Metafrog - The Anti-Blog

OMENICA GOLD RUSH: There's Gold in them thar British Columbian hills

2007-11-29T14:10:00.000-08:00

I'm not even going to bother with this blog anymore. After a year writing about random stuff, but even though I've learned a lot, too often it's just not interesting.

I wish I got more history articles, instead of a stubby article about a c-movie actress or a 3rd tier athlete in a sport i don't care about.

I'm not sure if anyone has actually read this blog other than a couple of folks I talked to about it almost a year ago. One thought experiment that I have long had is what if you were on a desert island by yourself, would you do anything creative, other than make a shelter for yourself? I'm guessing that no one would, because creation beyond the necessary is just a form of communication. In fact, many might even fail to create something practical enough to sustain themselves against the elements, if they knew they would never see another person. They might think, what's the point in living. I don't think all would -- some would relate with the animals around them. But if there were no animals, and yet someone still had the capacity to feed themselves, i think they would probably try to swim off the island, or die trying.

FEAR LIATH: the panic inducing giant of Scottish mountain Ben MacDhui

2007-10-04T13:28:00.000-07:00

One day in 1890, world reknowned British chemist and mountaineer J. Norman Collie climbed the 2nd highest peak in the British Isles, Ben MacDhui. Near the summit, he experienced a terrible feeling of panic, as he was convinced that he was hearing someone walking behind him, though he had come up the summit alone -- and the sound of these footsteps in the snow were as if a creature some two or three times his size were following close behind him. He descended from the top as fast as he could, but couldn't get a good look at what was behind him because of a heavy grey mist.

Or so Collie recounted to a group of Mountaineers some 35 years later. Others have also reported feelings of panic, and a sense of being chased by a giant grey man, when they approached the peak of Ben MacDhui. So began the legend of Am Fear Liath Mòr, or The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdhui.

One scientific explanation for this phemenon is that the climbers are experiencing a sense of being overwhelmed by the enormity of nature, next to which they feel their own isolation and mortality, a feeling enhanced by their exhaustion. Also that the climbers may have seen a Brocken Spectre, which is an optical illusion whereby someone looking into mist sees a magnified version of their own shadow, which they mistook for a giant creature.

The photo is of the Cairn at the peak of Ben MacDhui, taken by Oliver Mills.

ECUMENICAL SOMETHING OR OTHER

2007-09-28T14:08:00.000-07:00

I botched this one, it was a really obscure theology stub that came up a couple of weeks ago, and it was so unmemorable that I can't even find it now. It's got to be still in the browser history on my wife's computer, but I don't care to go back to it now.

But to summarize, it was about a certain group of people -- theologians and heads of different American Catholic and a few Protestant church leaders, who together agreed on a standard for what scripture would be part of the church program at a given year. This standard wasn't adopted by all churches, but it's a very common standard among catholic churches, and at least used as a guidline by many protestant churches. It's sort of a recipe book of 1 part old testament, a psalm or letter, then alternate years reading from one of the 4 main gospels, and one or two other things and that would be the whole service.

This was necessary to revise after the 2nd vatican council in the 60s, a reshuffling of what they were going to preach was required and that's what this council, over a period of years in the 70s, accomplished.

ARBOR LAKE: a well off characterless new suburb of Calgary

2007-09-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

Calgary is in the midst of an economic boom, it being the capital city of the resource rich Canadian provice of Alberta. It may get cold, but there's skiing and that kind of thing. But all the folks moving in need a place to live, and Arbor Lake, on the northwestern outskirts of the city (bounded by highways with names that sound far more quaint than they are, Nose Hill Drive and Stony Trail), was founded in 1991 for this purpose. The median income was over $70,000 in 2000, not bad at all. A full quarter are immigrants -- from England, Poland, France and a few other places (Americans are #7 on the list I think).

To counter the bordom of suburban life some Arbor Lake young men (maybe a woman in there too somewhere) started an artistic /social collective, the Arbor Lake Sghool. While none of the works that I came across seemed at all thought provoking, it seems like a good idea. One thing that is certainly original is the word 'sgool', google it and you'll find the link at the top, the rest is random gibberish.

LIST OF OKLAHOMA SOONERS MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIPS: a list that speaks for itself

2007-08-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

The Oklahoma Sooners, that is, the basketball team that goes by the team name of Sooners, of the University of Oklahoma based in the central city of Norman, have requited themselves very well over the decades, winning 9 NCAA championship titles over the decades. They do have a large pool of students to draw from (about 30,000 students enrolled at a time), though really basketball players are recruited for the school while in high school on the basis of their proven abilities with a basketball. This is not to say that the school itself doesn't have a distinguished academic record, it graduates the most per capital National Merit Scholars, and is in the top five schools for how many Rhodes scholars it graduates. Plus it has a good record for the amount of research is published from the School.

Good for them, I wouldn't want to be stuck in Oklahoma, but at least they've got that school going for them. Actually I have known one or two smart people from OK. And the Flaming Lips came from Oklahoma. Still, without having visited, I know the place is geographically flat, like my native Illinois, which is a big minus. And it's sad to think of all the Native Americans that were forced to move there in the 19th century, including the Cherokee -- who were cheated out of their land in Georgia, their treaty with the government broken under Andrew Jackson's administration, even though they had their own cities and written language. (well, they had their own slaves too, which they brought with them -- history is a complicated thing).

STEVE TORREALBA: former major league baseball player from Venezuela

2007-08-10T13:07:00.000-07:00

Steve Torrealba was born in Venezuela in 1978, but like his father he played major league baseball in the United States. Given that he was in the Army reserve program while he attended the University of Albany, we might wonder whether he had to serve in Iraq. Given that he was 26 when the was started, it seems a possibility. We know that in the picture above from the Albany ROTC website, he had already achieved the rank of Captain (Lieutenant would be the first rank someone would achieve while still in College, I believe -- this being entry level rank for a commissioned officer). Maybe his service in Iraq is the reason that Cpt. Torrealba only played two seasons -- 2001 and 2002 -- for the Atlanta Braves, and there ended his career in baseball. I wonder if Cpt. Torrealba even could have been a casualty of the Iraq war -- injured or killed? But I have no idea, for all I know he went back to Venezuela.

But, wait a second -- here on the web I see Steve Torrealba played for the Cincinnati Reds in 2006. He's probably still in baseball now! Well, that was a relief.

I guess you can't trust everything you read in Wikipedia. I hope they don't sent him back to Iraq, though, that was a close call!

SCALENUS POSTERIOR: neck muscle helpful in head-tilting and breathing

2007-07-26T10:53:00.000-07:00

The Scalenus Posterior is one of three Scalenus muscles (the s. anterior, the s. medius being the other two). It is the most deeply seated of these muscles, that is, it's overlapped by the others and would be impossible to find by flexing your neck muscles. But if you pulled it, you would not be able to tilt your head to the same side, or only with pain and difficulty. Also, breathing would perhaps be just a tad more labored and you'd feel it with every breath, as the muscle is attached to your second highest rib at one end (the other end is attached to the knobs coming off your lowest two or three vertebra in the back of your neck).

ATHANUR: A Tiny Tamil Town in India

2007-07-19T14:12:00.000-07:00

ATHANUR is a town of a mere 9,000 or so residents (according to a 2001 census), which is pretty small for an Indian town I imagine. It is a 'panchayat' town, which is part of a kind of government conceived by Mohandas Ghandi during the days of British Rule. The idea was to have autonomous power at the local level by officials appointed by a council who would be attentive to the issues that are relevant to that particular area. At the village level, these officals number between 7 and 31. The Caste system prevented the wide adoption of this system in many parts of India, but in some areas it was implemented starting in the 50s and 60s, and given official status in the Indian Constitution in 1993.

Only 55% of Anarthur's residents are literate, lower than the national average. There are 2% more males than females, possibly owing to the culture and poverty of the people in the area -- men can work more, women are a liability because it is necessary to provide them with a dowery when married, and then they are incorporated into the new family and do not support the parents any longer. That is, there is female infanticide.

Pictured is the Indian State of Tamil Nadu and its districts.

FOREST ECOLOGY: The study of patterns in the lives of the world's largest living beings

2007-07-12T14:13:00.000-07:00

Forests are really important, as we hear more and more these days. Forest Ecology is a field that helps us understand them better, by understanding certain patterns of how they live, interact with each other and their surrounding environment.

Forests are so important to life on earth because they represent a huge amount of biomass, and are have enormous amounts of water and potential energy. We say potential energy, because their kinetic energy is expressed mostly in their growth, which takes place over centuries or longer. But, they have the potential, when acted upon by outside forces, of sudden bursts of activity -- like when a tree falls, or gets burned in a forest fire. And their presence affects the weather, usually exerting a moderating influence on what otherwise would be extreme wind and percipitation -- this is also due to their being huge repositories of water, and their soaking up carbon dioxide and producing oxygen.

Aspen trees form in colonies that have linked roots, so they are really part of the same organism. The Pando colony in Utah may be the oldest (80,000 plus years), largest, and it certainly seems to be the heaviest living organism.

GAD: an ancient Semitic diety of good fortune

2007-06-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

GAD was one of at least two gods worshipped by the Jews while they were staying in Babylon in addition to their main God (the other one being Meni, the God of fate). Its not necessarily true that they all worshipped him, but this was a very popular deity amonst non-Jews in the area too, and since he was the God of Fortune, it probably seemed like a wise thing to worship him becase they really wanted fortune to smile on them so they could get back to Israel, from which most of the Jews were forced to leave by the Babylonian King Nebuchadrezzar in the 6th Century BCE. Most of us would have thought the most salient aspect of Judaism was monotheism, but this clearly isn't how it started out, or if it did there were many centuries of lapsing back into polytheism. This is why Prophets kept showing up, like Ezekiel and Elijah, to condemn Jews for having lapsed into idolatry. But even these chastisements have to be understood in the context of the many edits that the books that comprise the Bible/Torah, and that in the original they might have had references to deities like Gad. In Isaiah, as a matter of fact, Gad and Meni are mentioned as being deities worshipped by Israelites, but this part is usually left out of most Bible translations. Moses of course was supposed to have gone up to mount Sinai and received the ten commandments from God, and the very first one, the most important, was that the Lord is the only god and there shouldn't be any others worshipped. But this part was surely written after the worship of Gad, the whole book of Exodus may have been written after the events of the Babylonian captivity.

It's also interesting to note that one of the lost tribes of the Israelites was named Gad -- and that these folks were condemned as Israel's enemy in the books of Kings and Samuel. Perhaps they were worshippers of Gad after the return of the Israelites from the last Baylonian captivity (when Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon and let them come back), whereas the others went whole hog back to monotheism.

Another way that traces of Gad survive even to this day is with my Grandmother, who on occasion has been known to exlaim, "Oh, my Gad!"

