Nepenthe

Abandonned bebe ducks swimmin' in a teacup People, The Daily Mail is reporting that an alert canoeist (is there any other kind? - Ed.) found a pair of tiny abandoned ducklings battling against waves after being washed out to sea. Now, those ducklings are being nursed back to health—IN A TEACUP OMG! Cute Overload, most naturally >:)

The Carpathian Mountains ( Romanian : Munţii Carpaţi ; Polish , Czech , and Slovak : Karpaty ; Ukrainian : Карпати (Karpaty); German : Karpaten ; Serbian : Karpati / Карпати ; Hungarian : Kárpátok ) are the eastern wing of the great Central Mountain System of Europe , curving 1500 km (~900 miles) along the borders of Romania , the Czech Republic , Slovakia , Poland , Ukraine , Austria , Serbia , and northern Hungary . The name 'Karpetes' may ultimately be from the Proto Indo-European root *sker- / *ker- , from which comes the Albanian word kar pë (rock), perhaps by way of a Dacian word which meant 'mountain,' rock , or rugged . Polish archaic word kar pa mean rugged irregularities, underwater obstacles/rocks, rugged roots or trunks. Common word skar pa is sharp cliff or other vertical terrain. Yep, crossing Europe from the Black Sea to the Portuguese language ;)

(July, 31, from a Guardian blog ) Ingmar Bergman left in the early hours of yesterday morning. Within a few hours, Michelangelo Antonioni had followed him through the exit door . It remains to be seen whether this signals the onset of some art-house apocalypse - some Biblical purge of revered European auteurs - but the omens are hardly encouraging. How are Godard, Resnais and Rohmer bearing up? Can we urge them to stay indoors, wrap up warm, and maybe put on some old DVDs. Anything to keep them out of circulation until the curse has run its course. From the Comments :-D They always come in threes..? Though relatively unknown in the West, the Japanese master Kon Ichikawa is over 90 now. Even more venerable -- 100 next year, possibly -- is Manouel de Oliveira (don't think I've spelt him right). CagedHorse, although the common spelling is "Manuel", the name is " Manoel de Oliveira " and he'll be 100 next year, having just premiered one film, finishe...

'I can promise you the trip of a lifetime." It was my first evening on board Searcher and the speaker was the vessel's captain, Art Taylor, a rugged 50-year-old Californian. Four times a year for the last 15 years, Art has been taking a maximum of 24 passengers on board his 95ft vessel on 12-day whale watching and nature tours around Mexico's Baja peninsula, at 800 miles one of the longest and narrowest in the world. During that first briefing session, Art ran through the essentials. The accommodation would be comfortable - with air-conditioned cabins. The food would be plentiful, the crew skilled and knowledgeable. For those of us who wanted to see a desert environment, Baja California was sans pareil. On half a dozen occasions, we would be landing from skiffs on the mainland or on one of the islands and we would have a chance to hike through the wilderness, keeping a wary eye out for rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas, centipedes and sandflies. As for those of us wh...

Consider it from the plant's point of view. At some point in its evolution, cannabis discovered that giving animals a buzz was a great way of ensuring the distribution of its seed. It turns out that no animal likes a buzz as much as humans, who have employed our legendary ingenuity in amplifying the high and propagating the weed. Now we find ourselves divided over the consequences. The majority of smokers try it, like it or don't, and move on. Some of us get into it and give it a lot of our time. Of those, some find ways of fitting lives around it, as fans, growers, dealers or all three. Others get into it and end up in terrible trouble: either because we start too young, or do too much, or have fragile minds, or all of the above. Even a second's psychosis is no fun, as anyone who has had even a moment of the Fear will know. A week, a month or a year of it is a kind of living hell. So we stand now in a weed field of paradoxes: cannabis is both quite safe and very dangerous...

It’s a miracle plant – a member of the grass family with more than 5,000 uses, from scaffolding to surfboards, fuel to furniture, musical instruments, food, cosmetics, aphrodisiacs and medicine. It’s part of the daily lives of up to half of the world’s population and more than a billion people overseas live in houses made from it. Bamboo – it’s one of the fastest growing plants on Earth, and adaptable enough to grow on every continent except at the Poles. Bamboo is rated highly among architects and designers. ‘Bamboo is strong, flexible, durable and beautiful,’ says American architect Gale Beth Goldberg. Colombian architect Simon Velez, who has built sports stadia and enormous factory roofs from bamboo, calls it ‘steel from nature’. But it’s lighter than steel or concrete, and has a natural flexibility that they lack – which is why bamboo buildings fare better in earthquakes and hurricanes. ‘Bamboo is subtle, elastic and tenacious,’ says Goldberg. ‘It’s a survivor. It bends but it doe...

