James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960) drew the same way that he lived: brash and arrogant. Flagg’s confidence was understandable. He started his career at the moment when improvements in the printing process and the rise of popular magazines created a huge market for his drawing skills. Illustrators such as Flagg became national celebrities, and he basked …
Author Archives: brownstudy7975
Colin Roberts comments on Back from Holiday
Mark, I read your leader on the above with interest. It reminded me of the following experience: I once worked for a large Insurance company. My boss was a manager who came back off holiday to an inbox of several hundred e-mails. He deleted them all and then sent a mail to everyone in the …
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Out of This World
Decluttering my workspace and reading about the Collyer brothers led me to a 1953 book by Helen Worden Erskine, Out of This World (thanks, library). Erskine was a New York reporter who seems to have started working in the mid-1920s. She developed a niche as a chronicler of the lives of urban recluses and in …
Cappadocia
Cappadocia in central Turkey is highly recommended. Imagine the Moab if it had been inhabited for 4000 years by a succession of Hittites, Christians fleeing Romans and Persians, Greeks and Turks and you have some idea. These faerie chimneys exist in the thousands and some are still inhabited. One fellow showed me around his chimney …
Progress Report
I’ve been using the technique I described in Procrastination Buster for most of this week now, and I’m finding it a very efficient way of processing stuff. Although it may appear to be very different from the techniques described in Do It Tomorrow, it is actually based on very much the same principles. It is essentially …
Stuff We Like: The Power Strip Space Saver
At one point or another, we’ve all experienced the heartbreak (yes, heartbreak) caused by fat AC adapters taking up more than their fair share of space on an outlet or power strip. The Power Strip Space Saver from ThinkGeek not only remedies this problem, but provides you with an extra plug-in to boot. And at …
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Can you judge a book by its cover?
I read Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, by Gerard Prunier, and was quite impressed. I thought “what a smart and unbiased introduction to such a difficult topic." But why was I impressed? I don’t know nearly enough about the topic to judge the material. I was impressed because the author sounded so reasonable and so intelligent. …
Will Ross comments on Dieting and Health
The most thought provoking advice I read recently (from a well known stage hypnotist and NLP populist) was that you should pay attention to what you actually want to eat most, and eat that. Try it: it’s surprising how often I find myself with a chocolate bar when, if I’m honest, the taste of chocolate …
Beethoven
From a book review of a recent biography of Beethoven by Doctor Mai: Diagnosing Genius: The Life and Death of Beethoven. “The cause of Beethoven’s death was liver failure due to alcohol abuse. The autopsy was performed by Dr. Johann Wagner, who was assisted by Dr. Karl von Rokitansky. Rokitansky was a resident in pathology, …
Love And Marriage
Ralph Waldo Emerson in a journal entry during January 1850 writes: “Love is temporary and ends with marriage. Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought. Marriage is a good known only to the parties, — a relation of perfect understanding, aid, contentment, possession of themselves and of the world, …
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