Everything's Gone Green

Flowers on a table

2008-07-12T12:11:00.002-04:00

My most recent painting

Egypt bans 92-year-old's marriage

2008-06-13T20:28:00.001-04:00

I'm sorry, he looks like an over ripe banana.

From the BBC

The Egyptian authorities have banned a 92-year-old man from marrying a 17-year-old girl, the Egyptian al-Akhbar newspaper has reported.

The ministry of justice invoked a law which says the age gap between spouses should not exceed 25 years.

Egypt brought in the law prohibiting the marriage of elderly men to very young girls during the Gulf oil boom.

It was an effort to prevent wealthy men from the Gulf states seeking young poor brides from the Egyptian countryside.

Not much is known about the 92-year-old man who tried to marry an Egyptian girl of 17 except that he is an Arab from the Gulf.

An Egyptian justice official said by refusing to endorse their marriage it would now be impossible for the girl to travel abroad with her husband.

However, in special cases, the justice ministry does allow foreign men to marry Egyptian women more than 25 years their junior if they deposit a very large sum of money in the name of their wife at the Egyptian National Bank.

Both husband and wife also have to report in person to the ministry which checks their marriage is genuine to prevent any kind of trafficking in women.

According to the al-Akhbar newspaper, 173 such marriages were allowed in the past year after the foreign husband deposited a sum equivalent to about US $8,000 and was screened.

Beautiful garden

2008-06-07T22:52:00.007-04:00

Wayland, MA. garden center, yadi yadi yah.

Smile for your close-up

2008-06-07T22:34:00.003-04:00

Garden center in Wayland MA.

Chinese lanters

2008-06-07T22:23:00.002-04:00

These are from the garden center is Wayland, MA.

Orchids

2008-06-05T16:07:00.001-04:00

These are from the garden center in wayland, ma as well.

Pretty fish

2008-06-05T14:27:00.003-04:00

These are from a fish/garden center in Wayland, MA.

Ladybug

2008-06-05T14:22:00.000-04:00

Can you see the ladybug on the flower?

Chinatown, NY

2008-05-21T21:17:00.003-04:00

It was very intimidating being in New York City and not being able to tell what's what. In Chinatown all the signs are in chinese, not just the store signs but also in the grocery stores, restaurant menus and such.

South Street Seaport, NY

2008-05-20T21:53:00.004-04:00

Last week my BF and I stayed in New York City. This is a view from South Street Seaport.

My apples

2008-05-11T21:31:00.002-04:00

The two little apples of my eyes, my nephew Jonathan @3 and his sister my niece Lily @8 months.

Curried haddock with green mangoes

2008-05-09T00:26:00.001-04:00

I love cooking with green mangoes but unfortunately only shrimp and fish goes well with it. The tartness works well with seafood, I guess very much so in the sense that lime works with it as well.

Total cook time and prep time: 45 minutes

Ingredients
· 2 table spoons of Shan curries mix [or 2 tablespoon curry powder]
· 1 teaspoon garam masala [nice to include but can be excluded]
· 1 teaspoon ground cumin
· 1 medium onion, diced
· 3 cloves of garlic, crushed
· 1 small green mango chopped [any way you want]
· 1 large ripe tomato quartered
· Pepper to taste
· Salt to taste
· 2 tablespoon olive oil
· 1 lb halibut cut to one inch squares [halibut can be substituted for any type of firm fish]

Directions
1. Mix the Shan curry [or curry powder] in a medium size bowl. Add garam masala, cumin, onions and garlic, mix together
2. Add 2 tablespoons water to the mixture, stir so that the water absorbs the powders
3. Pour oil into pan, heat over slow fire on stove
4. Add mixture to the oil; keep turning the mixture from the bottom, making sure that it does not stick to the pan. Keep turning until the onions become transparent
5. Add chopped green mango, tomatoes, salt, and pepper to taste as well as 2 cups of water to the pot. Cover and bring to a boil over slow fire. Keep cooking it this way until the tomatoes and mangoes become soft – usually takes about 10 minutes
6. Add the halibut to the sauce; make sure that it is completely covered by the sauce. Cover the pot and let it simmer for about 10 minutes so that the fish soaks up all of the seasonings.

You can cook it for less time if you prefer After 10 minutes turn off the stove and let the curry sit for about 5 minutes, then it is ready to serve. Curry such as this can be eaten with bread, over rice or just by itself

Shan Curry Mixes: http://www.shanfood.com/. Any type of curry such as chicken or vegetable will do for this recipe, if you don’t want to use this mix, you can use curry powder instead Green mangoes can be substituted with tomatoes

Mix ingredients in bowl, combine with water

Simmer in pot

Add chopped mangoes, tomatoes and water

Endicott, Johnson City NY

2008-05-04T18:50:00.002-04:00

Due to work obligations [my boyfriends'] I found myself upstate New York in Johnson City. Besides the view of the mountains, there isn't much else to report. Here are some pictures that I took.

Mini berry pies

2008-05-03T00:32:00.004-04:00

Ingredients for filling

* 2 cups of mix berries: halved strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries and seedless cherries

* 2 packets of splenda [less if prefer more tart]

* 1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch

* 1 box Betty Crocker pie crust

Directions

Preheat toaster oven to 325 degrees

1. Place berries in a large bowl, mix in splenda

2. Add cornstarch, gently toss to make sure that all the berries are coated

3. Line a 6 muffin pan with pie crust

4. Spoon berries into each cup halfway, do not fill completely

5. Bake in oven until crust is golden brown

6. When cold lightly sprinkle with icing sugar or if you prefer splenda

You can add pudding or any type of paste at the bottom before adding the fruit filling, however, I don't because I like the tartness of the berries without too much sweet or nutty

Mix fruit in bowl with splenda and cornstarch

Place mini shells in muffin pan

Add filling

The days of old ~ Bollywood

2008-03-18T22:17:00.003-04:00

I have not watched a Bollywood movie in almost twenty years and while I do not feel like I am missing much, occasionally a simple song will send a wave of nostalgia through me, creating a longing for the old country.

The old country and the days when we went to the cinema not to see one movie, but two of them back to back. Wednesday at noon, Saturday at noon and at 6:00 p.m. was well. This was the only form of entertainment we were allowed and as a result the women would line up about an hour before a scheduled showing to get their tickets. We always dressed our best, for the young men would stand outside to watch the women and to see if there was a chance that one of them would turn up alone, giving them the opportunity to sit next to her and ‘chat’ her up. But, alas, none ever did, because to do so would have been to risk her reputation.

Looking back, I cannot believe that I sat there, sometimes with my mom and aunts and other times with my friends, for four hours at a time watching a movie in a language that I did not understand. While I cannot believe it, I can still feel that fuzzy warm feeling that I had then when I sat and watched the hero and heroine sing and dance their way to each other’s hearts.

As I sit now watch on youtube Hema Malini and Feroz Khan sing their way across the Afghanistan desert and Netu Singh and Shashi Kapoor sing along in the car, my heart feels light. The women were beautiful and sweet, the men handsome and charming. I remember the drive-in in Paramaribo where we went as a family and sat quietly as we watched this movie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0vsraYJtbY and many many more like it. And then there are the songs from ZAMAANE KO DIKHANA HAI which to this day I still adore.

The draw of Bollywood then was that it was clean and provided an escape from the everyday hardships. The movies were so romantic and beautiful. And no matter what happened love will conquer all. Fairytale on film.

This is old Bollywood, when the movies were clean or nudity, sex or anything sexual. The violence was limited and you could sit there with grandma and grandpa and know that none would be embarrassed.

I think I’ll go to the cinema tomorrow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj1Rn--wz6w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S875u8jFWYk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3YTBozxlm8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmRVZhnZtCc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDK40H5oX-k&feature=related

Hema Malinie

Feroz Khan

Shashi Kapoor

Guyana Shooting Rampage Kills 11

2008-01-27T11:33:00.001-05:00

It cuts me deeply when I read of such things taking place in my birth country.

Killing Shooting Rampage Kills 11

Protesting civilians confronted troops in Lusignan after the attackGunmen in Guyana have gone on a rampage, killing 11 people, including five children, police say. The gunmen stormed into a village east of the capital, Georgetown, and fired into several houses.

It was reported to be the worst mass killing in the South American country for more than 30 years, and sparked angry protests by neighbours.

Officials suspect a criminal gang acting on the orders of the country's most wanted man, Rondell Rawlins.

Police say Rondell Rawlins has accused government forces of kidnapping his pregnant girlfriend, and has threatened to launch attacks until she is returned.

'They didn't come here to rob, they came here to slaughter' Jag Singh Lusignan resident

Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo deplored the attack, in the village of Lusignan, east of the capital Georgetown, as a "cowardly act" carried out by "sick, demented criminals". "We have to hunt them down," he said.

Screaming on streets

Divisional Police Commander Leroy Brummel said unidentified gunmen kicked down the doors of five wooden houses in Lusignan, shooting at inhabitants within.

The dead include a man, his wife and their granddaughter in one house, and a mother and her two children in another, news agency AFP reported.

"They didn't come here to rob, they came here to slaughter," a resident, Jag Singh, told AFP.
Local people screamed and wept on the streets of the village.

Later, as many as 300 people from the neighbouring town of Mon Repos started fires on the roads to Lusignan and vowed to form vigilante groups to avenge the killings.

"We want justice!" they cried. "Government can't protect us! We want more police!"

Ethnic tension

Hours before the village massacre, heavily armed gunmen had also attacked the headquarters of the Guyana police force, injuring two policemen.

On Wednesday, in the criminal haven of Buxton, east of Georgetown, gunmen engaged Guyanese soldiers in a firefight that left one soldier dead and another seriously injured.
Police said Rondell Rawlins himself had made telephone threats following the disappearance of his 18-year-old girlfriend.

He is reputed to head a gang of about 20 heavily armed men engaged in "urban warfare", and is also wanted over the murder of a government minister in 2006.

President Jagdeo suggested that the latest attack may have been meant to stir up ethnic tension. The village of Lusignan is mostly ethnic Indian, while Rondell Rawlins and his followers come from the ethnic African community.

Heath Ledger

2008-01-27T11:06:00.000-05:00

It didn't register when I was the headline, how can it ever register when one so young dies. I remember the first movie I saw him in, 'ten things i hate about you'. How beautiful he was. May his soul rest in peace and may he always be remembered for the laughter and joy he brought.

Exhausted

2008-01-27T10:42:00.000-05:00

With the change of job my commute went from 20 minutes one way to an hour 15 minutes to an hour and a half each way. And I am only about 10 miles away from Times Square! Go figure!!!

I am pooped. When I accepted the position I thought I was going to have a team of 3 people reporting to me. When the reorg was announced I ended up with 7 people instead of three and have to carry a full workload. I am spending a quarter of my time managing my teams, another quarter working with sales on pricing and half the time working on my projects and my clients. So I am working about 60 hours a week and spending the rest of the time commuting.

I am exhausted.

Peter Doig

2008-01-27T00:07:00.000-05:00

Record painterFifteen years ago, while Damien Hirst and the other YBAs were storming the citadels of the art world, another British artist was working away largely unnoticed. But all that changed last year when one of his paintings sold for £5.7 million - a record for a living artist. Here Peter Doig tells Tim Adams about LSD, fame and why the prices of his art make him feel physically sick

As a painter, Peter Doig is a master of the unsettling. Even so, this must have been an odd experience: nearly a year ago, a picture he had made in 1990 of a white canoe mirrored on a lake at night, one of an obsessive series, sold at Sotheby's for £5.7m. It was the most ever paid for a painting by a living European artist. Doig didn't get the money - the painting had been owned by Charles Saatchi - but in that extravagant moment, he went from being a quiet critical success to an infamous commercial one. He was, suddenly, new evidence of the art world gone mad. How did that feel?'

It made me feel sick, really,' he says, after a longish pause. We are sitting eating croissants in a room at Tate Britain on London's Millbank, where Doig has a retrospective opening in February. 'I'm talking about nauseous sick, not so much disgusted or anything. That someone should have put their hand in their pocket and spent that much money on a painting of mine seemed so unconnected to anything that I ever did.

'Doig is a youthful 48, quick to smile. He thinks some more, has another go at it. 'As an artist, you are aware there is this strange money market out there, but you have no sense of how it works. The last time I had an exhibition, people wanted to buy the paintings, sure, but not for money like that. So you ask yourself: what happened to create that escalation? I thought when a painting of mine went for £300,000 that was a huge amount of money - I mean, when I was a trustee of the Tate 10 years ago, I remember discussing how much a Sickert was worth and at the time it was thought about £300,000, so you wonder who is the architect of that change? Certainly not the painter... not me.

'The day after the sale, like every day, Doig had to go back into his studio in Port of Spain, Trinidad, where he has lived for the past five years. The studio is hot, dusty, industrial, in one corner of an abandoned rum factory. His oldest painter friend, and current neighbour, Chris Ofili describes the place as like 'an artist's Oxfam, full of paintings hanging around, almost discarded, as if there are lots of false starts'. Did the new price tag change the way Doig looked at those works in progress?

'It did for a long while, certainly,' he says. 'It made me wonder: what am I doing this for?' The way he works didn't help. He cheerfully describes his finished work as the product of 'mistake, after mistake, after mistake', a painstaking process of failing better, and talks of wanting the layered surfaces of his work to be 'slightly repellent, on close inspection'.'If you are someone like Jeff Koons,' he says of the American king of kitsch, 'and you have to work out how to make a big chrome heart or something, then there are lots of people and a big production involved. The money is more natural somehow. For me, I am just on my own in the studio, trying to make things work. One thing is sure: it doesn't make painting any easier.

'Fifty of Doig's paintings, going back 20 years, are packed and waiting to be hung at the Tate. His autobiography is stacked in those crates. In some ways, this retrospective represents a homecoming - Doig painted White Canoe, for example, at the Chelsea Art School next door to the Tate - but he's had lots of homes. The son of a restless father, an accountant for a shipping company, he was born in Edinburgh, moved to Trinidad at tw0, Canada at seven and never lived in the same house for more than a couple of years.

His paintings always gesture toward this journey - colour-saturated tropics, whited-out snowscapes - and though he is more fascinated, he says, by the idea of memory than by specific events of his past, they often invite you to think: how did he get here? He explains a little hesitantly, as if giving away secrets.

His father was an occasional painter, dabbling in abstracts. Doig first started drawing for himself, though, after he had left home at 17 to go to work as a roughneck with a crew drilling for gas on the Canadian prairies. 'That was an extreme time as far as my relationship with landscape went,' he says. 'The prairies are flat and go on for thousands of miles. You feel extremely vulnerable. I worked with the crew during the day, but I had no vehicle. We would often be 50 miles from the nearest motel, so I'd walk up to a local farmhouse and ask if I could sleep in the barn.

'It was his first experience of a sense that his paintings often give: 'of being attached to the earth, but only just, like in a dream'. Working on the rigs also made Doig realise he did not want to be a roughneck for the rest of his life, not least because the majority of his fellow labourers on the drilling platform had lost most of their fingers. So at night, he started drawing, still lifes and landscapes, and had an idea he would go to art school in London, the place where the music he listened to, punk, started out.

He enrolled at Wimbledon, and later went to St Martin's and Chelsea art schools, all the time picking up friends. He met Ofili at Chelsea and later shared a studio with Dinos Chapman. At one remove, he watched the emergence of Brit Art and the phenomenon of Damien Hirst and YBAs.

