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Writers needed. Help search for and post interesting news and/or press releases.
Chana and Simon Taub have been bickering over getting a divorce for nearly two years, but neither will move out of the spacious three-storey house they own in Brooklyn.
So, to make sure they stay in their own separate parts of the house, a few weeks ago Simon had a white drywall partition built in the middle of the ground floor. The couple are already separated on the second floor by a door which Chana has bolted shut with a large piece of wood.
Like most bitter divorcing couples the accusations fly – with and without substance. He claims she has 300 – or is it only 299? - pairs of shoes trapped on his side of the house. She says that’s a lie, to make her look like the Imelda Marcos of the Orthodox Jewish Community.
Chana says that Simon’s been monitoring her through strategically placed video cameras. Simon says the surveillance is mutual, and points to cameras on her side. Chana claims she doesn't have control of those. She says he’s bugged her phones, though he reckons he doesn't care who she talks to.
He says she thinks he has more money than he has – his business went bankrupt in the late 1990s – but she claims she’s not interested in money. She’s divorcing him because he’s treated her like a servant for years.
It's not as if either of the Taubs has no place else to go. Just two doors down from the house with the new wall, they have another residence. But stubbornness, spite and mutual love of the home, keeps them still under one roof.
If you live in Bendigo, Victoria, in Australia, and you have an artistic talent, you still have time to go in for one of two competitions: the Bendigo Work on Paper Prize. You can enter a drawing, a collage, watercolour, photography (including digital images) and any other medium on paper. This competition closes on the 11th February, so get those artistic cells moving! Photographers also have a chance to enter their work in another competition for the Millowick Photography Prize. This prize is donated by Julie Millowick, the senior lecturer in photography at La Trobe University.
In connection with this second prize, particularly, there’s a great exhibition going on at the Bendigo Art Gallery. This is a fantastic exhibition organised by the National Portrait Gallery in London of nearly 100 photographs exploring the lives of ten well-known figures from history. Many of these photos had previously been lost, suppressed or hidden. The ten people are a real mixed bunch (to put it mildly): Muhammad Ali, James Dean, Mahatma Gandhi, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, Adolf Hitler, John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Queen Victoria.
Can you imagine these ten people in a room together? What sort of conversations would ensue? Some of the people would be overwhelmed by the others, I suspect, and some, like Hitler, and maybe Muhammad Ali, would dominate the talk.
Did you know: La Trobe University is named after Charles Joseph La Trobe, who was the first Superintendent of the Port Phillip District from 1839 to
1850, and first Lieutenant-Governor of the new colony of Victoria from 1851 to 1854. He was a man of great talent, supervising the establishment of self-government, the public library, art gallery, a university, and the development of the gold fields.
He’s also famous for ensuring that a minimum of 20% of all land in Melbourne and its surrounding suburbs contain parkland. This old legislation has helped Melbourne to remain one of the great cities of the world.
Most people manage to get their license in less than twenty lessons. Some few struggle through to thirty. Maria McCarthy, who lives in Devon, England, took 250 before she finally felt confident enough to take her license. And it cost her nearly £3000.
She’s now written a book called The Girls’ Guide to Losing Your
L-Plates, which both celebrates her success and gives other women like her lots of tips on how to persevere through the learning stages. It also encourages women to keep going: one women in the book “booked five tests, but failed to get out the test centre for three of them because of nerves."
McCarthy’s early attempts at driving were a ‘terrifying ordeal.’ This in spite of having been an aid worker in Romania, where she saw some ‘really awful things’. For her, driving was ‘something else entirely.’
CNN reports that an MD-10 cargo jet equipped with Northrop Grumman's Guardian anti-missile system took off from Los Angeles International Airport on a commercial flight Tuesday.
The FedEx flight marked the start of operational testing of a laser system which will defend aircraft against hand-held or shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons during takeoff and landing
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Robert Falcon Scott (6 June 1868 – 29 March 1912) was a Royal Naval officer and Antarctic explorer. In the so-called 'Race to the South Pole' Scott came second, behind the Norwegian Roald Amundsen; he and his four companions died whilst trying to return to their base. Scott has become the most famous, and tragic, hero of the "heroic age" of Antarctic exploration.
Robert Falcon Scott
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A little bit of background on the Salone de Cinquecento (which, if my small amount of Italian serves me, means the room of the five hundred. Not sure what five hundred this is, but perhaps someone else can enlighten me.
The grandiose room
, the work of Cronaca (1495) is on the first floor of the Palazzo Vecchio (Old Palace) which held the assemblies of the General Council of the People under the State reforms brought about by Savonarola
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The Battle of Anghiari {1505} is a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci, which is still believed by some to be hidden somewhere in the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. The Age reports that Italy's culture minister has given the go ahead to search the building and see if it is hiding the 500 year old painting.
Leonardo was commissioned to create the fresco in 1503. While his preliminary sketches survive, there is no trace of the fresco itself. Some art historians believe it may never have been completed, others say it was destroyed, while others suggest it was covered up by subsequent art work at the Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall.
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Philip tells me he's got a new job, and this blog may have to be maintained by me. Wasn't quite the way I intended things to be, but let's think about this in terms of Public Journalist's future.
I'd still like to see quirky news items on here, like the one I came across yesterday about the couple in Idaho who had 300 snakes in their house, mostly living in tupperware containers (the snakes, not the couple). There were also umpteen mice and rats - for the snakes to feed on, of course. What puzzled me about the story was why it took the neighbours so long to complain. You don't acquire 300 snakes overnight, and these ones were being well cared for. Nor do you go out and by 300 tupperware containers at the drop of a hat. So how come the neighbours have been living with these rather uncomfortable denizens for so long
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This is just a brief introduction. I'll be adding posts to this blog, courtesy of Philip, as often as I can.
I'll try and find some quirky news for you, things to keep you interested. Maybe you could even suggest some of the kinds of news you're looking to hear about.
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121 Posts dating from December 2006
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DeAnne
Mike Crowl
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