“The Simpsons Movie,” opening on Friday, reminds us of your substantial role in giving masterpiece status to cartoons and animation. Do you see yourself as an A-level artist? No. Cartooning is for people who can’t quite draw and can’t quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career. How much of the movie is hand-drawn? We used a combination of cheap labor and computers. What does that mean? You outsourced the film to animators in China ? No. When I say cheap, I mean there’s no amount of money that an animator can be paid — they deserve our eternal gratitude. I would give them back massages if they would take them. One highlight of 20th-century art is surely Marge Simpson’s blue beehive hairdo. That was inspired by a combination of my own mother’s hairstyle in the 1960s and, of course, “The Bride of Frankenstein.” Marge’s hair also puts one in mind of Queen Nefertiti and makes her seem regal beside her husband. Any woman would seem regal in comparison to...

I seem to have missed this in the Spanish media although it was everywhere. I have looked for the source in order to avoid likely mistranslations o biased opinions in the Spanish papers: Este foi o regresso mais longo de José Saramago a Portugal desde que a polémica que envolveu a candidatura do seu livro O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo ao Prémio Literário Europeu o levou para um "exílio" na ilha espanhola de Lanzarote. A atribuição do Prémio Nobel parece tê-lo feito esquecer essas mágoas, mas não amoleceu a sua visão da sociedade e da História, que continua a ser polémica. Como se pode ver nesta entrevista. Durante dois dias, o Nobel da Literatura português sentou-se no sofá e analisou o estado do mundo. Na única entrevista que concedeu durante a temporada passada na sua casa de Lisboa, falou muito de política, mais de literatura e também da vida e da morte. Pelo meio ficou o anúncio da criação da fundação com o seu nome e a revelação de que está a escrever um novo livr...

When your computer fails, it's like being returned instantly to the 70s. Post Offices, record players and board games become important again. You then have three options: the first is to buy a new computer; the second is to embrace a preindustrial lifestyle; the third is to attempt to fix it. Of the three the last is the most expensive, most stressful and least likely to succeed. The most effective way to fix a computer is to restart it. This is the technical equivalent of a detox weekend. It's important to switch the power right off, and that doesn't mean pushing only the button on the front, it means shutting down the power to the whole street. One of the main causes of breakdown is that computers and printers hate each other. The causes of conflict are: computer won't talk to printer; printer ignores computer; computer has never heard of printer; printer doesn't take computer seriously; computer recognises other printers you don't have. Losing your internet c...

Many great thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries looked to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia for answers to core questions about what it meant to be human, as if they were so close to the beginnings of society that their ways of life could reveal its starting point or its very essence. Engels looked to them for the basic forms of property relations; Emile Durkheim and James Frazer for the meaning of religion; Freud for the original human trauma; Kropotkin for original human equality; Malinowski for the fundamental structure of family life. In retrospect, the speculations range from fanciful to fatuous. And the one thing all these theorists have in common is that none ever saw an Aboriginal Australian or set foot in one of their societies. One anthropologist who did spend time with real live Aborigines was Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. In 1911, he embarked on research in Australia, working at first with an inland group of Aborigines. This was disrupted by a police attack on the...

At TEDGLOBAL in Arusha, Tanzania in June, 2007, we launched the " Africa Cookbook Project ," whose goal is to archive African culinary writing and make it widely available on the continent and beyond. A database is being developed and copies of hundreds of cookbooks are already being catalogued at BETUMI: The African Culinary Network. Google has offered assistance in eventually digitizing some of the information. The enthusiasm and tangible support both at and after the conference is wonderful. Issa Diabate has already e-mailed that he's sending an Ivorian book, Dominique Bikaba that he's searching for one from DRC, and Jens Martin Skibsted has scanned the covers of several books in his collection. People have promised to send books from Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, etc. I'm thrilled that others recognize the urgent need to protect these books, whether for their value as a record of popular culture, social history, or, my specialty, culinary creativity.

