Christo and Jeanne-Claude Christo’s Collaborator on Environmental Canvas Is Dead at 74. “Jeanne-Claude, who collaborated with her husband, Christo, on dozens of environmental art projects, notably the wrapping of the Pont Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin and the installation of 7,503 vinyl gates with saffron-colored nylon panels in Central Park, died Wednesday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 74.” (New York Times obituary)
21 Nov 09
R.I.P. Jeanne-Claude
Diagnosis
By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.
`– Sharon Olds, from One Secret Thing. © Random House, Inc., 2009.
Uninsured Twice as Likely to Die in ER
“Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance, according to a troubling new study.
The findings by Harvard University researchers surprised doctors and health experts who have believed emergency room care was equitable.” (Truthdig)
20 Nov 09
17 Nov 09
How Do You Say 2010?
- Time Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones
Today’s All Things Considered had a story about the division of opinion over how to refer to the name of next year Which is it, “two thousand ten” or “twenty ten”? One commenter said that “two thousand ten” is proper and polite; I think he went so far as to call it the “adult” thing to say. This gets right to the core debate about whether proper usage is vernacular — as spoken — or normative.
But, more important, the story did not address more vexing questions. First, what nickname will we use for 2010. 2009 was “oh nine”; will we say “one oh” or “oh ten” for short? For example, if you trade in your “oh five honda” for a new car, is it an “oh ten prius” or what?
And how will we refer to the decade to come in aggregate? This, it seems, has remained an unresolved issue with respect to the decade now ending: what came after the Nineties? The “oughts” or “noughts”? So are we heading into the “teens”? Does anyone know how people referred to the corresponding decades a century ago?
(And, no, I’m not going to beat a dead horse by mentioning that, of course, since there was no year zero, the decade does not really end for another year, until December 31, 2010. I thought we had put that one to rest a decade nine years ago at the turn of the century.)
16 Nov 09
Palin says she doesn’t believe in evolution
‘Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) vice presidential running mate, signals in her new book Going Rogue that she doesn't believe in evolution, panning it as theory that human beings “originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea.” ‘ (Raw Story)
Palin sees conspiracy in new dollar coins
“It now seems clear why the staff to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin didn’t want anyone to bring recording devices or cell phones to her speech Friday night.
Even news outlets like Politico — which have prominently featured Dick Cheney’s terror jeremiads — would have been likely to lampoon her.
But the ban on recording devices didn’t stop them. Politico says they bought three tickets to Palin’s Wisconsin speech and then penned a write-up. Their review was somewhat grim, taking aim at Palin’s frequent use of the words bogus and awesome and delivering a strange anecdote about dollar coins.
‘Palin had remarks prepared but frequently wandered off-script to make a point, offering audience members a casual awesome or bogus in discussing otherwise weighty topics’ Jonathan Martin wrote in his review…” (Raw Story)
Related?
- Sarah Palin Warns Of Pro-Choice “Mind-Set” [Scare Tactics] (jezebel.com)
- Liz Cheney suggests Cheney presidential ticket in 2012 (videocafe.crooksandliars.com)
- George Bush said Palin was ill prepared: ‘Is she the Governor of Guam?’ (crooksandliars.com)
- Palins Book: The Overview (blogs.wsj.com)
- Alaskans Await Progress on Palin Pipeline Plan (abcnews.go.com)
Story
“I don’t know what made me do it. It was like getting up late at night and going out to find the moon, hung full, at the end of the block. Framed, between the low row of houses. As if it had been there, waiting, all the time.
When I came back inside, there was my life, enormous about me. It hung, as in a story, and then started to shrink. A girl with pigtails came into the room and reached up and grabbed the thing like the moon and started swaying with it back and forth, tossing it up and down.
I lay down, letting the page turn, for choice. Letting the light come up, as a decision. When I woke, you were there, at the head-end of the crib, still in your blankets. A small form. Your breath like someone escaping, then being caught.
As if this time it will be different. Up in the sky, intact. A small stranger opening her arms. Letting the thin silver slip through into the blank before the hands can clasp. Or, in the undergrowth, the little squirrels, or in the dark burrows, beneath the house.” — Nadia Herman Colburn (RealPoetik)
13 Nov 09
New jihad code threatens al Qaeda
- Worldwide map of al Qaeda terror attacks.
From within Libya’s most secure jail a new challenge to al Qaeda is emerging.
“Leaders of one of the world’s most effective jihadist organizations, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), have written a new “code” for jihad. The LIFG says it now views the armed struggle it waged against Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s regime for two decades as illegal under Islamic law.
The new code, a 417-page religious document entitled “Corrective Studies” is the result of more than two years of intense and secret talks between the leaders of the LIFG and Libyan security officials.
