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Ortega said that although the manager told her she could bring the chicken head back to the restaurant she told him he could see it on television.
"I wanted consumers to watch and know what they're eating," she said. Ortega said several co-workers have told her that she was correct to alert the public. She said it's taking her a while to get over the ordeal.
It's oversimplifying White Teeth to say that it makes racism seem out of date, precisely because the book includes characters like Joyce and Marcus Chalfen. Smith does make the point that the boundaries between white, black, Asian, etc., are getting harder to trace and, perhaps, act upon. But she's more silent on what the ramifications of that blurring between races and cultures means for the people in them. History has left many of the minorities in the book out of touch with their roots and put out about it, but their efforts to overcome it seem more comic and touchingly futile than earnest and effective. It's interesting, though, that the halal butcher joins KEVIN because of the racism he suffers, and yet Smith's lightly mocking treatment of the fundamentalist group makes it clear that she doesn't see it as any kind of solution.
I thought Joyce Chalfen, incidentally, was one of the funniest and best-written characters in the book. She really brings out Smith's skill as a satirist because she's so much more a caricature than anyone else, yet at the same time her motivating impulses such as lust for Millat and pride in her family are some of the most human emotions in the book, too. I hope Smith uses more of her skills as a satirist in her future books. Her interest in gardening was totally apt, because it represents her patronizing ideas about "diversity." Diversity is great, let's have more "brown" people in the house, etc., etc., but keep it under control for goodness sake.
After I read hcog's last post, I started wondering if the thrust of the book actually works against Smith in a way. In the end (and if you've gotten to the end you know what I mean), all of the efforts to control and engineer the purity of life fail, and relativism wins. But isn't it almost a contradiction to come out with that kind of message--to say, basically, that change is the only constant? And by saying that, doesn't an artist, who essentially wants to posit some kind of "truth," necessarily undermine him- or herself?
hcog, you raise another interesting question--who are the victims in White Teeth? Who comes out looking worse than they did when they went in? Maybe the victims are the misunderstood, such as Salman Rushdie, the unnamed author that Millat is so gung-ho about protesting even though he's not sure why he should be. Perhaps there are no real victims, since the book is a comedy at heart, which precludes shutting anyone out in the end. Everyone is flawed in one way or another, which might be victimhood enough.
Clearly, Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the most interesting actor in Hollywood. Close is old buddy John C. Reilly and heart-throb/Ralf Youtz lookalike Jude Law. But Phillip has my heart.
Today is the anniversary of the N30 protests in Seattle -- protests that shut down the WTO conference and exposed the fear and contempt with which the plutocracy regards the rights, beliefs, and bodies of the public. A lot of people are remembering the protest today: check out John Butler's thread on Metafilter and Dr. Menlo's N30 tribute for a start. If you're lucky, This is What Democracy Looks Like may be screening in your area this weekend. Keep an window on the Seattle Indymedia center, for the protestors have promised to return, and the Mayor has asked for a media blackout while he enacts his revenge.
Not only does he taste 10,000 wines a year, but he stores the sensation of each one into a permanent gustatory memory. When I asked him about the mechanical aspects of his work, he told me in a matter-of-fact way that he remembers every wine he has tasted over the past thirty-two years and, within a few points, every score he has given as well. That amounts to several hundred thousand relevant memories, which apparently he can summon up at will. He said he has no idea how he does this, except perhaps through intense concentration while tasting wine.The latest Atlantic Monthly includes several articles that are well worth reading, including this fascinating and lengthy profile of wine critic Robert Parker that's both a three-dimensional portrait of the man himself and an introduction to the complicated skullduggery that is the international wine biz. Also: an article on the phenomenon of physically healthy people who want amputations gives way to a broader meditation on how mental disorders spread, and whether physical surgery is the right way to deal with them.
MST3K meets "Dark Dungeons", an anti-D&D comic screed by Jack Chick: two great tastes that taste great together.
Unfortunately, I've been super busy getting ready for our baby and so have had to crap out on this round of reading, but I noticed a handful of Zadie Smith links on this weblog. "Writing is the exact opposite of therapy." I have no idea where that quote came from.
Dave Eggers reviews four recently published books by four of the greatest living comic artists for the New York Times. thanks, tripping.
Did you ever wonder which baseball players had the same birthday as you? Wonder no longer.
originally posted by zagg
Scientists at CSIRO's Telecommunications and Industrial Physics are developing artificial photosynthesis, which copies what plants do by taking light and carbon dioxide and converting them to energy to produce food.
originally posted by zagg
What are we to make of the exclusive publication of an early Kerouac novella fueling the launch of a new proprietary Windows-only ebook reader? Tell you what, they've already got my $3.95 -- but I'll be ripping the text from that file faster than you can say "the one thing we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the rememberance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced at death," even if I have to print, scan, and OCR the fucker. Email me if you want a copy.
There are many people who believe that the human mind, based on neurons and physical principles, is just a very sophisticated formal system. Does Gödel's theorem imply the existence of facts that must be true, but that our minds can never prove? Or even stronger, that our minds can never believe -- or strongest yet, ever conceive?From Kenny's Overview of Hofstadter's Explanation of Gödel's Theorem, via the always-rewarding larkfarm.
I dated Yumi for awhile, and I have to confess I became very attached to her. Yumi could get very angry over small things. She would yell at me and ignore me the exact same way as all my other girlfriends have. Finally I decided to stop the relationship. It was too draining for me. It was hard sometimes to remember that Yumi wasn't real.