BURLINGAME: a 19th century American diplomat, a treaty and a couple of cities named after him, a victim of 9/11, his sister, a high school, an author

2007-06-20T18:25:00.000-07:00

Anson Burlingame was born in 1820 and died in 1970, and is most famous for being the US minister (a 19th century equivalent of ambassador I think) to China during the Lincoln administration, and author The Burlingame Treaty, which gave China most favored nation status for trading and gave the Chinese many of the same rights of immigration and status that were enjoyed by some of the European powers. He served from 1961 until his death, he managed to be in China during the civil war. That must have been weird for him. Burlingame had, before serving the newly formed Republican party, been a Free Soiler and then a Know Nothing in the House of Representatives. These terms are only relevant to the time in which he was living, but had to do with the divisions between the Democrats and the other parties that led to the Civil War. Basically the Democrats were the party of Slave owning Southern Aristocrats, and they were quite intent on extending slavery to the new territories to the West, -- though this would have meant expanding their influence and power in Washington as well and giving them control over the Senate and possibly the House as well. Different political forces were coalescing to oppose the Democrats influence, which had been felt since Andrew Jackson's polarizing Presidential terms 1829-37. The Fee Soilers had a platform of wanting to open up the West to settlement through incentives, while forbidding the expansion of Slavery. Not because they wanted Slavery to be abolished necessarily, and not all of them were abolitionists, nor were all abolitionists not racists necessarily either. Eventually these forces, the Free Soilers, Know Nothings and others came together to form the new Republican party, and when they managed to get a president elected -- Lincoln -- the result was Southern succession and the Civil War.

Charles Burlingame was the Pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon on Septeber 11, 2001. His Sister Debra is a reactionary attorney who has written columns for the Wall Street Journal and who was instrumental in sinking the proposed International Freedom Center at the World Trade Center site. The Center was supposed to be a museum about various genocides and crimes against humanity through history; she used her influence along with other ignorant fire breathers to stop the center being built because she said the center had nothing to do with crimes against humanity in general; this was unique and somehow the center was seen as celebrating the terrorists.

Jeff Burlingame is a music PR guy and writer, he wrote a well regarded biography of Kurt Cobain.

Burlingame High School is in Burlingame, California, a very wealthy town near San Francisco. The three children of Kathryn Crosby Grant (blogged about by myself a couple of months ago) went there.

SASHA ALEXANDER: Another Los Angeles Actor of Moderate Fame

2007-06-15T11:27:00.000-07:00

Being that my blog subjects are chosen randomly, I do end up with a lot of short blogs about minor celebrities or sports people who I had never heard of, and who nevertheless about whom I am compelled wax poetic. Oh Sasha Alexander, a TV star many would recognize. But I haven't lived in a place with TV reception for almost 10 years now, and I haven't had the chance to catch any of the shows that you appeared in. Apparently you had a major role in the tv series NCIS, which sounds like a copycat show of CSI, the twist being that you were part of a team of investigators from the Navy instead of a special investigative division of the police.
Congratulations on the birth of your daughter Lucia, I always liked that name. That's pretty cool that your stepmama is Sophia Loren, or will be whenever you and Lucia's father do get married. Hey, you're living in fornication, as the born again owner of a pet store once told my (now) wife.

PRISMATOID: A shape beloved of geometers and industrial designers

2007-06-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

A Prismatoid is a polyhedron where all the vertices lie in 2 planes. So this could be a pyramid, or so many other things. If the two planes have the same number of vertices then it is a prismoid, a subset of prismatoid.

The simplest prismatoid you could have would be a 3 sided pyramid --a single vertex on one plane and 3 on another. the next simplest would be a wedge, 2 vertices on one plane and 3 on the other. The 3rd most would be 3 on each plane, which is also the simplest prismoid you could create.

COLLEGE MISERICORDIA: A pretty O.K. Catholic college in Pennsylvania

2007-05-31T12:53:00.000-07:00

The website of this college makes me not nostalgic for my college days. It really doesn't seem like my kind of place, but in its favor, it places something like 53rd in the top 176 colleges of its class according to some college survey, according to them. Also in its favor, when you check out their total room and board it only comes out to about $14,000, which is less than half what most small colleges will run you nowadays. But maybe it shouldn't be compared with those liberal arts colleges, its really not quite the same -- my college didn't offer nursing classes for instance, and this one doesn't offer Multicultural or, this is a new one i've been hearing about, Fat Studies. Also the student profiles they put up there are, well, couldn't they have found more attractive students? It's just marketing, but if this college doesn't sell itself so well, then is that supposed to inspire me with confidence about what it will do for me as a potential student?

One thing they do for their students is guarantee them they will get a position in their chosen field within 6 years or else they will give them an internship in it. But if after 6 years of trying all you can get is an internship, that's pretty sad. The idea is depressing, I'm glad my 20s are in the past.

HYBOTIDAE: Little flies, aren't bloodsuckers, you probably never notice 'em

2007-05-30T08:29:00.001-07:00

Hybotidae, or Dancing Flies, are a family within the order Diptera, or True Flies. There are so many different classifications within the order Diptera that there is no real agreement as to how to do it amongst entymologists; there are just too many 'infraorders' and 'superfamilys' with shared characteristics. And tons of undiscovered species, no doubt -- flies are everywhere, as we know. However, there are two distinct agreed upon suborders -- Nematocera, which are full of misquitoes, blackflies and other bloodsuckers plus gnats, and Brachycera, which includes the Hybotidae. Anyway, none of the species in the Hybotidae family do any bloodsucking and seem pretty harmless as far as I can tell, and they're not big, so you probably will never even take note of them beyond reading this post.

REBBENA: A South Eastern Northern Central Indian Sub-Sub-Sub division

2007-05-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

Rebbena is a Mandal in the Indian State of Andhra Pradesh, in the Eastern part of South India (Capital: Hydrabad). The main language of this Indian State is Telugu, and in Telugu this is the name of the state: ఆంధ్ర ప్రదేశ్ (pretty, no?). 90% of the people in the State are Hindus, most of the rest are Muslims and speak Urdu -- but the percentage is probably somewhat higher in Rebbena, being that this particular Mandal is located in the northmost District of Andhal Pradesh, Andilabad, and the Muslims came down from the north in the 10th century but never made it as far as the most southernly State, Tamil Nadu (the only part of India not conquered at any point by Muslims). Pictured above is Andilabad, the #40 area in the center eastern part is Rebbena. It's probably a fairly poor district, the main industry is farming, with some textiles, leather production, and a smattering of others.

If you know more about Rebbena, you can add your own comments on this site that interfaces with Google Maps, called Wikimapia.

THUNDERPUSS: a couple of dj's who rearranged beats of music industry moneymakers to fuel alcohol and sex industry niches

2007-05-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

When one of the perfomers that a record company heavily promotes has a chart topping single, the typical thing to do is to make several mixes of the track to suit different radio formats -- boost the vocals here, add some strings there, or adjust certain sounds for easier listening or for radio stations that program what is still blandly and fairly meaninglessly referred to as 'rock'.

But a record company will also often hire a dj to make an extended dance remix. These remixes are bought and used for private public spaces, where the familiarity of the music track plus the heavier beats will make people want to dance, drink, and have sex.

The name of this dj duo, Thunderpuss, is suggestive of at least two of the aforementioned industry uses of dance remixes. As for the dj's themselves, who no longer work together or under this name, they continue to work as dj's at parties and are paid for their production and mixing work on records. But as the major record labels have been in freefall for a while, the record work is no doubt less lucrative, and they have to rely on their dj skills more -- though they're probably not hurting too bad.

CHEVRON - The original abstraction

2007-05-17T11:46:00.000-07:00

A chevron is a straight or slightly curved line bent in the middle at approximately ninety degrees. We see these all over the place -- one such place is on military uniforms. A private has one of these on their sleeves, a corporal has two, and a Sargeant has three. They are a common feature on flags -- the flag depicted is the flag of the North American Vexilogical Association; other Vexilogical organizations also favor the chevron. Vexillology is the study of flags, thus the chevron is a flag lover's ideal, and this is a flag of flags.

The chevron it is in fact one of the very first abstract symbols ever. The Soviet experimental filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein wrote an essay comparing the language of film montage to Chinese pictograms (which are known to be at least 4,000 years old), in which he noted that a chevron was symbolic of 'house', a wavy line of 'woman', but when you put the chevron over the wavy line the word became 'tranquility'. Thus to have a home and a woman was to live in tranquility.

CAROLINA PASCUAL: Spanish gymnast wins medal, retires at 17

2007-05-14T12:55:00.000-07:00

Rhythmic gymnasts are seperated into two divisions by the World Gymnastics Federation -- those under 16 and those over. This must be because once you hit 16 you just aren't as good any more, not as short and spry and have a reduced elasticity -- and your really past it by the time you've hit 17, which is why Carolina Pascual quit at that age and started coaching.

I noticed in the Wikipedia entry for rhythmic gymnastics, someone snuck a little something at the end of the main description: ' u is a bitch nigga '. I don't know how long that edit will survive Wikipedia's roving editors, this could be a test for them.

BATTLE OF GETTYSBURGH, FIRST DAY -- things look bad for the Union, but the next day Lee's blunder will lose the war for the Confederates

2007-05-10T11:08:00.000-07:00

The Battle of Gettysburgh wasn't planned, it started when confederate general Henry Heth went looking for some shoes for his troops, during the campaign where the armies of the South were supposed to be battering places in the North to get them to give up the war. At this point, the war could have gone either way, and despite the built-in advantage that the North had in being more industrialized than the South, the South had overall won more engagements and had better leadership. But this was the first day of the 3-day battle that would destroy such a large part of General Robert. E. Lee's fighting force that it was to spell the beginning of the end of the whole Confederate war effort. And the moment of truth was during Day 2, a charge through Union artillery on three sides known as "Pickett's Charge," which despite all the successes owing the Lee's great strategic skills, this blunder was all his, as he acknowledged as the Confederate forces retreated on the 3rd day of the battle.

But in this first day, things were looking better for the Confederates than the Union army. The Rebels were able to outflank the Union armies in several areas, and by midday the Union was retreating in disarray through the town of Gettysburgh, seeking higher ground beyond the town. They did get there, and that the Confederate Generals did not prevent them or see it through all the way would be something they would pay for the next day. General Heth was one of the casualties that day; he was struck in the head by a bullet -- though his life was saved because his hat, too big for his head, was stuffed with paper and somehow the bullet only knocked him out for 24 hours. But these were crucial hours. On the Union side General John F. Reynolds, one of the most senior and respected Union Generals, was hit by a bullet in the back of the neck, knocked of his horse and died. In this first day, about there were about 9,000 union casualties (killed, wounded and missing) and about 6,000 confederate casualties. By the end of the three day battle the totals were around 23,000 each.

MARK GODDARD: former racing driver now managing third-tier racing organization in Asia

2007-04-19T09:18:00.000-07:00

MARK GODDARD is the managing director of the Asian Forumula Three Corporation, which is based in Manila in the Philippines. Though he is British, there are a lot of Brits involved in the Asian racing scene, probably because it's a pretty new thing to have competitive racing events in Asia, and there are so many British expats living in Australia. Also, Asia means opportunities that don't exist for many drivers in Britain, as the cost of having a team in Asia is a fraction of what it would cost in Britain (about $160,000 US as opposed to the $800,000 it would cost in Britain).

F3 is for newer drivers, by winning these races a driver can work their way up to the Formula One racing that gets the big audiences and sponsorship money.

The Asian Formula Three Corporation are eight racing teams, including "Team Goddard", of which Mark Goddard is the Team Principal. Thus he probably traveled with his team to Zuhai China for the first 3 rounds in January, to Albert Park Australia in March, and I think the team isn't advancing farther than that this year but if they did they would go to Sentul Indonesia in May and finally back to Zuhai China in July.

Mr. Goddard never got that far as a driver, his best showing was finishing 3rd in the B-series in British F3. But was apparently a roomate of former worldclass F1 driving Eddie Irvine, who even was able to win with cars designed by overrated Jaguar, while that company briefly experimented with F1 racing. Irvine is now the fifth richest person in northern Ireland.

