Nepenthe

[Some graphic images of LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland — Bloody Sunday, Jan. 30, 1972, at Slate ]

To Die For :-) Voices by Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Joanna Lumley, Emily Watson, and Christopher Leeeee!

Breathtaking wallpapers at National Geographic Magazine

THAT EXCEPTIONALLY WISE diplomat Sir Frank Roberts once observed that “Roosevelt and Churchill were susceptible to Stalin because he did not fit the dictator stereotype of the time. He was not a demagogue; he did not strut in flamboyant uniforms. He was soft-spoken, well organised, not without humour, knew his brief — an agreeable façade concealing unknown horrors.” Roosevelt was definitely the more susceptible of the two. Paradoxically, this came from his own vanity. Proud of his famous charm, he was convinced that he alone could win Stalin to a postwar partnership after the wartime alliance. But such a transformation was highly unlikely. Roosevelt overestimated his own abilities and completely underestimated Stalin’s paranoid schizophrenia, xenophobia, ruthlessness and cruelty. Roosevelt’s instinctive generosity and vision in 1941 must be recognised when he decided to throw his country’s industrial might into supporting the Soviet Union immediately after the Nazi invasion. The letter...

Jarhead is a war movie without a war. Set in the scorched, oil-drenched deserts of Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991, it tells the story of a group of young US marines hanging around endlessly waiting to 'kick some Iraqi butt'. They wank, drink, scuffle, clean out toilets and wank some more for what seems like an eternity. They know a war is taking place, and even overhear it at one stage when US fighter planes zoom overhead, but the closest they get to seeing any action is while watching Apocalypse Now in a cinema screen. It's all very postmodern. If the Gulf War, in French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's words, didn't really take place, then Jarhead is the movie in which we see it not taking place. Jake Gyllenhaal of Donnie Darko (and more recently Brokeback Mountain ) fame plays Anthony Swofford, who wrote the book that the movie is based on. He's a bright guy who reads Camus and is separated from the rest of the square-jawed, foul-mouthed jocks in hi...

Ever

Behold The aurora australis (southern lights).

We don't even exist! Or rather, meeeeee! The Web search engine Google continues to expand its power in cyberspace. Everyday people come up with another quirky way to make use of its almighty algorithms. First came the Googlewhack, where people with way too much time on their hands tried to find two different words that would come up with a single search result. But it didn't stop there. Now a German blogger has come up with a world map that shows what traits different nationalities are especially known for. It's called "The Prejudice Map," but it seems more like a catalog of stereotypes and clichés to us. But seeing as how such stereotypes can lead to prejudice, we can probably let that slide. How does it work you ask? Well, its creator has simply put the phrase "Germans are known for *" into Google and the the search engine has done the rest. SPIEGEL ONLINE turned that tactic against Google itself and found out that the Web site is known for its relaxed...

NEXT time you are organising a cheese and wine party, don't waste your money on quality wine. Cheese masks the subtle flavours that mark out a good wine, so your guests won't be able to tell that you are serving them cheap stuff. Bernice Madrigal-Galan and Hildegarde Heymann of the University of California, Davis, presented trained wine tasters with cheap and expensive versions of four different varieties of wine. The tasters evaluated the strength of various flavours and aromas in each wine both alone and when preceded by eight different cheeses. They found that cheese suppressed just about everything, including berry and oak flavours, sourness and astringency. Only butter aroma was enhanced by cheese, and that is probably because cheese itself contains the molecule responsible for a buttery wine aroma, Heymann says. Strong cheeses suppressed flavours more than milder cheeses, but flavours of all wines were suppressed. In other words, there are no magical w...

I didn't, but then again I haven't done my research. Peter H. Fogtdal has written 10 novels in Danish, four of them best sellers. One (Le Front Chantilly, O Paraíso de Hitler ) is translated into French and Portuguese. This is what interests me, that a (small?) Portuguese publishing house brought this to our attention, Mercado de Letras . Since there's not a word translated to English anywhere, here's a synopsis from Webboom: «A "Frente Chantilly" foi o nome dado por Adolf Hitler ao seu protectorado modelo na Dinamarca (...) Conta a história, baseada na realidade, de Andreas Spiess, um oficial austríaco responsável por um quartel alemão na Dinamarca durante a II Guerra Mundial. Um dia, Spiess conhece David Huda, o único judeu da aldeia (o avô materno do autor). Entre o oficial alemão e o judeu lavrador nasce uma amizade que pode ter sérias consequências para ambos. Através de uma lógica de flashbacks, seguimos o jo...

as of January, 23rd 2006, four months after enrolling :-) Now that I have received a postcard from New Zealand, I'm only short of Africa. Telling, innit?

