Convention Centre Quotes

Just because you have stolen someone's heart, luckily owned and occupied as a home, doesn't give you the audacity to enforce hurtful policies.

Twenty-five minutes later, Port Vila’s most decrepit taxivan pulled up outside the $28 million Convention Centre. Every panel was dinted, most windows were held in place with plumbers’ tape, the engine burnt more oil than petrol, and only one windscreen wiper worked.

The Convention Centre had caused great consternation in Vanuatu for many years. All of this was the result that Vanuatu didn’t want it, Vanuatu didn’t ask for it, and Vanuatu couldn’t afford it. That hadn’t stopped the generosity of the Chinese Government insisting on building it with very favourable financial terms.

In the late Middle Ages the stupefying simplicity of the heliocentric model was used as an argument to discredit the new astronomy. Its elegance was interpreted as naivete...Just as the legendary inquisitor refused to look through Galileo's telescope, so most modern economists refuse to look at an analysis that might displace the conventional centre of their economic system.

An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.

A woman named Cynthia once told me a story about the time her father had made plans to take her on a night out in San Francisco. Twelve-year-old Cynthia and her father had been planning the “date” for months. They had a whole itinerary planned down to the minute: she would attend the last hour of his presentation, and then meet him at the back of the room at about four-thirty and leave quickly before everyone tried to talk to him. They would catch a tram to Chinatown, eat Chinese food (their favourite), shop for a souvenir, see the sights for a while and then “catch a flick” as her dad liked to say. Then they would grab a taxi back to the hotel, jump in the pool for a quick swim (her dad was famous for sneaking in when the pool was closed), order a hot fudge sundae from room service, and watch the late, late show. They discussed the details over and over again before they left. The anticipation was part of the whole experience. This was all going according to plan until, as her father was leaving the convention centre, he ran into an old college friend and business associate. It had been years since they had seen each other, and Cynthia watched as they embraced enthusiastically. His friend said, in effect: “I am so glad you are doing some work with our company now. When Lois and I heard about it we thought it would be perfect. We want to invite you, and of course Cynthia, to get a spectacular seafood dinner down at the Wharf!” Cynthia’s father responded: “Bob, it’s so great to see you. Dinner at the wharf sounds great!” Cynthia was crestfallen. Her daydreams of tram rides and ice cream sundaes evaporated in an instant. Plus, she hated seafood and she could just imagine how bored she would be listening to the adults talk all night. But then her father continued: “But not tonight. Cynthia and I have a special date planned, don’t we?” He winked at Cynthia and grabbed her hand and they ran out of the door and continued with what was an unforgettable night in San Francisco. As it happens, Cynthia’s father was the management thinker Stephen R. Covey (author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) who had passed away only weeks before Cynthia told me this story. So it was with deep emotion she recalled that evening in San Francisco. His simple decision “Bonded him to me forever because I knew what mattered most to him was me!” she said.5 One simple answer is we are unclear about what is essential. When this happens we become defenceless. On the other hand, when we have strong internal clarity it is almost as if we have a force field protecting us from the non-essentials coming at us from all directions. With Rosa it was her deep moral clarity that gave her unusual courage of conviction. With Stephen it was the clarity of his vision for the evening with his loving daughter. In virtually every instance, clarity about what is essential fuels us with the strength to say no to the non-essentials. Stephen R. Covey, one of the most respected and widely read business thinkers of his generation, was an Essentialist. Not only did he routinely teach Essentialist principles – like “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” – to important leaders and heads of state around the world, he lived them.6 And in this moment of living them with his daughter he made a memory that literally outlasted his lifetime. Seen with some perspective, his decision seems obvious. But many in his shoes would have accepted the friend’s invitation for fear of seeming rude or ungrateful, or passing up a rare opportunity to dine with an old friend. So why is it so hard in the moment to dare to choose what is essential over what is non-essential?