I poured the French roast I'd brought for us to share. She smiled. I placed a rose between us. She demurely looked away. I reached for her hand. She reached for mine. They almost seemed to touch. But almost was not enough. Her fingertips broke up into shards of three-dimensional light as they pushed toward me, out of the range of her imaging computers.The Washington Post is carrying an interesting article about the progress and shortcomings of tele-immersion. It looks we've got a long way to go before the technology can convey the crucial subtleties of face-to-face interaction such as eye contact duration, pupil dilation, nuances of posture, and the musical qualities of speech.
You can only get six shooters at any time, so the margin for error is narrower than on any other legendary golden age game. Plus, the game is faster and more ferocious than even Robotron when played on difficulty level #9.Following last year's amazing perfect game of Pac-Man ("It was tremendously monotonous"), Twin Galaxies -- the "worldwide authority" on videogame rankings and statistics -- certified a new Centipede world record this week. The previous record stood for fourteen years.
If we'd been taught this Virginia history in 4th grade (and taken a couple of field trips) I'd have become an historian!
Hunter Thompson is writing for ESPN?
Also, this article made me happy.
Lastly, I know this is waaaaay after the fact, but it's never the wrong time to consider how wrong the School of the Americas is. This year's protest got some good coverage from the Independent Media Center.
originally posted by zagg
Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is a stunning image of Earth at night. The full-size image (534k) demands a few moments of reflection. The earth observatory site provides some more background information. It might be interesting to compare this illustration with a political atlas of the world.
A thread on creating Aqua-style interface elements and other graphics at the MacNN forums links to Phong's eplastic tutorial and a couple other promising resources.
Having already ruined the legacy of the fourth best movie of all time, George Lucas is now trying to ruin every other film for the rest of time. "Digital film" will go down as another or our generation's great oxymoron's, along with "fresh frozen," "friendly fire," and "military intelligence."
The coverage from the Times pathetic film staff reads more like a press release from those who support such a move - the film execs who would love to ax movie production budgets and pocket the difference. The picture of the AMC, Miramax, Disney and Boeing execs all throwing film canisters in the trash is priceless, since it's such a literal interpretation of their working legacy. Also supporting this travesty is Ben Affleck, who must figure his next "Bounce" has to be in the upward direction.
Eloquent proponents of the superior Maxivision technology include Roger Ebert (here and more here), and Jeffrey Wells (mentioned here).
50 pages from the end...I have been really wrestling with my expectations for the 'weighty indictment' of racism the 11/14 post wisely points out was not Smith's aim. Again, I say that self-critically. It troubles me that I'm not getting the direct racial and colonial power-analysis through anyone except Mad Mary. It is a very fun read, and a refreshing shift away from all the other weighty but boring indictments I am usually reading. I like that Josh discovers something elemental within himself that is different from his father when he recognizes that "the world happens to you, you don't happen to the world" (412). Her language is cryptic enough for me to assign meaning to his words, but it seems that where Marcus feels himself above the world and able to control it with rational mind, Josh is humble to it and realizes he cannot control it.
A problem, however, with Smith's ability to show how characters in present day London inhabit a racialized, colonized world without making a didactic statement about the system is that it leaves room for commentary like:
"Her (Smith's) attitude to the complications and conflicts, loves and hates that inevitably result from living in a cultural melting pot is not only post-imperial but post-racial," wrote Anne Chisholm in the Sunday Telegraph. "One of the endearing qualities of her sharp-eyed but warm-hearted book is that it makes racism appear not only ugly and stupid but ludicrously out of date..."(This is from the linked review below.)
Down other avenues, I like what she does with sons and fathers between Samad and Marcus and Magid, Millat, and Josh. The only extent to which each son relates to his biological father's values is in rebelling against them. Otherwise, they each find new fathers and ideological systems to parent their rebellion. I like how various characters, Samad, Millat, Irie make sense of and try to nail down their histories using different means--exalting a myth, accentuating a reinvented religious tradition, reclaiming one set of family roots. Smith makes it so funny and such a great comment on humanity, don't we all run around looking for fathers/ parents and grabbing ideologies and histories in order to feel we are independent while making sure we have guidance and structure? (Though that raises the question for me of what else are we looking and grabbing for? Why?)
Lastly, re: Chinese burn, accents, etc. I think you're right that Smith can still ask pointed questions about racism/ colonialism using some tools shaped by them. It is still important to question the tools. Because where do you draw the line? What does it mean for someone who is adept at playing with culture and race to perpetuate stereotypes (such as the "various ledges" of Irie's curvy body that Smith describes as "shelf space for...children, bags of fruit, buckets of water"(222)--as if Irie is genetically built for work on her mother's family's pre-industrial island of origin). What does it mean if there are a few--not excessive, if I caught most of them--of these stereotypes? Are they slip ups? Can they be read other ways? How does this relate to her story--set in a racialized society--that does not yet (maybe there is something in the last few pages) have any human vicitms?
Ok, I can't get away from the same question. But I have written this too many times without posting to start over. Later.
originally posted by hcog
"Of course you must vomit," the interpreter said. "But this is an experience of a lifetime. Your instructor wishes to assure you that you will vomit with satisfaction."BBC correspondent Emma-Jane Kirby files a report from zero gravity.
I just can't get enough of this picture from the great fires this past summer. It's quite arresting -- and I can feel the heat on my eyeballs!
An optics researcher has developed a procedure which can improve anybody's eyesight -- no matter how good. I want to be a cyborg when I grow up.
Somebody really hates us?!
arthur asks: Can you recommend a good Pinot Blanco?An amusing online chat with This American Life's Ira Glass, in which he periodically riffs on that Saturday Night Live skit where Dan Ackroyd played Jimmy Carter hosting a call-in show. At least I think that's what's going on here.