SCID: a severe congenital disease, a chess database, a database using meta-application, a diagnostic procedure, and an ID# from fiber optic technology

2007-04-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

SEVERE COMBINED IMMUNODEFICIENCY is one kind of SCID -- being born without an effective immune system. This is what David Vetter, the original Bubble Boy, suffered from, forcing him to live his short life in a bubble, venturing out a couple of times in a suit made by NASA. Nowadays someone born with a SCID doesn't have to live in a sanitized bubble, they can give them bone marrow transplants.

SHANE'S CHESS INFORMATION DATABASE is another SCID. It is a nice way of gathering many different chess games played by chess masters and comparing them. It is available for Unix, Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems. It is free and open source -- though apparently some of the code was stolen from a similar application, ChessDB.

STRUCTURED CLINICAL INTERVIEWS FOR DSM-IV (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is another SCID. This is a process developed for researchers to obtain a diagnosis of what mental disorders someone they are interviewing has. DSM-IV is the major classification system used across the United States, and its classifications are recognized by Psychologists, Biologists, Sociologists and other Ologists.

SOURCE CODE IN DATABASE is an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment (an application made for the development of other applications) that uses a database to store bundles of pre-packaged code for the coder who uses it.

Finally, SCID is a SONET CARRIER IDENTIFICATION, SONET being the protocol by which data is decoded, through pulses of light carried on fiber optic cable, and the carrier (probably) being a telecom. For instance, Verizon will provide you with some SCID codes if you buy service from them using SONET.

HUGO HERGESELL: a scientist tests the atmosphere for the air war

2007-04-14T00:49:00.000-07:00

Hugo Hergesell was a German meteorologist born in 1859 in Bromberg in Prussia, which is and was also called Bydgoszcz to the Poles. The Teutonic Knights took it briefly in the 14th century, and then Prussia took it in the first division of Poland in 1772. It had been split between the powers of Prussia, Russia, and Austria in an agreement in order to maintain the balance of power. Frederick The Great treated his new subjects well, unlike what would happen to them later when Hitler's Wehrmacht were to annex the place in 1938.

Hergesell became a professor of meteorology at the University of Strasbourg, the capital of another historically contentious territory, Alsace (taken by Germany in 1871, then reclaimed by France after WWI, and taken again by Germany in WWII, now again part of France). He conducted many of the first important research on the atmosphere using balloons, manned and unmanned, in the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th century. This research was both a product of and integral to the development of aviation technology. This may be why he was so close with Kaiser Wilhelm, the agressive militaristic leader of the German state, and why they went on trips together in the years preceding WWI. In an expedition to Tenerife, an Island posession of Spain off of the West coast of Africa (conveniently located between Germany and its German colonies), Hergesell helped set up weather stations donated by the Kaiser himself.

In 1934, Hergesell was awarded the Third Reich's medal for German achiever's, the Eagle Cross, for his contributions to Science and Avaiation -- probably pinned on his chest by Adolf Hitler himself, as was usually done. Hergesell died in 1938 at the outbreak of the Second World War.

THE SOUTH-WEST AFRICA CAMPAIGN: Brits order Boers to kick Germans out of their favorite African colony

2007-04-12T13:06:00.000-07:00

One of the first actions taken by the British Empire in Africa after hostilities had broken out in World War I was to get their South African client government to attack the German's South West African colony, in the area now known as Namibia. In August 1914 Louis Botha, the Prime Minister of modern South Africa's predecessor nation, The Union of South Africa, said he could send some troops to France. London asked him if he could invade German South West Africa instead, and Botha gave the order to invade to his armed forces.

However, this wasn't what many of his Generals or other soldiers of the Boers wanted to do. Only 12 years before, the Boers had been at war with Britain, and Britain had been responsible for a terrible scorched earth campaign against the Boers, finally sending tens of thousands of them to concentration camps (this is where the name actually comes from, they were concentrated in small areas). Some 27,000 whites and 14,000 blacks or more died of starvation and disease. Other blacks, maybe as many as 600,000 or so, were killed by the Boers during this time, as the oppressive Boers thought the Blacks were allying or might ally with the British. Well that's off the point, the real issue was that Germany had been their ally during this 'Second Boer War' of 1899-1902. Many of the Boers had escaped across the border and never signed the peace agreement and fealty to the British government that Britain had made the Boers sign as a condition of peace after defeating them.

And so it was that when the call to arms came, some Boer Generals were conspiring together to protest, resign, rebel -- some combination of these. But what really set off the Maritz rebellion was the death of Koos de la Ray, General and war hero of the Second Boer War, when the car he was riding in was gunned down after riding through a government roadblock. The driver probably thought the government set up the roadblock to arrest the General, who was on his way to meet up with other conspiring war leaders opposed to the British. In reality the roadblock was set up to stop a group of murderous bandits known as the Foster Gang. His death on September 15, 1914 triggered the rebellion -- which was quashed pretty quickly by the Union of SA forces, who stayed true to their oath to the British Government.

The Boers weren't kind to the indiginous people of South Africa, as we know. But the Germans who they had kicked out by 1915 were actually worse. The first Genocide of the 20th century was not the Armenian genocide, as I suggested in an earlier post. It was actually the attempted German extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples -- specifically singled out for their race and identity for destruction, after they rebelled against the German colonists (The Germans had been enslaving their people to work on farms and in diamond mines, expropriating their land and settling the area). By 1907 there were only a small fraction of their original population left.

TRANSMEDIALE: Berlin avante garde music festival too cool for the U.S.

2007-04-09T09:42:00.000-07:00

Transmediale is a festival held in the Club Transmediale since 2001, which receives a major grant from the German government to invite music and video artists from around the world for a several weeks avante garde noise and video extravaganza.

The U.S. government doesn't put up money for this kind of thing. But a much smaller percentage of the U.S. population is into this kind of art. Now if the government did fund it, then there would be an event which would get a bigger audience for it. But I can only imagine it really working out in New York City. And even though New York City is New York City, it's still not Berlin, which really specializes in this kind of hipster avante garde scene. I can imagine this festival happening in Williamsburg Brooklyn -- and attracting a lot of Germans, especially.

HAMMARLUND: the radio manufacturer that put the ham in hammy

2007-04-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

Hammarlund was one of the first manufacturers of radio equipment, founded by Oskar Hammarlund, a Swedish immagrant to the USA, in New York City in 1910. It became the biggest name in radios just before and during WWII, when their radios, particularly the "Super Pro" radio as pictured above, was bought in large quantities by the US government for military use. The resulting surplus ensured that these radios are still found and collected by vintage radio collectors today. The company itself shut its doors in the 60s.

The name "Hammarlund" may be the origin of the "ham radio operator", a term used to refer to an amateur user of radio equipment to broadcast. These people still need a license to do so, and the reason for this may be that in time of war these folks could be useful to the government to get word out -- of a zombie attack, for instance.

I wonder also if it might have been the source of another use -- to "ham it up", to overract, as people did in the serial radio shows of the 1930s and 40s.

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

2007-03-31T06:42:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-28T18:46:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-27T19:07:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-21T17:54:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-20T08:56:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-14T16:06:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-11T17:17:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

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

2007-03-07T19:07:00.000-08:00

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

2007-03-05T17:08:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-03-04T15:42:00.000-08:00

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

2007-03-02T07:43:00.000-08:00

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

2007-03-01T18:50:00.000-08:00

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.

a point when one thing turns into another, or tries to embody explain or pass for said idea

2007-02-27T15:35:00.000-08:00

First of all you've got the concept of a Tipping Point, when one thing tips everything over, sort of casting the deciding vote and catalyst of a mass wave of change. What the final straw does to a camel's back.

Tipping Point could refer to the point of a propogation of memes, which are ideas from simple concepts to behaviors to religions, that humans are triggered to replicate. Charles Dawkins came up with the Memes concept, which is itself a Meme, and it's an idea that I'm propogating. Albeit lazily.

Its been used to refer to white flight when a certain number of black families moved in, in urban areas in the 1960s. Morton Grodzins was a pofessor of Political Science of the University of Chicago, and he wrote about the Tipping Point in The metropolitan area as a racial problem, which was explaining the sudden creation of the racial problem of poverty, isolation and desperation of America's inner cities.

just another instrument of the reign of terror

2007-02-24T07:45:00.000-08:00

Francois Louis Bourdon was a lawyer/representative of the Oise in Northern France, and one of the first radicals in history, taking part in the insurrections and intrigues of the French Revolution from its inception in 1792 until it's it's last phase before the rise Napoleon ("The Directory"), when he became one of its many victims.

In 1792, as a member of the National Assembly (a legislative body of the government in those earlier years of the Revolution) he voted with the majority to gillotine King Louis XVI. in 1796 this body was succeeded by The Directory, an arrangement when all executive power was shared by five regicides. One of those five Directors was Paul Barras, the debauched Aristocrat and opportunistic adventurer. A couple of years earlier he'd supported Maximilien Robespierre through the Reign of Terror(1792-1794), of which Robespierre was the bloody architect. Our man Bourdon de l'Oise also supported Robie, but in 1794 Barras and Bourdon turned on Robespierre (in the Thermadorian Reaction), and as the government forces under General Napoleon came for his arrest Robie jumped out a window, but they were still able to bring him alive to the guillotine (though with his jaw shot off), and beheaded (it was said, face-up, a first in French history) in 1794.

When in 1796 Paul Barras became one of the five members of The Directory, he and two of the others ordered the suppression of Bourdon and others considered Royalists, this despite Bourdon's earlier vote to kill King Loius XVI ("Louis the Last") and Marie Antoinette. Loyalties and even ideologies switched very quickly in those years of this revolutionary republic, and practically every day numerous people were killed in the name of Revolutionary principles.

They shipped Bourdon de l'Oise off to the Penal Colony of French Guiana, where he died shortly after arrival in 1797.

Its pretty remarkable how complex the French Revolution is, if you try to follow the play by play of warring ideological forces during a period when France was also at war with half of Europe. But "The revolution eats its children" as it is said, and this is the prime historical example.

Napoleon, a General taking his orders from the Director who ordered the downfall of Bourdon, took absolute power for himself in 1799. He didn't bring stability but was hugely successful for a time in conquering Europe. It's impossible to know what he would have been like in peacetime. But we can think of dicators like bacteria -- in terms of survival and reproduction, it's still a 'successful' form of government -- more prevalent throughout the world than democracies and republics (in all but name.)

One hell of a Tier II Provincial Junior A Hockey team

2007-02-21T16:06:00.000-08:00

The Brampton Capitals are based in the city of Brampton, a city of 400,000, in the Brampton district of Toronto, Ontario.
If you came across my January posting about Box Lacrosse, you might have been reminded that when the summer's over, there's going to be ice on that Box Lacrosse court, and people are going to play Ice Hockey there.

The Hockey Leagues of Canada and their histories, you might imagine, would be one of the most Byzantine and banal of palimpsests. But you would be underestimating the extremity of it. There's Provincial vs. National, Tier I and II, Regional league subheadings, Junior A, Junior B, and on and on, divisions of leagues of regions, etc.

If it pleases you, the Brampton Capitals are seeded first in the West Division, and are playing in the second round of championship playoffs tomorrow night, after defeating the Ice Hawks last Friday. As recounted from the Brampton Capitals website, "Several games saw numerous players drop the gloves in the heat of the battle."
It must be said, this team needs a new mascot. They haven't even picked a single capital letter, like 'B' ... maybe they mean 'B' and 'C', but that's so self referential, not to mention abstract.