Mental discipline, prayer and remoteness from the world and its disturbing visions reduce temptation to a minimum, but they can never entirely abolish it. In medieval traditions, abbeys and convents were always considered to be expugnable centres of revolt against infernal dominion on earth. They became, accordingly, special targets. Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumoured to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the legend continues, sleeps at his post. There is no work for him; the battle was long ago won. But monasteries, those scattered danger points, become the chief objectives of nocturnal flight; the sky fills with the beat of sable wings as phalanx after phalanx streams to the attack, and the darkness crepitates with the splintering of a myriad lances against the masonry of asceticism.

But there is something other than entertainment which one derives from reading in bed: a particular quality of privacy. Reading in bed is a self-centred act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.

There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity — yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most spiritual and vaguest of earth’s dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of the Me in the centre,) creeds, conventions, fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look’d upon, it expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven.

These phenotypic consequences are conventionally thought of as being restricted to a small field around the replicator itself, its boundaries being defined by the body wall of the individual organism in whose cells the replicator sits. But the nature of the causal influence of gene on phenotype is such that it makes no sense to think of the field of influence as being limited in this arbitrary way, any more than it makes sense to think of it as limited to intracellular biochemistry. We must think of each replicator as the centre of a field of influence on the world at large.

Like the usurpers in the Italian Renaissance, they seek to gloss over the illegitimacy of their rô1e by offering tangible advantages and making a fine show; that explains their economic liberalism and their patronage of the arts. They employ art not merely as a means to fame and a propaganda instrument but also as an opiate to soothe the opposition. The fact that their art policy is often accompanied by a true love and understanding of art does not affect its social basis. The courts of the Tyrants are the most important cultural centres of the age and its greatest repositories of artistic production [...] Yet in spite of this activity at the courts, the art of the age of the Tyrants is not entirely a product of the court; the rationalistic and individualistic spirit of the age hindered the development of that solemn pageantry and those conventional forms which are characteristic of a court style. The only features in this art that we can ascribe to the court are its joy in the senses, its refined intellectuality, and its somewhat artificial elegance of expression—all features to be found in the older Ionian tradition but developed to a still higher degree at the courts of the Tyrants.

She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today’s Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centred? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn’t such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgemental. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.

But that's fatalism." "The illusion which man has that his will is free is so deeply rooted that I am ready to accept it. I act as though I were a free agent. But when an action is performed it is clear that all the forces of the universe from all eternity conspired to cause it, and nothing I could do could have prevented it. It was inevitable. If it was good I can claim no merit; if it was bad I can accept no censure." "My brain reels," said Philip. "Have some whiskey," returned Cronshaw, passing over the bottle. "There's nothing like it for clearing the head. You must expect to be thick-witted if you insist upon drinking beer." Philip shook his head, and Cronshaw proceeded: "You're not a bad fellow, but you won't drink. Sobriety disturbs conversation. But when I speak of good and bad..." Philip saw he was taking up the thread of his discourse, "I speak conventionally. I attach no meaning to those words. I refuse to make a hierarchy of human actions and ascribe worthiness to some and ill-repute to others. The terms vice and virtue have no signification for me. I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world." "But there are one or two other people in the world," objected Philip. "I speak only for myself. I know them only as they limit my activities. Round each of them too the world turns, and each one for himself is the centre of the universe. My right over them extends only as far as my power. What I can do is the only limit of what I may do. Because we are gregarious we live in society, and society holds together by means of force, force of arms (that is the policeman) and force of public opinion (that is Mrs. Grundy). You have society on one hand and the individual on the other: each is an organism striving for self-preservation. It is might against might. I stand alone, bound to accept society and not unwilling, since in return for the taxes I pay it protects me, a weakling, against the tyranny of another stronger than I am; but I submit to its laws because I must; I do not acknowledge their justice: I do not know justice, I only know power. And when I have paid for the policeman who protects me and, if I live in a country where conscription is in force, served in the army which guards my house and land from the invader, I am quits with society: for the rest I counter its might with my wiliness. It makes laws for its self-preservation, and if I break them it imprisons or kills me: it has the might to do so and therefore the right. If I break the laws I will accept the vengeance of the state, but I will not regard it as punishment nor shall I feel myself convicted of wrong-doing. Society tempts me to its service by honours and riches and the good opinion of my fellows; but I am indifferent to their good opinion, I despise honours and I can do very well without riches." "But if everyone thought like you things would go to pieces at once." "I have nothing to do with others, I am only concerned with myself. I take advantage of the fact that the majority of mankind are led by certain rewards to do things which directly or indirectly tend to my convenience." "It seems to me an awfully selfish way of looking at things," said Philip. "But are you under the impression that men ever do anything except for selfish reasons?" (324)

