"I think it would be a mistake for us to go on to Baghdad [during the first Gulf War]. I think it would have sundered the coalition. None of our Arab allies was prepared to do that. We would have been all alone in Baghdad and we would have switched from being the international organizer of this coalition that defeated aggression, to a situation in which we were sort of a colonialist power -- an imperialist power coming in taking down governments and replacing them. That would have been a very big mistake for us." --Dick Cheney, Aug 27, 2000

Word of the day:

verbigeration: an obsessive repetition of meaningless words and phrases, especially as a symptom of mental illness.

Robert Wilson

First Voice:--A game of checkers?

Second Voice:--Well, I don't mind.

First Voice:--I move the Will.

Second Voice:--You're playing it blind.

First Voice:--Then here's the Soul.

Second Voice:--Checked by the Will.

First Voice:--Eternal Good!

Second Voice:--And Eternal Ill.

First Voice:--I haste for the King row.

Second Voice:--Save your breath.

First Voice:--I was moving Life.

Second Voice:--You're checked by Death.

First Voice:--Very good, here's Moses.

Second Voice:--And here's the Jew.

First Voice:--My next move is Jesus.

Second Voice:--St. Paul for you!

First Voice:--Yes, but St. Peter--

Second Voice:--You might have foreseen--

First Voice:--You're in the King row--

Second Voice:--With Constantine!

First Voice:--I'll go back to Athens.

Second Voice:--Well, here's the Persian.

First Voice:--All right, the Bible.

Second Voice:--Pray now, what version?

First Voice:--I take up Buddha.

Second Voice:--It never will work.

First Voice:--From the corner Mahomet.

Second Voice:--I move the Turk.

First Voice:--The game is tangled; where are we now?

Second Voice:--You're dreaming worlds. I'm in the King row.
Move as you will, if I can't wreck you
I'll thwart you, harry you, rout you, check you.

First Voice:--I'm tired. I'll send for my Son to play.
I think he can beat you finally--

Second Voice:--Eh?

First Voice:--I must preside at the stars' convention.

Second Voice:--Very well, my lord, but I beg to mention
I'll give this game my direct attention.

First Voice:--A game indeed! But Truth is my quest.

Second Voice:--Beaten, you walk away with a jest.
I strike the table, I scatter the checkers.
[A rattle of a falling table and checkers flying over a floor.]
Aha! You armies and iron deckers,
Races and states in a cataclysm--
Now for a day of atheism!

[The screen vanishes and Beelzebub steps forward carrying a trumpet, which he blows faintly. Immediately Loki and Yogarindra start up from the shadows of night.]

Beelzebub:--Good evening, Loki!

Loki:--The same to you!

Beelzebub:--And Yogarindra!

Yogarindra:--My greetings, too.

Loki:--Whence came you, comrade?

Beelzebub:--From yonder screen.

Yogarindra:--And what were you doing?

Beelzebub:--Stirring His spleen.

Loki:--How did you do it?

Beelzebub:--I made it rough
In a game of checkers.

Loki:--Good enough!

Yogarindra:--I thought I heard the sounds of a battle.

Beelzebub:--No doubt! I made the checkers rattle,
Turning the table over and strewing
The bits of wood like an army pursuing.

Yogarindra:--I have a game! Let us make a man.

Loki:--My net is waiting him, if you can.

Yogarindra:--And here's my mirror to fool him with--

Beelzebub:--Mystery, falsehood, creed and myth.

Loki:--But no one can mold him, friend, but you.

Beelzebub:--Then to the sport without more ado..."

--Edgar Lee Masters "Epilogue" (excerpt)

"It is something from a surrealist still life—a hat, glasses, moustache and toilet seat. This is the collection of belongings that forensic scientist Michael Rieders was offered when he put the word out that he was trying to track down Salvador Dalí’s DNA."

Jose Hernandez

St. Pancras Chambers

Tomb of Edvard Grieg

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Samuel Beckett

Mark Henson

Jacek Yerka

Tom Uttech

More...

"History repeats itself [twice], first as tragedy, second as farce." --Karl Marx

Wisdom Goddesses - Mahavidyas and the Assertion of Femininity in Indian Thought

More...