"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ. The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one. We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer Show But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, each of whom have said in their own way how we could behave more humanely and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favourite humans is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of thi...

In 1970, an insanely ambitious 31-year-old whose grandiose effort to create a new motion-picture studio in San Francisco was proving difficult, what with all the hippies he had hired stealing his equipment to sell for drugs, got an offer from Paramount Pictures. It was a chance to write and direct the Hollywood version of a book the young filmmaker read and quickly dismissed as "a popular, sensational novel, pretty cheap stuff." The novel was full of gore and sex, which this personally conservative scion of the 1960s found tasteless and offensive — not to mention retrogressive and far too mainstream. Even though he had worked anonymously on a nudie or two in the early 1960s and a few horror movies while he learned his craft, he now fancied himself a revolutionary artist in the manner of the self-conscious geniuses of the European "new wave." But the writer-director was in debt by $300,000 and had no other prospects. He turned to his quiet, intense assistant — a ...

The Nazi inner circle, Tojo, the Ceausescus, Il Duce, and posthumous punishment: « When it comes to dealing with an ex-dictator’s body (or that of a war criminal), at some point in time, men have done all of the above and more. But which methods have successfully closed dark chapters in history and which ones have led to public embarrassment or worse? It might be helpful to examine a few historical examples spanning the good, the bad, the ugly, and the just plain bizarre.» Read on from Policy Review

In 1949, Cardinal Jószef Mindszenty appeared before the world's cameras to mumble his confession to treasonous crimes against the Hungarian church and state. For resisting communism, the World War II hero had been subjected for 39 days to sleep deprivation and humiliation, alternating with long hours of interrogation, by Russian-trained Hungarian police. His staged confession riveted the Central Intelligence Agency, which theorized in a security memorandum that Soviet-trained experts were controlling Mindszenty by "some unknown force." If the Communists had interrogation weapons that were evidently more subtle and effective than brute physical torture, the CIA decided, then it needed such weapons, too. Months later, the agency began a program to explore "avenues to the control of human behavior," as John Marks discusses in his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate . During the next decade and a half, CIA experts honed the use of "chemical and biologi...

As millions of people in the developing world try to lose weight through diets, coaching and even surgery, there might be a faster way. Just consider the following figures: More than 840 million people worldwide don’t know how they’ll get their next meal and are physically and mentally exhausted. At least half are children, who suffer from acute vitamin and mineral shortages. Every three seconds a child dies in the arms of a despairing mother, simply because there is no healthy food available. Losing everything from ODE

Introduction to the Canongate Books Myths series : Already published and yet to be: Logos (...) is "the rational, pragmatic and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world." (...) Mythos, in contrast, is "not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning." Unmissable article on this groundbreaking event in Salon

More favorites: e.e. Napa «I n Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree» Sushi-i Other favorites in Dharma and Já Cheiro o Samádhi

Boy, I'm good... and modest... uff...

Here I was in another bloody cold day of translation work, physiotherapy, more translation, and finally the odd bit of surfing, reading and TV (compulsive, huh), occasionally peppered by cat purring, cat scratching and cat fighting, when I stopped on my tracks to watch this movie on cable. The story of the two hostages Brian Keenan and John McCarthy in the 1979-91 Civil War in Lebanon, with Ian Hart and Linus Roache as you've never seen them before. Blind Flight , Luta Cega em português.

