In November, I wrote about his disappearance. As someone who was a participant in and subscriber to his ‘Red Rock Eaters’ mailing list for the duration, I wanted to repost the missing person’s alert about him to spread the word. He was certainly someone who would know how to drop off the grid if he wished to, but I worried, as did many, that something more dire had happened to him.Now the UCLA police dept. posts this update (pdf).
Author Archives: FmH
Extreme cuisine
Top 10 ‘exotic’ tastes: I’ve eaten one of the items on this list from Lonely Planet; can you guess which?
Old Medicine is New
Maggots and Leeches: Patients may be initially repulsed but they sort of grow on you. (LiveScience)
R.I.P. Howard Zinn
“The author, teacher and political activist whose book “A People’s History of the United States” became a million-selling leftist alternative to mainstream texts, died Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif.” NY Times Obituary.
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/01/28/us/28zinnimg/articleInline.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/01/28/us/28zinnimg/articleInline.jpg "R.I.P. Howard Zinn")
The Loudness Wars
Why Music Sounds Worse (NPR)
Why the Haiti quake killed so many
‘In 1988, the Spitak magnitude-6.9 earthquake in Armenia took more than 25,000 lives. By contrast the magnitude-7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake in California in 1989 caused only 63 deaths. “The difference in the numbers of fatalities illustrates the huge effect that high building standards can have in saving people’s lives,” says DeMets.
The multi-storey concrete buildings that made up much of Port-au-Prince proved to be death traps when the earthquake struck. “The buildings were brittle and had no flexibility, breaking catastrophically when the earthquake struck,” says Ian Main, a seismologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
And the disaster was compounded by the earthquake’s shallow source. “With deep earthquakes the primary waves arrive first, giving you a bit of warning before the shear waves [responsible for shaking the ground from side to side] arrive,” says Uri ten Brink, an expert on earthquakes in the Caribbean from the US Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In Haiti the epicentre was so close to the surface that the primary and shear waves arrived almost at the same time.’ (New Scientist)
‘Don’t give money to Haiti’
This is not your Pat Robertson rant about Haiti deserving to go under because of its pact with the Devil. What do you think of this argument?
‘…For one thing, right now there’s very little that can be done with the money. There are myriad bottlenecks and obstacles involved in getting help to the Haitians who need it, but lack of funds is not one of them. For the next few weeks, help will come largely from governments, who are also spending hundreds of millions of dollars and mobilizing thousands of soldiers to the cause. But with the UN alone seeking to raise $550 million, it’s going to be easy to say that all the money donated to date isn’t remotely enough.
The problem is that Haiti, if it wasn’t a failed state before the earthquake, is almost certainly a failed state now — and one of the lessons we’ve learned from trying to rebuild failed states elsewhere in the world is that throwing money at the issue is very likely to backfire.
What’s more, charities raising money for Haiti right now are going to have to earmark that money to be spent in Haiti and in Haiti only….
…It’s human nature to want to believe that in the wake of a major disaster, we can all do our bit to help just by giving generously. And if there’s a silver lining to these tragedies at all, it’s that they significantly increase the total amount of money donated to important charities by individuals around the world. But if a charity is worth supporting, then it’s worth supporting with unrestricted funds. Because the last thing anybody wants to see in a couple of years’ time is an unseemly tussle over what happened to today’s Haiti donations, even as other international tragedies receive much less public attention…’ — Felix Salmon (Reuters opinion)
Related:
- Donate, But Not To Haiti (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
- State warns Haiti donors to beware of scams (seattlepi.com)
Limbaugh: Don’t give Haitians a penny
“Amid the rash of appeals for Haiti donations has come a call from one of the most prominent voices on the American right for people to hang on to their cash because Barack Obama might steal it.Rush Limbaugh, the most popular radio talkshow host, who is sometimes described as the real leader of the Republican party, says Americans should not give a penny to a population struggling for survival after the earthquake.” (Guardian.UK)
How to Give to the Haitian Relief Effort
This massive catastrophe, on our doorstep and on an unimaginable scale of tragedy, requires an urgent relief effort now. Please give, generously and immediately. Here is a list of many agencies to whom you can donate.
The Americanization of Mental Illness
“For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.” (New York Times Magazine)
Related:
- Are American psychiatrists (and Chinese media) to blame for anorexia in China? (trueslant.com)
- In search of Hasan’s syndrome (powerlineblog.com)
Good reasons why you shouldn’t mess with nature
APOD: 2010 January 5 – A Roll Cloud Over Uruguay
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1001/rollcloud_eberl.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1001/rollcloud_eberl.jpg "Roll cloud, Uruguay")
Has anyone ever seen a roll cloud? I haven’t. (APOD via julia)
The Mystery of the Missing Sea Lions Is Solved!
Anyone who has ever visited San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf has probably hung out with the sea lions of Pier 39, who first appeared after the 1989 earthquake. You should have heard by now about their recent mysterious mass departure, which had left some speculating that they had some sixth sense about an impending disaster such as another major quake. Now, it appears, it has been determined that there is a simpler explanation. In this El Nino season, they have simply gone after their shifting food source. (SFist) This is not to say, it seems to me, that they are not canaries in a coalmine with respect to a different sort of impending disaster, climate change.
Elusive Supermassive-Black-Hole Mergers Finally Found
“Observations have shown that nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole — a black hole with a mass of one million to one billion times that of the sun — at its center and that galaxies often collide and merge to create larger galaxies. Astronomers have expected to find many mid-merge galaxies by focusing on the two supermassive black holes, which should be orbiting each other in the middle.”
Now, innovative observational techniques have identified 33 of the ‘waltzing’ black hole pairs. (Wired News)
Centuries-Old Star Mystery Coming to a Close
Artistic rendering of e-Aurigae system.
The bright star Epsilon Aurigae, visible to the naked eye in the northern hemisphere, has long puzzled scientists because of a 27-year cycle of dimming and brightening. This suggested that it was an eclipsing binary system. However, the spectral signature of the bright component, suggesting that it was a supermassive giant star, made it difficult to build a model that would account for what might be eclipsing it. Now, the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope may have put the mystery to rest with some ingenious observation techniques.