Ruth Gwily

Scott Eagle

Dressing the Wounded during a Gas Attack by Austin Osman Spare

Why Blue Green Algae Makes Me Tired

"Actually, the algae isn't tiring me. I'm tired of the people trying to sell it to me. Most blue-green algae is sold in a multi-level marketing scheme through Cell Tech. Sellers see me, a physician, as a potentially lucrative franchise to sell algae for them. So I get two or three sales calls every week (once as many as twenty). Never mind that selling algae to make myself money is a conflict-of-interest and an unethical ploy already encouraged by pharmaceutical companies ("The only solution I see for your diagnosis, Mr. Smith, is blue-green algae, which I happen to have right here..."). I've tried the algae and it doesn't do much for me. The cost/benefit ratio is poor. Nevertheless, in the past three years I've received over 400 phone calls, dozens of tapes in the mail, and had people barge into my office and home, all selling algae...

Blue green algae is a lot like the Kombucha tea - of dubious benefit and full of potential danger. But while most Kombucha is distributed free as an act of caring and love, Cell Tech made $50 million off its algae last year, and 54¢ of every dollar's worth of algae goes to sellers as a commission. I realize this article may anger some people distributing blue-green algae. I'm sorry. But I hope they'll stop asking me to buy and sell the stuff..."

Brain Diseases I Wish I Had

"The vast majority of mp3 enthusiasts - the millions of people who transfer mp3 files around the Internet via Napster-style file sharing software, or via IRC, or Usenet, or whatever - are probably blissfully unaware of all the arguments which take place concerning lame v Fraunhofer, 128k v 192k, CBR v VBR, stereo v joint stereo - and good luck to them! However, once people start to acquire a basic level of knowledge concerning the mechanics of audio compression, they almost inevitably gravitate towards the opinion that "Joint Stereo Is BAD"..." But is it?

William Burroughs Book Covers

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

Dark Pines Under Water by Gwendolyn MacEwen

Potatoes are in the nightshade family. Nightshade, as in Deadly Nightshade.

Do NOT eat potatoes which are green under the skin or bitter tasting. Even if you avoid the green parts, they can still be poisonous.

More

He comes across the granite yard,
Grizzled feather glint in his black wings.
He strokes the tree, the water and the cat,
Glances at the mirror of the day.


And the pond shivers though the wind has stilled,
And the cat on the doorsill attacks the air
Like a mouse. The tree's blood begins to jell,
Day falls in stains on the brown grass.


The hundred year old oak door
Screeches like a newborn. Through yellow fog
The patient's eyes see: rainbows
Slump to earth like cackling parrots.


The clock counts out the time for the living,
A spider hangs his web among the stars,
And the angel, having entered the hearth,
Turns into smoke, ashes, embers.


Death's Angel by Henrikas Radauskas

If you're traveling in the wilderness, or at sea, or anywhere else where being found may save your life, you might want to invest in a personal locator beacon. Here are the results of two tests of various PLBs: 1 2

Overhydration does not equal good hydration

Make your own energy gels

Ever wonder how to coil cables so that they don't tangle? Here's how.

Why I'm not an "Ultralight" backpacker

What items should a good waiter carry with them at all times?

A Spotting Guide to the Common Dalek

Word of the day:

    jejune: vapid, uninteresting, childish, immature

"de vries' first and perhaps most important work in this context was the installation `16 dm2 wiese' (16 dm2 meadow) dating from 1974, exhibited in the Vleeshal in Middelburg in 1979. For this work, he dug up a square with a side length of 40 cm out of a meadow, took it apart and completely filled the walls of a relatively large room with the individual, pressed plants, each glued on to a piece of paper..."

"herman and Susanne are sitting together in the forest near Eschenau in the autumn, between them is a large board with a sheet of paper attached to it. As the leaves fall from the trees they glue them on to the paper, exactly where they have landed."

"The library was founded in 1970 when three collectors merged their private libraries. It was named for the 19th-century author of the first full-length work of drug literature written by an American (who was known as "the American De Quincey"), and the first book about cannabis or hashish experience in the English language — The Hasheesh Eater (1857)...

