[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.