randomWalks

Is It a Sign? (washingtonpost.com) - Babies with normal hearing are being taught sign language by parents hoping to produce a learning boost or tantrum relief.

The LA Times is running two fascinating stories today:

When you’re white, you have the luxury of invisibility. Anything that peels back the veil that keeps you invisible and makes you opaque is jarring and frightening to white folks. You don’t ever have to think about being a dominant group member. Your world is natural and normal. It’s not white. It just is.

When people can't establish a racial category for this guy they can't see him; in a sociological sense he's invisible. But what makes him interesting is not just that he could be passing -- moving between races -- but that he's playing with it

I was fascinated by seed packets as a kid. I remember tearing them open and pouring out a couple dozen little black specks into my hand, and then looking out over our garden like “nuh-uh”.

• cherry tomatoes
• morning glory
• soybeans
• the first thing I remember wanting to be was a "pumpkin-seller"

Interview with Norton Juster, author of “The Phantom Tollbooth”.

beatthief

Would you live on Noah’s ark?

Google Search: what would buddha do?

Hopefully people don't mind long songs.

The All-Star Newspaper links to articles by “the best newspaper writers in the business” every day at noon ET.

Here was a woman who no longer could recognize her own children; a woman who had no idea who her husband had been; no clue where she was, what her name was, what year it was -- and yet, knew what she had been taught at a very early age to call black people. Once she was no longer capable of resisting this demon, tucked away like a ticking time bomb in the far corners of her mind, it reasserted itself and exploded with a vengeance. She could not remember how to feed herself, for God's sake. She could not go to the bathroom by herself. She could not recognize a glass of water for what it was. But she could recognize a nigger.

It's like when you go to the bathroom. After you use the toilet, you must wipe yourself. That's how you finish the job!

What went wrong is that we allowed ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by media representations of crime and violence that portray both as the province of those who are anything but white like us. We ignore the warning signs, because in our minds the warning signs don't live in our neighborhood, but across town, in that place where we lock our car doors on the rare occasion we have to drive there. That false sense of security -- the result of racist and classist stereotypes -- then gets people killed. And still we act amazed.

Take a penny, leave a penny, says filepile.org.

Zoinks! Like, not even for ten Scooby Snacks!

Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration --
that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.
There is no such thing as death,
life is only a dream,
and we are the imagination of ourselves.
Here's Tom with the weather --

Ellison Music Labs features a hip hop stream, a drum and bass stream, and a jam band stream. That’s something for just about everyone – and three things for me!

It would be wrong to say that I would only be discriminated against because I am Korean or Asian American. I used to bus tables, and people used to think I was Mexican. The reality is that I might be discriminated against because someone thinks I am Native American or Latino or Asian American.

Holloway 7 is a brief exploration of how Jef Raskin’s ZUI (zoomable user interface) is intended to work. Interesting stuff, but I guess there’s no substitute for actually using something – I still can’t figure out if this thing makes any sense.

I ask them if Harris allows people to smoke in the loft. I ask if they know where he and Corrin keep the iron. In one particularly surreal moment, I realize I've lost my keys. I enter the chat room and ask if anybody happened to see where I left them.

These PLBM arcade games for PalmOS look great – I can’t wait to install lunar lander.

More Cold Mountain poems by Han-Shan.

Selected Han-Shan Poems for Hippie Reading

The Unimog, a converted German military vehicle manufactured by Daimler-Chrysler will be sold as a luxury vehicle in the US later this year. (This ten-foot-tall, six-ton beast dwarfs the Hummer.) According to Unimog marketing manager Bruce Barnes, “even in Scottsdale, Arizona, moms will want to take it to the grocery store. It’s a head-turning vehicle.” It seems to me this thing pretty much condemns itself, but here’s a tree-hugging press release to chew on.

I think this one’s pretty good.

It should be understood that caught in between is on fire, but I’ve been remiss in not mentioning the Black History Month blogging that BoyCaught’s been doing all month long. Take a minute today and an hour this weekend to peruse the great links he’s gathered. Maybe if we ask him nice he’ll collect them into a single page somewhere that’s easy to point to.