KATHRYN CROSBY: Bing's widow campaigns for painful facial condition, leaves her own face in frightening state

It's a bit unkind of me but I find it unsettling to look on the recent pictures of the visage of former actress Kathryn Crosby, as she's facelifted it almost beyond recognition. She's made appearances in the last couple of years as spokesperson for the Trigeminal Neuralgia Association, which is meant to raise awareness and money to cure a painful condition of the face that happens sometimes after people get root canals. Why do people do this to their own face -- the cosmetic surgeries i mean -- how do they convince themselves this looks better than ordinary wrinkles. I like the way old people look, but I guess growing up in Texas and California amongst the monied classes, this is what looks acceptable to them.

THE JUNE MOVEMENT: a Danish political party of moderate Euroskeptics not afraid to team up with fat Greek fascists

Jens-Peter Bonde (http://www.bonde.com/), whose 59th birthday was yesterday, is an MP in the EU from Denmark, and the sole remaining elected member of the June Movement, the Euroskeptic Danish political party, since 2004 when two other MPs from the party were not re-elected. Bonde's websites -- he has one in both English and Danish -- show him to be a believer in open government, and he really tries to explain what he does by blogging about it every few days. I don't know if he writes this himself, the politicians here in the U.S. usually don't write their own blogs, but you get the sense that it's his voice. He has written a number of books in both English and Danish in which he explains the E.U. constitution, a couple of these you can also download from his website.

The June Movement takes its name from the month of June in 1992, when there was a referendum on the Maastricht treaty -- which was the treaty that led to the creation of the European Union. Denmark in this referendum rejected the treaty (by a slim majority), and this was the rallying point for the people who founded the party two months later. Denmark actually did sign the treaty less than a year later, after a few concessions had been made (for instance Denmark still does not use Euros, they still use the Danish Kroner.) The party doesn't want the EU to have so much power over the sovereign nations, they just want the EU to be a merely reactive force that responds to the orders of the member countries.

'Euroskeptic' is a rather broad term, for in the case of other parties in other European contries, it can mean they don't want any kind of EU at all, or they want certain limits on it, which can vary. In 2004 the June Movement joined The Independent and Democracy Group, a coalition of these sorts of parties from different countries. Some of them are real nasties, like piggish nationalist and anti-semite Georgios Karatzaferis of the Popular Orthodox rally of Greece. In 2005, many left the June Movement because of these associations.

The month of June is when people pick strawberries in Scandanavia, and that's also the symbol of the party.

VALERIE SOLANIS: nihilism incarnate

After shooting Andy Warhol three times in 1968, she told the press that the reasons for her doing so could be found in her book "The S.C.U.M. Manifesto," which was a book about how men should be killed in a violent revolution.

However Andy Warhol was hardly the typical man. He was one of the most androgynous of people, and he even put her in one of his films. But she was crazed and harassing him to produce her play, and his distancing of himself from her, coupled with his posse in the Factory ignoring or taunting her, seems to have driven her over the edge. So it didn't really have anything to do with her hatred of men, it was classic nihilism -- which i believe to be basically synonymous with self-hatred -- that led her to shoot Andy Warhol. Someone who was within her reach to hurt, someone who was vulnerable. Given her S.C.U.M. manifesto's agenda, she should have killed one of her Johns, but no.

As to why feminists would later defend her or even see her as a kind of feminist martyr and read her book -- well that really shows those people to be beneath contempt, as well as being completely intellectually bankrupt.

As a side note, I think the films of Andy Warhol and the whole Factory scene which they depicted were perhaps the primary visual embodiment of what drove the conservatives of middle America crazy. You had it all there, drugs, sex, homosexuality, and the poorly shot quality of it all giving it a very seedy edge. It was a very powerful force for uniting the country into a reactionary political force. The images are still with us today, and represent for many those folk the godless liberal New Yorkers.

