A friend sent a link to J. K. Rowling's speech at Harvard.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
The speech ends with a few lines that I thought were quite - what's the word - apposite :
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships.
[Updated date. Last update 11/15/2008]
Friar Tuck writes in.
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Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is an idiot.
They laugh when he says something clever or elliptical or cleverly elliptical, which is much of the time. As in, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, what do you read?
"Mind," he says. "And spirit."
His voice is soft and high, the tenor of young boys and old men. Though he sleeps sometimes two or three hours a night, he says, he doesn't get weary. (Well, actually, what he says while grinning is: "Do I look tired?") He favors expressions like "if mind is kite, breath is thread," and "knowledge should be used as soap, for cleansing."
Also, "truth is always contradictory."
Why is that?
"Truth is not linear, it is spherical," Shankar says. "So it has to be contradictory. Anything that is spherical is always contradictory."
Friar Tuck writes in.
==
So Martti Ahtisaari did win the Nobel after all. Here is the Mission Statement for the Crisis Management Initiative from his website.
Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) is an independent, non-profit organisation that innovatively promotes and works for sustainable security. CMI works to strengthen the capacity of the international community in comprehensive crisis management and conflict resolution. CMI's work builds on wide stakeholder networks. It combines analysis, action and advocacy.
Found on the Internet. Reason for a spot of cheer.
Douglas Adams's increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy is to be extended to six titles, after Adams's widow Jane Belson sanctioned a project which will see children's author Eoin Colfer taking up the story.
And Another Thing… by Colfer, whose involvement with the project was personally requested by Belson, will be published next October by Penguin. No information has yet emerged about the plot of the novel but Hitchhiker fans will be hoping for a resurrection of much-loved characters Arthur Dent, Trillian and Ford Prefect, who were all apparently blown to smithereens at the end of the fifth novel, Mostly Harmless.