in the dark

I usually detest lightbulb jokes. But the last line of this one just makes me smile.

Q: How many Bush administration officials does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are a delusional spin from the liberal media. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate freedom?
Via moriseylvr

passport, please

These are places I've visited. It only adds up to 14 countries, or 6% of the countries in the world. So much for being well-traveled. I really need to step up my travel plans.



These are the 12 states (23% of the U.S.) to which I've been. I've only included states where I've left the airport and of which I have a meaningful recollection. (Which means I left out the cross-country drive my parents and I made from the east coast to California when we moved here from Spain.)

Create your own visited countries or visited states map.

Via Diana

justicia for the desaparecidos?

30,000 people disappeared during Argentina's 1976-83 military rule in a crackdown on students, intellectuals, leftist dissidents, and innocent bystanders.

The country hasn't healed, because the perpetrators of the crimes have not been brought to justice and most of the victim’s families have never recovered the bodies of their loved ones.

But today, the Argentine court struck down amnesty laws, a bold first step toward justice:

Argentina's Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that laws granting amnesty for atrocities committed during the so-called Dirty War are unconstitutional, opening the possibility that hundreds of people could be brought back to court.

In a 7-1 vote, with one abstention, the Supreme Court struck down laws passed in 1986 forbidding charges involved in the disappearances, torture and other crimes, a court spokesman told The Associated Press.

Some 3,000 officers, about 300 of whom are still serving in the armed forces, could be called for questioning, according to human rights groups, which estimated that up to 400 of them could face new charges.

The ruling came in the case of Julio Simon, a former police officer accused in the disappearance of Jose Poblete and Gertrudis Hlaczik, and of his taking their daughter, Claudia Poblete, as his own.

quotable

"A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power."
- George Meredith, 1828-1909, English Victorian poet and novelist whose novels are noted for their wit, brilliant dialogue, and aphoristic quality of language.

in search of bling

It costs a bit to see the King — 30 dollars to be precise.

But he's in town (well at LACMA) until November 15. I'm thinking that it's probably worth the drive and the duckets to see Tutankhamun & Golden Age of Pharaohs. While there, I hope to take in the André Kertész photo exhibit, which by all accounts is wonderful.

unfinished business

Let's hope that this time, justice is served.

The bodies of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner were discovered by FBI agents near Philadelphia, Miss., on Aug. 4, 1964. The three men, civil rights workers who came south to register African Americans to vote, were shot to death sometime on June 21. Their Ford station wagon was torched and their bodies were bulldozed 17 feet under an earthen dam.

But for civil rights activists of long standing, and for a brother of one of the murdered men, the forthcoming trial of the principal suspect in the crime is unfinished business for America.

On Monday, in what’s thought to be one of the last pursuits of justice postponed from the civil rights era, the trial of 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen begins in Philadelphia with jury selection.

apparently, hell hath frozen over

Pink Floyd to reform for Live 8 concert: July 2 show will be first time band has been together since '81

the downing street memo

One more thing you won't hear a word about in the mainstream American press.

More than two years after the start of the Iraq War, Americans are just learning that our government was dead set on invasion, even while it claimed to be pursuing diplomacy.
Via Laura

recipe for a great weekend

1 wonderful guy
1 cup fresh berries
2 slices pound cake
1 Cape Cod
1 glass beaujolais
2 slices Woodstock's pizza
2 hours art and conversation
1 glass red wine
1 Malibu and pineapple juice
20 minutes dancing
3 of the guy's friends
1 'Christine's Favorite' breakfast scramble at Brians' Diner
3 sips Diet Rite
1 three-piece fish and chips order
2 sips organic vanilla créme soda
7 glasses water

Garnish liberally with music and intelligent conversation. And back scratching.

week in review

Sunday: Thai food at Harry's.
Monday: Dao Son and jewelrymaking with Marta.
Tuesday: Des Paris Peeps (Becki, Trevor, the Rollins boys, and Ian) and the Padres game.
Wednesday: Cass and living with intent.
Thursday: Dinner and beating the pants off of ksanti (and Laura) at Boggle.
Friday: Dinner and shopping with Renee.
Saturday: Limbo and the Sports Club.

consider this

Straight from Renee's lips:
"I mean, no really, I've never been considerate in my relationships."

i heart david sedaris

Check out his latest essay, in the New Yorker:

Were the plane to lose altitude and the only way to stay aloft was to push one person out the emergency exit, I now felt certain that the flight attendant would select Becky rather than me. I pictured her clinging to the door frame, her hair blown so hard it was starting to fall out. “But my husband—” she’d cry. Then I would step forward saying, “Hey, I’ve been to Raleigh before. Take me instead.” Becky would see that I am not the asshole she mistook me for, and in that instant she would lose her grip, and be sucked into space.

