Saturday, May 01, 2004

Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read by China Mieville
China Mieville tremendous British SF writer
Acadians to get apology from Queen Elizabeth: "'This is a royal proclamation, and it involves two very important things for Acadians everywhere,' Euclide Chiasson, president of Canada's National Society of Acadians, based in Moncton, New Brunswick, said Thursday afternoon. 'This is important because it makes historic records a fact, and the Crown is admitting it caused irreparable damages to the Acadian people."
this very difficult to sing song a great favorite of Dad's--


Mountain Greenery--Lorenz Hart (music Richard Rodgers)

On the first of May
it is moving day--
Spring is here
so blow your job,
Throw your job
away!

Now’s the time to trust,
To your wanderlust,
In the city’s dust
you wait,
must you wait
Just you wait.......!

In a mountain greenery,
Where God paints the scenery
Just two crazy people together,

While you love your lover,
Let blue skies
be your cover-let,
When it rains
we’ll laugh at the weather,

And if you’re good,
I’ll search for wood,
So you can cook...
while I stand look
in’

Beans could get no keener
reception
in a beanery--
Bless our mountain greenery home!

(Mosquitoes here,
Won’t bite you dear,
I’ll let them sting
me on the finger!)

We could find no cleaner
retreat from life’s machinery
Than our mountain greenery home.


Kennebec-Chaudiere International Corridor - tourism, heritage, history, Quebec, Maine
Evangeline, Longfellow's poem

"On the banks of the Teche, are the towns of St. Maur and St. Martin.
There the long-wandering bride shall be given again to her bridegroom,
There the long-absent pastor regain his flock and his sheepfold.
Beautiful is the land, with its prairies and forests of fruit trees;
Under the feet a garden of flowers, and the bluest of heavens
Bending above, and resting its dome on the walls of the forest.
They who dwell there have named it the Eden of Louisiana! "
ACADIAN - CAJUN Genealogy & History
more Acadiana
"KATC-TV has begun airing a summary of its weather forecast in Cajun French at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. each weeknight"
Outrage Knits Defiant Unions

"As calls rose for a General Strike in B.C.... "

Friday, April 30, 2004

Contracting out torture
"Titan, based in San Diego, describes itself as a 'a leading provider of comprehensive information and communications products, solutions and services for national security'. It recently won a big contract for providing translation services to the US army."

Thursday, April 29, 2004

Thomas "Fats" Waller's centennial coming up, cats!
can't argue with Patrick J. Buchanan!

"The Old Right curmudgeons who warned us against giving these vagabonds food, shelter and a warm place by the fire were right. We should have put them back out on the street.
President Bush should have listened to his father, who kept the neocons at some remove, and he had best beware, because they have a major card yet to play. That card is escalation.

With the situation in Iraq deteriorating, the neocon agenda is to widen the war into Syria, Iran and perhaps Saudi Arabia, and convert it into 'World War IV,' the war of their dreams, a war of civilizations, an Armageddon, with America and Israel on one side and Islam on the other.

Exiting Iraq with honor and avoiding the wider war for which the neocons are even now scheming is the first duty of patriots."
Hey Ya! not as good as the Peanuts one, but the dancing banana....
Acadians in Maine--"Nos Histoires de L'Ile (Our Stories of the Island) is not only the title of our book, but also the organization that has been created by current and former residents of French Island to preserve the unique story of our French community. "

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Hubert Selby, Jr. 1928-2004

"Couteau: You're at the gates of heaven because that can be the next step? Or ... ?

Selby: Let me put it this way: I think we're always striving for this perfection of our own being, to realize our own perfection. To realize and be consciously at one with this thing that created us, that we always have within us. I mean, we always have it in its entirety. It's my belief that says, "I don't." And it seems to me that, periodically, the closer I get to the conscious awareness of my oneness with this creative power the more insane the human ego becomes. And I'm defining "ego" as the lie of separation. The lie that says I'm separate from this thing that I can never be separate from. I'm separate from me; I'm separate from you. It starts to feel really threatened, and it just becomes outrageously vicious -- at its best, [laughs] it's vicious. And so, I can just feel so twisted and turned, that I can't move; I just don't know what the hell is going on. But my experience has proven to me that when I'm feeling that way it's because I'm really knocking at the gates of heaven. You know, to use a phrase. And if I can just find some way of letting go of my fear, which usually means surrendering right into the middle of the fear -- in other words, just sitting and saying: Okay, you fucking dragons, you demons, here I am, eat me up alive, you fucking punk. Then I become aware of being at the gates of heaven. But, boy, it's not easy. [laughs] "
gratefully received: IDC's "Top 20" and David Perry's
New Years
He fought for...something
"One of the things about football is that there is always another team you have to defeat. War is permanent. This is the central fact of the game. You want a guy who always fights because you always have to fight. Who does he have to fight? The other guy, naturally--it doesn't matter exactly who.

