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Wednesday, May 06, 2026
Today only: Win back your purchase! 🤑
Tuesday, May 05, 2026
Here’s 10% off, just for you!
Hi there! Clive here from Cove & Clive.
I noticed you didn’t complete your order, and just wanted to check in, is everything alright?
The items in your cart are almost gone, and I’d hate for you to miss out.
The items in your cart are almost gone, and I’d hate for you to miss out.
To give you a little nudge, I’d love to offer you 10% off your order.
Simply use your personal discount code SQMNQBJH at checkout.
If you run into any issues or have any questions, feel free to reach out! I’m happy to help.
Thanks in advance and have a great day!
Clive, Team Cove & Clive
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Friday, February 04, 2011
Spirituality & Society
I have migrated my blog here and hope to be writing more thoughts on spirituality as well as observations on society...
Thursday, January 27, 2011
The Gospel of Glee
I do not like Glee. It is entertaining, but it is over-the-top in caricaturing people and promoting an amoral self-centerd approach to life. Everything's OK if you like yourself, and the weirder the better.
I have heard the actors talk about the message of acceptance and affirmation in the show, and how wonderful it is.
Now the creator of the show points out that acceptance and affirmation only goes so far... to those who like Glee! Hypocritical?
I have heard the actors talk about the message of acceptance and affirmation in the show, and how wonderful it is.
Now the creator of the show points out that acceptance and affirmation only goes so far... to those who like Glee! Hypocritical?
Well, fine, Ryan Murphy doesn't want to use someone like you, either. Nyah-nyah!
The Glee creator, in acknowledging all of the big stars just dying to be on the Golden Globe-winning series or have their music adapted for the show, made a special point of singling out the more reluctant Kings of Leon in a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter.
"F--k you, Kings of Leon," Murphy said. "They're self-centered assholes and they missed the big picture."
And it doesn't get any bigger than Glee, apparently...
Meanwhile, Kings frontman Caleb Followill says he certainly didn't mean to be the Sue Sylvester of rock.
"This whole Glee thing is a shock to us," he told THR in response to Murphy's diatribe. "It's gotten out of hand. At the time of the request, we hadn't even seen the show. It came at the end of that record cycle, and we were over promoting ["Use Somebody"]. This was never meant as a slap in the face to Glee or to music education or to fans of the show. We're not sure where the anger is coming from."
"Usually I find that people who make those comments, their careers are over; they're uneducated and quite stupid," Murphy said, this time referring to Slash, who, unlike Followill, actually did make a crack about Glee, calling it "worse than Grease" as far as licensing went.
Increased Anxiety Among College Freshmen
I recently read a book by Tim Elmore called "Generation iY," and in it he stated that young adults today have higher levels of anxiety, in part because of our culture's emphasis on building self-esteem divorced from accomplishments. We want kids to feel good about themselves without having done anything to actually earn respect. This paradoxically can lead to higher anxiety levels as they do not have a foundation for their self-esteem.
Interestingly, this parenting and teaching focus on self-esteem is contrary to the "Tiger Mother" approach espoused by Amy Chua.
Here is recent data reported in a NY Times article, showing that college freshmen have higher stress levels than at any time in the past 25 years.
Interestingly, this parenting and teaching focus on self-esteem is contrary to the "Tiger Mother" approach espoused by Amy Chua.
Here is recent data reported in a NY Times article, showing that college freshmen have higher stress levels than at any time in the past 25 years.
The emotional health of college freshmen — who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school — has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.
In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
The Gospel of Steve Jobs
Insightful and eloquent commentary on Steve Jobs' success and the worldview behind it - and how he epitomizes modern yearning and thinking. An excerpt from the introduction:
As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple's early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress.
In the 2000s, when much about the wider world was causing Americans intense anxiety, the one thing that got inarguably better, much better, was our personal technology. In October 2001, with the World Trade Center still smoldering and the Internet financial bubble burst, Apple introduced the iPod. In January 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession, the very month where unemployment breached 10 percent for the first time in a generation, Apple introduced the iPad.
Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—and technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket....
Apple made technology safe for cool people—and ordinary people. It made products that worked, beautifully, without fuss and with a great deal of style. They improved markedly, unmistakably, from one generation to the next—not just in a long list of features and ever-spiraling complexity (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Word), but in simplicity. Press the single button on the face of the iPad and, whether you are five or 95, you can begin using it with almost no instruction. It has no manual. No geeks required.
Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress—and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It's worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn't, say:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
5 Happiest countries in the World
Five years ago researchers at the Legatum Institute, a London-based nonpartisan think tank, set out to rank the happiest countries in the world. But because "happy" carries too much of a touchy-feely connotation, they call it "prosperity."
Legatum recently completed its 2010 Prosperity Index, which ranks 110 countries, covering 90% of the world's population.
To build its index Legatum gathers upward of a dozen international surveys done by the likes of the Gallup polling group, the Heritage Foundation and the World Economic Forum. Each country is ranked on 89 variables sorted into eight subsections: economy, entrepreneurship, governance, education, health, safety, personal freedom and social capital.
The core conceit: Prosperity is complex; achieving it relies on a confluence of factors that build on each other in a virtuous circle.
The Top 5 Happiest countries in the World
1. Norway
2. Denmark
3. Finland
4. Australia
5. New Zealand
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