The code's most direct challenge to al Qaeda is this: “Jihad has ethics and morals because it is for God. That means it is forbidden to kill women, children, elderly people, priests, messengers, traders and the like. Betrayal is prohibited and it is vital to keep promises and treat prisoners of war in a good way. Standing by those ethics is what distinguishes Muslims' jihad from the wars of other nations.”
The code has been circulated among some of the most respected religious scholars in the Middle East and has been given widespread backing. It is being debated by politicians in the U.S. and studied by western intelligence agencies.
Video: Into the prison in Tripoli
Gallery: The new jihadi code
In essence the new code for jihad is exactly what the West has been waiting for: a credible challenge from within jihadist ranks to al Qaeda's ideology.” (CNN.com via Steve Silberman)
Cocaine and pepper spray – a lethal mix?
- Capsaicin
“Deaths in US police custody during the early 1990s may have been the result of an interaction between capsaicin, the key ingredient in pepper sprays, and psychostimulant drugs, an experiment in mice suggests. If the two have a fatal interaction in people then police forces might have to rethink their use of pepper spray as a non-lethal weapon, says John Mendelson of the Addiction and Pharmacology Research Laboratory at St Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco, who led the mouse research.
In the early nineties, anecdotal reports emerged in the US of people dying after being sprayed by police. “They seemed to die very quickly,” says Mendelson. At post-mortem, many of these people showed signs of having taken cocaine, so Mendelson wondered if capsaicin and cocaine could interact fatally in the body. (New Scientist)
Get a Good Deal on Oceanfront Property (cont’d.)
LCROSS Finds Water on the Moon: “At a press conference today, researchers revealed preliminary data from NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicating that water exists in a permanently shadowed lunar crater. The discovery opens a new chapter in our understanding of the Moon.” (NASA)
Keystone Neuro-Cops
Judging Murder with an MRI: “People are being jailed after lie-detecting brain scans find them guilty. The science is flaky, but this is just the latest instance of neuro imaging being used to ‘read’ the human mind – and even acclaimed studies are now being challenged as spurious.” (Wired via Steve Silberman).
12 Nov 09
Fort Hood Shooting Suspect Faces 13 Murder Charges
“Military officials say the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 and wounding 29 in last week's shooting rampage at his post in Texas has been charged in a military court with 13 counts of premeditated murder. The decision makes him eligible for the death penalty if convicted.” (NPR)
As more comes out about Hasan’s past, concern has seemed to center on his contact with a radical Islamist cleric. President Obama has ordered an inquiry into the fact that this intelligence was known but not shared or acted upon. I am more concerned with the evidence, as Daniel Zwerdling reported today on NPR, that there were considerable concerns about his fitness to be a psychiatrist and, indeed, about his mental stability overall, while he was in his psychiatric residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
‘”Put it this way,” says one official familiar with the conversations that took place. “Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole.”‘
One source, shamefully conceding that no action had been taken on those concerns, described the decision to send Hasan to Fort Hood as being based on the sense that he could do the least harm there.
Some have characterized this as a particularly egregious example of a recent overall military pattern. If someone is unfit for a job, another job is created for him rather than drumming him out of the corps. It is not implausible to suggest that this relates to the climate of overwhelming difficulty with recruitment and retention in the Iraq- and Afghanistan-era military.
10 Nov 09
The linguistic construction of pedagogical institutions carries with it the engendering of history as such
Hours—nay, days—of fun can be had with the University of Chicago’s Make Your Own Academic Sentence widget. You select four theoretical terms from a pull-down menu, it generates a delightfully meaningless string of words. One of mine appears in the title. That’s right: read it and (try not to) weep.
via The New Yorker.
Are nuclear weapons safe in Pakistan?
- Image by Cecilia… via Flickr
Seymour Hersh, with his usual uncanny inside access,writes in the New Yorker on the current state of the US-Pakistani alliance in light of concerns about the security of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. Hersh feels that the Pakistanis’ apparent cooperation is a case of telling the Americans what they think they want to hear in return for coveted American bankrolling. By and large, he says, the Pakistanis distrust and dislike the Americans, fearing that anything they shared with the US in candor would find its way to Indian intelligence. Hersh hopes the Obama regime is not naive enough to believe the lines that the Pakistanis are feeding them, including their assurances that their nuclear arsenal is secure.
The US is stuck propping up the extremely unpopular Zardari regime, garnering the enmity of important segments of Pakistani society. The antipathy within the military is bolstered by the perception that they have been coopted as proxies in the US war on terror, turning their guns on their own people (local villagers, rather than the Taliban, were certainly the main victims of the bloodbath in Swat) from their traditional self-defined role defending their country against India. And it is upon this cooptation that the US’s “Af-Pak” strategy depends.