At this writing, the reputation of the Ludlow Library (although it has been largely inactive for the last decade) has grown to almost mythic status among those working and collecting in the psychoactive drug field. No comparable resource exists for scholarly research. This is largely due to the vision of the library’s founders and directors, who were educated members of the antiquarian book trade while at the same time participants in the 1960s counterculture. As the first to acknowledge and uncover the existence of a vast literature of drug experience, they ultimately served to reverse the neglect in which drug literature was previously held."

The Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons." --Bertrand Russell

"I saw the murderers and I saw the victims
It was just courage, not compassion, that I lacked..." --Bertolt Brecht

"Never believe anything until it is officially denied." --Claud Cockburn

"During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group, Charter 77. One of them, the novelist Zdener Urbanek, told me, “We are more fortunate than you in the West, in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines of the media. unlike you, we know that that real truth is always subversive.”" --John Pilger, Journalism as a Weapon of War

"Physics does not reduce to atomic physics, nor science to physics, nor life to science" --Erwin Schrödinger

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent." --George Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi"

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among it's desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

-- W. H. Auden, "August 1968"

"Humble thyself, impotent reason." --Blaise Pascal

Persian Literature

"There is an oriental tale about a deposed sultan who sat in his prison thinking only of escaping with the help of a fantastic bird about which he had heard marvelous things.

The bird comes to his window, takes a muslin band from his turban, and changes it into a magnificent carriage in which the sultan can sit.

He goes to the window, is already standing with one foot in the carriage, when the bird says, 'Get in, but repeat these words loudly and clearly: In the name of the great Kokopilesobeh, the one god, I wish to travel from here to Herak.'

'What are you saying?' shouted Ali-Ben-Giad in horror. 'There is only one God and Mohammed is his prophet.' Instantly, the carriage vanished, and he dropped dead." --Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“There’s a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think… it’s all about the information!”

If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn't everyone in Asia have a headache?

"May you live as long as you laugh, and laugh as long as you live." --Ole Olsen

Dozens of ways to clean your pennies

Space Shuttle Atlantis undocking from the International Space Station
(click above for the full pic)

"Something wonderful happened to me. I was transported into the seventh heaven. All the gods sat there in assembly. By special grace I was accorded the favour of a wish.

'Will you,' said Mercury, 'have youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the prettiest girl, or any other of the many splendours we have in our chest of knickknacks? So choose, but just one thing.'

For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: 'Esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing: always to have the laughter on my side.'

Not a single word did one god offer in answer; on the contrary they all began to laugh. From this I concluded that my prayer was fulfilled and that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste, for it would hardly have been fitting gravely to answer, 'It has been granted you.'" --Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or

"If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world's follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world's follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world's follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom." --Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Echoes of Fascism: violent right-wing intimidation tactics are resurfacing in Japan

"Facts are stupid things." --Ronald Reagan

How to make Ramen Noodles a microwave

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." --Dante Alighieri

From Welfare To Poverty: "welfare reform" has gotten people off the welfare rolls, some of them even got jobs, but it hasn't helped most of them escape poverty

Charisma Man

"I always wanted to stay anonymous. At first, I didn’t even give my name to the Criminal Investigation Division. I just burned a copy of the pictures onto a CD, typed an anonymous letter, put them in a manila envelope, and handed them to an agent at CID. I said, “This was left in my office,” and walked out.

But about an hour later, this little short guy named Special Agent Pieron came to my office and started grilling me about where the pictures came from. It took him about half an hour before I gave it up...

That was one of the most nervous periods of my life. I was constantly scared. I started getting paranoid. I kept my gun with me at all times. I took it to sleep with me... I would lie there in bed with both arms behind my head and my left hand inside the pillowcase, gripping my nine-millimeter with the safety off. I would just listen..."

In an Aug 17th interview, Noam Chomsky mentions an interesting Program on International Policy Attitudes poll on the US budget in Feb 2005, as an indicator of just how far from the mainstream the Bush administration and Congress is:

"What's happened is that both political parties are pretty far to the right of the general population on a host of serious issues... If you take a look at popular attitudes on international affairs, on international crisis, on who should take the lead on the so-called "War on Terror", on domestic issues like healthcare, on and on, [the public's attitudes are] just radically different.

