Chillifrog

Pennsylvania

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:54:32 +1100

Pennsylvania

Droll

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:52:34 +1100

When Father Tim Jones advised his poorest parishioners in York that they should shoplift in supermarkets for things they need this Christmas, because that was better than mugging or burglary to pay for them, he introduced a fascinating new relativism into the Ten Commandments.

Maybe it’s because he’s a Christian. The New Testament does fanny about a bit with established Old Testament absolutes and Jesus is forever telling little stories instead of making direct statements (sometimes you want to set Paxman on him: “Come ON, the voters don’t want to hear about camels and the eyes of some wretched needle, they want to know how much money they can have and still go to Heaven. In pounds and pence, please!”). But the God of the Old Testament wasn’t like that. The Commandments were intended to tell thick Stone Age nomads exactly what they may and may not do.

Maybe Father Tim would have preferred Moses to come back down the mountain with some stone tablets that took a more realistic view of things. Ten commandments a bit more like these:

I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, if you go along with all that literal stuff. I’m not asking you to believe that I actually parted the Red Sea or anything. I mean, for a start, what would have happened to all the fish? And imagine how boggy the seabed would have been for the Israelites to walk across. They’d have been forever going: “Bugger, I’ve got me sandal sucked off again by this hellish boggy seabed, hang on, I’ll have to try and dig it out”.

But you could maybe go along with the burning bush episode and other smallscale phenomena for which there are perfectly feasible scientific explanations, and also with things like Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac, which could have just been because he was bonkers.

What Ever. I am the LORD thy God — and if you feel more comfortable just “generally having the feeling that there is something out there that is bigger than us but I’m not saying it’s an old man with a beard” then, frankly, I will take what I can get. Although I sometimes wonder why I bother with the beard. It’s very itchy and seems to be a big stumbling block for most people.

As I say, I am the LORD thy God and thou shalt have no other gods before me. Although that doesn’t mean that other people’s gods aren’t equally valid and fine. This is categorically not an excuse to go and beat up Muslims, who will anyway claim that their God is me, too, or to make fun of Hindus or put whoopee cushions under the bums of Buddhists. Although if you want to poke a Scientologist in the eye I guess I could be persuaded to look the other way.

(Interesting theological point: I am omniscient and all-seeing, therefore I presumably cannot look the other way. And yet I am all-powerful, so I can do whatever I want. So can I, or can’t I?) Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them. But I’ll be sending along a Son eventually, and you can make all sorts carvings of him if you want, and kneel in front of them, prostrate yourselves, whatever floats your boat. And also you can put up huge posters of David Beckham in his pants. And the Angel of the North is OK. And most public art, but not stupid drama students who paint themselves silver and stand around on the South Bank scaring dogs. For I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, and if anyone is going to stand around pretending to be a statue and then suddenly come to life and make children cry, it is going to be me.

Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain. Although I know everyone does it, and compared with some of the swearing you hear nowadays, just shouting out my name when you’re angry is pretty tame. I have to admit that only this morning I was making a little garlic mayonnaise and it split, and then the doorbell rang with the first guests, and I had nothing to serve with the cold turkey and I went: “Oh, Goddddd!” and hurled a tea-towel at the wall.

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Which doesn’t mean you have to go to church, don’t worry. You can go to the football if you want, or go shopping, or, if you are poor, shoplifting. To be honest, most people get so drunk on Saturday night that they are barely even alive on what used to be my day — and I count myself a winner if just a handful of my flock don’t spend the Sabbath groaning, vomiting and phoning girls to try and find out as subtly as possible, without asking a direct question, if they had sex the night before.

Honour thy father and mother, unless your dad knocks you about or is a drunk or has a rubbish job or an embarrassing car. Or if your mum is a right slag. At the same time as honouring them, though, you’ve got to tell people if they abuse you because they might have done it to other kids, or even have a whole other family living downstairs in the cellar, especially if you are Austrian.

Thou shalt not kill. Actually, thou really shan’t. This is about the only one that has held up and I’m quite pleased with it. You could get rid of all the others if people would only stick to this one. There would be no wars (or, at least, only really lame wars where people threw fish at each other or old pants) and no awful violent movies where people get a sharpened pencil poked up their nose into their brain so that you feel ill for about a week afterwards .

Thou shalt not commit adultery, except with a Lithuanian. Isn’t it funny how “Lithuanian” has become a synonym for “prostitute”. When did that happen? Anyway, having it off with a prozzy is basically OK because — unless you’re famous — your wife will almost certainly never find out. But you knew that.

Thou shalt not steal. Unless to get stuff you really want from rich poo-heads such as Tesco and Simon Cowell.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. This one was too easy, I always thought. I mean, how often are you tempted to phone the police and say, “I saw old Mrs Vogelbaum from No 72 stamping on a dormouse” when it isn’t true? Total waste of a Commandment. Even Hitler probably never broke it.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife unless she is well fit, in which case, go ahead and covet, as long as you don’t shtumpf her, which would be an offence against Commandment 7 (assuming she is not Lithuanian). Also thou shalt not covet his maidservant (who probably is Lithuanian), nor his ox, nor his ass (yes, ha ha ha), nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s, unless you want to be part of the world market economy, whose business model is explicitly dependent upon coveting. Which brings us back to the moral issue on which we came in. But don’t sit here reading, it’s Boxing Day: The sales have started, the shops will be overrun, security will be at its slackest of the whole year … Go forth, and shoplift!