[Does anyone, apart from my friend abby, whom I have to thank for sending me many such links, enjoy these arcane astronomical items?]
5 Theories That Explain Why Avatar Was Such A Huge Hit
Now that Avatar is on track to be the second biggest film of all time, pundits are starting to wonder if there’s more to its success than Art Nouveau pterodactyls in 3-D. Here are five explanations they’ve come up with. (io9)
Court to Cops: Stop Tasing People into Compliance
“The use of Tasers has become increasingly controversial over the last year, following high-profile cases such as the Tasering of a 10-year-old girl who had refused to take a shower and video of a 72-year-old great-grandmother who was Tasered following a driving offense. Now a federal appeals court in San Francisco has set down new rules for when police officers are allowed to use Tasers. In particular, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Tasers can’t be used simply to force a non-violent person to bend to an officer’s will. The court’s reason was that Taser’s X26 stun gun inflicts more pain than other “non-lethal” options….”It sounds like this court is attempting to raise the bar for non-lethal use of force,” retired Los Angeles Police Department Captain Greg Meyer told the Los Angeles Times. The ruling specifies that the Taser X26 and similar devices should only be used where there is “strong government interest [that] compels the employment of such force.” This rules out any situation in which there are alternative means of dealing with the situation. Some may see the new ruling as a great step forward for human rights. But there are reasons to be a little more cautious.
A recent study in the American Journal of Public Health looked at 24,000 cases in which police officers had used force, including Tasers, pepper spray, batons and manual methods. After controlling for factors such as the amount of resistance shown by the suspect, the study found that Taser use reduced the overall risk of injury by 65 percent. In other words, restricting Taser use could triple the number of injuries caused in this sort of incident.
It would be naïve to assume that there will not be any market response to the ruling. We have recently seen a rash of new devices aimed at police forces, including assorted laser dazzlers and pepper ball guns as Taser alternatives. There are also portable pain beams in prospect, both microwave and infrared laser varieties, not to mention various acoustic blasters. The ruling is likely to lead to more experimentation, both technical and in the courts, to find out just what the acceptable level of pain and suffering is and how it can best be delivered.” (Wired)
Angry people in local newspapers
“I feel sorry for local news photographers. They are hugely skilled and poorly paid, and sent out to photograph miserable people pointing at dog turds. Here, we celebrate their work…“
New Year’s Customs and Traditions
This is the my annual New Year’s post, a tradition I started early on on FmH:
I once ran across a January 1st Boston Globe article compiling folkloric beliefs about what to do, what to eat, etc. on New Year’s Day to bring good fortune for the year to come. I’ve regretted since — I usually think of it around once a year (grin) — not clipping out and saving the article. Especially since we’ve had children, I’m interested in enduring traditions that go beyond getting drunk [although some comment that this is a profound enactment of the interdigitation of chaos and order appropriate to the New Year’s celebration — FmH], watching the bowl games and making resolutions.
A web search brought me this, less elaborate than what I recall from the Globe but to the same point. It is weighted toward eating traditions, which is odd because, unlike most other major holidays, the celebration of New Year’s in 21st century America does not seem to be centered at all around thinking about what we eat (except in the sense of the traditional weight-loss resolutions!) and certainly not around a festive meal. But…
Traditionally, it was thought that one could affect the luck they would have throughout the coming year by what they did or ate on the first day of the year. For that reason, it has become common for folks to celebrate the first few minutes of a brand new year in the company of family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night after the ringing in of a new year. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good luck or bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor happened to be a tall dark-haired man.
![//tonos.ru/images/articles/dragon/ouroboros.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://tonos.ru/images/articles/dragon/ouroboros.jpg "Ouroboros")
“Traditional New Year foods are also thought to bring luck. Many cultures believe that anything in the shape of a ring is good luck, because it symbolizes “coming full circle,” completing a year’s cycle. For that reason, the Dutch believe that eating donuts on New Year’s Day will bring good fortune.
“Many parts of the U.S. celebrate the new year by consuming black-eyed peas. These legumes are typically accompanied by either hog jowls or ham. Black-eyed peas and other legumes have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog, and thus its meat, is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity. Cabbage is another ‘good luck’ vegetable that is consumed on New Year’s Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also considered a sign of prosperity, being representative of paper currency. In some regions, rice is a lucky food that is eaten on New Year’s Day.”
The further north one travels in the British Isles, the more the year-end festivities focus on New Year’s. The Scottish observance of Hogmanay has many elements of warming heart and hearth, welcoming strangers and making a good beginning:
“Three cornered biscuits called hogmanays are eaten. Other special foods are: wine, ginger cordial, cheese, bread, shortbread, oatcake, carol or carl cake, currant loaf, and a pastry called scones. After sunset people collect juniper and water to purify the home. Divining rituals are done according to the directions of the winds, which are assigned their own colors. First Footing:The first person who comes to the door on midnight New Year’s Eve should be a dark-haired or dark-complected man with gifts for luck. Seeing a cat, dog, woman, red-head or beggar is unlucky. The person brings a gift (handsel) of coal or whiskey to ensure prosperity in the New Year. Mummer’s Plays are also performed. The actors called the White Boys of Yule are all dressed in white, except for one dressed as the devil in black. It is bad luck to engage in marriage proposals, break glass, spin flax, sweep or carry out rubbish on New Year’s Eve.”
Here’s why we clink our glasses when we drink our New Year’s toasts, no matter where we are. Of course, sometimes the midnight cacophony is louder than just clinking glassware, to create a ‘devil-chasing din’.
In Georgia, eat black eyed peas and turnip greens on New Year’s Day for luck and prosperity in the year to come, supposedly because they symbolize coppers and currency. Hoppin’ John, a concoction of peas, onion, bacon and rice, is also a southern New Year’s tradition, as is wearing yellow to find true love (in Peru, yellow underwear, apparently!) or carrying silver for prosperity. In some instances, a dollar bill is thrown in with the other ingredients of the New Year’s meal to bring prosperity. In Greece, there is a traditional New Year’s Day sweetbread with a silver coin baked into it. All guests get a slice of the bread and whoever receives the slice with the coin is destined for good fortune for the year. At Italian tables, lentils, oranges and olives are served. The lentils, looking like coins, will bring prosperity; the oranges are for love; and the olives, symbolic of the wealth of the land, represent good fortune for the year to come.