One of the most striking examples was the major study of public opinion right after the Federal budget was announced in February of 2005, the Federal budget of the Bush administration. There was a major study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, the most respected polling institution. Public attitudes were almost exactly the opposite of the budget.

Where the budget was going up the public wanted it to go down, by large majorities: military spending, supplementals for Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on. Where spending was going down the public wanted it to go up, also by very large majorities: health, education, welfare, renewable energy, support for the United Nations...

[But] the results [of this poll] were apparently not reported. A friend of mine who does database searches checked carefully and couldn't find a single report in any American newspaper of very dramatic information: information that says the public is completely opposed, radically opposed, to the Federal budget, meaning public policy. And the same has been true on occasion after occasion. Now that's a serious problem within the United States."

Word of the day: cloy

To disgust or nauseate with excess of something originally pleasing

"I am posting this (and it is long) because I think our society needs a huge “Wake-up” call.

As a shelter manager, I am going to share a little insight with you all...a view from the inside if you will... All of you breeders/sellers... should be made to work in the 'back' of an animal shelter for just one day.

Maybe if you saw the life drain from a few sad, lost, confused eyes, you would change your mind about breeding and selling to people you don't even know... that puppy you just sold will most likely end up in my shelter when it's not a cute little puppy anymore. So how would you feel if you knew that there's about a 90% chance that dog will never walk out of the shelter it is going to be dumped at? Purebred or not!

About 50% of all of the dogs that are "owner surrenders" or "strays", that come into my shelter are purebred dogs. The most common excuses I hear are; “We are moving and we can’t take our dog (or cat).” Really? Where are you moving too that doesn’t allow pets? Or they say “The dog got bigger than we thought it would”. How big did you think a German Shepherd would get? “We don’t have time for her…”. Really? I work a 10-12 hour day and still have time for my 6 dogs! “She’s tearing up our yard…”. How about making her a part of your family? They always tell me “We just don’t want to have to stress about finding a place for her…we know she’ll get adopted, she’s a good dog”.

Odds are your pet won’t get adopted & how stressful do you think being in a shelter is? Well, let me tell you…your pet has 72 hours to find a new family from the moment you drop it off…sometimes a little longer if the shelter isn’t full and your dog manages to stay completely healthy…if it sniffles, it dies. Your pet will be confined to a small run/kennel in a room with about 25 other barking or crying animals. It will have to relieve itself where it eats and sleeps. It will be depressed and it will cry constantly for the family that abandoned it.

If your pet is lucky, I will have enough volunteers in that day to take him/her for a walk. If I don’t, your pet won’t get any attention besides having a bowl of food slid under the kennel door and the waste sprayed out of its pen with a high-powered hose. If your dog is big, black or any of the “Bully” breeds (pit bull, rottie, mastiff, etc…) it was pretty much dead when you walked it through the front door. Those dogs just don’t get adopted.

If your dog doesn’t get adopted within its 72 hours and the shelter is full, it will be destroyed. If the shelter isn’t full and your dog is good enough, and of a desirable enough breed…it may get a stay of execution…not for long though. Most get very kennel protective after about a week and are destroyed for showing aggression…even the sweetest dogs will turn in this environment. If your pet makes it over all of those hurdles…chances are it will get kennel cough or an upper respiratory infection and will be destroyed because shelters just don’t have the funds to pay for even a $100 treatment.

Here’s a little euthanasia 101 for those of you that have never witnessed a perfectly healthy, scared animal being “put-down”. First, your pet will be taken from its kennel on a leash…they always look like they think they are going for a walk…happy, wagging their tails. Until they get to “The Room”, every one of them freaks out and puts on the breaks when we get to the door…it must smell like death or they can feel the sad souls that are left in there, it’s strange, but it happens with every one of them.

Your dog or cat will be restrained, held down by 1 or 2 vet techs depending on the size and how freaked out they are. Then a euthanasia tech or a vet will start the process…they will find a vein in the front leg and inject a lethal dose of the “pink stuff”. Hopefully your pet doesn’t panic from being restrained and jerk…I’ve seen the needles tear out of a leg and been covered with the resulting blood and deafened by the yelps and screams.

