Larry Mullen was looking for musicians; Adam Clayton bought his first guitar, Edge read about Bono in the music papers. What a way to form a band - but they did.
The group orignially called their band “Feedback“, then renamed it to “The Hype” and later on, to the iconic name “U2“. After years of scouting, they finally signed on with Island Records and in May 1980, they released their first single 11 O’Clock Tick-Tock, followed by their first album, Boy, and subsequently, War.
And.. you can read the rest of their “Timeline” (history) here: http://bit.ly/boOCBn
U2 has won numerous awards and allocades both for their music (22 Grammys and counting) and humanitarian efforts. To know more on how you can contribute to any of them, perhaps you would like to click here: http://bit.ly/9zckSw .
Admittingly, I am not a huge U2 fan, though my brother is. And so, I grew up, like some of you, not turning off when their music is on.
**
Thank you for all the entries. The winners for this round of contest are:
Ivy Khaw* Imran Muhammad Yusof * Sunny Loh
Each of you has just won a copy of U2 by U2 (ISBN 9780007196692, valued at RM 49.90).
Emails will be sent to winners by tomorrow, Tuesday (21 September 2010)
The books are given, courtesy of MPH Distributors Sdn Bhd.
Alfred Abraham Knopf, Sr. (September 12, 1892 – August 11, 1984) was a leading American publisher of the 20th century, and founder of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.. His contemporaries included the likes of Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, and (of the previous generation) Frank Nelson Doubleday, J. Henry Harper and Henry Holt. Knopf paid special attention to the quality of printing, binding, and design in his books, and earned a reputation as a purist in both content and presentation.
Asked how to say his name, Knopf told the Literary Digest: “Sound the k: k’nupf.”
Knopf was born into a Jewish family in New York City. His father Samuel Knopf was an advertising executive and financial consultant, his mother was Ida Japhe, and his brother Edwin H. Knopf, who worked for Alfred briefly, then became a film director and producer. Alfred attended Columbia University, where he was a pre-law student and a member of the Peithologian Society, a debating and literary club. He began to show an interest in publishing during his senior year, becoming advertising manager of an undergraduate magazine. His interest in publishing was allegedly fostered by a correspondence with British author John Galsworthy. After visiting Galsworthy in England, Knopf gave up his plans for a law career, and upon his return went into publishing.
After receiving his B.A. in 1912, Knopf worked as a clerk at Doubleday (1912–1913), then as an editorial assistant to Michael Kennerly (1914). He founded his own publishing house in 1915. The company initially emphasized European, especially Russian, literature, hence the choice of the borzoi as a colophon. At that time European literature was largely neglected by American publishers; Knopf published authors such as Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka.
Knopf also published many American authors, including H.L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Vachel Lindsay, James M. Cain, Conrad Aiken, Dashiell Hammett, James Baldwin, John Updike, Shirley Ann Grau, and Knopf’s own favorite, Willa Cather. He often developed a personal friendship with his authors. Knopf’s personal interest in the fields of history, sociology, and science led to close friendships in the academic community with such noted historians as Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Samuel Eliot Morison. A prominent Republican until Watergate, Knopf often drew legislators into lengthy correspondence by mail.
Knopf himself was also an author. His writings include Some Random Recollections, Publishing Then and Now, Portrait of a Publisher, Blanche W. Knopf: July 30, 1894-June 4, 1966, and Sixty Photographs.
When Knopf’s son, Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., left the company in 1959 to found Atheneum Publishers[1], Alfred and Blanche became concerned about the eventual fate of their publishing house, which had always been a family business. The problem was solved in 1960, when Knopf merged with Random House, which was owned by the Knopf’s close friends Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. Knopf retained complete editorial control for five years, and then gave up only his right to veto other editors’ manuscript selections. The editorial departments of the two companies remain separate, and Knopf, Inc., retains its distinctive character. Knopf called the merger “a perfect marriage”.
Random House itself eventually became a division of Bertelsmann AG, a large multinational media company. The Knopf imprint remains in existence.
Blanche Knopf died in June 1966. Alfred remarried in April of the following year, to Helen Norcross Hedrick. He died of congestive heart failure on August 11, 1984, at his estate in Purchase, New York.
Secretly, if not overtly, almost everyone in America desires to become rich: to make it big, to enjoy the fruits of the most successful life imaginable. But unfortunately, most of us don’t have a clue how to reach these all too elusive goals. Quite simply, there’s no definitive road map for getting there, no proven plan, and certainly very little access to those who have become “the richest man in town.”
