randomWalks

On the highway, rescue workers laid out the cell phones of the dead in a neat row. For hours they rang and rang and rang.

If we assess the foreign policy accomplishments of the Bush administration since Sept. 11, the scorecard is quite dismal. There are some people in the Bush administration who have the same mentality as Arafat or Sharon. I can name names, like Ashcroft, Cheney and Rumsfeld, although that is considered impolite. ...The war on terrorism cannot be won by waging war.

O is for the Other Things She Gave Me: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Jane Elliott in Bitch Magazine)

As Franzen himself pointed out when he admitted that Oprah had picked ‘some good books,’ the Oprah list is neither as middlebrow as its detractors would have it, nor as unfailingly invested in bringing quality to the mainstream as its supporters often claim. Despite the widespread perception of Oprah books as spoon-fed schmaltz, many of the novels Oprah has chosen—like Edwidge Danticat’s Breath Eyes Memory and Joyce Carol Oates’s When We Were Mulvaneys—invite the same sort of thoughtful reading Franzen seemed to desire from his audience. But because it draws unapologetically on one person’s taste, the Oprah list doesn’t reflect a consistent standard of literary merit. Rather, it records exactly the sort of meandering path many habitual readers take through the landscape of the literary, dipping into the comfort of Maeve Binchy’s Tara Road one day and stretching to accommodate the difficulty of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye the next. And just because the same person reads both Binchy and Morrison doesn’t mean she reads them both for the same reason or suffers from any confusion about their relative merits. Just as the presence of male writers on Oprah’s list often gets erased, many critics ignored these quality variations as well, lumping her choices into the general category of what one commentator called ‘earnest, womanly fiction.’ As the pejorative use of the word ‘womanly’ suggests, these generalizations rely on assumptions about literary quality that are close at hand—namely, the longstanding association of female writers, ‘feminine’ forms, and middlebrow status.

“I helped kill a Palestinian today.”

ABC Electric Journal: Book Discussion Scheduled – “Interested parties should read the short classic tale on this page and meet back here, at this entry, at nine o’clock EST this Sunday (the fourteenth of April) to unearth its deep mysteries, to sound its fine art.”

A young calf has his belly shaved. Many slashes are made in the skin. A prior batch of smallpox vaccine is dropped into the slashes and allowed to fester over a period of days. During this period of time, the calf stands in a head stall so that he can’t lick his belly. The calf is led out of the stock to a table where he is strapped down. His belly scabs and pus are scraped off and ground into a powder. The powder is the next batch of smallpox vaccine.

Boing Boing discussion: Oprah sez: “Literature is dead”

U: This just in – MetaFilter is not dead: a wonderful discussion about the demise of Oprah’s Book Club in which the “everybody read” phenomenon, the “high vs. low art” debate, and many good authors, books, and bookstores are referenced is well worth your attention.

It's like, you know, you put dog or cat in some box and put smoke there, how he gonna fight for life? Same we did.

McFarlane Toys has released a “statuesque” Jerry Garcia action figure. Oddly, all these photos and the photos on the package show Jerry with glasses, but the actual figures I saw at the toy store yesterday must have been wearing contact lenses. Jerry was cool, but I couldn’t resist Moishe.

• Independent Media Center: Palestine
• Electronic Intifada
• BBC News: Middle East
• wire service images (Yahoo News)
• Ha'aretz breaking news

Counterpunch: An American Student in Ramallah

My name is Tzaporah Ryter. I am an American student from the University of Minnesota. I currently am in Ramallah. We are under a terrible siege and people are being massacred by both the Israeli army and armed militia groups of Israeli settlers. They are shooting outside at anything that moves.

I am urgently pleading for as much outside help as possible to help save lives here.

I arrived in Ramallah last Thursday. I had come back for a visit to the Palestinian city where I had been previously living and studying. On Thursday afternoon, the Israeli army began sealing off each entrance to Ramallah and there were rumors that they planned to invade.

Women carrying their children were trying desperately to flee from Ramallah, carrying infants and toddlers, and their young children were running along in the rain through the fields, slipping and falling on the rocks, trying to reach safety. Israeli jeeps were speeding across the terrain pulling up from every direction and shooting at the women and children, and also at me, as we ran in opposite directions. They were chasing down people, hunting them like that in the fields.

When night fell, Israeli tanks began to invade and also we saw Israeli troops coming on foot from the valley, and surrounding our house. I could hear them calling to each other in Hebrew. They were against our door and all around. They were firing everywhere a barrage of bullets and there was tank fire. We had to lay on the floor and keep silent. We stayed there, on the floor, for nearly four days in the darkness.

We knew that our circumstances were better than others because old people or infants or people with medical emergency needs had no help. It was very cold, with most families packed all in one room. Some people are without life sustaining medicines like insulin, and they are altering their doses dangerously if they have any medicine left to take. People are becoming dangerously sick from lack of food and water and heat. The fear and terror only makes things worse, but it cannot be avoided.