A New Year’s meal in Norway also includes dried cod, “lutefisk.” The Pennsylvania Dutch make sure to include sauerkraut in their holiday meal, also for prosperity.
In Spain, you would cram twelve grapes in your mouth at midnight, one each time the clock chimed, for good luck for the twelve months to come. (If any of the grapes happens to be sour, the corresponding month will not be one of your most fortunate in the coming year.) The U. S. version of this custom, for some reason, involves standing on a chair as you pop the grapes. In Denmark, jumping off a chair at the stroke of midnight signifies leaping into the New Year. In Rio, you would be plunging into the sea en masse at midnight, wearing white and bearing offerings. In many northern hemisphere cities near bodies of water, they will have a tradition of people plunging into the cold water on New Year’s Day. The Coney Island Polar Bears Club in New York is the oldest cold-water swimming club in the United States. They have had groups of people enter the chilly surf since 1903.
Ecuadorian families make scarecrows stuffed with newspaper and firecrackers and place them outside their homes. The dummies represent misfortunes of the prior year, which are then burned in effigy at the stroke of midnight to forget the old year. Bolivian families make beautiful little wood or straw dolls to hang outside their homes on New Year’s Eve to bring good luck.
In China, homes are cleaned spotless to appease the Kitchen God, and papercuttings of red paper are hung in the windows to scare away evil spirits who might enter the house and bring misfortune. Large papier mache dragon heads with long fabric bodies are maneuvered through the streets during the Dragon Dance festival, and families open their front doors to let the dragon bring good luck into their homes. The Indian Diwali festival, welcoming in the autumnal season, also involves attracting good fortune with lights. Children make small clay lamps, dipas, thousands of which might adorn a given home. In Thailand, one pours fragrant water over the hands of elders on New Year’s Day to show them respect.
![//www.elanguages.org/images/16245' cannot be displayed]](http://www.elanguages.org/images/16245 "Revelry")
- a stack of pancakes for the New Year’s breakfast in France.
- banging on friends’ doors in Denmark to “smash in” the New Year, where it is also a good sign to find your doorstep heaped with broken dishes on New Year’s morning. Old dishes are saved all years to throw at your friends’ homes on New Year’s Eve.
- going in the front door and out the back door at midnight in Ireland.
- making sure the First Footer, the first person through your door in the New Year in Scotland, is a tall dark haired visitor.
- water out the window at midnight in Puerto Rico rids the home of evil spirits.
- cleanse your soul in Japan at the New Year by listening to a gong tolling 108 times, one for every sin
- it is Swiss good luck to let a drop of cream fall on the floor on New Year’s Day.
- Belgian farmers wish their animals a Happy New Year for blessings.
- In Germany and Austria, lead pouring” (das Bleigießen) is an old divining practice using molten lead like tea leaves. A small amount of lead is melted in a tablespoon (by holding a flame under the spoon) and then poured into a bowl or bucket of water. The resulting pattern is interpreted to predict the coming year. For instance, if the lead forms a ball (der Ball), that means luck will roll your way. The shape of an anchor (der Anker) means help in need. But a cross (das Kreuz) signifies death.
- “It’s a bit bizarre when you think about it. A short British cabaret sketch from the 1920s has become a German New Year’s tradition. Yet, although The 90th Birthday or Dinner for One is a famous cult classic in Germany and several other European countries, it is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, including Britain, its birthplace.”
Some history; documentation of observance of the new year dates back at least 4000 years to the Babylonians, who also made the first new year’s resolutions (reportedly voews to return borrowed farm equipment were very popular), although their holiday was observed at the vernal equinox. The Babylonian festivities lasted eleven days, each day with its own particular mode of celebration. The traditional Persian Norouz festival of spring continues to be considered the advent of the new year among Persians, Kurds and other peoples throughout Central Asia, and dates back at least 3000 years, deeply rooted in Zooastrian traditions.Modern Bahá’í’s celebrate Norouz (”Naw Ruz”) as the end of a Nineteen Day Fast. Rosh Hashanah (”head of the year”), the Jewish New Year, the first day of the lunar month of Tishri, falls between September and early October. Muslim New Year is the first day of Muharram, and Chinese New Year falls between Jan. 10th and Feb. 19th of the Gregorian calendar.
The classical Roman New Year’s celebration was also in the spring although the calendar went out of synchrony with the sun. January 1st became the first day of the year by proclamation of the Roman Senate in 153 BC, reinforced even more strongly when Julius Caesar established what came to be known as the Julian calendar in 46 BC. The early Christian Church condemned new year’s festivities as pagan but created parallel festivities concurrently. New Year’s Day is still observed as the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision in some denominations. Church opposition to a new year’s observance reasserted itself during the Middle Ages, and Western nations have only celebrated January 1 as a holidy for about the last 400 years. The custom of New Year’s gift exchange among Druidic pagans in 7th century Flanders was deplored by Saint Eligius, who warned them, “[Do not] make vetulas, [little figures of the Old Woman], little deer or iotticos or set tables [for the house-elf] at night or exchange New Year gifts or supply superfluous drinks [another Yule custom].” (Wikipedia)
The tradition of the New Year’s Baby signifying the new year began with the Greek tradition of parading a baby in a basket during the Dionysian rites celebrating the annual rebirth of that god as a symbol of fertility. The baby was also a symbol of rebirth among early Egyptians. Again, the Church was forced to modify its denunciation of the practice as pagan because of the popularity of the rebirth symbolism, finally allowing its members to cellebrate the new year with a baby although assimilating it to a celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus. The addition of Father Time (the “Old Year”) wearing a sash across his chest withthe previous year on it, and the banner carried or worn by the New Year’s Baby, immigrated from Germany. Interestingly, January 1st is not a legal holiday in Israel, officially because of its historic origins as a Christian feast day.