South Bronx 1980

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:41:09 +1100

South Bronx 1980

George S. Kaufman

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:38:55 +1100

the notorious wit of George S. Kaufman (1889-1961), one of America’s most prolific and esteemed humorists and playwrights, whose work included such plays as You Can’t Take It With You and Of Thee I Sing:

“Unlike Dorothy Parker, who seems to have been credited with every witticism uttered by every woman in the United States between 1920 and 1970 but actually said only a few of them, George S. Kaufman was the genuine author of virtually all the funny, sardonic, and wise comments and bon mots attributed to him. …

“It was Kaufman, for example, who deflated Raymond Massey when the actor had scored a huge success playing Abraham Lincoln and began to grow more and more Lincolnesque in his manner, speech, and clothing off the stage. ‘Massey,’ Kaufman said, ‘won’t be satisfied until somebody assassinates him.’ It was Kaufman who deflated Charles Laughton when Laughton, commenting on his own performance as Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, said pompously that he was probably so effective in the role because he came from a long line of seafaring men. ‘I presume,’ Kaufman said, remembering Laughton’s equally excellent performance as Quasimodo, ‘that you also come from a long line of hunchbacks.’ And it was also Kaufman who took care of an actor with the unfortunate name of Guido Nadzo by commenting, ‘Guido Nadzo is nadzo guido.’

“Kaufman’s comments were aimed with deadly accuracy, but he wanted them to make their point and nothing more, and he became upset and contrite if damage resulted and seemed to be growing permanent. When, for example, his line about Nadzo achieved such widespread currency that the actor began to find it difficult to get work, Kaufman went from friend to friend until he found a job for him, and he continued to get him jobs until Nadzo himself decided that Kaufman had been right in the first place and left the stage.

“Actors were a favorite target of Kaufman’s, partially because they caused him constant agonies by forgetting, rewording, playing badly, or otherwise failing to do justice to the brilliant lines he wrote for them. The Marx Brothers, for whom he wrote two plays, Animal Crackers and The Cocoanuts, and a movie, A Night at the Opera, were particularly painful to him because of their practice of changing lines at every performance and even trying to throw each other off balance by suddenly speaking lines which weren’t in the play at all, stealing these from other plays or making them up on the spot. Once, in despair, Kaufman walked up onto the stage in the middle of a rehearsal of Animal Crackers. ‘Excuse me for interrupting,’ he said, ‘but I thought for a minute I actually heard a line I wrote.’ …

“He used humor all the time to bring his associates and others back into line when he felt they were straying too far, employing every device from notices on backstage bulletin boards - ‘11 a.m. rehearsal tomorrow morning,’ he once noted on a call board, ‘to remove all improvements inserted in the play since the last rehearsal’ - to telegrams. Once he dropped in to view his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Of Thee I Sing - it was the first musical in history ever to win the prize - after it had been running for many months, and was depressed to observe that William Gaxton, who played the principal role of John P. Wintergreen, had grown bored and was speaking his lines routinely and mechanically. Kaufman left the theatre, went to a nearby Western Union Office, and sent Gaxton a wire: WATCHING YOUR PERFORMANCE FROM THE LAST ROW. WISH YOU WERE HERE. … But he needed no telegram to cool down an actor who kept blowing his lines and blaming the script. ‘It doesn’t flow,’ the actor said. ‘It flows, all right,’ Kaufman said. ‘You don’t.’ “

Scott Meredith, George S. Kaufman and his Friends

The Hallway

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:37:58 +1100

The Hallway

10 places you can't go

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:37:06 +1100

10 Mezhgorye

Mezhgorye is a closed town in Russia which is believed to house people working on the highly secret Mount Yamantaw. The town was founded in 1979. Mount Yamantaw stands at 1,640 metres (5,381 ft) and is the highest mountain in the southern Urals. Along with Kosvinsky Mountain (600 km to the north), it is suspected by the United States of being a large secret nuclear facility and/or bunker. Large excavation projects have been observed by U.S. satellite imagery as recently as the late 1990s, during the time of Boris Yeltsin’s pro-Western government after the fall of the Soviet Union. Two garrisons, Beloretsk-15 and Beloretsk-16, were built on top of the facility. Repeated U.S. questions have yielded several different responses from the Russian government regarding Mount Yamantaw. They have said it is a mining site, a repository for Russian treasures, a food storage area, and a bunker for leaders in case of nuclear war.

9 Vatican Secret Archives

This has been mentioned on a previous list – the archives are not secret despite their names. You can view any document you wish. But you cannot enter the archive. You must submit your request for a document and it will be supplied to you. Despite the foolishness of the recent junk from Ron Howard and Dan Brown (Angels and Demons) the documents are all available and there are no copies of suppressed scientific theories or great works that were banned. The only documents you can’t access are those which are not yet 75 years old (in order to protect diplomatic and governmental information). Indexes are available for people who want to see if a document exists in the archives. The Vatican Secret Archives have been estimated to contain 52 miles (84 km) of shelving, and there are 35,000 volumes in the selective catalogue alone.

8 Club 33

Contrary to popular belief, Disneyland has a full liquor license which is used when the place closes down to the general public to accommodate private parties. But there is one place in Disneyland that is always open to sell booze: Club 33. Club 33 is a private club located in the heart of the New Orleans Square section of Disneyland. Officially maintained as a secret feature of the theme park, the entrance of the club is located next to the Blue Bayou Restaurant at “33 Royal Street” with the entrance recognizable by an ornate address plate with the number 33 engraved on it. Fees for joining range from 10 – 30 thousand US dollars and membership comes with a car park. If you want to join the club, you have to go to the end of the fourteen year waiting list.