They all don’t just “go to sleep”, sometimes spasm for a while, gasp for air and defecate on themselves. When it all ends, your pets corpse will be stacked like firewood in a large freezer in the back with all of the other animals that were killed…waiting to be picked up like garbage. What happens next? Cremated? Taken to the dump? Rendered into pet food? You’ll never know and it probably won’t even cross your mind…it was just an animal and you can always buy another one right?

I hope that those of you that have read this are bawling your eyes out and can’t get the pictures out of your head…I do everyday on the way home from work. I hate my job, I hate that it exists & I hate that it will always be there unless you people make some changes and realize that the lives you are affecting go much farther than the pets you dump at a shelter.

Between 9 and 11 MILLION animals die every year in shelters and only you can stop it. I do my best to save every life I can but rescues are always full, and there are more animals coming in everyday than there are homes.

My point to all of this.. DON'T BREED OR BUY WHILE SHELTER PETS DIE!"

"At a law school Supreme Court conference that I attended last fall, there was a panel on "The Rehnquist Court." No one mentioned Bush v. Gore, the most historic case of William Rehnquist's time as chief justice, and during the Q. and A. no one asked about it. When I asked a prominent law professor about this strange omission, he told me he had been invited to participate in another Rehnquist retrospective, and was told in advance that Bush v. Gore would not be discussed.

The ruling that stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidency to George W. Bush is disappearing down the legal world's version of the memory hole, the slot where, in George Orwell's "1984," government workers disposed of politically inconvenient records."

From Has Bush v. Gore Become the Case That Must Not Be Named?
(Thanks to Jesse)

Photographers in NYC are arrested and harrassed just for taking pictures.

"These arrests for 'taking pictures' usually come in the course of police officers doing their job, arresting someone else, and they don't want to be photographed arresting someone, so they charge the photographer with obstructing justice, or disorderly conduct, or they throw them to the ground and then charge them with resisting arrest. A Reuters photographer who was photographing police was charged with 'obstructing traffic.' It's getting ridiculous."

America is #1 ?

"The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr." --Muhammad, Sunnah (c. 630)

San Francisco journalist jailed for not handing over video to the government. More from Slashdot.

"There's an old story about a young man who cornered a world-famous violinist and begged to be allowed to play for him. If the master offered him encouragement, he would devote his life to music. But if his talent was not equal to his calling, he wanted to know ahead of time so he could avoid wasting his life. He played, and the great violinist shook his head. "You lack the fire," he said.

Decades later the two met again, and the would-be violinist, now a prosperous businessman, recalled their previous meeting. "You cahnged my entire life," he explained. "It was a bitter disappointment, giving up music, but I forced myself to accept your judgement. Thus, instead of becoming a fourth-rate musician, I've had a good life in the world of commerce. But tell me, how could you tell so readily that I lacked the fire?"

"Oh, I hardly listened when you played," the old master said. "That's what I tell everyone who plays for me -- that they lack the fire."

"But that's unforgivable!" the businessman cried. "How could you do that? You altered the entire course of my life. Perhaps I could have been another Kreisler, another Heifetz--"

The old man shook his head again. "You don't understand," he said. "If you had had the fire, you would have paid no attention to me." --Lawrence Block

"A bizarre biological discovery about punning was made by a German surgeon named Forster in 1929. Dr. Forster was operating on a patient's brain to remove a tumor. Whenever the surgeon manipulated the spot where the tumor was located, the patient would start with whatever words the doctor had just uttered and make a series of puns about his own brain surgery. He didn't mean to do it; he couldn't help it. The surgeon had discovered the spot in this patient's brain that made him pun. Since then the rare disorder of compulsive punning has been called Forster's Syndrome. It is a physical affliction a bit like epilepsy." --Kathryn Lindskoog

More than 100 years ago, a French sociologist named Émile Durkheim did what nobody since has been able to do: He explained the mind of the suicide bomber.

That, at least, is the contention of numerous scholars and authors whose resurrection of Durkheim's ideas has been gaining traction within the field of terrorism studies...

