Category: people

“As a teenager I was taken to a Billy Graham rally at Haringey. At the end of it I went down to the arena to give myself to Jesus. But as soon as Graham stopped talking it was like the choir stopped singing and [ he snaps his fingers] I felt totally conned and embarrassed.”

“The alleged Czech thief who has boasted about his crime on the internet says he wants to now display the famous teeth and dentures he has robbed not just from Austrian waltz king Johann Strauss Jr. and German Romantic composer Johannes Brahms, but from hundreds of other graves as well.”

“Neil Harbisson can only see shades of grey. So his prosthetic eyepiece, which he calls an ‘eyeborg’, interprets the colours for him and translates them into sound.”

“In 1969, Mr. Karp was one of the first gallery owners to follow artists to SoHo, an industrial area that would quickly become as much an art gallery district as the Upper East Side. His O K Harris Works of Art — first at 485 West Broadway, then at its present address, 383 West Broadway — would become the first gallery on one of SoHo’s principal boulevards. He, like several other pioneers to venture south of Houston Street, liked to think of himself as SoHo’s unofficial mayor.”

Over a six-decade career, “[she] won the 1948 Sydney Morning Herald poetry prize for the title poem of her second collection, The Ship of Ice, and in 2001 the Age book of the year for Untold Lives and Later Poems.”

“A recent Harvard study revealed that 50 per cent of the average person’s time is spent mind wandering. People who can control this are rare – and can make others feel extraordinarily special.”

Janet Maslin: “When Nora Ephron wrote about her early aspiration to be the only lady at the table, the sharpest wit in the room, she called this her ‘Dorothy Parker problem.’ … Dorothy Parker set an example for scathingly smart female journalists of Ms. Ephron’s generation, but Ms. Ephron’s five-decade-long career outdid that. It’s now the Nora Ephron problem instead.”

“The Stressful Life of Salman Rushdie and Implementation of His Verdict is the title of the game being developed by the Islamic Association of Students, a government-sponsored organisation which announced this week it had completed initial phases of production.”

“The group, calling itself Bread and Circuses, a reference to its argument that the Olympics are a means of distracting people from pressing economic and social issues, said it had ‘liberated’ the part-derelict five-storey house on Lincoln’s Inn Fields, one of central London’s most picturesque and expensive garden squares.”

“The inspirational Burmese opposition leader has accepted the position of honorary ambassador for the Leeds International Piano Competition which take place in August and September. A piano was one of the symbols of her lonely fight against political oppression.”