It was, he suggests, a curious time to be a young painter; the energy was elsewhere, with the conceptual artists who were coming out of Goldsmith's and being snapped up by Saatchi. He made a painting while at Chelsea, called Art School, which depicts three chipmunks peering out of a tree trunk. 'I was a mature student,' he says, amused, '30, I'd been painting for 10 years and I was suddenly surrounded by all these 21-year-olds, incredibly eager, and starting to be exhibited. The chipmunks were supposed to represent all these keen students, though at that moment you couldn't imagine how popular they would become or how prominent their art became.

'Charles Saatchi came to some of Doig's early shows, in pubs and odd spaces, but he never bought anything. The press was full of articles about the death of painting, but Doig, who by now had a wife whom he'd met at St Martin's and the first of their five kids, trusted those obituaries were exaggerated.

Perhaps one consequence of his rootless childhood was a hoarder's habit: he was a great collector of images and scraps of things, taking Polaroids, hanging on to bits of strangeness he saw. In London, he often went to Canada House on Trafalgar Square to raid its library of travel brochures, trying to make some sense of his memories of adolescence in Toronto. In contrast to the slickness of the art that was making headlines, he had a desire to make paintings that were resolutely 'homely', often literally so: a recurring obsession in his work were colloquial suburban and rural houses, glimpsed from across roads or through trees, domestic images so singular that they shift, like David Lynch scenes, into the territory of uncanny.

Doig's first break, and the first money he made, came in 1993 when his painting Blotter won the John Moores Prize. The painting, though apparently naive, carries the intensity that Doig is able to invest in his surfaces. He describes the way people look at paintings as 'different from how they look at anything else; it's a strange, lost scrutiny ...' Blotter demands this gaze. It depicts a single adolescent figure standing alone on a frozen lake dwarfed by the woods and ice around him; it invites many questions, not least the relation of the figure to his teenage self.

'I understand it completely as something autobiographical,' he says, 'though I don't know it's easy to explain.' The painting partly grew out of a photograph he had taken of his brother, after they had deliberately flooded a frozen pond to see the effect the water had on reflection. 'The figure is not doing much, standing there, contemplating, moving his foot. But then there is this other stuff around. The painting is about noticing that stuff really - all my painting is concerned with something like that.

'The blotter of the painting's title is a reference to the LSD that Doig used occasionally as a teenager 'without being a total acid head like some of my friends'. Looking back, he suggests 'it was an important, sometimes terrifying drug to experiment with, though only people who have taken LSD would really understand how it might have affected my work. Blotter tries to catch the idea of all this activity in the head, but the body being still. It is something like being absorbed into the landscape, I suppose.

'Doig stopped taking psychedelic drugs when he was 18, but the experience remains a reference point. His paintings often feel very much like distant products of the Seventies, dwelling on damaged utopias, though he is anxious to loosen their moorings: 'Painting becomes interesting,' he says, 'when it becomes timeless.

'As a result, his best work occupies some uneasy space between anecdote and abstract; it never lets you forget either its reference in the real world, nor its painterly surface. Alongside his canoe pictures, the best expression of this is perhaps his 'Concrete Cabin' series, made in 1994, which also casts light on some of his recurring preoccupations.These paintings were all based on a near-derelict Corbusier building at Briey-en-Forêt in north- eastern France, which Doig stumbled upon while walking in adjacent woods. 'The building took me by surprise as a piece of architecture,' he says, 'but it was not until I saw the photographs I had taken of the building through the trees that it became interesting. That made me go back and look at it again. I was surprised by the way the building transformed itself from a piece of architecture into a feeling. It was all emotion suddenly.

'Some of this emotion he brought with him, some of it seemed centred in the place itself. 'The building is in a strange, sad part of France, very close to Verdun,' he says, 'and just approaching the town you are immediately aware of what went on in the First World War and the Second World War. In the town, there is a graveyard with lots of black crosses on the graves of German soldiers. The woods have a sombre feeling that there is no getting away from. The paintings could not help but contain that.

'Such a romantic idea of painting was violently at odds with the sensation and irony of many of Doig's contemporaries, but eventually the market, and Saatchi, started to come round to his way of thinking (a shift which culminated a couple of years ago in Saatchi's show The Triumph of Painting, in which Doig starred alongside Martin Kippenberger and others). It is tempting to think he moved to Trinidad to escape the venality of the London art world, but it was less complicated than that. 'It was more to do with being excited by somewhere else,' he says. 'And giving my family some of the childhood I'd had. I went back to Trinidad in 2000 with Ofili; we were doing a residence together.

He and I went back maybe seven times in the next three years - at any opportunity. One time, we were in a group show in Los Angeles and we managed to blag a ticket to go via Trinidad for two days - a crazy journey. It just got to us. I bought a piece of land when I went there in 2000, which wasn't something I would have imagined that I would do. It seemed like a good alternative to London, because, although I had left there when I was seven, it was so familiar to me. I could still remember my way around.'He and Ofili are now embedded in Port of Spain culture; Doig runs a weekly film club in his studio that attracts a 'proper Trinidad mix' of people to watch the likes of Black Narcissus and The Big Lebowski. The flyers for the films are probably worth holding on to - Doig paints them himself.

Since he has been in the Caribbean, he has stopped painting so much from photograph and memory and started responding to what is around him, Gauguin-like. He takes boat trips, sometimes with Ofili, to the wild northern coast: 'Incredible landscapes and caves and archaic spaces like natural cathedrals, chasms, strange pelicans, islands covered in their shit.'Does being there make him want to collapse the idea of what a Peter Doig painting is?'

You always want the paintings to have some freedom; the good ones always had that; they were escaping from what you had done before.

'Those escape routes are often tortuous; Doig works slowly, finishing maybe six or eight paintings in a year. The process of finding endings still troubles him. 'Basically, I am always trying to resolve something. It is sometimes a technical thing, usually involving drawing, which I'm not very good at, and it is always one of those things you can only get to by making it. Just scrape it off and start again. It is often a fluke until you eventually get there.'He talks of his work with great modesty and with a sense of vocation. He's not sure he wants the extra pressure of fame. 'This might sound strange, but I never thought of them as being particularly good paintings. I wasn't trying to make an anti-painting or anything, but I certainly enjoyed the idea that there was a lot of bad painting involved in them. That trips you up, too, though. What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.'In that sense does he fear, now he is the most expensive painter in Europe, that he can do no wrong?'Oh,' he says, laughing, 'I'm pretty sure I can still do lots of wrong.'

Sunday, January 27th, Observer

Change

2007-12-10T20:19:00.000-05:00

Today I started my new job. It is so good to be back in New York City after so many years. The commute will take some getting used to but like everything else I will settle in time.

Victoria Beckham, The Lost Kardashian

2007-10-29T18:34:00.000-04:00

Kris Kardashian

Posh Spice

Burqa Beauty

2007-10-02T08:56:00.000-04:00

I'm too busy to write my own stories unfortunately so have to amuse you with other peoples:(

Afghan models reveal the beauty under the burqa
By Jon Hemming Sun Sep 30, 9:03 PM ET

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A model strutting the catwalk is hardly revolutionary in most countries, but Afghan television's answer to "America's Next Top Model" is breaking boundaries and revealing the beauty under the burqa.

Nearly six years after the overthrow of the strict Islamist Taliban government, almost all women in deeply conservative Afghanistan still only appear in public wafting past in the burqa's pale blue, their dark eyes only occasionally visible behind the bars of its grille.

But in the relatively liberal northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, a local television station has started to show a different image of Afghan women with an extremely low-budget take on the hit "America's Next Top Model," a reality TV show in which judges choose prospective models from a group of contestants over several weeks.

"I was really enthusiastic to make this program because I wanted the girls to present the clothes and themselves," said Sosan Soltani, the 18-year-old director of the program.
"Afghanistan is free and these girls are the future of this country," she said.

Four girls in brightly colored traditional costumes with baggy pants and long loose-fitting shawls and headscarves strode down the impromptu catwalk decked out in traditional Afghan rugs. Seemingly less confident than their Western counterparts, they avoided the gaze of the all-male film crew and press.

A quick change later, the same four appeared in camouflage combat trousers, sneakers and embroidered smocks. Then came denim jeans, open-toed sandals and colorful lightweight jackets.

None of this would be at all risque in the West, but in Afghanistan, such attire can spark outrage, especially when broadcast on television.

"According to Sharia law, Islam is absolutely against this," said Afghan Muslim cleric Abdul Raouf. "Not only is it banned by Islamic Sharia law, but if we apply Sharia law and to take this issue to justice, these girls should be punished."

"A STEP FORWARD"

More than 10 other models due to take part in the program failed to turn up after hearing that members of the international press would be present, fearing the wider broadcast of the show could lead to trouble for them, their friends said.

Those who did brave the possible backlash were determined.

"It is a great idea I think for Afghan girls, to encourage them to go a step forward," said 19-year-old model Katayoun Timour.

"We know that in Afghan society 90 percent of people think it is not good, that it's absolutely wrong," she said of the program. "We had objections from people, but I tell them it is not something bad, they should see it in a positive way."

But on the streets of Mazar-i-Sharif, it was hard to find anyone who objected to the program, especially among the young.

"It is a good program," said 28-year-old shopkeeper Ahmad Sear. "People watch and like it, especially women are interested in this program -- through this program and the clothes they wear, they might be able to develop their country."

"Young people are interested in fashion and the program introduces new clothes to them," said businessman Ahmad Nasir. "It also complies with Afghan culture, so it's fine."

But asked if he looked more at the clothes or the girls, he replied with a smile: "The girls of course." Then added, "the clothes are important though."

Model Timour said she wanted the outside world to see a different image of Afghan women.
"I have seen outside Afghanistan they have a different kind of idea about women in Afghanistan -- they think they are always wearing the burqa and sitting at home but it is not like that," she said. "Girls in Afghanistan are beautiful."

My boyfriend rocks

2007-09-07T14:40:00.001-04:00

I finally noticed that he told the hanger on, the leach, the mooch, the noose, etc etc etc to stop taking credit for his hard work. Heh heh.

Don't feed the humans

2007-08-30T19:15:00.000-04:00

This story is hilarious ahahaha. Personally I think Knightley is over rated and the thinks too much of her horsey self.

Keira Knightley: pin-up or put down?
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 31/08/2007

The Atonement star may be a modern screen idol, but her looks have unleashed a battle of the sexes. Jasper Gerard and Becky Pugh fight their corners

Jasper Gerard: A textbook English Beauty

Since Kate Moss porked out a bit, celebrity magazines have been forced to find other young lovelies to illustrate those summer staples headlined: "Fears grow for dangerously thin [fill in the latest name here]".

The woman they often settle on is Keira Knightley, normally shown across a double page in a tiny bikini, looking "dangerously thin". This is accompanied by a "think" piece, invariably by a woman who is less thin, bewailing "whatever happened to the fuller figure all men secretly adore?" Hmm.

Alas, such photos of "painfully thin" Keira do not repel me as they surely should; indeed, even after studying a Knightley "painfully thin" photo for hours, I'm forced to conclude - against my better self - "Nope, I still wouldn't feed her."

Keira Knightley: what's not to like? You see, The Terrible Truth Which Responsible People Are Not Meant To Acknowledge is that most men under 40 like women to look a bit peckish.

In zoos, signs declare "don't feed the animals"; in Hollywood, they don't feed the humans. And that's the deal: we pay stars oodles and drool over them. In return, we get to eat all the Custard Creams.

An editor of another newspaper asked me to write a somewhat counter-intuitive piece recently on why I was apparently driven into a frenzy by photos of Beth Ditto, a veritable walking EU grain mountain of a singer. And lovely though she surely is, and far be it from me to turn down work, I gave up: I didn't, quite literally, have the stomach for it.

You see, the tastes of many men of a certain age were honed by early shots of a "painfully thin" Moss in those heroin-chic days. Older men spluttered; younger ones never recovered.

Now, teenagers who grew up with Knightley's tomboy beauty in Pirates of the Caribbean will never lust after those old-style Page Three girls who looked like they were attached to a pair of giant milk urns.

But Knightley's sexiness springs from far more than her Norfolk-esque flatness, a "flaw" she is the first to joke about. Any youngish guy who says he doesn't find her attractive must a) never have met her or b) be Graham Norton.

I first interviewed her after she had starred in the 2002 remake of Doctor Zhivago. I ambled along with scant enthusiasm: young actresses tend to give good photo but dreary quote. Yet I was spellbound, and not exclusively by her physical charms.

Even calibrating for the obvious truth that we consider beautiful people fascinating and hilarious, she was enormous fun.

I even found myself asking - in that hideously lascivious way of the perspiring older hack - if she had a boyfriend. To which she slapped me on the knee and reminded me she was only 17, and I instantly felt rather ashamed.

Next time I saw her was on a train and I looked up to see her sitting opposite me: disguised in ordinary clothes but unmistakeable.

I was about to shout out a greeting, blowing her disguise to the entire carriage, when she moved a finger to her delectable lips, motioning me to "shh". She smiled, and nothing was said. A review of her role in her new film Atonement accused her of lacking "passion", but that surely misses her appeal.

She is perfect for elegant, period pieces where emotion lies in what is unspoken. If you like your cinematic sex unsubtle, watch Sharon Stone. Knightley attracts because she isn't brassy and upfront.

She is demure, her mischievous sexuality all the more intriguing for hiding beneath a veneer of cut-glass restraint and her loveliness so very English.

Becky Pugh: An unemotive plank of wood

When I look at Keira Knightley I do not see the subtly sexy siren that so many men drool over - I see a mediocre actress who wears a permanent pout. She may be beautiful, demure and successful but to me she is just a pretty plank of wood (albeit one that came briefly to life in her Oscar-nominated role as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice).

Planks of wood are not sexy. Sexiness is about joie de vivre, and Keira has none. And no, this isn't about her being terribly thin. I don't mind that she is extremely slender, even if it does set a tiresome standard for us lesser mortals. It's just that being that skinny makes it look as though she forgoes the most pleasurable things in life, like food.

Something vital is missing. Where's the oomph in Keira? Where is the sparkle? There is no glint in her eye, no liberating quirkiness with which either sex can fall in love. She should pose less and laugh more; cheer up and chill out.

Perhaps it's because she works too hard.

"I really don't have time for much," she says. "You have to take the work while it's there because it won't be there for ever. I might as well enjoy it now." Exactly! I'd like to see her doing just that.

She gets her roles because the camera adores her perfect face and because she is reliable, giving a wide berth to the hedonistic lifestyle of so many of her contemporaries. In my view she certainly doesn't get them on the strength of her ability to act.

Lots of men fancy Keira, my boyfriend included. He once told me: "I want to sleep with her, but sometimes she looks too thin." Empire magazine once voted her the sexiest movie actress of all time.

Lots of women are bewitched by her. They think she lights up the screen. They watch her rigid, passionless performances and love her unconditionally. Not me. I just want to shake her.

I'm not averse to a pin-up; I have a fair few girl-crushes myself. In fact there are legions of women I love so much that I'd like to be them (Kate Moss in her pre-Pete days, Jade Jagger, Natalie Portman), but I do not want to be Keira Knightley.

Her flaws are not to be overlooked - she is amazingly quick to point them out herself. Her seemingly radiant skin is prone to acne. Her abs are only to-die-for if you like the washboard stomach of a teenage boy.

