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Back to current entries
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December 20, 2002
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Man
And His World is an official Canadian archive documenting
the Montreal fair. Contrast with the personal recollections at Jeffrey
Stanton's Expo 67
site.
Here's something new in my "miscellaneous" section,
a small group of photo pages featuring old buildings
familiar from neighborhood walkabouts:
Mountain
View Views.
The
Green Fairy has arrived! All about absinthe, its history
and New Orleans, and how chemist Ted Breaux is working to bring
the real beverage back -- he's reverse-engineered the original,
and its smuggling is apparently of a very low priority, to
US Customs. Says the louche effect (which occurs
when the water's mixed with the absinthe) was heightened in
the old days by the antimony trichloride additive, which
doesn't sound good -- it's interesting, that word
"louche" -- my dictionaruy says it means "Of questionable
taste or morality." For more info and links see Chuck Taggart's
What
is Absinthe? page.
Another question: What is the "Big Dig"? Sure, I've
heard of it, biggest construction undertaking ever, so
forth; but since Boston is way beyond my usual
orbit, I've never really had a grasp of what
they're doing up there, until now. Basically,
they're burying a couple of freeways; finally,
a 'virtual tour' site
offers a map, the first I've ever encountered
in years of reading about this thing -- the usual
illustration accompanying such is like that at the top of
this
John Pike article which reports that
incredibly,
the project already is more than 40 years old.
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December 19, 2002
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Norman Mailer holds forth on 'flag' vs. 'values'
conservatives, among other things, in
I
Am Not For World Empire":
Flag conservatives are not Christians. They are, at best, militant
Christians, which is, of course, a fatal contradiction in terms.
They are a very special piece of work, but they are not Christians.
The fundament of Christianity is compassion, and it is usually
observed by the silence attendant on its absence. Well, the same
anomaly is true of the Muslims. Islam, in theory, is an immensely
egalitarian religion. It believes everyone is absolutely equal
before God. But the reality, no surprise, is something else. A
host of Arab leaders, who do not look upon their poor people in
any way as equals, make up a perfect counterpart to the way we
live with Christianity. We violate Christianity with every breath
we take. So do the Muslims violate Islam. We are speaking of war
between two essentially unbalanced inauthentic theologies. So, it
may prove to be an immense war. A vast conflict of powers is at
the core and the motives of both sides are inauthentic which, I
expect, makes it worse.
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December 18, 2002
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Meet Tissue-San,
and all his friends! (Then scroll down, hit
"home" and explore more -- lots of Japanesey
kawaii goodness here!)
End of the year, so it's time for lists:
The 50 Most
Loathsome People in America, 2002;
by the Beast.
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December 13, 2002
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At the Sunnyvale Borders on my lunch break: a little
holiday shopping, actually found an empty chair & was
engrossed in The Big Book of the Unexplained
(reading about the Crystal Skull), when a distracting
male voice came on the loudspeaker, announcing that,
available for book signings up by the front register:
Kenneth Starr! I stood up, looked over, and there
he was, sitting at a little table, all alone,
surrounded by stacks of his new book on the Supreme
Court. I analyzed my feelings about this media figure,
who'd so enraged me just a few years past, and now he
was just a footnote, yesterday's news, ignored. After
a while, drifting around close by, I decided that (at
a minimum) I had to do something, maybe ask why he
didn't take that job at Pepperdine, do us all a favor;
but he'd attracted an adoring sycophant who kept on
hovering about, so eventually I just left.
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December 12, 2002
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Are you an IT worker, leaving town for the
holidays? In Unix shops like mine, people use the
"vacation" command, which causes the creation
of automated "I'm gone" replies to any emails
they receive, advising when I'll return... perhaps
this is not such a bright idea?
Burglars
using 'out of office' auto-reply emails to find empty homes.
"You wouldn't go on holiday with a note pinned to your door
saying who you were, how long you were away for and when you
were coming back, so why would you put this in an email?"