7 Moscow Metro-2

Metro-2 in Moscow, Russia is a purported secret underground metro system which parallels the public Moscow Metro. The system was built supposedly during (or from) the time of Stalin and codenamed D-6 by the KGB. Russian journalists have reported that the existence of Metro-2 is neither confirmed nor denied by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) or the Moscow Metro administration. The length of Metro-2 is rumored to exceed even that of the “civil” (i.e. public) Metro. (It is said to have 4 lines and lie 50 to 200 m deep. It is said to connect the Kremlin with the FSB headquarters, the government airport at Vnukovo-2, and an underground town at Ramenki, in addition to other locations of national importance. Needless to say, the fact that no one confirms its existence makes it pretty difficult to visit.

6 White’s Gentlemen’s Club

White’s is the most exclusive English gentlemen’s club. It was founded in 1693 by Italian Francesco Bianco (Francis White) to sell the newly discovered hot chocolate but eventually became a typical (but extremely private) gentlemen’s club. The club is famous for its “betting book” in which members make bizarre gambles. The most famous of which is a 3,000 pound bet on which of two raindrops would slide down the window first. So why is this club on the list? Women are excluded completely from membership, so that is half our audience out. Secondly, men who want to join this exclusive club can only do so if invited by a sitting member who has the support of two other members. Unless you are a member of royalty, or are extremely powerful in politics or the arts, you are unlikely to ever see the exclusive White’s invitation.

Just paying the bills…

5 Area 51

I have put this so high on the list because it is the one place most readers are likely to expect to see. Area 51 is a nickname for a military base that is located in the southern portion of Nevada in the western United States, 83 miles (133 km) north-northwest of downtown Las Vegas. Situated at its center, on the southern shore of Groom Lake, is a large secretive military airfield. The base’s primary purpose is to support development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. The intense secrecy surrounding the base, the very existence of which the U.S. government barely acknowledges, has made it the frequent subject of conspiracy theories and a central component to unidentified flying object (UFO) folklore. The sign above states that deadly force can be used if people enter the Area 51 zone.

4 Room 39

Room 39 or Bureau 39 is arguably one of the most secretive organizations in North Korea that seeks ways to obtain foreign currency for Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s Chairman of the National Defense Commission. Room 39 was established in the late 1970s. It has been described as the lynchpin of the North’s so-called “court economy” centered on the dynastic Kim family. It is unknown how the name originated. Very little is known about Room 39 due to the secretive nature surrounding the organization, but it is widely speculated that the organization uses 10 to 20 bank accounts in China and Switzerland for the purposes of counterfeiting, money laundering, and other illicit transactions. It is also alleged that Room 39 is involved in drug smuggling and illicit weapon sales. It is known, however, that the organization has 120 foreign trade companies under its jurisdiction and is under the direct control of Kim Jong-il. North Korea has denied taking part in any illegal activities. Room 39 is believed to be located inside a ruling Workers’ Party building in Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea.

3 Ise Grand Shrine

The Ise Grand Shrine in Japan (which is actually a series of over 100 shrines) is the most sacred shrine in Japan. It is dedicated to Amaterasu (the Sun goddess) and has been in existence since 4BC. The main shrine is alleged to hold the most important item in Japan’s imperial history: the Naikū (the mirror from Japanese mythology which eventually ended up in the hands of the first emperors). The shrine is demolished and rebuilt every 20 years in keeping with the Shinto idea of death and rebirth (the next rebuilding will be in 2013). This ranks very high on the list of places you will never go because the only person who can enter is the priest or priestess and he must be a member of the Japanese imperial family. So unless we have a Japanese prince or princess reading the site, no one here will ever see anything more than the thatched roof of the Ise Grand Shrine.

2 Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center

This is a place that is not only closed to the public, but it is a place that the public hope to never have to enter! In most “end of the world” films we see these days, there is always a highly classified area where US government officials and a chosen few get to go in the hopes that they can escape the impending doom. The Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center is the real thing. It was set up in the 1950s due to the cold war but continues to operate today. It is a “last hope” area. For obvious reasons its operations are highly classified. It is run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The center is already functioning and even in small local disasters in the US, much of the telecommunications traffic is routed through it.

1 RAF Menwith Hill

RAF Menwith Hill is a British military base with connections to the global ECHELON spy network. The site contains an extensive satellite ground station and is a communications intercept and missile warning site and has been described as the largest electronic monitoring station in the world. The site acts as a ground station for a number of satellites operated by the US National Reconnaissance Office, on behalf of the US National Security Agency, with antennae contained in a large number of highly distinctive white radomes, and is alleged to be an element of the ECHELON system. ECHELON was reportedly created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early 1960s, but since the end of the Cold War it is believed to search also for hints of terrorist plots, drug dealers’ plans, and political and diplomatic intelligence. It has also been involved in reports of commercial espionage and is believed to filter all telephone and radio communications in the nations which host it – an extreme violation of privacy.

French aerobatic team

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:33:50 +1100

French aerobatic team

Words

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:32:52 +1100

Toffee-nosed

Meaning

Snobbish; supercilious; stuck-up.

Origin

Judging by the queries at my website’s Bulletin Board, the British expression ‘toffee-nosed’ isn’t familiar to everyone in the English-speaking world. Whenever it crops up in a BBC drama that is shown in the USA I get mail about it. For those not familiar with it, the meaning is somewhat similar to ‘posh’.

The origin of ‘toffee-nosed’ has nothing to do with the sugary, brown sweet, but derives from ‘toff’, which was the slang term given by the lower-classes in Victorian England to stylishly-dressed upper-class gentlemen. It was recorded by Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor, 1851:

If it’s a lady and gentleman, then we cries, ‘A toff and a doll!’

It is widely agreed amongst etymologists that ‘toff’ was a corruption of ‘tuft’, which has a clear aristocratic pedigree, being the ornamental tassel on an academic cap. Specifically, a tuft was the gold tassel originally worn on academic caps at Oxford University by the sons of those peers who had a vote in the House of Lords. They were worn on the celebratory ‘Gaudy Days’, i.e. the university’s twice-yearly feast days (which sound a good deal more fun than ‘Dress-down Fridays’). The wearers of the prestigious tufts became known as tufts themselves, even having their own sycophantic crowd of wannabees, known as the ‘tufthunters’.

If ever there was a tuft, it was the well-connected student Archibald Philip Primrose, the fifth Earl of Rosebery, first Earl of Midlothian and later British Prime Minister. In March 1894, The Westmoreland Gazette reported that:

Lord Rosebery was one of the last undergraduates of Christ Church who wore the gold tassel, known by the name of ‘tuft’, which was the distinguishing mark of noblemen and the sons of noblemen.

Tufts were variously called tofts, tuffs and, by 1851 at least, toffs. They were already a well-established breed before ‘toffee-nosed’ began to be used. That didn’t emerge until the early 20th century, as in this definition from Fraser and Gibbons’ Soldier and Sailor Words, 1925:

Toffee-nosed, stuck up.

‘Stuck-up’ had emerged a century or so earlier, and is found in Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, 1839:

‘He’s a nasty stuck-up monkey, that’s what I consider him,’ said Mrs. Squeers.

The ‘nosed’ part of ‘toffee-nosed’ appears to derive from the allusion to the haughty toffs, who stuck their noses in the air when faced with the hoi-polloi.

Photo

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:31:04 +1100

Paul Shaffer & Sammy Davis Jr

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:29:33 +1100

Paul Shaffer frantically tries to reach Sammy Davis, Jr., to select a song and schedule rehearsal before his appearance on the David Letterman show:

“Every time I called [Sammy Davis, Jr., to try and select a song or discuss rehearsal], he was either working or sleeping. He never did return my calls.

The morning of the show I was feeling some panic. Sammy was flying in, and we still didn’t know what he wanted to sing. At 10 a.m., the floor manager said I had a backstage call. It was Sammy calling from the plane.

’ ‘Once in My Life’ will be fine, Paul,’ he said. ‘Key of E going into F.’

‘Great!’ I was relieved.

I was also eager to work out an arrangement. We whipped up a chart, nursed it, rehearsed it, and put it on tape. That way when Sammy arrived, he could hear it.

Then another backstage call. Sammy’s plane had landed early, and he was on his way over. When I greeted him at the backstage door with a big ‘We’re thrilled you’re here,’ I was a little taken aback. He looked extremely tired and frail. He walked with a cane.

‘We have an arrangement, Sam. You can rehearse it with the band.’

‘No need, baby. Gotta conserve my energy. I’m just gonna go to my room and shower.’

‘I wanna make it easy for you. So I’ll just play you a tape of the arrangement on the boom box. That way you’ll hear what we’ve done and tell me if it’s okay.’

‘Man, I know the song.’

‘I know, Sam,’ I said, ‘but what if you don’t like the chart?’

‘I’ll like it, I’ll like it.’

‘But what if the key’s not right?’

‘Okay, if you insist.’

I slipped the cassette in the boom box and hit ‘play.’ To my ears, the chart sounded great. Sammy closed his eyes and, in Sammy style, nodded his head up and down to the groove. He smiled.

‘It’s swinging, man,’ he said, ‘but think of how much more fun we could have had if I hadn’t heard this tape.’

His words still resonate in my ears; the notion still haunts me. Sammy swung that night, but as he was performing, I couldn’t help thinking that his carefree feeling about time - as opposed to my lifelong notion of the pressure of the time - was coming from a higher spiritual plane. As a musician, I’ve always thought I rushed. I still think I rush. The great players never rush.

It reminds me of that moment when I watched Ray Charles turn to his guitarist, just as the young guy was about to solo, and say, ‘Take your time, son. Take your time.’ “

Paul Shaffer, We’ll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives

Total eclipse of the sun, 1878.

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:27:41 +1100

Total eclipse of the sun, 1878.

