Just checked Kate's Voice, a blog mentioned in Denise Graveline's year-end wrapup. This one is a "blog about voices: using them, freeing them…and hearing them." The posts look pretty good. If you're interested in developing your voice, you may want to visit, too.
My appreciation for Christmas tradition does not generally include Christmas carols. Most arrangements tend to the soppy, sentimental, and syrupy. I tend to go for Cyndi Lauper, Jimi Hendrix doing Little Drummer Boy, Five Pound Box of Money, and Santa Claus Goes First to the Ghetto. Here's a treatment of 12 Days of Christmas that gets my stamp of approval.
The Morgan Library has posted a short video on Jane Austen's talent, skill, and impact, The Divine Jane, in connection with their exhibit A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy. Actors, writers, even a philosopher tell what they appreciate about Austen. Interesting to speculate on what Austen could have achieved in a medium like television, but we probably wouldn't have wound up with the same problems we experience today.
From Kris Broughton at Big Think
“We as a nation are television watchers. Not only do we learn about politics by watching television, but we are television watchers; who we are as humans is in part defined by the attention that we pay to the television.”
Roderick Hart
It led me to conclude that if a person is prone to base all of his or her political opinions on the information they get from television, then they are usually forming their outlook with data that is often colored by the broadcast medium itself. The need for television networks to inject their own sense of drama into the fractious debates surrounding healthcare, war and global warming can often create a political narrative that is more melodramatic than the actual events.
Most of the kinds of things that make for great TV moments -- asking the president if he thinks Afghanistan will be another Vietnam, making references to unofficial communications between the White House and the Senate Majority leadership, or describing President Obama “bursting into a meeting” during the Copenhagen emissions conclave -- don’t really convey enough useful information for the average citizen to make well-informed decisions.
From @FredericBrussat at Twitter:
Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.
- Corrie ten Boom