Every year at the Booker Prize, there's an odd little ritual in which six 21st-century writers come face to face with the art and craft of the book as Caxton and Chaucer knew it. Before the winner is announced, each writer is presented with a sumptuous, hand-tooled, hardback edition of their novel. Once a reaffirmation of a venerable, but vital, tradition, in years to come this ceremony may seem as quaint as the presentation of Maundy money. All the signs are that the book as we know it may be going the way of the codex and the illuminated manuscript. This is paradoxical. Rarely in Britain has the book trade seemed so vigorous. In 1990, 65,000 new titles were published here. Last year, the total had risen to a staggering 161,000, far greater, pro rata, than France, Germany or even America. Never mind the figures. Britain's literary microclimate is tropical in its fever and Elizabethan in its profusion. Book festivals from Folkestone to Edinburgh heave with visitors; book clubs ...

La palabra “whisky” viene de “uisge” es una forma cortada para uisge beatha, que en gaélico significa 'el agua de la vida', antes del siglo XI los escritores lo definían como 'usquebaugh' o aqua vital y así se transformó con el tiempo en la forma inglesa whisky: Main Entry: whis·key Variant(s): or whis·ky / 'hwis-kE, 'wis- / Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural whiskeys or whiskies Etymology: Irish uisce beathadh & Scottish Gaelic uisge beatha, literally, water of life 1 : a liquor distilled from the fermented mash of grain (as rye, corn, or barley) 2 : a drink of whiskey

MEMBERS OF THE GREEN INK Brigade (GIB) get a rougher press than they deserve. They’re the same species as nosey parkers and every society needs its nosey parkers. The old lady who lives alone and spends her time peering out from behind her net curtains might also be the one who spots the yobs vandalising cars — or worse. The nosey parker might be the person who notices that the old lady has stopped twitching the curtains and might have had a stroke. They may be a nuisance but they do tend to spot when something is going wrong. So it is with GIB. I speak on this subject with authority. Anyone who makes a living from broadcasting will get more than his share of GIB letters. Anyone who dares to write a book about the English language had better change his address if he’s not prepared to be swamped. Yes, it can be profoundly irritating. A Green Inker will always spot the mistake. So will many other readers but the GI will write to tell you about it. And if any GIs are reading, I know that ...

for Roger Waters opera, Ça Ira

Brace yourselfos for what you are about to see!

Bram Stoker wrote this fascinating gothic horror story. Some think it's a missing chapter from the novel, 'Dracula.' Others suspect Stoker wrote it several years before the novel. Whichever is true, the story stands on its own as a supreme example of its genre. We've made our first machinima animation to tell the tale. What is machinima? It is animation produced by using computer games. For this movie, we used a wonderful game called 'The Movies' by Lionhead Studios. Click the image to get to see the movie :-)

WASHINGTON DC -- To many privacy geeks, it's the holy grail -- a totally anonymous and secure computer so easy to use you can hand it to your grandmother and send her off on her own to the local Starbucks. That was the guiding principle for the members of kaos.theory security research when they set out to put a secure crypto-heavy operating systems on a bootable CD: a disk that would offer the masses the same level of privacy available to security professionals, but with an easy user interface. "If Granny's into trannies, and doesn't want her grandkids to know, she should be able to download without fear," says Taylor Banks, project leader. It's a difficult problem, entailing a great deal of attention to both security details and usability issues. The group finally unveiled their finished product at the Shmoo Con hacker conference here Saturday, with mixed results. Titled Anonym.OS, the system is a type of disk called a "live CD...

I think the prized possession of Lady Tottington in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was a Chantenay carrot :-) Know your carrots Britons eat their way through 600,000 tons of carrots every year. They are the biggest-selling vegetable after potatoes. Chantenay sales currently stand at 8 per cent of the carrot market. Growers have their sights set on a 25 per cent share. 80g of Chantenay (approximately five carrots) count as a portion of vegetables. Each portion contains just 20 calories. 20,000 bales of straw are used to protect Chantenay carrots from frosts. This means they can be stored in the ground over winter and harvested when needed, therefore losing none of their nutrients in conventional storage. The straw is then ploughed back into the land to enrich it. More from the Telegraph

THE brave seamen whose great voyages of exploration opened up the world are iconic figures in European history. Columbus found the New World in 1492; Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; and Magellan set off to circumnavigate the world in 1519. However, there is one difficulty with this confident assertion of European mastery: it may not be true. It seems more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called “The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft”. [From The Economist ]

In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. [Hollow Laughter, Kurt Vonnegut on The Guardian ]

Bloody good. Good to see a movie deliver as you expected it to do.