Ira Glass: Thanks for asking, Arthur.
Ira Glass: actually, pinot blanco is a South American misnomer for chenin blanc.
Ira Glass: Try an '89 or '90 from the Savennieres region.
limn: to draw or paint; to trace or delineate; to depict or describe
A singularly beautiful word -- but has anyone used it in a sentence in the past 300 years? Yes!
When I was little, the classified ads fascinated me. Like, who was selling their crypt? The ad said "evenings". It seemed like such an obvious trick.New One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry, a jive-ass faker who can't spell and has no idea what "story structure" even means, and all is well with the world.
Of some interest: Yahoo News' most-emailed content.
Slicing up eyeballs, I want you to know!
Iron Chef Kono ato "is dedicated to Iron Chef that has not aired or will not air in United States".
[N]obody can offer [cult members] what they want, only cult people can do that. They don't have a checking system, to decide what is right and what is wrong. We haven't given them those judging systems. I suppose that we authors have a responsibility for that. If I give you the right story, that story will give you a judging system, to tell what is wrong and what is right.Few things are more delightful and distracting than interviews with authors. Today, it's this old Salon interview with Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami that's thrown itself in the path between me and the work I should be doing. Murakami talks about interviews he did with victims of the nerve-gas attack in Japan's subway system, committed by the Aum cult. He wrote a book based on the interviews, which Amazon says will be published in April. (By the way, Don DeLillo's new book is due in February.)
Well, my little friend, you've got something jammed in here real good.
Can anyone help Fred find a used car?
It was really liberating for me to say, "I'm going to be a goofball for the rest of my life. I'm going to be a ninety-year-old guy with a fart cushion." It took a great weight off my shoulders.George Saunders is far funnier than anyone has any right to be. He's one of the few authors who can make me laugh out loud on the Metro. Waste no time, and read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia, his collections of short stories. You can also hear him read "The 400 Pound CEO" and "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz" on This American Life.
Someday I'll be all about "I knew this kid way back when....." Never too early to start. Since this article, him and his backcourt mate Mike Lee have committed to Kansas, where they're the back court of the future. Life Has Options...
He tried various other angles on convincing me that there's no way you could prank someone by e-flatulating in their cubicle. I still wasn't convinced, so we went round and round about email, rotting flesh, and flatulence for like 5 minutes before we both realized that the conversation we were having was sounding more and more bizarre. At this point I just thanked him for his time and took off.Did you make a pootie?
We're supposed to trust this person to be impartial in deciding the Florida election? Other nuggets. She also just hired a law firm with connections to Jeb Bush as a special counsel.
Even if she plays this exactly by the book, she's going to be questioned and this election is going to be questioned.
Oh yeah, and Salon smacks Nader again.
originally posted by zagg
At the National Cigar Museum: Racism Sells Cigars.
Minibosses is the band I always wanted to start.
Mr. Busy found a pretty good (brutal?) critique of Race Traitor, but didn't have time to post it. There's still a lot of good stuff in Race Traitor, though. Peggy McIntosh and Amoja Three Rivers wrote some good stuff too (two of my favorite instances of "good stuff").
There I was, wallowing for weeks in my unemployment misery, when one day, bam! I was watching the movie Pulp Fiction. And you know that scene where they blew the guy away in the back of the car and then had to bring in Harvey Keitel to clean the whole thing up?From the first chapter of Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs at the Turn of the Millennium.
It appears the only thing spoiled by the Nader candidacy was the Democrats' ability to think critically.
Cairo, Illinois, August 3 -- Early yesterday morning the decks of the steamers Success and Elliot, moored at the Mississippi levee, were observed to be literally covered with small green frogs about an inch in length, which came down with a drenching rain which prevailed during the night. Spars, lines, trees and fences were literally alive with the slimy things, while the lights from the watchman's lantern were obscured by the singular visitation. The phenomenon, while not entirely unknown, has never been explained, and is causing considerable comment.A recent viewing of Magnolia inspired me to poke around for information about animals and other peculiar objects falling from the sky. Of course frogs have met this surprising (for them and for us) fate, but other items noted in "falls" include coins, soda cans, meat, seeds, golf balls, peaches, hazelnuts, and ice-encased turtles. One of my favorite mysterious occurrences involves purple jelly.
Charles Fort was a pioneering cataloguer of bizarre natural occurrences, some of which prompted this fanciful passage from his Book of the Damned. It's so good it's worth quoting at length:
I think that even more amusing is our own acceptance that, not very far above this earth's surface, is a region that will be the subject of a whole new science -- super-geography -- with which we shall immortalize ourselves in the resentments of the schoolboys of the future --(Footnote: In one scene in Magnolia, an impressive overhead tracking shot shows Stanley the quiz-show prodigy kid poring over a table-full of books. Fort is among them.)Pebbles and fragments of meteors and things from Mars and Jupiter and Azuria: wedges, delayed messages, cannon balls, bricks, nails, coal and coke and charcoal and offensive old cargoes -- things that coat in ice in some regions and things that get into areas so warm that they putrefy -- or that there are all the climates of geography in super-geography. I shall have to accept that, floating in the sky of this earth, there often are fields of ice as extensive as those on the Arctic Ocean -- volumes of water in which are many fishes and frogs -- tracts of land covered with caterpillars --
Aviators of the future. They fly up and up. Then they get out and walk. The fishing's good: the bait's right there. They find messages from other worlds -- and within three weeks there's a big trade worked up in forged messages. Sometime I shall write a guide book to the Super-Sargasso Sea, for aviators, but just at present there wouldn't be much call for it.
