fog photos

  

Fog and spiderwebs from my 5min. walk a few mornings back.

Boston, PA

Digital camera for Christmas + finally figuring out flickr's online photo stuff = images, maybe. We'll start with the above, a (literal) screenshot from last Sunday night's Journal de France newscast. The story was about major US cities affected by the recent blizzard. Two for three ain't bad.

The uncritical enthusiasm of the European intellectual for tribal culture appears in the exclamation of the architect Le Corbusier on first seeing Manhattan: "It is hot-jazz in stone." It appears again in the artist Moholy-Nagy's account of his visit to a San Francisco night club in 1940. A Negro band was playing with zest and laughter. Suddenly a player intoned, "One million and three," and was answered: "One million and seven and a half." Then another sang, "Eleven," and another, "Twenty-one." Then amidst "happy laughter and shrill singing the numbers took over the place."

Moholy-Nagy notes how, to Europeans, America seems to be the land of abstractions, where numbers have taken on an existence of their own in phrases like "57 Varieties," "the 5 and 10," or "7 Up" and "behind the 8-ball." It figures. Perhaps this is a kind of echo of an industrial culture that depends heavily on prices, charts, and figures.

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

NY Times: Is Alaska's Only Elephant Happy? Some say that Maggie should be moved from the Alaska Zoo to a warmer climate where she could get more outdoor exercise. Zoo officials have responded with plans to build her a treadmill.

LA Times: TAIPEI, Taiwan — The radio show called "Special Communications" was an unlikely hit, given that it consisted of announcers reading strings of numbers for 15 minutes.
Taiwan used the mind-numbing program in the 1980s to send coded messages to its spies in mainland China. But like many Taiwanese propaganda broadcasts, it could also be picked up locally. To the surprise of many at the government-run Radio Taiwan International, the show soon developed a cult following among Taiwanese. [full story]

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.