Hersh reviews evidence that the military has indeed turned far more fundamentalist in the past decade and that there are significant jihadist elements. A number of scenarios in which an internal mutiny could occur, and place a nuclear device in renegade hands, seem plausible. Secret US commando units will almost surely jump into a Pakistani crisis to seize and secure their nuclear weapons, but the outcome is not likely to be welcomed by Pakistan whether it succeeds or fails.
9 Nov 09
Get a Great Deal on Oceanfront Property Now
New Ocean May Be Forming In The Desert: “Scientists studying a crevasse in the Ethiopian desert say we may be witnessing the birth of a future ocean. In 2005, a 35-mile-long rift broke open as two parts of the African continent separated. Researchers from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world's oceans. They say it is likely the beginning of a new sea. Host Liane Hansen talks with Professor Cynthia Ebinger of the University of Rochester about the event. “(NPR)
(Oh, as Prof. Ebinger points out, you would have to hold on to your landgrab for at least 100,000 years before you get your beachfront.)
8 Nov 09
Out of the Blue
Spectacular pictures of some of the world’s most interesting islands taken from manned spaceflights or satellites. (Wired)
6 Nov 09
Two Deaths
Two deaths this week saddened — and diminished — me. The first life, easier to celebrate, was a public loss, although I, probably like a legion of others, could say that I had know Brother Blue over the decades in which my life centered around Cambridge. The storyteller serves a unique, ancient, and in my opinion irreplaceable function in our society, and Brother Blue was the best.
R.I.P. Brother Blue, 88
![[Image 'http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_uSxPV2yh4iU/RXZMFI0Qz3I/AAAAAAAAAGw/G7-wAqqJItk/s320/Brother+Blue_3941.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_uSxPV2yh4iU/RXZMFI0Qz3I/AAAAAAAAAGw/G7-wAqqJItk/s320/Brother+Blue_3941.jpg)
Brother Blue by Roger Gordy
“The City of Cambridge lost an icon this week: a master storyteller known as Brother Blue.
If you’ve spent time in Harvard Square in the past three decades or so, you’ve probably seen Brother Blue, with a crowd gathered around, telling stories. He stood out of the urban environment in his signature bright blue ensembles.
Brother Blue also told stories in classrooms and jailhouses — anywhere he could find an audience.
He and his wife Ruth produced hours of programming on Cambridge Community Television.
Susan Fleishman is the public access station’s executive director and says the show, “Street Corner Classics with Brother Blue,” was adored.
“Everybody knew who Brother Blue was, and many of the children who are now in their 20s, 30s and 40s remember him from when they were younger,” Fleishman said. ” He was just such an iconic character.”” (WBUR obituary)
Brewtality:
The second death had a more personal meaning. A 48 y/o father of two young children died in a medical bed in my hospital this week, of multi-organ failure consequent to his severe alcoholism. He had first come to my unit soon after I began working there five years ago, seeking help with his alcohol addiction. I treated him through more than fifteen episodes since, watching him struggle and slip inexorably downhill in the grip of a gruesome disease, swearing he wanted to stop but utterly unable. Too late, during this last medical stay, desperately ill, he tried unsuccessfully to say goodbye to his children and express his regret at how his life had gone, and how it had impacted theirs. We could not help him and it is difficult to find anything to celebrate about his life. I had this fantasy of marching every other treatment-resistant alcohol-dependent patient down to his room to see what awaited them.
5 Nov 09
Baguette Dropped From Bird’s Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really)
I’ve previously written about the theory that the Higgs Boson exerts a sabotaging influence from the future on efforts to discover it. Now it turns out that the ‘terminator’ from the future may be avian. (Popular Science via Steve Silberman)
Heil Heidegger!
“How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.” (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Going to the Dogs
“Moral in Tooth and Claw: Animals are in.’ This might well be called the decade of the animal. Research on animal behavior has never been more vibrant and more revealing of the amazing cognitive, emotional, and moral capacities of a broad range of animals. That is particularly true of research into social behavior—how groups of animals form, how and why individuals live harmoniously together, and the underlying emotional bases for social living. It’s becoming clear that animals have both emotional and moral intelligences.” (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
And:
The Dogs Have Eyes — And the Nose Knows: “…[W]hat do we really know about the creatures we’ve promoted to full-fledged family members? To judge from the proliferation of books, classes and celebrity trainers offering their own elaborate theories of the beast, the answer is “Not as much as we’d like.” It’s a central irony of our pet-obsessed era: As retail-driven humanization of pets reaches increasingly improbable levels — 56 percent of dog owners report buying Christmas presents for their animals — we’re more eager than ever to understand their essential dogginess.” (Washington Post)
Related?