She lacks an innate sense of style - all those beanies and bovver boots are deeply unsexy. Dressed by stylists in Chanel couture, she is a knock-out. Dressed by herself, she completely misses the mark.

And as for that infuriating pout… I've examined Keira's face in repose a couple of times and concluded that her mouth is normal, entirely pout-free. So why pout? It makes her look sullen at best, deranged at worst.

Finally, and call me bitchy if you must, below that staggering visage lurks a minuscule pair of breasts and a shapeless pair of pins. In a still shot her face is as breathtakingly beautiful as a work of art, but there is a lifelessness about her that I just don't see as sexy.

I understand a man wanting a photograph of Keira on his wall - but not him wanting her in his bed. An unemotive plank of wood.

The Telegraph

My family

2007-08-19T22:30:00.000-04:00

I spent the entire afternoon today with my nephew and niece. My nephew is the most fearless and playful child I have ever come across, and, he is a comedian. At two and a half years old, he donned his painting smock, pulled a pair of diapers over his head and started playing his colourful toy saxophone.

A, my beautiful little baby. My niece at a week old is the spitting image of my dad and his mother. My sister-in-law today said that Lillian's eyes are grey and that she would love for them to stay that way. I don't think she knows that my grandmother's eyes were grey, I don't think she realises that her daughter is the mirror image of me when i was a baby. It is an odd thing indeed to hold a tiny being in your arms that is a replica of you yet not of you, an image of a loved one that you will never see again. Such a conflict of emotions, such pain yet joy. God does indeed work in strange ways.

Jonathan held his cup today, handed it to me and said it was leaking. I took it from him and sure enough it was. And then I realise that he said leaking. Two and a half years old, where the heck did he hear about leaking, and knowing what it meant.

These are my brother's children, I love them so. If I love my nephew and niece this way, what does it feel like to love one's child? Since I held my brother's daughter in my arms a week ago, I have been plagued with memories of my childhood, of my brothers, of trying my darndess to be their champion. I wonder if they remember the times I put them first because I was so worried that something would happen to them and that I wouldn't be there to protect them. Ah, my brothers, they are both grown men, but I still see them as my little brothers. And still see us playing hide and seek, walking home together after school, and sitting around my mom as she read to us from the big book of fairy tales.

Our family is not the same because my dad is gone. But it has grown, for we are now plus three, one sister-in-law and two beautiful children. If only my dad was here.

The girls

2007-08-18T22:24:00.003-04:00

Pre July 4th party. Some of my girlfriends and I, can you tell that we're toasted?

Lillian

2007-08-12T21:41:00.000-04:00

Today I am the proud aunt of a brand new niece. She is six pounds of perfection and is the spitting image of my paternal grandmother. My nephew Jonathan looks more like his mother's side of the family so I'm very happy that my niece looks like our side of the family.

I've told my boyfriend many times that I want one, and I think he's finally coming around. yaeh.

Edith Piaf ~ Non, je ne regrette rien

2007-07-09T20:04:00.000-04:00

Beautiful woman, beautiful voice with a tragic life.

Her voice is so soulful it hurts to listen to her. It is hard to image that the painful words that flow tells about her life. I sobbed through Le Vie En Rose as the hours told of the highs and lows that was her life. How very sad. So gifted, but life and her genes played a nasty trick on her, like her father and her mother she was an alcoholic at an early age.

I have never questioned Piaf’s background but the early part of the movie mentioned that she was raised partially by her maternal grandmother Aicha. AHA! Aicha is the name of my grandmother’s sister and it sure as hell isn’t a French name. And Piaf’s features were the same as my mother-in-law’s and so many of my friends. And what do you know, the great French icon was half AlgerianJ who loved an Algerian man Marcel Cerdan – wait, did the French say he was French???

Give us back Piaf and while you’re at it give us back Zizou too. Keep the Chebs.

In memory of my father

2007-07-07T01:43:00.000-04:00

Had my father lived, yesterday we would have celebrated his 56th birthday. Almost one year later I thought it would have been a little easier to deal with. But I think we are all still having a hard time. My mom lost her best friend and her partner. My brothers lost their father and their tool time buddy. I lost my dad.

Thinking about it, I probably have a harder time coming to terms with my dad’s death that my brothers. My younger brother has his family and his son to distract him from everything. My older brother is with my mom and my grandmother now lives with them. I am only the one that is truly alone, well expect for my thoughts.

I remember when I was a about eight or nine years old and we were living in Suriname. I remember praying for my mom and dad to not outlive me. It was a heart breaking thought at that age and many nights I would fall asleep crying at the thought of my parents dying. Except for the random nights when my mom would hear me.

The last year of his life was the best year. He wanted to move to Florida so they sold their house here and they moved. He puttered around the new house, and the yard. Looking around the house his touch is everyone. Anything that was broken he fixed. I remember my mom saying that we should be careful with everything because my dad wasn’t there to fix anything anymore.

On weekends he went fishing with my uncles and would stop by and visit with my grandmother [mom’s mom] for hours. He liked his job and the people that he worked with. He was enjoying learning how to use a computer. And most of all he loved his grandson to pieces.

Everyone that knew him liked him, none had anything bad to say about him – in life or in death. My aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbours. Even folks from the old country, from so many many years ago.

One of the saddest memories I have is of my nephew who was about 16 months old when my dad was in the hospital. He thought that my uncle – dad’s brother – was dad, and kept looking at him and pointing outside repeating the words “walk, walk”. My brother and his family had visited a few months prior and my dad had walked my nephew around for hours. Poor Johnny, he was probably wondering why his grandpa wasn’t paying attention to him that time.

I miss my dad. I try not to think about him because when I do I miss him so terribly. I am sad that he is not here to grow old with my mom, to watch my nephew grow up. That he will never see me married or hold my child in his arms.

So many things, it was his time to go. His memory and name will live on in me and my brothers, and my mom.

Sixteen days and counting

2007-06-26T15:53:00.001-04:00

The mornings are the most difficult. When I am at that moment between sleep and wake; when I am still in that dreamlike state. And then reality sets in. He hasn’t called in over three weeks. He is not going to call now because his pride is most important to him.

Oh how the time flew. The good and the bad alike. The thoughts just strolling through my head, sometimes running. The only reason why there are so many memories is because after every argument I picked up the phone.

Because my pride didn’t matter. I had none when it came to him. After all, there is no pride in love - no shame and no ego. At least not on my part.

But now I know, if I hadn’t picked up the phone so many times before, three months it would have been instead of three years.

Three years of my life I will never get back, more scars on an already scarred soul. Many hopes crushed, dreams unfulfilled. Many empty I love yous. Manipulative soul.

Ah psychic is this the happy time you saw for me this month.

How disappointing. No “I’m sorry your dad is not here” on father’s day, sixteen days and counting. As each day goes by I am less and less important. And soon I become a distance memory, nothingness.

Puerto Rico

2007-06-24T17:24:00.000-04:00

I just found this CD with pictures from 2001 from my friend Jennifer's wedding. This was by far one of the most beautiful weddings I've ever been to. It was small, only about 50 people and took place in the garden of the resort. My friend Jen is still the most beautiful bride ever.

With my BFF Gina at Jen's wedding in PR in 2001. A shame the rest are in print, such a beautiful wedding.

YIPPPES, I was sooo thin.

One hundred miles

2007-06-22T14:17:00.001-04:00

To where????

Life's Good

2007-06-22T09:54:00.000-04:00

After moaning and groaning for about two months I finally had more responsibilities added to my plate. So now in addition to managing all primary research, I am also responsible for TV and movie product placements and any ad-hoc print advertising opportunities that come up. Not too shabby at all.

I am swamped at work, school is kicking my ass. Last weekend I bought my first set of oils and am in the middle of creating my very first oil painting. Interestingly enough it’s not as difficult as I thought it would be, acrylics seems to a little harder.

You know, of the past few years I had forgotten how much I loved Maynard. I think its now almost 10 years ago that I drove about a hundred miles to Hartford to see him. Okay, so I didn’t exactly drive out there to see him, more like Trent. But it was love at first sight and even now when I hear him I can still see the darkness that surrounded him and become enveloped by that feeling.

Responsible work, fun hobbies, f**cking awesome music, new kick-ass wheels. I feel like breaking out the stratocaster. Summer has only just begun but life's good. Like being on the beach with an icy margarita.

Her legacy

2007-05-21T22:49:00.000-04:00

Sylvia Plath was a great American author who committed suicide in 1963 at the age of thirty. She lived a troubled life having attempted suicide once before without success. Plath was a prolific writer that started writing at a very early age. Her first poem was published when she was only eight years old and while at college she wrote over four hundred poems. This was while she was still a teenager and later she went on to write many books and poems. It is said that her turbulent life influenced her work. This paper will examine one of her works “Daddy” and how much of her life is reflected in this poem as well as any other external forces that played a part as well.

The poem “Daddy” was published in 1966 in a book of poems by Sylvia Plath titled “Ariel”. It is a very dark poem in which Plath vents her rage at her father and then at her husband. She talks about killing her father and that he died before she could kill him herself. She went on to compare him to the Nazis and herself to the Jews. It would be easy to say that she truly hated him, but, it is also that she idolized him, put him on a pedestal and was deeply angry and hurt that he died so early in her life leaving her without the love and nurturing of a father figure.

But in reading Rough Magic: a biography of Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar, there is no suggestion that Plath’s father abused her. If anything, he neglected her since he worked numerous hours as an etymologist and a college professor. The neglect and the fact that he died when she was young, severed any type of bond that she may have developed with him. She didn’t think of his death a natural end, but thought of it more as him leaving her in the world to fend for herself. His death changed her life drastically as her mother who couldn’t fend for herself and her two children uprooted the family and moved in with her parents in another town. It seems that this added to Plath’s feeling of abandonment by her father, as he not only left her, his death also disrupted her life.

This feeling persisted. At thirty years old she wrote the poem “Daddy”. Her age is evident in the line “For thirty years” (4) and the entire contents of the poem shows that she held strong to the belief that her father neglected her. It is also evident in her reading of the poem in a recording for BBC in 1962. One could almost hear the pain, sorrow and anger in her voice. When she read “Ghastly statue with one grey toe, Big as a Frisco seal, And a head in the freakish Atlantic” (9-11), I thought she was going to burst into tears.

Because of Plath’s early loss of her father and the lacked of a father figure in her life, she sought to fill the void by finding a man that she thought was just like him “I made a model of you” (64) and “I said I do, I do” (67). The man she refers to in her poem is poet Ted Hughes whom she married in 1957.

It was by no means a happy union. Plath’s feeling of desertion by her father created a deep void in her life and as such, it made her cling to her husband with a need for his undivided attention. Throughout her marriage she suffered from bouts of depression as well uncontrollable jealousy and rage.

But her jealousy which was driven by suspicion that her husband was cheating on her was not unfounded as she later learned that he was betraying her with another woman. How devastated she must have been. First her father left her, choosing death over her and then her husband choosing another woman over her. It her mind it must have seemed a repeat of her father’s death all over again. To be abandonment by yet another man whom she looked to for love, support and nurturing. Instead abused her trust and love with what must have seemed the ultimate betrayal.

And then one day she had had enough. She sealed off the kitchen, stuck her head in the oven and turned on the gas. That was how author Sylvia Plath died, by taking her own life. Plath had attempted suicide once before which she talks about in the poem “Daddy” when she said “At twenty I tried to die” (58).

The first man in her life, her father, was the reason for her attempted suicide when she was twenty years old. Her suicide was brought about because of her husband’s desertion and her resulting sense of hopelessness and despair. It seems that the men in her life were control figures. They controlled her thoughts and in the end her life. It is a strange thought indeed that through her suffering she produced such brilliant work and that if she was successful in her first suicide attempt the world would have suffered the loss of a great writer.

While Plath did not achieve any fame throughout her lifetime, she is now referred to as a feminist poet and is often referred to as a great American author. Her work is studied in not only universities in the United Stated but also around the world with heavy emphasis on the poem “Daddy”.

When reading “Daddy” my main thought was about the author’s relationship with the power figures in her life, her father and her husband. But, there is more to the poem than that, for “Daddy” because of its Holocaust imagery is one of the poems in Holocaust Poetry by Hilda Schiff.

The life of Sylvia Plath was far too short and turbulent, filled with loss and betrayal. She poured all of this into her writing and when she passed away, she not only left her life story but a legacy of creativity and survival, not through the flesh, but through the pen. The works that she left behind has made a mark on many and will undoubtedly continue to do so in the future.

Sylvia Plath

2007-05-21T22:37:00.000-04:00

I have developed a slight obsession with author/poet Sylvia Plath since I read her poem "Daddy" for one of my classes. I recently saw the movie Sylvia which didn't do justice to the woman and I think painted Ted Hughes in rose colours. I wonder who wrote the script, hmmm.

Daddy

by: Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Beautiful Savannah

2007-05-11T20:50:00.000-04:00

Many years ago I read "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil". It had everything that one could hope to find in a dime novel and then some. I was completely captivated by the story and fell in love with Savannah. I visited shortly after and it was exactly as Berendt described. Breath taking and unlike anything I could have imaged in the United States. These are pictures from a few weeks ago when I my boyfriend and I drove through.

Surrealist building

2007-04-08T18:33:00.002-04:00

Give us a swirl
Is there such a thing as a surrealist building? Of course - although it may not keep the rain out. Jonathan Glancey lists his favourite weird and wonderful designs

Surrealism was concerned with the unconscious, with dreams, with personal and political liberation, socially, sexually, psychologically. While it is possible to dream strange, swirling, madcap forms of liberating architecture, it is difficult, if not impossible, to realise such forms in the waking day. This didn't stop surrealists from trying - although only one architect, Romanian-born Frederick Kiesler, ever declared himself a member of the surrealist movement. He had great plans, yet built very little.

One of the high points of "surrealist architecture" was a Paris flat designed in 1930 for the wealthy art collector Charles de Beistegui; it was designed by none other than Le Corbusier, he of the famous dictum "the house is a machine for living in". Although the apartment is mostly what you would expect of Le Corbusier, it featured a surrealist roof garden complete with a false fireplace, incongruous living-room furniture and a mirror. The "carpet" of this living room was a lawn, and the Eiffel Tower popped up over the parapet. Today, you might well say: so what? Yet at the time, this sort of thing was just not done.

Cecil Beaton decorated the top floor of his Wiltshire country house, Ashcombe, with Jean Cocteau sconces in the form of human arms reaching out from the wall, and papier-mache versions of Victorian chairs. Champion of surrealism Edward James did his colourful thing at Monkton House, his West Sussex hunting lodge, with its dog-print stair-carpet, breathing wall, Dalí furniture and screaming colours. Yet perhaps the best surrealist architecture was in films; best of all in the sets by Christian Berard for Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946).

The greatest work of surreal architecture wasn't actually by a card-carrying surrealist but by a French rural postman, Ferdinand Cheval, who built a dream-like structure with his own hands, stone by stone. While surrealists pontificated and analysed their dreams in Freudian terms, Cheval made his come true. Edward James did something of the same in the Mexican jungle, yet his jungle folly, although a delight, is knowing and contrived; in this sense alone, it is very different from Cheval's truly surreal creation.