Auld Lang Syne (literally ‘old long ago’ in the Scottish dialect) is sung or played at the stroke of midnight throughout the English-speaking world (although I prefer George Harrison’s “Ring Out the Old”). Versions of the song have been part of the New Year’s festivities since the 17th century but Robert Burns was inspired to compose a modern rendition, which was published after his death in 1796. (It took Guy Lombardo, however, to make it popular…)
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
And here’s a hand, my trusty friend
And gie’s a hand o’ thine
We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne
![//www.sfgate.com/chronicle/pictures/2005/02/09/ga_lunar01.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/pictures/2005/02/09/ga_lunar01.jpg "Wake Up!")
Here’s how to wish someone a Happy New Year around the world:
- Arabic: Kul ‘aam u antum salimoun
- Brazilian: Boas Festas e Feliz Ano Novo means “Good Parties and Happy New Year”
- Chinese: Chu Shen Tan
- Czechoslavakia: Scastny Novy Rok
- Dutch: Gullukkig Niuw Jaar
- Finnish: Onnellista Uutta Vuotta
- French: Bonne Annee
- German: Prosit Neujahr
- Greek: Eftecheezmaenos o Kaenooryos hronos
- Hebrew: L’Shannah Tovah Tikatevu
- Hindi: Niya Saa Moobaarak
- Irish (Gaelic): Bliain nua fe mhaise dhuit
- Italian: Buon Capodanno
- Khmer: Sua Sdei tfnam tmei
- Laotian: Sabai dee pee mai
- Polish: Szczesliwego Nowego Roku
- Portuguese: Feliz Ano Novo
- Russian: S Novim Godom
- Serbo-Croatian: Scecna nova godina
- Spanish: Feliz Ano Neuvo
- Swedish: Ha ett gott nytt år
- Turkish: Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
- Vietnamese: Cung-Chuc Tan-Xuan
However you’re going to celebrate, my warmest wishes for the year to come… and eat hearty! [thanks to Bruce Umbaugh for research assistance]
Related?
Blue Moon on New Year’s Eve
![[Image 'http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:qTBNeD-sbH22mM:http://api.ning.com/files/1edgfT45wsn-veMuyde8uTkmoqcQGYAIG8vlI-hSELcqnJTMxjjMvaGA81RER1s-8nMAEIrwt*W-0oZQCq3Z2oy9h2Fp19zW/blue_moon1.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:qTBNeD-sbH22mM:http://api.ning.com/files/1edgfT45wsn-veMuyde8uTkmoqcQGYAIG8vlI-hSELcqnJTMxjjMvaGA81RER1s-8nMAEIrwt*W-0oZQCq3Z2oy9h2Fp19zW/blue_moon1.jpg)
For the first time in almost twenty years, there's going to be a Blue Moon on New Year's Eve.
…Don't expect the Moon to actually turn blue, though. “The 'Blue Moon' is a creature of folklore,” explains [professor Philip Hiscock of the Dept. of Folklore at the Memorial University of Newfoundland]. “It's the second full Moon in a calendar month.” (NASA).
Related:
- Folklore of the Blue Moon — by Philip Hiscock of the Dept. of Folklore, Memorial University of Newfoundland
- Blue Moons and Lavender Suns — (Alaska Science Forum) yes, the Moon can really turn blue
- What’s a Blue Moon? According to the editors of Sky & Telescope, the definition of “blue moon” as the second full Moon in a month is a mistake, prompting some to cry “Bah, Humbug!”
Going to Bed
I check the locks on the front door
and the side door,
make sure the windows are closed
and the heat dialed down.
I switch off the computer,
turn off the living room lights.
I let in the cats.
Reverently, I unplug the Christmas tree,
leaving Christ and the little animals
in the dark.
The last thing I do
is step out to the back yard
for a quick look at the Milky Way.
The stars are halogen-blue.
The constellations, whose names
I have long since forgotten,
look down anonymously,
and the whole galaxy
is cartwheeling in silence through the night.
Everything seems to be ok.
— George Bilgere
R.I.P. Vic Chesnutt
Singer and Songwriter Dies at 45: Vic Chesnutt, whose darkly comic songs about mortality, vulnerability and life’s simple joys made him a favorite of critics and fellow musicians, died Friday in a hospital in Athens, Ga., a family spokesman said. He was 45 and lived in Athens.
He had been in a coma after taking an overdose of muscle relaxants earlier this week.
Mr. Chesnutt had a cracked, small voice but sang with disarming candor about a struggle for peace in a life filled with pain. A car crash at age 18 left him partly paralyzed, and he performed in a wheelchair.
The accident, he has said, focused him as a songwriter, and it became the subject of some of his earliest recordings. “I’m not a victim/Oh, I am an atheist,” Mr. Chesnutt sang in “Speed Racer,” from his first album, “Little,” produced by Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and released in 1990.
In a recent interview on the public radio show “Fresh Air,” he told Terry Gross: “It was only after I broke my neck and even like maybe a year later that I really started realizing that I had something to say.”
Although he never had blockbuster record sales, Mr. Chesnutt was a prolific songwriter who remained a mainstay on the independent music circuit for two decades, making more than 15 albums.
Musicians flocked to work with him: he recorded with the bands Lambchop, Widespread Panic and Elf Power, as well as the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, and in a recent burst of creative activity he made two albums with a band that included Guy Picciotto of Fugazi and members of the Montreal indie-rock group Thee Silver Mt. Zion.
Because of Mr. Chesnutt’s fondness for simple guitar chords — after his accident his fingers could no longer form the jazzier ones, he has said — his work was often described as a variant of folk-rock. But the sound of his albums changed with their revolving collaborators, from stark recordings of Mr. Chesnutt alone to finessed full-band arrangements.
…He sings about suicide in “Flirted With You All My Life,” from his recent album “At the Cut,” describing death as a lover he must break up with because his accomplishments in life are incomplete:
When you touched a friend of mine I thought I would lose my mind
But I found out with time that really, I was not ready, no no, cold death
Oh death, I’m really not ready.
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/26/nyregion/26chesnutt_CA0/articleInline.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/26/nyregion/26chesnutt_CA0/articleInline.jpg "Vic Chesnutt, R.I.P.")