"Durkheim's genius lay in identifying suicide as a social or political act, rather than as something genetically determined or some psychological impairment," Weinberg says in a telephone interview. "I realized the same thing worked with Palestinian `martyrs.'"

"I came over here because I wanted to kill people."

"The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.'"

"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing"

"Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.'"

The next time I saw him, in a front-page newspaper photograph five months later, he was standing outside a federal courthouse in North Carolina, where he had pled not guilty to charges of premeditated rape and murder. The brutal killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family in Mahmudiyah that he was accused of had taken place just three weeks after we talked...

from Encountering Steven Green

"I get all my ideas in Switzerland near the Forka Pass. There is a little town called Gletch, and two thousand feet up above Gletch there is a smaller hamlet called Uber Gletch. I go there on the fourth of August every summer to get my cuckoo clock repaired. While the cuckoo is in the hospital, I wander around and talk to the people in the streets. They are very strange people, and I get my ideas from them." --Dr. Seuss

"The right to take photographs is under assault now more than ever. People are being stopped, harassed, and even intimidated into handing over their personal property simply because they were taking photographs of subjects that made other people uncomfortable. Recent examples have included photographing industrial plants, bridges, and bus stations. For the most part, attempts to restrict photography are based on misguided fears about the supposed dangers that unrestricted photography presents to society...

The Photographer's Right is a downloadable guide that is loosely based on the Bust Card and the Know Your Rights pamphlet that used to available on the ACLU website. It may be downloaded and printed out using Adobe Acrobat Reader. You may make copies and carry them your wallet, pocket, or camera bag to give you quick access to your rights and obligations concerning confrontations over photography."

The Photographer's Right

Also see Travel Photography and the Law

"I felt like poisoning a monk." --Umberto Eco on why he wrote The Name of the Rose

"The English department [of the University of Ibadan] was a very good example of what I mean. The people there would have laughed at the idea that any of us would become a writer. That didn't really cross their minds. I remember on one occasion a departmental prize was offered. They put up a notice: Write a short story over the long vacation for the departmental prize. I'd never written a short story before, but when I got home, I thought, Well, why not. So I wrote one and submitted it. Months passed; then finally one day there was a notice on the board announcing the result. It said that no prize was awarded because no entry was up to the standard. They named me, said that my story deserved mention. Ibadan in those days was not a dance you danced with snuff in one palm. It was a dance you danced with all your body. So when Ibadan said you deserved mention, that was very high praise.

I went to the lecturer who had organized the prize and said, "You said my story wasn't really good enough, but it was interesting. Now what was wrong with it?" She said, "Well, it's the form. It's the wrong form." So I said, "Ah. Can you tell me about this?" She said, "Yes, but not now. I'm going to play tennis; we'll talk about it. Remind me later, and I'll tell you." This went on for a whole term. Every day when I saw her, I'd say, "Can we talk about form?" She'd say, "No, not now. We'll talk about it later." Then at the very end she saw me and said, "You know, I looked at your story again, and actually there's nothing wrong with it." So that was it! That was all I learned from the English department about writing short stories. You really have to go out on your own and do it." --Chinua Achebe

"The war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay, and greater freedom than the soldier, but at this stage of the game, having the freedom to choose his spot and being allowed to be a coward and not be executed for it is his torture. The war correspondent has his stake - his life - in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. I am a gambler. I decided to go... in the first wave." --Robert Capa, on D-Day

Roberto Matta

Lyonel Feininger

Hans Bellmer

“For years, I photographed dead bodies"

Letizia Battaglia

Why judging cameras by megapixels is misleading

How to Sleep Comfortably on a Hot Night

Don’t Read This Post (or the Kitty Gets It)!

The Ian Knot: 2 minutes of practice make for faster shoelacing

10 Rules for Writers

1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
6. Be more or less specific.
7. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
8. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
9. No sentence fragments.
10. Don’t use no double negatives.
11. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

"... So, I had a double life. In the summer I was a teenage messiah with an old Harley Davidson and cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and during the rest of the year I was taking walks with an old man who I had literally run into. I knocked the wind out of him and he said with a thick French accent, "are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?" I said, "yes sir, it looks that way," and he said, "well, bon voyage." The following week I met him again. He had a long name but he asked me to call him by the first part which to my ears was something like Mr Tayer.