Of course, many of the great surreal moments architecture has to offer were created without the help of the surrealists. Witness what happens when rain falls through the great "oculus" in the dome of the Pantheon in Rome: it disappears into a great decorative brass drain. It is beautiful to watch, and quite surreal. When US structural engineers investigated the enormous domed hall Albert Speer had designed for Germania (as Berlin rebuilt for Hitler, post-victory, was to be called), they found that, when the building was full of chanting crowds, clouds would form from their breath in the underside of the dome, and a light rain would fall. How Wagnerian. How surreal.

Today, with the help of powerful computers and materials that allow plenty of bending and twisting, we can make buildings that are more adventurous than ever. Look at what Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and others have done. But imagination is something separate from materials and the limits (and even the possibilities) of new technologies; throughout the centuries, architects have been able to play surreal games that outdid the surrealists of the interwar years of the 20th century. In any case, Ferdinand Cheval, the postman who left school at 13, out-surrealed the lot of them.

1 Experience Music Project
From the air, this museum of music history - set up by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and collector of Jimi Hendrix memorabilia - looks like a Fender Stratocaster guitar seen through Dalí's eyes. Distorted and bent, the roofscape, too, is something like a floppy Dalí wristwatch. As if to prove just how hard it is to realise surreal architecture (and this is about as surreal as it gets), this Frank Gehry design, in Seattle, Washington, has not gone down well with US critics. Herbert Muschamps said it was like "something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over, and died". Crawled out of the sea? The surrealists would have loved that.

2 Palais Idéal
A village postman from the remote Drome province of southern France, Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924) spent 33 years creating an "ideal palace" from stones gathered on his daily 32km round. Poorly educated and with no knowledge of architecture, he shaped his surreal palace from daydreams, without help.

Considered a madman by fellow locals (whose descendents live off his legacy today, the palace being a big tourist attraction), Cheval was hailed by artists and intellectuals, from Breton and the surrealists to Picasso. Here was - and is - a work of wholly spontaneous surrealist art, a man's dreams turned into a gloriously abstract work of architecture.The Palais Idéal is overwhelmingly bizarre, its handmade architecture drawing its inspiration from what appear to be sources as diverse as Khmer temples, Swiss chalets, Neuschwanstein castle in Bavaria and Hindu shrines - despite Cheval's lack of learning, books or photographs. Some of the palace looks as if Gaudí had a hand in it, and the petrified fountain could easily be by Dalí. Today, Cheval's lifelong work is a national monument.

3 Einstein Tower
Opened in 1924, this curious, boot-like building in Potsdam, Germany, was designed to test Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. A telescope in the observatory caught cosmic rays that were reflected by mirrors to the "spectrographic" equipment in the basement. Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953) was the architect. Fascinated by the cosmos, he made dreamlike sketches of fantastic buildings that owe nothing to conventional architectural logic or to constraints imposed by existing materials. The architect, who worked in Britain, Palestine and the US, said he designed the tower out of some unknown urge emanating from "the mystique around Einstein's universe".

Originally, he had imagined the Einstein Tower as a building made of just one super-elastic material - a form of modern concrete that didn't exist when he did his first drawings. In the end, he had to make do with bricks rendered in stucco. His masterpiece was fully restored in 1999 - not, happily, as a museum, but as a working laboratory, although there is an open day once a month.

4 Endless House
Imagine a voluptuously shaped, womb-like house on stilts, with curved walls indistinguishable from floors and ceilings; with sand, pebble, wood, grass and tile floors; with bathing pools instead of baths; with coloured lenses and mirrors bringing light into organically shaped rooms. This was Frederick Kiesler's 1959 vision of the Endless House, never built - it was far too surreal for that - yet worked on in intriguing drawings until the architect's death in 1965. It remains a house of endless speculation and possibilities.

Kiesler, born in Romania in 1890, emigrated to New York in 1926. In trying to build the surreal, he was always unlikely to receive many commissions for real buildings. One of his few, the Film Guild Cinema in New York, has been demolished.

He made his living designing opera sets, exhibition stands and, with Armand P Bartos, the extraordinary Shrine of the Book, built in Jerusalem in 1965 to house the Dead Sea Scrolls. This haunting, surreal building offers a glimpse of the world he might have created if someone had commissioned the Endless House for real. The drawings still exist. Any takers?

5 Surrealist Architecture
This is the name of a painting by Dalí, c1932, that hangs in the Kunstmuseum, Basle. What's it got to do with architecture, you may well ask. But perhaps it makes its point perfectly well: surrealist architecture cannot really exist; it's beyond reality. So it could look like this, a typical Dalí swirling thing, with some fried eggs emerging from the top. If this could be built, it would be a lot more interesting than most contemporary "iconic" architecture.

6 Las Pozas
This is the dream-like city, without a purpose, that the British champion of surrealism, Edward James, built from 1949 until his death in 1984. Situated in Mexico's San Luis Potosí state, it rises, writhes, and twists around nine artificial pools (or "pozas") between trees festooned with parrots. It appears to exist as much in the imagination as it does in reality.

Work on Las Pozas was most intense between 1962 and 1979, with some 150 craftsmen and labourers busy in the jungle. Flamingos, monkeys, parrots, turtles and crocodiles arrived during these years. Electricity, too; in the evenings, the whole spectacle can be lit up by coloured lights. Its layout is labyrinthine. Visitors can find themselves walking into a house that turns into a cave, or climbing a spiral stair that leads nowhere, except high into the sky. The three dozen or so structures were meant to be, in James's mind at least, stylised and everlasting flowers.

"Edward James is crazier than all the surrealists put together," Dalí said. "They pretend, but he is the real thing."

7 Casa Milà rooftop
The Casa Milà is no longer the apartment block it was built as, but the headquarters of an arts foundation. The good thing about this, for visitors to Barcelona, is that it is now easy to join a queue and tour Antoni Gaudí's extraordinary "organic" building. Everyone seems to love its dreamlike roofscape, where chimneys and ventilation shafts twist and turn above parapets. Each has its own character, each seems alive.

Gaudí (1852-1926) was a major inspiration for the surrealists, but their concerns were not his. Although his imagination was febrile and his architectural forms extraordinary and all but surreal, he saw himself as an inheritor of the gothic tradition brought into the modern age. His structures are like man-made plants; no wonder Dalí and Edward James loved them.

8 The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
his bizarre silent horror film, premiered in Berlin in 1920, has long been described as a masterpiece of German expressionist cinema, but its crazily angled, cartoon-like sets are the stuff of surrealism, too. It shows a nightmare world, brilliantly realised architecturally by set designers and art directors for director Robert Wiene. In the 1980s, London architect David Connor designed a flat for a member of Adam and the Ants in the guise of a Dr Caligari set, complete with sloping floors and walls.

9 Dream of Venus pavilion
Dalí's pink, coral-like pavilion was a highlight of the 1939 New York World's Fair. Venus, a topless model wreathed in flowers and lying on a rococo-style bed, was surrounded by her "dream"; this was composed of topless models swimming in water tanks around her, some milking a cow wrapped in bandages, others tapping away at typewriters that floated in seaweed-like strands. Lobsters lay cooking on underwater coals, while bottles of champagne littered the seabed. The pavilion was entered, once tickets had been bought from a fish-like booth, through a spread-leg archway (very Freudian) leading to halls covered in writhing female sculptures and a ceiling of upturned umbrellas.

Dalí's extended trip to New York made him famous - and surreally wealthy. Though it has been demolished, the pink pavilion survives in photographs.

10 Scottish Parliament building
This great and controversial Edinburgh masterwork by Enric Miralles (1955-2000) is nothing like a conventional parliament building. No wonder, cost aside, so many people were suspicious and unkind about the design; it boasts shades of Gaudí and his contemporary Josep Maria Jujol, overtones of Russian constructivism, and hints of something else altogether: a tendril-like architecture that snakes from townscape to landscape. Scots will say the only thing surreal about the building is its mind-blowing price, hopelessly over-budget, and there are plenty of detractors hoping for leaks and other flaws. They deserve a concrete box.
From The Guardian Unlimited

The penis platter

2007-04-07T20:46:00.000-04:00

Beijing's penis emporium
By Andrew Harding BBC News, Beijing

There are many thousands of Chinese restaurants around in the UK and everyone has their favourite dish, but only in China itself do chefs specialise in a range of slightly more unusual delicacies.

Many of the restaurant's guests are wealthy businessmen

The dish in front of me is grey and shiny. "Russian dog," says my waitress Nancy. "Big dog," I reply. "Yes," she says. "Big dog's penis..."

We are in a cosy restaurant in a dark street in Beijing but my appetite seems to have gone for a stroll outside. Nancy has brought out a whole selection of delicacies. They are draped awkwardly across a huge platter, with a crocodile carved out of a carrot as the centrepiece. Nestling beside the dog's penis are its clammy testicles, and beside that a giant salami-shaped object.

"Donkey," says Nancy. "Good for the skin..." She guides me round the penis platter. "Snake. Very potent. They have two penises each." I did not know that.

Deer-blood cocktail

"Sheep... horse... ox... seal - excellent for the circulation." She points to three dark, shrivelled lumps which look like liquorice allsorts - a special treat apparently - reindeer, from Manchuria.

The Guolizhuang restaurant claims to be China's only speciality penis emporium, and no, it is not a joke. The atmosphere is more exotic spa than boozy night-out. Nancy describes herself as a nutritionist. "We don't call them waiters here. And we don't serve much alcohol," she says. "Only common people come here to get drunk and laugh." But she does offer me a deer-blood and vodka cocktail, which I decide to skip.

Medicinal purposes

The Chinese believe that eating penis can enhance your virility

He is 81 now and retired. After fleeing China's civil war back in 1949, he moved to Taiwan, and then to Atlanta, Georgia, where he began to look deeper into traditional Chinese medicine, and experiment on the appendages of man's best friend. Apparently, they are low in cholesterol and good, not just for boosting the male sex drive, but for treating all sorts of ailments.

Laughter trickles through the walls of our dining room. "Government officials," says Nancy. "Two of them upstairs. They're having the penis hotpot." Most of the restaurant's guests are either wealthy businessmen or government bureaucrats who, as Nancy puts it, have been brought here by people who want their help. What better way to secure a contract than over a steaming penis fondue. Discretion is assured as all the tables are in private rooms. The glitziest one has gold dishes.

"Some like their food served raw," says Nancy, "like sushi. But we can cook it anyway you like."

Rare order

"Not long ago, a particularly rich real estate mogul came in with four friends. All men. Women don't come here so often, and they shouldn't eat testicles," says Nancy solemnly. The men spent $5,700 (£3,000) on a particularly rare dish, something that needed to be ordered months in advance. "Tiger penis," says Nancy.

The illegal trade in tiger parts is a big problem in China. Campaigners say the species is being driven towards extinction because of its popularity as a source of traditional medicine. I mention this, delicately, to Nancy, but she insists that all her tiger supplies come from animals that have died of old age.

"Anyway, we only have one or two orders a year," she says. "So what does it taste like?" I ask.
"Oh, the same as all the others," she says blithely. And does it have any particular potency? "No. People just like to order tiger to show off how much money they have." Welcome to the People's Republic of China - tigers beware.

Sliced and pickled

"Oh yes," she adds, "the same group also ate an aborted reindeer foetus. "That is very good for your skin. And here it is..." Another "nutritionist" walks in bearing something small and red wrapped in cling film.

My appetite is heading for the airport. Still, I think, it would be rude not to try something. I am normally OK about this sort of thing. I have had fried cockroaches and sheep's eyes, so... There is a small bowl of sliced and pickled ox penis on the table.

I pick up a piece with my chopsticks and start to chew. It is cold and bland and rubbery. Nancy gives me a matronly smile. "This one," she says, "should be eaten every day."

_______________

Disfuckinggusting. What comes after animal penises, raw animal penises and aborted foetus? Disgusting.

My first painting

2007-04-07T20:42:00.000-04:00

I'm not an artist and due to my boyfriend's laziness and delegation, I picked up a paint brush for the first time a year ago. Naturally, I gave him the first painting I painted because thanks to him I had a new hobby.

Tada... This painting actually started out with big red lips which I changed to a red circle and finally very lost and tired and annoyed I decided to change it. So there you have it, angry things such as lightning bolts hurling towards the earth. Not too shabby for my first effort no?

Old North Bridge, Minute Man National Historical Park

2007-04-07T20:03:00.000-04:00

My boyfriend lives in Concord, MA and a few weeks ago we went to Minute Man National Historical Park so that I could take some pictures. "Situated nineteen miles from Boston alongthe old Lexington Road, Concord became the first battleground of the American Revolution, as Yankee militiamen alerted by Paul Revere, routed the British troupes at the Old North Bridge". Here are some of my pictures. It was way too cold to dawdle more. I'll take more this summer.

The first picture is of the driveway at his home. There was a family of deer walking by but unfortunately you can't see them, only the top of the snow truck.

What happened to March?

2007-04-07T19:51:00.000-04:00

What happened to March? I was that busy that I didn't poste? hum!

Updates tomorrow

Technology and cinematoghrapy [Movie art]

2007-04-06T23:54:00.000-04:00

Two weeks ago I saw the movie “300” at the IMAX cinema in Natick Mass. It was my first IMAX experience and it’s one that I would never forget. The line to get into the cinema was ridiculously long but it was worth the wait and the hassle.

The cinema we (my boyfriend and I) went to is at the top of a Jordans Furniture Store and right next to the cinema there is a Bose showroom. The theater was outfitted with Bose sound systems so as you can tell the sound quality was amazing. In typical Bose style, the room was small (Bose founder built the company on the belief that sound varies depending on the size of the room) and it was completely full.

When the movie started, the seats shook. I sat there thinking ‘oh man, I’m not going to be able to take this’. At one point I felt motion sickness as it felt as thought the theater was moving away from the screen. Not to mention that at times it felt as though the characters were coming out of the screen. I think during this film I imagined every scary movie that I’ve seen that took place in a cinema. But boy was it worth the experience!

As I watch “King Kong” on TV now, yes, on my new 26” LCD, heh heh, I can only imagine how amazing it would have been to see this movie on IMAX. This goes for “Pan's Labyrinth” as well which I saw a couple of months ago. But all’s well, as the next movie that plays there will be Spider Man III. I’ve already made a date and I can’t wait.

Patterson Graffiti

2007-04-06T19:58:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago for my art class I had to document graffiti that I found on my way to and from work. Do you know that there is no such on my drive? As a matter of fact, I didn't find any in Bergen County so I took a drive out to Patterson. I didn't stop, I took pictures while I drove, constantly looking over my shoulder and has happy to speed out of there once I got what I needed. Here's some of what I found.

It is a sad day indeed

2007-03-08T23:57:00.001-05:00

Captain America is dead. One word to the bastards. F*#$@#(s
Comic hero Captain America diesFrom BBCCaptain America has been fighting villains for 66 yearsSuperhero Captain America has been killed off after appearing in US comic books for 66 years. The character, who appears in the Captain America comic book, was created in 1941 to build up patriotic feeling during World War II.

Co-creator Joe Simon told the New York Daily News: "It's a hell of a time for him to go, We really need him now."Publisher Marvel Entertainment has confirmed it is developing a film based on the character. Fans may not have seen the last of the character in print either, as the comic's editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada, refuses to rule out resurrecting him in the future.