(New York Times obituary)
R.I.P. James Gurley, Big Brother Guitarist
“James Gurley, who played guitar in Big Brother and the Holding Company, the psychedelic rock band that brought Janis Joplin to fame, died on Sunday at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 69. One of the central groups of San Francisco’s fertile mid-1960s rock scene, Big Brother and the Holding Company took blues-based songs on long, strange, electric trips that often featured Mr. Gurley’s protracted solos. In an interview in 2007 with The Desert Sun, in Palm Springs, Calif., Mr. Gurley said that his approach was inspired by the music of John Coltrane.” (New York Times obituary)
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/25/arts/25gurley_CA0/articleInline.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/25/arts/25gurley_CA0/articleInline.jpg "James Gurley, R.I.P.")
Happy Yule
“I salute you. I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep.
There is nothing I can give you which you have not already, but there is much, very much, which though I cannot give it, you can take.
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today.
Take heaven.
No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this precious little instant.
Take peace.
The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy. There is radiance and courage in the darkness could we but see; and to see, we have only to look.
Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by their coverings, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, and wisdom, and power. Welcome it, greet it, and you touch the angel’s hand that brings it.
Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, a duty, believe me, that angel’s hand is there, the gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing Presence.
Our joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.
Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven.
Courage, then, to claim it, that is all! But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims wending through unknown country our way home.
And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you, not quite as the world sends greeting, but with profound esteem now and forever.
The day breaks and the shadows flee away.”
— Christmas greeting from a letter written by Italian friar and painter Giovanni da Fiesole (Fra Angelico) 1387-1455
The vast left-brain conspiracy
‘I use the term “neuro-enthusiasta” for those given to excessive excitement over what brain science teaches. I have been warning, often in these pages, of its mostly amusing excesses and its tendency to produce newspaper headlines exclaiming that the brain “lights up” when people think and feel various things.
Still, I did not foresee “neuro-” becoming a universal prefix. We have neuro-economics, neuro-theology, neuro-aesthetics and now, if Iain McGilchrist is to be believed, neuro-history.’ — Owen Flanagan (New Scientist)
Snakefly Snatches “Ugliest Bug” Title
First prize in this year’s Arizona State University (A.S.U.) annual Ugly Bug Contest. [I actually think she’s kinda cute.] Did you vote when I posted the link to the contest last week? (Scientific American)
Getting at the Texture of Inner Experience
“Maybe it is possible with our modern technology to take a flash picture in the dark.” — Russell T. Hurlburt (New York Times via abby)
New Scientist 2009 trivia quiz
“If you want to read about the big science stories of the year, you have come to the wrong place – turn back to the news review gallery. Here we are celebrating the science trivia of 2009. Read on and test your mental mettle in New Scientist's annual end of year quiz, and we will see whether 2009 has truly been the Year of Science as promoted by the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science, or rather a Year of Superstition, Ignorance and Minds Like a Sieve.” (New Scientist)
Charity Navigator…
…works to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of over 5,400 of America’s largest charities.
Related:
- Be a smarter charitable giver (money.cnn.com)
- FTC Announces Operation False Charity Law Enforcement Sweep (ftc.gov)
Think You’re a Film Buff?
Name That Movie puts up six iconic drawings, by Paul Rogers, from classic films. Figuring out which film each set references is harder than you would think.
Marburg Fever Survivor Puzzles Scientists
“The Marburg virus had never before reached North America, as far as experts know. It is a close relative of Ebola, and the diseases these viruses cause are among the world’s most dreaded, because they can have horrific symptoms and high death rates and are easily transmitted by bodily fluids. There is no vaccine, cure or even specific treatment.
Infectious disease experts had warned for years that someday an infected person might board a plane and carry one of these deadly viruses halfway around the world, potentially exposing countless others along the way. Now it had happened.
But Ms. Barnes survived, and no one else became infected, even though epidemiologists calculated that 260 people — hospital and lab workers, friends and family — had potentially been exposed.” (New York Times )
Can you really be “addicted” to shopping or using the Internet?
“Despite the scientific implausibility of the same disease—addiction—underlying both damaging heroin use and overenthusiasm for World of Warcraft, the concept has run wild in the popular imagination. Our enthusiasm for labeling new forms of addictions seems to have arisen from a perfect storm of pop medicine, pseudo-neuroscience, and misplaced sympathy for the miserable.” — Vaughan Bell (Slate)
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010
- 1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
- 2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
- 3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
- 4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
- 5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
- 6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
- 7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
- 8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
- 9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
- 10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
- 11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
- 12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
- 13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
- 14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
- 15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
- 16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
- 17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
- 18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
- 19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
- 20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
- 21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
- 22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
- 23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
- 24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
- 25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon
via Project Censored.
One-Liners Of The Decade
The short quips, phrases and exclamations that defined the '00s.
How many can you identify?:
- “Wassup?”
- “The Tribe has spoken.”
- “The American people have now spoken. But it’s going to take a little while to determine exactly what
- they said.”
- “Holy Fucking Shit.”
- “There are known knowns… we also know that there are known unknowns… There are also unknown unknowns.”
- “Shock and awe.”
- “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”
- “Wardrobe malfunction.”
- “He’s just not that into you.”
- “Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits.”
- “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
- “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
- “I wish I knew how to quit you.”
- “What are you doing?”
- “F—-ing Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”
- “An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator: These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.”
- “Leave Britney alone!”
- “Yes, we can.”
- “I drink your milkshake.”
- “The difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.”
- “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
- “You lie!”
- “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, and Imma let you finish, I’m sorry, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.”
For the attributions, go here. (Buzzfeed via walker)
[Are you as glad as I am that that decade’s done?]
