Good news! A New York revival of Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, a challenging and rewarding play I saw in London during its initial production. “First produced in London in 1972, Jumpers was Mr. Stoppard’s first major play after his breakthrough success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), his existential riff on two Shakespearean bit players. Jumpers is a wildly ambitious work about a charmingly verbose professor (played by Simon Russell Beale) and his increasingly unhinged wife (Essie Davis), and touching on issues from the existence of God to the aesthetic implications of the moon landing.

But as heady as the themes may be, what may be even more challenging is the staging, which required the director, David Leveaux, to create an array of reality-bending moments, including a topless woman on a swing, a cocktail party-cum-crime scene and a bedroom that assembles itself around a completely naked woman. (And that’s just in the first few minutes.)” — New York Times

“Circuit bending (is) the creative alteration of electronic devices – usually toys – so they can produce new and unusual sounds. Benders delve beneath the sometimes fuzzy underbelly of talking dolls, toy instruments and basic keyboards. They rewire circuits, experimenting until they hear tones, beeps or squawks they like. Then they solder on switches, buttons and knobs to be able to recreate the novel noises on cue.” — New York Times

“If it can truly be said that people train cats, rather than the other way around, human-feline bonding apparently had its start at least 9,500 years ago – about 5,000 years earlier than previously thought.

French archaeologists, excavating a grave in Cyprus, have found the remains of a person, some buried offerings and the curled-up skeleton of a cat. Everything about the grave, dated at about 7500 B.C., suggested to the discoverers that the cat probably had as favored a place in the life of the departed person as that of your dear Daddles or Willie or whatever the name of the little master of the house.” — New York Times

“When the United States invaded Iraq a year ago, one of its chief concerns was preventing a civil war between Shiite Muslims, who make up a majority in the country, and Sunni Muslims, who held all the power under Saddam Hussein.

Now the fear is that the growing uprising against the occupation is forging a new and previously unheard of level of cooperation between the two groups — and the common cause is killing Americans.” — New York Times

You have got to hand it to the Bush administration’s prowess at nation-building. I would never have believed it would have happened in Iraq if I weren’t seeing it with my own eyes. Fitting that this is happening on the year’s anniversary of the famous toppling of the Saddam statue. The lesson to be taken from this is not that the tide has turned against us in the ensuing year, but that it was never with us in the first place. Recall that the jubilation at the toppling of the statue was a sham, a photo-op staged for the occasion with a few carefully assembled cheering Iraqi dupes. It is only a pity that it has taken so long, and so many thousands of Iraqi lives, for the Iraqis to unite in effective opposition against the ‘coalition’ invaders.

Related: Experts Concerned:

Milt Bearden, who retired after 30 years with the CIA’s directorate of operations, notes that in the last 100 years any insurgency that has taken on a nationalist character — for instance, a shared goal of getting rid of Americans — has succeeded.

Other former intelligence officials familiar with the region caution that outside Shiite groups, acting more covertly than the Sadr militia, could prove to be formidable problems.

Bob Baer, a former CIA officer who spent 21 years in the Middle East, said he met with Islamic fighters in Lebanon just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq who told him they were preparing to fight a long-term war with the West in Iraq. They included members of Hezbollah and Hamas, he said. —SF Chronicle

Point-by-point analyses of the errors, evasions

and omissions in Condoleezza Rice’s opening statement and Q&A testimony before

the 9/11 commission. —Center for American Progress

“The message boards of Fox’s latest reality show, ‘The Swan,’ turned into a cultural battlefield, even before the first episode was broadcast.

The very concept of this particular show seemed to strike a raw nerve among viewers, who posted several hundred messages in what turned into a surprisingly heated debate over whether television is our fairy godmother, the ultimate Big Brother, or just a boob tube.” —Holly Gail, AlterNet