Via Rick

here's to you, mrs. robinson

Anne Bancroft dies of uterine cancer at age 73

Anne Bancroft won the 1962 best actress Oscar as the teacher of a young Helen Keller in "The Miracle Worker," but achieved greater fame as a seductive mother in 1967's "The Graduate."

She died of uterine cancer on Monday at Mount Sinai Hospital, John Barlow, a spokesman for her husband, Mel Brooks, said Tuesday.

Via MSNBC

licens(censure)

It's not too late to get your hands on this fun, government-issued license plate that proclaims your disdain for our current President. Bidding ends 12-Jun-05 21:11:22. EDT

An actual government issued Anti Bush item. How rare is that? This is an original license plate accidentally issued by the State of Washington.

I had this plate on my car for 4 months before receiving a letter from the DOL informing me that they determined my plate to be "Offensive to good taste and decency."

This is a used plate but in excellent condition. No scratches or dents. It is a one of a kind. Well, actually 2 of a kind. I'm keeping the other one. You can have either the front one pictured, or the rear plate with the actual tabs so you have proof that it is an authentic, state issued plate.

This plate has changed my life. I receive comments all day long while driving around town. Usually it's either a middle finger or a thumbs up. (My own personal "up or down" vote)

I feel like KRAMER driving around with his ASSMAN plates.

I've had people wanting their pictures taken beside the plate, had interesting conversations at gas stations, many waves and horn toots. It's been a blast.

Via moriseylvr

t-h-e a-m-e-r-i-c-a-n d-r-e-a-m

I loved Spellbound, and grabbed the paper last Friday when I saw that a kid from Poway won the national spelling bee. I also noticed that he appeared to be Indian. Now there's this interesting article in the New York Times on that very topic:

Striving in America, and in the Spelling Bee

By JOSEPH BERGER, Published: June 5, 2005

For many American contestants, the most uncommon words at last week's national spelling bee were not appoggiatura and onychophagy, but the names of the top four finishers: Anurag Kashyap, Aliya Deri, Samir Patel and Rajiv Tarigopula. All were of Indian ancestry.

In recent years, descendants of Indian immigrants - less than 1 percent of the population - have dominated this contest, snatching first place in five of the past seven years, and making up more than 30 of the 273 contestants this year.

Behind those statistics lies a beguiling story, not just of immigrant pluck, but of a craze that seems to have swept through the Indian-American community.

Excellence in a number of fields has always had a cultural tinge - consider the prevalence of Dominicans in baseball, Jews in violin playing, Kenyans in long-distance running. In 1985, when a 13-year-old son of Indian immigrants, Balu Natarajan, beat out his competitors by spelling "milieu," it had an electrifying impact on his countrymen, much as Juan Marichal's conquest of baseball had for Dominicans. Balu not only became an overnight Indian sensation, one whose name resonates 20 years later, but other Indian-Americans have tried to emulate his feat.

Certainly, immigrant strivers have always done astonishingly well in national academic contests, not to mention in school in general. In some years, more than a quarter of the 40 winners in the Intel Science Talent Search, known originally as the Westinghouse awards, have been immigrants or their children.

Interviews with those winners, many who are the children of seamstresses or small-time shopkeepers, reveal that to bring the glow of accomplishment into their parents' spare lives, they will sacrifice television viewing and socializing to work on agonizingly slow and complicated experiments.

But Indians brought to spelling mastery some particular advantages, said Madhulika S. Khandelwal, an Indian immigrant who directs the Asian American Center at Queens College. Their parents or grandparents were usually educated, often as scientists or engineers; their parents generally spoke English and appreciated the springboard powers of education.

Unlike many American children who are schooled in sometimes amorphous whole-language approaches to reading and writing, Indians are comfortable with the rote-learning methods of their homeland, the kind needed to master lists of obscure words that easily stump spell-checker programs. They do not regard champion spellers as nerds.

By 1993, the North South Foundation, based outside of Chicago and devoted to making sure Indians here do as well in English as in math, set up a parallel universe of spelling bees. Now 60 chapters around the country hold such contests, according to its founder, Ratnam Chitturi.

They become a minor-league training ground for the major league 80-year-old Scripps National Spelling Bee, which was started by The Louisville Courier-Journal as a way to promote "general interest among pupils in a dull subject."

