Weekly Picture 101
Nola and Terra, City Park, New Orleans, 11.27.2007
Vegetable Mandala
Tele-cam snap. Portland, Oregon. November 2007.
Goebbels’s Script
Goebbel’s script is one of the most difficult I have ever deciphered. Ordinarily German handwriting does not bother me in the least. When I first looked at the handwritten diaries of Joseph Goebbels cursorily I thought, “What regular, clear writing!” On closer inspection, however, the Goebbels calligraphy proved anything but easy to read.
From Louis P. Lochner’s introduction to his translated edition of The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943 (New York: Doubleday, 1948).
Police Sketches Caricatures
British researchers are recommending that cops drop the practice of circulating police sketches of suspects in favor of crazy, amusement-pier-style caricatures that “over-emphasise prominent features.”
A study at the University of Central Lancashire found that over-emphasising prominent features on people’s faces made them twice as easy to identify than before.
Alien Tourism Stirs Controversy
Instead of highlighting New Mexico’s picturesque desert landscapes, art galleries or centuries-old culture, a new tourism campaign features drooling, grotesque office workers from outer space chatting about their personal lives.
The Moment of Truth
Fox’s version works like this: Before the show is taped, a contestant is given a polygraph test and asked 75 questions. Samples include: “Do you really care about the starving children in Africa?” “Are you sexually attracted to one of your wife’s friends?” “Do fat people repulse you?” and “Do you think you’ll still be with your husband five years from now?” Unlike the Colombian version, the show avoids asking about felony-level activities and sticks to revealing family secrets and unearthing private opinions.
God Likes Big Flags
The record for the world’s largest flag now belongs to an Israeli banner produced by a Filipino evangelical Christian.
“God spoke to me in thunder and lightning,” Galindez-Gupana said. “The Lord said, ‘Make the flag of Israel, the standard of my people.’”
“This is a tall order,” she said, breaking down in tears.
Humanity “Shortening the Life of the Universe”
This startling claim, made by a pair of American cosmologists, has to do with observing dark matter. This is a “must read” article for those interested in the weirdnesses of quantum physics.
Three in One
Alas, all ass, a lass.
Natural Disasters Quadruple in Two Decades
More than four times the number of natural disasters are occurring now than did two decades ago, British charity Oxfam said in a study Sunday that largely blamed global warming. “Oxfam… says that rising green house gas emissions are the major cause of weather-related disasters and must be tackled,” the organisation said, adding that the world’s poorest people were being hit the hardest. The world suffered about 120 natural disasters per year in the early 1980s, which compared with the current figure of about 500 per year, according to the report. “This year we have seen floods in South Asia, across the breadth of Africa and Mexico that have affected more than 250 million people,” noted Oxfam director Barbara Stocking. “This is no freak year. It follows a pattern of more frequent, more erratic, more unpredictable and more extreme weather events that are affecting more people.”
Nellie McKay on Fresh Air
It is an obligation to listen to the interview. It is the most delightful and exciting musical find I have made in the past two years.
melting into
“White Noise”
Just so you have a bit of context, Phil Nugent’s father was a Klansman, and proud of it. Mr. Nugent himself, considerably less so. That makes the conclusion of his post, on the recent back-and-forth in the New York Times on whether Reagan’s speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, signaled to certain Southern whites that he was, politically, at least, one of them, all the more compelling:
Just for the record though, there are [. . .] those of us who just made it under the wire, generation-wise, and who if we had been born ten years earlier would have been confronted with the “whites only” and “blacks only” drinking fountains, and been forced to make a choice: whether to go with the flow, and, consoling ourselves with what we knew to be in out hearts, sully ourselves by drinking from the “whites” fountain and nodding our tacit approval of the system, or suck it up, drink from the “blacks” fountain, and likely get ourselves stomped, maybe from somebody black who didn’t appreciate our making a gesture that might end up making his life harder? It’s something I was spared by the hard work of thousands of people whose names I will never know, some of who gave up their lives in the process, and whose work David Brooks regards as less important, in the end, than making sure that nobody ever thinks the worst of some of the politicians who defined themselves as the opponents of those people. Because of them and the accident of timing that was my December 6 birthdate, I’ll never know for sure just how brave I was as a kid. And for that, as we wind up a week devoted to the tradition of giving thanks, I’d like to say to several people who’ll never read this: Thank you.
