Nepenthe

Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents. Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior. According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat." In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created. The Soviet authoriti...

The ManyOne free browser: jeeeeeeeezzzzzz

Bien: por lo visto mis consideraciones de hará ya sus buenos quince años no han caído en saco roto. Mejor tarde que nunca. Veamos: cuando por aquel entonces expuse la opinión de que la novela, como género, estaba entrando en una fase de declive, se me tildó de aguafiestas y catastrofista. ¡Si hoy se lee más que nunca! Y es que, claro, si por una parte nada resulta tan difícil de entender como lo que no se quiere entender, por otra, el fenómeno al que me estaba refiriendo es realmente complejo. Una especie de movimiento de vaivén entre sujeto (novelista, lector) y sociedad, una sociedad que va dando la espalda de forma creciente a la creación literaria, encarada, como suele estar, a diversas pantallas, televisor, móvil, ordenador. ¿Cómo no han de resentirse las ganas no ya de leer sino incluso de escribir? Y si se tiene algo que contar, lo lógico será hacerlo en un lenguaje próximo al de las pantallas, no al de los libros. Un proceso largo, que no ha hecho más que empezar y que no s...

THE WRITING AND TELLING of stories is an inherently social act. You don't whisper a story to a glass of water, you whisper it, eventually, into someone's ear. Stories should be shared. When Life of Pi, my story of a 16-year-old boy named Pi stranded at sea with a Bengal tiger, won the 2002 Man Booker Prize, I was stunned. Now that The Times in Britain, The Age in Melbourne and my publishers, Canongate and Text, are launching a competition to illustrate a new edition of Life of Pi , I'm excited: it's another way of sharing the story. Once you put the story out there, it's up to the reader what happens next. How it is interpreted is no longer your affair. I loved the cover picture by Andy Bridge for the first edition as soon as I saw it D, and I told all my foreign publishers that they should take a look at it.Illustrations can only enhance the reader's experience. There is a wonderful tradition of complementing literature with dramatic images and I...

Calvin and Hobbes was a much-loved comic strip where Calvin (the kid) imagined that his toy tiger (Hobbes) was his best friend, and talked to him (although it is open to different interpretations). Then they would go on adventures, and discuss life, and that. It finished about ten years ago, with a happy ending. Both the characters remarked on how the world was full of possibilities, and sledged off into the snow. This is a doctored strip that was distributed around the Internet as though it was the genuine last episode (although this was not its author's intention). In it, Calvin appears to have been prescribed Attention Deficit Disorder drugs (a contentious point in America, where many unruly or hyperactive children seem to be prescribed them as a matter of course. The commonly-perceived effect of ADD drugs is that they leech a child of any character or enthusiasm about the world). Then, at the end, as Calvin has stopped imagining, Hobbes in effect dies, and becomes just a stuffe...

The top 10 weirdest USB drives ever

I want my MTV — and my TiVo, Palm Pilot, iPod, podcast and, of course, blog. So does America still have any interest in the big, lumbering, predictable media of Hollywood and Manhattan? A moment of silence, please, for the imminent death of the old Mainstream Mass Culture. Born sometime between the invention of baseball and the 1904 World's Fair, it began experiencing violent headaches and seizures shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, then lapsed into a coma during the launch of MySpace.com. There will be no survivors, except on select reruns of "Lost." In lieu of flowers, friends may send checks to the "Bring Back Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw Emergency Fund." There — that wasn't so painful, was it? After all, it's been common knowledge, or at least conventional wisdom, that traditional mainstream mass culture has been clinging to life for decades, like one of Anne Rice's mottled vampires. But 2005 is when a chronic condition may have turned terminal. This...

Contests really take the prize Gore Vidal once observed that there are more prizes than writers in the United States. Ours does seem to be an age of unrivaled excellence. Never before have there been so many "award-winning" authors, actors, journalists, doctors, plumbers, car mechanics, librarians and quilters -- the Mary Diamond Butts Award, for example, honors fiber artists under 40 residing in the Canadian province of Ontario. The standard reference work "Awards, Honors & Prizes" (Gale) runs more than 2,000 pages. And as James F. English observes in his provocative new book, "The Economy of Prestige" (Harvard University Press), it is adding "new prizes at the rate of about one every six hours." If this "prize frenzy," as English calls it, seems straight out of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," that's because it is. Remember the Cacus race where "everybody has won, and all must have prizes." Lik...

Ghibli / Miyazaki on Ursula K. Le Guin's EARTHSEA I've died and gone to heaven...

