Category: family fun

I’m not

The Circular World of Illegal Labor:

Just caught this at Rolling Stone:

It’s hard to imagine a clearer sign that current American immigration policy is a total crock:

The Golden State Fence company, a firm that builds border fencing to keep illegal immigrants out of the San Diego area, has just been fined $5 million for… wait for it… employing illegal immigrants to build its border fencing.

Um. Please raise your hand if you are really surprised.


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Captain Renault might have been, but me, not so much.

links for 2006-12-14

links for 2006-11-05

plague

Would we be ready for a recurrence of the diseases that wiped out the Americas’ native populations 400 years ago?

It’s been a hard day’s night …:

Here’s the deal. In about 1913 a flu virus “jumped” from one species (probably swine) to another (people) and by 1918, more than five million persons [Actually, it was between 20 and 40 million] had died from it. That virus has been recreated in labs for study within the past two years, and one of its nifty effects, technically termed a “cytokine storm“, is to turn your body’s immune system into a self-targeting ninja horde. It was, and is, the deadliest single disease on record since the flea-borne “Black Plague” that decimated Europe in the days of rats, mice, open sewers and “miasmatic transference.”

In the rising tide of theocratic oligarchism sweeping around the globe, it’s worth remembering that science exists and has proven some things.

Preventing communicable diseases isn’t rocket science.
1. Wash your hands.
2. Stay home when you’re sick.
3. Keep your kids home when they’re sick.
4. Cough into your shoulder or elbow, not your hands.
5. Wash your hands. Use warm water and soap, or an antibacterial gel.

The Conservative Soul

The Conservative Soul:

In the mail: The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back by Andrew Sullivan. It’s yet another devastating indictment of the Bush administration by a conservative.

From the book jacket: “The contradictions keep mounting. Today’s conservatives support the idea of limited government, but they have increased government’s size, power, and reach to new heights. They believe in balanced budgets, but they have boosted government spending, debt, and pork to record levels. They believe in individual liberty and the rule of law, but they have condoned torture, ignored laws passed by Congress, and been indicted for bribery. They have substituted religion for politics, and damaged both.”

Does anyone think they really believe in any of those things? They may pay lip service to them but it doesn’t follow from the headlines that there’s anything to it.

And let’s leave out how long it took Sullivan to work this out. Why an openly gay man aligns himself with a political party that considers him an abomination escapes me.

Now playing: Little Red Light by Fountains Of Wayne from the album “Welcome Interstate Managers”

Orwell said it already

Billmon pointed me to this:

Politics and the English Language – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Not unlike Strunk & White (oops) in its quest for simplicity and directness.

One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence:
A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946

cutting, stitching, and gluing: the bookbinding process

The fellow says “Make Your Own Moleskine-Like-Notebook.” So I did.

The promise of “your very own Moleskine-like-notebook/journal/sketchbook” was too much to resist, especially as I have always been curious about bookbinding.

Continue reading “cutting, stitching, and gluing: the bookbinding process”

links for 2006-09-06

as we are imperfect, art is also

One of the more prolific posters at f295 has a blog, and posted a long piece, from which I excerpt below.

Unmediating the Media:

Photographs are proxy-holders. They possess an Orwellian Newthink duality whereby the viewer simultaneously holds two diametrically opposing views to be equally true: that, on the one hand, the photograph possesses the power to be equated with the subject represented; and second, that the photograph is a mere representation, an abstraction, of a disparate subject matter.

This duality defines the chasm between what we now know as art versus craft. Art suspends disbelief long enough for us to know that the picture of a mountain is, in fact, a mountain; craft suspends the suspension of disbelief for us to know that this is, in fact, a picture of a mountain, and not the mountain itself. The focus of craft upon the materials and techniques at hand helps to break the spell of Orwellian Newthink that possesses contemporary media.

Artifacts. Art + i + fact. Artifacts, we were told, are unwanted byproducts of the imperfect medium through which information must be conveyed. Ghost images. Graininess. Distortions of various kinds. We were told things were getting better, that the new media would contain fewer artifacts, would be able to convey The Truth without distortion. Implicit to this propagandizing is the promise that, with the arrival of the new hi-definition media, Truth would at last be laid bare, for all to see, brought to you by our sponsors.

Not sure I agree with this 100%. Are the artifacts always unwanted? I think for people who just want a good picture of their kid, they may be, but for those of us kooks who like taking pictures with flawed cameras, with old film, even getting them processed in the wrong chemistry, the limitations are part of the fun. Is the picture the scene photographed? No more than the map is the territory.