About In the film City Slickers, Billy Crystal's hum drum blue collar worker Mitch spends two hours hauling cattle across the southwest of the US so that he can learn to smile again.
At the centre of the film is this exchange between his character and Jack Palance's Curley, a grizzled old rancher who doesn't look like he's seen a concrete building let alone walked through its doors, but he's happy because he knows this one thing, the secret of life, but as Mitch discovers the problem is that secret is different for everyone.
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
[holds up one finger]
Curly: This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean shit.
Mitch: But, what is the "one thing?"
Curly: [smiles] That's what *you* have to find out.
-- Curley, City Slickers.
Which is a fine premise for Review 2014, asking people to write about what they think is "the secret of life".
But that's hard.
Plus it's surprisingly limiting.
So instead, I took the idea of the "one thing" and expanded it.
So this year, in December, I've asked a series of guest bloggers to write about the one thing everyone else should know about.
This could be anything.
For some of them it could be advice or an idea they’ve had.
For others it’ll be some piece of science or culture we want to bring to everyone else’s attention, a book, or film or album or piece of television.
It could be a place.
It could be a time.
Could even be a confession, something they’ve always wanted to talk about.
A memory.
Let's see what happens.
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