Saturday, 23 November 2013

SELFIE, BELFIE AND DRELFIE


SELFIE: OXFORD DICTIONARY WORD OF THE YEAR 2013


selfie image

Last year Oxford University Press split its word of the year honors between the US and the UK, but for 2013 there's one word to rule them all — and it is "selfie." The term beat out contenders like twerk, bitcoin, and binge-watch, due largely to its remarkable uptick in usage. According to research conducted by Oxford Dictionaries editors, the use of selfie has increased an incredible 17,000 percent since the same time last year.

While the term has certainly come into the mainstream over the past 12 months, its origins actually go much further back. The Oxford University Press discovered the term used in an Australian forum posting in 2002, where it was used to describe a photo the poster took of themselves after a drunken fall. Despite earning the year's top honors, however, selfie is oddly not included in the Oxford English Dictionary itself. It is part of the online Oxford Dictionaries website, however, and is being considered for future inclusion in the OED as well.

This isn't the first time that technology's heavy influence on popular culture has resulted in a word of the year selection. In 2005 the US word of the year was "podcast," while last last year's US honors went to none other than the venerable GIF (which stands for 'graphics interchange format').

Click on this link and you will find the origins and meaning of this word, others derived from it, like belfie or drelfie, and the ranking of shortlisted words for this year.
Read more here

The BBC also devoted some lines to this new word. Check about the convenience of selfies at funerals or find out what the Obama girls and the Pope have in common!!
Read this BBC article and don't miss the video


Friday, 22 November 2013

JFK'S ASSASSINATION: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY


We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier — the frontier of 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled dreams. ...

John Fitzgerald Kennedy 
(Brookline, Massachusetts, 29 May 1917 - Dallas, Texas, 22 November1963)

                     

Today is the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. As in any good tragedy it contains all the necessary ingredients to capture a nation's imagination: power, ideals, glamour, mystery, love, sex and death. The rendition of the plot was, and still is, in the hands of the media.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on 29 May 1917 in Massachusetts, into a wealthy and political Irish-American family. Educated at Harvard University, he graduated in 1940. Following naval service in the Pacific in World War Two, he entered politics in 1946, spurred on by his ambitious father Joseph, and won election as a Democrat to the US House of Representatives. In 1952, he was elected to the Senate.

In 1960, Kennedy won the party's presidential nomination and defeated Richard Nixon in the subsequent election that same year. At 43, he was the country's youngest president as well as its first Catholic head of state. He presented himself as a youthful president for a new generation. His wife Jackie added glamour to the presidency, although it was later revealed that he had numerous affairs. In a country without royalty they represented a new kind of aristocracy, embodying the mythical kingdom of Camelot.
Kennedy's years in power were marked in foreign affairs by Cold War tension, together with a rhetorical commitment to introducing domestic reforms - most of all to expanding the civil rights of African Americans.
He inherited a plan that was devised under the preceding Eisenhower presidency for anti-communist Cuban exiles in the US to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro's government. In April 1961, the 'Bay of Pigs' invasion ended in failure. According to some historians, this led the Soviet Union to conclude that Kennedy was a weak leader, and that they could get away with installing nuclear weapons on Cuba in 1962. The Cuban missile crisis ensued. After a thirteen-day stand-off that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev withdrew the weapons and Kennedy's reputation was restored.
Domestically, Kennedy oversaw the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962, and of the University of Alabama the following year - despite each state's political establishment opposing this policy. More substantial legislation to encode civil rights was not passed, however, until the subsequent administration of Lyndon Johnson (1963 - 1969), who was Vice-President and acceded to the position of President on Kennedy’s assassination. 

Here is today's covearge by BBC
Read more about the man and the myth

President Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963 in Dallas, Texas. According to the Warren Commission established to investigate the assassination, a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed the president, but there has been consistent speculation ever since that Kennedy's death was the result of a conspiracy. 

Watch the following CNN video about the enduring fascination caused by JFK.



Finally you can visit The Wahington Post photo gallery which shows some public and private moments in John Kennedy's life.