“[Malcolm] Gladwell’s latest book, What the Dog Saw, bundles together his favourite articles from the New Yorker since he joined as a staff writer in 1996. It makes for a handy crash course in the world according to Gladwell: this is the bedrock on which his rise to popularity is built. A warning, though: it’s hard to read the book without the sneaking suspicion that you’re unwittingly taking part in a social experiment he’s masterminded to provide grist for his next book. Times are hard, good ideas are scarce: it may just be true. But more about that later…” (Guardian.UK review)
3 Nov 09
R.I.P. Claude Lévi-Strauss
![[Image 'http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/11/03/obituaries/03cnd_strauss/popup.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/11/03/obituaries/03cnd_strauss/popup.jpg "RIP, Claude Levi-Strauss")
The renowned anthropologist is dead at 100: “His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, Tristes Tropiques, a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.
The accepted view at that time held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes that practiced ruthless warfare.
His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, La Pensee Sauvage (1962).
“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ” (New York Times obituary)
As an anthropology student before I went into psychiatry, I was an ardent follower of Levi-Strauss and La Pensee Sauvage one of my bibles. I don’t think, however, that Levi-Strauss’ contribution was to elucidate the ‘pre-scientific’ logic of the ways tribal people make sense of the world. Our ’scientific’ ‘objective’ worldview is just another exemplar of the ’savage’ ordering methodology, it rather seems. For me, this was far more important than the intricacies of structural analysis of any particular myth system, and it informs my “cross-cultural” approach to my work with psychotic patients to this day, if that makes any sense.
‘Google’ town that only exists online
“Argleton, a 'phantom town' in Lancashire [UK] that appears on Google Maps and online directories but doesn't actually exist, has puzzled internet experts.
…Google and the company that supplies its mapping data are unable to explain the presence of the phantom town and are investigating.”
(Telegraph.UK)
2 Nov 09
Is time out of joint?
![[Image 'http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/mg20427314.400/mg20427314.400-2_300.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/mg20427314.400/mg20427314.400-2_300.jpg "Starlight behaving badly (NASA x-ray image)")
“Rethinking relativity: Everything from the concept of the black hole to GPS timing owes a debt to the theory of general relativity, which describes how gravity arises from the geometry of space and time. The sun's gravitational field, for instance, bends starlight passing nearby because its mass is warping the surrounding space-time. This theory has held up to precision tests in the solar system and beyond, and has explained everything from the odd orbit of Mercury to the way pairs of neutron stars perform their pas de deux.
Yet it is still not clear how well general relativity holds up over cosmic scales, at distances much larger than the span of single galaxies. Now the first, tentative hint of a deviation from general relativity has been found. While the evidence is far from watertight, if confirmed by bigger surveys, it may indicate either that Einstein's theory is incomplete, or else that dark energy, the stuff thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, is much weirder than we thought”. (New Scientist)
1 Nov 09
Beatles mp3s finally available online
BlueBeat.com has them for an unbelievable $.25 a track, as well as free unlimited streaming. Hope it’s legal.
Related:
- Download the Beatles! But lawyers loom… (timesonline.typepad.com)
- EMI quashes rumours that Beatles are coming to iTunes (telegraph.co.uk)
Halloween Music Stream From NPR Music
“NPR Music staffers and station partners observe the holiday by assembling a chilling collection of songs about ghosts, hauntings and otherwise disembodied and discombobulated spirits. More unsettling than pumpkins and more ethereal than zombies, these ghosts are sure to alternately soothe and rattle your nerves as the big day approaches:
“Bach: Toccata in D minor,” Helmut Walcha (DeutscheGrammophon 419 047)
“Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” Bauhaus, 1979-83 Vol. One [The Current]
“The Devil Had a Hold of Me,” Gillian Welch, Hell Among the Yearlings (Acony) [Folk Alley]
“Marie Laveau,” Dr. John, N’walinz — Dis Dat or D’udda (Blue Note) [Jazz 24]
“The Wizard,” Bat for Lashes, Essence [The Current]