He had no self-consciousness whatsoever. He had leaky margins and he was falling into lovingness with things all the time. He would fall to the ground in the park in ecstasy to look at a caterpillar with his long gaelic nose raking the ground. "Oh Jean look, a caterpillar! What does a caterpillar become, uh? Moving, changing, transforming - metamorphosis. Can you feel yourself to be a caterpillar? What is it to be a papillon, a butterfly? The butterfly is within you! What is the butterfly of Jean in ten, twenty, thirty years, uh? I replied tentatively, "I think I'll be flying around the world meeting different peoples and helping them to be what they can be." This question was my adolescent initiation.

He was something. He had all kinds of strange ways of relating to reality. He'd talk to trees and rocks, addressing them tu, toi, thou. We would lean into the wind and say, "this same wind was once sniffed by Jesus Christ. Alexander the Great - very interesting, Genghis Khan - not so good.(laughter) Here it comes, Jean d'Arc - be filled with Jean d'Arc! Be filled with the tides of history - same molecules." People followed us around, not laughing at us but with us. He created a kind of conversational gestalt. He would look at you as if you were God in hiding and I would leave my littleness behind when I was with him.

We walked together twice a week for a year and half. The last time I saw him was on April 7th 1955. He was very pale. He went off on this extraordinary riff about spirals. It began with a talk about the floor of Chartres Cathedral and brains and intestines and galaxies and evolution. He said, "Jean, the people of your time at the end of the 20th century will be taking the tiller of the world, but they cannot go directly, they must touch upon every people, every culture - you must do that Jean. It will be a great field of mind, we will be turning the corner on the human race."

He said, "au revoir Jean," and I said, "goodbye Mr Tayer, I'll see you on Tuesday." My dog Chicky didn't want to go and was whining. The next Tuesday he didn't come. For eight weeks I went to meet him but he still didn't come. He had died that Easter Sunday but I didn't know it. Years later in graduate school somebody handed me a book without a cover called The Phenomenon of Man. I read it and the words were very familiar. I asked where the cover was and my friend showed it to me with the photo of the author. Mr Tayer had been Pierre Teilhard de Chardin."

From an interview with Jean Houston

Bush Jr molests German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who shrugs him off.

Embarrassingly offensive.

Why isn't this all over the mainstream news?

Imagine if Clinton had done this during his Presidency.

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Polyphasic Sleep (Day 3)

I managed to awaken just fine from my last couple of naps, which I took more or less on time. But now, at a little after 7am, I'm starting to feel pretty sleep deprived. I feel tired and drowsy, and am finding it difficult to concentrate on reading.

Now I am beginning to see the wisdom of making the attempt to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule when one has absolutely no other commitments. Unfortunatley I have quite a lot of work to do in the next couple of weeks.

I hope I won't crash from lack of sleep or be reduced to a non-functional state, but it may be inevitable the way this is going. I've actually gotten about 6 hours of sleep in the last 24hrs, which is about 4hrs less than I usually like to get, but twice as much as what I'm aiming for. So this is likely going to get much worse before it gets better.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 2)

Napping for just 45mins was no problem this time, since I didn't even feel the least bit tired or sleepy when the time case. Anyway, I'd only managed to doze off for a short time, and my nap was interrupted by a phone call. I also managed to spontaneously get up one minute before the alarm was set to ring.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 2)

I think I should rename this "The Oversleep Chronicles", because yes, I overslept again. Set my alarm for 10:30am, got up at 1pm. This time I have no excuse. The alarm went off. I walked over to it, turned it off, and went back to sleep. The room outside my bed just felt so cold, and my bed felt so warm and cozy, and my mind was so groggy.

I just didn't have the determination to stick with it despite the inevitable discomfort. But now I do. There'll be no oversleeping next nap. I also think I'm going to try napping in my clothes, as some other polyphasics have recommended, so there'll be less disincentive to get out of bed.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 2)

Well, ok. So I overslept. But I blame my alarm clock!