UK science fiction writer Charles Stross, author of novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, posits a future in which all human experience is recorded on devices the size of a grain of sand. We've had agriculture for about 12,000 years, towns for eight to 10,000 years, and writing for about 5,000 years. But we're still living in the dark ages leading up to the dawn of history. Don't we have history already, you ask? Well actually, we don't. We know much less about our ancestors than our descendants will know about us. Indeed, we've acquired bad behavioural habits - because we're used to forgetting things over time. In fact, collectively we're on the edge of losing the ability to forget. For the past 50 years we've become used to computers getting cheaper and more powerful exponentially - doubling in performance (or halving in price) roughly every 18 months. The core trend, described by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, describes the transistor count in...

Following up on a previous BB post about internet-related aspects of the current meltdown in Zimbabwe , BoingBoing reader Bretton Vine writes: I'm in from South Africa, currently experiencing what the popular media calls a 'human tsunami' of illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe across our borders for everything from work to medicine and even basic foodstuffs which are smuggled back into Zimbabwe for resale. The recent enforcing of price controls has left Zimbabwe shelves empty, militia going ape, major cross-border escape (5000 captured in last two weeks, and that's barely a dent in the number that make it though). Add to this is bittersweet irony that the 'Rainbow Nation' of South Africa is experiencing a form of African xenophobia historically unparalleled despite more than a decade since apartheid become the past. But this is another heated discussion not related to my email. I just wanted to point out that the Internet Service Providers' Associati...

Last fall, shortly after I returned from Nigeria , I was accosted by a perky blond college student whose blue eyes seemed to match the "African" beads around her wrists. "Save Darfur!" she shouted from behind a table covered with pamphlets urging students to TAKE ACTION NOW! STOP GENOCIDE IN DARFUR! My aversion to college kids jumping onto fashionable social causes nearly caused me to walk on, but her next shout stopped me. "Don't you want to help us save Africa ?" she yelled. It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East , the West has turned to Africa for redemption. Idealistic college students, celebrities such as Bob Geldof and politicians such as Tony Blair have all made bringing light to the dark continent their mission. They fly in for internships and fact-finding missions or to pick out children to adopt in much the same way my friends and I in New York take the subway to the pound to...

Japanese Airlines First to Install Bidets in the Air Japan's All Nippon Airways have announced they will be installing bidets in the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner , set to be delivered in May of 2008. This is a first for any commercial airline. ( Vladimir Putin had a bidet in his private jet, however.) With over 60 percent of Japanese households sporting a bidet, this makes sense. But I can't help but wonder just how much larger the lavatory will have to be to accommodate this. Will the bidet be built into the toilet, or will it be separate? Or will it be a hand-held spray bidet that are common across Asia? The bidet-toilet combo makes the most sense due to the constricted space, but the Dreamliner is a big plane, so who knows? Gadling

Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them) Humans are naturally polygamous Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy Most suicide bombers are Muslim Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce Beautiful people have more daughters What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of It's natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they're male) Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist

From the wonderful work of Stéphane Kardos

Reflections, b y James Ivory, Elmore Leonard, Tracy Chevalier, Patrick McGrath, Jerry Stahl, Michael Tolkin, Susanna Moore, Time Krabbe, Irvine Welsh, Barry Gifford, Alexander Payne, Myla Goldberg, and Frederic Raphael Best Adaptations And much more. Unmissable ;)

Em Outubro de 2000, numa escola secundária em Barrow, Alasca, houve uma reunião de representantes das oito nações árcticas – Estados Unidos, Rússia, Canadá, Dinamarca, Noruega, Suécia, Finlândia e Islândia – para conversarem sobre o aquecimento global. O grupo anunciou planos para um estudo tripartido das alterações climáticas na região no valor de dois milhões de dólares. Em Novembro de 2004, as primeiras duas partes do estudo – um enorme documento técnico e um resumo de cento e quarenta páginas – foram apresentadas num simpósio em Reiquejavique. No dia seguinte à minha conversa com Sigurdsson, assisti à sessão plenária do simpósio. Além dos quase trezentos cientistas, atraiu uma quantidade considerável de residentes nativos do Árctico - pastores de renas, caçadores de subsistência e representantes de grupos como o Conselho Venatório dos Inuvialuit . Entre as camisas e as gravatas, vislumbrei dois homens com as túnicas garridas dos Sami e vários outros com coletes de pele de foca. ...