But now W. Randall Jones, the founder of Worth magazine, is about to change all that. He’s traveled to one hundred different towns and cities across the country and interviewed the wealthiest resident in each. No, these are not those folks who inherited their wealth, or happen to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Rather, these are the self-made types who, through hard work and ingenuity, found their own individual paths to financial success.
Remarkably, during his research, Jones found that these successful people were not so different from one another. They all shared many of the same traits and followed what the author calls the Twelve Commandments of Wealth: stay hungry (even when you’re successful) . . . you really do learn more from failing than you may think . . . absolutely be your own boss, the sooner the better . . . understand that selling is the key to success . . . where you live doesn’t matter . . . never retire, and other, more surprising revelations.
Practical, unique, and inspiring, this book lets you peek inside the living rooms of dozens of America’s most successful people-and shows how you, too, can become THE RICHEST MAN IN TOWN.
W. Randall Jones
W. Randall Jones has spent 25 years in the magazine and media business. He is the founder of Worth magazine, the financial lifestyle magazine for active wealthy investors, and is also the founder of The American Benefactor magazine, the first magazine about philanthropy from the donor’s perspective. He was recently honored by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America as “Philanthropist of the Year.”
An array of foods being offered to the deceased at a Buddhist temple
Food is offered to the ancestors during the annual Ghost Festival
The Ghost Festival also known as the Hungry Ghost Festival is a traditional Chinese festival and holiday celebrated by Chinese in many countries. In the Chinese calendar (a lunisolar calendar), the Ghost Festival is on the 15th night of the seventh lunar month (14th in southern China).
In Chinese tradition, the fifteenth day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar is called Ghost Day and the seventh month in general is regarded as the Ghost Month, in which ghosts and spirits, including those of the deceased ancestors, come out from the lower realm. Distinct from both the Qingming Festival (in Spring) and Chung Yeung Festival (in Autumn) in which living descendants pay homage to their deceased ancestors, on Ghost Day, the deceased are believed to visit the living.
On the fifteenth day the realms of Heaven and Hell and the realm of the living are open and both Taoists and Buddhists would perform rituals to transmute and absolve the sufferings of the deceased. Intrinsic to the Ghost Month is ancestor worship, where traditionally the filial piety of descendants extends to their ancestors even after their deaths. Activities during the month would include preparing ritualistic food offerings, burning incense, and burning joss paper, a papier-mache form of material items such as clothes, gold and other fine goods for the visiting spirits of the ancestors. Elaborate meals (often vegetarian meals) would be served with empty seats for each of the deceased in the family treating the deceased as if they are still living. Ancestor worship is what distinguishes Qingming Festival from Ghost Festival because the latter includes paying respects to all deceased, including the same and younger generations, while the former only includes older generations. Other festivities may include, buying and releasing miniature paper boats and lanterns on water, which signifies giving directions to the lost ghosts and spirits of the ancestors and other deities.
The Ghost Festival in Malaysia is modernized by the ‘concert-like’ live performances. It has its own characteristics and is not similar to other Ghost Festivals in other countries. The live show is popularly known as ‘Koh-tai’ by the Hokkien-speaking people, performed by a group of singers, dancers and entertainers on a temporary stage that setup within the residential district. The festival is funded by the residents of each individual residential districts.
A temporary stage of Ghost Festival in Kuala Lumpur
A young girl performing on Ghost Festival in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The red seats in front are reserved for ghosts
A female dancer in white, performing at Ghost Festival in Kuala Lumpur
Another female dancer, performing at Ghost Festival in Kuala Lumpur
Recommended Books
The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry
The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry
Raped then murdered in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong in 1942, Lin Shui’s ‘Hungry Ghost’ clings tenaciously to life. Holing up in a hospital morgue, which is destined to become a school, just in time she finds a host off whom to feed. It is twelve-year-old Alice Safford, the deeply-troubled daughter of a leading figure in government. The parasitic ghost follows her to her home on the Peak. There, the lethal mix of the two, embroiled in the family’s web of dark secrets and desperate lies, unleashes chaos. All this unfolds against a background of colonial unrest, riots, extremes of weather and the countdown to the return of the colony to China. As successive tragedies engulf Alice, her ghostly entourage swells alarmingly. She flees to England, then France, in a bid to escape the past, only to find her portable ‘Hungry Ghosts’ have accompanied her. It seems the peace she longs for is to prove far more elusive that she could ever have imagined.