Bill Gates has seen the future of personal computing, and it's... a Newton?
Virtually the entire world, including the United States and the UN Security Council, regards Israel's occupation of Palestinian land as a violation of international law. Yet in a typical news story reporting on "Palestinian violence" against Israeli occupation soldiers, viewers are not told that Palestinians are fighting against a military occupation. The right to use force to resist foreign occupation is universally recognized and enshrined in international law.Something's rotten in the state of mideast coverage. thanks, thewebtoday.
I finished White Teeth a few days ago, not seriously thinking anyone would read it besides me (pardon my pessimism), and now I'm wishing that I had taken notes on it or something. Overall I liked it a lot. She has a wonderfully sharp eye for pop culture, rhythms of speech, and turns of phrase, and more than anything it's just fun to read. I don't think, in the end, it's a terribly weighty indictment of the racist environment the characters inhabit, for example, or the colonialist side of Britain's past -- but I don't really think she wanted it to be that, anyway. In her view, Britain's past errors are beside the point. What matters in White Teeth is how people, today, are dealing with them.
Overall, I think it's true that the characters are not intended to be fully-fleshed-out, complicated individuals. Each one seems to be defined by just one or two conflicts, and it's the meat of those conflicts, not the characters themselves, that Smith seems to be concerned with. They're basically vectors for the particular issue at hand, and their coming together and going apart shapes the book's questions of itself (and answers). I know you're not done with it yet -- some of this stuff (I hope!) will make more sense when you are.
Why is a Chinese burn called a Chinese burn? I'm not familiar enough with the phrase to know if it's racist at its root. I remember coming across some things in the book and wondering if it was racially insensitive, or not. Unfortunately, I can't remember examples. I am curious, though, what you think of the fact that Smith renders Clara's and Hortense's Jamaican accents in print, but no one else's (and surely some of the other characters have accents). It reminded me a bit of reading old Bobbsey Twins books, and coming across "Mammy" characters who say stuff like "gwine" and "fo' sho'". But, at the same time, it made their voices ring in my head a little more than they might have if she'd written them in plain English. What's your take on that?
As for digging into racism/colonialism, I think it's still possible for her to ask good, pointed questions about such matters even if the tools she's using seem to be shaped -- perhaps negatively -- by some of the same forces.
On a similar topic, here's an interesting quote I found in this article:
When I was little, we'd go on holiday to Devon, and there, if you're black and you go into a sweetshop, for instance, everyone turns and looks at you. So my instinct as a child was always to over-compensate by trying to behave three times as well as every other child in the shop, so they knew I wasn't going to take anything or hurt anyone. I think that instinct has spilled over into my writing in some ways, which is not something I like very much or want to continue.
Also: some interesting tidbits about Smith here. (Nota bene: WT is going to be a BBC miniseries! Which is appropriate -- as I read it, I wondered if she'd already sold the film rights, it's so danged cinematic.) There's tons more about her online, and I gotta work. But a Google search brings up a lot.
It's sad to fall asleep. It separates people. Even when you're "sleeping together," you're all alone.
Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless has been re-released. Go see it.
Hey, I need this website like I need a hole in my head!
"Governor Bush feels that Eminem is the perfect embodiment of what his presidency can accomplish," said Karen Hughes, Bush's communications director. "Like the governor, Eminem is charismatic, funny, and extremely dangerous to women, homosexuals, the country, and the world."Mired reports that Eminem will speak at Bush's inauguration. (Obviously a satirical piece, but I think this interview with Mos Def is for real. Who are these guys?)
This premature ejaculation is so buggy I'll never be able to convince my NS4 friends to switch to it, which means it'll be that much longer before I can spiff up my site with more and sexier CSS -- but someone just came by and tossed me a NS6 t-shirt! "The Code is Ready... are you?" Woohoo!
Who here thinks that the famous mail ballots aren't going to cause more problems?
Brian and Helle Kain in the village of Naesby, Denmark display a U.S. presidential election postal vote, one of two, that by a so far inexplicable mistake ended up in Denmark. The postal votes were sent from Steven H. Forrester and his wife, of Bellevue,WA. The Kain couple opened one of the envelopes and the content was a vote for George W. Bush (courtesy Reuters).
originally posted by zagg
Not to belittle the situation in Florida, but it's funny that there are equally disturbing stories coming from Wisconsin that nobody seems very outraged about. Part of me wants to say that this is because the candidate that wins Florida wins the presidency, but part of me wonders whether the inequity in coverage stems from the fact that Democrats seem to have committed the fraud, not Republicans. Read about students voting multiple times and about Democrats trading cigarettes for votes from the homeless.
originally posted by zagg
The Fox News reporter who led the wave of networks that incorrectly gave Florida to Bush on Election Night is ... Bush's cousin. What's even more remarkable is that John Ellis evidently was worried enough about the conflict of interest to stop writing about the election for the Boston Globe. Fox is defending him.
In other election wrap-up... did Dan Rather actually say that many of the candidates' leads "shrunk like my nutsack in a bucket full of Icy-Hot?" Take the quiz. thanks, MediaNews.
November 11, 2000
To: Secretary General of the United Nations, Koffi Anan
From: Michael Moore, citizen
Dear Mr. Secretary General:
Help us! Massive election fraud is taking place in an area that looks like a banana republic -- but is actually part of the United States of America! We are sitting here helpless as our leaders appear unable to do anything about this stolen election. (more)
originally posted by hcog
Logo Design Workshop, parts one and two. Logos for the Design Challenged in 19 parts. Happy companies, sad companies. xblog on logos and symbols. And, of course, swish, swirl, and swoosh.
