Radio Australia: Cricket Australia is pushing ahead with its new Long Live Cricket media campaign aimed at promoting the game and highlighting its role in Australian culture. The TV ads are also running in a number of cricket mad countries - including India - not that such countries need to be reminded of Australia's dominance of the sport. Australia demolished Pakistan during the first international test in Perth last weekend - the win only fuelling ongoing debate about whether its deadly grip was good for the sport.

A stocking-stuffer from the NY Times -- an article about the growing specialized textile super-cities in southern China, including Datang, producer of one-third of the world's socks!. Add to it the fact that the word "socks" is inherently funny once it appears more than once per paragraph, and you get wonderful quotes and captions like: Each year, the town is decorated with balloons and flags for the annual sock fair. Banners promoting socks are draped across buildings.

NY Times on the anglicization of German advertising. Hallo, Denglish:

A private company in Hanover, Satelliten Media Design, in conjunction with Hanover University, keeps track of one key aspect of the entire mixed language phenomenon, annually tabulating the 100 words most used in German advertising. In the 1980's, only one English word made the list. The word, a bit improbably, was "fit." By 2004, there were 23 English words on the chart.

The first four words are still German - wir (meaning we), Sie (you), mehr (more) and Leben (life). In fifth place is the English "your," followed farther down the list by world, life, business, with, power, people, better, more, solutions and 13 more.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: A war may be about to break out on the streets of the Pacific, although this time it has nothing to do with gangs, coups and disaffected army generals. An Australian restaurant chain serving up one of the western world's most popular fast-foods, pizza, hit the region this month. And with the promise of an authentic, mouth-watering cheesy topping served on a thick, doughy base, the restaurant's backers say they're ready to start a revolution. But traditional Pacific pizza purveyors say a home-grown secret weapon, referred to simply as the "Bombay", will help them fend off the Aussie upstarts.

[email fragment] A few weeks back I heard a live session with Allison Krauss and Union Station that I thought you'd enjoy. The music's super-tight, the interview portions vaguely muppet-like.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: In Guam, Santa was grounded at Anderson Airforce base due to bad weather. Yes, Santa Claus ! And while it is the season to be jolly it's also monsoon season across the region with tropical storm Talas making an impression around Guam. So much so the storm made the US Airforce in Guam cancel this year's 52nd annual Christmas drop of presents across Micronesia.

The latest in the "My Poet Had a Day Job!" series:
Poems, Bombs, and the Road to Baghdad

[via aldaily]

[email fragment] Speaking of Japanese pop, have you ever heard the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra? They had a live session at KCRW a few months back that was a lot of fun. Their lead guitarist plays a Telecaster that is the electric guitar of my dreams. audio/video

NY Times on the Catholic Worker and their quaintly radical -- or is it radically quaint -- protest tactics and all around good work. Dorothy Day would be proud.

"The interesting thing about doing silent marches in New York City is it leaves things open to reaction," Mr. Daloisio said. "When you march and yell, people make up their minds fast. When you have a long line of people walking silently it gives people an opportunity to look and think.

[email fragment] I've been watching more this year than last year -- turns out we get a few commercial free movie channels along with the soccer. There was a glut for a couple months, but I realized that watching more than one or two a week wound up stressing me out: both the worrying about Is the VCR programmed right? and, more, just immersing myself in plot after new plot. Lately I stick with soccer, foreign-language news, Everybody Loves Raymond, and a triumverate of "old-seeming teens and young-seeming adults" dramas: Gilmore Girls, Joan of Arcadia, and The O.C.

But on Sunday nights the classic movies channel runs old silent films, which I like a lot, what with their being silent and all.

Faves of the past year: Tortilla Soup (Mexican-American remake of Eat Drink Man Woman); About a Boy; The Outlaw Josey Wales (becoming quite a Clint Eastwood buff); A Nun's Story; Bringing Up Baby; Langaan: Once Upon a Time in India (Hindi film about a hilariously epic colonial cricket match); The Milky Way (sound pic with silent comedy star Harold Lloyd).

Lost tribe leaves the jungle for brave new world of mobiles

[email fragment] I was just now thinking it's been five full years, plus three or four days, since my arrival in Nairobi. In unconscious celebration of that fact (maybe) I've been reading a book by the early-20th-century Kenyan colonist/aviatrix Beryl Markham. I actually read the book ("West With the Night") once before, but this time I found out our local library had a copy of a Spanish translation ("Al oeste con la noche") so I thought I'd give it a go. Even though I know the story and my Spanish comprehension has been getting decent, it's been actually harder than I thought it would be -- could be the translator's fault, or I guess also when I'm reading a South American novel, the sections I don't understand still exude a general atmospheric Spanishness, so when I'm getting nothing I'm still getting something. This works less well when it's a Spanish version of an English version of a memory of a conversation that took place in Swahili.

NY Times on Satellite Radio N. of the Border:

Though XM and Sirius signals reach Canada, and some Canadians furtively own receivers, the equipment is not yet legal. The hitch is a decades-old Canadian broadcasting policy meant to guarantee that the content on Canadian airwaves is sufficiently Canadian (about 35 percent for the typical music radio station) and not overwhelmed by a flood of American pop culture.

[email fragment] I just discovered some kind of strange music today -- it's this group called Culcha Candela, who prove that you can indeed mix equal parts dancehall reggae, salsa, and German hip-hop ... though in my estimation they fall just slightly short of proving that you should. Still it's fun in a polyglot-glut sort of way.

They've got a 9min. realaudio sampler from their latest album.

[email fragment] For some reason I found myself watching the Cartoon Network last night, a program called "¡Mucha Lucha!" which is of course a sort of Anime-ish (my best descriptor, but probably wrong) cartoon about a school for masked Mexican-style wrestlers. All the characters speak a sort of Spanglish. ("I think that's buena!" etc.) The weird bit is that neither the creators nor the voice-actors (with one or two exceptions) seem to be Latino. All told I didn't know whether to be excited or troubled. I read somewhere how Latin American culture's up next to be strip-mined by the powers of mass-pop-culture-production so this might be one of the opening shots.

[email fragment] Also: ADJECTIVE ALERT: by way of keeping tabs on the alumni yesterday I watched an "Inside the Actors' Studio" featuring Natalie Portman, wherein she talked of her Israeli birth, of what it was like to play Anne Frank on the stage. Then, in the final psychological-questionnaire that James Lipton always rattles off, she reported her least favorite sound to be that of European police sirens ("WEE-WAA WEE-WAA WEE-WAA") because they always freak her Jewish self out, sounding, as she put it, "all Holocausty".

[emial fragment] Been reading The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman, which is an interesting argument but makes me feel like I'm DESTROYING WESTERN CIVILIZATION every time I turn on the TV. Also Shah of Shahs by this Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, and Jimmy Jo Joyce's Ulysses, which I have to admit I've given up trying not to be confused by.

