What I Learnt Today

What is your favourite app?

As of today, there are 96929 iPad apps available in the AppStore, as well as 350,000 for the iPhone. That’s a lot of apps to sort through.

Current top paid app is Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, and the top free app is Mr Giggle HD Lite .

The Good Weekend last week published their pick of the top 100 apps, and their list is now available online.

Let us know about any apps you think that they overlooked in the comments.

My friend Willo has a question……..

Nagasak 1945, after the atomic bomb

Nagasaki 2011, following earthquake and tsunami

Willo’s question –  What the flock is that arch made of!?

JK Rowling admits to being very nervous before she delivered the Commencement Address to the Harvard Alumni Association in 2008.

No wonder, its a big gig.

‘The Commencement’ is the American term for the what we call a Graduation Ceremony. The Harvard Alumni Association have only been organising the Harvard Commencement since 1867! The year before Rowling, William Gates III was the speaker. Others to have been the Commencment Speaker include Kofi Annan, Alan Greenspan, Mary Robinson, Al Gore, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John F. Kennedy, Thornton Wilder, and even our own Robert Menzies (1960).

“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, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.”

Joanne “Jo” Rowling studied French and Classics at the University of Exeter. (she had no middle name, and so made up the ‘K’ in her penname). Confronted with speaking to graduates of the prestigious Harvard, whose ‘conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success’, she comes up with two themes.

“On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.”

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

The full text of this speech is well worth a read and is available in Harvard Magazine. Thanks Michelle for the tip.

“Will, get out of bed, for goodness sake”. Repeat every minute for 10 minutes.

On these cold mornings, we need some evil alarm clocks.

Maybe one of these will do the job.

1. Clocky, and his new hi-tech little brother Tocky, jump off the bedside table and run around the floor when they raise the alarm, beeping and generally being a nuisance until you get up and catch the blasted things.

2. Wake up to the smell of animosity. Every time you hit the snooze button on the wifi-enabled SnūzNLūz Alarm Clock, a donation is made from your bank account to an organisation that you can’t stand. Perhaps we could set Will’s SnuzNLuz to donate to the All Blacks retirement fund.

3. I’m sure this next evil alarm clock would work. The Money Shredding Alarm Clock starts to shred your hard-earned notes if you don’t get out of bed in time to turn it off.

OK. Once out of bed, how do you extract victims from the very strong attractive field surrounding the ‘kid magnet’, also known as the gas heater.

What I Learnt On 21st June in other years

21st June 2015 FitzJones and the FezTones do the Lismore Lantern Festival