But in life? When you're fighting with guns and bombs? Well, it kind of matters who you're fighting; one ought to know who the enemy is--at the very least. But does anyone know whom Pat Tillman was actually fighting when he was killed? Not according to the news reports. As far as I could tell from most of the breathless paeans that appeared last weekend, the former Arizona State star died protecting our freedom from--a bunch of unidentified guys."
King of New York out on DVD

Monday, April 26, 2004

Luc Sante on Nick Hornby and Geoffrey O'Brien
" The shock of the new is something they sought between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, if at all; now, however, a pop song should be like a cold beer on a hot day, with a bit of uplift worked into the transaction. Just as Hornby sets up a straw pop star--who in Eighties fashion applies heavy makeup, among other torts --when he needs a hissable villain to contrast with one of the hard-working, unaffected singer-songwriters he admires, so he crumples everything he finds emotionally or intellectually difficult into a wad and labels it with the damning adjective 'edgy.' Whatever kinds of music this advertising cliche might be applied to Hornby is content to represent it all as assaultive screeching with lyrics about murder, against which he can propose something or other by Teenage Fanclub, 'packed with sunshine and hooks and harmonies and goodwill.' So no problem, then. For that matter, he seems to think that jazz is that velveteen-textured pap you hear in commercials, and classical music is 'something that makes the room smell temporarily different, like a scented candle.' "
The Tyee: Recalling the Mounties Major Minor Legend
"When you come right down to it, there is no excuse for walking a batter," Bamberger told Boyd back in 1958. "It's accepted as normal, but it isn't normal; it's a mistake. If you throw four bad pitches, you have made four mistakes. There is no other sport where you can survive making that many mistakes."
Mantis shrimp may have swiftest kick in the animal kingdom
"The high-speed video revealed other interesting aspects of the strike, including bubbles generated at the point of impact. The researchers suggest that the shrimp is taking advantage of a physical process called cavitation - the destructive effect of exploding bubbles - to break snail shells. The bubbles are created by negative pressure near the point of impact, either during the swift strike or as the heel of the appendage pulls back afterward. The popping bubbles also generate sound, and perhaps even light."
interview with African Head Charge etc. drummer Eskimo "Mus'come" Fox

(thanks gmtPlus9)
documentary about Vancouver painter Attila Richard Lukacs

"Vaisbord: 'What did he do for painting?'
Sokolowski: 'I think he tried to show that Canadians could be more than people with good manners...you know, it's the school of eight thing.'

V: 'The Group of Seven?'

S: 'The Group of Seven. If I were to fault Attila and Diane (Farris), they sort of wanted to play with fire but they weren't willing to get burnt.... You just can't take loaded symbols and say, `Oh, I'm just play acting.'... You know, Saturday afternoon Sodom and Gomorrah.'"

Sunday, April 25, 2004

The Avalon Project at Yale Law School : Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy
ID card trials to start next week
"'What has anybody to worry about having their true identity known?' he said. "
Trouble for the Tories in BC?
"What was once a populist Western protest movement has revealed itself to be an old style Political Party just like the Liberals and, yes, the Conservatives. Voters who deserted the NDP a decade ago for the Reform Party are taking a look and don't like Reform's metamorphosis into Conservatives. "
Nanaimo Lakes Road
farewell Lennie Briscoe
Pantaloons on Mike Scharf's "Verite"-- " 'colloidal asphyxiates,' 'cathexes,' 'pulvery,' 'Axl Rose,' 'numbkin,' 'McKenseying,' 'fuckball,' "
rare photograph of Jefferson & Adams
blissblog

"The thing that IS offensive is the condescension to the hardcore Grime fans. They might mangle the Queen's grammar and use patois and sling slang and misspell words (deliberately, though, often), but surely it's OBVIOUS that the level of literacy in the better grime (or hip hop, or dancehall) lyrics is staggering? And therefore by implication and by definition the fans have extreme verbal skills. They're probably not bookworms (although that's just an assumption--for all I know D Double E's got library cards and overdue books all across East London) but they don't need to be--this is a post-literate literati, a voracious oral culture sucking in and chewing up stuff from across the mediascape. With a lot of these lyrics, the sheer comprehension skills needed to follow the twists, spot the allusions, and unravel the compressions, is staggering. You need skill to actually even ENJOY this stuff, the sheer linguistic sport of it. And that suggests to me that the people who are into it, the kids for whom it's their life, must be really sophisticated. When you read interviews with Dizzee and Wiley, they come across as very perceptive and insightful. What the Americans call EQ or emotional IQ, these guys score pretty high. I'd also venture that without having to read the Guardian or New Statesman or political blogs, the grime kids are probably pretty sussed in their grasp on what's fucked about the world. In that sense 'street knowledge' is as good (or better) an education as reading Fredric Jameson or some Routledge primer on late capitalism, postcolonialism etc etc. So yeah, as Matt concludes, tweak some of the words, translate a bit between jargons and idiolects, and you'll find that the bloggaz and the grimesters are speaking the same language. Gutterlectuals unite, down with middlebrow!"
"Some Pictures a friend brought back from Iraq"