Dom Chiti, as Middle America as you can get

2007-02-20T15:38:00.000-08:00

Dom Chiti's dad was the major league catcher Harry Chiti, who will forever be remembered not for his catching knuckleballs, but for being the only player ever traded for himself -- from the Cleveland Indians to the New York Mets, in 1962. Chiti, stuck working for the same club that had just traded him away, hung up his glove that same year.
Two decades later Harry's son, Dom, became a left handed pitcher for the Atlanta Braves in 1976, then the Baltimore Orioles in 1981. And then he retired, at the age of 23, perhaps because of injury, but details are scarce -- only the skeleton of his five years of pitching and running stats remain.
But he became a scout, then other functions within the infrastructure of the Texas Rangers. Now he is their bullpen coach, one of six under-coaches beneath the head coatch. He's the guy in the dugout who's job it is to psych up the relief pitchers. "I wan't you to pitch their asses off!", for instance.
Dom was born on the western border of Missouri, in Independence -- a holy city for Mormons. Harry was born in a bare patch of South Central Illinois, population is currently just over 1,000 beings. How more middle of America could one possibly get?

the strength of moderation, in opposition to the extremes of our time

2007-02-18T14:40:00.000-08:00

Daniel S. Nevins was born 1966 in River Vale, New Jersey. There are some fairly well off white folk who live in those parts. Mostly fiscal conservatives, Republicans, yet comedian Bill Maher grew up there too.
Nevins went to the Frisch school, also located in Bergen county, a post-high school Orthodox Yeshiva. Then he went to an Orthodox Yeshiva outside of Jerusalem, Efrat, settled since the Bronze Age about four thousand years ago.
Then he became a rabbi in Farmington Hills, Michigan, a wealthy suburb of Detroit. He'll shortly be moving to back east to be the new Dean of the Rabbinical School of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a major institution in Conservative Judaism.
Conservative Judaism differs from Orthodox in that Conservative Judaism (or some prefer Masorti meaning 'tradiltional' Judaism) allows for change with the times, if need be, a little flexibility. They have organisations -- like the Jewish Theological Seminary, that make up the practice, kind of like lawyers building a case for a Judge. You know who the Judge is -- God, or the Messiah, in some mixture. It was just a couple of years ago that Nevins, along with two other Rabbis, wrote a paper that espoused a more open understanding of homosexuality and homosexuals, that didnt condemn them. The paper narrowly won a majority of supporters from the JST, and became part of their law. But it was a divisive issue, and almost fifty perfect of people were opposed -- and no doubt upset about it. And everyone should remember that when 'the center will not hold', then there's danger of wars among tribes. I note that those that the majority of Jews were Masorti fifteen years ago; Reform Judaism has been diminishing quickly. Now the Orthodox have come in the lead. We know that the Orthodox are the most inflexible by definition. Not to condemn, just to say, I think if Daniel were in charge there'd be more middle ground. He's been educated in all Orthodoxy, he knows it -- but check out the rest of the world, he's saying, sometimes if the shit don't work, change it.

media subversion vs. self delusion: a nuanced view

2007-02-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

The Most Royal Candidate Theory is the idea that in US presidential elections, the candidate with the most royal connections is the one that always wins. As the author of the wikipedia article points out, this theory is obviously false, for the simple fact that there were four cases of US history when two candidates vied for the presidency and one would be defeated, only to win four years later.

And then the anonymous author points to the late Harold Brooks-Baker as a proponent of this theory, and how world press outlets would listen to his pronouncements despite there not really being any basis to how he came about these judgements of whether someone was more or less royal. There's a link to an obit in the Daily Telegraph, which is really nasty to Brooks-Baker, saying he wasn't really the publisher of Burke's Peerage but made himself seem like he was, and slights to his character.

I had dinner with Brookie, as he called himself, in London, as he was a friend of my wife's family. He was very charming and affable and fun to be with. I was very saddened to hear when he succumbed to polio a couple of years ago. Maybe he did make pronouncements to get media coverage, and maybe what he said didn't always have a basis in fact, but I don't really know or care that much. Because I think the whole business of trying to find who is related to Charlemagne is really pointless at best, and at worst indicitive of someone's ability to delude themselves into thinking they are more special than someone else without even trying to actually achieve anything.

I didn't have that kind of feeling about Brookie, and I guess I never knew that much about his work with the Burke's publications. But as he said himself, many British people had a problem with an American -- though one that had lived in England for decades -- to follow this subject, and this seems like anti-American snobbery, even as they were sniffing at his interest in royal lineages. And if Brookie did make things up, then I can understand that a bit better (wanting publicity for financial reasons or attention) than the types that follow this to justify a self-aggrandizing idea of blood and history (and I know this was not how Brookie was or what motivated him). Those latter types are fools to think there's any there there to be distorted by Brookie.

But for those that just didn't like the how the media would publish or broadcast what he said, because what the royals are doing or who they are related to isn't really news at all...well for that I have sympathy. But I'm suspicious of anyone who feels too strongly about it, because lets face it, that's unfortunately the kind of media we have these days, and you can't blame that on Brooks-Baker. You can't applaud him either. But look closely into it if someone is too vehement... then they are secret haters, with overt reasonable arguments, and covert dislike of someone because of nastier reasons and bigotries.

where volunteering for the British army Leeds you

2007-02-15T15:24:00.000-08:00

The West Riding Artillery have for most of the century or so of their existence consited of a couple of regiments of volunteers. If anyone should attack Yorkshire, they have to look out for these guys. One of these regiments, the 101st, is based in Leeds, one of the eight 'core cities', or largest cities in England apart from London. They have people in Iraq right now, since 2004. They've got five of their people in Basrah.
Until recently they had been training in the use of anti-aircraft guns, but now their main focus is on finding batteries of enemy mortars or artillery, primarily using the COBRA system, which is a big box of radar equipment mounted on a rack that gets trucked around.
You can check on the British Army's website all the equipment that they have, and even how much they pay and terms of service. http://www.army.mod.uk/ Or visit the West Riding 101st regiment site (http://www.army.mod.uk/269bty/), if you want to live in Leeds, and visit the Royal Armory museum there.

the education of a little place in Arkansas

2007-02-13T16:25:00.000-08:00

If you live in this school district you are proud to be a Hillbilly. You are almost certainly white, there are hardly any minorities here at all. The biggest town in the district is Ozark -- its population was 3,504 by the last census taken, in 2000. It's got a certain outsize media notoriety, as follows.

Elizabeth Gracen was Miss America in 1982, appeared nude in Playboy magazine. In the 1990s someone she knew said then governer Bill Clinton raped Gracen in 1983. Gracen said no, it was just rough sex.

Dr. Rebecca Johnson was a doctor with a private practice and maybe the most successful physician in Arkansas, who dominated and collected money from the regions hospitals and medical institutions. In 1992 she he was found strangled by her secretary's husband in a hotel room in 1992. The story goes that he convinced he was connected to 'the southern mafia' and to give him 1.5 million in cash, and he would use it for laundering and double her money in days. She brought him the bag of cash and he killed her.

the good old days of hackerdom

2007-02-12T16:24:00.000-08:00

"Eternity" was the name of a BBS program active from 1994-1996. BBS, if you don't know because you're not a hacker or coder active during the 1990s, was a kind of precursor to the web discussion groups we have today. Someone would moderate a group using his (maybe her) computer -- which could have been and often was something like an Amiga or Commodore 64 type ancient computing device with a modem, over which others could dial in to download updates to and participate in the discussion, or share some limited packs of information. Modems were so slow back then, it was mostly text.
BBS's for some harken to a great time before the world wide web became complicated, commercialized, what have you. Someone has even created a five and a half hour documentary about the phenomenon in 2005 (http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/)-- it's pretty good too, according to Film Threat and Wired magazine.
We are in the age of ever more articulated subcultures!

Aussie against pollution, except noise

2007-02-10T14:18:00.000-08:00

Jim Longley is an Australian accountant, born 1958, member of the New South Wales Legislative assembly from 1986 until 1996, affiliated with the Liberal party. He is also a lay Anglican minister.
On the national stage, a politician of note is Peter Garrett, born 1953, an MP with the Australian Labor Party -- the other major party of Australia. Peter Garrett used to be the vocalist and frontman of the band Midnight Oil, a rock band that had highly politically charged lyrics advocating environmentalism and Aboriginal rights.
These two people may not have a whole lot to do with each other, but when I think of an Australian government person, I think of Peter Garrett, because it is interesting to me that a rock star would become an MP. In the US, the nearest we had to that was Sonny Bono. He was republican house representative from California who would never escape his having become the cliche of what it was to be a soft-rock-70s AM mustachioed and later died skiing husband of Cher.
I saw Midnight Oil play in 1988 at the campus of the University of Illinois. The auditorium was of an octagonal shape, and I was all the way at the front and to the right side, a speaker twice my size on stage in front of me. This was probably the worst design for an auditorium ever, as the parallel walls ensured endless bouncing back and forth of the sound, and I couldn't actually hear the music because of the reverberation off the walls. I remember only Peter Garrett's bald pate now and then emerging from beyond the back of peoples heads, and that after a while, much too long, I was clutching my head in pain as I escaped the auditorium. My right ear was ringing for the next two days.

the short but benevolent life of a submarine

2007-02-09T17:02:00.000-08:00

the USS Stickelback was commissioned at the end of March 1945, and began tests shortly afterwards in Guam. She departed for the Sea of Japan on August 6, 1945 -- the day the atomic bomb 'little boy' was dropped on Hiroshima. three days after that, a second atomic bomb 'fat man' was dropped on Nagasaki. When Stickelback reached her patrol waters, a cease fire had been declared --the war was over. When two bamboo rafts of Japanese sailors were discovered by the Stickelback, survivors of a sunken Frigate, they were taken aboard, given food and medical treatment, and set afloat again right next to Japanese shores.
In 1952, the Stickelback was converted to a snorkel type submarine. But it never saw any combat. in 1958, during an exercise with a couple of ships, the submarine lost power while submurged, and surfaced right in front of a ship that was unable to swerve away in time to avoid a collision with the Stickelback.
The submarine crew were rescued, but the Stickelback went down 1000 feet to the bottom of the Pacific, near Hawaii.
"On Eternal Patrol" (http://www.oneternalpatrol.com/uss-stickleback-415.htm) is a website that honors all those sailors that died in US submarines, and the submarines themselves that sunk. It's somehow comforting to see this, probably because dying in a submarine seems like a very lonely way to go, like an astronaut dying in space. Usually the crew of a submarine die with the craft, for it's just a little tin can protecting them against the vastness of the ocean. In this fortunate case, only the Stickelback went to the bottom.

a play that I went to but mostly lost to memory

2007-02-08T16:57:00.000-08:00

Brian Friel, born in 1929, in Omagh in northern Ireland, is a reknowned playright and director. His first plays were produced in the late 1950s. Probably his most successful play he's made is Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), a production of which I saw on stage in New York, somewhere in the early 1990s. I've mostly forgotten what happened, but I remember that there were five women that seemed really unhappy, and that this seemed to have to do with they're being oppressed by catholocism and the suppression of the Irish language and pagan practices, like dancing. Suddenly some music comes on from somewhere, and a couple of the women are suddenly propelled into a kind of violent jig or dance, freeing themselves from the repression of dogma.
Looking back on it they were poor Irish folk so maybe the lack of work would make them sad as well, not just the church. But this is just how I remember the play, and may or may not be accurate.

central europe rocks in the summertime

2007-02-07T14:42:00.000-08:00

The Czech Republic is a great place to be in the summertime, especially if you're just out of college. I was there for almost a year, 94-95. It got pretty dreary sometimes in the fall and winter, and most of the spring actually, but the summer had amazing weather, great times and music festivals. Hip Hop Kemp is one of two Hip Hop festivals that have been taking place in the Czech Republic in recent years. The tickets are cheap - something like $40 for three days of music, and very cheap camping. Almost 20,000 people have shown up to see some fairly major names in Hip Hop from the US, the UK, and elsewhere.
My music festival and concert experiences were especially memorable, of my times in C.R. and in Hungary, I wish I'd seen more. Now I'd be annoyed by the crowds, and the accursed youths having too much fun. But, I still got my memories of summertime in Europe.

