelty and entertainment?

Or is the goal and purpose to gain valuable knowledge?

What do I hope to accomplish?



“There are things that attract human attention, and there is often a huge gap between what is important and what is attractive and interesting."

- Yuval Noah Harari

  

Friday, May 25, 2012

Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt


 

But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.
Stephen Greenblatt

First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.
Stephen Greenblatt

First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.
Stephen Greenblatt

I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.
Stephen Greenblatt

I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.
Stephen Greenblatt
 

I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.
Stephen Greenblatt

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.
Stephen Greenblatt

I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller.
Stephen Greenblatt

I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!
Stephen Greenblatt

I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough.
Stephen Greenblatt

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.
Stephen Greenblatt




No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.
Stephen Greenblatt

Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.
Stephen Greenblatt

The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.
Stephen Greenblatt

Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
Stephen Greenblatt

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.
Stephen Greenblatt

What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off.
Stephen Greenblatt

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.



My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.
Stephen Greenblatt

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/stephen_greenblatt.html#vgZmwem33M3tLRGx.99







Sunday, October 2, 2011

Beginner's Mind

Sit down before facts like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion.  Follow humbly whatever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
- T.H. Huxley

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

My Diverse Blog Topics Demonstrate My Struggle To Focus On One Topic By Attempting To Categorize Many Interesting Tings Into Themes

    Work In Progress:
    This account is a member of the following 105 blogs: