Please use this thread to post whatever you’d like about whatever you’d like. Self-linking is encouraged, if you like.
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I don’t recall ever seeing animal photography as beautiful as Nick Brandt’s photos from East Africa. Definitely worth checking out. He takes all his photos without the use of telephoto lenses, incidentally.
On the same website, I found Florian Böhm’s gallery of photographs of New Yorkers waiting to cross the street oddly compelling.
What a lovely, peaceful photo. I hate to break the mood, but I am deeply concerned by how quickly major interests are working to hurt fat children, and all children, with this unsound childhood obesity hysteria and scaremongering. People desperately need to marshall together and create huge public outcries about this stuff, before it’s too late. The Washington Post, courtesy of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Obesity Society, has made their agenda front page news all week. Here are two posts about it:
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/05/war-on-childhood-obesity-is-showing-its.html
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/05/misplaced-priorities-for-children.html
I hope people find this as upsetting as I do and will help bring this disgraceful journalism-marketing to public attention. Thanks for listening! And thank you for this opportunity, Ampersand.
I posted about heterosexual privilege a while back on my blog. here is the link:
http://shihtzustaff.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/privilege-heterosexual-and-others/
ok, shameless parental bragging here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/97741731@N00/2506258625/
look at that smile! :)
Animation director Gene Deitch wrote an online book about his animation career at Animation World News.
http://genedeitch.awn.com/
Believe it or not, Gene Deitch has a connection with alt-weekly comics. When Deitch was at Terrytoons, he hired Jules Feiffer to be their designer. (Feiffer’s stint at Terrytoons was, however, short lived. When Deitch got fired, so did Feiffer)
ACM, that smile is really a stunner!
A baffling mock Ken Burns documentary of the Hobo Wars. Simultaneously hilarious and tedious.
Black Agenda Report: The Perils of Racial Solidarity
Calling all atheists/agnostics. Where are yall when we need you? ;)
SC Senate bill allows display of Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments
Is there ANYTHING we can do about this?
Love the images! The images of people waiting to cross the street is amazing. I’ve written quite a bit lately at Uncensored Feminista as I just started this blog over the weekend and I have a whole lot to say about everything!
Well, if you look at colonial history there’s really not much question that the 10 Commandments (and the Protestant version in particular, not too many Catholics helped settle SC, did they?) were influential in the creation of the legal code of that colony.
It cannot be questioned that Christianity in general and a couple of different Protestant sects in particular had a major influence on the settlement and cultural formation of the United States from the very establishment of the colonies up to the present day. The more you exclude that from the teaching of American history the less accurately you teach the subject and the less able the students are to comprehend and understand how present American government, law and culture were formed. Schools should not be teaching religion as doctrine, but it’s revisionism to not teach what it’s influence has been and is and what the basic precepts of the religion are that comprises that influence. In turn, it’s impossible to do that if a student does not know about things such as the Ten Commandments.
Now, this is not necessarily a school we’re talking about here. But if you were going to put up a display of documents such as they are talking about, it makes little sense to include, say, the Rev. Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech and not include the Ten Commandments – without the former, you’d have never had the latter. The speech is suffused with references to Christianity (no surpise there, the man was a Baptist preacher), and if you don’t understand Christianity you’d miss the point of a lot of the speech.
“Where were Obama’s friends?” The Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Henninger asked. Quiet, quiet, quiet.
Considering that his friends include people like Rev. Wright, William Ayers and Tony Rezko, Sen. Obama might well be well served by his friends keeping quiet. How many more like that are there out there?
I’ve heard the same thing said in seriousness by more than one white person. “If Obama gets the White House what will they want next?” Or, “if Obama wins, blacks will think they’re running things.”
Reminds me of what happened in Chicago when Harold Washington ran for Mayor. Of course, Chicago has a lengthy tradition of nepotism, cronyism, etc., so from a purely functional viewpoint it was in a way true; when Harold got elected, some white folks got tossed and more black folks got in and got put in charge of things. Welcome to Chicago. When you get elected your friends are in and the last guy’s friends are out.
But it was also instructive in that after Harold was elected the city was not overrun with gangs (anymore than it already was …) nor did the city fall apart. Sure, your buddy may have lost his job to a black guy, but the garbage still got picked up and the potholes got filled. Everything didn’t go to hell like some people apparently thought they would. If Harold hadn’t died of a heart attack he’d have probably gotten re-elected, among some grumbling from the die-hards.
I’ve been trying to figure out blogging on the DHL shipping/no one can sleep at night mess, which resulted in a large public meeting. Someone from DHL (which visits my blog) came up to me with the company’s written response. And no scanner, so I might have to type the damn thing out.
Calfifornia’s AG Jerry Brown came out with an important legal opinion on releasing the names of law enforcement officers involved in onduty shootings. I blogged on how my city’s department hadn’t done that with two and the next day out of the blue, I received an email with the names of those officers from the agency.
A bunch of White folks this time on a school board are howling about naming the newest school after Thurgood Marshall. Whining about naming schools after noted Black or Latino figures takes place about once every five years. They’re always so embarrassing.
Dianne Odell dies.
I read about that. It’s sad in many ways. But I must say, you’d have thought that they would have gotten a backup generator for her iron lung. Heck, I live in suburban Chicago and we have power outages sometimes. I don’t have a generator, but if the life of someone in my house depended on uninterrupted power I would.
What’s the DHL shipping/no one can sleep at night mess? People near one of their facilities can’t sleep due to the 24/7 activity?
Thurgood Marshall would be a fine person to name a school after. I’d be glad to have my kids’ school named after him.
Ron:
It’s common for majority-black inner-city schools to be named after famous black people. Many parents fear that naming a high school after a famous black person will cause college admissions committees to assume that that school has lower standards (i.e., a 3.8 GPA at Thurgood Marshall High School may be assumed not to mean as much as a 3.8 GPA at John Marshall High School). I don’t know whether there’s any truth to this fear–I would assume that colleges use SAT and other standardized test scores to norm GPAs across different schools rather than just taking them at face value.
By the way, could you send me an e-mail? My address is my full name at gmail.com.
I don’t see a problem with displaying religious material in schools in a historical context. I do see a problem with displaying religious material in schools in a *wink wink* “historical context”.
Sure, there’s a fine line between the two, especially in those parts of the country where the First is only respected when convenient. But banning it entirely is not the answer — it’s an important part of our history. The answer is to take extra care to ensure that the display is truly historical, and to keep a close eye on the bible-thumpers who would use the display as a loophole by which to persecute religious minorities.
The commission in charge of developing the former air base turned air field lured DHL to put a hub there. DHL has 6-7 flights in the early morning hours, which have kept thousands of people up and not able to sleep. There’s a lot of duplicity involving whether or not the commission and management firm for the air field misrepresented the flight path to the public and the FAA. More pretty bad behavior, by those two entities. But it’s an election year and one local commission member is trying to run for higher office against an incumbent who cast the only nay vote for the zone change leading to the night flights. Lots of angry people. Lots of political postering.
But since DHL has projected losses of $1.3 billion domestically for 2008, it’s considering having UPS to its domestic flights. The DOJ is going to address the anti-trust issue (I think it is) and it’s not a done deal. The noise isn’t pleasant by any means where I’m at and it’s got to be pretty bad underneath the flight path, which the residents were told would be 8,000 feet when it passed their neighborhoods but it turned out it was less than 2,000 feet.
On the school, yeah it’s so silly but people in my city have revolted over naming schools after MLK, jr. and Caesar Chavez. The first was voted in, in fact it made national news, the meeting was televised on CNN and the subject of talk shows and the NY Times appeared.
New York Times article on school naming
It was really something to be there at the school board meeting, packed, very racially segregated into two separate aisles. I spoke about 16th, and all I remember was not being able to even see the board because of the television lights hitting me in the face.
FTMP, the Black speakers supported MLK, jr. as a name and the Whites were against it, and one woman had to be led away screaming about her kid being thought of going to a Black school. I think she then launched a losing campaign to be on the board. Never a dull moment.
Ironic, for the school district which in the late 1960s become the first to voluntarily desegrate its schools. Of course, I think several schools did get firebombed in protest.
The Marshall name was fought by members of the city’s other school district. One board member called anyone who supported Thurgood Marshall as a name an “outsider” and “hypocrite”. It didn’t make it far enough for public opinion.
Bjrandon Berg, yeah that’s what the parents said when the district wanted to name a high school after MLK, jr. when they weren’t calling him a gangster and outsider of course.
Rev. King, no problem. I’m not so sure about Caesar Chavez, I’d have to look into him a bit more.
It is true that college admissions officers consider the high school a kid graduates from when evaluating them. But they look well past the name. “They’ll think my kid goes to a black school”? Please …. If that’s going to influence the admissions officials at a school, you’re probably better off if your kid goes somewhere else.
OTOH, there’s plenty of people that are fit to name a school after, and Dr. King I imagine has a lot of schools named after him already. There certainly seems to have been a certain amount of racism involved here (although the article was from the NYT, so you have to allow for the spin), but that doesn’t mean that every white person who’d like to name the school after someone or something local is actually a racist liar.
The NYT article covered mainly the speechs made at the board meeting, and the local newspapers, both daily and community, and news covered the comments that had been made earlier which were more racial (including multiple mentions of the “black school” and derogatory comments about King, jr. which is what had attracted the attention of those media outlets.
As for the speeches quoted, I can only vouch for one of them but I do remember most of the speeches. None of the school board members made any comments againt the naming of King, jr. The Marshall situation was an interesting if disappointing contrast in that it was FTMP members of the school board who raised the objection.