[email fragment] John Donne RULESSZZZ!!! I got through half of Africa with his collected poems in my pack. Several of his last poems have been pretty helpful [...] And every time I end a letter with "Yours, etc." I'm specifically quoting his letters.

I keep meaning to read his "Devotions on emergent occasions" (whence cometh the line "for whom the bell tolls" etc.), which get the high recommend by Philip Yancey in Soul Survivor.

And, when I get to London again, to go to St. Paul's and see his tomb there -- he got up off his death bed and wrapped himself in a winding sheet to pose for the statue.

Death to Interesting! Well maybe not fully. For a while now I've tried to refrain from the i-word, mainly because it's often a bit lazy -- saying "oh did you see that article? It was very interesting" saves us the trouble of coming up with any sort of specific description. But more than that, it also exempts us from aesthetic and (more importantly) moral judgement -- allowing us to like something without having to explain why we like it, what makes it worthy of our attention.

There's a quote from Walker Percy's novel Lancelot where the narrator notes that in the past things and acts were judged on a continuum of Good and Bad, but now it seems like the moral scale runs instead from Interesting to Boring. Granted, the character who says it is something of a psychopath but still ...

And then there's this, from Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor:

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses. "I look pale," said Byron, looking into the mirror. "I should like to die of consumption." Why? asked his tuburcular friend Tom Moore, who was visiting Byron in Patras in February 1828. "Because the ladies would all say, 'Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying.'" Perhaps the main gift to sensibility made by the Romantics is not the aesthetics of cruelty and the beauty of the morbid (as Mario Praz suggested in his famous book), or even the demand for unlimited personal liberty, but the nihilistic and sentimental idea of "the interesting."

So there you have it, the condensed qualities of the interesting-obsessed: laziness, amorality, nihilism, and sentimentality. Take your pick.

[via This American Life's episode 97, "Death to Wacky"]

NYTimes:"When these modern machines arrived, Kiswahili came up with a quick word for something that didn't exist in our culture," said Clara Momanyi, a Swahili professor at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. "That was 'kompyuta.'"

But scholars subsequently opted for a more local term to describe these amazing machines, she said. It is tarakilishi, which is a combination of the word for "image" and the word for "represent."

The Swahili experts grappled with a variety of other words. How does one say folder? Should it be folda, which is commonly used, or kifuko, a more formal term?

Is a fax a faksi, as the Tanzanians call it, or a kipepesi?

Everyone seemed to agree that an e-mail message was a barua pepe, which means a fast letter. Everyone also seemed to agree that the effort they were engaged in to bring Swahili to cyberspace was long overdue.

Ahhh ... takes me back to my own senior-thesis researches. I'm glad to see the appointed experts are making efforts to balance westernisms and swahili-isms to make for a technical vocabulary that will be useful to the greatest number of people. Seems a bit better than the 1980s technical dictionary I was writing about.

[full article]

Radio Austraila/Pacific Beat: The Solomon Islands Education Committee is meeting in Honiara to decide whether to give the go-ahead to a new university. A company registered as Cornell University Solomon Islands has applied to establish a tertiary institution in the capital, although little is yet known about the types of courses on offer. The proposal comes less than a year after the now notorious King's University scam, which saw a small group of Indian students enrol in medical degrees, only to find that the university didn't exist.

[email fragment] Any contacts with Prof. Miroslav Volf down at Yale Div? I'd heard good rumblings about him from [magazine] and more recently [campus ministry] circles ... a couple Sundays ago I spent some time hunting up stuff of his Christianity Today had published, like the devotional he happened to be giving at a UN event the morning of 9/11, about reconciliation and Paul Celan ("dein goldenes Haar Margarethe / dein ashenes Haar Sulamith" [english trans.]) and the "Will to Embrace".

The Guardian: Indian farmers have come up with what they think is the real thing to keep crops free of bugs.

Instead of paying hefty fees to international chemical companies for patented pesticides, they are reportedly spraying their cotton and chilli fields with Coca-Cola.

[full text]

One of my favorite things about the New York Times website is the little weather line that runs right under the big "New York Times" flag. Specifically what I liked was that if you hadn't told the NYT database where you were located, the weather line was actually just a link to a page where you could add that info: "Personalize your weather", it said. I loved that little phrase so much that in 5+ years of near-daily use I never followed the link. For me it was way less important to know the actual local temp and precip than to be reminded that the Internet (which promises omnipresence and omnipotence) and the New York Times (itself offering omniscience) thought it sensible to suggest that my weather might actually be personalizable with a click. Well if you aspire to the attributes of God, why not?

Sadly, the little joke is finally over: sometime in the past few days they switched the default to just tell you whether it's raining in New York.

For pre-election listening -- some more earnest antiwar vinyl, from Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. The single's called "What if we all stopped paying taxes?" which, apart from sounding nice, is a weird so-far-left-it-merges-right deal: anti-Bush, pro-tax-cut. The real gem though is the b-side, a superfunky version of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land".

[via tunes.co.uk]

"Chuu Chuu!!" -- What the Bengali donkey says. For his Afrikaner donkey cousin's retort (and much much much much more), head to Sounds of the World's Animals. I've been wishing for something like this for a long time. Some day I'll have to dredge up my old Tamil barnyard vocabulary and send it to them.

[via xblog]

"'The biggest tomato producer in the world today?' Smith paused, for dramatic effect. 'China. You don't think of tomato being a part of Chinese cuisine, and it wasn't ten years ago. But it is now.'" -- Malcom Gladwell, "The Ketchup Connundrum"

[via aldaily.com]

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "A Tongan nobleman has complained to the New Zealand government, after he and his wife were detained and their flight from Australia held up for 45 minutes -- and all, apparently, because of his name. The Honourable Luani, like all Tongan aristocrats, only has one name. But when he and his wife were flying home to Tonga from Sydney via Auckland at the end of September, he says the Air New Zealand ground staff found his lack of a last name a huge problem. Although, a spokeswoman for Air New Zealand says the airline has since written to the Honourable Luani to formally apologise, and has paid some compensation."

"The Chayma and Tamanac verbs have an enormous complication of tenses: two Presents, four Preterites, three Futures." -- Humboldt on northeast Venezuelan indigenous languages.

Got sent a NY Times article about the local Bengali-language independent press, interesting in itself, but even more so its mention of the New York Independent Press Association's project, Voices that Must Be Heard, which runs weekly articles (in translation where necessary) from various local ethnic newspapers. Scrolling through the archives of news stories and editorials provides something of an overview of immigrant and minority experiences in New York (and the broader US). The overall feel of things is simultaneously small-towny and internationally engaged. Three samples that jumped out at me:

Why Bush must go: Armenians should wake up and smell the Turkish coffee

Don't call me Puerto Rican; I'm Ecuadorian

What is gained and what is lost in America?

Polish rollerblader crosses country to seek help from Bill Gates

[email fragment] Are you getting the LA Times at home there? Last month I wrote a little applescript to download front page PDFs from a handful of newspapers via newseum.org (newseum.org!!). Of the batch I get the LA Times has become the hands-down favorite. Whoever their weekday P.1 and photo editors are, I'm a fan. The photos especially, which are almost always great compositions. I'm also developing this theory that they're purposely de-saturated, both to bring them in line with the elegantly utilitarian layouts, and with the actual light and landscape of the region. Even when they run the same AP photo as the Boston Globe, the LA version winds up looking like it was taken with a zoom from the grounds of the Getty museum.

Have you ever seen the old Audrey Hepburn movie A Nun's Story? I watched it on tape a couple weeks ago. Very good, quietly surprising on several levels, and brimming with good spiritual-thought-provoker moments around issues of calling, submission, authority, and the like.

Trio of top-of-the-page headlines in today's Toronto Globe and Mail:

• SpaceShipOne wins X prize ($10-MILLION (U.S))


• Canada gets tiny smart car


• Janet Leigh dies quietly

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was plenty to be sad about, but one thing I remember sticking out in a particularly resonant-metaphoric way was the story or two that came out about Sikh immigrants being attacked because their assailants assumed, given the turbans, that they must be Muslims -- the irony being that in my understanding, one of the original reasons for the Sikh mode of dress was to differentiate them from their Hindu and Muslim neighbors in the Punjab. I think the early Gurus believed that if the Sikhs stuck out, then they'd have to stick together, and the community would be stronger. Hence the strong Sikh martial tradition too. Anyway, today there was a nice resonant-metaphoric counterpoint to all that, in today's NY Times article about Akal Security, a huge and growing guard-supplying firm owned and operated by a New Mexico-based Sikh sect. Lots of meaty church-state, free-practice, open-bid, non-profit type details. Plus, who couldn't love that the sect's founder lives on a ranch in Espanola, NM called the "Hacienda de Guru Ram Das Gurudwara".

[email fragment] Motorcycle Diaries: Up a notch via the Nic Harcourt interview w/ that actor dude (Gael Garcia Bernal? I think.); back down one thanks to Slate n you.

Also this from Lawrence Weschler, "Anatomy Lesson", Atlantic Monthly, October 97, about visiting the Rembrandt painting in its gallery during a break from covering the Bosnia war crimes tribunal:

The Anatomy Lesson is so famously overexposed, so crusted over with conventional regard, as to be almost impossible to see afresh. And indeed, when I recently came upon the painting once again, rather than seeing it I found myself recalling an essay I hadn't thought about in almost thirty years -- the English critic John Berger's 1967 rumination on the occasion of Che Guevara's death. Responding to the simultaneous appearance seemingly all over the world of that ghastly photo of Che's felled body, stretched out half naked across a bare surface and surrounded by the proud Bolivian officers and soldiers who had succeeded in bagging the revolutionary leader, Berger made a startling connection to Rembrandt'sAnatomy Lesson. Gee, I remember thinking at the time, this man doesn't look at his morning paper the way I look at mine.

 
[via google image search]

"Truth exists, but people have a vested interest in not knowing it." -- Errol Morris eschews relativist doubts in an interview with The Believer about, among other things, whether or not he's a documentary filmmaker. I watched the second half of his movie The Thin Blue Line yesterday, and was curious to find out the details behind how he gets everyone he to make eye contact with the camera, but I discovered and got lost in the interview instead. Another Morris gem: "By the way, I have a theory about why the National Enquirer is more reliable than the New York Times... Elizabeth Taylor can sue. The Kurds can't."

My Saturday late-morning tradition: browsing the new releases at the British dance record store Tunes.co.uk. The selection's good -- a little electronic- and house-heavy, perhaps, but with nice nerdy-but-hip-hop and international releases (West African funk, for instance, or some long-sought-after examples of great-sounding rap in Portuguese). The best part is their RealAudio samples usually run to three or four minutes, rather than the 30 second standard at iTunes or Amazon.

Today's listening included The Pharcyde's sweet "Passin' Me By, with its ur-cool background loop (here I define ur-cool as anything Ira Glass has used as a background track for a This American Life story), and clever, diverse rhymes on the going-after-but-not-getting-the-wrong-girl theme. Where else in hip-hop do you hear an MC say something so self-effacing as "Damn I wish I wasn't such a wimp"?

The Guardian: "With a disregard for science which would have made Mercator spin in his grave, Foale dragged lines across the screen and shoved interchange stations about as if he was playing with a fictive city. 'No, it's definitely not a map,' he said. 'A map is geographic. This is a diagram.'" --Nicholas Crane on the ... um ... whatever that reshaped (our perceptions of) London.

A little living gem from Alexander von Humboldt's turn-of-the-19th-century descriptions of what's now northeastern Venezuela:

Of all the productions on the coasts of Araya, that which the people consider as the most extraordinary, or we may say the most marvellous, is 'the stone of the eyes,' (piedra de los ojos.) This calcareous substance is a frequent subject of conversation: being, according to the natural philosophy of the natives, both a stone and an animal. It is found in the sand, where it is motionless; but if placed on a polished surface, for instance on a pewter or earthen plate, it moves when excited by lemon juice. If placed in the eye, the supposed animal turns on itself, and expels every other foreign substance that has been accidentally introduced. At the new salt-works, and at the village of Maniquarez, these stones of the eyes were offered to us by hundreds, and the natives were anxious to show us the experiment of the lemon juice. They even wished to put sand into our eyes, in order that we might ourselves try the efficacy of the remedy. It was easy to see that the stones are thin and porous opercula, which have formed part of small univalve shells. Their diameter varies from one to four lines. One of their two surfaces is plane, and the other convex. These calcareous opercula effervesce with lemon juice, and put themselves in motion in proportion as the carbonic acid is disengaged. By the effect of a similar reaction, loaves placed in an oven move sometimes on a horizontal plane; a phenomenon that has given occasion, in Europe, to the popular prejudice of enchanted ovens.

[email fragment] Hey, I had a Spanish usage question -- I was just looking at El Pais (Madrid) and they abbreviate Estados Unidos as EE UU -- I'm assuming the doubling is because it's a plural? Anyway, I'm wondering how you would pronounce it if you were reading the abbreviation out loud. Would it be "eh eh ooh ooh"? I kind of like it that way -- sounds like a noise a chimp might make.

[email fragment] Thanks for the [Lawrence Weschler Inteview] link. There are a few equally great prose tidbits in the longer interview (linked therein) from which it was excised. I've also been following Weschler's current residency at Transom.org -- maybe one of these days I'll gather the courage and the words to post something. But the whole thing's worth browsing through, and, as usual, there are some great links to outside sources (like, say, a PDF of the sublime quasi-intro to Vermeer in Bosnia).

And speaking of W. (ah, to speak of a W. without deeply conflicted political emotions), have you gotten to see one of the prototypes of Omnivore, Weschler's doomed-from-the-go magazine? I ordered one from the MJT bookstore. Wonderful (that word again!) in every sense.

[email fragment] I'm not sure I can be that much more help than any decent guidebook. Also, most of my knowledge is at least six years out of date -- okay for monuments, less so for restaurants.

My main general suggestion would be to try taking a long second-class train journey. It's roughing it a little, but it's a really great way to see something of the diversity of the country, and to meet lower-to-middle-class Indians who don't make their living in the tourist trade. Rail journeys from Mumbai to Bangalore, Delhi to Bangalore, and Mysore to Chennai are among my favorite Indian memories. Note that in terms of cultural experience, second class is actually preferable to first, which can feel like being sealed in a 1970s doctor's waiting room.

Found on iTunes this morning the album "Is It Rolling Bob? - A Reggae Tribute to Bob Dylan, Vol. 1" which features, among more predictable adaptations, a nearly unrecognizable dancehall version of "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Even the 30sec preview's a sound to behear.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "An American zoologist is returning to rural Papua New Guinea to videotape local customs, after an overwhelming response to a similar expedition last year. Mark Wanner, a zoological manager at the St Louis Zoo, last year developed a school curriculum on world cultures, using Inuit from Alaska, the Masai of Kenya, and Australian Aborigines." Zoologist?!? Of course, of course, science should be -- as it was of old -- more interdisciplinary, with physicists doing geology and naturalists studying the stars. But still, can't we at least refer to Mr Wanner, despite his specialty, as at least a temporary anthropologist?

NY Times: "In another study, just completed, the researchers found that people who were told that they loved asparagus as children were much more drawn to that slender delicacy than those whose memories were left alone."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/health/psychology/31psyc

CHEF DE L'ETAT , PRESIDENT DU F.U.N.K.

The King of Cambodia has a web site:

http://www.norodomsihanouk.info/

Check out esp. the royal messages, including, as reported by The
Economist, a recent failed online attempt to abdicate the throne. O
to read French now ...

[email fragment] Yeah, the Warhol book was the one by Koestenbaum. It was quite stylish/stylized, but I got the feeling that it (and the series) are kind of designed to be read by people who are already familiar with the subjects' conventional bios. The strange thing is, most of what I previously knew about Warhol came from this article we ran in [the magazine] a few years back, about the depth of his oft-overlooked religious faith and practice -- the daily masses, the work in soup kitchens, etc. So I was familiar with Andy the Closet Catholic, and now, thanks to the latest bio, with Andy the Supergay Filmmaker (the only graphics in the book were 1 ballpoint drawing and a half-dozen black and white stills from "Empire" and "Blow-Job" and "Haircut No. 1"). But the central field of vision's still somewhat a blur.

The latest from Moscow: the magazine Novy Ochevidets, a New Yorker clone (though the editors apparently deny it, with a wink). [GO]


[via aldaily.com]

More thrilling moments from Viking lore, from Njal's Saga, Chapter 102: THE WEDDING OF HAUSKULD, THE PRIEST OF WHITENESS

[...]
Then they go to the Court of Laws, and Njal spoke and said,
"Thee, Skapti Thorod's son and you other chiefs, I call on, and
say, that methinks our lawsuits have come into a dead lock, if we
have to follow up our suits in the Quarter Courts, and they get
so entangled that they can neither be pleaded nor ended.
Methinks, it were wiser if we had a Fifth Court, and there
pleaded those suits which cannot be brought to an end in the
Quarter Courts."
[...]

Where have you gone, Doogie Howser?



[via an ad on the front page of the Hindustan Times]

Have you heard about Newseum.org? Every night, three or four hundred newspapers worldwide upload PDFs of the next day's front page to the Web site, which makes them available for browsing and download. The "map view" feature is particularly exciting -- roll your cursor over all them dots and see what made the front page in all them places.

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/

I've actually, though, graduated from the map view to direct downloads. I figured out how to write a script that would get my computer to download, with a single click, the PDFs for the NY Times, LA Times, USA Today, Boston Globe, Birmingham News (sweet home Alabama!), Sydney Morning Herald, Hindustan Times (Delhi), O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), El Tiempo (Bogota), El Universal (Mexico City), Toronto Globe and Mail, The Guardian (UK), El Pais (Madrid), Le Monde (Paris), and this paper from northern Germany with decent layout but a forgettable name. Then I can unplug the laptop, open them all in my PDF viewer, and read/skim/view it all.

I find the PDFs far far superior to looking at the same papers' websites -- more of each article is on the same page, and you can literally zoom in and out to read rather than having to click on a headline and be catapulted to a whole different page. And way more photo- and typo- and info-graphic possibilities.

Also, one gets to see the dizzying way in which stories -- and not just the major news stories -- bounce across the globe in different languages and layouts. One about Viagra use among young men started in Delhi, popped up the next day in one of the US papers, and two days later: Bogota.

Anyway, this has become a little obsessive, but oh well.

[via the web log newsdesigner.org]

[email fragment on South Africa's fast-dwindling opposition parties] Meanwhile, though the SOCCER party has vanished (or maybe changed into the Independent Sport Party (ISP)), many other old and new favorites plug away on -- KISS, the Pro Death-Penalty Party, the Super Party, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, the God's People Party, and UMMA (the United Moral Movement for the Advancement of All). Below's linked the full, logo-rific list of parties local and national for the 2004 elections. [GO]

Lately I've been realizing that all my favorite programs on public radio are the ones that feature hip-hop music from time to time: This American Life, Morning Becomes Eclectic, and my latest discovery, Pop Vultures. Have you heard of the latter? It's basically music-savvy people talking like teenagers about their favorite pop stars, with everything edited down so it sounds inane yet winds up being, at times, rather profound. There's also a lovely dramatic tension over the whole thing -- you can never quite tell how serious they are (which, given that it's produced by Garrison Kiellor, the king of mixing celebration and mockery, ain't so surprising). Listening to the first couple episodes, I couldn't tell whether I loved it or hated it, which probably suggests the former.

Anyhow, lis'n up: http://popvultures.publicradio.org/programs/

I'd suggest starting with the earlier episodes, which I think are, if not better, at least more alive with a sort of "hey we could do anything" spirit. It's always fun to see how a new show finds its feet.

