Me and My Shadow
Too Much, Magic Bus (Tour Guide)
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| post-Cruise Levitch Dana O'Keefe/Hulu |
The most recent update I could find about Mr. Levitch was this story in the New York Times, from 2012. It seems that he starred in a Hulu series in which he tours various cities around the country. The writer's review? "... it’s impossible to look at Mr. Levitch here — working within the system, even if it is in an independently produced Web series — and not recall the much more interesting and unwashed figure he cut in 'The Cruise.'" My own take, after watching half of the first episode? I agree but will add that, as he did in the movie, our Mr. Levitch unearths interesting places one might not always be familiar with and is most informative about them and, through them, the cities they inhabit: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/arts/television/up-to-speed-with-timothy-levitch-on-hulu.html?_r=0
P.S., A profile in NYU's alumni magazine concludes, "Whether or not Up to Speed gets renewed, Levitch will keep busy with mobile barbecue tours, occasional acting gigs, and a long-simmering plan to start a Shakespeare theater troupe that makes monologue 'deliveries' across New York City": http://www.nyu.edu/alumni.magazine/issue20/classnotes_1.html
Building With Bamboo in Bali
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| who wouldn't want to wake up to this every day? screen shot |
There Once Was a Man Named Ed Lear ...
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| a self-portrait Beinecke Library |
Somanyinterestingthings.
It's the site that gives your brain wings.
News, facts, fiction galore ~
And what else is in store?
Perhaps walruses, cabbage, and kings!
May 12 is National Limerick Day, so chosen to honor English artist, musician, and writer Edward Lear (1812-1888, and the youngest, btw, of 21 children), who, if not the inventor of the form, is commonly held to have popularized it. While the limerick usually has five lines, Lear often fused the third and fourth together:
There was an old man with a beard,
Who said, "It is just as I feared—
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren
Have all built their nests in my beard."
Arguably, his most famous poem, though not a limerick, was The Owl and the Pussycat.
One of the better limerick writers, imho, was Ogden Nash. Here's one of his more famous attempts:
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, "Let us flee!"
"Let us fly!" said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
My favorite, though often attributed to Nash, was written by Dixon Lanier Merritt:
A wonderful bird is the pelican.
Muscle Mass
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| leaders at first YMCA camp in U.S., 1887 |
It lives on, too, according to the author of this piece, in our violent sports, such as boxing and football. He quotes Roosevelt: "The sports especially dear to a vigorous and manly nation are always those in which there is a slight element of risk." The risks inherent in football have taken center stage of late. This happens, writes the author, "once every 30 or 40 years in America. It happened in 1905, when around 20 players (estimates vary on the exact figure) died in game action. It happened again in the 1930s, when so many players were getting hurt that the American Football Coaches Association felt it necessary to begin an annual survey of player injuries. It happened in 1968, when 66 players were either killed or paralyzed on the field, an epidemic that forced the creation of official equipment standards and led to the birth of the hard shell plastic helmet still in use today. And it has been happening once more over the past half-decade, as the damage hidden under those hard helmets has been revealed in the form of CTE diagnoses and other mental health issues now rampant among former NFL players": http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/may/08/muscular-christianity-and-american-sports-undying-love-of-violence?CMP=ema_565
Fly Away Home
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| awww ... from flikie.com |
The Double-Edged Word
On May 8, San Francisco's City Hall is expected to be the site of a demonstration against what many are seeing as the gentrification of the Mission district. The movement's Facebook page states "10,000 people have been displaced from La MiSSiON! Join us MAY 8th @ City @ 12 NOON to tell the Mayor & Board of Supervisor 2 immediately STOP the Evictions & development of Luxury Condos in La MiSiON! We will DEMAND that the City build 3,000 AFFORDABLE HOUSING & bring everyone that's been evicted from the MiSiON back! Si Se Puede!" The city's supervisors mirror the public's conflicting attitudes as they contemplate a building moratorium. According to the article, "Supporters say the once thriving
The Progress of Progress
ZIP Tips
Extra points to whomever can name the year we added those five digits to our addresses (1963). According to about.com, "The first digit designated a broad geographical area of the United States, ranging from zero for the Northeast to nine for the far West. This was followed by two digits that more closely pinpointed population concentrations and those sectional centers accessible to common transportation networks. The final two digits designated small post offices or postal zones in larger zoned cities": http://inventors.about.com/od/xyzstartinventions/a/zipcode.htm