A nice South Australian town where it rains like you were in London

2007-02-06T17:25:00.000-08:00

Ah, Sterling, a nice small town, adjacent from South Australia's little capital, Adelaide. Because it's so close to Mount Lofty, it's the wettest place in South Australia. Which granted consists mostly of some of the most arid places you can find anywhere. But for those accustomed to the British climate, it's a great place to live in Australia, because of the Lofty Mountain range, for the precipitation in Sterling is comparable to London. I hope nothing happens to screw up the wind that blows up from the Great Australian Bight (Sea) into old Mount Lofty and keeps the areas that side of the mountain wet.
Mild weather is something that needs to be preserved, and is in short supply in Australia. The continent as a whole has terrible problems with soil erosion and salinification from bad farming practices. Even before the British Empire started to settle it as a big Penal colony, very little topsoil or good land existed, and moisture was in short supply. It was the ancestors of the Bushmen themselves who it seems were the cause of an ecological collapse, probably many milennia earlier. Read Collapse by Jared Diamond. It's important to know how industry and human activity affect our world by seeing how ecological collapse has been the cause of the destruction of societies in the past, so that we can appreciate what is happening today.

mid-70s fusion rocker attempts comeback without ever having been there

2007-02-05T18:39:00.000-08:00

George Tickner was the rhythm guitarist for Journey when they first formed, as a non-vocal progressive jazz-rock fusion band. He toured made one album with them. Then he got tired of the touring and went into medical school. It's unclear whether he completed medical school, but he kept in touch with the band as the members changed and they became huge, with songs like... I'm going to spare you because you probably know the songs and you might have them in your head all day, as I have (the sacrifices I make for my art, sigh).
Flash forward, 2005 -- Tickner appears with past and 'current' members (about a dozen people) of Journey to see the band receive a star on the walk of fame.
Tickner, basking in the glory for the first time (they weren't widely known for their first three albums/incarnations), that year cuts an album with two of his former bandmates, which may still be available on one of their websites.
George got a slick website, lean on information, but not on web features. Of special interest is Josh's Journal, where a young fan named Josh details two days of his life in late 2005 -- how he's 'gotten really close to Lori :)', how he's practiced some guitar licks and ' and have gotten and in my friend Scott's opinion, really good.'.
Please don't go George Tickner's myspace page, you will regret it.

end-timers are ignorant haters, part 2

2007-02-04T15:58:00.000-08:00

In the best-selling 2005 novel The Ezekiel Option, Joel C. Rosenberg postulated a near-future scenario wherein most of the world's powers, led by Russia and Iran, gang up against Israel and the U.S. to bring about Armageddon. Israel is close to using 'The Samson Option', in which it will launch hundreds of nuclear missles against various powers arrayed against it. But an American envoy manages to convince them that they should instead use 'The Ezekiel Option', which would entail taking no action, trusting in the prophesy of Ezekiel which says that God will smite the enemies of Israel, so that they won't have to. Right as the forces of evil are swarmed on the borders of Israel and Russia is ready to launch its missles, balls of fire fly in from space and destroy all the major enemy cities, their arms and armies, thus saving Israel and the world.
A lot of people in the US really believe this sort of scenario WILL happen. They really want and want to believe it will happen. This is especially frightening because people with this mindset have a great deal of influence in the US government these days. As hard as it is for a normal, non-life hating person to fathom, many people of the armageddon seeking ilk actually seek the destruction of our natural environment because it shores up their belief that the end-times are near. And books like The Ezekiel Option are the expression of these fantasies, couched in a realistic-seeming scenario, by someone well versed in world politics and current events, and able to creatively shape possible scenarios to a worst-possible scenario, before the deux ex machina fulfills the prophesy as the author sees it.
But the way Joel C. Rosenberg, a Jew, reads Ezekiel is not the way other end-timers might read it. For Rosenberg sees the evil forces of Gog and Magog as Iran and Russia, and backs this up with little hints to this effect, even if some of these may be based on sources that lived well after Ezekiel and presumably would not have had any better idea about what he meant than we do today.
Compare his scenario with that of an anti-Semitic end-timer, who would have it that the Jews themselves are 'Gog and Magog', and also bases this belief on sources that are old but are dated milennia after Ezekiel's time. In particular he bases this claim on the belief that most Jews are really descendants of the Turkic Black Sea kingdom of Khazaria, whose leaders adopted Judaism in the 8th Century. Ultimately he argues this makes the Jews not really Semitic, but a wiley barbian people, and Ezekiel's Gog and Magog. I use this as a counter example of how a great deal of fragmentary evidence can be accumulated to support whatever end-timer's chosen position, a justification of their hatred, fear and hope that a celestial hand will rid them of those they despise.
I would argue additionally, though I won't get into it this time, this usually comes from self-hatred -- but Nietzsche says this better than anyone.
Incidentally about the Khazars, I read Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe years ago and found it fascinating, but recent genetic research has I believe pretty much vanquished the idea that Ashkenazic Jews are not what most people think they are, and there isn't that big connection to Turkish peoples that (Jewish) Koestler or that apocalyptic Christian hater wishes they were.
And as a final digression, which will muddy the waters a bit but I can't resist, one of my favorite books of fiction is The Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavić. This is in spite of the facts that I later discovered about the author, who is Serbian. Pavić, it turns out, supported the Nationalists during their genocidal push to create a Greater Serbia in the early 90s, led by Slobodan Milosivic and his gang. Pavić apparently thought of the Serbs as the real Jews, the victims and not the perpetrators, maligned and misunderstood by the world. But tell that to the Croats, Bosniaks, or those massacred as Srebrenica.
Yeah, some Israelis do that kind of thing too I suppose, small scale but fairly regularly. I don't think an avenging God would have an easy time figuring out who NOT to smite these days.

Shakespeare as litmus test of cultural health

2007-02-03T06:09:00.000-08:00

Wayne and Schuster were a famous Canadian comedy duo primarily active from the 40s through the 70s. Despite their great popularity at the time -- they had more appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show than any other act, 67 appearances in 11 years -- they are hardly known by anyone today who is not of an age old enough to have seen them. The reason for this is partly that humor does change over time. But if one looks at one of their classic routines (http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/a_baseball.cfm), in which baseball players speak in Shakespearean dialogue, it seems funnier and better to me than, say, Bob Hope. (whose fame for those under 50 now rests mostly with his movies, make of them what you will, and his appearances with Ronald Reagan or whoever, cracking semi-funny jokes).
The humor of the Shakespearian baseball sketch will continue to be funny so long as people continue to be familiar with the plays of Shakespeare. This is because the humor is sophisticated, and not just based on the sounds of Middle English but actually are based on a good knowledge of the material itself, as any good parody must be. (Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist, greatly admired this sketch). But now that the American public education system has deteriorated so such a horrendous degree since the post-WWII period, the plays of Shakespeare are barely known or read by the general public who grew up in the 80s on and went to public schools. Therefore this kind of humor will be less appreciated, and this is not a reflection of the changing cultural mores or values, but rather of how bad things have gotten in US public education.
Disclaimer, I am not a Shakespeare expert nor have I read more than a handful of his plays, none recently. But that was a key part of our education back then, and it was enough to 'get' Shakespeare, and as time went on start to realize his centrality in Western literature and language. He's the foundation upon which most literature that followed rests. And forever ripe for parody, so long as we retain familiarity with his works.

cold war films: propaganda in reverse

2007-02-01T12:16:00.000-08:00

Cold War films hit their peak shortly after the peak of the Cold War itself, which reached its apotheosis with the building of the Berlin Wall (1961) and the Cuban Missle Crisis (1962). The classic and best period of Cold War films would be 1962-5. Noteable Cold War films of this period include Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, and The Bedford Incident.
This latter film starred Richard Widmark as a Captain Ahab-like US Navy Captain of the fictional USS Beford, leading a destroyer ship that stalks a Russian submarine, and Sydney Potier as a journalist who happens to be on board and who resists this course of action that could lead to a full war with the Soviet Union.
Cold War films are, like any dramatic films, a reflection of society's fears, but much more so. I like these classic Cold War films not only because they are good movies (well I don't care as much for Manchurian Candidate, really, but its a film of note), but because they are overt expressions of these fears, as opposed to most films that work on our fears covertly -- which is the essence of propaganda. Commercial films are typically steeped in a covert kind of propaganda, making it doubly concealed in the way it does our thinking for us, making assumptions for the viewer about how the world works, and what prejudices we have.
Some of the worst offenders in this regard were films of the 40s and early 50s, prior to the flowering of CW films but on the heels of WW2 and then McCarthy, when we were steeped in fear of the Cold War, coupled with studio control of filmmaking. But as the 50s progressed, the public became more critical of the implications of adherence to the policies of the paranoid extremes of the US right, and the fear became at least as intense that something THEY would do would cause WW3, and a nuclear holocaust. Plus, the studio system was breaking up, and would fall apart in the 60s.
'The enemy' of these classic Cold War films were not the Soviets, but the mindset of anyone that could do something that could lead to the end of the world as we know it. And this fear will be with us as long as we still have that world.
The Bedford Incident was fiction, but a few years before its production there was a real life incident chillingly close to the events described in the film, though it involved an American submarine on a spying mission in Soviet polar waters, and several Soviet ships that had discovered the sub through the use of sonar. The submarine could not flee the Soviet ships, for to move quickly away it would have to surface, and the Soviets detonated grenades above it to indicate what would happen if it did. After three days the submarine had just about run out of fuel, the Soviet ships had not budged, and so the submarine was forced to take its chances and come to the surface. When it did, the Soviets did not attack it, but let it pass unmolested to return to European waters. As it did so, on of the Soviet ships flashed its lights, signaling a message in code, "thanks for the sonar practice."

you can judge a book by its cover

2007-01-31T12:28:00.000-08:00

I don't know when they came up with that 'you can't judge a book by its cover' expression, but rarely has a cliche been more dated and less true to today. The purpose of cover art is to make sure that you CAN judge a book by its cover art. This has been true for at least the last 60 years, since marketing to the masses really came into its own, after World War II. During that war, American industry was transformed and ramped up to an unprecedented degree in order to produce the huge amounts of armaments needed, first for our European allies who we were selling and 'lend-leasing' our wares to, and then for the US itself and the Allied powers when we joined the war after being attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. After the war, there was a great worry that all this industrial capacity would suddenly not have a use, and this is where consumer culture was born, when the heads of these industries found new ways to make people want things, and to keep wanting things, to keep these machines buzzing and making stuff. And one of the tools to do this was cover art, or more generally adverting of all kinds.
Book art and Record Album art especially were great creative outlets. Pictured is one of my favorite record sleeves, for the album 'Percussion!', with music from Darius Milhaud, Carlos Chavez and Bela Bartok. Its a shame, cd art just can't replace Record art, much too small a canvas. Now with digital music downloads, we won't even have that, I suppose.

the ancient romans thought lions were funny...