This is the burrito page with the burrito personality-style test that New Yorker article mentions. It's a great page in that it covers one of the greatest possible topics for a web page, but otherwise it's pretty piss-poor -- which can be only partially attributed to the paucity of burrito information on this world wide web. A google search reveals a few data points, vegetarian burrito recipes (umm, fresh onion-tomato-cilantro salsa, rice maybe cooked with a little peanut oil, and your choice of beans cooked as you like them rolled up in the largest tortilla you can find is a good starting point), and of course the site that turns you into a burrito, but not much else besides way too many links to the world's largest burrito which couldn't possibly be as interesting as the world's smallest burrito, which I'm going to make this week by wrapping a single grain of rice and one bean in a tortilla the size of my fingertip.
My uncle told me the story of this place when I was 13 and I didn't believe it until I saw it. The story goes that during WWII the US was worried that the Germans would try to bomb US airports, so they built a fake town just east of Richmond International Airport (then called Byrd Airport). The town is strange to see -- it consistes of roads, sidewalks, driveways that lead to nothing, streetlights, sewer covers, mailboxes, even the occasional park bench. It also had a runway with landing lights. All the lights were designed to be turned on in case of an air raid and at the same time, the real airport and all of Richmond would be blacked out in the hopes that the Germans would bomb the fake town.The only Virginia listing on ghosttowns.com (listed as Portugue Road), some research reveals that this construction project located on Portugee Road east of Richmond International Airport was better known as Elko tract (or Lost City to locals who used to park and party there) until some short-sighted bureaucrat decided that rural Virginia needs semiconductor plants more than it needs a fascinating historical and cultural landmark. I was excited for about 45 minutes this morning at the prospect of exploring and photographing the unusual site, but now that I know it's become the White Oak Technology Park, this aerial picture is probably as close as I'll come to Elko.
Online hip-hop has changed a lot recently. Pseudo, home of 180 hiphop and online pioneer, went under. 360hiphop got purchased by BET (who got purchased by Viacom who own MTV) and as a result slashed their politics coverage. Now Urban Box Office and the aka network have gone under as well. But hip-hop fans do still have Okay Player, Support Online Hip-Hop and the Active Element Foundation web site is launching soon.
Jeff Chang, co-founder and ex-editor of Color Lines Magazine, is still the editor of 360hiphop's politics section, despite the setbacks. Their coverage of the election (here and here) is definitely worth checking out.
Maybe you are a fan of Jesse Jackson, or maybe you are a fan of Michael Moore, but both agree we need to support Al Gore now. Here are Michael Moore's words:
I find it more than ironic -- actually, downright abhorrent -- that, in addition to the thousands of ballots that have been thrown out, at least a few hundred of these senior citizens' votes, through what appears to be an illegally constructed ballot, will end up being counted for a right-wing anti-Semite like Mr. Buchanan. South Florida has perhaps the largest population of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel and New York. Is it just me, or do these good people, all of whom have suffered enough in their lives, deserve not only our respect, but our commitment to see that their vote is counted?
...
But if the campaign for Ralph Nader was nothing, it was, at its very core, about trying to stop the disenfranchisement of the American people. For us not to speak up now -- even though OUR will did not prevail -- would make everything we stand for lack credibility.
This is the tale of two children, born with the outward appearance of girls, but lacking the inner passageways of either sex: no cervix, uterus or fallopian tubes, and no seminal vesicles, vasa deferentia or prostate either. They did have gonads, though: one had a boy's testes, the other had a girl's ovaries.Both the children were reared the way their appearance demanded--as girls. Both were traumatized by their physical abnormality and by society's response to it. But one of them found comfort in her role as a girl, and she eventually grew into a woman whom everyone now recognizes and treats as such. The other was a tomboy who rebelled against everything girlish; eventually she demanded sex reassignment and is a man today. So which was which?
--by Simon Levy
Know what intersex means? Gender assignment surgery is only about 40 years old. Expand your knowledge about gender, biology, power and what we can do about it.
originally posted by hcog
It took me a while to get reading and back online. Been away and overwhelmed with work. Smith's book has drawn me in. Its voice reminds me of Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz--where characters seem like extremes of themselves in a fairy tale-like or allegorical way--but where they are also rooted in a reallife, life-sucks-and-you-live-it-any-way kind of way. This kind of characterization reminds me of that in the Accidental Tourist and The Shipping News--although in both those books the characters were portrayed as more endearing than Archie, Samad, or Alsana are being protrayed. I'm not sure how I feel about them yet. I've just gotten to the moment where Irie, Millat, and Magid visit the elderly white man and I'm glad Smith has set me up to be taking in the characters with the lightness and humor she's been portraying them with, because the punch hit me that much harder.
I'm finding myself really aware of myself both as a product of identity politics and of my raised consciousness as a white person as I read this book. It's similar to my experience with comedy--I'm not quite sure whether to laugh sometimes and I'm constantly suspicious of the use of race, ethnicity, etc. When I double-checked to make sure Zadie Smith looked like a person of color like I thought she was after reading Clara being described as a thoroughbred, I saw that both as a comment of her choices and my need for additional information and reassurance in deciding what my attitude should be toward what I was reading. I am being self-critical when I say that. Like, when Smith talks about Alsana trying to give Samad a "Chinese burn" by twisting her hands on his wrist during a PTA meeting, how do I take that? My gut says that's racist. And yet I see that she is really digging into culture, racism, colonialism, etc. so am I missing something?
originally posted by hcog
I wonder why this took as long as it did. (No, not the election, Spike Lee skewering the white supremacists fantasy that is "The Legend of Bagger Vance.")