Good Gardens
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| United States Botanic Garden is our oldest public garden U.S. Botanic Garden |
Mitochondrial Memories
The Force on the Fourth
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| screen shot |
Of course, if you're a real fan, you know that the latest entry in the series is due out on Dec. 18 and that the merchandising will begin Sept. 4. But have you seen any of the teasers yet? (videos): http://www.starwars.com/the-force-awakens/trailers/
A Very Very Very Twine House
In a recent interview, Clark explains that growing up poor rather forced her to be creative with the materials that were available to her. As for what she hopes her work transmits to the public, she says, "Visually, I love it when people bypass my work thinking it's nothing other than a simple painting. Until they look a little closer and see that, in fact, it is fibers [and] thread. Then they have to proceed to look even closer and look into the windows of the home. I like to push my viewers to then question, Whose home is this? What kind of people live in this home?": http://jungkatz.com/2014/12/08/artist-interview-stephanie-k-clark-embroidery-artist/
A War, Illustrated
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| South Vietnamese soldiers crossing a river, 1964 Horst Faas/AP |
more photos (same warning): http://www.nydailynews.com/news/vietnam-real-war-marks-conflict-50-year-anniversary-gallery-1.1474566
The Drone Detectives
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| © Alamy |
Streets Without Cars
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| one night in L.A. KW |
It started when we had to skip dinner before the theater because we couldn't get over 15 mph on the freeway. That reminded me that, a few days before, I had decided against attending a college alumni get-together because the mere thought of sitting in rush-hour exhaust exhausted me. Then, the next day, a good friend bowed out of a party on my side of town because, she said, "I just can't face the traffic." Pathetic? You bet! (But I continue to hold out high hopes for our expanding metro rail system.)
So of course I was intrigued by this article on the direction many cities in Europe seem to be taking, what with point-A-to-point-B bike rentals, ride sharing, Ubering, and all (which some U.S. cities are adopting as well). Birmingham, England, for example, is in the first phase of a program it's calling Birmingham Connected. Its main proponent could just as well be talking about L.A. when he says, "Birmingham was seen as the champion of the car, and as a result it didn’t develop an underground or the tram network you see in major cities across Europe. There’s been a failure to develop those systems because there’s been no longer-term vision." He's hoping to change that. Helsinki, Finland, is working toward a vision in which "the future resident ... will not own a car."
And how are the car companies responding to all this? Good question: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/28/end-of-the-car-age-how-cities-outgrew-the-automobile
The Sound of Tears
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| Shostakovich |
The other night, we attended a classical-music concert at a local venue. One of the pieces played was the Chamber Symphony for Strings in C Minor, Op. 110, by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). Somehow, it's also called String Quartet No. 8. You can see by the preceding sentence that I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. Fortunately, though, this particular chamber orchestra took this particular opportunity to enlighten its audience about this piece and its creator. It's a fascinating story that brings both composer and composition to life.
While much of what I've found online corresponds to the information we got at the concert, there was one point that I couldn't find but that made perfect sense, given the time (1960) and country (the Soviet Union) in which Shostakovich wrote the piece. Apparently, although he dedicated String Quartet No. 8 "to the victims of fascism and war," his children contend that, in reality, he was dedicating it to all the victims of totalitarianism, including himself. Indeed, his own initials show up inIn a Dry State
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| California Aqueduct Department of Water Resources |
"... California is a beautiful state. In the south, its days are forever sunny, [and] moving north we find the south end of the Central Valley that is blessed with a near year-round growing season. As we reach the beginning of Northern California, the Salinas Valley, we find temperate weather that is ideal for growing vegetables for only nine months of the year. Near Sacramento, the summer days are explosive and perfect for hot-weather, summer crops, and it doesn't cool off enough for vegetables until fall and then it is too cold for many things through the winter. North of Sacramento exists a mighty chunk of our state, filled with mountains and natural resources, but shy of any significant population.