2007-01-29T16:26:00.000-08:00

"Amazing Animal Videos" aired on the Animal Planet television channel in the years 2001-2002. I'm not surprised it only lasted two seasons -- how many videos can one find of animals doing amazing or funny things, other than maybe dogs. The idea was 'America's funniest home videos', but with Animals instead. Most of us with video cameras aren't that in touch with wildlife, other than dogs. And cats and birds can't be relied upon to be very funny or do much interesting.
The other problem is that if you've got interesting footage of exotic animals doing something, most people who shoot the footage will want money for it. I'm guessing the producers got tapped out of the cheaper footage after only two seasons, and after that it would have been prohibitively expensive to fill the shows with interesting material that they would have to purchase.
I used to work for a company that found stock footage, for ad agencies and the like. There was this one Russian who had the rights to some footage for a show that was the Russian version of 'America's home videos'. Some of this material was really good, and would have worked for the commercial we were working on finding footage for -- like this woman who was playing the piano with her nose. simple, cheaply shot, but cute. Much of the other material was seriously not funny, to most Americans, but must have been funny to Russians I guess. There was some really violent material, like Russian women knocking another woman out with a beer bottle.
And there was this one clip, where someone fed a mule some vodka and got it drunk. The mule then started running after a large horse, trying to mount it, and ended up getting semi-trampled by the horse.

does team player mean lacks initiative?

2007-01-27T09:03:00.000-08:00

Andy Turner is a 28 year old lacrosse player who grew up in a tiny town short ride from Niagara Falls, in Ontario, Canada. The town, Beamsville, is part of a greater township with a total population of just over 20,000, in an area settled by those who remained loyal to British king George III, having left the US after the Revolutionary war. Almost 200 years after the loyalists arrived in Ontario, in 1978, Andy Turner was born. Little is known about his life until his 22nd year when he started playing box lacrosse for the Rochester Nighthawks, not that far from home, in Rochester New York. But box lacrosse -- which is typically played on ice hockey rinks in the summer when there isn't ice, unlike field lacrosse, which is played outdoors -- is a bigger sport in Canada than in the US, just as ice hockey is. During the winter months he started to play for the Victoria Shamrocks, all the way on the west coast, in British Columbia. And in 2006, Turner was traded away to the newly formed lacrosse franchise, the Edmonton Rush, of Edmonton Alberta.
Alberta is freakishly prosperous right now, largely due to its having an abundance of oil, and the Edmonton Rush are in many ways a team reflective of the character of Alberta. Their mascot is a yeti on a motorcycle, they have a team monster truck, and provocatively dressed cheerleaders called the 'crush dancers', who have their own website and are probably at least as popular as the team itself.
According to the profile of Mr. Turner on the websites of the Victoria Shamrocks and the Edmonton Rush, Turner's favorite film is "The Ladies Man." This movie spinoff of an SNL skit is by no stretch of the imagination funny for more than a short while, but seems to be a good answer if someone wanted to ingratiate oneself with others, and has no strong opinions of his own. Who could fault Mr. Turner, amongst his own peer group anyway, for liking this film? But especially interesting is what Mr. Turner claims is his favorite food, which is inconsistant on the two websites. On the Victoria Shamrocks website (http://www.victoriashamrocks.ca/players/turner.htm) , he says his favorite meal is 'Pita Pit', a popular Canadian food franchise that specializes in simple healthy fare. For the health conscious British Colombians, this would be a good choice. On the Edmonton Rush website (http://www.edmontonrush.com/roster/turner.php) , however, Turner says his favorite food is 'stadium dogs' -- therefore seeming to align himself more closely with the health food despising Albertans.
Turner is a fine defensive player no doubt -- but perhaps given this need to appease his peers, it is not surprising that he is not an offensive player. And when he must retire in a few years time, will this serve him well when he must make a living as a non-athlete? Given Alberta's prosperity, he probably won't have much trouble finding work should he stay in the area. Perhaps he will work in a ski lodge, or drive the monster trucks they use in the Oil Sands quarries over there.

the trouble with trains

2007-01-26T17:47:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of terminology to unpack when you talk about trains. Most people think of trains as having a locomotive in front, pulling a bunch of other cars. that is usually the case for heavy rail, pulling things like coal in long trains of cars a mile long.
But to move people, the trains typically used are Multiple Unit trains (MUs). These are cars that have driving controls in many or all of the cars, can have engines in many or all of the cars, and often have different components that pull and power the cars divided up among a few of the cars. This has many advantages. One advantage is that unlike having a locomotive, MUs can have driving controls in cars located in both the front and the back, so that when you hit the end of the line, you can just reverse the train's direction without further ado. Also, movement is more efficient in many ways because many or all the cars can break, and so they break faster, and there are multiple engines in multiple cars that are coordinated to work together to pull the train.
MU's themselves are broken into two categories, EMUs and DMUs. In Europe and Australia Candada and a few other places they use trains that we haven't been able to use here in the US, - Diesel Multiple Units (DMU's), due to regulations that we've got that says the trains have to be heavier than they are to be used on freight lines. DMU's are a little like diesel buses on rails, so there are carbon emissions. On light rail, that is commuter trains, the US has tended to use Electric Multiple Units (EMU's), which use 3rd rails or electric lines. there are no emissions, except at the power plants that create the electricity that powers them. all this extra setup with the electrical rails or wires is expensive and cumbersome, and is only efficient for shorter distances with more frequent trips.
Only in the last couple of years have DMUs started to gain opportunities to be used in the US, because they're finding ways of combining them with EMUs on the same tracks, gaining certain advantages.
DMUs are themselves broken into three categories, by their transmission system -- mechanical, electric and hydraulic. The electric version is a DEMU.

the exploitation continues?

2007-01-25T08:36:00.000-08:00

TV and film actor Obba Babatunde was born and raised in Queens, New York, and is known for playing the father in Half and Half, was in Dawsons Creek, the films The Celestine Prophesy and Philadelphia, among others. He got his big break in 1982, playing a record executive modeled on Motown Records founder, Berry Gordy. However he turned down an offer to appear in the film version, which was released last year to great acclaim and is now nominated for a whole slew of Academy Awards.

The reasons why he turned down the role are explained by Babatunde as being some combination of his being upset at being bilked out of any profit sharing of the film and that key changes were made in the tone of the film , taking out the emphasis on how the singers were exploited financially. So he seems to be saying that he and other cast members were crucial in the creation of the story as it was developed, but they signed away their rights to future profits just like the Supremes did, and then had that whole element of the script written out of it in the film version too. Kind of complex an issue. You still got to wonder, he must be kicking himself for not being in this film. But, he's still a pretty successful actor anyway.

Another Babatunde, albeit it is his first name, is Babatunde Olatunji, the Nigerian percussion master whose seminal work Drums of Passion of 1959 was the record that introduced much of the US to World Music.

Babatunde is a Yoruba / Nigerian name. Other musicians of Nigerian ancestry include Seal, Sade, and Shirley Bassey, singer of the memorable theme to the James Bond film Goldfinger.

"Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery.
And today? Today is a gift.
That's why we call it the present".
---Babatunde Olatunji

Gibrat finds size regular, rate of growth random

2007-01-24T14:06:00.000-08:00

I'm skeptical of many ideas of economics. It always seems like when economists try to predict something about real life, they are wrong because there was some other set of factors they weren't taking account of, and they can only work out why it happened after the fact.

In 1931 Roger Gibrat, a Frenchman, wrote a book which proposed an idea that would later be known as Gibrat's Law. Roughly, the idea is that if you look at the sizes of a set of companies, they will fall into a regular curve pattern, however the rate of growth of these same firms will be random, having no relationship to the size.

That's an oversimplification, but it's probably all you need to know. Gibrat based his theory on an analysis of French manufacturing companies in the early part of the 20th century. But more recent studies have shown, for instance one analyzing data of italian manufacturing companies, that Gibrat's law does NOT hold -- growth WAS related to how big the company was.

The theory is not dead though, apparently it still is considered relevant when analyzing how cities grow. If you plot city growth on this regular distribution curve, you'll find that the the size is random. Or visa versa. OK, maybe you can tell that I'm not an economist, but it sounds like BS to me.

When radio has bad connotations

2007-01-23T12:07:00.000-08:00

Usually one would think of active as a word with good connotations, but also seems over-appropriated by consumer marketing. The more you look into it the less positive this word seems to me. Being active could be good if you're actively engaged in something positive, but you could be actively doing something horrible.

Writing in an active voice is usually considered better than writing in the passive. This text is being written by me. I'm writing this text. The latter is better, so score one for active.

Having an 'active lifestyle' on the other hand could be thought of as a good thing by many people but it has bad overtones for me. Makes me think of an aerobics instructor from the 1980s. The word 'lifestyle' itself, so often associated with the word 'Active', Is also a concept associated with a very insidious and effective system developed by the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s called VALS. Lifestyle types can be ascertained by questionaires, and based on knowledge of how people behave within these lifestyle categories, we are sold everything from toothpaste to politicians. See the BBC documentary series 'The Century of the Self' and your eyes will be opened to the in many ways frightening uses of psychology on PR and marketing.

I filled out the questionaire on the SRI VALS website and found out that I'm an 'Innovator' with an 'Achiever' emphasis. Looks like i'm a highly desirable consumer. Oh, you flatter me!

Innovators (formerly Actualizers)
Innovators are successful, sophisticated, take-charge people with high self-esteem. Because they have such abundant resources, they exhibit all three primary motivations in varying degrees. They are change leaders and are the most receptive to new ideas and technologies. Innovators are very active consumers, and their purchases reflect cultivated tastes for upscale, niche products and services.
Image is important to Innovators, not as evidence of status or power but as an expression of their taste, independence, and personality. Innovators are among the established and emerging leaders in business and government, yet they continue to seek challenges. Their lives are characterized by variety. Their possessions and recreation reflect a cultivated taste for the finer things in life.

An active volcano is a negative idea that marketers can use positively to their advantage. the word would have very bad implications if you were near an active volcano, but positive in that volcanoes may have something to do with the source of life. Actually I may have just made that up, but it makes one think of virility and power and those have positive connotations. Think of how 'Viagra' seems to combine the words for 'Niagra' and 'Volcano' and 'Magma'.

uninspiring Latinate word induces obscure memories

2007-01-22T09:28:00.000-08:00

Charlotte: Salutations.
Wilbur: Salu-what?
Charlotte: Salutations.
Wilbur: What are they? And where are you?
Charlotte: Salutations are greetings. It's my fancy way of saying hello.

This pivotal first exchange between the two main characters of Charlotte's Web is well etched into my memory -- I played Farmer Arable when I was about 12 in summer camp. The girl who played Wilbur the Pig will forever be remembered by me not only for her freckles and red hair but most especially for her pigs snout and porcine ways. Charlotte the word-spinning spider was a short spindly dark haired girl in a black leotard. I wore too big overalls and a straw hat.

