|
Archives
what will those southern baptists say about this?
The Jesus pictured on the cover of this month's Popular Mechanics has a broad peasant's face, dark olive skin, short curly hair and a prominent nose. He would have stood 5-foot-1-inch tall and weighed 110 pounds, if the magazine is to be believed.
This representation is quite different from the typical lithe, long-haired, light-skinned and delicate-featured depiction of the man Christians consider the son of God. thanks to follow me here...
comics
a new meaning for the term political science U.S. Revises Sex Information, and a Fight Goes On The National Cancer Institute, which used to say on its Web site that the best studies showed "no association between abortion and breast cancer," now says the evidence is inconclusive. A Web page of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used to say studies showed that education about condom use did not lead to earlier or increased sexual activity. That statement, which contradicts the view of "abstinence only" advocates, is omitted from a revised version of the page.
Critics say those changes, far below the political radar screen, illustrate how the Bush administration can satisfy conservative constituents with relatively little exposure to the kind of attack that a legislative proposal or a White House statement would invite. thanks to Tapped
environment Ranchers Bristle as Gas Wells Loom on the Range
As it runs through Orin Edwards's ranch, the Belle Fourche River bubbles like Champagne. The bubbles can burn. They are methane, also called natural gas, the fuel that heats 59 million American homes. Mr. Edwards noticed the bubbles two years ago, after gas wells were drilled on his land. The company that drilled the wells denies responsibility for the flammable river.
The only fully automatic machine gun that's LEGAL in all 50 states! Pummel your friends and officemates in an unrelenting barrage of rubber bands with this one-of-a-kind machine. thanks to DANGEROUSMETA!
samuel pepys Two Pepys postings in two days. This timely book review explains the importance to the Diarys that will be posted at the site in the post below. 'Samuel Pepys': The Man Behind the Diaries
Who remembers Samuel Pepys anymore? Of all the dead white males who used to throng the anthologies and the English lit syllabus, Pepys (1633-1703) is now among the deadest, relegated to footnotes and to trivia questions about the correct pronunciation of his name. (It rhymes with cheeps.) In today's literary climate, there are lots of reasons for benching Pepys -- he was a political chameleon, nasty to the servants, and a serial groper and philanderer -- but the most compelling may be that he's such an anomaly. He comes out of nowhere -- writing only for himself, in a form of his own invention -- and he doesn't lead anywhere either. By the time his work was discovered, a century later, he was a curiosity but not an ''influence.'' Yet the decline in Pepys's reputation only makes Claire Tomalin's engaging new biography all the more remarkable: she not only brings him back to vibrant life, but makes a powerful case that he's more central, more ''relevant,'' than we ever imagined.
books This site is a presentation of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned 17th century diarist who lived in London, England. A new entry written by Pepys will be published each day, with the first appearing on 1st January 2003.
 [more]
afghanistan
Details of U.S. victory are a little premature In fact, America's Afghan adventure has gotten off to as poor a start as that of the Soviet Union. The U.S.-installed ruler of Kabul, veteran CIA asset Hamid Karzai, must be protected from his own people by up to 200 U.S. bodyguards. Much of Afghanistan is in chaos, fought over by feuding warlords and drug barons.
There are almost daily attacks on U.S. occupation forces. My old mujahedin sources say U.S. casualties and equipment losses in Afghanistan are far higher than Washington is reporting - and are rising. thanks to Cursor Afghan warlord threatens foreigners
An Afghan rebel leader, opposed to the government in Kabul, has warned that a holy war would be stepped up against international troops based in Afghanistan. thanks to Politics in the Zeros
economy
Lumps of Coal Merry Christmas? No no no. Retailers found lumps of coal in their stockings this Christmas; the holiday shopping season was disappointing. So where's the economy heading?
Put it this way: It's getting harder to tell a tale with a happy ending.
robots and ray guns
Clayton Bailey has made approximately 100 life-size robot sculptures of found objects since 1976. He searches the local flea markets and scrap metal yards for discarded home appliances, cookware, bicycle and automobile parts. He carefully grafts the parts together into new forms; reincarnating them as robot sculptures. The "past lives" of the robot's various "mechanical molecules" are said to give them their soul. His family of robot sculptures range from the humanoid to the pet dog or exotic bird or insect. They don't walk around and break your china and endanger your art collection. They are static; they stand still and blink their lights. (The robot sculptures sometimes function as clocks and radios that speak and sing in the native tongue wherever they travel.) thanks to Riley Dog
iraq America tore out 8000 pages of Iraq dossier THE United States edited out more than 8000 crucial pages of Iraq's 11,800-page dossier on weapons, before passing on a sanitised version to the 10 non- permanent members of the United Nations security council.