"These places are connected by many things, including a water system that captures snow melt in the north and delivers it down the Sacramento River to the delta where man-made canals pump rivers that run uphill to deliver water to farms [and] cities. The reality of the water situation for farms is
Hey, Kids, Let's Start a Country!
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| Jedlicka and the Liberland flag liberland.org |
Welcome to the Singularity
In his book The Future of the Mind (http://somanyinterestingthings.blogspot.com/2014/05/just-because-future-of-mind-part-1.html, etc.), Michio Kaku recalls his interview with Dr. Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot and a former director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab. "If you ask Dr. Brooks how we can coexist with these super-smart robots," he writes, "his reply is straightforward: we will merge with them. With advances in robotics and neuroprosthetics, it becomes possible to incorporate AI into our own bodies." A team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has created a patch of gold electrodes that, when worn on and behind the ear, can, via EEG, allow the user to control electronic devices. It is still in its preliminary stages and will be used in medical situations at first: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630182.200-digital-tattoo-lets-you-control-devices-with-mind-power-alone.html#.VTqBVRc0zeQ
On Their Way to the Desert
Emotions in Hand
Che in the Congo
On April 24 fifty years ago, an idealistic rebel named Ernesto Guevara, better known as Che, sneaked into an unstable, recently independent, uranium- and cobalt-rich African country called the Congo. With him were a dozen Cuban fighters of African origin. They had been sent by Cuban leader Fidel Castro to help the rebels there make a stand against "Yankee imperialism." It didn't work out, with Guevara calling the whole episode "a failure." "There are too many armed men and what is lacking are soldiers," he reported back to Castro (story, video): http://www.afp.com/en/news/fifty-years-later-tracing-ches-failure-dr-congo
Epilogue: Shortly after Guevara left, Gen. Joseph Mobutu seized power from the coalition government of Joseph Kasavubu and Patrice Lumumba and ruled, with Western support, from 1965 to 1997. In 1971, he renamed the
country Zaire and himself Mobutu Sese Seko (http://somanyinterestingthings.blogspot.com/2015/02/upper-crust-to-dust.html). In its list of "Top 15 Toppled Dictators," Time magazine called him "the archetypal African dictator": http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2097426_2097427_2097458,00.html
No Longer in the Dark
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| artist's drawing of matter being sucked into black hole NASA/JPL-Caltech |
We now have a map of dark matter in space. While it's a highly accurate map, it covers only 0.4 percent of the cosmos. Still, it's a big deal, in that it shows where the dark matter is and isn't, which,
Just Because: 'Speak, Memory'
And here, I must share the line from Lolita that continues to tickle me all these years later. It, unfortunately, is in French and kind of untranslatable, but for those who understand French, it's just fun. Humbert Humbert is ringing the doorbell of Lolita's house: "Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne." Just a miniscule glimpse of the man's facility with and love of language ~ and his sense of humor.
In 1951, Nabokov published Speak, Memory, an autobiography whose chapters had been previously published as short stories in various magazines, mostly the New Yorker. It is subtitled An Autobiography Revisited. In his Foreword, Nabokov wrote, "The present work is a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections ranging geographically from St. Petersburg to St. Nazaire, and covering thirty-seven years, from August 1903 to May 1940, with only a few sallies into later space-time."
(Reading the first paragraph, it is hard for me not to think back on the recent post about the challenges of giftedness [http://somanyinterestingthings.blogspot.com/2015/04/brilliant-shadows.html], and particularly the difficulties inherent in seeing The Big Picture, especially when one is young and emotionally incapable of dealing with it.)
Speak, Memory
One
I
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.