The weight of the world's tallest skyscraper -- specially built to withstand Taiwan's frequent earthquakes -- could be causing a rise in the number of tremors beneath it, a professor from the island wrote in a scientific journal. Lin Cheng-horng, an earthquake specialist at the National Taiwan Normal University in the capital, Taipei, says the 1,679-foot Taipei 101 building -- named for the number of floors -- might rest on an earthquake fault line. In the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters, Lin wrote that the pressure of the building's 700,000 tons on the ground may be leading to increased seismic activity. The tremors "could be a direct result of the loading of the mega-structure," said an abstract of Lin's article, published on the American Geophysical Union's website. However, Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau said Friday that the one year since the building's completion was too short a time in which to evaluate its effect on tremors...

yes, you :-)

so far, but most likely very hard to beat: jeez, wonders like these brighten one's day, or at least mine. I'm lucky...

The Personal World Map How far could you go in 10 hours and with € 1000? Or any other conditions?

IN 2001 John Edginton produced & directed the Syd Barrett documentary 'Crazy Diamond for the BBC's Omnibus series, the film is now available as the DVD 'The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story. Interview at Roger Waters Online

Peter Whitehead's documentary Pink Floyd London 1966-67 offers a wealth of footage of the band in its earliest days, including performance footage of original lead singer Syd Barrett. In addition to interviews with a variety of celebrities about the band and the era, the footage also includes images of John Lennon and Yoko Oko taking in the scene.

Tigres, leões e outras espécies protegidas, como linces e lobos brancos, estavam a ser abatidos a tiro em Badajoz, muito perto da fronteira com Portugal. Eram safaris ilegais para milionários, organizados por uma rede que está a ser desmantelada pela Guardia Civil. Numa operação que ainda não terminou. Feras africanas a 100 quilómetros da fronteira. Nesta herdade da província de Badajoz, a Guardia Civil encontrou um leão e dois tigres, um deles morto a tiro. Compravam os animais em jardins zoológicos para mais tarde organizar caçadas ilegais, um negócio milionário. Por enquanto, há sete detidos. Na aldeia vizinha, há tempo que os 700 habitantes ouviam rumores sobre actividades suspeitas, abates de lobos brancos e linces, duas das espécies mais protegidas da Península Ibérica. As cabeças eram oferecidas como troféus e os corpos queimados para não deixar rasto. A vedação, electrificada e muito alta, chamou a atenção do Serviço de Protecção da Natureza. Dizem que por um lobo branco pag...

Ahhhhhhhhhh, desta é que não estavam à espera :-) E com domínio .pt na bela página Web! Bimby !

(Gutta percha provided the key to good cable insulation) The world's first global communications system for exchanging text messages was not the internet nor the mobile phone. It was the great engineering project undertaken 150 years ago to put wires across the globe. In an editorial on 20 April, 1857, the New York Herald commented: "The laying of the telegraph around the world is the great work of the age." For the first time in history, the telegraph made rapid communication possible between Europe and America, and between Britain and her distant colonies such as Australia. "It's worth trying to imagine how fantastic it would have been when that cable was finally completed and instead of taking 45 days for a message to get through from Britain to Australia, it took less than 24 hours," says Mary Godwin, director of the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum in Cornwall. The story of how they put a "A Wire Around The World" and P...

You scored 10 out of a possible 10 You've seen more twists than an Olympic gymnastics judge. But what you've just done wasn't a quiz at all. It was a cat. An alien cat. A half-robot alien cat. In a woman's body. Called Keyser Soze. And you can kill it by throwing water at it. And ... it's your own father. Yep, The Guardian again

Born in 1928, Stanley Kubrick was raised in the Bronx, the son of a respectable and successful GP, Dr Jacques Kubrick, and his wife, Gertrude. There was no manifest reason for young Stanley to regard himself an outsider; it was scarcely unusual to be a Jew in his neighbourhood, but he once told me - kidding, of course - "I'm not Jewish; I just had two Jewish parents." A loner from early on, irregular in attendance, and performance, at school, he didn't mix with the local gang and was, said one of them, "always a mystery". Unlike the no less mysterious (and secretive) artist Balthus, Stanley did not "escape" a defining identity by fabricating a non-Jewish lineage; he set out instead to transcend banal circumstance by making a name for himself as the highest possible form of invisible man: first photographer, then film director. His only regular interplay with others, before he became a cinematic maestro, was as drummer in a high school jazz band. H...

KAFKA ON THE SHORE By Haruki Murakami. Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95. This graceful and dreamily cerebral novel, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, tells two stories - that of a boy fleeing an Oedipal prophecy, and that of a witless old man who can talk to cats - and is the work of a powerfully confident writer. • Review • First Chapter • Featured Author ON BEAUTY By Zadie Smith. Penguin Press, $25.95. In her vibrant new book, a cultural-politics novel set in a place like Harvard, the author of ''White Teeth'' brings everything to the table: a crisp intellect, a lovely wit and enormous sympathy for the men, women and children who populate her story. • Review PREP By Curtis Sittenfeld. Random House, $21.95. Paper, $13.95. This calm and memorably incisive first novel, about a scholarship girl who heads east to attend an elite prep school, casts an unshakable spell and has plenty to say about class, sex and character. • Review • First Chapter SATURDAY By Ian...