Zoos

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:26:07 +1100

Zoos, or at least animal menageries, have been around since at least Roman times when exotic animals were collected for the purpose of being used in battles in the coliseum. During medieval times, the greatest zoo around was actually contained in the Tower of London. It was opened to the public for the first time during the reign of Elizabeth I. During the 18th century, guests could visit the zoo for only three half-pence, or they could come for free if they brought a dog or cat to feed to the lions. This animal collection was eventually moved into the world’s first official “zoo,” the London Zoological Gardens. Over the years, zoos have moved from being collections of caged animals designed to please the public to expansive parks dedicated to maintaining ecological diversity and conservation. While modern day zoos are mostly safe places where the public can go to see wild, exotic animals, this isn’t always the case. Here are some weird stories relating to modern zoos in honor of Visit The Zoo Day on December 27. Image Via www.theedinburghblog.com [Flickr] Gaza’s Painted Donkeys Untitled-1_220x14782648When the only two zebras in the Mara Land Zoo in Gaza Strip starved to death during the Israel-Hamas war, zoo officials knew they needed the popular creatures in order to entertain the crowds. Unfortunately, replacing the expensive attractions through the secret underground tunnels in the area was not an option for the financially strapped zoo. So keepers did what any good zoologists would do and just faked their zebra collection by painting donkeys to look like their stripped cousins. To give them the dye jobs, zoo keepers used masking tape and black hair dye to create “authentic” stripping patterns on the creatures. While it may sound like a bad solution, many of the zoo’s young guests had never seen a real zebra and were equally impressed by the frauds. I guess it is still better to see a mock wild animal than no wild animals. Source Image Via Associated Press The Loneliest Pig In the World _45746179_khanzirWhat’s exotic to one culture may just be a standard farm animal to another, as evidenced by Khanzir, the only known pig in all of Afghanistan. Because pork products are illegal in the country, the pig is a true rarity in the country, who received Khanzir as a gift from China. As if the poor pig wasn’t lonely enough grazing beside goats and deer, when fear of the swine flu hit the country, he was forced to spend his time in quarantine all by himself. The zoo director, Mr Saqib explained the zoo’s decision to isolate the animal, despite the knowledge that it would not actually be able to infect the general public, “The only reason we moved him was because Afghan people don’t have a lot of knowledge about swine flu, and so when they see a pig they get worried and think they will get ill.” Mr. Saqib does have hopes to alleviate the pig’s loneliness though, he says after the swine flu concerns die down, he would like to get Khanzir a female companion. Perhaps then, poor little Khanzir could at least be a member of the only pig family in the country. Source #1, #2 Image Via BBC In Case of Escaped Rhino… If you’ve ever wondered how keepers prepare for the possibility of an animal escaping the zoo, you’re not alone. Fortunately, thanks to the miracle of the internet, a Japanese training session to get keepers prepared for a potential rhino escape has been caught on tape and made its way into your home. The “rhino” in this case is pretty darn terrifying, what with its eight legs and all. While the team’s efforts seem effective, you have to wonder if they would work nearly as well when the beast is actually 1 ton and angry as all heck. Orangutan Escape Perhaps those zoo keepers should have worked on their plans for escaped primates rather than escaped rhinos. A video seen on Animal Planet (sorry its not embedded, but they don’t offer that service) demonstrates the terrifying things that happened when a four-hundred pound angry orangutan broke out of its cage and chased tourists and charged security guards. During his escapade in the outside world, Blacky also smashed some scooters and took control of a camera tripod hoping to use it as weapon against the guards who shot him with a tranquilizer dart. In the shot, you see just how long it takes for a huge animal to fall after getting shot with a tranquilizer dart –meaning the rhino training exercise certainly was optimistic about that part of the procedure. Nuts About Knut In nature, it is not uncommon for a mother to abandon her cub. Some environmentalists claim that the best thing to do in these situations is to let nature take its course and let the cub die off. But when the animal is already affected by human intervention because it lives in a zoo, it seems more than a little cold-hearted to just abandon the cub. Zookeeper Thomas Dörflein agreed, which is why he saved a two newborn polar bears that were abandoned by their mother. 450px-Knut011 One of the bears died of an infection within four days, but the other, Knut, was hand raised by Dörflein, who provided the cub with around-the-clock care. Only a few months into little Knut’s life, a German tabloid carried an article about Knut that featured a quote by animal rights activist Frank Albrecht, who said the bear should have been left to die rather than be subjected to a life as “a domestic pet.” The director of another local zoo agreed with Albrect and said that keepers should have “had the courage to let the bear die.” To be fair, both of the people quoted said they were taken out of context and Dörflein has said that he was making a point about a German court’s decision saying that it was OK for another zoo to have euthanized an abandoned cub in a similar situation. Naturally, animal lovers everywhere rallied in support of the little bear and the Berlin Zoo vowed to keep him alive and care for him. As a result of the controversy, Knut became a worldwide celebrity and videos of the little cub with his zookeeper were loaded onto YouTube for everyone to marvel at. His fame brought so many visitors to the zoo that it soon experienced its most profitable year out of its entire 163 year history. As Knut grew older, he continued to be a popular attraction for visitors and he is still living at the zoo. Unfortunately, Dörflein died of a heart attack in 2008, although he remains a hero to many residents of Berlin. Source Image Via Jean-Luc [Wikipedia Commons] Human Exhibits A long time ago (actually as recent as 1958 in Brussels), it wasn’t uncommon for humans of other races to be displayed in zoos alongside exotic animals. While racism in that time is not unusual, having people live in a zoo these days certainly is. But in 2007, the Adelaide Zoo in Australia ran a zoo exhibit where humans were housed in a former ape enclosure (they did get to go home at night). Inhabitants took part in a number of exercises and the amused onlookers were then asked for donations towards a new enclosure for a new exhibit for the chimpanzees.

Kabul

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:47:57 +1100

Kabul

In remembrance of a decade

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:46:20 +1100

If their deaths came in the first decade of the 21st century, their lives helped define the 20th. They led nations, produced masterpieces, pushed the boundaries of science and entertained. And they did so in that seemingly distant time when the years began with 19.

In life we called them famous, renowned, celebrated; their deaths we call notable, because their names register. They people our collective memory. Some — those who destroy rather than build — we would like to forget. But most make us pause and think of the past and take account of what the world has lost.

It’s probably fitting that actors should best evoke a century. To hear the names of the stars of old who have vanished since 2000 (yes, officially the last year of the last century) is to receive final confirmation, if any were needed, that an era — particularly of the sort we tend to dip in gold in retrospect — is truly over. To think of Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Alec Guinness, John Gielgud, Loretta Young, Jack Lemmon, Jennifer Jones, Jason Robards, Charlton Heston, Van Johnson, Glenn Ford, Deborah Kerr and Marlon Brando is to recall a very different world indeed.