The Hungry Ghosts is a remarkable tour de force of the imagination, full of instantly memorable characters whose lives intermesh and boil over in a cauldron of domestic mayhem, unleashing unworldly spirits into the troubled air.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate
Based on Gabor Mate’s two decades of experience as a medical doctor and his groundbreaking work with the severely addicted on Vancouver’s skid row, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts radically reenvisions this much misunderstood field by taking a holistic approach. Dr. Mate presents addiction not as a discrete phenomenon confined to an unfortunate or weak-willed few, but as a continuum that runs throughout (and perhaps underpins) our society; not a medical “condition” distinct from the lives it affects, rather the result of a complex interplay among personal history, emotional, and neurological development, brain chemistry, and the drugs (and behaviors) of addiction. Simplifying a wide array of brain and addiction research findings from around the globe, the book avoids glib self-help remedies, instead promoting a thorough and compassionate self-understanding as the first key to healing and wellness.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts argues persuasively against contemporary health, social, and criminal justice policies toward addiction and those impacted by it. The mix of personal stories—including the author’s candid discussion of his own “high-status” addictive tendencies—and science with positive solutions makes the book equally useful for lay readers and professionals.
Festival Of Hungry Ghosts by Hugh Hickling
Festival Of Hungry Ghosts by Hugh Hickling
Festival of Hungry Ghosts is concerned with the lives of those engaged in administering a small British Colony in the Far East. The Governor and his Councillors are brilliantly depicted as men committed to maintaining a status quo, yet inwardly aware that the phase of history they represent is fast drawing to a close.
“Bulan Ramadan adalah bulan yang sangat popular di kalangan umat Islam berbanding bulan-bulan yang lain. Umat Islam sentiasa tertunggu-tunggu kehadiran bulan Ramadan kerana di dalamnya mempunyai keistimewaan perintah yang diwajibkan berpuasa., terjadinya malam Lailatul Qadar, Nuzul Quran, dan diberi ganjaran yang besar kepada sesiapa yang tekun dan ikhlas beramal soleh.” (Y.A.B Bentara Setia Tuan Guru Nik Abdul Aziz bin Nik Mat, Menteri Besar Kelantan)
Diari Ramadan adalah himpunan amalan soleh yang disusun mengikut waktu bermula dari bulan Rejab, Syaaban dan Ramadan hingga Syawal. Turut memuatkan kelebihan-kelebihan beramal menurut al-Quran dan sunnah, tip-tip ibadah dan renungan-renungan yang disusun bagi membantu pembaca mencapai pahala ibadah yang penuh pada bulan Ramadan.
U2 is a ultra-big phenomenal rock band which was in the papers recently for having been fined for playing their music too loudly in Barcelona. Oh well. If that piece of news didn’t make it to the papers, I would have stayed ignorant to the bigger news that U2 was scheduled to play to an almost-sold out 360° concert around Australia and New Zealand this week!
Let me cut to the chase! I have 3 copies of “U2 by U2” (ISBN 9780007196692, valued at RM 49.90) to give out this week.
This book was published back a few years ago but fans would still want it, right?
Hmm… let’s a mini lucky draw for this one. Only those who can answer the following questions correctly will qualify for the mini lucky draw.
Questions:
Which country does U2 hail from?
Name us the 4 members that make up U2.
U2 is / had been involved in numerous community/humanitarian projects etc. Name us any 3.
(And out of curiousity, why do you consider yourself a U2 fan?)
You may only enter this contest once. Multiple entries will be disqualified. Do type your answers at the comment column below.
Only those who live in West Malaysia only are eligible to participate and win the prizes.
Contest ends on 19th September 2010
P.S. ** Please press ‘submit comment’ once only. Answers will not appear immediately.
Like Me, Follow Meis a practical guide to making the most of social media to achieve effective communications, branding and engagement. Social media is the buzzword of the moment but it’s not fad. It’s here to stay. But social media can be very confusing with a dizzying array of options available. This book focuses on two Big Kahunas of the social media scene. This book will teach you how to leverage on them for the maximum effect and boost you company’s communications, branding and customer service offerings.
Oon Yeoh is a veteran journalist of online and offline media, has been writing about New Media’s impact on society and businesses for the past decade. This is his seventh book.
