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.

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.

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.)

Spectacular pictures of some of the world’s most interesting islands taken from manned spaceflights or satellites. (Wired)

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

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)

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)

“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)

“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)

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)

“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)

Related:

• Let’s revive the Golden Rule: Karen Armstrong on TED.com (ted.com)
• Live on Sunday: Karen Armstrong and the Dalai Lama talk about compassion (ted.com)
• Twitter Snapshot: Karen Armstrong and the charter for compassion (ted.com)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“…[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)

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)

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.

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)

‘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).

‘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).

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).

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)

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.

“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.

“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)

Iberian Wolf: Jose Luis Rodriguez

(New Scientist)

(c) Igor Iwanowicz

Insect Images By Igor Iwanowicz, each more amazing than the previous (60 pics) (Acid Cow)

Andrew Sullivan: “The Beltway’s conventional wisdom has long been that the war in Iraq is over. According to the partisan GOP blogs, Bush won the war last year. And yet, for all the many reports of a new calm in Iraq, and on the day that Tom Friedman buys into Maliki’s hope that a new non-sectarian future is imminent, two massive car bombs reveal that security still needs a city divided by huge, concrete barriers, and American troops for investigation and clean-up. It’s worth recalling that this is still happening even as over 120,000 US troops remain in the country. If this can happen when they are there in such vast numbers, what are the odds that Iraq will remain half-way peaceful and unified when/if the US leaves?” (The Atlantic)

“With a mixture of anticipation and anxiety, the art world has been awaiting Crumb's long-rumored illuminated manuscript, a four-year, monastic-like effort to adapt every word of the first book of the Bible in distinctive pen and ink.” (USAToday)

Related:

• R. Crumb zaps the Book of Genesis in latest work (Popeater)

Grammatical rules have always baffled

me, leaving me wondering whether my

life is transitive or intransitive, if I am the

subject or object of my life, and no one

has been able to provide words to describe

my actions, even if they do end in –ly.

But now the problem seems to be with

pronouns: I am unwilling to be him

and you are unable to be her, so we

will never be them~the ones talking

about what they need from the grocery

store because the Rogers are coming for

dinner tonight; the couple saving for a

vacation, perhaps a cruise to Alaska or a

museum tour of Europe; the two who meet

with a financial advisor to plan their children's

college fund while still managing to set enough

aside for their retirement~and so we will

continue to be nothing more than sentence

fragments, perfectly fine for effect,

but forever looking for the missing

part of speech we can never seem to find.

(The Writer’s Almanac)

Explore, if you will, the world of E-Prime. Arising from the thinking of Alfred Korzybski and the International Society for General Semantics which he founded, E-Prime consists of the subset of the English language left after expunging it of the use of the verb ‘to be’ in its two major functions of connoting identity (“I am a weblogger”) and predication (“I am nice”). Proponents feel that these uses of ‘to be’ cause major confusion of thought and consequent social problems. To start with, consider how the use of the same verb for identity and predication readily obscures the distinction between opinion and fact. Moreover, it readily lends itself to stereotypy and inflexibility.

This paper claims that using “E-Prime in Negotiation and Therapy” can challenge dogmatic viewpoints, clarify confusion, and defuse conflict in daily life. I don’t conduct myself as a strong proponent of E-Prime in my life; awkward circumlocutory constructions arise whenever I try to write in that way. But the difficulty in using it perhaps speaks to how early in our lives the associated thought patterns were ingrained. Language doesn’t determine what we can and can’t think, but it does readily shape what can be thought with ease as opposed to with difficulty, IMHO. Does the challenge involved in thinking ‘outside this box’ perhaps indicate the importance of doing so? The links above have plenty of further links if you want to explore your identifications and predications more thoroughly.

Amazon tribe down to five as oldest member dies: “The Akuntsu tribe in the Brazilian Amazon has lost its oldest member, Ururú, leaving the tribe with only five surviving members.

Ururú was the oldest member of this close-knit, tiny group and an integral part of it.
Altair Algayer, head of FUNAI’s (Brazilian government Indian affairs department) team which protects the Akuntsu’s land said, ‘She was a fighter, strong, and resisted until the last moment.’ In addition, the oldest-surviving Akuntsu, Ururú’s brother Konibú, is seriously ill.