The
AgoraPhone -- call 617-253-6237 and anything you say is audible
in a public part of the MIT campus, piped out of a
horn-sculpture which reminds me of the voice of authority's
apparatus on the "Teletubbies."
dubyadubyadubya.com has a
great Flash message about America's having
technical difficulties, Please Stand By.
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December 8, 2002
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The
Duct
Tape wallet is complete how-to instructions,
from 3M Canada. Sounds like a good idea, but this
would never work for me -- my wallet rides in my hip
pocket, I realize how easy an aging ductape repair
sags, exposing that icky-sticky adhesive -- yucko.
More fun from our Canadian chums to the north:
The
Human Powered Move -- very heart-warming. It's
about changing somebody's address by a couple miles,
strictly with pedal power. Night falls and it begins
to snow, but after five trips -- well, see for
yourself. (It's a slow-loader, but a good design,
I thought.)
The
evolution of bizarre machines that walk when powered by
gusts of wind is kinetic art by Theo Jansen, as reported
in Popular Science -- three amazing photos.
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December 6, 2002
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Hmmm... I see the juggernaut of
Amazon has assimilated
CD Now, but
CD Universe
still seems to be independent. The latter
got my business early on, just 'cause it seemed
like the underdog, but then they lost a bunch of
credit card numbers in their database to theives
who allegedly sold them, so I changed my number
and never ordered from them again. Instead, now, of
late I've used (ahem) Amazon.
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November 27, 2002
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"I will not sell the chocolates."
This
review
of The Chocolate Wars: Inside the
Secret Worlds of Mars and Hershey has interesting
details concerning both houses, and their product.
Mars does not make chocolate bars with
peanut butter. Why? [Follow
the link, or read the book.]
It is one reason why Hershey is winning
the chocolate war.
That "Cloaca" art-machine described
in the previous post, just below... does
it belch, and fart? I wonder if it converts
its food input into actual red blood cells -- I read
somewhere
that most of what we poop is dead red blood cells.
(Also -- another old Straight Dope column explains
anal
retentive, a term which came up recently in a
discussion I had with my parents.)
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November 23, 2002
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Cloaca
(named after the sewer in ancient Rome)
is a working digestive system made of glass tanks, tubes, and pumps,
created by artist Wim Delvoye.
Each day, a full meal is poured in its "mouth" (a
funnel), and as the food works its way through the
system, it's subject to the same chemicals and
digestive processes found in the body. At the end
of the 27-hour process, the resulting feces is ejected
onto a conveyor belt. (At some galleries they were
selling the stools at $1000 a pop).
Justin's published a speculative new article,
From
Weblog to Moblog, about new trends like mobile blogging.
This
"Invisible Shoebox" comic grapples with the Big
Question: Just what exactly is a weblog? In
one variation, instead of people posting written
blurbs, they're putting up a bunch of photos to
document their days... an excellent example is
Ziboy
in Beijing -- he catches lots of faces amid urban
views.
Groceteria.net is
an in-depth web-shrine to American supermarket architecture
and history.
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November 20, 2002
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According
to Pravda, Sergey Korolev (the Soviet space program's
'Chief Integral' in The Right Stuff) studied a UFO which
supposedly crashed near Kiev -- it was an ancient silver rocket which
had inscriptions inside, in Sanskrit.
More on Ranger Hal: the reason I'm familiar with his show was
The
Space Explorers serial -- somebody's finally
put up a page about it.
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November 19, 2002
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The maps
at the Dialect Survey are fascinating -- here's my reactions to a sample:
- #15: merry/Mary/marry -- I'm
red on this one -- was surprised to learn (in one of my teaching-English
classes that people say these words differently... when those who can
discriminate are hearing a difference, I perceive no difference -- it's
too subtle.
- #72 -- I call them dust 'woofies' (which was not a choice offered)
- #77, doing donuts -- I've actually met somebody from Nebraska who uses the
"cookies" term, but... "whipping shitties"?
- #80 -- "The devil is beating his wife"? (Strange -- I didn't know he was married)
- #111 - last
and first slice of a loaf of bread: "boot" is not a valid choice, but "nose"
is -- the Nose? (I like the noses, for toast)
The dcmemories.com URL now bounces one into
kidshow.dcboomer.com -- the
last page of
the Ranger Hal section has color photos.