The numbers of these killings I fear are much greater than the numbers confirmed in the press, because the human rights offices and the media centers have been stormed, and everything is shut down. No one can move without almost certain chance of being shot by the Isreali snipers, who are everywhere.

The Israelis are demanding that all journalists leave Ramallah and today another foreign journalist was shot. They do not want any more internationals here and are deporting people. It seems quite clear that they do not want eyewitnesses which is only heightening my own fears.

The hospitals have also been surrounded and invaded and Israeli troops are taking the injured people and interrogating them. Today a woman, a patient, tried to walk out from hospital. The Israelis shot her in the neck and killed her.

There are reports that they are rounding up men between the ages of 14 and 45 in that neighborhood, and these civilians, from these same Palestinian families trapped in that building, were just used to walk in front of an Israeli tank as it invaded the Preventative Security Compound.

This is a massacre. The foreign delegations tried to get in but were turned back, the International Committee of the Red Cross is trying to help but they are being ignored. Please help.

On the news in America, we see hardly anything of demonstrations. What are you doing over there?

For the love of God, please stop this slaughter. Please help.

Lynda Barry: Let us now praise hairy men!

Here's a rundown of the extra scenes:

• Bilbo's journal, "Concerning Hobbits": A brief introduction to the history of Hobbits, which comes after the introductory prologue about the creation of the ring.
  
• The introduction of Samwise Gamgee ( Sean Astin)--a scene that had showed him doing his gardening work.
  
• More footage from the Green Dragon Inn, with Merry and Pippin singing Hobbit songs.
  
• Sam and Frodo ( Elijah Wood) on the road to Bree, during which they see an exodus of elves.
  
• Aragon song: Viggo Mortensen singing an Elvish song foreshadowing his relationship with Arwen ( Liv Tyler).
  
• Aragorn in Rivendell at the site of his mother's grave.
  
• An extended scene in which the Fellowship leave Rivendell.
  
• New scenes, pre-battle, from the Mines of Moria, which explain the history of the mines.
  
• Cate Blanchett's character giving a special gift to each member of the Fellowship before they depart.
  
• Thirty more seconds of footage from the film's climactic battle scene.
  

This image of black water off the coast of Florida was acquired on March 20, 2002, by the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS). Scientists and local fishermen are not sure what is coloring this typically turquoise water black. Amid growing concern, scientists are now trying to determine the source of the black water.

I am insane now. I have become the honking, and the honking has become me. I cannot throw eggs. It is bad and wrong. But I can't just do nothing, either.

The Warmth Of Oscar’s Open Arms (washingtonpost.com)

“I feel like I won the Academy Award last night. I leaped up and made a fool of myself,” said director Warrington Hudlin, who watched the awards at a big party in New York. “I lost it, I can’t be cool. It’s too wonderful. It’s too historic.” Entertainment lawyer Nina Shaw said she watched the faces in the audience at the Oscars as they listened to Berry’s emotional acceptance speech and could see the import of the moment dawning on them. “There was absolute shock on some of those faces, as they realized for the very first time they were witnessing history."

Terrorism Fears Push Maryland Toward Wider Police Power (washingtonpost.com)

“I realize that this bill basically says you can tap someone’s phone for jaywalking, and normally I would say, ‘No way,’ " said Del. Dana Lee Dembrow (D-Montgomery). “But after what happened on September 11th, I say screw ‘em.”

The Cloud of Unknowing and post-modernism

Tonglen means "taking in and sending out." This meditation practice is designed to help ordinary people like ourselves connect with the openness and softness of our hearts.

As a fervent dissenter, I'd love to think I'm taking an illustrious, courageous stand, but it worries me how easy this is when I'm preaching to the converted. If you don't like my cynical critique of everything under the sun, I know you won't be reading FmH regularly for long no matter if I'm the most thoughtful, literate, erudite weblogger on the planet.

Writing quickly and well: 13 secrets from Poynter Senior Scholar Roy Peter Clark. All great, but – “texterity?”

With the smart eye band implanted, you'd set your eyes to read a book, say, by clicking a button on the device sitting behind your ear. This would generate a magnetic field to activate the eye band's artificial muscle.

In the end, we will need to give up any lingering fantasies of a color-blind Web and focus on building a space where we recognize, discuss and celebrate racial and cultural diversity. To achieve that goal, all of us -- white folks and people of color -- will have to shed the defensiveness that surrounds the topic of race.

Yeast Infection: The Pitfalls of Self-Diagnosis

A new study of customers in pharmacies and grocery stores showed only a third of the women buying over-the-counter vaginal antifungal product had accurately self-diagnosed their conditions.

Boing Boing seems to attract a knowledgeable crowd. Here, they discuss absinthe.