AUSTROSLAVISM: a reasonable idea in the dustbin of history

The Hapsburg Empire was a patchwork of different ethnicities, represented by aristocrats of different status and privledge within the Empire. It was a rickety structure that all came crashing down in World War I, after the Empire's armies were destroyed, making it impossible to keep its disparate parts together any longer. But that it even lasted that long is something of a wonder, for the ideas of Nationalism were well underway by mid 19th century, with the Empires very numerous peoples clamoring for their languages and cultures to be recognized, and for some measure of autonomy if not independence.

In 1846, a Czech politician by the name of František Palacký (considered by later Czechs to be one of three founders of Czech nationhood) proposed Austroslavism as a way of giving autonomy to the Slavic peoples of the Hapsburg (Austrian) empire.He proposed a federation of 8 slavic regions, but still under the rubric of the former empire and with fealty to the Austrian Emperor.

The slavic peoples were in the majority if brought together -- 55% of the empire. This alone probably made the Austrians reluctant to go with the idea. There was another rival, more radical concept called pan-Slavism which looked to a unity of all Slavs, including the Russians, independent of Austria. The problem with this idea in the minds of the Czechs is that the Russians, having a much larger population and power, would dominate this kind of arrangement. Austroslavism looks like a reasonable way of keeping the empire together -- but it wasn't the concept that won out. Instead, the Austrians teamed up with the Hungarians -- who controlled all of the Slovak lands and significant parts of other slavic peoples territory -- to form the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867. Simmering resentments this caused amongst the Slavs, in particular the Serbs, would lead to revolutions and wars and eventually would bring the whole house of cards down by 1918.

Anyway, it was a good idea, even if it only remained relevant for a couple of years -- from 1846 when the idea first sprang up in Palacký's head until the 1848 revolution, after which the Czechs were suppressed and the moderates influence on the Austrians was diminished.

character from tv show is tastelessly funny but contributes nothing to thoughtful conversation

I saw the South Park episode that featured Nurse Gollum several years ago -- she's the one who horrifies everyone because she has a dead fetus attached to her head. I don't watch tv these days as I don't pay for cable television access, and in the megalopolis around New York City you don't get any reception unless you pay.

So when I saw this show at a friends house, South Park -- well I remember it as being very funny. But not having seen an episode didn't make me feel like I was missing out on life. What if your friends saw a hilariously scathing show that you didn't see, you might feel left out of the laugh they share in remembering what it was they saw. But the conversation doesn't really get much deeper than, 'wasn't that funny.' There is so much more food for thought outside of even the funniest shows. Unless I'm wrong, and the imprint of the visual and the impression made is more valuable than I am giving it credit for.

Of course this is satire, and it has an important social function. It's important that hypocrites are exposed, and the bullshit of society is revealed to the masses, and I think that's what South Park is brilliant at. The ugliness of the show is but a reflection of the kind of world we live in now, which is a whole lot uglier still.

But also because of it's topicalness, satire gets dated faster than most other arts. Aristophanes plays are still done today, but I don't know why, they are not in the least bit funny to a modern audience. And satire has always seemed to me somehow easier than drama -- its easy to mock people. Even if you're brilliant at it, it's not pure art -- it's too functional and timely, not timeless.

But on the other hand -- we may well be at the cultural end of history because of mass visual media, which has frozen our impressions of things -- through films and stock footage and television shows -- and allows them to be played the same way each time. So, unlike in the recent past of a few decades ago, I am of the generation where I can expect almost everyone I meet to have the most of the same cultural references as me. So, this being the case, the Satire of today, as opposed to that of before this period, may remain funny 'forever.'

The Simpsons has been around for 20 years and is still producing new shows. And I think many of the old ones would still hold up pretty well -- if I saw them on my friends' television sets again today.

Pentultimate album of Christian Rock 3rd Wave Ska band proves the death of the musical genre years before

By 2004 the musical movement known as 3rd Wave Ska, originating in Southern California, had lost most of its popularity. 'The Revenge of the OC Supertones' (OC stands for Orange County, that mostly conservative outcropping of LA) barely even made it onto the Christian charts, and their last album didn't make it there at all. So the Supertones disbanded after that.

a suburb of Queensland, a city on a river that used to be a harsh penal colony

Blackwall -- close to downtown Brisbane -- currently doesn't have any real estate available online. But there has been a lot of people moving in to Brisbane. Most of the housing in the city is single-building houses, but that's changing, especially downtown. The business district population, for instance, has grown almost 100% in the last 5 years.