The full extent of Washington's complete control over who sees what in the crucial Iraqi dossier calls into question the allegations made by US Secretary of State Colin Powell that 'omissions' in the document constituted a 'material breach' of the latest UN resolution on Iraq. thanks to Progressive Review
lotr
I've been watching The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring (Platinum Series Extended Edition Collector's Gift Set). Highly recommended. I didn't actually pay for it — I borrowed it form my daughter Katie. 30 minutes were added to the movie which fleshes it out nicely. There are now four commentaries with the movie as well as two additional discs of how they made the movie. Pretty amazing.
10:14 PM - link fiction
THE TRIALS OF FINCH
Finch had three friends: Claire, Karen, and Jemima. These were tall, lucky, professional Englishwomen in their early forties who had been ever so kind to Finch, and who felt, with some reason, that they had saved her. Ten years ago, when Finch first entered their circle, these three women were married, they had families and intricate lives, and Finch had no one and nothing. It was a friendship so unlikely it had the color of charity. By befriending her, they plucked poor Finch from the very edge of something. Stopped her from slipping down a notch to join the lonely mad, who were visible everywhere in Hampstead, with their sticks and props and wigs, spitting, effortful, bent. Because of her friends, Finch was not one of these people. She had a job and did not fear the London Underground or any of its African employees with their blue caps and bloodshot eyes. She had been persuaded (after a battle!) to give up long, bright socks and men's suspenders. She no longer kept food loose in her pockets. It turned out that Finch wasn't mad at all—she was only an eccentric. thanks to wood s lot
This week, Zadie Smith's short story "The Trials of Finch" appears in the Winter Fiction Issue and here online (see Fiction). The story is about a peculiar middle-aged woman with a dark secret in her past, involving the deaths of two other children when she was a child. Here Smith discusses this story, and her career, with The New Yorker's Ben Greenman.
food Why vegans were right all along This is one of the reasons why many people have returned to eating red meat at Christmas. Beef cattle appear to be happier animals. But the improvement in animal welfare is offset by the loss in human welfare. The world produces enough food for its people and its livestock, though (largely because they are so poor) some 800 million are malnourished. But as the population rises, structural global famine will be avoided only if the rich start to eat less meat. The number of farm animals on earth has risen fivefold since 1950: humans are now outnumbered three to one. Livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially.
This is why biotechnology - whose promoters claim that it will feed the world - has been deployed to produce not food but feed: it allows farmers to switch from grains which keep people alive to the production of more lucrative crops for livestock. Within as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world's animals or it continues to feed the world's people. It cannot do both.
dr.seuss
Every reader of "The Cat in the Hat" will feel that the story revolves around a piece of withheld information: what private demons or desires compelled this mother to leave two young children at home all day, with the front door unlocked, under the supervision of a fish? Terrible as the cat is, the woman is lucky that her children do not fall prey to some more insidious intruder. The mother's abandonment is the psychic wound for which the antics of the cat make so useless a palliative. The children hate the cat. They take no joy in his stupid pet tricks, and they resent his attempt to distract them from what they really want to be doing, which is staring out the window for a sign of their mother's return. Next to that consummation, a cake on a rake is a pretty feeble entertainment.
anti-war ads Zoe sent me the following from the latest MoveOn newsletter. Two weeks ago we announced a follow-on radio campaign, and we've received hundreds of radio scripts from members. Thanks so much to those of you who took the time to create and rate these scripts. You can see all this incredible work at: http://www.actionforum.com/forum/index.html?forum_id=251 We've recorded the top rated ad, written by Betsey Binet of Los Angeles, and we'll be running it during the week of January 6th in Washington D.C., on local news-radio stations. Here's the ad, in RealAudio format (a 178K download): http://www.moveon.org/radio/bell48kps.rm
energy usage and sustainability — or the lack of it
The Olduvai Theory: My Odyssey with the Olduvai theory began thirty-two years ago during a lecture series titled, Of Men and Galaxies, given at the University of Washington by cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle.