They were largely royalty of the silver screen, of course, men and women who appeared to us at some remove, alighting from a mythical place called Hollywood. Their deaths carried an element of grandeur.

A more immediate sense of loss seemed to accompany the deaths of those who had become everyday faces, who had looked into television cameras and entered our homes, whether to inform us (Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Peter Jennings, Tim Russert) or to divert us (Johnny Carson, Ed McMahon, Milton Berle, Steve Allen, Julia Child, Jack Paar, Bea Arthur, Merv Griffin and Fred Rogers, who always went by Mister).

We saw vestiges of the Vietnam era buried in the one we call post-9/11: Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, Gen. William Westmoreland, Eugene McCarthy, Nguyen van Thieu. Remnants of the Kennedy years, like Pierre Salinger and the historian Arthur Schlesinger, entered history themselves, as did the last of the Kennedy brothers, Edward, and the sisters Patricia Kennedy Lawford and Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Lady Bird Johnson died (where else?) in Texas.

There were echoes of Jim Crow and Selma with the deaths of Rosa Parks, Lester Maddox and Coretta Scott King.

There were actors in the drama of Watergate: W. Mark Felt, a k a Deep Throat; Rosemary Woods, L. Patrick Gray and the lawyers Archibald Cox and Samuel Dash, who died on the same day. And there were those who ascended in Watergate’s wake, like Gerald Ford.

Ronald Reagan’s death beckoned memories of a Republican ascendancy and the cold war’s twilight. Benazir Bhutto’s murder told of the dangerous era that had dawned.

Other deaths harked back to a different world stage, occupied by a different cast, though many of the scripts still ring familiar. We recall, for better or ill, Hafez al-Assad, Idi Amin, Pierre Trudeau, Kim Dae-jung, Augusto Pinochet, Boris Yeltsin, Suharto, Yasir Arafat, Saddam Hussein and Corazon Aquino.

To what degree history will recall them remains to be seen, but there is little doubt that it will reserve a spot for John Paul II, the Polish pope who seemed to know no borders.

The halls of Congress — as big a stage as any — lost a pride of lions, their battles and debates mostly long settled, but not always; a cause or two remained among their survivors. There was Ted Kennedy, of course, but also Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Mike Mansfield, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Lloyd Bentsen and Claiborne Pell.

Across the street, in another marbled setting, Byron White and William Rehnquist were remembered.

The literary world’s losses were canonical: Saul Bellow, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty and the Nobel laureates Naguib Mahfouz and Czeslaw Milosz. Widely and passionately read authors like Ken Kesey, Kurt Vonnegut and Arthur C. Clarke died, as did prolific and hugely popular writers like Michael Crichton, Sidney Sheldon and Robert Ludlum.

Theater lights dimmed for Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and August Wilson, not to mention Wendy Wasserstein, Horton Foote, David Merrick and both Comden (Betty) and Green (Adolph).

Voices were stilled. Some, with their pens, had shaped the national discourse about politics and culture, whether their ideological stripes leaned left or right. We remember Susan Sontag, Irving Kristol, Betty Friedan, Jane Jacobs, Pauline Kael and William F. Buckley Jr.

Others had declaimed from the pulpit, whether steering clear of politics, like Oral Roberts, or meeting it head on, like Jerry Falwell.

That is to say nothing of the voices and players who gave us music, both of their time and timeless. The world was consigned to getting along, somehow, without James Brown, Johnny Cash, Beverly Sills, Bo Diddley, Peggy Lee, Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Rosemary Clooney, Lionel Hampton, Max Roach, Luciano Pavarotti, Les Paul, Eartha Kitt, Tito Puente, Oscar Peterson, Artie Shaw, Isaac Stern, Waylon Jennings, Celia Cruz, Mary Travers, Perry Como, Mstislav Rostropovich and Johnny, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone.

And then there were two — Beatles, that is — with the too-soon death of George Harrison.

The names, too many for any full accounting here, become the drumbeat for a century parading away. The art world lost Robert Rauschenberg, Balthus, Larry Rivers, Andrew Wyeth and Tyeb Mehta; architecture, Philip Johnson; dance, Merce Cunningham. A legion of those who had elevated photography — Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Yousuf Karsh, Arnold Newman, Gordon Parks, Helen Levitt, Irving Penn — seemed to die en masse.

Two old masters of film, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, died, uncannily, on the same day. They were preceded by colleagues who had literally framed the decades: Billy Wilder, Robert Altman, Elia Kazan and Stanley Kramer. And later: Sydney Pollack and John Hughes, “The ’80s Auteur of Teenage Angst,” as a headline had it.

There would be no more comic relief courtesy of Bob Hope, Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Pryor or George Carlin, though the pretensions and pieties they skewered outlasted them, and had the last laugh.

The Splendid Splinter, too — Ted Williams — left and went away. So did Johnny Unitas, taking with him his ’60s buzz cut and his precision instrument of an arm. Images of flannel pinstripes and leather helmets and smoke-shrouded boxing rings were summoned with the news: Phil Rizzuto, Otto Graham, Floyd Patterson. A victory cigar for another Celtics championship: Red Auerbach. A straw hat at the Masters: Sam Snead.

More names out of the sports pages: Willie Shoemaker, Warren Spahn, Althea Gibson, Sammy Baugh, Kirby Puckett, Max Schmeling, Dale Earnhardt.