“Ralph Vaughan Williams: Job (“Satan’s Dance”),” English Northern Sinfonia (Naxos 8578085)
“Scared,” John Lennon, Walls and Bridges [WFUV]
“John Williams: Devil’s Dance From The Witches of Eastwick,” Gil Shaham, Devil’s Dance: Gil Shaham [WGUC]
“The Vampire,” Buffy Sainte-Marie, The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie [Folk Alley]
“Little Ghost,” The White Stripes, Get Behind Me Satan [WXPN]
“The Skeleton in the Closet,” Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra, Vol. 2. (Fantasy/Prestige) [Jazz 24]
“Haunted House (Blue Ghost Blues),” Lonnie Johnson with Elmer Snowden, Blues and Ballads (Fantasy/Prestige) [Jazz 24]
“Wasteland,” The Black Heart Procession, Six, [WXPN]
“Crumb: Black Angels (excerpt),” Kronos Quartet
“Rama Lama,” Sons & Daughters, The Repulsion Box [The Current]
“Black Dahlia,” Bob Belden, Black Dahlia, [WDUQ]
“In This World,” Moby, 18 [WFUV]
“I Put a Spell on You,” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, I Put A Spell On You: The Best of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
“Camille Saint-Saens: Danse Macabre,” Philharmonia Orchestra, Saint-Saens: Carnival of the Animals [WGUC]
“(Ghost) Riders in the Sky,” Johnny Cash, The Essential Johnny Cash
“The Long Black Veil,” Lefty Frizell, The Best of Lefty Frizzell
“See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” Lightnin’ Hopkins, Lightnin’ Hopkins
“The Unquiet Grave,” Jean Ritchie, Jean Ritchie: Ballads From Her Appalachian Family Tradition
“Liszt: At the Grave of Richard Wagner,” Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79318)
“Weber: Der Freischutz (Wolf’s Glen Scene, excerpt),” Eugen Jochum, Conductor (DeutscheGrammophon 4593)
“Hoo Doo Lovin’” Steve Ferguson, Mama Usepa [Jazz 24]
“Dance With La Diablesse,” Etienne Charles, Folklore (Etienne Charles) [WDUQ]
“Walking With a Ghost,” The White Stripes, Walking With a Ghost EP [WFUV]
“The Witch,” The Sonics, Nuggets Vol. 4 [The Current]
“Stravinsky: Histoire du Soldat (“Devil’s Dance”),” Orchestra of St. Luke’s (Naxos 8578085)
“The House Is Haunted by the Echo of Your Last Goodbye,” Holly Cole, Holly Cole [Jazz 24]
“Haunt You Down,” Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain [WXPN]
“Gloomy Sunday,”Branford Marsalis Quartet, Eternal, (Marsalis Music) [WDUQ]
“Hellhound on My Trail,” Robert Johnson, Complete Recordings
“Sixteen,” The Heavy, The Heavy [The Current]
“Ghost Town (12″ Mix),” The Specials, Ghost Town EP [WXPN]
“Philip Glass: Dracula (Horrible Tragedy),” Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79542)
“Berlioz: Chorus of Damned,” Nat’l Orch of Lille, Slovak Philharmonic Choir (Naxos 8578085)
“Manuel DeFalla: Dance of Terror,” Rachel Barton Pine, Instrument of the Devil: Rachel Barton, Violin [WGUC]
“Angel in the House,” The Story, Angel in the House
“Ghost,” Indigo Girls, 1200 Curfews [WFUV]
“You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory,” Johnny Thunders, So Alone [WXPN]
“Raven in the Storm,” John Gorka, Land of the Bottom Line [Folk Alley]
“Be My Frankenstein,” Otis Taylor, Truth Is Not Fiction
“Evil Is Alive and Well,” Jakob Dylan, Seeing Things [Folk Alley]
“Death Letter,” Son House, Father of the Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions
“St. James Infirmary,” Louis Armstrong, The Essential Louis Armstrong [WDUQ]
“(I Don’t Stand a) Ghost of a Chance,” Billy Eckstine, Imagination
“Philip Glass: Dracula (Dracula Enters),” Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79542)
“Kothbiro,” Kenny Werner, Lawn Chair Society [WDUQ]
“Bad Moon Rising,” Rasputina, The Lost and Found, 2nd Edition [WFUV]
“Purcell: When I’m Laid in Earth,” Jessye Norman, The Essential Jessye Norman
“Philip Glass: Dracula (Lucy’s Bitten),” Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79542)
“Giacomo Puccini: Witches Sabbath,” Philharmonic of La Scala/Riccardo Muti, Puccini Catalani, Ponchielli Per Orchestra [WGUC]
“Carolina Drama,” The Raconteurs, Consolers of the Lonely
“The Devil Got My Woman,” Skip James, Hard Time Killing Floor Blues
“The Ghost of Smokey Joe,” Cab Calloway, New York, 1938-1939, Volume 2 [Jazz 24]“
(NPR)
Charter for Compassion countdown
“In February 2008, Karen Armstrong won the TED Prize and called for the creation of a Charter for Compassion to bring together people of different religions and moral codes in a powerful common cause. The Charter launches November 12, accompanied by thousands of self-organized events, services and sermons.
To help prepare the way, today on TED.com we offer six talks from six perspectives. Be ready for a surprise. Compassion is not the soft, fuzzy notion you might expect. Indeed, it might just be the best idea humanity’s ever had.” (TED: Ideas worth spreading)
Related:
31 Oct 09
There’s a word for that?