The Strange Consensus on Obama’s Nobel Speech
“Obama puts a pretty, intellectual, liberal face on some ugly and decidedly illiberal polices. Just as George Bush’s Christian-based moralizing let conservatives feel good about America regardless of what it does, Obama’s complex and elegiac rhetoric lets many liberals do the same. To red state Republicans, war and its accompanying instruments (secrecy, executive power, indefinite detention) felt so good and right when justified by swaggering, unapologetic toughness and divinely-mandated purpose; to blue state Democrats, all of that feels just as good when justified by academic meditations on “just war” doctrine and when accompanied by poetic expressions of sorrow and reluctance. When you combine the two rhetorical approaches, what you get is what you saw yesterday: a bipartisan embrace of the same policies and ideologies among people with supposedly irreconcilable views of the world.” — Glenn Greenwald (Salon)
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
“…[W]ith his garish, pointless and downright inept rendering of Alice Sebold‘s 2002 novel, The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson has hit a new low in the annals of movie adaptations.” (Salon)
“Copenhagen is about doing as little as possible”
‘An interview with Dennis Meadows, whose 1972 book The Limits of Growth was an early warning of global crisis.’ (Salon)
Deepest View of Universe
“NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has made the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are galaxies that formed 600 million years after the Big Bang. No galaxies have been seen before at such early times. The new deep view, taken in late August 2009, also provides insights into how galaxies grew in their formative years early in the universe’s history. The image was taken in the same region as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), which was taken in 2004 and is the deepest visible-light image of the universe. Hubble’s newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) collects light from near-infrared wavelengths and therefore looks even deeper into the universe, because the light from very distant galaxies is stretched out of the ultraviolet and visible regions of the spectrum into near-infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the universe.” (HubbleSite)
Living Off Found Money
“For the past 10 years, Jesus Leonardo has been cleaning up at an OTB parlor in Midtown Manhattan, cashing in, by his own count, nearly half a million dollars’ worth of winning tickets from wagers on thoroughbred races across the country.
During his glorious run, Mr. Leonardo, 57, has not placed a single bet.
“It is literally found money,” he said on a recent night from his private winner’s circle. He spends more than 10 hours a day there, feeding thousands of discarded betting slips through a ticket scanner in a never-ending search for someone else’s lost treasure.
“This has become my job, my life,” he said. “This is how I feed my family.”
Leonardo, who favors track suits and wears his graying hair and bushy beard in long ponytails, is what’s known in horse racing parlance as a stooper — a person who hangs around racetracks and betting parlors picking up tickets thrown away by others. Most tickets are losers, but enough are winners to make it worth his while.” (New York Times [thanks, abby])
Ugly Bug Contest
“The biologists from Dow AgroSciences, NAU Imaging and Histology Core Facility, ASU International Institute for Species Exploration and W. M. Keck Bioimaging Laboratory are pleased to present the Ugly Bug contestants for 2009. Each of the bugs are anxious to be crowned champion so be sure to vote soon and vote often… and remember…Ugly is only cuticle deep.” (ASU-Ask A Biologist)
And:
- Pick World’s Ugliest Insect (scientificamerican.com)
Ezekiel’s Wheel Over Norway?
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/spaceweather.com/swpod2009/09dec09/Jan-Petter1.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/spaceweather.com/swpod2009/09dec09/Jan-Petter1.jpg)
“This morning in arctic Norway, onlookers were stunned when a gigantic luminous spiral formed in the northern sky. “We are used to seeing lots of auroras here in Norway, but this was different,” says Nick Banbury of Harstad who witnessed the phenomenon on his way to work “between 7:50 and 8:00 a.m. local time.” Onlooker Jan Petter Jorgensen took this photo:
The first reaction of many readers when they see this picture is Photoshop! Surely this must be a fake. But no, many independent observers witnessed and phtotographed the apparition. It is real.
Banbury continues: “It consisted initially of a green beam of light similar in color to the aurora with a mysterious rotating spiral at one end. This spiral then got bigger and bigger until it turned into a huge halo in the sky with the green beam extending down to Earth. According to press reports, this could be seen all over northern Norway and must therefore have been very high up in the atmosphere to be seen hundreds of km apart.”
UPDATE: Circumstantial evidence is mounting that the phenomenon was caused by a malfunctioning rocket, possibly an ICBM launched from a Russian submarine. A Navtex no-fly alert was issued for the White Sea on Dec. 9th, and photographers appear to have recorded the initial boost phase of a launch below the spiral (see inset). A rocket motor spinning out of control could indeed explain the spiral pattern, so this explanation seems plausible, although it has not yet been confirmed.” (SpaceWeather.com via julia)
Related:
- That Crazy Spiral in the Sky? It Might Be Real (wired.com)
- WTF Is the Norway Spiral? UFO? (blippitt.com)
Social scientists build case for ‘survival of the kindest’
“Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.” (Science Daily)
The Talented Ms. Highsmith
Review of Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith: “She kept 300 snails as pets. She drank a quart of gin a day. She considered robbery worse than murder. She left the United States to live in Europe because of what she called ‘the Negro problem’ — by which she did not mean discrimination against Negroes, but the civil rights movement that had Negroes demanding their rights.
A houseguest once left her window open; she threw a dead rat inside. She took tips left on restaurant tables. She’d drive 60 miles to get a cheaper spaghetti dinner. She called Hitler’s extermination policy a ‘semicaust’, because only half the world’s Jews died.
She thought that ‘life didn’t make sense without a crime in it.’ Her idea of happiness was to write a murder. At 1:30 in the morning, standing in a lover’s apartment, she didn’t hesitate to make a booty call to another woman. ‘I am a man and I love women,’ she wrote. She liked young blonds, very made up.
A mental health professional, observing her for only a few minutes, pegged her as a psychopath. Another writer described her as ‘a black cloud.’ Her own assessment: ‘If I were to relax and become human, I could not bear my life.’
…Why would you even think of reading more than 600 pages about such a monster?” (Head Butler)
What Do Facebook Quizzes Really Know About You?
“Ever take one of those Facebook quizzes to find out which superhero most resembles your dog, or have a friend who seems to spend most of their life doing so? Then you might be in for a surprise when you take this quiz and learn just how much of your personal information these quizzes can access.Even if your Facebook profile is “private,” when you take a quiz, an unknown quiz developer could be accessing almost everything in your profile: your religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, pictures, and groups. Facebook quizzes also have access to most of the info on your friends’ profiles. This means that if your friend takes a quiz, they could be giving away your personal information too.But don’t take our word for it – take this quiz and see for yourself! And, yes, we know it’s a little weird to warn you about Facebook quizzes by asking you to take a Facebook quiz – but at least you know who we are and that we have a real privacy policy that we’re committed to upholding. Can you say the same for every unknown author of every quiz you or your friends take?” (ACLU)
Humans Wonder, Anybody Home?