Or out of the funnies: Charles M. Schulz.

In television land, a cartoonist team died in the familiar order, first Hanna (William) and then Barbera (Joseph). In the more pointedly etched realm of caricature, it was Al Hirschfeld and David Levine.

And let us now praise the stylish and those who helped make them so: Yves Saint Laurent, Bill Blass and Liz Claiborne, whose labels, at least, go on.

Then there were those who put us in mind not so much of the visual as of the conceptual, thinkers who changed our understanding of the world: a father of the nuclear age, Edward Teller; the economists John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson; the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss; the geneticist Francis Crick; the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross; and the agronomist Norman Borlaug, whose legacy was the millions who did not die, because he had fed them.

Two others — Michael DeBakey and Christiaan Barnard — saved lives by other means, showing that a heart that could not be mended could nevertheless be replaced. Some deaths shocked, for their abruptness, prematurity and theft of promise: Heath Ledger, Natasha Richardson, David Foster Wallace, the rising young pop star Aaliyah.

And there was the falling star of Michael Jackson, whose death became a global event, overshadowing in a matter of hours the expected but still sad passing of Farrah Fawcett, many of whose admirers felt she had been dealt a double blow by dying on a day when heads were turned in another direction.

Their grief was real, and that should come as no surprise. The widely known may be people we never knew, but their deaths can feel personal; the chapters they signify are not just historical. Their deaths, in a fleeting way, compel us to take measure of what has slipped from our own lives. They remind us of our own passages through the decades that they, familiar strangers, had helped fashion. They remind us of the times when — times that we, like they, can never get back. They remind us, that is to say, of our own impermanence.

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Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:08:24 +1100

Population

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:07:38 +1100

The combined populations of Europe, the United States, and Canada (often referred to simply as “The West”) has declined from 33 percent of the world’s population in 1913 to just 17 percent in 2003, as these countries’ fertility rates have declined and many European countries now have shrinking populations:

“At the beginning of the eighteenth century, approximately 20 percent of the world’s inhabitants lived in Europe (including Russia). Then, with the Industrial Revolution, Europe’s population boomed, and streams of European emigrants set off for the Americas. By the eve of World War I, Europe’s population had more than quadrupled. In 1913, Europe had more people than China, and the proportion of the world’s population living in Europe and the former European colonies of North America had risen to over 33 Percent.

“But this trend reversed after World War I, as basic health care and sanitation began to spread to poorer countries. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, people began to live longer, and birthrates remained high or fell only slowly. By 2003, the combined populations of Europe, the United States, and Canada accounted for just 17 percent of the global population. In 2050, this figure is expected to be just 12 percent - far less than it was in 1700. (These projections, moreover, might even understate the reality because they reflect the ‘medium growth’ projection of the UN forecasts, which assumes that the fertility rates of developing countries will decline while those of developed countries will increase. In fact, many developed countries show no evidence of increasing fertility rates.) …

“According to the economic historian Angus Maddison, Europe, the United States, and Canada together produced about 32 percent of the world’s GDP at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By 1950, that proportion had increased to a remarkable 68 percent of the world’s total output (adjusted to reflect purchasing power parity). This trend, too, is headed for a sharp reversal. The proportion of global GDP produced by Europe, the United States, and Canada fell from 68 percent in 1950 to 47 percent in 2003 and will decline even more steeply in the future. …

“The year 2010 will likely be the first time in history that a majority of the world’s people live in cities rather than in the countryside. Whereas less than 30 percent of the world’s population was urban in 1950, according to UN projections, more than 70 percent will be by 2050. Lower-income countries in Asia and Africa are urbanizing especially rapidly, as agriculture becomes less labor intensive and as employment opportunities shift to the industrial and service sectors. Already, most of the world’s urban agglomerations - Mumbai (population 20.l million), Mexico City (19.5 million), New Delhi (17 million), Shanghai (15.8 million), Calcutta (15.6 million), Karachi (13.1 million), Cairo (12.5 million), Manila (11.7 million), Lagos (10.6 million), Jakarta (9.7 million) - are found in low-income countries. Many of these countries have multiple cities with over one million residents each: Pakistan has eight, Mexico 12, and China more than 100.”

Jack A. Goldstone, “The New Population Bomb,” Foreign Affairs

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Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:06:31 +1100

Houdini & Arthur Conan Doyle

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:05:12 +1100

It seems strange that a man best known for creating the quintessential detective, who based his deductions solely on reason, would also be one of the biggest proponents of Spiritualism around the turn of the last century. Equally strange is that a man who based his career of performing illusions and magic tricks was one of the most stringent disbelievers of the same religion. Perhaps strangest of all was the friendship of these two men, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini.

Good Beginnings

Houdini met Doyle while doing a performance tour in Europe. While the magician did not believe in Spiritualism, he had a strong interest in the subject and said many times that he did desperately want to believe, as he truly wished to speak to his beloved deceased mother.

Doyle was already well-known for his support of the belief by this point, and was considered by many to be a saint of Spiritualism. When he met Houdini, he went about bringing him to some of the best mediums in Europe in an attempt to convert the magician. At this point, Houdini attempted to lead Doyle to believe that he was very open to the idea, but just undecided. He did enjoy hearing about the religion from a person he considered to be on the same intellectual plane as himself and not an entirely gullible person.

Still though, the magician was able to see through the parlor tricks used by the mediums that Doyle brought him to. The more of the mediums he saw, the less convinced he became. While he did not yet begin exposing the frauds, he did record their methods and become increasingly frustrated with their taking advantage of people’s trust.