The latest edition will show the superhero dying on the steps of a courthouse in New York, after he was shot by a sniper. Captain America first appeared nine months before the Pearl Harbor bombings, punching Hitler on the cover of the comic's first issue. Since then, Marvel has sold more than 200 million copies of Captain America magazine in 75 countries.Shocking event for Captain AmericaFrom CNNNEW YORK (CNN) -- He fought and triumphed over Hitler, Tojo, international Communism and a host of supervillains, but he could not dodge a sniper's bullet. Comic book hero Captain America is dead.

After close to 60 years in print, Marvel Comics has killed off Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, one of its most famous and beloved superheroes amid an already controversial story line, "Civil War," which is pitting the heroes of Marvel's universe against one another. In the comic series, Rogers was to stand trial for defying a superhero registration law passed after a hero's tragic mistake causes a 9/11-like event. Steve Rogers eventually surrenders to police. He is later mortally wounded as he climbs the courthouse steps.

Marvel says the comic story line was intentionally written as an allegory to current real-life issues like the Patriot Act, the War on Terror and the September 11 attacks."Every child knew about 9/11," says Dan Buckley, president of Marvel Comics. "If [he] could see a TV he knew what 9/11 was. The other similarities [to] things going on are just part of storytelling."It was a violent and strange end for an American hero.

Captain America first appeared in 1941, just as the United States entered World War II. He was a symbol of American strength and resolve in fighting the Axis powers, and later Communism. As originally conceived by creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Rogers was a man born before the Great Depression in a very different America. He disappeared after the war and reappeared only recently in the Marvel timeline. For a superhero many thought perfect, it was perhaps a fatal flaw for "Cap," as he became known.

"He hasn't been living in the modern world and the world does move," says Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada. Quesada said he wanted to readers find their own meaning in Cap's end."There is a lot to be read in there. But I'm not one who is going to tell people, this is what you should read into it, because I could look into it and read several different types of messages," he told CNN.

The character's death came as a blow to co-creator Simon, the Associated Press reported."We really need him now," Simon, 93, told The AP.Still, one has to wonder: Is Captain America really dead?

Comic book characters have routinely died, only to be resurrected when necessary to storylines. Joe Quesada agrees -- but said times are different now. "There was period in comics where characters would just die and then be resurrected. And the death had very little meaning and the resurrection had very little meaning," he said. "All I ask of my writers is if you're going to kill a character off, please let that death have some meaning in the overall scope of things." Besides, he said, there are other important questions left unanswered. "What happens with the costume? And what happens to the characters that are friends and enemies of Cap?" Quesada said with a smile. " You're going to have to read the books to find out."Copyright 2007 CNN.

All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report

Interesting news

2007-02-14T12:37:00.000-05:00

Some wierd things in the news today

A Kenyan secondary school sent home 20 boys because they were not circumcised - circumcision is not obligatory for admission into the school, but a study released in December said it reduced the risk of contracting HIV/Aids. Message - get your pee pee cut, come back to school and bugger all you want.

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A report from one of Australia's most respected research bodies has shown that alcohol abuse claims the life of an Aborigine every 38 hours. Summary - No job = no money = no food + no home + can't support family = high levels of stress = substance and alcohol abuse

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Clinics offering abortions and cosmetic surgery have been banned from opening in the UK's most famous medical district. Officials said they were trying to move away from "lifestyle procedures" to become a centre of medical excellence. - I've never considered the right to choose as a lifestyle choice but if you really look at it I guess it is.

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Russia has a plan to boost birth rates in the country by introducing a new scheme this year that will allow government handouts of $9,000 [about two years income] for women with more than one child. - Hogwash if you ask me. Russia needs to educate its people about drugs, alcohol and safe sex as this is what's killing them. As a country with one of the fastest growing HIV infection rates the government should set aside funds to treat the people with HIV infections and take care of the children that are born to those with the infection instead of leaving them in clinics to die.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of modern photojournalism

2007-02-13T19:00:00.000-05:00

Today as I am reading the news I learn of yet another great photographer. While there seems to be some confusion as to when or how he died there is no confusion over the life he led.

--------------

In 1946 photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson glued the pictures which formed the basis of his first American exhibition into a scrapbook. The prints have recently been restored by the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Cartier-Bresson his wife Retna Mohini in 1936

Famous pictures, such as this one taken in Brussels in 1932 (inset), contain some of Cartier-Bresson’s handwritten notes on the reverse. This one states simply: “One of my very first pictures.”

Only a few actual pages of the original scrapbook have survived, and these are also reproduced in Henri Cartier-Bresson: Scrapbook published by Thames & Hudson.

Cartier-Bresson's ability to blend into his surroundings led to writer Truman Capote describing him as “dancing along the pavement like an agitated dragonfly” when he was taking pictures. (Photo: Two children taken in Italy in 1933)

Cartier-Bresson's show in New York was beset by problems. Initially it was thought he had died whilst imprisoned during the war, and then the shortage of photographic paper in Europe meant supplies had to shipped from the US.

The collection also demonstrates how Cartier-Bresson edited the sequences of photographed he'd taken in the search for the one image he would eventually choose to show publicly - here he photographed gypsies in Spain in 1933.

Source: BBC

Feel me up boys

2007-02-13T11:46:00.000-05:00

Last night I once again tuned in to VH1 to watch I Love New York. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better it did. New York went on a date with White Boy and they proceeded to slobber all over each other for about fifteen minutes. Back at the house Six Pack and Real led her upstairs where she changed into her swimsuit to prepare for a “massage” and bath by the two “boys”. This was more like foreplay and somewhat pornographic. In her interview when she talked about it she drooled about having an orgasm while they were massaging her. While the two guys were feeling her up, Mr. Boston walked in and started slobbering all over her. That night before going to bed she engaged in long kisses each each of the seven men before going off to bed.

Blah, blah, blah and then came the elimination. During the elimination process, as usual, New York whined and shed a few tears. Mr. Boston picked his nose through the entire thing. He tried once but it seems whatever was up there he couldn’t get it out so he stuck his finger in and kept digging.

In summary, New York is looking for something and I don’t think its true love. I think she’ll be very happy to stay with all the men as they each seem to fulfill a need.

Why we cared about Anna Nicole

2007-02-09T10:07:00.000-05:00

This morning the headline on a news brief read “Why we cared about Anna.” It’s the biggest crock of baloney if I’ve seen one. The tabloids didn’t care about her, they cared about their ratings. They loved her because she was a constant source of news and amusement.

I didn’t love Anna, in fact I never even thought about it. I am sad that she is gone, she was only 39 and had the rest of her life ahead of her. One shouldn’t be surprised though, after all how much can one person take? She just lost her son and was having nightmares about him, there were disputes and paternity tests to settle who is the father of her child and then more recently the Trim Spa lawsuits. It seems that while she was down anyone and everyone that could kick her was taking aim. And this only in the past five months.

Poor thing. Hopefully her daughter will have a better and easier life than she did. R.I.P. Anna.

Christo like

2007-02-08T18:56:00.000-05:00

In my art class we reviewed art created by Christo and Jeanne Claude. Before I started reading about them I had assumed that Christo was the woman and Jeanne Claude was the man, going simply by their names of course. What interesting characters, and what background. They truly seem to have been destined to be together.

For the class I had to create "wrapping art" following the form of Christo. I didn't mind doing it but I couldn't thow myself into it because I found the images of bodies wrapped in white a bit disturbing. I am muslim and when a muslim person is buried they are wrapped in white cotton before they are placed in their coffin. Looking at the pictures and my own wrapping reminded me of death and my dad.

My mother-in-law is coming to town

2007-02-05T22:18:00.000-05:00

Finally after being with my boyfriend for two and a half years I’m about to meet his mother for the first time and I’m as nervous as hell. And with good reason. He absolutely adores her and I’m afraid that if she doesn’t like me it will be a deal breaker.

I will certainly be on my best behaviour but since she speaks french and I speak english we will not be able to talk or have any conversation for that matter. Keeping my fingers crossed, I still have a month to learn french

So what exactly is art?

2007-01-24T00:18:00.002-05:00

In my art class there are many opinions on what exactly art is. Some of them I agree with and some of them I strongly disagree with. Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion and just because I disagree with some doesn’t mean they are wrong.

That said, I do believe art can take many shapes and forms. Cooking, baking and eating are great hobbies of mine. I believe chefs [not all of them mind you] are artists in their creations. I like architecture. Not designing or building anything but in actually enjoying and appreciating what has been created by man. So much so that one of the people I admire most is the fictional character Howard Roark. Oh what character. But, Roark is not a real person; he is the figment of someone’s imagination. Like Roark’s creator, anyone that can wield a pen in such a manner and tell us such stories that we forget that their work is pure fiction deserves the title of artist.

It is by no mere coincidence that Central Park looks and functions the way it does in the bustling city. It took great imagination to create such beauty out of a treeless, rocky swampland. Central Park is the way it is by man’s design and vision.Like the painters and photographers chefs, architects and authors deserve to be called artists as well.

Galiano

A cake

A hotel

A vile, pig-ignorant racist bully consumed by envy...

2007-01-22T14:42:00.000-05:00

The recent events that took place on Big Brother UK just goes to show that you can take the girl out of the gutter but you can take the gutter out of the girl. Jade Goody is a pig. With her upturned nose she looks like a pig and with every word that came out of her mouth proved herself to be gutter trash.

As the Sun eloquently puts it:

"Jade Goody went into the Big Brother house appearing to be simply a fun-loving working-class girl canny enough to have made millions from her 15 minutes of fame. It was all a meticulously manufactured lie."

"She has left the house with her true personality laid bare - a vile, pig-ignorant, racist bully consumed by envy of a woman of superior intelligence, beauty and class."

I stole the below from the BBC because they did such a good job in providing a summary.

Big Brother controversy in quotes

In the past week, Celebrity Big Brother moved from being TV entertainment to a national race debate and an international diplomatic incident. Here are some of the key quotes - from participants in the show and key figures in the real world.

SUNDAY 14 JANUARY

Shilpa Shetty: "Why do they hate me? Why am I detested? I feel like I'm losing my dignity. I'm the only one they are mean to, I don't know why, nobody is mean to anyone else except me. I'm scared to say anything else. They've pushed me to the brink."

TUESDAY 16 JANUARY

Jade Goody referred to Shilpa Shetty as "Shilpa Poppadom"Jade Goody to Shetty: "You're a liar and a fake. You're a liar. You're not in Neverland here, you're not no princess here you're normal. You are normal. You are normal Shilpa and learn to live with it. You need a day in the slums. Go in your community and go to all those people who look up to you and be real."

Danielle Lloyd: "I think she should f**k off home."

Cleo Rocas to Shetty: "I don't think there's anything racist in it."Shetty: "It is, I'm telling you."
WEDNESDAY 17 JANUARY

Goody: "I couldn't think of her surname. Why would I be talking to someone like that, I don't know what her surname is. What is it? Shilpa Cookamada, Shilpa whatever Rockamada, Shilpa Poppadom. It was like that, literally come out like that.

"There was no fault or no racial anything meant in any of those comments. It's not in me to be racial about somebody or to somebody because I wouldn't. It was just a tongue in cheek, Shilpa Poppadom."

Shetty, referring to her previous opinion that Jade was racist: "I take that back. I thought it was because everybody was having an argument with me...

"You know, people say things in a fit of anger and I stand corrected. I don't feel that there was any racial discrimination happening from Jade's end. I think there are a lot of insecurities from her end but it's definitely not racial."

Shetty to Goody: "I don't think you're racist. But it did come across as kind of racial, what you said even before that. I didn't hear you say it. Your mum used to address me as Indian..."

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair: "I've not seen the particular programme in question and therefore can't comment on it.

"But of course, I would agree entirely with the principle that we should oppose racism in all its forms."

UK Chancellor Gordon Brown: "I understand that in the UK there have already been 10,000 complaints from viewers about these remarks, which people see, rightly, as offensive.

"I want Britain to be seen as a country of fairness and tolerance. Anything detracting from this I condemn."

Indian Minister for External Affairs Anand Sharma: ''It has caused indignation, it is most unfortunate, and any kind of racism - or racist slur - is unacceptable in any civilised society.''

THURSDAY 18 JANUARY

UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell: "I think this is racism being presented as entertainment, and I think it is disgusting. My personal view is that this has caused enormous offence not only abroad but to the Indian community here."

Bollywood filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt in Mumbai's DNA newspaper: "I believe no-one can insult you without your permission. Shilpa Shetty has paid the price for trying to desperately seek the approval of the West.

"It is pathetic how we can go on bended knees and lick the boots of Westerners in an effort to be part of their world."

Carphone Warehouse chief executive Charles Dunstone: "Our concern has rapidly mounted about the broadcast behaviour of individuals within the Big Brother house.

"We are totally against all forms of racism and bullying and indeed this behaviour is entirely at odds with the brand values of The Carphone Warehouse.

"As a result, we feel that as long as this continues, we are unable to associate our brand with the programme."

Channel 4 chief executive Andy Duncan: "The debate has been heated, the viewing has at times been uncomfortable but, in my view, it is unquestionably a good thing that the programme has raised these issues and provoked such a debate.

"These attitudes, however distasteful, do persist - we need to confront that truth.

"We have reached the view that we cannot with certainty say that the comments directed at Shilpa have been racially motivated or whether they stem from broader cultural and social differences."

FRIDAY 19 JANUARY

Goody after being evicted: "I'm not racist, but I can see why it has had the impact it's had. I can see why it looks like bullying.

"I'm disgusted in myself for saying what I have just seen myself saying. I do not approve of any of my actions and I do not approve of the words that came out of my mouth."

SATURDAY 20 JANUARY

The Sun newspaper editorial: "Jade Goody went into the Big Brother house appearing to be simply a fun-loving working-class girl canny enough to have made millions from her 15 minutes of fame. It was all a meticulously manufactured lie.

“She has left the house with her true personality laid bare - a vile, pig-ignorant, racist bully consumed by envy of a woman of superior intelligence, beauty and class."

Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu: "Sadly ignorance is not in short supply. Racism is real. As the week's events on reality television demonstrate, there is an ugly underbelly in society only too ready to point the finger at the foreigner, or those who might not fit in.

PR guru Max Clifford: "Ironically, the programme that made [Jade] could be the programme that breaks her. "Whoever is responsible for putting her in there obviously is responsible for possibly finishing her career."

The Stank of Skank

2007-01-17T09:39:00.000-05:00

Last fall I tuned in diligently to watch the episodes of Season I and II of “Flava of Love.” Some of them I even saw twice and the reunion quite a few times. It was like a train wreck that I had to watch because I couldn’t believe it.

First of all, Flava in all his flayvafullness at 48 by definition of a 20 year old is an old man. The women that were competing for his love were all in their early twenties [as in under 24] – but they all had kids. So there you had the old man with the young girls who were vying for their chance at love and their five minutes of fame.

Secondly, they were all sleeping with him. Well at least not the ones that got kicked off the show early, but the ones that stayed on to the last four [at least.] I must say, the man showed some sense when he decided against the drag queen New York and chose the chick with the burn marks on her shoulders.

Since VH1 found a winner in the format of this show, the channel launched their version of The Bachelorette and we get to watch New York find true love. Unlike the show on ABC TV, this bachelorette has thin ankles, a huge cleavage that is flaunted at every opportunity and skimpy little outfits.