I got pretty drowsy at around 4:20 am, so instead of waiting 'till 5 like I'd planned, I decided to take my nap a bit early, and set my alarm for 5:05 (since I'm planning to stay awake in 6hr blocks, I decided to get 45mins of sleep each time, for a grand total of 3hrs per 24hrs). Anyway, I awoke not at 5:05 but at 7:39, oversleeping almost 3hrs. But my alarm clock was still on! (though it wasn't beeping when I awoke)

I'm pretty sure this alarm does not go off by itself. So it should have still been beeping when I awoke, though I can't be certain. Plainly it either malfunctioned or I did. I don't remember it beeping, and I certainly did not turn it off. So it must have gone off, if it worked, and I must have slept through it. And if it didn't work then I'm happy to have only overslept 3hrs. Well, the vibrating alarm I bought yesterday should be arriving in the mail any day now. So hopefully that'll manage to wake me, and do so without disturbing those around me.

For now I'll just treat this as my core sleep and try to proceed with my other naps as usual. The question is when to take my next nap. If I hadn't overslept I'd take my nap 6hrs later at 11am, except that I was trying to move my schedule up a bit to be in sync with school, so maybe at 10am. But now I only have 2hrs 'till 10am. I think I'll still nap then, otherwise I'll have totally screwed my schedule up.

Polyphasic Sleep (Day 2)

My second nap was more of a break than a real nap. I did loose consciousness of where I was, but when I came to I felt that I hadn't really slept, just concentrated intently. But in retrospect, I think I did get some sleep, and my initial analysis of the period as "not really sleep" was simply confused because I was half asleep at the time. I also managed to wake up after 20 minutes without aid from the alarm clock, which I'd set for 30 minutes.

I took my nap a little early, at 11pm instead of at midnight, since I'd realized I really hadn't thought things through when I'd started, and had made no effort to synchronize my nap schedule to my school schedule. So the earlier nap is an attempt to remedy this.

I feel relatively refreshed, compared to the drowsiness I'd felt immediately before the nap, but I expect that the effects of sleep deprivation will start to occur within the next twelve hours, as I've only had 6 1/2 hours of core sleep plus an hour of naps in the last 24hrs, compared to my usual 10hrs of sleep. Still, I'd stayed up 'till 7am last night, so maybe I won't really start to feel it until sometime around then.

By the way, I feel I should mention there is something that makes my own situation rather unique compared to other polyphasic sleep experimenters. Over the last several months I've been using a light therapy lamp and a negative ion generator to treat seasonal affective disorder.

I don't know (and I don't think anyone knows) how using these devices is going to affect me while attempting to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule. Exposure to bright light is supposed to affect the production of melatonin and help to regulate one's diurnal rhythms.

The general advice for people who have trouble getting up in the morning is to use the light boxes just as you wake up for about one hour to one half hour. But what do you do when you're waking up four to six times per day instead of just once, and napping for just 20-30mins at a time instead of getting a full night's sleep?

If I keep using the lamp once in the morning it might make it harder for me to switch to a polyphasic sleep schedule. But if I try using it for a few minutes each time I awake then I'll be in completely uncharted territory. Who knows what effect that will have on my body chemistry or mental health? It might help me adapt easier to the polyphasic schedule. Or it could really mess me up. Or it might have no effect. I simply don't know, and I don't think anyone does. There's been relatively little research in to polyphasic sleep, little research in to light therapy, even less research in to negative ion therapy, and absolutely no research in to combining all three. As far as I know I'll be the first one trying this combination.

This gives me pause, but I think there are many much riskier things in life (like getting in to an automobile). So I think I'll stick with it for now, and leave my therapy regimen the way it is. Later, I might try slowly adjusting the light regimen to be more in tune with my polyphasic schedule (assuming I succeed). Changing the light regimen right away may in fact help me make the adjustment to a polyphasic schedule, but it compounds the unknown factors in my particular situation. Combining all three of these factors is risky enough in itself. There's no need to make it potentially worse by messing with the schedule of light I get during the day as well as the amount and schedule of sleep.

Anyway, I think I'll take my next nap at around 5am. 'Till then.