Nothing liberating, either – and my authority is the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who thought porn “a sign of a diseased condition of the body politic.” D.H. Lawrence wasn’t ducking indictment or an inquest when he wrote in 1929, in “Pornography and Obscenity,” that “even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously,” rebuffing “the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit…. There is no reciprocity… only deadening.” Lawrence hated porn because he exalted sexual love. He was happy that “the intelligent young… are rescuing their young nudity from the stuffy, pornographical hole-and-corner underworld of their elders, and they refuse to sneak about the sexual relation.” He came as close as any well-known writer of his time to seconding Oscar Wilde’s defense of homosexuality. Lengthy article on the pornification of public spaces, from Salmagundi

Views from Madeira :-)

He speaks!

Stress Reliever... (hand breaker...)

These are almond trees? More postcards received from PostCrossing on the Dharma blog :-)

Even chefs who were loath to admit professional shortcuts were more forthcoming about their personal habits. Dickerman finds "pretty much any Japanese or Spanish canned good quite acceptable." Legras, whose wife is Japanese, said they take advantage of packaged Japanese goods like pickled vegetables. Charles Phan of the Slanted Door relies on dried seafood like shrimp and squid to enhance soups and other dishes. Chef Tom Colicchio also recommends jarred Spanish products, such as roasted red peppers. Spanish chef José Andrés uses fresh tubers in Jaleo 's tortilla de patatas , but he subs in potato chips at home. ;-))))))) Read more

The Woody Allen Quiz My Score: You scored 9 out of a possible 13 Play it again, Sam. Room for improvement. To quote Mr Allen, "My brain is my second favourite organ" (Sleeper). Maybe you should concentrate a little more on number two

The scenes replay in my mind, though when I saw it it was painful (then again 3 hours...) Ok, it's a classic. (three-hous-three) The hunks... Huh? 3 hours...

KLM’s airline staff travel the world over, staying in luxurious hotels and enjoying exotic excursions along the way. But that’s not all. Many are also confronted with widespread human misery: begging, sick people and neglected children. KLM Captain Marius den Dulk says, “In some countries all you have to do is look out your hotel room window to see the slums, where children are the main victims of disgraceful and unjust circumstances.” Den Dulk and his colleagues began to feel increasingly frustrated by their inability to do anything about the situation, so he wrote an article in a trade journal, calling on co-workers to work together in finding solutions to these problems. Three months later, in November of 1998, Wings of Support was born. Now every pilot, flight attendant or member of ground staff who encounters injustice or poverty on a trip abroad can offer suggestions on ways to support the children. This can vary from building a school in Africa to funding an AIDS clinic in South...

"Jon is the epitome of a perfect host — smart, engaging, irreverent and funny," Oscar producer Gil Cates said. Stewart released a statement of his own: "As a performer, I'm truly honored to be hosting the show. Although, as an avid watcher of the Oscars, I can't help but be a little disappointed with the choice. It appears to be another sad attempt to smoke out Billy Crystal."

Still Life With Pomegranates Henri Matisse Yep, much more than one initially thinks. Read more...

Seed presents the ten most revelatory experiments, findings, discoveries and proofs of the year

It was minus 3.3 degrees Celsius - the dead of winter in Mongolia - when Jerry Friedman stepped off a plane in Ulan Bator and resumed his search for the oldest people on Earth. Friedman was in awe the next morning when he met Damchaagiin Gendendarjaa, a 110-year-old Tibetan Buddhist lama: He had earned a doctorate in theology at age 106. He had all his teeth. He had never seen a doctor in his life, yet mild arthritis in his lower back was his only ailment. ''He was the holiest person I've ever been in the presence of,'' Friedman recalled of his February 2003 trip. ''It's hard to describe, other than he had a certain countenance I had never experienced before.'' The lama was one of more than 50 ''supercentenarians'' - people at least 110 years old - whom Friedman interviewed and photographed for a book, Earth's Elders: The Wisdom of the World's Oldest People. Friedman, 58, a commercial photographer, closed his Connectic...