And for good measure: Mr. Nugent also has a nice post up on Todd Haynes and his new Dylan film . . . and Charles Nelson Reilly
Quintessential
Memorycemetery is the place to rest your memories and share dreams. Once posted, they can not be edited or deleted, and will stay here in open access forever. It means they preserved as they are, for you and future generations to come.
As we are trying to understand what a “human being” is, we put quintessential of memories and dreams contained here and started to transmit it as a collective message of Humankind. Radiowaves are indestructable. As light from the stars dead for billions years shines in the night sky, your consciousness will travel through time and space forever. Thus you can become immortal.
enunciate
The shy, steely Ronald Firbank
Only this night I got to wondering, “Do my fellow ‘Flockers — and Friends — share my admiration for Ronald Firbank? Have they read — do they read — Ronald Firbank?” Answer came there none, and so here is Alan Hollinghurst on The shy, steely Ronald Firbank.
One of the first fellow novelists to write intelligently and gratefully about Firbank after his death was Evelyn Waugh. For Waugh, Firbank was a liberator, the person who had seen how to take the novel forward through a radical reconsideration of technique. This was very different from the Jamesian alternative, the ever-deepening interiorization of the novel through the elaboration of individual consciousness. Firbank achieved his highly complex originality not by expansion but by a drastic compression: instead of putting more and more in, he left almost everything out.
Atrocity Files
It is not often we discover an essay in a major magazine providing an accurate report of the work of an archivist. Kate Doyle, “The Atrocity Files: Deciphering the Archives of Guatemala’s Dirty War,” Harper’s 315 (December 2007): 52-62 is one of those rare occasions.
More from Richard Cox’s Reading Archives. (Thanks to Maarja Krusten.)
What I am thankful for
Poem–from news story just read
The bomb, which was hidden in a box of small birds, exploded Friday morning as Iraqis were strolling past animal stalls and bird cages at Baghdad’s al-Ghazl market. AP
Tied to the foot flying, this message: No small wing
so soft it can’t stoop, gain speed, and bring metal
talons to the eye before it sees. No small heart here
too delicate to be used.
Out in the sun the child asked for,
delight almost finds old days waiting like
dreamed parapets of gold. Then the flurry, the flush
contagious, pushed through wire.
Goldilocks Universe
Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue. The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.
Kindle
Have any of you seen Kindle? I think I want it. Sony Reader has to connect to a computer (and doesn’t support Mac). Kindle doesn’t need a computer connection.
Connections
Yesterday at woolgathering Elizabeth Perry offered us her drawing of a tangle of cords, together with a meditation on connections and gratitude.
Funny. I think that’s what I had when I snapped this cam-phone shot of my own connecting cords and set it as the ‘front wallpaper’ image on my phone.
1964 Pontiac Banshee Prototype XP-833 Coupe
If Only He Weren’t a Creationist
“We penalize law-breakers. We don’t penalize their children for something they can’t help.
“If a child is gasping for air, asthmatic, and he’s on the hospital steps, what do the other candidates suggest we do, let him sit there and gasp until he doesn’t have any air left and he dies? If a child comes to our school — and our law, by the way, in most of our states, mine certainly says you’ve got to educate a child if he’s of child age — what do you, break your own law and say, `No, you can’t come in the schoolhouse door’?“No, you don’t do that. What you do is you elect a president who will fix the problem where it needs to be fixed: At the border. But if your government at the federal government is so incompetent that it fails to secure the border, you don’t then grind your heel into the face of a 6-year-old child over it. That’s not what this country does. We’re a better country than that.”
On the Road to Dertu, Kenya
… in a Landcruiser full of rather boisterous Kenyans…
more on 5cense.