William
Shatner, techno-idiot -- a review of his latest
book, Star Trek: I'm Working on That.
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November 17, 2002
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This
rebuttal
to that appalling Newsweek cover story, "Why TV Is Good For
Kids," points out how the Washington Post, which owns
Newsweek, also owns six television broadcast stations,
as well as Cable ONE.
How
to Break the American Trance is a speech given by
92-year-old "Granny D" Haddock, who walked across the US
in 1999-2000 for campaign finance reform.
We Americans are split into two meaningful camps, [but] it is
not conservative versus liberal. The two camps are these: the
politically awake and the hypnotized -- hypnotized by television
and other mass media, whose overpaid Svengalis dangle the swinging
medallions of packaged candidates and oft-told lies. It is all done
to politically prolong the open season on us -- open season indeed,
as the billionaire takeover artists bag their catch for the day.
And in their bags are our freedoms, our leisure, our health care
futures, our old age security, our family time, our village life,
our family-owned businesses on Main Street, the middle class itself,
and our position of honor and peaceful leadership in the world.
Update on Joe Frank -- now he has his own site at
joefrank.com -- it's
a dark place, hard to read; enter it
here to
retain complete control of your browser. His catalog of streaming
audio is available in there, too. Plus: Joe
interview
with Douglas Mcgowan, dated 1994.
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November 14, 2002
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While bopping around Concourse "B" of the Pittsburgh
aerodrome yesterday, I came across a discarded
Food section of the NY Times. The story on peculiar
Rhode Island
cuisine and its nomenclature was weird ('New York
System' weenies? Cabinet = milk shake? Clam
cake "stuffies"!?) but the real eye-opener was the
Carbs
in My Soup article about the ubiquity in NYC restaurants
of the latest weight loss philosophy, which ideally induces
ketosis -- the theory that a low-carb diet forces
the body to burn stored fat.
"And the bad breath doesn't help either," said Ms. Hochwald,
the health writer, referring to the "ketosis breath" many dieters
experience. (Dr. Atkins recommends chewing parsley sprigs.)
I first encountered these ideas while reading about
The Zone
a few years back, and although I found that method
way too regimented, I did retain some useful ideas
concerning serving size, the needs to increase consumption
of fresh produce and to cut back on the bread,
rice and pasta -- but these Atkins people sound like
they've gone off the deep end. I can't believe increasing
fat intake is healthy; rather, one needs more sweat production to
lose weight, as well as developing that anorexic ability of
getting used to being hungry. It's what worked for me.
He's fed up with the red state mentality --
Will
Durst wants California to C-Seed -- me too. That's
why, rather than the stars&stripes, my vehicle's
been sporting a California flag for several months now.
And don't think we'd stop at mere secession: might as
well liberate and annex Baja at the same time.
The word of the day is "Electroclash" -- came across it whilst
spreading around some newsprint from an old Metro,
for easy cleanup after some mundane chore. The term was
coined by New York dj Larry Tee to characterize a retro
sound... Can't understand the reaction of hostility some have
towards "80s music" -- I thought it was and still is great.
Tune out the negative tone of
the
great Electroclash swindle, to come to some understanding
of what it is.
All about construction of the
Military Tribute to Bob Hope
in San Diego (with illustrations). Although they won't get one from me,
they'd like a donation from you, to build this monument and its set of
audio-animatronic Bobs.
Insect-obsessed artist Jan Fabre has tiled 1.4 million beetles onto a
Belgian palace ceiling -- unveiled tomorrow, public display for one day
only, Guardian story
here
(no illustrations, perhaps in tomorrow's news).
Some creepy photos of
'detainees' inside a
C-130 military transport (on Art Bell's site), and a crisp
Astro-Pic of a sunspot
close-up snapped with the Swedish Solar Telescope last July.
