Food for the brain and soul....

The Age Melbourne Writers’ Festival, now in its 21st year, has established itself as one of the pre-eminent cultural events in Australia. Staged over 10 days and nights, in August and September each year [this year - 25 August to 2 September] the festival promotes the art and talent of more than 200 writers from Australia and around the world, with attendances of more than 38,000.

The festival program features an enormous range of literary activity – entertaining discussions, debates, readings, film screenings, interviews, performances, workshops, master classes and book launches, as well as a lively schools’ program for both primary and secondary students.

The writers’ festival attracts some of the finest names in writing in Melbourne. It is an international platform for Melbourne writers and a Melbourne platform for international writers. Each festival features a fabulous line-up of Australian authors, from much-loved favourites to some of the most exciting and distinctive new voices in Australian fiction. It also offers the richest selection of international writers, many of whom have changed the way we think about the world, literature, or both.

Go to the Festival web site, here, for more info and to book. Go.......!

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The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend. Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades. Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...

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Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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