The relative unimportance of trying to stop global warming From the Taipei Times , no less, and best viewed in Mozilla :-)

Writer-director Stephen Gaghan’s new film, Syriana , is a look at the politics of oil – and much more. In a interview in San Francisco, Gaghan spoke about politics, art, the dealer-user paradigm for drugs and petroleum, and how if he’d written a movie about his experiences researching Syriana , he would have wound up with something that looked and felt like Dr. Strangelove. Gaghan was more than willing to digress – about if ‘running the gantlet’ or ‘running the gauntlet’ is correct, Congressmen who live on boats paid for by defense contractors and how Turkish coffee can ruin your film crew and perhaps how he shouldn't have had that last Caramel Macchiato – and his thoughts on oil and chaos, politics and art were bursting out of him at a fever pitch, as crude and refined and combustible as the resource that fuels his film. This is the first part of a two-part interview; if you're sensitive about profanity, you may not want to click further. (Gaghan is asked about a remark he...

A contest by Cinematical

Joke 1: Why don’t the ocean date? Because it’s tired of beaches. Joke 2: What do sharks eat for dessert? Octopi. Joke 3: Why doesn’t Darth Vader drink milk? Because he’s galactose intolerant.

Tamburlaine: Now, Casane, where’s the Turkish Alcoran, And all the heaps of superstitious books Found in the temples of that Mahomet Whom I have thought a god? They shall be burnt . . . . . . In vain, I see, men worship Mahomet. My sword hath sent millions of Turks to hell, Slew all his priests, his kinsmen, and his friends, And yet I live untouch’d by Mahomet. There is a God, full of revenging wrath, From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks, Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey. So Casane; fling them in the fire. (They burn the books.) Now, Mahomet, if thou have any power, Come down thyself and work a miracle. Thou art not worthy to be worshipped That suffers flames of fire to burn the writ Wherein the sum of thy religion rests . . . . . . Well, soldiers, Mahomet remains in hell; He cannot hear the voice of Tamburlaine. Seek out another godhead to adore: The God that sits in heaven, if any god, For he is God alone, and none but he. Act V, scene i Tamburlaine the G...

Wiiiiiiiishlist... "Aside from the fact that you can easily lose an afternoon looking at the streets that you have lived in and known, what is particularly interesting is the social milieu in which Booth undertook his project. The late 19th century was a time of growing concern about the very nature of urban society. As David Reeder says in his introduction to the map, "During the 1880s a new perception was being formed of London's social condition, growing out of a spate of writings on how the poor lived by journalists and city missionaries ... Middle-class anxieties were fuelled by descriptions of ... the poor as a brutalised and degenerate race of people, the victims but also the agents of the deteriorating forces in city life". Then, as now, there was much talk about the poverty gap, and the newspapers were full of stories about violent youth and rising criminality. The social commentator Charles Masterman felt that Booth's maps showed a city "beyond the...

Move over, broccoli! These incredible edibles fight cancer and heart disease, fill you up and give you energy. Take this list to the grocery store today. When nutrition experts discuss the stars of the healthy-eating world, the same names always make the A-list. Broccoli? Check. Tomatoes? Natch. Salmon? Sure. These and other well-known "functional foods" certainly rate their celebrity. But — just as in Hollywood — these attention getters aren't the only game in town. For every tub of antioxidant-rich blueberries or bowl of cholesterol-squelching oatmeal, another less fanfared healthy food is in the wings, waiting to shine. In fact, recent research is turning the spotlight on 10 everyday foods that can protect your heart and bones and help fight cancer. Try one (or more) at your next meal. 1) Black Tea Star power: When it's tea time, health-conscious consumers tend to go for green. But black tea (including brands like Celestial Seasonings, Lipton and Tetley) can be as...

A story with a boat The sun lays its pattern over the city. Portuguese people are good level-headed people with sun above. I will not be bothered. Others bother. Spanish people are loud sensation hunters with flapping gestures. The French being sits still in long sentences for a space of time. Then her nerves start to quiver. Who decides what is of weight? I tell them I signal that I am not willing to drive them in my car. British people jabber like monkeys in a cage. I find myself a good shady spot to lie down and rest for a while. If it matters what matters. The Portuguese bus comes when it comes. And if I want to take the Portuguese boat somewhere I can do it when it does. But if I go away I would do so just to come back not to stay. I shut myself out from all that talk of direction and course. We are a couple of taxi drivers driving a gang of sailors down to the harbour. The sailors eagerly wave the flag and strike up a chorus. German people, British and French say they are up to...