“Mamihlapinatapai is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word”, and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It describes “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.”” (Best of Wikipedia)
Obama’s Delusion
“Long before he became president, there were signs in Barack Obama of a tendency to promise things easily and compromise often.
…For Obama to do the courageous thing and withdraw would mean having deployed against him the unlimited wrath of the mainstream media, the oil interest, the Israel lobby, the weapons and security industries, all those who have reasons both avowed and unavowed for the perpetuation of American force projection in the Middle East. If he fails to satisfy the request from General McChrystal – the specialist in ‘black ops’ who now controls American forces in Afghanistan – the war brokers will fall on Obama with as finely co-ordinated a barrage as if they had met and concerted their response. Beside that prospect, the calls of betrayal from the antiwar base that gave Obama his first victories in 2008 must seem a small price to pay. The best imaginable result just now, given the tightness of the trap, may be ostensible co-operation with the generals, accompanied by a set of questions that lays the groundwork for refusal of the next escalation. But in wars there is always a deep beneath the lowest deep, and the ambushes and accidents tend towards savagery much more than conciliation.” — David Bromwich, who teaches literature and political thought at Yale and writes on America’s wars for the Huffington Post
Monsters
“Grab your flashlight and duck under the covers as NPR’s Madeleine Brand talks to David Gilmore, author of a book on monsters. Every culture throughout history has invented its own monsters — it seems humanity just can’t live without them.” (NPR)
Related:
- The Ultimate Guide to Universal’s Movie Monsters (cinematical.com)
- Monsters and Wild Things (oup.com)
- The 25 Best Worst Horror Movies of All Time (pastemagazine.com)
Halloween Warning: That’s Not A Polar Bear Costume
“It's polar bear season in the town of Churchill, Manitoba. Officials usually warn kids to stay inside after dark in case a migrating bear comes too close to town. But on Halloween night, the town bands together in a polar bear patrol to keep the streets safe for trick-or-treaters.” (NPR)
The Defining Moment
“…[E]veryone in the political class — by which I mean politicians, people in the news media, and so on, basically whoever is in a position to influence the final stage of this legislative marathon — now has to make a choice. The seemingly impossible dream of fundamental health reform is just a few steps away from becoming reality, and each player has to decide whether he or she is going to help it across the finish line or stand in its way.” — Paul Krugman (New York Times op-ed via laurie)
Physicist makes high-res Milky Way photo
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Axel Mellinger of Central Michigan University said he spent 22 months and traveled more than 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan to produce the panoramic view.
“This panorama image shows stars 1,000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae,” Mellinger said.
…An interactive version of the panorama image can viewed at http://home.arcor.de/axel.mellinger/.’ (UPI)
Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult within 25 years
Roth has long been pessimistic about the survival of the novel in a gaudy, short-attention-span culture, but his latest prophesy is one of his bleakest yet, predicting that the form will dwindle to a “cultic” minority enthusiasm within 25 years.
The author believes that the concentration and focus required to read a novel is becoming less and less prevalent, as potential readers turn instead to computers or to television. “I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range,” Roth told Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast“. (guardian.co.uk)
You are all computer literati and most of you are readers. Are you noticing impairments to your attention span? Do you think Roth is right? Will you be in the (illustrious) minority, when it comes to that? [thanks, Barb S.]
Related:
- Coming Soon(er): Beast Books (themoderatevoice.com)
- The Daily Beast to Publish Rapid-Fire eBooks (mediabistro.com)
Castle Frankenstein
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The real one, near Darmstadt, Germany, said to be the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, including photos. And here you can listen (Real Player) to the famous 1952 ‘Frankenstein prank’ in which something was waiting for an Armed Forces reporter who visited the crypt under the castle on Halloween night.
Happy Samhain (Hallowe’en)
A reprise of my Hallowe’en post of past years:
It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time. It is fortunate that Hallowe’en falls on a Monday this year, as there is evidence that the pagan festival was celebrated for three days.
With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve. All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.
The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.
Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North AMerica, given how plentiful they were here.
The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.
According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.
Folk traditions that were in the past associated wtih All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition and liminality.
The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards
The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence, and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (Familiar with the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain?) Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well.
What was Hallowe’en like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? For my purposes, suffice it to say that it was before the era of the pay-per-view ’spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from several years ago [via walker] puts it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like. Related, a 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Hallowe’en?”, argues as I do that reverence for Hallowe’en is good for the soul.
“Maybe at one time Hallowe’en helped exorcise fears of death and ghosts and goblins by making fun of them. Maybe, too, in a time of rigidly prescribed social behavior, Hallowe’en was the occasion for socially condoned mischief — a time for misrule and letting loose. Although such elements still remain, the emphasis has shifted and the importance of the day and its rituals has actually grown.