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November 7, 2002
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Sam Smith on the losers:
For the [Democratic] party to recover, it must divorce itself
from the con men who have done it so much damage. It must find
its way back to the gutbucket, pragmatic populism that gave this
country Social Security, a minimum wage, veterans' programs,
the FHA, civil rights, and the war on poverty. It must jettison
its self-defeating snobbism towards Americans who go to church
or own a gun. It needs to be as useful to the voter in the
cubicle as it once was to the voter on the assembly line. It
must find a soul, a passion, and a sense of itself. Most of all,
it must get rid of those false prophets and phony friends who
have not only done it so much damage but have left the country
fully in the hands of the cruel, the selfish, the violent, the
dumb, and the anti-democratic.
That's the concluding paragraph of The
Party's Over, just published in his
Progressive
Review -- well worth reading, today and any day.
The Joe
Frank web page at KCRW was updated recently: now all it says is
"www.kcrw.com no longer
houses Joe Frank's shows on its website." But the
crafty Internaut, peering into this page's HTML, can see all their
old RealAudio links, commented out -- and they still work! No need
to go to so much trouble, however --
this site
mirrors the original page. And if you're not into streaming audio,
Bob Lee's site
has MP3 files for almost everything, with more submissions (via
FTP) encouraged. (I'm currently in the process of harvesting that
data, for to burn my first CD using the marvelous Mac machine.)
But -- what happened to Joe? The following is from an indirect
posting of last Sunday to the message board of the
Joe Frank Network:
Hello, everyone. I want to express my appreciation for your continued
interest in my work--in spite of the fact that I've produced no new
programs for over a year. I'm in the process of writing a piece--you
might even call it a "full disclosure"--of what happened between me
and KCRW. The story is alternately funny, emotionally wrenching and
ludicrous (among other things) and none of the principles involved
escapes scathing scrutiny, including myself. When I think about a
central theme, it's about betrayal and the lies people tell themselves
and others in order to justify their behavior.
From
the
Color of Cool in Business 2.0, about the more
desirable instrument illuminations:
... an association between blue and high-end audio dates back to 1923.
In that year, product inspectors at German radiomaker Ideal began
to daub a blue dot on earphones that met their standards. The mark
became so identified with quality that in 1938 the company changed
its name to Blaupunkt -- literally, blue dot.
About the new
Hitchcock
movie mosaics at the Leytonstone tube station,
in London.
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November 5, 2002
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Six
sushi essays by Chef Chip -- the even numbers are
Tuna Tuna Tuna (which mentions albacore, or
binnaga -- this is what's canned... if you're
ever offered this "white tuna" at a sushi place, give it
a go: can be better than yellowtail); California
Roll (which identifies its source); and Salmon Sushi.
Quite informative.
While idly surfing I came across
this
lengthy post to the Making Light weblog about fraud, how
there's only about a half-dozen actual confidence games.
These scams take the forms they do because they're parodies--no,
a better way to put it: they're cargo-cult effigies--of the deals
the ruling class cut for themselves. If you're an insider, if you
have the secret, you can have a job where you make heaps of money
for very little work. Of course people believe it. After all, they
vaguely know this sort of thing happens. It just doesn't happen to
them. But why shouldn't they be the lucky ones, this time around?
Speaking of fraud this election day,
The Election is
a weblog devoted to cataloging incidents of dirty tricks involving
the voting process.
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November 3, 2002
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Pete Townsend reacts
to the recently-published journals of Kurt Cobain, musing
on "stinking thinking," Nirvana, and death in the rock
industry.
Sally and Johnny have a web-site:
Black
People Love Us!
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October 31, 2002 
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Global Public Announcement! A mystery site whose URL is
March 8, 2003 says to
"Be patient and
all will be revealed." Photographs are involved.
The Traser
GlowRing is
A small hollow glass tube, which has been internally
coated with a phosphorous material, injected with a special
gas and then sealed by a laser. The gas inside the tube excites
the phosphor, which creates a cold light that will glow for
ten years without any external power source.
Sorry, but "due to
international regulations regarding this product"
they won't ship it out of the UK. So what makes it a ring?