Such fancies are not foreign to young lives. Or, to put it otherwise, first and last things often tend to have an adolescent note—unless, possibly, they are directed by some venerable and rigid religion. Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness of both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by
happy bEarthDay
The man we mostly have to thank for Earth Day, Sen. Gaylord Nelson (1916-2005), was a Democrat from Wisconsin. It was about 10 years earlier that he started thinking about how best to focus the spotlight on the environment and the harm being done to it. He tried various means, including talking President Kennedy into a "national conservation tour," but it wasn't until he began using people power that the day took off and politicians started listening (or pretending to). "I was satisfied that if we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda," he wrote. "It was a big gamble, but worth a try": http://earthday.envirolink.org/history.html
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| WPRI.com |
Plus, what better time to learn a little something about the gloriousness that sparkles under our feet? Chert! (thanks to KD): http://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/education/chert-faq.htm
Big Sheet
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| Alex Wong/Getty Images |
What made this carta so magna was that, in addition to various and sundry rules having to do with the feudal system, it pretty much said that the king had to obey certain laws, just like the rest of us. It also included a clause that many consider the first guarantee of trial by jury and of habeas corpus. It was not an immediate success and was reissued several times before it finally, in 1225, became part of English statute law. Still, the fine citizens of Britain the Great will be celebrating as only they can (website): http://magnacarta800th.com/
Brilliant Shadows
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| Lewis Terman |
Just Because: 'Open Veins'
Like Günter Grass, Galeano is perhaps best known for his first work, published in 1971, the seminal Las venas abiertas de América Latina, or Open Veins of Latin America: five centuries of the pillage of a continent. (Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave President Barack Obama a copy the first time they met.) Between that and his other best-known book, Days and Nights of Love and War, it's hard to know which to share, but I'm going with Open Veins. Even then, though, his introduction and Chapter 1 are equally deserving of being excerpted. This edition is translated by Cedric Belfrage.
Open Veins of Latin America
"We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity."
—From the Revolutionary Proclamation of the Junta Tuitiva, La Paz, July 16, 1809
Introduction: 120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane
The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations. Centuries passed, and Latin America perfected its role. We are no longer in the era of marvels when fact surpassed fable and imagination was shamed by the trophies of conquest—the lodes of gold, the mountains of silver. But our region still works as a menial. It continues to exist at the service of others' needs, as a source and reserve of oil and iron, of copper and meat, of fruit and coffee, the raw materials and foods destined for rich countries which profit more from consuming them than Latin America does from producing them. The taxes collected by the buyers are much higher than the prices received by the sellers; and after all, as Alliance for Progress coordinator Covey T. Oliver said in July 1968, to speak of fair prices is a "medieval" concept, for we are in the era of free trade.
The more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business. Our inquisitor-hangman systems function not only for the dominating external markets; they also provide gushers of profit from foreign loans and investments in the dominated internal markets. Back in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson observed: "You hear of 'concessions' to
Just Because: 'The Tin Drum'
This translation is by Breon Mitchell.
The Tin Drum
BOOK ONE
The Wide SkirtGRANTED: I'M AN INMATE in a mental institution; my keeper watches me, scarcely lets me out of sight, for there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can't see through blue-eyed types like me.
So my keeper can't possibly be my enemy. I've grown fond of this man peeping through the door, and the moment he enters my room I tell him incidents from my life so he can get to know me in spite of the peephole between us. The good fellow seems to appreciate my stories, for the moment I've finished some tall tale he expresses his gratitude by showing me one of his latest knotworks. Whether he's an artist remains to be seen. But an exhibition of his works would be well received by the press, and would entice a few buyers too. He gathers ordinary pieces of string from his patients' rooms after visiting hours, disentangles them, knots them into multilayered, cartilaginous specters, dips them in plaster, lets them harden, and impales them on knitting needles mounted on little wooden pedestals.
He often plays with the notion of coloring his creations. I advise him not to, point toward my white metal bed and ask him to imagine this most perfect of all beds painted in multiple hues. Horrified, he claps his keeper's hands to his head, struggles to arrange his somewhat inflexible features into an expression of manifold shock, and drops his polychrome plans.
My white-enameled metal hospital bed thus sets a standard. To me it is more; my bed is a goal I've finally reached, it is my consolation, and could easily become my faith if the administration would allow me to make a few changes. I'd like to have the bed rails raised even higher to keep anyone from coming too close.