The enthusiasm has spread. There are now chat rooms and blogs where Indians discuss spelling. Stories about the contests are featured prominently in community newspapers.

"When you see a kid spelling correctly, there was the excitement that he was representing all of us," said Arun Venugopal, a reporter for the newspaper India Abroad who has written about the spelling bees.

Indian families throw themselves in fevered fashion behind their youngsters, drilling them on esoteric words and etymologies, Greek and Latin roots, as well as from spelling lists provided on the Scripps Web site. In doing so, they are as single-minded as other American parents, who have been known to help their fledgling gymnasts, tennis players and singers.

The 2003 documentary "Spellbound," about the 1999 national spelling bee, offered its own example of pushy kin. The father of one Indian contestant, Neil, mentions that a relative back home in India has hired a thousand people to chant prayers during the bee and promised to provide meals for 5,000 if Neil should win.

Mr. Natarajan, the 1985 winner and now a 33-year-old doctor of sports medicine, described the contest as a "a bridge between that which is Indian and that which is American," and it may be that the example of Neil's father is a bridge too far.

But overall, Mr. Natarajan said, the Indian record on spelling bees "gives the community quite a bit of confidence that we can do well here, much like other ethnicities pursuing the American dream."

Via Laura

thinking about the last twenty-four hours

"What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens."
- Benjamin Disraeli , 1804-1881, English politician and author, "Henrietta Temple," bk. 2, ch. 4

re: her recent engagement

... and purchase of her first home — "I owe it all to Bootyfood."
-Denisse

gay gene in fruit flies

This new study on genetics determining sexuality is very interesting. If the same is true for humans, then it will make it harder for homophobic laws to stay on the books. It may also mean that certain folks want to screen out any fetuses that are gay, but as miriku puts it, "in this case most people who are anti-gay happen to be anti-abortion and [anti-]research as well" so maybe that won't happen. Of course, it's only a matter of time before Fred Phelps and his nutjob minions condemn the Drosophila, too.

I'm wondering if fruit fly sexuality is an either/ or proposition, i.e., you're a Kinsey 0 or a Kinsey 6. It will be interesting to see if they can correlate behavior (kinda hard to know what makes a fruit fly bi) back to a Kinsey 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5.

The long-running scientific debate about whether homosexuality is determined by nature or nurture is dramatically closer to resolution after new scientific evidence was published yesterday.

Biotechnologists have found evidence that sexuality is, after all, determined by genes and not environment. Researchers discovered a single "switch gene" that swaps the sexual orientation of males and females.

In the research, published yesterday, genetically altered male fruit flies spurned females and became attracted to other males. Genetically altered females engaged in complex male mating rituals, vibrating their wings, licking other female flies' genitalia and curling their backs ready for copulation. They rebuffed males that tried to mate with them.

The heated debate about the nature of gay sexual orientation has divided opinion for decades, with many gay men and women saying that they were born homosexual. Anti-homosexual activists say that gay sexual orientation is learnt and can be "cured" with psychological help.

The paper's lead author, Barry Dickson, senior scientist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, said: "We have shown that a single gene in the fruit fly is sufficient to determine all aspects of the flies' sexual orientation and behaviour," he said. "It's very surprising."

Dr Michael Weiss, chairman of biochemistry at Ohio University, was as surprised at the findings. "It seems that none of us chooses our sexuality. It just happens. The results are so clean and compelling, the whole field of the genetic roots of behaviour is moved forward tremendously by this work," he said.

"Hopefully this will take the discussion about sexual preferences out of the realm of morality and put it in the realm of science."
Via miriku

visible earth

Check out this collection of images from NASA. I've always loved the "Earth's city lights" one.

gettin' hitched

Chad and Denisse -- I'm not saying where you should get married, just that you might want to check these pictures out before you finalize any wedding plans in California. And you could even leave the ceremony on a Vespa!

everyone's a (dia)critic

I love the irony of using umlauts to make things sound "tougher" when, in fact, their presence means to pronounce the vowel "lighter" than usual.

A heavy metal umlaut is an umlaut over a letter in the name of a heavy metal band. The use of umlauts and other diacritics with a blackletter style typeface is a form of foreign branding intended to give a band's logo a Germanic or Nordic "toughness". It is a form of marketing that invokes stereotypes of boldness and strength commonly attributed to peoples such as the Vikings. The heavy metal umlaut is never referred to by the term diaeresis in this usage, nor does it affect the pronunciation of the band's name.