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October 30, 2002
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To commemorate the anniversary of the Cuban Missle
Crisis, the Washington Post has posted
PDFs
of the complete daily editions for that last
October week of 1962 -- very interesting. (Of
course, all I've read so far is the
comics -- refreshing, seeing Moon Mullins
again... and Penny!)
From Jim Knipfel's review
of a new coffee-table book edited by
Diane Keaton called Clown Paintings, which
has thrift-shop illustrations as well as essays
by various celebrities --
Coulrophobia is the official psychological term
given to the irrational fear of clowns.
Yeah, but what about loathing? That's the
word to know.
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October 28, 2002
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Went camping in a
Big
Sur redwood grove this weekend -- very
pleasant. Being privately-owned, the campground
allows campfires, contained within wide, ten-inch-high
metal rings, although you must supply your own wood.
Gazing at a fire can be one of the most relaxing
things there is.
Astro-pic: the
Richat
Structure is a round, geological feature of
the Sahara, visible from space.
The Carter
Hummingbird aerobatic aircraft seems close to
reality -- a radical design.
According to someone at Slate,
"President Bush" is, of course, a metaphor. Much Washington
political commentary and analysis is basically a discussion
of what or whom the term "President Bush" is a metaphor for.
Is it Karl Rove? Is it still Karen Hughes, although she has
decamped? Even more than most presidents, Bush is regarded as
the sum total of his advisers.
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October 25, 2002
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Experienced an interesting little exhibit over
on the Stanford campus,
Enter
the Dragon, which sounds like a 'king fu'
movie... rather, China in the 20th Century. It
provoked some vexillological
research into pre-modern Chinese flags, triggered by the sight of
a striking non-Communist red banner in some of the
pictures. Two decades ago, while watching "Chariots
of Fire," I spotted an unfamiliar, striped flag in
the 1924 Olympics scenes, similar to today's
"fruit
salad" banner denoting gay pride. This was
China's flag at that time (and it represented the
Manchurian, Han Chinese, Tibetan, Mongol, and Muslim
peoples). The ever-wonderful "Flags of the World" site
has a
History
of the Chinese Republic pages explaining
all, if one probes around a bit. (The dragon flag is
dynastic, pre-Republic -- it went away with "The Last
Emperor." Also -- the black or white stripe represented
Islam?! This should've been green!)
Two unrelated travelogues:
An extended business
trip out of Silicon Valley is by Raymond "Bo" of
Northern Virginia (I've linked to one of his cruise
reports, previously) and Journey
into Kimland, from an American guy in North
Korea, who speaks the local language -- fascinating!
I keep hearing the phrase "targeted by President Bush"
in the stories about Paul Wellstone, but nowhere (yet)
any suspicion of foul play, in the plane crash...
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October 24, 2002
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The
American Republic Is Dead. Hail The American Empire. Or Else by
John Perry Barlow of the EFF, who places some of the
blame for creeping American fascism on the Internet:
Cyberspace has become an infinite set of street
corners, each with its lonely pamphleteer, howling
his rage to a multitude all too busy howling their
own to listen.
He's encouraging people of a progressive bent to come
together this weekend, smart-mobs-style. More John
Perry Barlow:
Liberty
and LSD.
Oblivion
awaits is "a scathing column about the music industry's
foolishness" by Jack Kapica -- 10 rules of e-business failure, a
list inspired by the recording industry's 'imaginative' approach,
addressed to their management, and pointing out what's really going on:
When you count the songs being swapped on peer-to-peer networks,
do not notice that most are moldy oldies. It's still theft, you
argue, even if you yourself stopped paying royalties for those
songs in 1961. Blame piracy, not taste, for your inability to
sell new songs that no radio station will play. Go on KaZaa, count
the MP3 versions of songs you produced, old and new, and multiply
that number by the current retail price of a CD; howl that you are
losing a fortune. Forget that a Buddy Holly album sold for $2.95
in 1958; you sell records for much more now, and that's the price
you use when calculating your losses.