In the first episode New York [and us the viewers] met the men. After much preening she introduced her mother. Oh the men, where do I begin? Some of them were blatantly effeminate, some had a few screws loose and some were just nuts. Did I mention the Pooty the manwhore? And one of them called her his little black girl. Hahahaha.

Instead of this bachelorette asking the men sweetly to leave, she tells them to get the fuck up out of her house. Some of them got mooned a few times. Very charming indeed.

In episode two, we got to see her take one of the guys [yes, the one that called her his little black girl] up to her room to help her into her bikini and then watched her grind on him in the hot tub. Did I mention that there were bleeps over her nudity while he was helping her change? One guy had the right idea though. In a sitting with New York she asked him to kiss her. He kissed her on her cheek and refused to kiss her lips. In his camera time he acknowledged that he refused to kiss her because he had no intention of kissing someone that had kissed he doesn’t know how many guys already that evening. Hoorah for him, even if it got him kicked out of the house.

In a preview of upcoming episodes it seems that it gets raunchier. One would think that with her mother as co-host that the setting and attitudes would be quite sedate. Oooooohhhh, no. Not for a minute since mommy dearest doesn’t seem to care two figs about her daughter’s behaviour.

I bet ABC execs are beating themselves up for not bringing this soft core pornography of a show to their channel. It most certainly would have kept their dating shows on air and their ratings through the roof.

In search of inspiration

2007-01-16T00:16:00.000-05:00

In this weblog I’m supposed to write about any I see in the form of art that inspires me. After waiting for it to come to me over the past few days I went in search of inspiration yesterday. I’m disappointed to say that I wasn’t inspired by anything.

The reality is that the last time I was actually inspired was when I broke the side of my trousers. The inspiration was that it was time to join a gym. Don’t laugh, I’m only a size four, and so what that I can no longer fit into a zero or a size two.

The Power of Ex

2007-01-15T09:03:00.000-05:00

Let’s face it, by the time you reach your mid twenties you’ve left in your wake a number of people who you refer to as “exes.” Usually, you use this term when referring to the people that you dated for a period of time that lasted more than a week or two. As you move into your thirties, the list of exes expands to include wives, husbands and in-laws. In general, once you decide that they no longer deserve to be recognized as your significant other, you cut the strings. This you can do tactfully by not returning phone calls or making excuses not to see the other person frequently. Eventually you will move on to dating other people and you forget about the previous experience.

However, there are those people who break-up but decide to stay very good friends. Women sometimes hold on to their exes in the event no one else comes along. These exes are used as stand-ins for a number of things including occasional sex, errands, and loans and so on. Sometimes there are unresolved issues or feelings for the other person and as such they cannot bear to part with them. And of course you have the women who just cut the strings and move on, staying in touch with their exes but keeping their distance at the same time.

Men on the other hand don’t seem to know how to stay friendly while maintaining a distance. They either stay closely in touch with their exes or they cut ties with them completely. For those of you that never even considered that there may have been an ex, now you know why. For others, I’m sure you’ve had to deal with the pesky ex-girlfriend/wife at some point or another that seems to have her grubby little fingers on his pulse. He thinks there is nothing wrong with it and he can’t understand why it bothers you.

Don’t misunderstand. He’s a great guy, an upstanding citizen, great sense of humour, your soul mate, never lies to you – except about her – because he knows that it bothers you when he sees or talks to her. So he lies to you so as not to hurt your feelings. But he didn’t always lie to you about her. When she made him muffins and he brought them home he did tell you they were from her. You weren’t too happy about it but you accepted them gracefully and told him to thank her that they were quite delicious. Or that time he went to her house for thanksgiving because she lived on his way home from work – but then you find out that she lives about thirty miles away from him and 40 miles away from his job.

And it continued downhill from there. He decided that whatever he chose to do with her was none of your business and you simply had to trust him. He wasn’t going to pay for the sins committed by another man [that made you lose your trust.] That without trust there was no relationship and so on and so forth. And he stopped telling you everything altogether.

But you always knew when he saw or spoke with her. Like the time when there was six inches of snow on the ground and he asked you to leave his house because he wanted to go see if his ‘friend’ needed help cleaning her driveway. And that other time when he came home with a little bowl of flour in his hand and when you asked where he got it he told you that he’d always had it. Or when you saw the holiday ornament on his counter and asked where it came from and he said one of his friends gave it to him.

The slide downhill got steeper after you found out that he had gotten her a job at his company and not only was he her reference but that he allowed her to put on her resume that she was joint owner and starter of his other company. This was when you broke and asked him when he was going to tell you. And he said never, that it was none of your business. You asked him for her to change her resume and he said no that he rarely spoke to her and he wanted to keep it that way. But then a week later he told you that she was going camping.

You want to trust him and for the most part you do. But you also know and accept that you’re not first but maybe you are second. She is more important to him than you are and because of that you can never fully trust him. She has demonstrated over the years that she has no respect for you and that he is still hers. Decent women once they let a man go they let them go. Women that still want something hold on.

Your feelings are secondary to hers. She is smarter, funnier and more beautiful than you can ever hope to be. You heard the admiration and adulation in voice when he used to speak of her. In his protection of her he has put her on a pedestal and made her into a superwoman, one that you can never measure up to. You don’t do the things you do out of jealousy. It’s just that your confidence is gone and your insecurities have taken over. You don’t hate her, you try to emulate her. After all, any woman that can hold on to a man to the extent where he will do anything for her even at the cost of loosing his relationship with you is worthy of worship.

You are so different; maybe if you are more like her he will stay with you. If you don’t change when he meets someone else like her he’ll leave you.

Why doesn’t he see that his relationship with her is doing this to you? Maybe he does see, but he’d rather let you go than let her go. You’re a filler until he can truly be with her.

You know that he sees her on holidays and birthdays, don’t you? No? It’s none of your business that’s why. Did you think that it was random that you never see him on holidays? Or that there are weekends when you can’t seem to get in touch with him

Did you really think it was his friend’s underwear you found at his house? He never mentioned his friends staying with him. They were hers, if they weren’t why would he lie. Where do you think your clothes that you leave behind disappear to? It is not by accident that after these years there are no sign of you anywhere in his home. Not one picture or a piece of clothing, it is almost like you’ve never been there. Who will say otherwise? His family and friends do not know of your existence.

Why don’t you tell him how much his relationship with her bothers, how much it hurts when he lies about not seeing or talking to her when you know that he does and quite frequently? Why don’t you give him an ultimatum? Because he’ll choose her.

Anything he chooses to do with her is none of your business; you are never to mention her sweet name from your filthy mouth. You have no right to do so even as a partner. Don’t bring it up. Have you forgotten already that he blamed you when she contacted you? Why don’t you tell him how much it hurts when he takes her side over yours? Now why would you want to do that?

Can’t you tell, the signs are all there. She is not his ex, she’s his partner and you’re the other woman.

The Power of the Pen

2007-01-12T23:51:00.000-05:00

Earlier today as I was trying to find an appropriate image of Wonder Woman to post on my other blog the old TV series came to mind – hard not to when there are more images of Linda Carter as WW available than the cartoon itself. This is what led me down this train of thought.

As a child I had a stack of comic books starting with Archie Comics and then moved to Marvel Comics in my early teens. The heroes were larger than life and seem to jump off the pages. From fifteen to seventeen I read mostly romance comics and PhotoRomance Kiss and Darling. The comics were in black and white and whenever I found one in colour it was a treat. The PhotoRomance had real people and the stories were told in frames, very similar to a comic. I couldn’t get enough of these and would read them until they became dog eared and the covers fell off.

Today my love for print comics has expanded to include cartoons such as X-Men and Batman Beyond and a few of the movies that have been made based on these characters. When it comes to images such as these, one would expect the camera aught to be mightier than the pen. However, the movies and shows that have been created with real people are sadly lacking. The strokes of the pen that portrays strength, agility and larger than life personas are somehow missed by the camera when these characters are brought to life on screen. Besides Spider I and II, I cannot think of another movie that is as exciting as reading a comic book. Superman in all his comic book glory is lost on both the small and large screen.

Not to say that they are not good movies and TV shows, they are, they are just not as good as the comics and cartoons. This could explain why the comic book industry is still booming and Marvel Comics has such a large following.

Im nin'alu daltei n'divim daltei marom lo nin'alu for Ofra Haza

2007-01-12T11:44:00.000-05:00

Im nin'alu daltei n'divim daltei marom lo nin'alu ~ If there be no mercy left in the world, the doors of heaven will never be barred. ~ Poem by Rabbi Shalem Shabazi

Ofra Haza died in 2000 and I’m only just reading about it. I’m very sad today as I have wonderful memories of listening to her music with my dear friend Seth. She was a beautiful woman that sang like an angel. This is one of my favourite songs by her based on a poem by 18th Century Rabbi Shalem Shabazi

Im nin'alu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n76eaisDX0Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skFqTYt8NQE&mode

Im nin'alu daltei n'divim

Daltei marom lo nin'alu

el Chai, mareimawm al kawruvim

Kulawm b'rucho ya'alu

El Chai

Ki hem elai kis'o kawruvim

Yodu sh'mei weihal'lu

Chayet shehem rotzeh washawvim

Miyom b'ri'aw nichlawlu

El Chai

Uv'shesh kanufayim s'vivim

Awfim b'eit yitjaljelu
Im nin'alu daltei n'divim

Daltei marom lo nin'alu

El Chai, mareimawm al kawruvim

Kulawm b'rucho ya'alu

El Chai

Jaljal wa'ofen ru'ashim

Medim sh'mei u'm'gadehim

Miziv k'veido loveshim

Uv'shesh kanufayim s'vivim

Awfim b'eit yitjaljelu

Ya'anu b'gel shirim areivim

Yachad b'etet nidjalu

Jaljal wa'ofen ru'ashim

Medim sh'mei u'm'gadeshim

Miziv k'veido loveshim

El Chai

If the doors are locked
The following translation appears on the 50 Gates of Wisdom album, by Keren Barak:

If there be no mercy left in the world,

The doors of heaven will never be barred.

The Creator reigns supreme, and is higher

than the angels

All, in His spirit, will rise

By His nearness, His life-giving breath

flows through them.

And they glory in His name

From the moment of genesis,

His creations grow,

Captivating and more beautiful.

The wheel in his circle thunders

Acclaiming His Holy name

Clothed in the glory of His radiance,

The six-winged cherubs surround Him,

Whirling in His honor

And with their free wings sweetly sing,

Together, in unison

R.I.P. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ofra_Haza

A Beautiful Princess

2007-01-12T08:39:00.000-05:00

I was browsing yesterday and found this superhero link. It seems that I’m Wonder Woman. Damn, I always knew I was special

Your results: You are Wonder Woman: You are a beautiful princess with great strength of character

Wonder Woman: 85%
Green Lantern: 80%
Supergirl: 70%
The Flash: 70%

Which superhero are you? Click here to find out. http://www.thesuperheroquiz.com/

Artistic Soul

2007-01-11T23:44:00.000-05:00

When I think of art I think of painting, drawings and photographs. Sometimes I expand on that, but unfortunately not too often. I think I have an idea of what art is as well as visual culture. The second of course is quite clearly stated in the word visual. But where does language and accents and music fit into this? Since they are what we hear, is there such a thing as audio culture? If one pays close enough attention they can find such beauty in words.

Take for example Bjork singing “Army of me.” I listened to it today – no, I mean actually listened - and the words are not what I thought they were. Her accent makes it a little difficult to understand what she’s saying but it is her accent that makes the song lovely. Her music, words, voice, everything combined is very artsy. Which makes me wonder, does it take an artistic person, lets say someone with an artistic soul [if there is such a thing] to create art in any form?

If I go by the example that I’ve given, I would say yes, that one does need to be artistic to create art.

Army of Me

Artist: Bjork Album:

Post Stand up

You've got to manage

I won't sympathize

Anymore

And if you complain once more

You’ll meet an army of me

You're alright

There's nothing wrong

Self sufficience please!

And get to work

And if you complain once more

You'll meet an army of me

You're on your own now

We won't save you

Your rescue squad

Is too exhausted

And if you complain once more

You'll meet an army of me

The Young and the Stupid

2007-01-11T09:56:00.000-05:00

About six months ago we hired a kid [John] just out of college to work on our team. As it stands John only has two dedicated projects that he works on each week. One project takes about four hours – I know this for a fact since it used to be a part on my job prior to him joining us. He turns this in after two days and usually after 5:00 p.m. The second project has been due for about one month and he still hasn’t turned it in or provided anyone with an update.

When he had just started I worked on part of project one with him and then handed it over to him completely after a few weeks. A month later he was in our manager’s office having a chat about how work was going. I didn’t mean to but I did manage to overhear him saying that he will be more effective if things went back to the way they were and I helped him. I swear I almost fell out of my chair. I think it would have gone over better if he had asked to be ridden. Thankfully our boss said no that the project was his responsibility and not mine.

On Tuesday afternoon he handed in his weekly project, copied in our group president and vice president. The email started with ‘hey.’ Is it just me or is ‘hey’ a little too informal to use in business correspondences especially when addressing senior members of staff? Moving right along I opened the PowerPoint presentation which was attached. On some of the charts there were heavy lines and thin lines. The thin lines were ones that he had added and didn’t bother to standardize them. The bar at the bottom of some slides had dates going in all different directions and what’s worse there were lines with the same colour representing different companies. The whole thing was sloppy.

Here’s the kicker, I get the impression that he believes if he doesn’t do the things that he doesn’t like doing that he won’t have to do them. By handing in his assignment in two days instead of four hours that it will be handed back to me. And that by not even doing project two our boss will believe that he’s extremely busy and not give him anymore work or hand that project off to someone else as well.

To top it off, he’s expecting a big bonus and a nice sized raise. I think someone has to tell him that bonuses and raises are based on performance. Oh if I can be a fly on the wall during his review.

Yaaayhhh to a new camera

2007-01-05T23:42:00.000-05:00

In my haste and excitement to take a picture of my cutesy little nephew a few months a go I dropped and broke my camera. My boyfriend just got me a new fantastic one for christmas and I've decided that I'll put it to good use. Here's to fantastic pictures to come.

The week of two hour lunches

2006-11-02T15:15:00.000-05:00

If only I could take a nap right now I’d be one very happy camper. This has been the week of two hour lunches. Senior management is gone and there’s hardly anyone in the office. Oh mini vacation.

So how did I make use of this time you ask? Let’s see.

Monday: A group of us went to the mall and ate mall food. Taco Bell and KFC to be exact. I am convinced that Taco Bell stuffs their tacos with whatever road-kill they can find along with all the bugs that they sweep up in their grimy little stores. I think I turned green after eating there.

Tuesday: Oh yeah. Sushi and then more sushi. Who would have thought that raw fish would taste so yummy when dipped in soy sauce. The one food I can eat everyday. I have to say though that I miss Japanese curry. I’ve tried Korean curry but it doesn’t come even close to what the Japanese make.

Wednesday: One of my friends decided that it was a good day to take me to a belated birthday lunch. Instead of taking me for margaritas like I wanted she took me for Syrian food – which is no different than Turkish food btw. The hummus was good but then again, when is hummus ever bad? The lamb was a little too fatty and that was the end of my lunch. Oh well.

Thursday: Today we went to the all you can eat curry buffet. Yeah baby. Indians know how to use their spices and do love to use as much of it as they can. So much of it in fact that when you leave the food it sticks to your hair and clothe. But damn it was good.