Chris Leong is a senior executive at Cradle Fund and former technology evangelist at Microsoft, is currently completing his MBA on the use of social media for branding and marketing.
C follows the short, intense life of Serge Carrefax, a man who – as his name suggests – surges into the electric modernity of the early twentieth century, transfixed by the technologies that will obliterate him.
Born to the sound of one of the very earliest experimental wireless stations, Serge finds himself steeped in a weird world of transmissions, whose very air seems filled with cryptic and poetic signals of all kinds. When personal loss strikes him in his adolescence, this world takes on a darker and more morbid aspect. What follows is a stunning tour de force in which the eerily idyllic settings of pre-war Europe give way to the exhilarating flightpaths of the frontline aeroplane radio operator, then the prison camps of Germany, the drug-fuelled London of the roaring twenties and, finally, the ancient tombs of Egypt.
Reminiscent of Bolaño, Beckett and Pynchon, this is a remarkable novel – a compelling, sophisticated and sublimely imaginative book uncovering the hidden codes and dark rhythms that sustain life.
Jack is five. He lives in a single room with his Ma. The room is locked. Neither Jack nor Ma have a key.
The novel opens as Jack turns five. Jack has never been outside of Room, as he calls it, and although he and Ma have access to a TV, Jack believes that everything he sees on the screen is make-believe: as far as he’s concerned, Room is the entire world. He’s happy enough with his lot, however, because he doesn’t know any different; Ma keeps him entertained, and he has her undivided attention. Their days have a structure, with time to sleep, a time to eat, to play, to watch TV – even a time for lessons. (And at night, which is when ‘Old Nick’ sometimes visits, Ma keeps Jack hidden away.)
But now Jack is five, and Ma tries to explain to him that – contrary to everything she’s told him previously – there is a world beyond Room. Jack finds the concept impossible to grasp, but when Old Nick cuts the power supply to Room, Ma realizes their situation is even more precarious than she had previously thought. She decides they have to act, and comes up with a plan: she will tell Old Nick that Jack is dead and persuade him to dispose of the body. At an appropriate moment, Jack – still very much alive – will make a run for it.
Ma and Jack spend ages rehearsing exactly what Jack has to do, and – miraculously – their plan works: Jack manages to get out of Room, and away from Old Nick. He manages, too, to convince a bystander to alert the police, who subsequently rescue Ma.
For Jack, however, freedom is an alien concept, and he’s suddenly catapulted into a world that’s both unfamiliar and terrifying; for him, it’s escape, not being held captive, that is frightening. For Ma, too, life on the outside requires many adjustments; not least, the two have to learn how to live together in a world full of other people.
3. Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
‘He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one…’
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czech always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.
Now, both Libor and Sam are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s grand, central London apartment.
It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you have less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends’ losses.
And it’s that very evening, at exactly 11:30, as Treslove, walking home, hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country, that he is attacked. And after this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.
The Finkler Question is a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.
When my countrymen imagined America, they thought of savages and bears and presidents who would not wear wigs. Who among them could have conjured Miss Godefroy in all her beauty of form and elegance of mind, her wit, her delicacy, her slender ankles amid those mad red leaves?
An exploration of the great adventure of American democracy, it thrillingly brings to life two characters who, born on different sides of history, come together to share an extraordinary relationship. Olivier is a French aristocrat, sent to the New World ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to save his neck in a future revolution. Parrot is the son of an itinerant English printer, sent to spy and protect him. With the narrative shifting between the perspectives of master and servant, we see the adventure of American democracy, in theory and in practice, told with Carey’s dazzling wit and inventiveness.
5. Andrea Levy’s The Long Song
The Long Song by Andrea Levy
The Long Song is Andrea Levy’s first novel in six years, following the critically acclaimed and award-winning Small Island.
Told by July, a slave girl born on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the nineteenth century, this is the story of her life during and after the last years of slavery:
‘You do not know me yet. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed.’
There is a moment when any real journey begins. Sometimes it happens as you leave your house, sometimes it’s a long way from home…
A young man makes three journeys that take him through Greece, India and Africa. He travels lightly, simply. To those who travel with him and those whom he meets on the way – including a handsome, enigmatic stranger, a group of careless backpackers and a woman on the edge – he is the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian. Yet, despite the man’s best intentions, each journey ends in disaster. Together, these three journeys will change his life.
A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, In a Strange Room is the hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man’s search for love and for a place to call home.
Loading ...