Ururú witnessed the genocide of her people and the destruction of their rainforest home, as cattle ranchers and their gunmen moved on to indigenous lands in Rondônia state. Rondônia was opened up by government colonisation projects and the infamous BR 364 highway in the 1960s and 70s… [T]oday’s survivors say their family members were killed when ranchers bulldozed their houses and opened fire on them… The ranchers attempted to hide evidence of the crime, but wooden poles, arrows, axes and broken pottery were discovered.

…Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘With Ururú’s death we are seeing the final stages of a 21st century genocide. Unlike mass killings in Nazi Germany or Rwanda, the genocides of indigenous people are played out in hidden corners of the world, and escape public scrutiny and condemnation. Although their numbers are small, the result is just as final. Only when this persecution is seen as akin to slavery or apartheid will tribal peoples begin to be safe.’ ” (Survival International)

Related:

• Vanishing forests, vanishing tribes (energyrefuge.com)
• You: Amazon tribe has just five members left (telegraph.co.uk)
• Growing despair (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Swine flu strikes Amazonian Indians (scientificamerican.com)
• A Google partnership to save an Amazon tribe and rainforest (seattlepi.com)

and more…]
(Urlesque – Internet Trends, Viral Videos, Memes and Web Culture)

“Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at.” [thanks, abby]

‘“There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”The forward slashes at the beginning of internet addresses have long annoyed net users and now the man behind them has apologised for using them.Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has confessed that the // in a web address were actually “unnecessary”.He told the Times newspaper that he could easily have designed URLs not to have the forward slashes.’ (BBC)

Dave Johns writes in Slate Magazine about the resurgence of the long-discredited ’science’ of physiognomy, the idea that personality attributes can be inferred from facial features alone.

My attention was grabbed by this on both a professional and personal basis. It is crucial for those in the behavioral sciences today to find their own position on the resurgence of biological determinism some would say has come to dominate the field. And, personally, I have always been dogged by the fact that people’s initial reaction to me seems to have a greater-than-chance tendency to find me intimidating. (I could understand it if they waited to hear what comes out of my mouth, but I think the reaction precedes any interaction with me.) It would be fine if I were the exception that proves the rule, but I think that, as is true of most of us, I am all too capable of falling into the role that has been shaped for me by those initial preconceptions. In addition to all the other prejudices in our society, are we face-ist?

A number of studies have demonstrated that most people hold …stereotypes about what criminals look like and believe that “the face fits the crime.” This can play out in court: The psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz has shown that “mature-faced” defendants are more likely to be found guilty of certain kinds of crimes. And when baby-faced defendants are found guilty, they tend to get more lenient sentences. She calls this form of discrimination “face-ism” and argues that defendants shouldn’t be required to show their faces in court. But if it is proved that the male face does indeed reveal “honest” signals about aggressiveness, jurors might deserve access to that information. (Then, too, defense attorneys might want to adopt a novel legal strategy: the meathead defense. “My client can’t be blamed for his actions because he suffers from high testosterone. Just look at his face!”)

Many of the supposedly indicative features are shaped by testosterone, which is linked to ‘masculine’ appearance and to aggression. But if the development of our frontal lobes has supposedly conferred on humans a much greater capacity to modulate our behavior, does the persistence of masculine aggression really reinforce biological determinism or merely that we have been pitiful failures at modifying the traditional male role definitions?

[On a lighter but related (?) note, I just realized that an anagram for my name is "genial towel." Do I seem like a genial towel to you?]

When I was a child I understood everything

about, for example, futility. Standing for hours

on the hot asphalt outfield, trudging for balls

I'd ask myself, how many times will I have to perform

this pointless task, and all the others? I knew

about snobbery, too, and cruelty—for children

are snobbish and cruel—and loneliness: in restaurants

the dignity and shame of solitary diners

disabled me, and when my grandmother

screamed at me, “Someday you'll know what it's like!”

I knew she was right, the way I knew

about the single rooms my teachers went home to,

the pictures on the dresser, the hoard of chocolates,

and that there was no God, and that I would die.

All this I understood, no one needed to tell me.

the only thing I didn't understand

was how in a world whose predominant characteristics

are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment

people are saved every day

by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth.

This year I'll be

thirty-nine, and I still don't understand it.