Heavy metal umlauts have been parodied in film and fiction. David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) in the film This Is Spinal Tap opined, "It's like a pair of eyes. You're looking at the umlaut, and it's looking at you." In 2002, Spin magazine referred to the heavy metal umlaut as "the diacritical mark of the beast".

The German word Umlaut roughly means sound change, as it is composed of um- (a prefix often used with verbs involving "change") and Laut, meaning "sound". Adding an umlaut indeed changes the pronunciation of a vowel in standard (non-Heavy-Metal) usage; the letters u and ü represent distinct sounds, as do o vs. öa vs. ä. Umlauts are used in several languages, such as Icelandic, German, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish. The sounds represented by the umlauted letters in these languages are typically front vowels (front rounded vowels in the case of ü and ö). Ironically, these sounds tend to be perceived as "weaker" or "lighter" than the vowels represented by un-umlautted u, o, and a, thus failing to create the intended impression of strength and darkness.

Via Matt

what a beautiful world

It's an extreme(ly) frightening makeover. A photo atlas released by the United Nations Environment Program shows our impact on the planet, from major deforestation to urban sprawl:

The devastating impact of mankind on the planet is dramatically illustrated in pictures published on Saturday showing explosive urban sprawl, major deforestation and the sucking dry of inland seas over less than three decades.

"If there is one message from this atlas it is that we are all part of this. We can all make a difference," U.N. expert Kaveh Zahedi told reporters at the launch of the "One Planet Many People" atlas on the eve of World Environment Day.

Page after page of the 300-page book illustrate in before-and-after pictures from space the disfigurement of the face of the planet wrought by human activities.

Via Matt and CNN

potter plot revealed?

Bookmakers fear part of the plot of the next Harry Potter novel has been leaked.

A betting website has been inundated with bets on the death of Hogwarts' head teacher Dumbledore - all from the town where the book is being printed. The bets were refused by one chain of bookmakers which claimed it was "obvious" the manuscript had been read.

your ad here

Apparently, you can buy everything on E-bay. Including ad space on a hobo.
Via moriseylvr

mark your calendars

In conjunction with National Donut Day on 3 June 2005, participating Krispy Kreme stores throughout the U.S. will be celebrating by offering customers a free donut of their choice.

For those of you who eat donuts, this is fantastic news:

National Donut Day was established in 1938 by the Chicago Salvation Army to raise much-needed funds during the Great Depression and to honor the work of World War I Salvation Army volunteers who prepared donuts for thousands of soldiers. National Donut Day is celebrated annually on the first Friday in June.

"National Doughnut Day is a perfect time for us to give a little something back to our loyal customers throughout the country," said Stan Parker, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Krispy Kreme. "It's also a great opportunity to build awareness and acknowledge the continued good work of the Salvation Army."

Via InvertedMan

tie a yellow ribbon

Via ksanti

top this

When Diana and Ophira had their commitment ceremony last year, they couldn't find a cake topper with two women on it that they liked. So they opted for a super-cool topper: Cat Woman and Wonder Woman.

They bid on vintage figurines on E-bay, and got them in the mail. Then, things took an interesting turn when their dog Shiri chewed Cat Woman all to hell. (I have to admit that although I was sad Shiri had wrecked a vintage figurine and really upset Diana, I found the irony of a dog detroying Cat Woman hilarious.)

But everything worked out okay. They got a Lara Croft doll to fill in for the Cat Woman instead.

I wonder if they would've used these racially/ gender changeable cake toppers if they had been available.

toxins may cause diseases in later generations

Reason #489 to pay attention to the crap that's being put into our environment:

Toxic chemicals that poisoned your grandparents, or even great-grandparents, may also affect your health, U.S. researchers suggested Thursday.

A study in rats shows the effects of certain toxic chemicals were passed on for four generations of males.

The finding, published in the journal Science, suggests that toxins may play a role in inherited diseases now blamed on genetic mutations.

When these male offspring were mated with females that had not been exposed to the toxins, 90 percent of the new male offspring had similar problems. The effect held for a fourth generation.

Via MSNBC

night of the living alias cliches

Cass and I watched the last three episodes of Alias season four tonight.

We were both pretty much done watching the series, given the Days of Our Alias / As the Alias Turns / General Alias / One Alias to Live tone of the double episode. By the finale, we'd had just about enough of the Night of the Living Alias theme (complete with ZombieNadia) and both announced that this would be the last season we watched.

Then, the last 4 seconds sucked us right back in.

Without spoiling anything, all I have to say is: WTF?!!

david p. henry travel photography

My friend Cristina turned me on to a photographer named David P. Henry. Some of his travel photography is just gorgeous.