Sunday, 17 November 2013

WRITER DORIS LESSING DIES AGED 94

"I'm just a story teller" (Doris Lessing)


Doris May Lessing (née Tayler; Persia 22 October 1919 – England 17 November 2013) was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In doing so the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny. Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest person to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Iran, then known as Persia, on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler, who were both English and of British nationality. Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital where he was recovering from his amputation. Alfred Tayler and his wife moved to Kermanshah, Iran, in order to take up a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia and it was there that Doris was born in 1919. The family then moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925 to farm maize, among other plants, when her father purchased around one thousand acres of bush. Lessing's mother attempted to lead an Edwardian lifestyle amidst the rough environment, which would have been easy had the family been wealthy; in reality, such a lifestyle was not feasible. The farm failed to deliver any monetary value in return.

Lessing was educated in a Roman Catholic all-girls school in Salisbury (now Harare). She left school at the age of 14, and was self-educated from then on; she left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid. She started reading material that her employer gave her on politics and sociology and began writing around this time. In 1937, she married her first husband, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children (John and Jean), before the marriage ended in 1943.

After her first divorce, Lessing's interest was drawn to the popular community of the Left Book Club, a communist book club which she had joined the year before. It was here that she met her future second husband, Gottfried Lessing. They were married shortly after she joined the group, and had a child together (Peter), before the marriage failed and ended in divorce in 1949. After these two failed marriages, she has not been married since. Gottfried Lessing later became the East German ambassador to Uganda, and was murdered in the 1979 rebellion against Idi Amin Dada.  

 Because of her campaigning against nuclear arms and South African apartheid, Lessing was banned from that country and from Rhodesia for many years. She moved to London with her youngest son in 1949. Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950. Her breakthrough work, The Golden Notebook, was written in 1962.


She declined a damehood, but accepted the Commonwealth appointment as a Companion of Honour at the end of 1999 for "conspicuous national service". In 2007, Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She received the prize at the age of 88 years, making her the oldest winner of the literature prize at the time of the award. She also stands as only the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy in its 106-year history.

Sunday, 10 November 2013

AMMA IN BARCELONA

“Love is our true essence. Love has no limitations of caste, religion, race or nationality. We are all beads strung together on the same thread of love.” —Amma




Mata Amritanandamayi, or Amma (Mother), as she is known,  was born Parayakadavu, state of Kerala, India, in 1953. Born to a family of fishermen, she displayed an intense spirituality from a very early age. Her education ended at the age of nine, when she began to take care of her younger siblings and the family domestic work full-time.

 As part of her chores, Amritanandamayi gathered food scraps from neighbours for her family's cows and goats, through which she was confronted with the intense poverty and suffering of others. She would bring these people food and clothing from her own home; soon she got a reputation for curing sick cows.

Her family, which was not wealthy, scolded and punished her. Amritanandamayi also began to spontaneously embrace people to comfort them in their sorrow. It was not permissible for a 14-year-old girl to touch others, especially men. But despite the reaction of her parents, Amritanandamayi continued. Regarding her embracing of others, Amritanandamayi commented, “I don’t see if it is a man or a woman. I don’t see anyone different from my own self. A continuous stream of love flows from me to all of creation. This is my inborn nature. The duty of a doctor is to treat patients. In the same way, my duty is to console those who are suffering."

Despite numerous attempts by her parents to arrange her marriage, Amritanandamayi rejected their efforts. In 1981, after various seekers had begun residing at her parents' property in Parayakadavu in the hopes of becoming Amritanandamayi's disciples, the Mata Amritanandamayi Math (MAM), a worldwide foundation, was founded. This institution is involved in many spiritual and charitable projects, like founding orphanages in India or raising money for the vicitms of natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina or tsunamis. It gets money from private donations exclusively but also from the sales of items related to her figure and her life.

Her ashram or spiritual centre has its hedquarters in Amritapuri, Kerala, and many people from all over the world visit it every year. She is also called "the hugging saint" and she travels the world hugging people who  wait long hurs to get her embrace. Miracles, meditation, prophesies and a lot of money revolve around Amma's orbit. She is reported to have raised 3 million dollars in a 7-week tour. She says she only offers love and comfort to those who need it.


Next week Amma is coming to Granollers, Barcelona, as a part of her European tour. Would you like to go?
Read more

In the following video, you can watch a BBC report on Amma's visit to London two years ago.