Once a week Visitors Day disrupts the silence I've woven between my white metal bars. It signals the arrival of those who wish to save me, who find pleasure in loving me, who seek to value, respect,
China's Rare Earth
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| Richard John Seymour/Unknown Fields |
A New Chapter for Libraries
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| booksellers along the Bosporus, Istanbul KW |
These little book houses may be just part of an evolution away from the traditional public library, says journalist Alex Johnson in his book Improbable Libraries. "The very concept of a library is evolving," he writes: "many of these libraries operate on principles that differ fundamentally from the workings of most traditional public and university libraries." Whether they're pop-up bookstores or open-air, 24/7 "social structures" or librarians on camelback, they are proof of people's need for the communal and convivial and of how books and the sharing of them can fill it (slideshow): http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150409-the-worlds-oddest-libraries
The View From Within
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| the S House, Saitama Prefecture Koichi Torimura |
No Place Like Home
Meals and Memories
Better Know a Philosopher
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| Friedrich Nietzsche |
Who said "God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown"? Well, that was the first one I got right in this quiz on philosophers' quotes, and it's only because of that famous graffito "'God is dead.' ~ Nietzsche; 'Nietzsche is dead.' ~ God" So, moving on ... how about "Genuine ignorance is more profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with a varnish waterproof to new ideas"? The great thing about this quiz is that the correct answer comes with a short explanation. (This stymied me for a moment: to move on to the next question, click on the correct answer, whether you got it or not): http://blog.oup.com/2015/04/which-philosopher-said-it-quiz/
Rides Around the World
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| taxis in Dubai |
Gone and Forgotten
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| the Wilhelm Gustloff Russ Willoughby Collection |
We all know the story of the RMS (which stands for Royal Mail Ship, btw) Titanic, if not the real one, then Hollywood's version, and most of us think of it as the greatest accident involving a passenger-carrying ship ever. But it wasn't. Maybe we don't know about the Wilhelm Gustloff because it sank in the last year of World War II, or maybe it was because it was a German ship named after a Nazi leader, or maybe it was because it was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, and at the time, we thought of the Soviets as our allies. But it was carrying more than 10,000 people, mostly refugees, half of whom were children, and the death toll was six times that of the Titanic. from wisegeek.com:
Most people know about the Titanic, the large passenger ship that sank in 1912. Some even believe it to be the worst maritime disaster, ever. But the worst maritime disaster in history is actually the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German military ship which sank in 1945, causing the deaths of an estimated 9,343 people on board. The death toll was six times the death toll of the Titanic disaster which took the lives of 1,517 people.
The Wilhelm Gustloff was a 700-feet long luxury liner that began cruising in 1937. By 1945, it was serving to evacuate German civilians from East Prussia which was quickly being taken over by the
The Lens and Eye
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| the Lytro Illum |
Apocalypse Then
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| AP photographer Nick Ut |
The Vietnam War ended with South Vietnam's official surrender to North Vietnam on April 30, 1975. Many, if not most, Americans had pretty much turned against the war by then. Daily news coverage, complete with film and photos of both soldiers and civilians, exposed the horror in ways words could not. One of the most powerful images from that time was that of a young girl running naked down a road, crying. There are other children running with her, and U.S. soldiers who aren't, and behind them all the sky is dark with smoke. The picture was taken just outside the village of Trang Bang by Vietnamese-American photographer Nick Ut on June 8, 1972. Ut recalls the day and the girl, 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, whose life he saved and with whom he has kept in touch, in this interview: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/04/vietnam-war-napalm-girl-photo-today
The Duke and the Emperor
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| screen shot |
And Now, Yemen
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| Yemen's capital, Sana'a Ferdinand Reus |
Snail Fail
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| one morning's cull |
The Other Shoe Has Dropped
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| screen shot |
The technology behind this is quite impressive ~ and you know this is just the beginning (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZyLHz2GlYs#t=13
Come On Down
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| London's Trafalgar Square last year Gonzales Photo/Michael Hornbogen |
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