Friday: Not yet. I think I go for my margarita and giant burrito tomorrow. That’s a good way to end the week. Yeee haaa.

Imagining love

2006-11-01T15:52:00.000-05:00

Jo who is Catholic met Bob a Muslim while he was visiting the US with a tourist VISA. Bob who is in his mid twenties courted Jo who is forty years old and viola! Two months later they were married. When I met Jo a little over a year ago they had been married for less than one year and she was asking for advice on what to do with him. He had cheated on her multiple times and then moved to living with his Jewish mistress while she lived in an apartment with two roommates. Jo very rarely saw Bob as he didn’t sleep with her and spent most of his time with his friends in bars and clubs. Bob couldn’t hold a job because he couldn’t communicate in English so Jo was the primary breadwinner and took care of him financially through all of this.

Jo was convinced that Bob loved her and that he was rebelling because he had never lived away from his parents or culture and that he only wanted to experience western life. Over the past year Jo dedicated herself to learning about Islam, about his culture and reading the Qur’an. She visited Bob’s homeland and made Muslim friends. Throughout this time, she focused on forgetting that Bob was a cheating sack of kaka, a grown man who may have married her for a green card and focused instead on how good looking he was and that he was only doing what young men do.

Over the year that I’ve known her she never once blamed him for anything. The women that he cheating with she always blamed for throwing themselves at him. Never once did she say that he was an asshole and kick him out.

I managed to catch up with Jo just recently and she was wearing a niqab. Her philosophy is that if she is a ‘good’ Muslim woman that he would love her. I didn’t smack her in the head as I was tempted to do, instead I offered her my sympathies.

Over the years this has become quite a common story. Except, it usually goes something like – old and fat western woman meets very young good looking man online. He professes to love her, she sends him money, she goes to his country, marry him and sponsor him to come live with her. Man gets his green card and tells her to bugger off. Woman runs crying to everyone that will listen to her whining about what a bad person he is and that he took advantage of her.

What the heck makes a 40 or a 50 year old woman think that a 25 year old young man that she’s never met is madly in love with her? What makes her so blind that she can’t step back and consider the facts???? Besides the huge age difference, most times there are religious differences - sometimes they can’t even communicate in the same language. Yes, I’ve met women that profess to be in love and the only way they can communicate is using translators.

I know love is supposed to be blind by when the heck did it become stupid as well?

Where is my ring goddamn it!

2006-10-31T09:49:00.000-05:00

My birthday this year was very low-keyed. I didn't feel much like celebrating because it was exactly one month since my dad passed away. My boyfriend was good to me with jewelry [is there such a word as jewelries]. A gorgeous watch and three strands of pearls. But, where is my god damned ring?

Violence et résistances à Guantánamo

2006-10-31T09:33:00.000-05:00

Violence et résistances à Guantánamo

Lors d’une rencontre avec la chancelière allemande Angela Merkel, qui estime que le camp de détention de Guantánamo « doit à terme cesser d’exister », le président des Etats-Unis, M. George W. Bush, a invoqué la guerre antiterroriste pour répondre : « La base de Guantánamo est nécessaire à la protection des Américains. » Détenu aux Etats-Unis à la suite des attentats du 11-septembre, auxquels il n’a pas participé, M. Zacarias Moussaoui encourt la peine de mort. Son procès commencera début mars (lire « Peine de mort pour M. Zacarias Moussaoui ? »).

Des suffragettes anglaises en 1909 aux détenus politiques des geôles turques en 1984, 1996 et 2000, en passant par Gandhi en 1943 et 1948, Bobby Sands en 1981 (1), mais aussi les sans-papiers lillois en 2004, la grève de la faim reste l’arme de la désobéissance et du défi face à un pouvoir autiste et écrasant. Sur la base militaire de Guantánamo, ceux que les autorités américaines nomment des « combattants ennemis » ont à six reprises et à plusieurs dizaines, voire centaines, défié leurs geôliers du Pentagone entre février 2002 et fin septembre 2005.
Les premiers mouvements de protestation de la part des quelque cinq cents détenus enfermés à Guantánamo débutent en février 2002, une poignée de semaines après l’arrivée des premiers d’entre eux. Nous ne connaissons ces actions que dans leurs grandes lignes, grâce notamment au travail des associations américaines de défense des droits humains ; elles ne cessent de diffuser des informations et des analyses complétant les maigres déclarations officielles. On citera par exemple Amnesty International (2), Human Rights Watch (3), l’American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) (4), le Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) (5), qui tous dénoncent à la fois les dangers que Guantánamo fait peser sur les libertés de chacun à travers le monde, la responsabilité de l’administration Bush dans l’utilisation de la torture, sa manipulation et son non-respect du droit, américain et international, son autoritarisme et son goût du secret, l’impunité dont elle semble bénéficier.

A Guantánamo, deux grèves de la faim auraient eu lieu avant le 27 février 2002 ; elles durent, semble-t-il, peu de temps et sont le fait d’une minorité de détenus. Changement d’échelle à partir de cette date puisque, le lendemain, l’administration militaire reconnaît que cent quatre-vingt quatorze prisonniers refusent de s’alimenter. Mi-mars 2002, trois détenus sont nourris de force. Début mai, les deux derniers grévistes sont eux aussi alimentés de force après, respectivement, soixante-trois et soixante et onze jours de jeûne. Une quatrième grève aurait eu lieu en décembre 2002. D’une durée de six semaines, selon un détenu de nationalité britannique qui y participa, elle aurait été entamée parce qu’un garde avait jeté le Coran par terre. Les cinquième et sixième grèves sont mieux connues. La première intervient entre le 21 juin et le 28 juillet 2005, la seconde du 8 août à fin septembre 2005. La totalité des détenus du camp 5, fermé à tout visiteur, aurait massivement participé aux deux mouvements.
D’après des avocats de la société Shearman & Sterling présents, fin juin 2005, afin de rencontrer leurs clients, les revendications des détenus concernent tous les aspects de leur vie dans le camp. Ils expliquent : « Nous voulons qu’on respecte notre religion (...) ; nous voulons des procès équitables et des avocats ; nous voulons une nourriture suffisante et de l’eau non souillée (...) ; nous voulons voir la lumière du soleil (...) ; nous voulons savoir pourquoi nous sommes depuis si longtemps dans le camp 5, depuis plus de un an dans certains cas (...) ; nous voulons des soins médicaux (...) ; nous devons avoir des contacts avec nos familles, leur écrire et recevoir leurs courriers (...) ; chacun doit être traité de la même façon (...) ; nous réclamons une commission impartiale qui enquête et fasse connaître publiquement la situation qui prévaut à Guantánamo. »

Grévistes de la faim

A partir du 2 juillet, les détenus jeûnent vingt-six jours consécutifs. Confronté à la détermination des grévistes, le ministère de la défense reconnaît certains des manquements qu’ils dénoncent, notamment ceux qui ont trait à leur vie quotidienne. De l’eau minérale en bouteilles commence à être distribuée. Les autorités acceptent également la création d’un comité de détenus chargé de négocier avec le commandement du camp les demandes des prisonniers, et elles promettent de mettre en accord les règles de détention avec les conventions de Genève.

Sur la foi de ces promesses, les grévistes cessent leur mouvement, le 28 juillet. Mais, mi-août, après que des détenus ont été battus par les membres de l’unité spéciale Force de réaction extrême et qu’aucune des promesses n’a été vraiment tenue, y compris celles relatives à l’amélioration de la nourriture et à la qualité de l’eau, le mouvement reprend, suivi encore plus massivement. Les membres du comité des détenus sont alors tous placés à l’isolement. L’avocat du CCR, M. Clive Stafford-Smith (6), présent à Guantánamo du 4 au 14 août, se voit interdire par les autorités militaires toute rencontre avec son client, M. Hisham Sliti.

Selon un autre détenu, M. Binyam Mohammed, qui, lui, rencontre son avocat au même moment, « nous demandons seulement justice : traitez-nous comme promis selon les règles des conventions de Genève qui s’appliquent aux prisonniers civils et, de deux choses l’une, ou vous nous jugez équitablement sur la foi d’une inculpation criminelle valide, ou vous nous libérez ». Les grévistes paraissent décidés à aller jusqu’au bout. Fin août, malgré le silence des autorités militaires, les avocats des détenus affirment qu’au moins deux cent dix d’entre eux participent au mouvement. Le 2 septembre, un porte-parole du ministère de la défense confirme la grève de la faim, mais la circonscrit à soixante-seize détenus, et il annonce que neuf grévistes sont hospitalisés et alimentés de force.

Grâce au Freedom of Information Act (« loi sur la liberté d’informer »), qui permet à un détenu de demander et d’obtenir son dossier auprès des agences de sécurité du pays (7), le CCR rapporte des tentatives de suicide collectif qui ont eu lieu au moins à deux reprises. Durant les dix-huit premiers mois de fonctionnement du camp, vingt-huit tentatives de suicide ont été enregistrées, concernant dix-huit personnes. En août 2003, la même semaine, plus d’une vingtaine de prisonniers essaient de se pendre dans leurs cellules ; aucun n’y parvient. Pour la seule journée du 22 août 2003, on relève dix tentatives de suicide. Mais, dans le jargon militaro-médical des médecins en poste à Guantánamo, une tentative de ce genre devient « un geste destiné à attirer l’attention » de la part de détenus « manipulateurs au comportement nuisible pour eux-mêmes ».

Guantánamo est-il seulement un camp ou une prison militaire, un lieu de relégation pour détenus indésirables ? Ne s’agit-il pas plutôt d’une institution totalitaire, parce que sans existence légale ? C’est là tout le combat des organisations non gouvernementales (ONG) américaines devant les tribunaux : faire reconnaître l’application de la loi des Etats-Unis et du droit sur cette base, possession militaire américaine en territoire cubain depuis 1902. Elles ont obtenu un premier succès quand, le 28 juin 2004, la Cour suprême des Etats-Unis, dans l’arrêt Rasul versus Bush, a rendu une décision favorable aux détenus de Guantánamo en reconnaissant la compétence des tribunaux fédéraux américains dans l’examen des appels des prisonniers de nationalité étrangère détenus sur la base militaire. Mais cette décision n’a jusqu’à présent pas été appliquée par les autorités militaires. Des détenus, dont l’identité est pour certains toujours inconnue, ne bénéficient pas des services d’un avocat (8). Les prisonniers ont été soustraits au monde du droit par une administration Bush qui souhaite agir à sa guise, en se confectionnant son propre mode opératoire hors de toute contrainte démocratique légale, hors de tout traité international.

Dans un communiqué d’avril 2005 (9), Amnesty International utilise d’ailleurs le terme de « disparus » pour qualifier les détenus fantômes, ceux de Guantánamo mais aussi ceux, environ quarante, tombés aux mains de la CIA, sans oublier ceux qui ont été transférés secrètement à des pays tiers (entre cent et cent cinquante) (10). L’organisation de défense des droits humains utilise également les termes d’« exécutions extrajudiciaires » pour relater le meurtre au Yémen, en novembre 2002, de six membres présumés d’Al-Qaida dont la voiture fut atteinte par un missile (11). Ce système illégal, dont nous connaissons aujourd’hui tout juste les contours, repose naturellement sur le secret : transports secrets de détenus d’un pays à l’autre ; vols secrets affrétés par la CIA ; détention au secret sur des bases militaires américaines ; tribunaux militaires gardant secrets les dossiers rassemblés sur les « combattants ennemis », refusant de leur en communiquer le contenu ainsi qu’à leurs avocats civils, ce qui interdit toute défense efficace ; interdiction faite à l’Organisation des Nations unies (ONU) de se rendre sur place, visites très encadrées pour les sénateurs américains et pour les journalistes.

Disparitions, secrets, tortures, tribunaux militaires, exécutions extrajudiciaires : autant de méthodes ordinairement appliquées par les régimes dictatoriaux, que l’administration américaine reprend à son compte.

Pourtant, la dénonciation de ces faits mobilise assez peu les opinions publiques occidentales, sensibles, depuis les attentats du 11 septembre 2001, aux déclarations de leurs gouvernements, qui usent volontiers d’un langage « terrorisant ». A Guantánamo, il n’y aurait ainsi que des talibans et des membres d’Al-Qaida ou leurs associés, des « fous de dieu » dont certains auraient abattu des Américains en Afghanistan et ailleurs, ou auraient aimé le faire. Les détenus de Guantánamo ne seraient alors que des terroristes et des tueurs qui, par leurs actions ou leurs pensées, se sont mis à l’écart du reste de l’espèce humaine. Qu’ils demeurent captifs indéfiniment, sans être jamais jugés, est perçu comme un moindre mal par des opinions qui adhèrent au consensus répressif en intégrant un discours de la peur distillé quotidiennement, et que la Maison Blanche sait gérer quand elle veut afficher sa détermination. Face à une telle situation, la dénonciation de la torture et de Guantánamo reste sans conséquence politique, car il n’existe pas de mobilisation collective contre l’existence de cette institution totalitaire.

http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2006/02/COMBESQUE/13201

What THE????

2006-07-28T10:06:00.000-04:00

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Dang, I didn't realise I had this many pictures of Garden in the Woods in Concord, MA:(

And yet more of the Garden in the woods in Concord, MA

2006-07-28T09:48:00.000-04:00

This seems like a never ending post. I used to be able to post multiple pictures. Well WHATEVA!!!!!!!!!!!

More of Garden in woods in Concord, Massachussetts

2006-07-26T13:23:00.000-04:00

For some reason I had a bit of a problem uploading all my picies. Anyway, another thread is not so bad, enjoy!

Garden in the woods

2006-07-26T10:57:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I went to one of the most beautiful gardens in Concord, MA. I have posted the pictures below. Enjoy.

Mass Media Freedom of Speech and Social Responsibility

2006-06-28T15:34:00.000-04:00

Another paper I wanted to save.

Mass Media Freedom of Speech and Social Responsibility

The events that took place around the world earlier this year raised the question of the social responsibility of the media. Should it relate stories that are marketable and sensational under the label of ‘freedom of speech’ without thought of the consequences on the population at large? At some point, the media has to accept that it holds great power, and that “with great power, comes great responsibility” (Spider-man 2002).

Who is entitled to free speech?

Individual freedom of speech and that of the mass media are the same. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” (Article 19). This is the governing body that is responsible for all individual’s rights regardless of nationality, religion or race around the world. As such, there is one standard of freedom of expression that applies to all nations.

Corporate social responsibility

Corporate social responsibility is defined as “the notion that corporations have an obligation to constituent groups in society other than stockholders and beyond that prescribed by law or union contracts” (Kreitner 61). Just as each individual has an obligation to make each society a better place, corporations do as well.

Free speech and social responsibility

One could argue that a corporation is not an individual and as such, while individuals have a right to free speech, corporations do not. In the case of newspaper corporations, the views they express are those of individuals, and by nature their business is to bring current events, viewpoints, entertainment and any other issues affecting a nation to the public. As businesses, they have a right to edit materials that can be potentially damaging to their organizations or to the community before they are aired. Also, corporations are formed and made functional by individuals and as a result, they have a collective interest in acting in the best interest of a society.

Sensationalism in the media

Over the years, many sensational stories have been aired, printed and become otherwise available to the public. While some of the stories are true, there have been many that were half-truths and some that were not fully investigated or factually checked. At other times, the media quite clearly fanned the flames of discord and at times this has directly resulted in the loss of lives and lead to great civil unrest.