It's you I like,It's you I like, Mr. Rogers, and you will be missed. Good luck in whatever you do.
It's not the things you wear,
It's not the way you do your hair--
But it's you I like
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you--
Not the things that hide you,
Not your toys--
They're just beside you.
But it's you I like--
Every part of you,
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new.
I hope that you'll remember
Even when you're feeling blue
That it's you I like,
It's you yourself,
It's you, it's you I like.
In case you're not completely saturated in election coverage, analysis, analysis of coverage, and analysis of analysis, three of my favorite websites are doing a much better job of linking and thinking about these things than I could hope to. Please visit:
The real blame rests with a Democratic Leadership Council that is pro-death-penalty, pro-censorship, pro-corporation, pro-plutarchy, pro-military-buildup and pro-drug-war, and yet still somehow, against all logic, expects Liberal support. Listen up Gore. Listen up Lieberman. If you abandon the Left, the Left will abandon you. This lesson should be etched into your brains with a big Green tattoo the size of Florida with the name Ralph Nader all over it.
Of course, the liberals will insist there are environmental explanations for white drug and alcohol problems. One can imagine them trying to blame two-earner white families for being too busy with their dot-com startup or landscaping classes at Home Depot to give their children the nurturing needed to resist drugs.This quote is from Tim Wise's brilliant open letter to the Pioneer Fund ("committed to the proposition that people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds are, on the basis of heredity, inherently unequal"), but if you only read one of his many articles on AlterNet, read Acknowledging and Challenging Whiteness.
Thanks to misnomer for tipping me off to the latest edition of Scott McCloud's online comic column I can't stop thinking!
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Help Philip Morris kill people with cigarettes while
you eat your breakfast, lunch, snacks, dinner, and dessert.
Still hungry? |
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originally posted by zagg
Tonight, just two hours after Florida election officials are due to announce the results of a vote recount and declare the
winner in the presidential elections, Texas is set to execute 31 year-old Miguel Flores, a Mexican citizen.
Only the Supreme Court and Texas Governor George W. Bush now have the power to decide whether to spare his life. If Bush is declared the winner tonight in the elections, one of his first decisions as president-elect will be to execute yet another person in the state of Texas.
I can't speak for all Nader voters, but I can speak as a Nader voter, and the fact of the matter is that Ralph Nader spoke to the issues and ideals that most concern me as a citizen. Call me a crazy radical Lefty, but I'm more concerned with the vast amounts of money permeating and polluting our political process than I am about whether or not elderly voters can get their drugs on the cheap. And, yes, the issue of character was a factor too. Given a false choice between two desperate, inadequate fortunate sons grasping to escape their fathers' shadows, I chose instead to pick a man who'd devoted his entire life really fighting for the people of this nation. In sum, given the candidates on the ballot, I believe Nader was - and is - the best choice.What he said.
But - and this is what the Goreites just can't seem to understand - had Nader not been on the ballot and this had been a two-man race, I still would not have voted for Gore. I would have abstained in the Presidential race and voted solely for local and congressional candidates and ballot initiatives. Meaning that, at least in my case, Nader is not responsible for my not voting for Gore. Al Gore lost my vote before Nader ever won it.
Two days after the election, we still don’t know who the next president will be. How did things get to be so weird?
Looks like we've got a winner.
originally posted by zagg
Not to belabor the day's news, but the word out of Florida is pretty astounding -- 19,000 Palm Beach ballots have been tossed out for being punched in two places, ballots are showing up which had been "forgotten" Tuesday night, Blacks were turned away from the polls yesterday, and it even looks like the flawed design of the Palm Beach ballot was illegal under Florida law!
Wow -- Buchanan did really well in Palm Beach County, Florida. Odd, don't you think?
This is the ballot that caused all the confusion in Palm Beach County.
Hundreds of irate Palm Beach County voters, fearing they or their friends voted for Buchanan instead of Gore, besieged the county Election Department on Tuesday and Wednesday with complaints about the ballot.
Buchanan received 3,407 votes in Palm Beach County, far more than neighboring areas such as Broward County, where he got 786, and Miami-Dade County, where he got 561. In precinct 162G, the Lakes of Delray area where Gore received one of his highest vote totals in all of Palm Beach County, a county high of 47 voters picked Buchanan, too.
originally posted by zagg
Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! ("The Exception to the Rulers") maneuvered a get-out-the-vote telephone call by President Clinton to WBAI in New York into a 30-minute interview addressing such controversial topics as the death penalty, sanctions against Iraq, clemency for Native American activist Leonard Peltier, relations with Cuba and China, racial profiling, and the candidacy of Ralph Nader! A transcript is available, and the audio is extremely compelling listening.
I'm getting ready to go vote ... then my girlfriend and I are going to do something absolutely numbing, like drink a bottle of gin and go see "Charlie's Angels" or the like. That way when I find out who won tomorrow, I will already have my blinding headache and wrenching nausea firmly in place.I found this MeFi post pretty amusing.
NewsForChange is carrying live election night updates from the Nader campaign headquarters.
Why do they just make fun of each other?WP columnist Marc Fisher's 9-year-old daughter on viewing a dozen presidential campaign ads.
Editorial: Exit poll results: post 'em if you got 'em.
Newsflash!!!
[Bush|Gore] Wins Presidency!
originally posted by dm8k
It will be a rally either way. You basically have a choice between a candidate who is pro-business and one who is more pro-business.Wall street is looking forward to a post-election rally, which should be good for the billionaires any way you slice it.
