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Issue # 49


A suggestion for your NY's resolution - plan ahead..

 

Mike's Pith & Wind - Charisma
The Concise Oxford Dictionary that Ross & Pat Wilson gave me in 1970 doesn’t even have the word, which tells you something about how times have changed, so I’ll be terribly modern and refer to the Wikipedia definition. ‘The word charisma … refers to a rare trait found in certain human personalities usually including extreme charm and a 'magnetic' quality of personality and/or appearance along with innate and powerfully sophisticated personal communicability and persuasiveness.’
Robbo came over today, (which was when I realised it’s been a long time since I had social intercourse with a rational human being), and somewhere in the conversation the subject of charisma came up. Since Billy Thorpe died, I reckon there’s been a gap at the top of the Oz rock ‘n’ roll Charisma tree. Whenever Billy walked in the room, there was no doubt, in his mind anyway, who was the top bantam strutting the fowl yard, and nobody else was left in any doubt either. If there were unbelievers, I never saw them challenge him, (apart from Max Merritt after a few whiskies on the bus back from Wollongong on the LWTTT tour, but that ended amicably enough), and anyway, Billy always had the ultimate weapon to fall back on when dint of personality proved inadequate – sheer, naked, unimaginable VOLUME. Billy started at eleven, both with voice and guitar.
I guess it’s possible to go through life without coming into contact with charisma, although, like genius, the quality has been somewhat diminished by being too liberally bestowed. The sales rep that comes round to the office every month with the winning read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Living in the past
Given that we are short-lived creatures with low attention spans, a limited knowledge of history, and febrile imaginations it is no wonder that we cannot understand what it was like to live in the past. Generations have passed and the last syllables of handed-down family stories have been blown away like dandelion parachutes balls by the hot winds outside our super-sized McMansions. Sometimes we vicariously experience the silent sentinels of yesterday in cracked sepia photographs or in scratched archival film. But our imaginations flare like momentary matches in the dark when those who lived in the past endured, for the most part, uncertain, grim and often reluctant lives. All day, everyday and with no happy ending
Two books have given me some insight. The first was ‘The Proud Tower: A portrait of the world before the war 1890-1914’ by Barbara Tuchman which I was re-reading because it.. read more


 
 
       
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