…(D)on’t just abandon a tradition that you yourself loved as a child, that your own children look forward to months in advance, and that helps preserve our sense of fellowship and community with our neighbors in the midst of all this madness.”
That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Hallowe’en certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Hallowe’en errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.
The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).
In any case: trick or treat!
Related:
- Happy Samhain (Hallowe’en) (liveactivecultures.net)
- The History Of Halloween Plus 5 Things You Didn’t Know About The Holiday! (huffingtonpost.com)
- The history and origin of Halloween (witnessthis.wordpress.com)
- Vatican condemns Hallowe’en as antiChristian (telegraph.co.uk)
- el dia do los muertos – a history lesson (thesecretlifeofviv.blogspot.com)
- Halloween to be frightening for retailers (dailyfinance.com)
- Trick or Treat! (halloweenforkids.blogspot.com)
- Toward a trick-or-treat philosophy (clubtroppo.com.au)
30 Oct 09
Neanderthals ‘had sex’ with modern man
- Neanderthal skeleton
‘Modern humans and Neanderthals had sex across the species barrier, according to a leading geneticist who is overseeing a project to compare their genomes.
Professor Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, will shortly publish his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome, using DNA retrieved from fossils. He aims to compare it with the genomes of modern humans and chimpanzees to work out the ancestry of all three species.
Modern humans arrived in Europe from Africa about 40,000 years ago to find Neanderthals already living there. The two species then co-existed for 10,000-12,000 years before Neanderthals died out — a fact that has caused endless academic speculation about whether they interbred.
Paabo recently told a conference at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory near New York that he was now sure the two species had had sex — but a question remained about how “productive” it had been.’ (Times.UK).
Research Reveals That Apocalyptic Stories Changed Dramatically 20 Years Ago
- Slim Pickens riding the bomb
“Most major religions, going back thousands of years, tell stories about the End of the World. And post-apocalyptic fiction is perennially popular. So why, in the last twenty years, has the apocalypse ceased to matter?
I recently finished a thesis project on post-apocalyptic genre fiction, and in my research I made a list of 423 books, poems, and short stories about the apocalypse, published between 1826-2007, and charted them by the way their earth met its demise (humans, nature, god, etc.) to see the trends over time.
It’s not the idea of Ending itself that has faded – that will be around until we are actually mopped off the face of the Earth. It’s the actual moment of disaster, the blood and guts and fire, that has been losing ground in stories of the End. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a 200-year-old trend, and for 170 of those years, the ways writers imagined the end were pretty transparently a reflection of whatever was going on around them – nuclear war, environmental concerns, etc. In the mid-1990s, though, everything just turned into a big muddle. Suddenly, we’d get a post-apocalyptic world whose demise was never explained. It was just a big question mark.” — Chanda Phelan (io9).
Pain Of Torture Can Make Innocent Seem Guilty
‘The rationale behind torture is that pain will make the guilty confess, but a new study by researchers at Harvard University finds that the pain of torture can make even the innocent seem guilty.’
Even without confessing anything, a subject suffering from torture is rated by observers as more guilty than otherwise.(Science Daily).
29 Oct 09
Bending the Rules of Clinical Trials for the Patient’s Sake
- Newspaper ad solicits research volunteers
In the current issue of the bioethics journal IRB: Ethics & Human Research, investigators from four different institutions surveyed over 700 clinicians involved in clinical trials and found that 90 percent believed that ignoring certain entry criteria was acceptable if a patient could, in their estimation, benefit from the trial. In addition, over 60 percent of those surveyed also believed that researchers should deviate from study rules if doing so might improve a patient’s care.
While bioethicists and researchers have long suspected that doctors and other clinicians might be committing an occasional protocol infraction, few if any studies have looked at the extent to which such violations occur and how they might compromise research results.” (NYTimes)
I am not a researcher but purely a clinician. I’ve never been in a position to discover whether I would compromise a research protocol to benefit a patient, but I suspect the temptation would be strong (and would limit my ability to deliver good research findings).
Martin Scorsese’s 11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time
Tina Brown asked her friend Martin Scorsese to give her a list and he made it a labor of love…with video clips. I can imagine him chuckling at the thought of how much sleep Tina will lose if she actually watches these. Although there are several pretty predictable entries (The Exorcist, The Shining, Psycho) most are obscure and often forgotten. Modern lists of ‘horror‘ films tend toward blood and gore; Scorsese is going for the truly eerie, as he says often embodied in what is not shown. As it turns out, I have seen all of these and am feeling proud and abit superior to be the same sort of horror aficionado he is. Most of the commenters to his Daily Beast post really put their feet in their mouths, suggesting additions to the list which are trite and embarrassing, although I’m glad someone thought of Funny Games. (The Daily Beast)
Related:
- Tina Brown’s Must-Reads: The Dead And The Undead (npr.org)
- Paranormal Activity (popsyndicate.com)
28 Oct 09
Ever Dream This Man?
