Rebecca Blood

Q. Why add Rebecca Blood to my links?
A. Because, she's simply the best.

Author of violence

Villages are being razed, food and water supplies destroyed, men and boys murdered, women and girls raped and branded... by the government-supported militia, janjaweed. That's what's happening in Darfur, western Sudan, as I write about Chuck Palahniuk in my blog.

Mr Palahniuk's descriptions of urban violence may be graphic enough and disturbing enough to send our heads reeling. Yet sometimes, the real world sets its own standards of violence upon us.

Don't believe me? Here's a glimpse from The New York Times to show you what men can do to men, women and children. No tsunamis here. Just brute human force.

Chuck Palahniuk link

A small clarification: http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net/ is not the only site on Chuck Palahniuk. It seems to be, in essence, a fansite. Among several other links to Mr Palahniuk and his work, there is another site (with a similar name) which lists his books - and the links take you to amazon.com. However, on this site, the bio link is incomplete at the moment.

In case these links aren't enough - and they may not be - you can check out a detailed bio on Mr Palahniuk on Wikipedia. If you're still hungry for more Chuck Palahniuk, there's always Google search.

Dreaming, storytelling

Storytelling may be an art and requires a skilled craftsman to tell a good story, but what about the stories that we tell ourselves in our dreams? Every dream we dream is a story our mind tells us, even enacts for us in vivid living colour. Some are so real that we remember them days on end, or wake up gasping in fright.

I thought I was the only one who was troubled by this idea - about dreams being stories that we tell ourselves - till I read an article by Chuck Palahniuk called "A Church of Stories" on nerve.com. Chuck Palahniuk is the author of many books, of which "Fight Club" became the most famous, particularly after the release of the film by the same name. I can't reproduce the story for you here, but I can guide you to Mr Palahniuk's website. He seems to have quite a cult following.

TASCHEN celebrates 25th Anniversary

This is their story, in their own words: From a young age, Benedikt Taschen had been interested in art, but found that art books were too expensive and hard to obtain.

In 1980, when only 18 years old, he opened a shop in his native Cologne, Germany, to market his massive collection of comics. But it wasn't until 1984 that his first art-book breakthrough occurred when he purchased 40,000 remainder copies of a Magritte book printed in English, and resold them for a fraction of their original price.

In 2000, TASCHEN surprised the world by breaking the record for the most expensive book published in the 20th century: copy #1 of Helmut Newton's SUMO, signed by over 80 celebrities featured in it, fetched over $300,000 at a charity auction.

25 years have passed since Benedikt Taschen opened his little comics shop. Today, TASCHEN has grown into one of the most successful and unique publishers in the global market, publishing an eclectic variety of books for people of all tastes, distributed worldwide in over twenty languages.

You can download a PDF version of TASCHEN’s history here. It’s quite colourful.

Innovation moves

Whether you’re a manufacturer or a marketer, sometimes it’s best to leave the innovation to your users. Or so proposes Prof Eric von Hippel at MIT and is reported in an article "Innovation moves from the laboratory…" in The New York Times by Virginia Postrel. Ms Postrel quotes Prof von Hippel from his book, Democratizing Innovation, “A growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many, and perhaps most, new industrial and consumer products.” Makes your job a lot easier, doesn’t it?

Pulitzer presents Iraq, in pictures

If you're still interested in Iraq, then the picture stories from The Pulitzer Prize Board will interest you: 20 winning photographs have been selected from the Associated Press staff, making up a wonderful photo essay.

Dynamist

In the last year or so, I've read some mind-blowing articles on business, technology and economics. But, few are as good as the ones written by Virginia Postrel. Have provided a link to her site on this page. Check it out.

Couldn't wait any longer

The bug finally bit me and now I have my own blog. Started out wondering why anybody would want to read what I had to say. Then I thought, who cares? So, I took some time off on a lazy Sunday afternoon and got down to it. And now, after an hour's struggle over what I wanted to say about myself, here I am keying in my first posting.