If you need to do some last-minute research about the choices you'll be met with in the voting booth today, you could do worse than look up your local chapter of the League of Women's Voters. Your local paper has probably published a voter's guide as well; check to see if it's online.
Anticipating the results: the WP offers a guide to watching the media watch the returns.
Perhaps there's a reason why Nader rallies seem so white, middle class, and disproportionately male; in short, so supported by those who wouldn't be hurt if Bush were in the White House.
Today I had an incredible Masala Dosa for lunch. The best I've ever had, with three wonderful sides: a coconut dip, a spicy red curry sauce and lentil soup. Exceptional.
Here are a couple of statistical facts from our work in Texas that may
be of interest. Please send it around to your list of people interested
in criminal justice, as you see fit.
1. From the time in which George W. Bush won office in November
1994---in a campaign where he accused his opponent, Democrat Ann.
Richards, of being soft on crime---the number of people serving time in
Texas prisons on DWI charges jumped from 1,091 to 4,229 in 1998. So,
from the year prior to George Bush becoming governor to 1998--the
lastest year for which prison counts are broken down by offenses---the
number of people imprisoned on DWI charges quadrupled. The percentage
of Texas inmates imprisoned for DWI charges grew from 1.2% to 3.3%.
(Source: Criminal Justice Policy Council)
2. In 1999, 92,895 people were arrested in Texas for DWI. Of those,
86,579 were white, and 5,969 were African American, and the rest were
classified as Native American or Asian/Pacific. (Source: Texas
Department of Criminal Justice).
3. In 1999, 106,516 people were arrested for drug offenses. Of those,
72,828 were white, and 33,397 were African American. As of 1998, there
were 28,083 people imprisoned for drug offense in Texas, up from 18,602
in 1994. (TDCJ, and CJPC).
4. Though more whites are arrested than African Americans for both DWI
and drug offenses, and while only 12% of Texans are African American,
as
of August, 1999, African Americans accounted for 44.2% of all Texas
prisoners. (TDCJ). In August, we estimated that African Americans
comprised 41% of Texas jail inmates.
5. In August, 2000, the Justice Policy Institute reported that Texas
has
the largest prison population in the country (161,000), that 1 in 20
Texas (5% Texas' adult population) was in prison, jail, parole, or
probation, and that nearly 1 in 3 young African American men in Texas
were under some form of criminal justice control. (Source: Justice
Policy Institute, www.cjcj.org/texas)
If you'd like the source material on these statistics, please give us a
call at (202) 737-7270, ext. 232
Jason Ziedenberg and Vincent Schiraldi The Justice Policy Institute (202) 737-7270 kate rhee program director prison moratorium project krhee@mindspring.com T. 646/486.6715 F. 212/727.8616 www.nomoreprisons.org
dj: anyway...
dj: i ride around in these rickshaws... and they are always kidnapping
tourists in shopping malls where they get a cut
S: kidnapping?
dj: not really kidnapping, but just taking you where they want to take you,
not where you want to go.
dj: and there is nothing you can do about it.
S: gezu
dj: so it's like 20 minute kidnapping
S: like they take you to a shopping mall or something
dj: well there are no malls, but they take you to their buddies shops.
S: yeah
dj: i have heard some incredible lines while people try to sell me junk
dj: "two different artists, but the same motif. look at this!"
S: i remember shopping with you for minidiscs on canal street
dj: "You see here we have a sandalwood elephant. Sandalwood is good
luck and soon will be extinct. Here is a baby elephant carved inside of another larger
elephant. Imagine the patience of that artist!!"
S: i love it
dj: Yes, I remember that minidisc shopping trip.
dj: It was great fun.
dj: That's what India is like 24x7.
S: poor sandalwood
S: i'm fascinated by the animals roaming around the cities
dj: Yeah I really am worried about the dissapearance of sandalwood from
the world.
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand -- not quite, but Planetarium for the Palm comes pretty close.
The multi-talented Gillian Anderson drops LAN switching science for RouterGod.com.
Around Town has a listing of all the vegetarian restaraunts in Delhi. There's also a nice feature on a vegetarian festival going on this week in the print edition.
The India Times has comprehensive English language news. But left out are some great editorials that were in the print edition about the presence of foreign cricket players in the Indian Eleven league. Here's an excerpt from the pro-integration side:
... It will be justifiable on sociological and psychological grounds... hiring foreign players will appeal to our slave mentality fostered by centuries of colonial rule. Sociologists will tell you that anything with foreign connections has an elitist overtone for us.
The mothers are going to walk right up to that computer and say, My children are dying, what can you do? They're not going to sit there and like, browse eBay or something.Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates addressing the Creating Digital Dividends conference in Seattle.
What emerged from this septic tank was this: when the chips are down, New York City Democrats often seem to see enemies only on the left, and are friendly to, or at least collude with, deviations to the right. At the meeting, it was noted that New York Democrats have, from time to time, endorsed Giuliani or others of that ilk for motives of presumed political expediency or shared ideology, and the Party has, in those circumstances, winked and looked the other way. But they seek to purge Democrats who, for reasons of conscience and intelligence, support Nader.
originally posted by zagg
My initiation into the mysteries of the database came unexpectedly today, with a request for a quick-and-dirty Microsoft Access job. I was delighted to discover that O'Reilly offers up database design principles as a sample chapter on their site. Of course, I started to get lost about 1/6 of the way in when the author talks about normal forms, but this totally abstract theory is just the stuff I love to smash my head on over and over and over until something breaks.