[via the Ira Glass interview at transom.org]

[email fragment] Glad you've been hitting the Wodehouse and Theroux. For some reason reading the latter's always felt to me like a kind of guilty pleasure, only I don't feel so guilty and it isn't that pleasurable. For some reason the phrase that keeps running through my head is "A first-rate second-rate writer", which coming from me is uncharacteristically uncharitable, and is just the sort of thing he always had Naipaul saying about others in "Sir Vidia's Shadow". Anyway, what books? I've been reading some afrocuban folk tales, Pat Barker's WWI psychological novel "Regeneration", and Ha Jin's novel "Waiting". about a very boring extramarital affair. And about to start the Andy Warhol biography from the Penguin Lives series.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "In less than a week, a Court sitting in New Zealand is expected to decide whether commandeering a British navy ship, sailing it to a remote deserted island then sinking it amounts to a declaration of independence. The Court of Appeal of the remote Pitcairn Island -- a British Pacific territory about half way between Australia and South America -- is being asked to decide whether seven islanders should face trial. The men are facing 96 sex charges, some of which date back to the 1960s and relate to underage girls. The public defenders acting for the men say that because the island was settled by the famous mutineers of the Bounty 214 years ago, along with their Polynesian wives, English laws don't extend to the island. But observers of international law say the court is unlikely to accept that an act of mutiny is enough to elude the long arm of English law."

An NGO I've started following and supporting a little recently is called Search for Common Ground; they focus on mediation, conflict resolution, etc. -- getting Hutus to talk to Tutsis, pro-choice activists to pro-life activists, Democrats to Republicans, Israelis to Palestinians. They also support ecumenical efforts that acknowledge the real, serious differences between religions -- and so make one a lot less queasy than the "You know, deep down, we all believe the same thing" types. Anyway, in their latest article packet was an op-ed by one of their officers, an Arab American, in the Detroit Free Press, calling Arab Americans to help step up to the plate in offering leadership in the whole obviously horrendously stalled "peace process", and also offered the following aside, which I found compelling: "What remains baffling is that topics that are off-limits for discussion in the United States get a much fuller hearing in Israel itself. Compare the diversity of critical opinions that appear in Israel's major newspapers to those in the United States -- you'd think the United States had a greater stake in defending the occupation than does Israel."

Been sampling some German pop these days on iTunes.de. Right now the only artist stepping above novelty value is Nena (of 99 Luftballons fame). Some of her more recent stuff reminds me of Julieta Venegas, my current fave-en-espanyol.

"Mortally wounded, Garfield lay in the White House for weeks. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, tried unsuccessfully to find the bullet with an induction-balance electrical device which he had designed. On September 6, Garfield was taken to the New Jersey seaside. For a few days he seemed to be recuperating, but on September 19, 1881, he died from an infection and internal hemorrhage."

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/jg20.html

"Today, Garfield the comic strip appears in nearly 2,600 newspapers around the globe, and its readership is estimated at 260 million. If the readership number is right, then 4 percent of the world's population reads Garfield every single day."

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102299/

Discovery of the day: German country-Western music, specifically a guy called Tom Astor who, in addition to singing a mean "Country Roads Take Me Home", has a power-trucker-ballad called, no kidding, "Sturm und Drang", as well as a song for which I found the following possibly-poorly-transcribed lyric:

Fahr in die Redneck Riviera,
Marguaritas, icecream, Florida sunshine,
Cowboys, pick-up-trucks and Dosenbier,
Redneck girls, die gibt es nur hier.
nur in der Redneck Riviera.

I suppose all this shouldn't seem quite so bizarre -- after all, I come from a line of German Texans. And there's a genuine country-western classic called "Fraulein", about an American longing for his German lover, which I came to know from Townes Van Zandt's great cover, though just last week I heard a version of it in French, on a Quebec Internet radio station.

[email fragment] Books: Cormac McCarthey, "All the Pretty Horses", and another Wendell Berry novel, and "All Souls Day" by this Dutch guy Cees Nooteboom -- the latter quite good, a heartwarming novel of ideas with some wonderful descriptions of sausage dinners. I also found this book C.S. Lewis wrote in Spanish, something about a lion and a closet, which I'm reading in hopes that less pretension will equal greater comprehension. And this collection of Joan Didion essays from the 1960s.

"Therefore was one single man created first, Adam, to teach you that if anyone destroys a single soul from the children of Man, Scripture charges him as though he had destroyed the whole Universe -- and whoever rescues a single soul from the children of Man, Scripture credits him as if he had saved a whole Universe."

-- Sanhedren 4:5 of the Mishnah

[via the wonderful epilogue to Lawrence Weschler's A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers]

Perhaps the most euphonious headline ever written, from Radio Australia:

Typhoon Tingting roars through Micronesia

I just want to keep saying it over and over. Typhoon Tingting roars through Micronesia. Typhoon Tingting roars through Micronesia. Typhoon Tingting roars through Micronesia.

[email fragment] I've just taken delivery of a set of 300 or so unused European postcards, collected during the 1970s by an elderly woman from northwest Washington, D.C., and auctioned on ebay for the grand sum of $10. From this point on my location may become unclear.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "Job descriptions for some members of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands may have to be re-written to include "crocodile hunter". Four locals on the main island of Guadalcanal have died recently as a result of crocodile attacks. And it seems the success of RAMSI's gun amnesty may be the reason for the increase in the numbers of man-eating crocodiles. In less than a year, RAMSI has successfully restored law-and-order and confiscated most of the high-powered weapons previously used to kill the crocs." Ah, unintended consequences. And with teeth.

Wonderful resource: bobdylan.com, full searchable lyrics, RealAudio samples of every song -- I'm kind of shocked at how useful the site is, at least for answering my questions, because a) it's corporate; b) it's for an artist who's not, as the Zulus say, of the eGeneration; and c) is famously reclusive, purposely mysterious, etc.

Though now iTunes gives the artist site a run for the money, at least when it comes to title searches and audio (I found a great Mac utility, itunesMSP that will play in order every song sample that shows up in an iTunes music store search, which eliminates much clicking).

Atlantic Monthly on the badness of campaign TV ads.

Writing systems of the world: my are there many of them

My latest Spanish reading is none other than "Naufragios", the conquistador/explorer/what-not Cabeza de Vaca's account of his shipwreck and journey overland from Florida to Mexico City. It was written sometime in the 16th century, but I seem to be understanding enough to at least follow the basic plot.

My other new project is a little herb garden on this second-floor deck we've got. It's kind of inspired by Nelson Mandela, who kept a rooftop garden during his final years in prison. He'd give the guards vegetables to win their favor. My parents weren't too happy at first when I mentioned this comparison ("What does that make us? Prison guards?") but they came around in the end ... anyway so far I've got oregano, rosemary, basil, chives, and two kinds of thyme.

Against my better instincts I watched some of the Miss Universe pageant last week. All the finalists kept making me think of praying mantises -- long and lithe and firm, triangular heads and enormous eyes. Actually, most beauty and bodybuilding contestants strike me as at least vaguely insectile.