Clues to consciousness in nonmammals: “Many people (some scientists among them) would like to believe that consciousness sets the human mind apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. But whether in humans or other creatures, behavioral signs of cognizance all arise from the tangled interactions of neurons in the brain. So a growing number of scientists contend that animals with brain structures and neural circuitry similar to humans’ might experience something like human awareness, even if a bit less sophisticated.” (Science News)
Related?
- Debunking the Big Brain Myth (geeksaresexy.net)
- Signature of consciousness captured in brain scans (biosingularity.wordpress.com)
- Man Actually Conscious Throughout Two Decades of “Coma” (neatorama.com)
- Terri’s Press Release: Doctors Misdiagnose Patient Thought to be in 23 Year “Persistent Vegetative State” (deaconforlife.blogspot.com)
Death to smiley
“…When I see a smiley, my first thought is, “What are you, 12 years old?” What is it about the emoticon that fills me with such loathing? Maybe it's the wastefulness of the enterprise, the redundancy of it, the implied lack of confidence in the writer's ability to communicate, or mine to comprehend. If you say, “I'm looking forward to seeing you tonight,” I think you're looking forward to seeing me. If you say, “I'm looking forward to seeing you tonight. :-),” I think you're not sure I understand the extent of sentiment in that seven-word message. And if you write, “I'm looking forward to seeing you tonight ;-),” I think your assumption of getting laid this evening may have been a bit premature, Winky.” — Mary Elizabeth Williams (Salon)
Autoimmune response to pig brain mist fells slaughterhouse workers
‘Doctors at the Mayo Clinic and government public health experts have confirmed the mysterious illnesses in 24 slaughterhouse workers in Minnesota and Indiana from 2006 to 2008 was caused by an autoimmune response to a mist of pig brain tissue.
Their article was published Monday in the British medical journal Lancet Neurology. Mayo Clinic neurologist Dr. Daniel Lachance, the lead author, said it was the first comprehensive account of the outbreak and response from Mayo, the state Health Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This was really a kind of unique experiment of nature where an unusual form of harvesting a part of an animal was utilized and inadvertently exposed individuals through their respiratory tract or their eyes or mouth and ended up triggering an autoimmune response in their own bodies”…
The immune response attacked the nervous systems of the 21 workers in Minnesota and three in Indiana from November 2006 to May 2008, causing painful symptoms that included weakness and fatigue to confusion and seizures.
All are improving and most no longer have measurable symptoms… although two may have permanent damage.
All the patients worked in or near areas where compressed air was used to extract pig brains, which are considered a delicacy in some Asian countries. It was a rarely used process then, he said, and he knows of no slaughterhouses that still use it.’ (The Associated Press)
The Wikipedia Exodus Is the Least of Our Worries
“A Web 2.0 site is one that by definition gets its value from the actions of users. But what happens when the best users stop using?
Wikipedia, which is arguably the most valuable source of information on the Internet, is written and edited almost entirely by volunteers. But what happens when those volunteers stop volunteering?We’re about to find out. In the first quarter of this year, the Wikipedia lost an incredible 49,000 editors, literally ten times the number lost in the same quarter last year.Another potential threat to Wikipedia is that its expenses could outpace costs. Currently, the site runs on donations. But if the most die-hard fans are leaving — the writers and editors — they could take their donations with them.As volunteerism goes down, successful acts of vandalism go up, and the resource becomes increasingly unreliable, which could cause even more people to leave and even fewer people to donate. Crowdsoucing is great — until the crowd goes somewhere else.Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but the death of Wikipedia is the least of our problems. The Wikipedia exodus is the least of our worries…” — Mike Elgan (Datamation)
Related:
- Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages (online.wsj.com)
- The collaborative construction of “fact” on Wikipedia (matei.org)
- Have you stopped editing Wikipedia? And if so, is it doomed? (guardian.co.uk)
- Wikipedia’s New Editorial Line of Defense (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)
- Quoted – Ecommerce Times – Wikipedia to Tinge Suspect Entries With Orange Cast (scotttesta.com)
- Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales denies site is ‘losing’ thousands of volunteer editors (telegraph.co.uk)
- Wikipedia on the wane? (bbc.co.uk)
- Hiring for Social Media: The Ugly Side (altitudebranding.com)
No Longer a Civil Rights Footnote
On that supercharged day in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., she rode her way into history books, credited with helping to ignite the civil rights movement.
But there was another woman, named Claudette Colvin, who refused to be treated like a substandard citizen on one of those Montgomery buses — and she did it nine months before Mrs. Parks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his political debut fighting her arrest. Moreover, she was the star witness in the legal case that eventually forced bus desegregation.
Yet instead of being celebrated, Ms. Colvin has lived unheralded in the Bronx for decades, initially cast off by black leaders who feared she was not the right face for their battle, according to a new book that has plucked her from obscurity.” (New York Times via abby)
Mental Illness in Academe
Elyn R. Saks is a professor of law, psychology, and psychiatry and the behavioral sciences at the University of Southern California’s law school. She is the author of a memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (Hyperion, 2007). Here is her essay about ‘outing’ herself as a university faculty member suffering from schizophrenia. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Phil Agre Has Gone Missing
Philip Agre was an associate professor of information sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, and for years he ran a popular technology e-mail list with thousands of subscribers. But one day the 49-year-old scholar just stopped showing up on the campus, and now colleagues have deployed Twitter, Facebook, and the Web to try to find him.
Last month the university police department put out a missing-person alert for Mr. Agre, whose absence was reported to authorities by his sister. The alert says he abandoned his apartment and his job “sometime between December 2008 and May 2009.” It also notes that he suffers from “manic depression.”
The scholar apparently had many professional contacts but few close friends. An expert on privacy, he was always guarded about his own, say those who know him.
“In his personal life, he never wanted to discuss social things,” said Charlotte Lee, an assistant professor of human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington who worked under Mr. Agre when she was a doctoral student. ‘When his behavior got more erratic, nobody felt close enough to him to help, and we thought we'd help by protecting his zone of privacy,” she said. “Respecting that zone of privacy is what allowed him to slip away.’ ” (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
As someone who was a participant in and subscriber to his ‘Red Rock Eaters’ mailing list for the duration, I am reposting this to spread the word. He is certainly someone who would know how to drop off the grid if he wished to, but I worry that something more dire has happened to him.