“Every night throughout the world hundreds of people dream about this face.
In January 2006 in New York, the patient of a well-known psychiatrist draws the face of a man that has been repeatedly appearing in her dreams. In more than one occasion that man has given her advice on her private life. The woman swears she has never met the man in her life.
That portrait lies forgotten on the psychiatrist’s desk for a few days until one day another patient recognizes that face and says that the man has often visited him in his dreams. He also claims he has never seen that man in his waking life.
The psychiatrist decides to send the portrait to some of his colleagues that have patients with recurrent dreams. Within a few months, four patients recognize the man as a frequent presence in their own dreams. All the patients refer to him as THIS MAN.
From January 2006 until today, at least 2000 people have claimed they have seen this man in their dreams, in many cities all over the world: Los Angeles, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Tehran, Beijing, Rome, Barcelona, Stockholm, Paris, New Dehli, Moskow etc.
At the moment there is no ascertained relation or common trait among the people that have dreamed of seeing this man. Moreover, no living man has ever been recognized as resembling the man of the portrait by the people who have seen this man in their dreams.” [Read more (www.thisman.org)]
“I’m a doctor. So sue me. No, really”
Defensive medicine is just one of the supposed systemic ills that doctors, doctors' lobbies and doctors' insurers invoke when they shill for what they call malpractice reform. Proponents of reform say that defensive medicine, frivolous lawsuits and high premiums are behind the surge in healthcare expenses. They insist that malpractice costs are forcing doctors to close their doors and depriving patients of care. Recently, three past presidents of the American Medical Association coauthored an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal that bundled all of these arguments into an attack on the public option. Their piece attempted to shift the blame for America's healthcare crisis away from private insurers and onto a supposed scourge of ambulance chasers. “The nation needs comprehensive medical malpractice reform,” they wrote. “It is the surest and quickest way to slow down the rising cost of healthcare.”Their refrain is familiar to anybody following the healthcare reform debate. The only problem is that it's not true. There's nothing “sure or quick” about changing medical liability laws that will improve healthcare or its costs. Defensive medicine adds very little to healthcare's price tag, and rising malpractice premiums have had very little impact on access to care.Let's look at the numbers.” — Rahul Parikh MD (Salon)
As an MD, I heartily agree with Parikh.The arguments for capping malpractice awards have seemed duplicitous, self-serving and, ummm, very Republican. On the other hand, an effective mechanism for discouraging frivolous suits would benefit everyone.
27 Oct 09
New York Times Editorial – The Cover-Up Continues
“The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up.
We have had recent reminders of this dismaying retreat from Mr. Obama’s passionate campaign promises to make a break with Mr. Bush’s abuses of power, a shift that denies justice to the victims of wayward government policies and shields officials from accountability.”
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Molecule of Motivation (and Salience)
- dopamine molecule
“Dopamine has lately become quite fashionable, today’s “it” neurotransmitter, just as serotonin was “it” in the Prozac-laced ’90s.”
New York Times science writer Nathalie Angier, attending the neuroscience meetings, writes a very lucid piece on the current understanding of the crucial role of dopamine.
26 Oct 09
No Einstein in Your Crib?
“Parent alert: the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those “Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses. They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.” (New York Times)
25 Oct 09
![[Image 'http://www.newscientist.com/data/galleries/wildlife-photographer-of-the-year-2009/00309b5612e.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://www.newscientist.com/data/galleries/wildlife-photographer-of-the-year-2009/00309b5612e.jpg "Iberian Wolf: Jose Luis Rodriguez")
Close Encounters
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(c) Igor Iwanowicz
Insect Images By Igor Iwanowicz, each more amazing than the previous (60 pics) (Acid Cow)
Musicians Protest the use of music during Gitmo Torture
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Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine, during 2008 RNC
“A large contingent of American bands have joined the Close Gitmo Now campaign in direct protest of the use of their music during torture practices at Guantanamo Bay. The new campaign is led by two retired generals: Lieutenant General Robert Gard and Brigadier General John Johns. Robert Gard has spoken out in defense of the musicians, stating: “The musicians' music 'was used without their knowledge as part of the Bush administration's misguided policies'.”
Popular artists such as REM, Pearl Jam, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Morello, Billy Bragg, Michelle Branch, Jackson Browne, and The Roots have signed an open letter to Congress requesting the declassification of government records concerning how music was utilized during “futility” interrogation tactics – making the prisoner feel hopeless while exploiting his psychological, moral, and sociological weaknesses.” (Foreign Policy Passport)
![[FmH-branded items]](http://theworld.com/~emg/uploaded_images/fmhcap.jpg "FmH-branded items")