One has to wonder about how much property values can go up in Brisbane, though, since the whole city straddles the flood plain of the Brisbane river, with creeks crisscrossing in many areas of the city. This, it is quite vulnerable to major floods. The last bad one was in 1974 as the result of a hurricane. Another of its like is surely on the way before too long.

But, markets can be irrational, and people can be quite short sighted when they need a place to live, find a nice house, and are told nice things by real estate brokers. But what are the insurers doing? I'm guessing the insurance coverage in Brisbane isn't so good when it comes to flood coverage. Because insurance companies aren't as irrational as the housing market and selling prices of such property would suggest.

Ethiopia: long distance running superpower

Tirunesh Dibaba is only 21 years old, but this girl from Southern Ethiopia has already won an Olympic Bronze in Athens 2004 for the 5,000 meter run. She'd been winning world competitions since she was 15, placing 5th in the 2001 World Championships in Athletics. She's won four World Cross country titles, and in the same event won both long and short courses (in Sainte Galmier, France in 2005).

Tirunesh has other runners in the family, including cousin Derartu Tulu, World Champion in the 10,000 meters.

Ethiopia is a superpower when it comes to producing runners -- as is Kenya, the two countries have been winning most of the World Class running events in the last few decades. Why is this? Part of it must be a lack of access to other sports, but natural ability might be a part as well. I've heard that those in East Africa, in some study or another, were shown to build long-distance type muscle tissue ('long') more than the usual. And I've heard conversely that in West Africa they have some of the best sprinters, and they have also found more of the short distance ('short') muscle proportionately in some of these populations. Now I haven't heard about this since high school, from a fellow cross country teammate. But I think not many studies like this are done, it looks weird, or it has, to look into racial differences. But now that the human genome's been decoded, we can start to talk about differences where they exist, just like we do everthing else in nature. All I'm saying is, if we have two different patterns of coloration within a species of frog, so we do in humans. Things adapt and change around, and when favorable combination of genetics and environment come together, there can be special success. For instance, it's possible for onions to taste different according to soil and climate, like the Valdelia onions in Georgia that people are supposed to be able to eat like an apple. So that's kind of like there being good runners in East Africa. (Not that anyone would eat the latter, unless you want to think of it as how the world 'consumes' the fame generated by people who gather the fuel of modern mass media).

In my early 20s, while I was chain smoking in a bar, I met a girl who really hated smoking. She was a self-declared feminist and said it was propaganda that men were more athletic than women, in fact women were every bit as strong. I said, surely you know that men have a greater muscle mass generally and this could be demonstrated, but -- did she really believe what she was saying? I tried to convince her for a little while, just because I was incredulous of her ability to believe this. Clearly men and women were different in at least ONE regard, but I wasn't sure she even allowed for this. Oh yeah and the babies too, I was thinking about genitalia. Anyway, she herself seemed sincere and relatively articulate. But nevertheless was too confident in her own indoctrination.

sophomore album by Aussie r&b singer yields sophomoric results

Selwyn is the moniker of an Australian r&b musician of South African ancestry, and "One Way" was his second Album, released in Australia, USA and South Africa in 2004. However, this album was considered of poor quality compared to his first, entitled "Meant To Be", which in 2002 netted three songs that crossed the top-twenty threshold in the Australian charts -- Buggin' Me, Rich Girl, and Way Love's Supposed To Be. The album went Gold, and Selwyn was a name, at least in Perth, where he's been living since he was a youngster. (Well he's still pretty young, he was born in 1982 in Durban, South Africa).