Related:
- Missing: Phil Agre, internet scholar (boingboing.net)
Monster Waves on the Sun
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/images/solartsunami/twoviews_strip.gif' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/images/solartsunami/twoviews_strip.gif)
‘Years ago, when solar physicists first witnessed a towering wave of hot plasma racing along the sun's surface, they doubted their senses. The scale of the thing was staggering. It rose up higher than Earth itself and rippled out from a central point in a circular pattern millions of kilometers in circumference. Skeptical observers suggested it might be a shadow of some kind—a trick of the eye—but surely not a real wave.
“Now we know” says Joe Gurman of the Solar Physics Lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center. “Solar tsunamis are real.” ‘ (NASA -Mystery of the Solar Tsunami–Solved)
African leaders advise Bono on reform of U2
Bono thanks Commission chairman Nelson Mandela for the report.“An expert commission of African leaders today announced their plan for comprehensive reform of music band U2. Saying that U2’s rock had lost touch with its African roots, the commission called for urgent measures to halt U2’s slide towards impending crisis.
“Our youth today are imperiled by low quality music,” said Commission chairman Nelson Mandela. “We will be lending African musicians to U2 to try to refurbish their sound to satisfy the urgent and growing needs for diversionary entertainment at a time of crisis in the global music and financial sectors.”
Concerns about U2 have been growing in Africa for a while. One Western aid blogger testified to the Commission that his teenage kids found U2’s music “cheesy.” The Mandela Commission proposed that U2 follow a series of steps to recover its Edge:
1) Hire African consultants to analyze U2’s “poverty of music trap”
2) Prepare a Band-owned and Commission-approved Comprehensive U2 Reform Strategy Design (CURSD)
3) Undertake a rehabilitation tour of African capitals to field-test and ground-truth proposed reforms
4) Subject all songs to randomized experiments in which the effect on wellbeing of control and treatment groups is rigorously assessed.
Mandela expressed optimism that the Commission’s report and proposed reforms had come in time to stave off terminal crisis in U2, and restore its effectiveness in the 80s arena rock field.”
via Aid Watch.
The World According to Americans
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/world-accordign-to-USA.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/world-accordign-to-USA.jpg)
.
‘The most inconvenient truth of all’
- Brazilian indigenous chiefs of the Kayapo tribe
“Measures to stop global warming risk being as harmful to tribal peoples as climate change itself, according to a new report from Survival.
The report, ‘The most inconvenient truth of all: climate change and indigenous people’, sets out four key ‘mitigation measures’ that threaten tribal people:
1. Biofuels: promoted as an alernative, ‘green’ source of energy to fossil fuels, much of the land allocated to grow them is the ancestral land of tribal people. If biofuels expansion continues as planned, millions of indigenous people worldwide stand to lose their land and livelihoods.
2. Hydro-electric power: A new boom in dam construction in the name of combating climate change is driving thousands of tribal people from their homes.
3. Forest conservation: Kenya’s Ogiek hunter-gatherers are being forced from the forests they have lived in for hundreds of years to ‘reverse the ravages’ of global warming.
4. Carbon offsetting: Tribal peoples’ forests now have a monetary value in the booming ‘carbon credits’ market. Indigenous people say this will lead to forced evictions and the ‘theft of our land’.” (Survival International)
Which is Your Favorite Thunderword?
‘Joyce described [Finnegans Wake] as a downwards parabola into sleep, or as a tunnel going through a mountain. As HCE moves through the dream, the “thunderwords” track his movement. There are 10 thunderwords, the first 9 of 100 letters each, the last of 101, for a total of 1,001–tales of a thousand and one nights, appropriate for this book of sleep.
As each thunderword leads into another part of the book, it fits into Joyce’s usage of Vico‘s philosophy to tell the story. Each thunderword leads to a new cycle and a deeper part of sleep, and a deeper, more muddled state in HCE’s mind (where the “mudmound” of his body fades from view and even the acrostics for HCE become muddled, as hec, ech, etc.). Thunder itself was important in Vico’s philosophy as a motivating force and a symbolic marker of events in history.
“There are ten thunders in the Wake. Each is a cryptogram or codified explanation of the thundering and reverberating consequences of the major technological changes in all human history. When a tribal man hears thunder, he says, ‘What did he say that time?’, as automatically as we say ‘Gesundheit.’ ” — Marshall McLuhan.’ (FinnegansWiki)
Here are the ten thunderwords, hyperlinked to their places in the FW text:
- (thunder):
bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk - (thunder):
Perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhurthrumathunaradidillifaititillibumullunukkunun - (clap):
klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrottygraddaghsemmihsammihnouithappluddyappladdypkonpkot - (whore):
Bladyughfoulmoecklenburgwhurawhorascortastrumpapornanennykocksapastippatappatupperstrippuckputtanach - Thingcrooklyexineverypasturesixdixlikencehimaroundhersthemaggerbykinkinkankanwithdownmindlookingated
- (shut the door):
Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk - Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrumstrumtruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup
- Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackfalltherdebblenonthedubblandaddydoodled
- (cough):
husstenhasstencaffincoffintussemtossemdamandamnacosaghcusaghhobixhatouxpeswchbechoscashlcarcarcaract - (Norse gods):
Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar
R.I.P. Jeanne-Claude
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)
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)
Hippos are photographed biting a crocodile to death
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.)
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)
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).
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.
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.
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.)
Out of the Blue
Spectacular pictures of some of the world’s most interesting islands taken from manned spaceflights or satellites. (Wired)
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 'https://i0.wp.com/1.bp.blogspot.com/_uSxPV2yh4iU/RXZMFI0Qz3I/AAAAAAAAAGw/G7-wAqqJItk/s320/Brother%2BBlue_3941.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/1.bp.blogspot.com/_uSxPV2yh4iU/RXZMFI0Qz3I/AAAAAAAAAGw/G7-wAqqJItk/s320/Brother%2BBlue_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.
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)
R.I.P. Claude Lévi-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.
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/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")
‘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)
Interspecies MUNI stop
Is time out of joint?
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/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)
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:
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)
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).
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)
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 (http://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.