The e-mail's creator could be guilty of voter fraud, a felony that carries a penalty of 16 months to three years in prison.
Cornel West: I’m for brother Ralph Nader. Not because he’s a perfect candidate — no candidate is perfect. But for me on personal grounds, I reached a point where working people and poor people are so disregarded and disrespected by a corporate-dominated Democratic Party that you have to begin a new cycle somewhere with somebody. And this broadens the discourse and broadens the engagement. And maybe we can see a little leftward leaning in the Dem ocratic Party. We shall see.Check out this great LA Weekly feature to see who other lefty thinkers are voting for and why.
Salim Muwakkil: The choice between Green Party candidate Ralph Nader and Democrat Al Gore is an agonizing choice, for all the obvious reasons. The choice is a bit clearer for African-Americans, however, who likely would bear the brunt of a Republican administration should George W. Bush squeak past Gore. What’s more, there’s a good chance that Congress will remain in the GOP’s hands; that dire prospect would set the stage for a three-branch assault on the very idea of an activist, progressive government. It was that idea that justified programs designed to redress the varied legacies of slavery and Jim Crow apartheid. I remember the dirty dozen years of the Reagan-Bush regime and its dire consequences. But I also remember how that era started and how many progressives urged a vote for independent candidate John Anderson in the 1980 election that launched Reagan; Jimmy Carter was too tepid a liberal for our tastes. The black community is still paying a steep price for the perverse policies put in place during that benighted era. Nader clearly is the best man for the job, but I’m voting for the lesser of the two-party evils. The worst of those evils is just too likely to cause too much damage.
Ishmael Reed: The white left can afford to experiment with Nader, because they agree with Bush that the problems African-Americans face are traceable to their personal behavior. As an African-American, I have to go with Gore, given the alternative. The Bush family gave us Willie Horton, drugs in the inner city, the outrage of Tulia, Texas, where 17 percent of the adult African-American population was rounded up and humiliated before photographers on trumped-up drug charges that were based upon the testimony of a corrupt undercover agent. And recently George W. Bush and his wife defended the Confederate flag. She even said that the Confederate flag was part of the Southern heritage. I wonder what heritage she’s talking about? Whipping people? George Bush’s enthusing about the reading scores of African-American fourth-graders has got to be the most cynical act in recent political history. The Bush family is always using black people for one purpose or the other. Bush’s father is famous for the Willie Horton campaign, in which they used a negative image of black people to gain 30 points among white male voters in the South during the time that Horton ad was used. In this case, they’re using black people to show their compassionate conservatism.
Due to an anticipated voter turnout much larger than originally expected,
the polling facilities may not be able to handle the load all at once.
Therefore, Democrats are requested to vote on Tuesday, November 7, and
Republicans on Wednesday, November 8. Please pass this message along and
help us to make sure that nobody gets left out.
2000 Presidential
Election Commission
If you happen to find yourself in conversation with a stranger, what's wrong with talking about France's surprising victory in the World Cup, say, instead of mining the Francophile roots of ambulatory social commentary?Patrick Tracey struggles with the merits and demerits of psychogeography for the Washington City Paper. I am heartened to discover that the Washington Psychogeography Association is now accepting members.
I love this bilingual presentation of The Cure B-Sides lyrics. Now why haven't these songs been released on anything but a too-long tangle-prone cassette?
For the first time, all Oregon ballots will be cast by mail (or dropped off at 240 sites). So will more than half the votes in Washington state and one-third in California.
Washington could be a long nail-biter - ballots must be postmarked by Nov. 7 but can arrive as late as Nov. 22 and still get counted. In 1996, 51.2 percent of Washington voters cast mail ballots. And it seemed to take forever this winter to count Washington's primary vote.
...
Oregon starts counting ballots on Election Day morning but California - which expects 4.5 million mail ballots - won't even start until polls close at 8 p.m.
originally posted by zagg
Supposedly we're reading White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. At least I am. If anyone else is and wants to start discussing it, go for it.
Also, if anyone wants to give this site a re-design, let me know. I want to but don't know when I'll find the time.
Sure, no one's offended by a lego Mona Lisa, but will the same be true when someone finally builds a lego Piss Christ?Slashdot reader Anne Marie wants you to support funding for the arts.
So what are we reading again?
I've finally read the Lord Of The Rings books by J.R.R. Tolkien, and
I love this quote by Gandalf:
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.I found this interesting rant from The Beanstalk while searching for the quote online. |
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I finally found a Community Supported Agriculture farm that serves my area! Fresh local ripe organic produce from June thru October for about $300 -- incredible! (Can you tell I'm excited?) If you find this appealing, see if there's a CSA farm near you.
If (like me) you spent way too much time playing the original Nintendo as a child, you're sure to love Seanbaby's NES page. Of special note are the twenty worst Nintendo games of all time and the NES congratulation! awards. thank you, mr barrett.
That steady stream was abruptly cut off sometime Monday evening when Vote Swap 2000 disabled its site after the California secretary of state told the site and a sister site, Vote Exchange 2000, that it was violating California laws against bartering for votes. Both sites are located in California.
All but one of the vote-swapping sites were subsequently disabled Tuesday except one, Win-Win Campaign a not-for-profit site that went online Tuesday morning.
originally posted by zagg
Perhaps we're looking at places comparable to 17th-century Amsterdam at the time of Rembrandt and mercantilism--places that have figured out a way to translate open-mindedness and tolerance into economic dominance.The Washington Post reports that the number one thing that correlates with a region's high-tech success is the concentration of gay people living there.