"One Way", by contrast, had one track which barely made it into the top 40 in the Australian charts. This must have delighted his Perth r&b nemesis, Cristian Alexandra, who has a new album coming out sometime soon. Cristian was born in Perth, but also seems to be a product of Perth's quite large and growing non-white, non-aboriginal community. In addition to immigrants from South Africa, there have been sizeable immigrations in the last three decades from Zimbabwe, Burma, India and elsewhere.

b-movie western character actor, not really French

If you go to findagrave.com, you can find a grave, which is pretty cool for all you dead celebrity stalkers. Check out the grave of old Charles K. French, born Krauss, in the Hollywood vicinity. Mr. French was born in Ohio back in 1860, and lived 91 years, dying in 1952, and making movies from 1909 until 1944. He was in westerns as much as anything else, tending to be a bartender in a saloon and that sort of thing. (http://www.b-westerns.com/villain42.htm)
Something about those old westerns that really makes me want to step into them... something very comforting about them. This has always been their appeal. But they are also in a sense possibly dangerous for this reason, because millions of foolish people take this fantasy as being their ideal, and somehow it leads them to a 'conservative' ideology. I don't know what the connection really is, but I've seen it, often.

the material that defined modernism

Stainless Steel was invented in the early part of the 20th Century. It's supposed to resist corrosion, and it does for a while. There are different grades of Stainless Steel, and depending on how much Nickel or Chromium it's got, it's better at resisting one type of corrosion or another.

Stainless Steel actually benefits from exposure to oxygen, and if it doesn't have access to it, things start to fuck up. It's got this thing called a passivation layer, which protects it from the outside, acutally adapts to different molecules that come at it. There are different ways of messing up this layer, like you could weld it away, or under the right conditions for long enough it could be worn off. like, you could deprive it of oxygen. it's weird to think how it needs to breath, almost like a living thing.

When they make stainless, they start by rolling it to a certain thickness. Then they do something called annealing, which is they heat it and cool it, sometimes repeatedly, to get rid of bubbles and impurities (things that could be pockets inside the metal that are deprived of oxygen, which work like a cancer to corrode from within.) Then they 'pickle' it, which in this sense means they soak it in acid, which removes the extra molecules on the surface, creating the passivation layer.

316L is the alloy used for most watches and for cutlery. Fitting for a watch manufacturer that charges thousands of dollars for its watches, Rolex uses the more expensive 904L, which is especially resistant to corrosion. But they could have done better -- types 6Mo and 'super duplex' are even more corrosion resistant. Meanwhile type 2205 has mostly replaced the need for 904L, because it's got similar corrosion resistance, and it's stronger. But if Rolex changed metals, someone would notice and then they'd realize they didn't have the best availabe.

I wonder what grade was Ultima, the robot from the film Metropolis.

a Catholic killed by the Virgin Queen

Though hardly anything is known about the life of 'Blessed' John Felton, a fair amount is known about his death, by execution carried out on August 8th, 1570. His crime was posting a Papal Bull that excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I and released her subjects from any fealty to her. This is because Queen Elizabeth took up the anti-papal baton that Henry VIII had passed (even though it was dropped in the interim by 'Bloody Mary' who'd reverted England to traditional catholicism and murdered hundreds of heretics). Henry's reason for splitting from Roman Catholicism was that the Pope forbade him to divorce his wife or remarry, but Elizabeth's reasons were more complex. Wars were being fought over these matters at this time; when you get down to it having a Church of England not beholden to the Pope made a lot of sense if you wanted to keep more power and funds for your own lands.

Anyway, in the context of the time what John Felton did was indeed seditious. And they had some pretty gruesome ways of doing away with traitors, jesuits and the like, that threatened the new Church and the monarch that stood behind it. Felton was hanged for 'six turns', then beheaded, then 'parboiled' and dismembered. Elizabeth I was not a soft touch!

In 1886 John Felton was beatified by Pope Leo XIII. This means that Catholics are allowed to revere him, but not required to -- he's not a saint, just a local Catholic hero. Even though we know almost nothing about him, except that he was short, of dark complexion, and seemed by turns defiant and freaked out when he faced his executioners, as documented in this free Googlebook, 'A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes..." (http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC01904713&id=1gIKAAAAIAAJ&pg=PP594&lpg=PP594&dq=cobbett%27s+john+Felton)

Pictured is Bermondsey Abbey in Southwark, near where John Felton lived in the dead center of London -- briefly excavated before being paved over again by developers in early 2006.