Another viewpoint on file-sharing, contrary to the usual
irate reactions of copyright abuse, comes from
Janis
Ian:
On the first day I posted downloadable music, my merchandise
sales tripled, and they have stayed that way ever since. I'm
not about to become a zillionaire as a result, but I am making
more money.
Two Japan links:
Blair's
Trip to Japan briefly mentions a visit to the Temari Museum;
and Justin is settling in nearby there, with his Japanese girlfriend,
On
the suburban frontier west of Tokyo.
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October 21, 2002
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The
Fillmore Collection is an online repository of
late-60s psychedelic concert posters.
A couple new products (since the holiday gift-giving
season is upon us):
Magnetic Paint
(not actually magnetic, but ferrous -- magnets stick
to surfaces coated with it) and,
the
most unappetizing kitchen tool EVER separates
yolks from egg whites. Must be seen to be believed -- the
perfect present for pre-teen boys, to give their mothers.
Things
about NYC is very good, but the info about
transport from (& then to) the JFK aerodrome
is incomplete -- the best method is the $13 Carey
Express bus, which drops you at Grand Central Station.
(They also serve the Port Authority bus station on
the West Side.) Incredibly, the company doesn't seem
to have a web site, but their phone number is
718-632-0500.
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October 19, 2002
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I can certainly relate to the sentiment behind
Read Comics
in Public although personally, I don't have the
nerve. (Something about comics naturally
triggers the sneaky in me.) He speaks of the practice
creating opportunities to actively engage "lapsed"
readers of comic books, a demographic I was part of
between 1967-71, and again around 1978-85.
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October 14, 2002
| A difficult-to-obtain
recording I crave is
currently
available on Ebay -- the Eno Vocal box set.
Actually, I just wanna tape it, or better yet,
transcribe a few key tracks to a MiniDisc. Anybody
out there got a copy they'd lend, or perhaps make
a dubb or, for me? Pur-reese?? Wished I'da known
how the remixed tunes sounded better, back when it
was released, the ignorant, pre-Internet early 90s.
I figured, I already have this stuff, and the
original packaging's much nicer.
UPDATEIt went for $80, and I'm
familiar enough now to know that I hate eBay.
Robert Jenson submits
The
American Political Paradox: More Freedom, Less
Democracy to Counterpunch -- excellent.
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October 13, 2002
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If you missed the new-perspective video (from the
camera mounted atop the external tank, looking
aft) of the Atlantis launch last Thursday,
access a Quicktime or something at
this
online archive. The lunch-break timing was such that I
caught it live, on a monitor in the visitor center... just
like old times. The feed was supposed to go on for several
minutes, but it stopped at only ninety seconds, so ya don't
get to see the right solid burn out and eject at T+0:02:00.
The
president's real goal in Iraq, according to Jay Bookman,
is -- dare I say it -- empire.
Coming next year:
'subtle
background colors' in US paper money.
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October 10-11, 2002
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Oh no! My trusty
Monorail's
floppy drive is suddenly kaputt, making a distressing
new & different noise whenever it tries to read
a disk. After 5.5 years as my main Internet Console it
seems I'll be transferring control to the squirrely
auxillary Tecra laptop, at least temporarily...
a serious hitch in my info-gathering getalong, the
floppy-in-the-shirt-pocket interface; I suppose
it's time to step up to a more modern machine.
Update (the next afternoon):
False alarm, works fine today.
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October 8 -- Tuesday
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Everybody's linking to
Using
Lasers to Temporarily Neutralize Camera Sensors
Laser pointers represent a case study of what happens
when technological advancement and high volume production
reduce costs so much that a product simply happens,
regardless of need or utility. Laser and other light-based
pointing devices were originally made to help a lecturer
highlight something on an accompanying projection screen.
So in theory, there need not be more pointers in the world
than lecterns or projection screens (or lecturers). But
because laser pointers could be made and sold for a few
dollars, they found a market as a novelty item.
Great page with lots of good links embedded, like to the
Surveillance Camera Players. Information about the
troubles people have gotten into with laser pointers
(apparently nobody's on record, ever, for permanent eye
damage from a pointer) and the latest military &
law enforcement capabilities.