One of the terrible events in our history that has aired many times over is that of the Rwandan genocide. In a land where there is constant struggle for land, water and political power between the indigenous tribes, the confrontations came to the forefront when the Rwandan President President Habyarimana’s plane was shot from the air killing him in April 1994. This started the violence that lasted 100 days in the country. Neighbors, friends and colleagues turned against each other with machetes and clubs in a killing spree that left an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus dead.

How could the death of one man instigate such violence? The media played a huge role in this. For when the Hutu President was killed, the media reported that it was at the hands of the Tutsis. “During the genocide, radio was used by the Hutu extremist conspirators to mobilise the Hutu majority, to coordinate the killings and to ensure that the plans for extermination were faithfully executed” (http://www.fahamu.org/rwanda.php). The media within the country failed its people by broadcasting inflammatory information, and the western media failed even more. They did not choose to “trust but verify” (Ronald Reagan) as it is their duty to do, they took the Rwandan media coverage as absolute truth and viewed it as yet another African nation at war with itself. As a result, the international community did not intervene until it was too late. Had the media done its job properly, stability could have been maintained at a time when it was most needed. The international media could have brought a halt to the massacre before it escalated out of control. Instead, both the national and international media fanned the flames and let it continue.

But this is not the only instance of the media’s social irresponsibility. Radio Television Serbia was bombed because it was alleged that it was used as a tool of propaganda that fanned ethnic hatred within the state. The Balkan wars were fueled by hatred propagated by the media and left many dead, displaced and missing. It was events such as this that coined the term “ethnic cleansing” in the early 1990s.

There are many more events where the media played a role in fueling crises. After many years of civil unrest, Angola is today a somewhat peaceful nation. This is no thanks to the media. The state-run newspaper Jornal de Angola on March 2, 2002, ran a one page story calling upon the nation’s people to take to the streets to “beat up or kill either slowly or at speed all remaining members of UNITA who dared to remember their slain leader Jonas Savimbi” (Marquis). The Angolan newspaper has a long history of inciting fear and warfare among that nation’s people throughout the country’s civil unrest.

Today many of the murderers of the Rwandan genocide and the Balkan wars have been called to justice for the war crimes that they have committed by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But this justice is two-fold since for the people that are no longer alive, it is has no meaning. Individuals are brought to justice, but the media that serves as the tools of the warlords very rarely sees the insides of such a court.

The positive effects of a socially responsible media

But, not all media are negligent in their news broadcast. The ones that are socially aware and observe their social obligations to communities serve a great and valuable purpose. The television channel Lifetime which is dedicated to programs for women, boasts 1.9 million visitors on its website each month. The station partnered with organizations such as Amnesty International, United Nations Development Fund for Women and The Body Shop to bring the facts of violence against women to the forefront. The popular belief is that the channel only shows “chick flicks”, but this is certainly not the case. Over the years, Lifetime has shed light on domestic violence, kidnapping, alcoholism and most recently the issue of human trafficking.

When a corporation engages in such a major undertaking, it is not only performing a humanitarian service for the community, it is also forming a chain, giving voice to organizations that know the facts but do not have a voice. Many of us will never read an ILO report on child labor statistics or any other such atrocities, but if a movie is made of it and it’s on TV, we will most likely watch it. This is the power of the media and Lifetime recognizes it.

One of the big stories covered in the news over the past couple of weeks was that of myspace.com. The morning television shows talked about the type of images that children post, the things they say and the people they talk to on that popular website. One of the things that came to light throughout these shows was that in most instances, the parents are not aware of how their children spend their time online. Another is that everything word and image that is posted and available online is available to anyone that chooses to browse or search.

The television show Dateline in its series “To Catch a Predator” took its investigation further. Under-aged decoys were set up to engage in conversations with adults and in some instances arranged dates at their homes. From the time the date arrived at the house, Dateline’s camera followed them and then questioned them about whether or not they knew that they had arranged dates with young girls. In most instances the men knew and it wasn’t the first time they were doing it. One man stripped off his clothing from the time he walked in the door and another took his little boy on the date. What this series of shows did was to bring to the attention of the parents the practices of the predators that lie in wait for their children if they don’t take the necessary measures to protect and monitor their children’s online activity.

Until recently, many had never heard of Guantanamo Bay or its purpose. This is a place where the United States holds its prisoners of war. Images and accounts of what was taking place within the prison walls rocked the international community a few years ago. Not only were there human rights violations, but violations of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. According to the Geneva Convention “prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated. Any unlawful act or omission by the Detaining Power causing death or seriously endangering the health of a prisoner of war in its custody is prohibited, and will be regarded as a serious breach of the present Convention” (A.13). If it was not for the images that were broadcasted across television screens, newspapers and websites, these atrocities would not have come to light and would have continued. In the media’s coverage, it was uncovered that not only was psychological torture prevalent in the prison, but that the United States was allegedly transporting prisoners to countries where physical torture was acceptable. Because of all that was uncovered during their investigations, Guantanamo Bay may be closed and rightly so.

The greater good of the media being socially aware and acting responsibly

Over the decades the media has had great influence on societies. It has caused wars and ended them, reported the rise and fall of great men and women alike and called on nations to help those in need. It has the ability to shape, save and end lives. The media serves as our eyes and ears to the world. Because of our inability to observe international events first hand, we have to rely on media outlets to tell us when children are dying of starvation, people are suffering from lack of shelter and women and children are used as tools of war. Without the media bringing us news of these occurrences, we will not be able to reach out with a helping hand.

It is fortunate that many of the media sources understand the power they hold and they utilize it for the greater good. During and after hurricane Kathrina, the Asian Tsunami and the September 11 terror attacks, when the media aired their rallying calls, people listened. The atrocities that take place around the world are brought into our lives and we realize that the opportunities and rights that we have are not entitlements but a gift and a luxury.

She no love him long time

2006-06-22T12:50:00.000-04:00

Last night as my boyfriend was browsing the web for french jokes he happened upon [or so he said:)] a chatroom that is for men who have been dumped by their mates for other men or caught their partner in the act of cheating.

It is a funny website, and you can tell that the men are super pissed. They describe what the woman was caught doing and in most instances they have naked pictures of them posted. Not just naked pictures, but NAKED pictures. Why would you let a man to take raunchy nude pictures of you and then fuck around on him? Stupid stupid.

The popular believe is that men are cheaters and women are saints. The reality is that women are worse than men, the only difference is that women hide it better. I know countless women that have had relationships with married men and others that have had more than one boyfriend at a time. Of course, they never know about one another and the woman ends up having her cake and eating it too.

I say it's about time that the men fought back. Women have countless websites, magazines and TV shows dedicated to help them air their dirty laundry. It's about time that the men do the same.

The website is at http://www.jemevenge.com/miluk_archives12.html

Romance and Relationships
thoughts

The Link Between Poverty, Illegal Immigration and Human Trafficking

2006-06-21T11:40:00.000-04:00

Paper I wrote for school that I wanted to save.

Within every society is a part of the population that lives in poverty. There are three layers within this segment of society. One is absolute poverty, a state that refers to the group of people that lives below the poverty line and cannot afford to purchase basic goods and services needed to maintain standard living. Then there is relative poverty, which is a floating standard of destitution that analyzes individual total income and spending patterns with those of the general population. Individuals with low incomes that use most of their money on goods and services, compared to the general population, fall into the category of people living in relative poverty. Lastly, there is the underclass, which is a term used by sociologists to describe the individuals who live in long term poverty and who are unskilled and lack training. One of the side effects of poverty which, if not tackled at its source, can end up costing many more lives and billions of dollars.

One such side effect is illegal immigration. This is a practice in which a society’s poor engages in a search of a better life and opportunities in another country, not just for themselves but for their families as well. When done illegally, it is an extremely dangerous feat since they could fall prey to bandits, traffickers, disease and sometimes lose their lives. One does not need to look further than one’s own backyard to see the negative effects of illegal immigration. Based on information received from the Mexican foreign ministry, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “431 migrants died trying to enter the United States in 2003, and 373 died in 2004.” This is an average of more than one death per day along our own borders.

As the debate on what to do with illegal immigrants in the United States continues, the side of the coin that remains obscured from view is the poverty that these people are trying to escape. In their book Mexico: The Struggle for Democratic Development, authors Levy and Bruhn wrote “Poverty and inequality are deep rooted in Mexico. The government’s own figures indicate that almost half the population lives in poverty, unable to meet the Food and Agriculture Organization’s minimal food intake standards, and about seventeen million are in what is classified as extreme poverty” (Levy, Bruhn 13). Seventeen million is an astonishing number of people that not only includes adults but children as well. The immigrants that illegally live on American soil today are here to escape that poverty.

Africa is the poorest continent on the planet and time after time news is brought to the world stage of a society on the brink of starvation. About ten years ago the undernourished children of Nigeria were plastered across the television screens, and more recently, the children of Niger. The reason why this happens is because most African societies rely heavily on farming to feed, clothe and shelter their families. Over the years, the continent has suffered from severe droughts and governments have neglected to put systems into place for families to survive by means other than farming. As a result, the majority of the African population remains poor surviving on less than one dollar a day.

The thousands of Africans that trek through the Sahara desert to cross the Moroccan border into Spain and the European Union seek to escape this poverty. This is by no means a safe endeavor as it involves hiding in clumps of trees and waiting for the right opportunity to rush the fences, which are topped with barbed wires and razors. But this is not the worse of the problems that these immigrants face. They travel hundreds of miles on foot, and because of lack of nutrition and healthcare, they suffer from ill health and fall victim to diseases. Additionally, if they make it to Morocco and are caught, they are taken by the Moroccan authorities to the farthest end of the Algerian desert to find their way back home without any supervision, funds or protection. Many once left to their own devises, turn around and start the trip back to the Moroccan/Spain border hoping that they will not get caught again.

In addition to individual efforts to illegally cross borders is the human trafficking aspect. In some cases, an individual contacts traffickers to organize passage. In others, traffickers solicit individuals with promises of jobs and bright futures. The poor within a society are particularly susceptible to human trafficking, as many times they are told they don’t need to pay upfront and that they can repay their travel expenses when they arrive at their destination and start working.

Not so long ago, thirty two Chinese stowaways were discovered in two containers on a cargo ship which was at sea for two weeks. This was not an individual effort and required the assistance of a human trafficker. But this was a lucky group of individuals, as many that are smuggled from their country, once at their final destination, only end up under the care of their traffickers. Amnesty International’s Firefly Project reported that “An estimated 20,000 people are trafficked into the United States every year. Unlike drugs or arms, humans are used as “products” that can be reused and resold.”

Many of these people live in servitude, as once they arrive at their destination, their passports are taken from them and they are forced to work to pay off their transportation fees for little or no salary. In addition to having no money, they live in fear for themselves and their families, as many times their families in their native countries are threatened with violence. It is unthinkable that in the twenty first century people are viewed as products that can be owned, used and sold.

Individuals that are relatively well off in their own countries seek legal ways to leave, such as obtaining holiday visas, continuing education and employment sponsorships by international organizations. It is society’s poor that are denied such opportunities and fall back on illegal and dangerous means of departure from their home countries.

Today security at the borders of developed countries are tightening as governments seek to curb the influx of illegal immigrants into Europe, North America and other developed nations around the world.

The United States is tackling the issue of Mexicans living illegally in the United States and many arguments have been raised as to why they should not be allowed to stay here. Among the reasons given is that they endanger our national security due to the false documentation which they use, they are taking the jobs that should go to legal American residents, and they committed a crime by crossing the borders illegally and should not be rewarded. These reasons are no different from the ones used by Spain and other countries as an excuse to close their borders.

The managing of illegal immigrants costs governments money which is the moneys of taxpayers. According to Jonathan Xavier Inda, in his recently released book Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology, and Ethics, “Whether it is healthcare, social services, or education, “illegal” immigrants are said to take advantage of public resources. The cost of this abuse is seen to be borne, of course, by tax-paying citizens” (Inda 112). This is most certainly true, but the other side of the coin is that it is a money making venture for some.

Spain’s alliance with Morocco, which called for Morocco to step up border patrols and return anyone caught attempting to cross the border to their country of origin, has cost both Spain and Morocco a lot. In addition to the finances to build the fences higher and putting more police on border patrol, they have also had to face the human rights violations that came to light after individuals reported having been beaten and left on the verge of starvation in the middle of the arid desert. The issue of human trafficking is costing governments worldwide millions of dollars to combat, and still with very little success in denting this highly organized criminal activity.

But while governments and non-government organizations are seeking to curb illegal immigration, they are neglecting the source of the problem. As they continue to use taxpayer dollars to build the border fences higher, increase border patrols and apprehend the criminals that engage in human smuggling, they have lost sight of as long as entire societies live in poverty, there will always be illegal immigration and individuals will become more resourceful in how they engage in this activity.

Even though it does not solve the problem immediately, governments should look to building infrastructure within societies that will allow every individual in a society to earn a living by which they can reside above the poverty line. They should build systems where people have access to social services, education, healthcare and other means of supporting and bettering their families. These are the things that if individuals lack in their own communities they will cross borders to find. Also, individuals that have the means of supporting themselves and their families are less susceptible to predators.

While the venture of alleviating poverty on such a large scale may seem a daunting and costly task, it is will cost much less than the continuing fight to stop illegal immigration and human trafficking. When one adds in moneys that governments pledge to fight hunger and disease, the cost of the upkeep of the world’s poor becomes much bigger. And these are all only “bandages” that are placed on a much bigger problem.

In fighting poverty and empowering societies, they will stem the flow of illegal immigration, human trafficking figures will decrease, less of the world’s poor would die of starvation and hunger and disease, and tax payers’ monies would be put to better use.

News and politics

The Outdoor Museum in Concord, MA

2006-06-20T12:23:00.000-04:00

Art and Photography

My Neighbour, the Retard

2006-06-20T08:42:00.000-04:00

I live in a garden apartment complex in Bergen County New Jersey. They are really nice, two levels with huge lawns. I live on the downstairs level and there are four one bedroom apartments in the units that I'm in. There is a black guy living in the apartment above me, an Indian couple with a child living in the apartment next to him and three guys sharing the apartment downstairs of them [apartment on the left of mine].

Like most apartment buildings, the walls are paper thin. About three weeks ago, I heard my upstairs neighbour having sex. Actually, first there was Barry White playing for about two hours mixed with laughter. This was followed shortly by his female companion squeeking, oooohing and moaning. Thank goodness this did not last as long as the music did - much to my relief.

After this he started the new retarded habit of turning on his radio at around 10:30 - 11:00 p.m. Not a sound would come from his apartment before that, and then boom. He leaves it on for about an hour and he turns it off. Last night he turned it on at 12:15 a.m. left it on for about an hour and then turned it off. It was so loud that I heard it through my running AC and TV both of which were on while I was sleeping. I rang his doorbell twice but I guess he didn't hear me through his music.

I am working on how to get back at him. I can't imagine waking up at midnight to music for the rest of the summer, I will teach him a lesson yet.

Blog Addict

2006-06-06T17:00:00.000-04:00

Gee, I think I'm becoming addicted to blogging, er maybe no, since the only thing I've done so far is create three blogs today. Hopefully, I'll have enough of an imagination to write and fill all three.