The flip side of 'salutations' is 'valedictions,' or goodbyes. 'hi' is a salutation, 'bye' is a valediction. But there are other kinds of valediction we use in correspondence, such as Yours Truly, so and so.

The valedictorian is the student who gives the last speech at a high school graduation, usually the best student. The salutatorian is the student who gives the first speech, ordinarily the 2nd best student. My tiny graduating class elected the 2nd worst student as salutatorian, Yours Truly. I only learned the word 'salutatorian' today, but i did give the high school salutatorian speech. The faction behind making me salutatorian was roughly the same one that almost voted to make "Rawhide" (Belushi Brothers version) our processional music, but it didn't win'. 'In My Life' by the Beatles became the processional music -- Nice song but totally maudlin in this context. And totally wrong for the kind of alienation many of us were feeling upon graduation. At least we did succeed in getting 'All Along the Watchtower' (Jimi Hendrix version) as the music at the end, with its opening lyrics 'There must be some kind of way out of here.'

looking at all the Angles between two Germanic kings and a Nigerian town

2007-01-21T13:35:00.000-08:00

OFFA of ANGEL was the name of a King of the Angles in the Fifth Century (d. 456), living somewhere in the Germanic lands of Northern Europe. He was mute so his blind dad Wermunde (who couldn't see what Offa was doing either) thought Offa was stupid and tried to get him to marry the daughter of this other king named Freawine, cause he thought at least Freawine would show him a thing or two. But then Freawine was killed in battle by the Viking Atisl. Old blind Wermunde took Feawines two sons in as his own, but a little while latter the sons killed the Viking Atisl in an ambush. This brought dishonor onto Old King Wermunde. Some Saxons came over and taunted the King, and at that moment Offa suddenly remembered how to speak. He challenged the Saxon prince and his champion to a duel. And he killed them both, making him a legend (In fact this is the first English story known to exist).

Just around the time that Offa of Angel was alive, the Angles began migrating to England from mainland Europe, across the North Sea (or German Sea, as it was known from Roman histories). The Roman Empire was in its death throes due to barbarian invasions from Germanic peoples, and the last Roman Emperor would die 20 years after Offa, in 476. In this time, the darkest of the dark ages, the Germanic peoples were on the move. Just as the Angles were arriving and made a kingdom from whatever lands they grabbed, pushing aside Celtic peoples and other Germanic peoples, the Vikings were beginning to do a whole lot more invading and pillaging for three hundred more years to come.

Also named Offa was the greatest King of the Angles, who lived two hundred years after the mainland Offa (died in 796). The Angle's new homeland in England was known as Mercia, and he's known to history as OFFA of MERCIA. Offa consolidated many of the Kingdoms of southern England, including those of the Saxons. he erected a huge dyke as a defense against the Welsh, and Offa's Dyke is still a prominent feature on the border to the East of Wales that was the west border of Mercia.

Offa of Mercia was powerful, but the most powerful king of the time was Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor.

When you give a daughter to another king, you give him the potential to inherit the throne. Charlemagne asked if he'd give him his daughter for Charlemagne's son. Offa said sure but only if you give one of your daughters to MY son. Charlemagne was so offended that he barred merchants sailing from England from landing in France, for a time.

Offa copied Charlemagne's currency to show that he was as important a king. He even copied gold dinars used in Iberia, which had been ruled by the Muslims since 711, emulating the Arabic script but with errors and upside down. This led some hopeful people to speculate that Offa had converted to Islam, since the phrase in Arabic was of praise to God.

Three hundred years later at the dawn of the first milennium AD, a town called OFFA was first settled in what is now Southwestern Nigeria, by Yoruba Muslims.

Nigeria itself is half Muslim, but also half Christian. A former colony of Great Britain, populous Nigeria now has the largest Anglican church in the world.

A Nationalist In a time before the word got ugly

2007-01-20T14:12:00.000-08:00

Titu Maiorescu was a Romanian Intellectual and later politician. He was for a literary critic and instrumental in the development of Romanian literature. He formed the Junimea Society together with four others, who were the scions of the boyar class.

One thing about the boyars -- the were the most powerful class and their power was based on being landowners of agricultural land, and toil of the 90% of Romania that lived as peasants. But in the mid nineteenth century, many of these becan to espouse liberal ideas, and the feeling in the air of cultural revolution. Peasant revolts had happened though, and they none of these elites wanted actual ignorant Romanian peasants to revolt.

Titu clashed with the Borgeiosie of his time, he was himself was considered a conservative. Yet he railed against many of the ignorances of the period that were common. He espoused European model as that was where most of the learning had come, but wanted to use this to get to the real Romanian novel and character. He railed against the fanciful versions of Dacian origins and the anti-semitism that was prevalent in much of the political class. He joined the Conserative party in the late 19th century and became the Prime Minister of Romania from 1912 to 1914. He resisted going to war with Germany in WWI, and then resisted the Germans when they came to occupy Bucharest.

He lost power for opposing the War, and he died in 1917 of a heart attack> Had he lived to 1919 and survived the end of the war, he would have been surprised to find out that Romania gained territory from Hungary for finally siding against the Germans --The woodlands and beautiful towns of Transylvania.

With his death, in the grim shadow of a war that left unimaginable destruction and impossible grievances, his positive brand of nationalism would vanish from Europe forever. The land exchanges and penalties inflicted by the victorious powers on the losers would set the stage for a more sinister kind of nationalism, and for the confilcts of the Second World War to come.

A lovely place I've never seen

2007-01-19T09:03:00.000-08:00

I love cross country skiing, even though I've not yet done it. How do I know that? I just do. I hope to try it soon. Here's a place, Burton Creet State Park, adjacent to lake Tahoe, that would be ideal for cross country skiing -- it's got 6 miles of unpaved roads. And it's completely beautiful over there.

I know this, and yet I've never seen Lake Tahoe. It's just a twist of fate that my life should be in some way intwined with this State Park. Perhaps only in pictures, but as I write this, it's undetermined whether i'll go there or not. Quantum physics, the uncertainty principle -- some things just haven't been decided yet.

Where Earthmen Live

2007-01-18T12:33:00.000-08:00

I hit the random button on Wikipedia, resolving to write about what came up, which turned out to be the Gannett Glacier, part of the highest mountain in Wyoming. As the article states, the glacier has been massively melting over the decades because of global warming.

I don't have a lot to say about global warming, but I will say that looking at that picture of the glacier, it made me think about places where mankind was not meant to live, even if we find a way to visit. We can invent contraptions to allow us to stay for a while on Antarctica, or the Moon, but when you get down to it, we need some basic resources to make life sustainable. we're not ever going to live on Mars, unless we invent some way to generate an atmosphere -- no, i don't think so.

Once we burn through this earth, we're not going to be able to go anywhere else. But on the bright side, when this particular glacier melts away completely, it will be easier to scale the peak.

please support metafrog with purchase of imetafrog

2007-01-16T16:23:00.000-08:00

(insert video of holiday card sized metal and plastic device)

See all. Hear All. Watch All.

imetafrog.
(woman playing video game on imetafrog)

the device
(man shaving with imetafrog)

Ask Your Doctor.
(beauty shot of imetafrog)

even hypothetically, physicists don't teach us what to with our lives

2007-01-15T11:20:00.000-08:00

You can't order chaos. It's chaos that creates order.
but what can we do with that knowledge to guide our behavior? for man craves power over his world's land and animals.
Promethius stole fire from the gods, known to us today as technology. Promethius couldn't give man immortality, but he gave them the power to understand the mortality of man and the laws of physics.
Art is to Technology like Memory is to Consciousness.
insert illustration of Promethius here.

passive vs. actively creating something

2007-01-14T19:52:00.000-08:00

The film director Luis Bunuel made reference in his Autobiography "My Last Sigh" his having heard this statement -- that anyone who does not create from tradition is a plagarist. Although he didn't really know what it meant, it rang true for him, for nothing can truly ever be original, how ever much so it may seem to the creator at the time he makes it.

Men Collect

2007-01-11T19:00:00.000-08:00

I'm sure I'm not the first to observe that most men collect things. Could be guns, cars, trophies, or whatever. Most of the people I know would collect books, dvds or cd's, and probably a few other things in addition. We here in the US know we live in a society preoccupied with the 'consumption' of goods, which means we buy stuff, get tired of it and then are persuaded to buy some more stuff. Collecting is different then just buying, but the difference is subtle. Women don't collect, they buy things according to fashion, and then put it in the closet. They wouldn't keep out of fashion things on display. But men like to have their dvds out there where they can see them, look at them with pride.

In the last few years I've become more aware of my collections, and it's changed the way I collect. I used to have lots of cds for instance. I especially liked to collect 20th century atonal music with styley sleeves. I still have those and I'm proud of them, but when I started to think too much about this phenomenon I stopped adding to the collection. But it probably wasn't because I didn't listen to the music anymore, though that might be part of it. The real reason is that collecting them made me feel like I had more creative potential. Each musical discovery represented a library of sounds that I could refer to to create a sound collage, which i was going to make into a video of some kind, something that sounded and looked utterly new! After making a few videos like this, I discovered there wasn't really a good time and place for anyone to appreciate it. And for me at least, being creative depends on an audience.

It wasn't long after that I found something new to collect. Electronic devices that record video, sound, and make light. While I may not have made a lot with it at this point, getting the stuff together makes me feel like I could. And that's what collecting is all about.

Fermicutes vs. Bacteroidetes

2007-01-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

Lest you be mislead by the sound of the name, if you've got a lot of Fermicutes nowadays you'll probably be fat and squishy, not firm and cute.

ALTHOUGH most people prefer not to think about it, human guts are full of bacteria. And a good thing, too. These intestinal bugs help digestion, and also stop their disease-causing counterparts from invading. In return, their human hosts provide them with a warm place to live and a share of their meals. It is a symbiotic relationship that has worked well for millions of years.

Now it is working rather too well. A group of researchers led by Jeffrey Gordon, of the Washington University School of Medicine, in St Louis, has found that some types of microbes are a lot better than others at providing usable food to their hosts. In the past, when food was scarce, those who harboured such microbes would have been blessed. These days, paradoxically, they are cursed, for the extra food seems to contribute to obesity. Worse still, these once-benign microbes have even subtler effects, regulating the functioning of human genes and inducing the bodies of their hosts to lay down more fat than would otherwise be the case.

Dr Gordon's research is outlined in a paper published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and two others published last month in Nature. In the Nature papers, he and his team reported that obese people have a different mix of gut microbes from that found in lean people—a mix that is more efficient at unlocking energy from the food they consume. Although individuals can harbour up to a thousand different types of microbes, more than 90% of these belong to one or other of two groups, called Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes. The researchers sequenced bacterial DNA from faecal samples taken from volunteers and discovered that those who were obese had a higher proportion of Firmicutes than lean people did.

- The Economist, Greedy Guts?

In the developed world, where we have more food than we could ever need or want, the result is there are a lot of fat people. But in some places in the world, and thousands of years ago when food wasn't so plentiful, having these kind of gut bacteria would've been really useful because the fermicutes are actually more efficient at using the food they get, it would seem.

If we have a set of nuclear disasters and epidemics, turning the survivors into roaving bands of starving cannibals and rat-eaters, the people with more fermicutes, the former fatties, will be a lot better off.!

Race is What

2007-01-05T08:22:00.000-08:00

No one is any one thing, even if they appear to be in one category or another. And since so many are so very mixed up, which genes from Africa and Europe and Asia, who is to say who is what. You could have two people with equal percentages of European and African genes, and one can look totally white and the other very dark, and each have features totally different from each other.