In other news, watched Monsoon Wedding this week -- a good 'un.

The German Air Guitar Federation

[email fragment] This morning I finished reading "Swann's Way". I'm not sure how many volumes of Proust you have to've read before you can say things like "well, I've been reading Proust and ..." I'm also halfway through Lauren Bacall's autobiography, which evidently won the National Book Award back in the late 70s. I still can't tell whether that was because it's a good book in its own right, or just a good book considering it was written by a movie star. Still, interesting Bogart tidbits.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "The sea cucumber may seem an unlikely icon to attract tourists, but it has been chosen by the Guam Visitors Bureau to promote the rich marine life of Tumon Bay. The bay is central to Guam tourism, as it is where most hotels are located, but encounters with sea cucumbers, or 'balate', have been keeping tourists away from the water. To change this, the Visitors Bureau has decided to turn the creature into a cartoon character and its latest educational tool."

"The Third Unheard: Connecticut Hip-Hop 1979-1983"

I came up with an interesting a philsophy-of-surgery question the other night while watching the latest horribly, horribly written earthquake-disaster miniseries on NBC. Anyhow, there was a surgery scene and I was struck (though it wasn't really anything new) at just how fully masked everyone in the OR is. I understand why that is, of course, in terms of keeping things sterile and all that, but I wonder what the psychological and sociological effect the masking ritual has on the whole process of surgery. I was reminded of an article I read last year in The Economist, on the child-soldiers of LURD, the Liberian revolutionary group, and their penchant for cross-dressing, putting on makeup or wigs of shower caps before committing their various atrocities -- the point being that it was likely a modernization of traditional W.African usages of mask and costume, the idea being that once you don the mask (even one that doesn't conceal your identity), you become in some sense a different person, and so can't be held responsible for your actions. I suppose the Western traditions of Carnival, Halloween, or, in a different mode, bank robbery, are a long similar lines, though with a bit less emphasis on full possession.

Anyway, given the (often necessarily) ritual nature of surgery, it seems at least metaphorically significant that masks are involved -- perhaps as a way of distancing the surgeons from the patient, or indeed from each other, and I guess of disguising the emotions and keeping things as scientific/mechanistic as possible.

Perhaps just a bunch of psychobabble, but my question's this: if someone invented a perfectly transparent surgical mask, hat, etc. -- that would provide all the antiseptic effects as the current system, and allow for full view of facial expressions in the OR, would surgeons go for it? And how might it change the operating room dynamics, both between members of the surgical team, and, at least in one direction, between surgeon and surgee?

[email fragment] First off, Norfolk Island is not, technically, between Australia and New Zealand, in the sense that one couldn't travel in a straight line and intersect all three. It's a little too far north. But we can accurately say it's between New Zealand and New Caledonia, or between Australia and Fiji.

Secondly [in relation to a discussion of the distinctly un-pine-like Norfolk Island Pine], you really should listen to the Australian-born, Norfolk-Island-Recordin' country singer I emailed you about, Kasey Chambers. If only for her song "These Pines", which takes on oodles of new meaning when you consider where it was recorded:

These pines are not the ones that I'm used to
They won't carry me home when I cry
Am I too far gone to recover
Or can I turn if I try
Should I trade my soul for another
Should I stay and pretend that I'm happy
Like so many times before

Yeah these pines
Are not mine
They don't smell so sweet
like the ones in my mind
And I search the needles
'Til I run out of time
But I don't see you in These Pines.

These past few months I've been doing a lot of searches at iTunes.com for the frequency of specific words in song titles, mostly to see which words of a particular set had the most songs with them in the title. i.e.:

Morning 1481
Afternoon 173
Evening 301
Night 4250

Monday 226
Tuesday 83
Wednesday 31
Thursday 29
Friday 186
Saturday 293
Sunday 549

I also learned that, while iTunes has 564 songs with "mile" in the title, and 68 with "inch", only 9 contain "meter" -- and of those, none of the usages is in the sense of distance.

After that I dredged up an older question, at last near-answerable, about whether (and why) certain names were much more common in song titles than in real life. i.e.:

iTunes Counts for Top 10 Female Names in USA (1990 Census)

1. Mary 685
2. Patricia/Patty 33
3. Linda 134
4. Barbara 66
5. Elizabeth/Beth 111
6. Jennifer/Jenny 161
7. Maria 587
8. Susan/Susie/Sue 577
9. Margaret/Maggie/Meg 200
10. Dorothy 14

Life Magazine, August 7, 1939: "Harvard's Hooten", p.66: an article about an eugenicist anthro professor with a penchant for collecting biometrics on different social classes: "Criminals vary according to their crimes. Robbers are nearly eight years younger than the average of the criminal class. Murderers are older, have broader jaws, narrower, longer, lower heads. Rapists are shortest. Forgers look like pretty much anyone else." I find the final tidbit a particularly pleasing version of the crime fitting the criminal.

Searching these things up at iTunes.com can get a little addictive -- I don't even make albums, just track lists, such as this afternoon's:

The Last Words of Copernicus - Sacred Heart Singers (an Alan Lomax Joint!)
Kepler - Nobukazu Takemura
The Ballad of Sir Isaac Newton - Dr. Chordate
Sigmund Freud's Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America - Randy Newman
Galileo - Indigo Girls
Harvey and the Old Ones - Banco de Gaia
Mendel's Theme - Dr. Chordate
Darwin's Children - Edwin McCain
Faraday - Djilia Phralengo
Descartes in Amsterdam - Dave Nachmanoff
Pascal's Egrets - Charivari
Halley's Waitress - Fountains of Wayne

Interestingly, when you search Google for "great scientists" 9 out of the top 10 listings are pages that append the phrase "who believed in the Bible".

[email fragment] Recently heard a fine (digitized) live performance from a folk/country artist named Kasey Chambers. Shades of Nanci Griffith and other favorites, plus the following fun facts:

a) she's Australian, & grew up as the daughter of an itinerant fox hunter on the wonderfully named Nullarbor Plain in not-quite-so-aptly-named South Australia.

b) most of the songs on her first album ("The Captain") were written in Africa

c) and then recorded in a studio on ... Norfolk Island

d) before being sent off to Nashville for final polishing.

Amazon.

KCRW live

Also if you don't 'lready, you should know about, and listen to, Nellie McKay, whose fusion of cabaret, rap, pop, rant, etc. is utterly winning.

KCRW live

Also, shift gears, what's this I hear about the arrival of Beard Papa?

[email fragment] Thanks for the reading update. I've read a couple by Vargas Llosa -- Feast of the Goat and El Paraíso en la otra esquina ("the paradise in the other corner"), the latter in Spanish and abandoned by me 100 pages in after an "if I'm going to be reading something and not really understanding it, it may as well be Borges and not yet another retelling of Gaugan's Tahitian sexcapades" moment. Gavan Daws' A Dream of Islands: Voyages of Self-Discovery in the South Seas treated it so well and, frankly, told me all I could possibly want to know.

