If you’re planning on taking a cruise, hopefully your ship won’t travel through the “great Atlantic garbage patch” that covers thousands of square miles between Bermuda and the Azores islands. The plastic debris is so small that some pieces are almost invisible, and the floating trash heap—pushed together by currents…(read more)

A study led by Prof. Mark Weiser of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Psychiatry and the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer Hospital has determined that young men who smoke are likely to have lower IQs than their non-smoking peers. Tracking 18- to 21-year-old men enlisted in the Israeli army in the largest ever study of its kind, he has been able to demonstrate an important connection between the number of cigarettes young males smoke and their IQ. (More from SCience Daily)

 Be Prepared! Know the risks!

 When will you have enough?

Good Morning Mr Jenkins from Marty Stalker on Vimeo.

 Don’t Waste Time!

John Pilger

Hope you don’t have to ask yourself who John Pilger is but, here’s a brief snapshot of the man which isuseful when you read his article:

John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s.
Noam Chomsky wrote: “John Pilger’s work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration.”
Harold Pinter wrote: “John Pilger unearths, with steely attention, the facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is.”
In 2009, John Pilger was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize, Australia’s international human rights award.

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger goes back to Australia, where Rupert Murdoch launched his worldwide media empire, and describes how his and Murdoch’s homeland has become a murdochracy – a country where important media, issues and perception are influenced if not dominated by Murdochism: “an inspiration to his choir on seven continents”.
Read his article – Welcome to the world’s first murdochracy!

The Queensland Writers Centre, of which I am a member, distributes a newsletter each month (with a trendily obscure cover) with “helpful” advice to writers.

As there is no letters to the editor section or any other mechanism for comments, suggestions and feedback, it does appear to be a closed shop! In this digital age, they don’t even have a forum or allow comments on their own blog!

Unfortunately, like most of the publishing industry (it used to be a profession), it has its head buried in the sand and only occasionally blinks around in a lame and often late effort to discover what is really occurring! Like the entire publishing business inAustralia, it is, sadly, ten years behind the times. Publishers,companies, critics, agents -  you could slap a glass dish over the lot and call it Jurassic Park! Oops, that’s been taken, hasn’t it.

If you want to know more about this great man, go here.