Comprehensive
online reference on sodium dropping -- he does it into
his pond.
I've witnessed quite a few miscarriages of
American justice, but none as severe and just plain sad
as this one. You realize he arrived in Afghanistan on
Septembr 6, 2001; a 21-year-old kid -- what could John
Walker Lindh have possibly done over there to deserve
twenty years?
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October 6, 2002
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The latest
Ted Rall:
Our campaign in Afghanistan, lest we forget, continues
even as thousands more troops pack for Iraq. "Operation
Enduring Failure" : : : we blew it. U.S. taxpayers are
spending between $500 million and $1 billion a month
to occupy Afghanistan and fight its Islamist guerrillas,
yet we haven't caught any of the people we blame for
Sept 11. Al Qaeda remains operational. One might
ask why our Generalissimo is going after Saddam Hussein's
Iraq when the war in Afghanistan has worked out so
poorly, but one would be missing the point: Trotsky's
theory of permanent revolution is at work. It is
precisely because we botched Afghanistan that we're
moving on to Iraq.
He goes into detail, describing the real Afghanistan,
today. Those who might scoff at this source should be
aware that the 'stan's have long been Ted Rall's interest
zone -- in 1999, he led a tour group through them. I
remember reading about this opportunity, that one could
visit Uzbekistan , with he as guide -- for more info
about this trip, including checkpoint tips and
a photo of Rall on-site, see
the
Comics Journal interview.
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September 29, 2002
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Work, and class (both in, and teaching) will probably
pre-empt any activity here for a couple weeks...
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September 25, 2002
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Excellent article by Harvard teacher Elaine Scarry:
Failsafe.
It contrasts the government's impotence on 9/11 with
the effective action by the citizens aboard
Flight 93 (and the subsequent 'shoebomber'
flight).
Interview
with Philip Jenkins, author of The Next
Christianity -- says most Americans and
Europeans are blind to Christianity's real
future (which is developing in the Southern
hemisphere). He describes how their flavor of
Christianity is different:
It's similar to the type of Christianity that the media
in the US don't like to pay attention to -- the John
Ashcroft brand.
The sociologist Peter Berger has this famous quote about
Indians and Swedes -- he says Indians are the most
religious people in the world, Swedes are the least religious,
and Americans are a nation of Indians governed by Swedes. I
wish I'd invented that quote -- it's very accurate.
Not sure if I agree... Also in The Atlantic, James Fallows
muses on the aftermath of our coming War of Iraqi Conquest in
The
Fifty-First State?
I first heard of 'Travellers' in conjunction with
Andy&Kristin's honeymoon tour of the UK -- seems
their Stonehenge visit was nearly thwarted by what
local law enforcement might characterize as a
'Traveller infestation.' These were probably
New
Age Travellers, engaged in something similar to
our stateside
Rainbow
gatherings; but this week's news brings to light a
different variant, closer to the source, more authentic --
according
to Slate,
Madelyne Toogood, the woman accused of beating her
4-year-old daughter in an Indiana parking lot, is
an "Irish Traveler." What's an Irish Traveler?
Irish Travelers, also known as "White Gypsies,"
are members of a nomadic ethnic group of uncertain
origin.
More info:
Irish
Travellers in the USA.
Made haste to see "Spirited Away" and loved it. Unlike
"Princess Mononoke", but like every other Miyazaki film
I've experenced, I'd see this one again. The title in
the original Japanese is "Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi"
which is often literally (but not quire correctly) translated
as "Sen and the Mysterious Disappearance of Chihiro" (Sen
and Chihiro both being names for the story's protagonist).
A more accurate translation would be "The Mysterious
Disappearance of Sen and Chihiro" -- and that's how you
arrive at the title's pun: "Sen to" = "Sen and",
but a "sento" is also a public bath. Hence, an alternate
meaning is "The Spiriting Away of bath-house Chihoro. To
find out how Chihiro became Sen in the spirit
world, where she worked in the sento, you'll
just have to see the picture, or read any
in-depth review.
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