I think I'd heard of the Jivaro and their shrunken heads sometime way-back-when. In fact, during my brief tenure in "Stockade", a church-sponsored boy-scouts-equivalent group, one of the father-son crafts was to make "shrunken heads" out of carved apples. All the skin was pared away, and then we had at it with our pocket knives. The leader took them away to dry over low heat for a week or two, after which the faces were wizened and leathery and ready for a preservative coat of lacquer. I kept mine in my closet for some time afterwards. What this had to do with Christianity, I've no clue.

Anyway, the tsantsa recipe you passed on reminded me of the passage in The Voyage of the Beagle where Darwin tells us how to catch an Andean condor:

Two methods are used; one is to place a carcass on a level piece of ground within an enclosure of sticks with an opening, and when the condors are gorged, to gallop up on horseback to the entrance, and thus enclose them: for when this bird has not space to run, it cannot give its body sufficient momentum to rise from the ground. The second method is to mark the trees in which, frequently to the number of five or six together, they roost, and then at night to climb up and noose them. They are such heavy sleepers, as I have myself witnessed, that this is not a difficult task.

[email fragment] Been a little while since we've swapped reading lists. I just finished W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, which I'd strongly recommend, and am getting started on Rick Moody's memoir The Black Veil. Also, as a TV-displacement therapy I've started downloading e-books and having my computer's speech synthesizer read them to me. The technology's good enough to where it sounds less like a robot than just a bad phone connection with an Eastern European woman. Which is, I think, what was going through Dickens' head when he wrote The Pickwick Papers anyway.

[email fragment] Also I found a NYC public schools PDF that says when they need to enroll the next flock of Kindergarteners, they put out fliers in ten languages: English, Spanish, Haitian-Creole, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Urdu, Polish, Arabic and Bengali.

Dredged up at a friend's request: a book review about the political efficacy (or lack thereof) of assassination.

[email fragment] I've been reading lots of Latin American stuff recently, much of it in Spanish, which has been fun. I'm currently reading some short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, of which one can subtract 40-60 percent of standard comprehension due to my stumbling language skills, and another 30-50 percent due to Borges' own philosophical loops and labyrinths, meaning that my actual understanding ranges from 30 percent to minus 10 percent -- the latter being a number that doubtless would have especially pleased the author.

[email fragment] In your years in Dhaka did you ever hear anything about the mysterious Second Kumar of Bhawal? He was a member of a zamindar family in Dacca district who died and was cremated under mysterious circumstances in Darjeeling around 1910. A decade later a sannysai appeared in Dacca who claimed to be the Kumar, and was eventually recognized by most of his family and tenants, but not his widow/wife nor the Court of Wards, which was administering the estate and collecting the taxes. Thus began a series of lawsuits and appeals that stretched till the 1940s and supposedly captivated much of Bengal.

Anyway, I just finished a recent account of the whole affair, _A Princely Imposter?_ by the Bengali historian Partha Chatterjee. It's a nice bit of patient legal storytelling, with some enjoyable traipses into the philosophy of identity -- both Western and Indian -- as well as the occasional pleasant postcolonial aside.

[email fragment] Hey, have you heard of Danny Gregory -- he's a sketch/journaling type artist who's written a few books. His web log was linked at one of the design sites I read -- a nice mix of sketches and essay-thought-things, some more interesting than others of course.

[via xblog]

Times of India: From the tie-breaker round of the Miss India beauty pageant: "When the five finalists faced the judges, the anticipation was so thick, you could cut it with a knife. The final question was -- If you had a chance to go back or forward in time and change one thing, what would it be? Ms Lakshmi Pandit won the Pond’s Femina Ms India Earth 2004 for replying, 'I would like to go forward because the past is behind us and better myself and my country with my efforts and sincerity.'

"Ms Sayali Bhagat won the Pond’s Femina Ms India World 2004 for the answer, 'I would go to the past and change the British coming to India and hence the Partition because then India and and Pakistan would be one and we would be a superpower once again.' The winning answer by Ms Tanushree Dutta, who won the Ponds Femina Ms India Universe crown was, 'I would like to go forward in time because a true human mind should be progressive and that is the essence of being a human being.'"

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "A family on Buka Island in Papua New Guinea is using copra oil to run their cars. As well as producing coconut oil for vehicles, the company Buka Metal Fabricators Ltd also manufactures pure coconut oil for food, and cosmetic products. Company owner Mathias Horn says this is not the first time coconut oil has been used for vehicles in Bougainville because people in the province were using it to run their trucks during the ten year civil war on the Island." It's times like this you realize Gilligan's Island wasn't totally made-up exoticicist island fantasy drivel.

[email fragment] Reading continues to go well and widely. For the past year or so I've been working on my Spanish, and have lately started reading (if not understanding) lots-o-Latin American novelists in the original. I've also become a regular viewer of Noticio Telemundo, which keeps me up to speed on the latest Central American elections and conjoined-twin-separations.

As for sports: The Argentinian Clausera tournament is heading into its sixth round, with my favorites River Plate resting comfortably in second or third -- all that really matters is that they're ahead of Boca Jrs. England's been less inspiring, with Liverpool (and Michael Owen) still in a slump (though at least it's Arsenal on top instead of Man U or Chelsea). Finally, the real news is in cricket, with India touring Pakistan for the first time in years; they're down 2-1 in the series of one-day matches, with a couple full 5-day test matches to come.

[email fragment] I read An American Pilgrimage [Paul Elie's new quadruple-biography of Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton and Walker Percy] sometime last year. My dad spotted it on the new books shelf at the library, recognized some of the names, and grabbed it for me. Reading it actually felt a little weird, because the material was so familiar: I'd already read pretty much everything by Walker Percy (when I know I'm in for a stressful week, I'll start rereading one of his novels so I know I'll have something familiar and comforting when the need arises), and 5 or 6 by Merton, plus O'Connor's stories and Day's _Long Loneliness_. Reading Elie inspired me to get O'Connor's collected letters, which I enjoyed mightily.

[email fragment] My Central American history didn't have that much on [19th century privateer/American meddler in politics south of the border William] Walker -- only said that the Nicaraguan Liberals invited him to come help them defeat the ruling Conservatives, which he did, installing a shadow government which was recognized only by the United States -- all which angered the Conservative governments in neighboring states, hence the attack led by the Costa Rican general.