At Cross Purposes

Soon enough, Houdini started to begin his famous crusade against fraudulent mediums. He eventually even became part of a Scientific America committee offering a massive reward to anyone who could prove their methods were authentic –of course, no one ever managed to claim the reward. As his fame grew for these acts, Houdini even started attending séances in costume, taking with him a reporter and a police officer.

Funny enough, Doyle actually supported these efforts at first, because he was afraid the fakes would damage the religion’s legitimacy. Although Houdini offered to show Doyle how to spot the tricks used by mediums, Doyle insisted that the mediums he knew were extremely honest and would never cheat their followers.

As Houdini started to push Doyle even further to admit the people were acting dishonestly, Doyle soon converted to the belief that Houdini himself was one of the most powerful mediums around. Doyle and other Spiritualists who held this belief claimed the magician actually dematerialized himself to make his famous escapes. They believed he was working to discredit other mediums so he could gain publicity and take his act even further. Doyle expressed many of these beliefs in his last book, The Edge of the Unknown.

Houdini, unfortunately, was caught between a rock and a hard place with these accusations. He couldn’t actually reveal his tricks, but by not doing so, the Spiritualists still had ammo to claim he was a medium. While he simply stated that his escapes were all performed by physical means, these tales haunted him until his death.

Attempting to Convert Doyle

In an attempt to prove to Doyle that his performances only involved trickery, Houdini offered to perform a special trick for his friend. The two men were joined by the Bernard Ernst president of the American Society of Magicians for the test, which started with a room filled with a slate, five cork balls and some white paint. Doyle was instructed to choose one of the balls at random and then place it in the container of paint. He was then given a pencil and a piece of paper and was told to go wherever he wanted to write a message of his choice on the paper.

Houdini and Ernst stayed in the room, while Doyle left the house, walked three blocks away and then wrote a message on the paper. He then folded the paper, put it in his pocket and returned to the house.

Upon his return, Houdini instructed Doyle to pick up the ball and put it on the slate. The ball then began to roll over the slate, where it spelled out the words Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin, the same words Doyle wrote on the paper.

While Houdini devised this test to show Doyle these methods all involved simple tricks, Doyle was convinced more than ever that Houdini was a medium.

Attempting to Convert Houdini

The two continued to be friends and spent a vacation together in Atlantic City shortly after Doyle’s speaking tour in New York. During the vacation, Doyle’s wife, lady Jean offered to perform a séance for Houdini. He accepted, trusting her sincerity and honesty, and tried to completely accept the realism of the experience. As stated earlier, Houdini wanted to believe, he still had not found anyone who was worth believing in though. He was particularly excited about the séance when Jean announced that she would be try to contact his mother. Houdini said, “I had made up my mind that I would be as religious as it was in my power to be and not at any time did I scoff during the ceremony… with a beating heart I waited, hoping that I might feel once more the presence of my beloved mother.”

Lady Jean entered a trance during the séance and her hand started moving, scribbling words across paper, which Doyle then handed to Houdini. The message detailed his mother’s pleasure in finally getting to contact her son. They started off saying, “Oh my darling, thank God, thank God, at last I’m through. I’ve tried, oh so often — now I am happy. Why, of course, I want to talk to my boy — my own beloved boy — friends, thank you, with all my heart for this.”

After the séance, Houdini wrote a small note on the bottom of the paper, saying, “Message written by Lady Doyle claiming the spirit of my dear Mother had control of her hand — my sainted mother could not write English and spoke broken English.”

A few months after the Doyle’s returned home to England, Houdini went public about the incident. He said there was no chance his mother had been summoned in the séance based on her poor English and the fact that she never learned to read or write. He said he believed the Doyle’s did not deceive him intentionally, but were victims to their own gullibility.

Doyle tried to argue against these claims by saying that language is universal to the dead. He also said Houdini was too nervous about the encounter to accept that it was his own mother speaking to him from the beyond.

The End of It All

After this, the pair tried to maintain some level of strained friendship, but the final blow came when Houdini began publicly attacking Mina “Magery” Crandon. His Scientific American panel was fervent in discrediting Mrs. Crandon after she came forward to claim the prize. Doyle was a huge supporter of Crandon, even praising her in his later book The History of Spiritualism. “The commission is, in my opinion, a farce,” he wrote, “and has already killed itself.”

The two began privately quarreling, but by 1923, the were exchanging criticizing letters to one another via the New York Times. After they publicly feuded when their tours happened to cross in Denver, they stopped talking for good.

A few years later, Houdini died. When his wife, Bess began clearing out his property, she uncovered a huge collection of books on Spiritualism and she opted to send them to Doyle. The author wrote back to her, stating his reluctance to accept the gifts though, because he thought Houdini harbored bad feelings against him up until the time of his death.

Bess wrote back and said that Houdini had, in fact, held out hope of contacting his mother up until his death and even told her so on his death bed. She assured Doyle that Houdini carried no resentment towards him and that the press had greatly exaggerated the feud between the two. She best summed up Houdini’s thoughts by writing, “he was deeply hurt whenever any journalistic arguments arose between you and would have been the happiest man in the world had he been able to agree with your views on Spiritism. He admired and respected you –two remarkable men with different views.”

Chinese parents sleep in auditorium at Wuhan after taking their...

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:29:17 +1100

Chinese parents sleep in auditorium at Wuhan after taking their children to uni for their first day

Buzzwords of 2009

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:28:32 +1100

Buzzwords of 2009