Göbekli Tepe held another sensational secret. For many years, geneticists have been tracing the origins of domesticated wheat. Recent discoveries indicate that at least one domesticated variant, einkorn wheat, originated in the Karaçadag Hills – less than twenty miles from Göbekli Tepe.6 This can hardly be a coincidence. It’s likely that the cultural centre of Göbekli Tepe was somehow connected to the initial domestication of wheat by humankind and of humankind by wheat. In order to feed the people who built and used the monumental structures, particularly large quantities of food were required. It may well be that foragers switched from gathering wild wheat to intense wheat cultivation, not to increase their normal food supply, but rather to support the building and running of a temple. In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple in the middle. But Göbekli Tepe suggests that the temple may have been built first, and that a village later grew up around it.

PARTIES, CONFERENCES AND NETWORKING EVENTS. You’ve got to be honest with yourself; this was the actual lesson you’ve been dreading, only if you are a natural extrovert, there are some things that are more stressful than going to parties and other networking activities. Today is going to be a bit tough, so you are going to have to be tougher. This is where all the lessons you’ve learnt so far will pay off. When you’re in a party, a conference or networking event, you are likely to hold one of four possible roles. How you react to the event will depend on this role. The possibilities include: Host/Greeter. Guest. Networker. Support. People will definitely come to you if you’re in the first category, making introduction moderately easy and opportunities for small talk plentiful. You may be in charge of giving a presentation or attending to a table at a convention or any similar event. Make sure to create eye contact and smile at strangers to acknowledge them, someone will approach you in no time. Topics that may outstand may include how successful the turnout was or other positive factors that craved out of the event. If you happen to be a guest or a visitor, the challenge is on you to approach and kick start conversations. The golden rule for breaking ice at events and starting small talks ate networking arena are remarkably the same. You have to keep one thing in mind; everyone attends a party with the intention of meeting a new person and talking with them. So, if you find out that your introduction is not so much an imposition as making it up to meet new people, you will find it much compelling and easy. Your best topics in this case are basically probing enquires about what brings your other party to the event and if you have mutual acquaintances. Your own work as a networker is a little bit different from being a host or guest. As a networker, you have to join groups, or even groups of groups in a cohesive way. You may need to go in to many conversations in the middle. The best way to go about this is to smile or enthusiastically go with something that was just said. When this is done, be careful not to shoehorn your conversation topics in to small talks, but try to carefully merge in to each of them as if you’re approaching from a highway on- ramp. Support is the final role, and the sad part about this is that you might find yourself at the end catering an event or working as a neutral staff. Even with that, you may still create opportunities for personal networking or even very revealing small talks during the course of the event. Conversation with other staff, special guests or even the host can turn out to invaluable connections that you can make use of later. With this at the back of your mind, always prepare for short conversations when you’re working an event just as seriously as if you were attending the event as a special guest. Maybe you’re not that kind of person that can withstand large crowd, take a break to regain who you are and review the topical assessments you prepared in the previous lessons. Don’t forget to excuse yourself so you can move around in the event centre on a regular basis, perhaps going for another role you think you’re capable of. This particular aspect does not have any other way to go about it. In fact, it might take the next 5 days before you put the whole concept together, and you may need to combine the zeal with tomorrow’s lesson. Now, you should go for a party or be the host to one yourself so you can utilize all these principles you learnt today. There’s no way to wave this, you have to learn it and be perfect. Bring your partner who has been your support all this while along to tackle the four roles and many more within the time frame. Until then, maintain the free flow with ease.