I spent a few minutes trying to dig up a bit more. First, here are some titles of published biographies of Walker:

_William Walker: The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny_ by Alejandro Bolaños Geyar
_Sad Swashbuckler: The Life of William Walker_ by Noel Bertrom Gerson
_Freebooters Must Die! The Life and Death of William Walker, the Most Notorious Filibuster of the Nineteenth Century_ by Frederic Rosengarten
_Filibusters and Financiers: The World of William Walker and His Associates_ by William O. Scroggs
_The World and William Walker_ by Albert H. Z. Carr

Next, a longish and goodish historical essay on Walker, putting the facts in more or less astounding order.

And, for local color, a Costa Rican take on the subject, including many a majestic malapropism and memorable turn of the phrase.

Oh, there's also a 1987 movie about him, _Walker_, starring Ed Harris.

[email fragment] First, a nice omnibus Pitcairn site, including shopping.

And in answer to the resettlement question, the Pitcairn Island gov't website.

[email fragment] Robert Hughes' history of Australian settlement, The Fatal Shore, has a couple of chapters on Norfolk Island, from which I remember the following:

1. At the outset, Norfolk Island was considered to be of way more importance and value than Australia -- due to the eponymous pine tree and a native form of flax. With a good supply of replacement masts and linen for sails, England could operate much more easily in the Pacific, and thus rule even more of the world. Problem was, neither the trees nor the flax turned out to be much good for those uses, so the whole scheme foundered.

2. The CIA Factbook info sort of glosses over why N.I. failed as a penal colony -- that it was way way way more brutal than even the worst Australia and Van Dieman's Land had to offer. I'm a little foggy on the details, but I think word finally leaked out about how bad the prisoners were being treated, and scandal shut the place down. So the island was empty and forgotten till some (but not all) of the Pitcairn Islanders were resettled there.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "Fiji's taxi drivers have reacted strongly towards a levy imposed on them for listening to the radio in their vehicles. The move is an attempt by the country's Performing Rights Association to clamp down on copyright infringement, but is not limited to cab drivers. Bus operators will not be spared either."

[email fragment] Finished [Woody Guthrie's autobiographical novel] Seeds of Man this afternoon. Thanks (again) so much for sending me the book. I don't know how much you got a chance to look at it along the way ...

Anyway, what thoughts? I guess the thing that struck me (not too surprisingly) is the overwhelming (though in places patchy) exuberance of the writing. Nobody strings together 14 or more adjectives like my man Woody. And of course the willingness to write pretty much as his interests lay, which means that sentences or paragraphs that start out being about one thing wind up being about another -- sort of like the song on "Mermaid Avenue" where he starts out about the ten hundred books he could write you about her, but by the end of the verse he's talking about union-organizing, and at the end of the song about the thousand-years-distant final blurring of all creeds kinds and colors. Of course exuberance, particularly without the benefit of much editing or selection, has its downsides -- in this particular case unevenness and pretty much no discretion when it comes to writing about sex (let's just say there were lengthy sections made "Walt Whitman's Niece" sound like Mr. Rogers).

Still all told a rollicking, dusty, rocky, paint-brushery, thistle-daggery, skattlerakery, catamountery, gila-monstery, burnt-rubbery, sour-whiskery good time.

One thing I've been trying to figure out is which languages lend themselves to rap, which don't -- this presumably would have a lot to do both with grammatical flexibility and with the sounds the language contains. For instance, pretty much all Portuguese rap I've heard sounds (to my ear) just awful. I think that's because so many words end on complex vowel sounds and swallowed consonents (-ao, -io, etc.) -- which is ironic, because I think it's that very feature that can make sung Portuguese so beautiful and versatile.

French and Spanish and, to a slightly lesser degree, Kiswahili, are all capable of producing (again to my ear) "cool-sounding" rap, but all the cool songs tend to sound kind of alike -- they fall into a certain patter, a vocal rhythm.

German and Swedish and (at least with Deux) Korean fare worse -- they've got the patter, but so often it gets too bouncy to be taken seriously.

English, of course, lands top of the heap. Is that just because I'm best positioned to appreciate the nuances? I'm not sure, though I suspect that the fact that, despite roots in African music, the genre was created and first defined mainly by native English speakers, so of course as style developed it was tailored to the strengths English offered.

[email fragment] The Astonishing Elephant has a nice chapter on the elephant in history. Evidently the first elephants in Europe were four brought back from India by Alexander the Great as a gift for his old teacher Aristotle, who wrote about them in his "History of Animals":

The elephant is said by some to live for about two hundred years; by others, for three hundred. (Book VII, Part 9)

Astonishing Elephant also says that Roman sources include descriptions of both African and Indian elephants (I think the differentiating feature being the number of nose-fingers). Also, it says that neither African nor Asian elephants can be truly tamed -- every few years even the Asian ones are supposed to need to head off into the forest for a while before coming back to their mahouts. Otherwise they go crazy and squash people. Speaking of which, have you been out to Coney Island to see the memorial they just put up in honor of the first elephant to be executed by electrocution?

Did you read the Johnny Cash obit that ran in First Things magazine? I liked it quite a bit...

Have you heard about Komar & Melamid's "People's Choice Music" project? Similar to what they did with the paintings, only they produced pop songs from the survey results.

Public radio's "This American Life" did a story on it -- with tasty audioclips -- a few years back. One who wanted to could search it out at thislife.org.

Entertainment of the day: hand painted signs

[via xblog]

[email fragment] Here are links to the KCRW performance by Josh Ritter, the singer-songwriter I was telling you about last night. I think it's a 35-minute set of songs with an interesting interview in the middle.

[realaudio]
[realvideo]

[email fragment] Here are links to the streams (windows media high bandwidth) of three of the Urbana talks I liked best. If for some reason they don't work, here's a link to a page with all the Urbana webcast offerings in every format and flavor.

"Cross-Cultural Conversion", Ray Aldred (42 minutes)
(A First Nations (i.e. Canadian Native American) minister)

Biblical exposition: Luke 10, David Zac Nyringiye (37 minutes)
(the Ugandan IFES missionary who I met briefly after spending 2 weeks in Nairobi helping Paula transcribe one of his talks)

Biblical exposition: Luke 26:34-50, David Zac Nyringiye (about 35 minutes)

[email fragment] I've still, thanks God, kept up with my voracious reading, listening to lots of great music, and watching quite a bit of TV (soccer, "Friends", "The West Wing", "This Old House"). I've also been trying to teach myself Spanish -- did some lessons and vocab and am now reading novels (I just finished Cien Anos de Soledad and am now early into Carlos Fuentes' Los Anos con Laura Díaz). I still only understand maybe forty percent of what I read, but it seems to be enough to follow the basic plot and make out the general scenery. I liken it to swimming underwater -- it's blurry and you can't breathe, but what fun!

[email fragment] Is it snowing much in your neck of the woods? It's absolutely beautiful up here -- probably six inches on the ground, and everything wonderfully hushed and quiet. This week's the first time since I've been here that there's been snow that stayed on the ground for more than a couple hours. Highly preferable to cold rain, I think.