A 10,000 year old town in Israel/Palestine/Roman Levant etc.

This town, Tzippori as it's now known, was settled at least as far back as 7500 BCE and probably well earlier. It's in an ideal spot -- on high ground above the beautiful sea of Galilee, just a few miles from Nazareth. The Virgin Mary's parents were supposed to have come from here, back in Roman times when it was known by Sepphoris (that's Greek, not Latin. The Romans spoke Greek most of the time, as did others like the Jews from the city -- it was the cultured thing to do. Mel Gibson, in striving to be more authentic than anyone by making people speak Aramaic and Latin, got it wrong as they would have been speaking Aramaic and Greek).

Before the Jews were there you had Assyrians and pagans of the like that the Jews slaughtered when they first came onto the scene, not being very kind to worshippers of idols (check out the Old Testament if you haven't already, its a blood soaked thing). Muslims came in around the 8th century killing and converting Jews, Crusaders came by around the 10th century slaughtering Jews and Muslims, and eventually the Jews came back and killed or made lots of the Arab inhabitants flee in 1948. This was part of Operation Dekel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dekel). Whether this was legitimate is entirely beside the point, it couldn't be legitimate, but the whole business of Zionism is a messy and complicated one and anyone who thinks its simple should read more before looking away from the abyss again. Resisting fascists could also mean resisting the Palestinian fascists, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawzi_al-Qawuqji, yet folks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Laskov pursued a policy of ethinic cleansing to get rid of Palestinians. That's just a couple of peels off the onion. When you get down to it, the history of man is a violent and cruel one, not to excuse that behavior, just to point out the obvious.

But check out the amazing Archeological heritage of Tzippori, and maybe you can forgive humans because they can make mosaics as beautiful as the one pictured, from a Roman villa built around the year 200 CE.

a place that used to exist in Armenia

This is the stubbiest stub I've yet been stuck with -- the Tachir district of the old Armenian region known as Gugark, Gugarq or Gogarene, which hasn't existed for about 1200 years now. The area that was the Gugark is now located in Turkey, Georgia and Armenia, but it seems that the Tachir is district is still roughly in the Area of Armenia right around its border with those other two countries.
As Armenians know and most Turks furiously deny, there was a genocide during WWI of 600,000 - 1.5 million Armenians by Turks who feared they would ally with the Russians against them, after the Turkish government had teamed up with the Germans. People were slaughtered in various hideous waves and whole communities wiped out; now there aren't so many Armenians in Eastern Turkey anymore. Everyone else agrees this happened, but many Turks are very nationalistic, it's more powerful a force than religion there. And to admit there was a genocide would be to put a dark cloud over Modern Turkey, whose founding father Ataturk was an officer in WWI and part of the movement that came to power at that time -- the Young Turks. That's what they really called themselves, it wasn't just a Rod Stewart song from the 80s.

A film about the environmental angst of a western consumer

Western Engineer from capitalist, consumer driven society, who makes energy from a huge construction that tames the river, goes into (his subconcious?) rainforest with seven year old son -- which could mean his soul, his imagination, his responsibility -- and this son is abducted by the indigenous tribe. Here known as 'Invisible People' -- as they might as well be, their culture makes no impact against the context of the western technological and cultural influx.
So when the engineer returns to Amazonia ten years later, and discovers that his son is one of the children of the forest -- well he's had a change of heart about destroying the forest and the culture of which it is an inseperable part. He's become one of them at heart... or at least, that is the kind of wish we are fulfilling by watching the film, and which is helped along by the idealistic title of the film, The Emerald Forest.
I'm a sucker for the sentiment myself sometimes. My favorite Star Trek episode is the one where Captain Kirk visits a planet that looks just like America's plains Indians, with teepees and beautiful squaws and unspoiled plains. It's a very appealing image. Very anti-capitalist, communal and socialist and closely associated with the environment. East Germans loved the Indians during the Soviet Era, they made a lot of Westerns from the Indian's perspective. And then people in the Czech Republic have 'Indian Clubs', where they all get together in the country and dress, and act as authentically as possible, like their ideal of American Indians.