For much of the first 100 years of the public school system, religious conflicts centred on intense anti-Catholic sentiments with tensions occasionally reaching violent levels. The Philadelphia Bible riots in 1844 ignited over the use of anti-Catholic books in public schools and the requirement that children read from the Protestant King James version of the Bible rather than the Catholic Douay version. Protestants, fearing that Catholics wanted to remove their Bible from schools and convert their children to Catholicism, rallied in the streets and violently rioted in Catholic neighbourhoods. The devastation resulted in the death of eighteen people and destroyed fifty homes, a church, and a convent.

In addition, Sultan Iltumish, for all his rhetoric of being India's sole legitimate Muslim ruler, continued to issue coins with the old bull-and-horseman motif and a Sanskritized form of his name and title: 'Suratana Sri Samsadina', the latter referring to his given name, Shams al-Din. He also enlarged Delhi's Qutb mosque by three times in order to accomodate the many immigrants from beyond the Khyber who had flocked to Delhi during his reign. And he added three storeys to the city's famous minaret, the Qutb Minar. Notably, he placed a seven-metre iron pillar in the centre of the mosque's oldest courtyard, on a direct axis with its main prayer chamber. Originally installed in a Vishnu temple to announce the military victories of a fourth-or-fifth century Indian king, the pillar was now associated with Iltumish and his own victories. In transplanting the pillar in this way, the Sultan broke with Islamic architectural conventions while conforming to Indian political traditions. For in 1164, within living memory of Iltumish's installations of the Vishnu pillar in Delhi's great mosque, Vigraharaja IV Chauhan (r. 1150-64) recorded his own conquests on the same stone pillar on which the emperor Ashoka had published an edict back in the third century BC.

Already, though, the fiction has become blurred. Am I Mr. Y? Do I have to be for the book to work? When I was a kid I always made an agreement with myself never to identify with main protagonists, because bad things or, more troublingly, big things tended to happen to them and I couldn’t cope with the feeling that these things were also happening to me, to the self that you project into fiction when you read. So I would decide on a secondary character that I would ‘be’ for the duration of the book. Sometimes I died; sometimes I turned out to be evil. But I never had to take centre stage. Now I’m older, I read more conventionally. Right now I’m scared for Mr. Y/me and I feel as though it must be raining outside, even though it isn’t.

The growing interest in medieval-period reconstruction is vividly legible in the music, cinema listings and television schedules of the late 1960s and early 70s. Besides the BBC Tudor series mentioned earlier – which led to a spin-off cinema version, Henry VIII and his Six Wives, in 1972 – there was Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), centred on Henry’s first wife Anne Boleyn, starring Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold; the Thomas More biopic A Man for All Seasons (1966); Peter O’Toole as Henry II in Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter (1968); David Hemmings as Alfred the Great (1969); the hysterical convent of Russell’s The Devils (1971); and future singer Murray Head in a melodramatic retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight (1973). In the same period HTV West made a series of often repeated mud-and-guts episodes of Arthur of the Britons (1972–3), and visionary Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini unveiled his earthy adapations of the Decameron (1970) and The Canterbury Tales (1971). From the time of the English Civil War, Ken Hughes cast Richard Harris in his erratic portrait of Cromwell (1970); and the twenty-three-year-old doomed genius Michael Reeves made his Witchfinder General in 1968, in which the East Anglian farmland becomes a transfigured backdrop to a tale of superstition and violent religious persecution in 1645. Period reconstruction, whether in film, television or music, has been a staple of British culture, innate to a mindset that always finds its identity in the grain of the past.

You never had the slightest conception of what happens when bombs are dropped on cities. Even conventional bombs. None of you ever experienced it. Not a single one of you. I walked back from the centre of Berlin to the suburbs one night, after one of the big raids. No transport moving, of course. The whole city on fire. Even the puddles in the streets are burning. They’re puddles of molten phosphorus. It gets on your shoes like some kind of incandescent dog-muck—I have to keep scraping it off—as if the streets have been fouled by the hounds of hell. It would have made you laugh—my shoes keep bursting into flame. All around me, I suppose, there are people trapped, people in various stages of burning to death. And all I can think is, How will I ever get hold of another pair of shoes in times like these?” Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. “Copenhagen

the cultural centre of Göbekli Tepe was somehow connected to the initial domestication of wheat by humankind and of humankind by wheat. In order to feed the people who built and used the monumental structures, particularly large quantities of food were required. It may well be that foragers switched from gathering wild wheat to intense wheat cultivation, not to increase their normal food supply, but rather to support the building and running of a temple. In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple in the middle. But Göbekli Tepe suggests that the temple may have been built first, and that a village later grew up around it.