It seems to me where you grow up -- the food and environment -- seem to have a major effect on appearance, beyond anything genetic. So really this race idea is pretty out-of-date; our language we use every day simply hasn't caught up with the facts as revealed by science, or even common sense. Besides if you go back far enough everyone's from Africa. To accept that you can't believe in creationism, but then ignorance and racism have always been closely linked.

It will not be easy for humans to give up racial and other prejudices, I suspect. Since we evolved making use of these shorthand techniques for identifying others as friend or foe, enemies of the tribe etc., some of this may be wired into our brains, as it was for a long time very useful -- we had to make quick judgments and couldn't be thinking through everything every time we met a new person outside the tribe.

And then the cultural differences are usually quite significant between peoples, and we tend to forget what is 'race' and what is culture. To use an example, now that many Anglo folks listen to hip-hop and talking like they're from the street, could their other prejudices be likewise broken down? Maybe a little, depending on other social circumstances, but then also maybe not much. Because culture is adopted and changed into one's own, and it's easy to forget where it came from.

debauchery

2007-01-04T12:45:00.000-08:00

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

-Edmond De Goncourt

True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself; hence it remains the favourite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.

-Albert Camus

The Amazigh Berbers

2007-01-03T09:56:00.000-08:00

One of the bad things about modern society is how things have the tendency to be homogenized into just a few languages and cultures, in a similar way that exotic plants and animals vanish when their landscape is replaced with roads or crops. The mechanisms may be different but I suppose it's technology itself that enables this type of thing to happen. You can't fight technological progress -- but maybe technology can also save what we've been losing -- for instance, the interesting culture of the Berbers.

Millions of Berbers (or more correctly the Amazigh culture of the Imazighen people who speak Tamzight) live in North Africa and their culture and languages have been under threat from the Arab governments of Morocco, Algeria and Libya.

They make really amazing music and were in fact the people who ruled Spain and North Africa back in the middle ages, where they had a cultured and tolerant society until some barbarians kicked them out.

Here's a good article on Berber music and history, including an interview with Moh Alileche -- i've got one of his albums, it's really good. And he's a really nice guy.

I learned about his album by searching for music on iTunes. And good old wikipedia and the web provides the history. That's not the same as these folks having the freedom and money to educate their kids in their language and way of living, but at least it's something.

German vs. British Sense of Humor

2006-12-28T09:34:00.000-08:00

What the Germans seem to object to is a sudden switch from slapstick to sarcasm or irony. This is the essence of British humour, the shift of levels, the ambush. Germans prefer their wit delivered in a straight line, like a ball in a bowling alley.

I think that the British prejudice about Germany’s supposed humour famine stems from the fact that there is no German tradition of daily banter. In London you can hear a dozen wisecracks in a day — at work or on the bus or in the coffee shop. They may be lame, but at least they’re quick. In Germany, humour is stockaded, kept apart from everyday life. In the evenings Harald Schmidt, a genuinely funny talk-show host, will crack their sides. But only after dinner has been eaten, the plates rinsed and the yoghurt pots washed, ready for recycling. In the office next day people will repeat Schmidt’s gags and they will laugh again. However, they will fail to spot the inherent absurdities of their own office life.

-Roger Boyes writing about his book My Dear Krauts

Why not to be overly concerned with being healthy

2006-12-25T17:36:00.000-08:00

"One may think that "prevention is better than cure" is a quote from the goddess Hygiene, yet the vintage is recent and the wisdom is more limited than it appears.
...if incisive changes in lifestyle are proposed, would not the prohibition of horse riding, parachuting, mountain climbing, and skiing be "better" than the risks associated with these pastimes?
"Tobacco, alcohol, drugs, coffee, chocolate, sugar, salt, red meat, raw fish, oysters, dairy products, smoked food, and food cooked in aluminium pots have been shown to constitute risks, as do walking in forests, living with mites, bats, dogs, cats, reptiles, or birds, or riding a motorcycle, sunbathing, or touching other people's genitals without gloves. One is told to move one's bowels regularly and inspect stools, monitor blood pressure, breasts, testicles, cholesterol... What is the fate of a person who lives by these rules? ... Do healthy people have a better life? True, a healthier society is more productive in terms of material wealth...
But is there an observable link between health and creativity? Great art has always been associated with suffering. The putative elimination of disability, of pain, and of anguish and the fear of death may well impoverish human experience. The two outstanding healthist societies of history, Sparta and Hitler's Germany, were philistine. There is no evidence that a healthier society generates more thought, more beauty."
Imre Loefler, editor, Nairobi Hospital Proceedings, Kenya
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/328/7431/115-a

Life is everywhere on Earth, but apparently not in space?

2006-12-23T18:44:00.001-08:00

On Earth, it's unfathomable how life is everywhere. If you looked at a bit of dirt under a microscope there are countless tiny bugs and micro-organisms. bacteria is everywhere, the most successful form of life on earth in terms of reproduction. Organisms eat each other, even when we breathe. If we could see a little better even in our own homes there are tiny http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springtails everywhere.

But apparently outside this atmosphere it's a vaccuum where nothing lives. And the universe as a whole is pervaded by radiation where celestial bodies are. The Earth seems to be kind of unusual in the universe for having any life at all.

Life has got to be out there in the universe too. But still, then how many planets have this much diversity of life everywhere?

the origin of species?

2006-12-22T11:27:00.000-08:00

What if you took your weird cousin and put him on an island with a person of the opposite sex, and came back a couple of generations later? And a couple of genrations after that? they'd have their own dialect, and leaving aside any issues of genetic mutations, they'd have a distinct look and culture. Darwin would have it that eventually they would mutuate into a new species. And i accept that's probably true.

But would this speciation thing happen just because of genetics and survival of the fittest? I don't think so -- I think something else is also going on as well. Not being a scientist, I am free to use my powers of induction, recklessly. Here's some things i have read and do observe:

1.
The New Yorker had a story a few years ago about how people in Europe are now really tall on average, in the Netherlands they've got the highest average. that's to do with health and not getting sick when you're little, apparenlty, not genetics. Go back a couple of generations and people were pretty short there, and in most of the world, as health and nutrition have improved in the developed world. So most places everyone's got the potential to be big, it's just if that potential is fulfilled.

2. Ten years ago there was still such a thing as a Chinese-Cuban community in New York City where i briefly lived -- people who were ethnically Chinese but had lived in Cuba for a long time. They had restaurants where they served both Chinese and Cuban food. These people really looked both Chinese and Latin to me -- the climate and the food must have altered their appearance, even in the span of just a couple of decades.
Native Americans from North America and the Indiginous peoples of Central and South America are supposedly from the same racial stock -- even from the same dozen people that crossed the bering straight during the last ice age, according to some recent genetic research(PBS program i saw). But don't those ones from North America look different ...

3. OK this is a little more compelling I think -- I heard this on the BBC radio a dozen years ago. This Swedish guy, a great grandson of August Strindberg the playright, wrote a book in which he questions whether we've really figured out how species can possibly evolve things like wings, sonar and complex organs like that merely from competition and genetic mutations (which are usually unfavorable, not x-men like powers). If only i could remember what his name was or the name of the book. He had a couple of ideas -- he thought maybe there was some kind of information-field that pervade areas and inform living things as to how to change to adapt to a given area, and this field was probably either magnetic in nature, or carried by the trillions of photons passing through our bodies every second.

Is Jerry Lewis Funny?

2006-12-21T07:17:00.000-08:00

I've heard from various people that the French find Jerry Lewis funny. Once upon a time Americans must have as well since he did make several movies, but those bits that I saw of films like the Nutty Professor were just slapstick, very unfunny. Maybe in the 50's Americans laughed but you'd have to be a pretty corny old codger to now -- or French, I guess. Why is he considered funny? The French also have Jacques Tati, which is also visual humor that I don't think is funny. And they were crazy about Charlie Chaplin, though there was a real visual style and heart in that, whereas Tati and Lewis make me depressed somehow. I associate them with watching daytime television in the 1980s, giving me a horrible feeling of ennui, like i want to stick a knife in my head. That might have been a funny shtick for Jerry, actually.

Attacking the things that make France French

2006-12-20T07:27:00.000-08:00

Two factors are at work. One is an assault on individual freedom, in the birthplace of liberty. France, with its strong state, has always imposed rules on its citizens. But, when it came to life's pleasures, the French have been free to enjoy, or wreck, their lives with abandon. Now prostitutes have been chased from the streets; the legal age of marriage has been raised from 15 to 18; G-string bikinis were even banned from Paris-Plage, the summer-long riverside festival.

The second factor is creeping globalisation. Libération's troubles affect many newspapers: the internet, the loss of young readers and advertisers. Globalisation often means Americanisation. The French elite profess hostility to America, but ordinary folk lap up Americana. Two of the top three box-office hits this year are Hollywood blockbusters. France is one of McDonald's biggest and most profitable markets. Even the baguette is under attack from le sandwich, often made from “Harry's American Sandwich” bread, a sliced product wrapped in decidedly unFrench plastic bags. Not exactly food for existential thought—especially in a smoke-free café.

-The Economist, October 19th, 2006

An interesting culture crushed by the Catholic church

2006-12-19T08:26:00.000-08:00

From 1208, a war of terror was waged against the indigenous population and their rulers: Raymond VI of Toulouse, Raymond-Roger Trencavel, Raymond Roger of Foix in the first generation and Raymond VII of Toulouse, Raymond Trencavel II, and Roger Bernard II of Foix in the second generation. During this period an estimated 500,000 Languedoc men women and children were massacred - Catholics as well as Cathars. The Counts of Toulouse and their allies were dispossessed and humiliated, and their lands annexed to France. Educated and tolerant Languedoc rulers were replaced by relative barbarians; Dominic Guzmán (later Saint Dominic) founded the Dominican Order and soon afterwards the Inquisition, manned by his Dominicans, was established explicitly to wipe out the last vestiges of resistance. Persecutions of Languedoc Jews and other minorities were initiated; the culture of the troubadours was lost as their cultured patrons were reduced to wandering refugees known as faidits. Their characteristic concept of "paratge", a whole sophisticated world-view, was almost destroyed, leaving us a pale imitation in our idea of chivalry. Lay learning was discouraged and the reading of the bible became a capital crime. Tithes were enforced. The Languedoc started its long economic decline to become the poorest region in France; and the language of the area, Occitan, began its descent from the foremost literary language in Europe to a regional dialect, now disparaged as a patois.

-Languedoc-France.info

end-timers are ignorant haters

2006-12-18T15:53:00.000-08:00

"John of Patmos deals with cosmic terror and death, whereas the gospel and Christ dealt with human and spiritual love. Christ invented a religion of love (a practice, a way of living and not a belief), whereas the Apocalypse brings a religion of Power -- a belief, a terrible manner of judging. Instead of the gift of Christ, an infinite debt...
"Christ will be made to submit to the worst of prostheses: he will be turned into the hero of the collective soul, he will be made to give the collective soul something he never wanted to give. Or rather, Christianity will give him what he always hated, a collective Ego, a collective soul. The Apocalypse is a monstrous ego grafted onto Christ."
-Gilles Deleuze, Nietsche and St. Paul

chillun

2006-12-17T12:03:00.000-08:00

"An abundance of children is a blessing for the greater, saner, part of mankind: I and a few others find blessings in a lack of them." -Michel de Montaigne, Essays I:14