It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only. (Hoyle, 1964; emphasis added)
I was fascinated—and stunned. His soft-spoken proposal seemed incredulous, bizarre, preposterous—and possibly inevitable. A return to the Stone Age? Deep cultural and material impoverishment? However nobody else in the audience seemed the least concerned. Perhaps Hoyle was just giving a lead-in to his next science fiction thriller. So for the next decade I went about my way: raising kids, building airplanes and teaching engineers. Haunted by Hoyle's hypothesis. thanks to MetaFilter
darryl purpose on testingtesting
Be sure to listen to his songs Mr. Schwinn and The Last Great Kiss of the 20th Century at his web site: An article from Dirty Linen:
Darryl Purpose
Playing blackjack for a living may seem an odd career choice to most people. Performing folk music, as well, is a vocation rife with uncertainty. Making the leap from one to the other would appear insurmountable. For Darryl Purpose, it's all he's ever known.
corporatism
Sing, Dance, Rejoice—Corporate Personhood Is Doomed
Unequal Protection may prove to be the most significant book in the history of corporate personhood, a doctrine which dates to 1886. For 116 years, corporate personhood has been scrutinized and criticized, but never seriously threatened. Now Thom Hartmann has discovered a fatal legal flaw in its origin: corporate personhood is doomed. This is a nice thought, but I don't think the corporations going to suddenly say "Whoops! Our mistake. What were we thinking?" But we won't get our government back from the corporations until the day they loose their personhood.
i think i'm back I came down with a flu/cold thingy before Christmas and have been upper-respiratorily-challenged. This is the first day doing actual work. I'm getting my blog entries organized so stay tuned for incoming links.
merry christmas
Jesus was a real person; His name was recently discovered in the Nazareth phone book of the correct period. There were two Jesus Christs in the 972 area code, one of whom was listed under both rabbinical and woodworking in the yellow pages (Jesus H. Christ*). Surely this was the Man himself. But this is where the record ends; there is no suggestion as to what time of year he was born, although the traditional heavy tourist season in Bethlehem was mid-August until the second century AD, so if his folks were going to have trouble finding a hotel room, it was surely mid-summer. The place was a ghost town in December, according to Chamber of Commerce records. You could get a suite for the price of a double room. Of course if there were recent lambs around, as suggested by the New Testament and 'the Little Drummer Boy', Christ would have been born in the spring. The Lamb of God may have been born at the same time as the lamb of Jim Horowitz, who was at the Holiday Inn for a shepherd's convention that year.
TestingTesting again The pictures are now up for last nights show
I've been sick the past couple of days. Hence the lack of linkage. Just trying to keep up with things. My daughters returned from Germany yesterday (we picked them up at the airport). TestingTesting was tonight. Christmas eve tomorrow night. Then Christmas. I just keep dragging my body around. Anyway, the sound archive for tonight's TestingTesting is up. It was our Christmas show so check it for a little Christmas cheer.
TestingTesting It's time for another living room webcast of TestingTesting. TestingTesting #142 is Monday evening , December 23 (Tuesday mid-day the 24th in Australia and Japan) at http://www.electricedge.com/testingtesting/
Monday 5:00pm (Hawaii-Aleutian), 6:00pm (Alaska), 7:00pm (Pacific), 8:00pm (Mountain), 9:00pm (Central), 10:00pm (Eastern), 11:00pm (Atlantic) Or 3:00am Tuesday, December 24, Universal Time (GMT) This will be our TestingTesting All Stars Christmas party. The TT House Band, along with TT friends, will be playing and sending holiday cheer through your computer speakers. Steve has promised to do his blues version of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer -- not to be missed. Click on in for some fine living room music. A good time will be had by all.
|
|
artillery for fun
The Cat in the Hat was a Cold War invention. His value as an analyst of the psychology of his time, the late nineteen-fifties, is readily appreciated: transgression and hypocrisy are the principal themes of his little story. But he also stands in an intimate and paradoxical relation to national-security policy. He was both its creature and its nemesis—the unraveller of the very culture that produced him and that made him a star. This is less surprising than it may seem. He was, after all, a cat.
We've hoped to get Darryl on