I’m always talking about the internet and what’s happening now, so cancel culture is something I’m interested in as a phenomenon, but I don’t want it to come across like I’m butt-hurt about it because, honestly, I don’t really care. Because what is cancelling? People start a social media account and once they get more than 300 followers they can’t see their audience as anything but an audience, something to be performed to — which is why you get the weird thing of your mate who works in a brewery talking on Facebook like he’s talking to a packed convention centre. When you’re performing to an audience, the only human inclination is to be the benevolent protagonist. You’d never assume the role of the antagonist — that’s why trolls exist with anonymity. People who actually put themselves out there, online, their role is to be the good guy. We’re not aware of the solipsism of this behaviour because we’re all doing it. So once a week, culture generates a baddie so all the good guys can go: ‘Look how good I am in opposition to how bad he is.’ And the reason we forget about whatever morally [dubious] thing that person has done a week later is because we don’t care. It’s all literally a performance. There’s a purposeful removal of context in order to seem virtuous that happens so constantly that people can’t even be arsed.

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue; my heart aches from the consciousness that I am working for money, and money is the centre of all I do.

The first basic income pilot in a developing country was implemented in the small Namibian village of Otjivero-Omitara in 2008–9, covering about 1,000 people.40 The study was carried out by the Namibian Basic Income Grant Coalition, with money raised from foundations and individual donations. Everyone in the village, including children but excluding over-sixties already receiving a social pension, was given a very small basic income of N$100 a month (worth US$12 at the time or about a third of the poverty line), and the outcomes compared with the previous situation. The results included better nutrition, particularly among children, improved health and greater use of the local primary healthcare centre, higher school attendance, increased economic activity and enhanced women’s status.41 The methodology would not have satisfied those favouring randomized control trials that were coming into vogue at the time. No control village was chosen to allow for the effects of external factors, in the country or economy, because those directing the pilot felt it was immoral to impose demands, in the form of lengthy surveys, on people who were being denied the benefit of the basic income grants. However, there were no reported changes in policy or outside interventions during the period covered by the pilot, and confidence in the results is justified both by the observed behaviour, and by recipients’ opinions in successive surveys. School attendance went up sharply, though there was no pressure on parents to send their children to school. The dynamics were revealing. Although the primary school was a state school, parents were required to pay a small fee for each child. Before the pilot, registration and attendance were low, and the school had too little income from fees to pay for basics, which made the school unattractive and lowered teachers’ morale. Once the cash transfers started, parents had enough money to pay school fees, and teachers had money to buy paper, pens, books, posters, paints and brushes, making the school more attractive to parents and children and raising the morale and, probably, the capacity of its teachers. There was also a substantial fall in petty economic crime such as stealing vegetables and killing small livestock for food. This encouraged villagers to plant more vegetables, buy more fertilizer and rear more livestock. These dynamic community-wide economic effects are usually overlooked in conventional evaluations, and would not be spotted if cash was given only to a random selection of individuals or households and evaluated as a randomized control trial. Another outcome, unplanned and unanticipated, was that villagers voluntarily set up a Basic Income Advisory Committee, led by the local primary school teacher and the village nurse, to advise people on how to spend or save their basic income money. The universal basic income thus induced collective action, and there was no doubt that this community activism increased the effectiveness of the basic incomes.

SECOND-HAND PLANTS ARE A GREAT ALTERNATIVE TO CONVENTIONAL PLANTS FROM GARDEN CENTRES. CHECK PORTALS SUCH AS EBAY FOR PLANTS – SOMETIMES YOU CAN FIND REAL GREEN GEMS ONLINE.