More world cup

I'll admit I'm not that into soccer myself,
but how can you not be impressed by the enthusiasm of this pair of Paraguayans?

the ides of August, 1958

Newsday

it's time to jump up and down

because today is Mike Gravel's birthday.


check out Eva Mendes's très chic hairdo,


according to the BBC, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed got married in April.

Mother's day

Mother's day inevitably makes me think of my mother, who died 49 months ago in early April of 2004. This means my mother, who was an Iraqi-American, died roughly a year after the war against Iraq began but a few days before the Abu Ghraib photos came out-- so you could say she was spared that. She was 70, having been born in 1934, which also means that when she was born her native country was ruled by the British, and when she died Iraq was ruled by the US. My mother died a US Citizen, having surrendered her Iraqi nationality voluntarily-- unlike Iraq herself.

Naturally I would wish my mother could still be here, even though I know I was pretty fortunate to have my mother live till I was 40-- needless to say, others aren't so lucky. Mother's day also makes me think of the various things I wanted and still want to do to make her see me as successful and the shepherd of a meaningful life, so that she might be proud.

Also inevitably, Mother's day makes me think of the iconic photo of the migrant mother, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936(above). Here's some verbiage about it from Wikipedia:

Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother". The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson, but Lange apparently never knew her name. The original photo had Florence's thumb and index finger on the tent pole, and was retouched in an attempt to hide Florence's thumb. Her index finger was left untouched .

In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

According to Thompson's son, Lange got some details of this story wrong, but the impact of the picture was based on the image showing the strength and need of migrant workers.

In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese-Americans (Nisei) to relocation camps in the American West, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). She covered the rounding up of Japanese Americans, their evacuation into temporary assembly centers, and Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps. To many observers, her photograph of Japanese-American children pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before they were sent to internment camps is a haunting reminder of this policy of detaining people without charging them with any crime or affording them any appeal.

Her images were so obviously critical that the Army impounded them. Today her photographs of the internment are available in the National Archives on the website of the Still Photographs Division, and at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Children at the Weill public school in San Francisco pledge allegiance to the American flag in April 1942, prior to the internment of Japanese Americans.

This photo was taken by Lange in San Francisco 1942, shortly before these kids were to be shipped off with their families to the internment camps. What were they thinking as they stared at Lange's lens? Were they frightened, or curious? Did they even know what was in store at that point?

Kim Novak and one of the Mirisches

I'll be away for a while. Then I'll be back.

Staring at the sun

Apparently a sundog, or a parhelic circle, is an "atmospheric optical phenomenon primarily associated with the reflection or refraction of sunlight by small ice crystals."
AP photo taken in Kerala, India by S. K. Mohan



And this is a Dragon blood tree, found on the "virtually untouched Yemeni Island of Socotra, a site of global importance for biodiversity conservation, located in the Indian Ocean."
AFP photo by Khaled Fazaa.

Sundry items for a Sunday

photo:NYT

1. Most of the time I have difficulty mustering sympathy for
Nancy "I ♥ Junior" Pelosi, but this item casts her in a somewhat sympathetic (or perhaps merely pathetic) light:"Thanks for stopping by."(Bag News)

Sentimentality aside, it begs the question: why would the most powerful person in congress allow herself to become so easily buffaloed? The photo was taken in relation to the recent dem collapse on the shaping of the economic stimulus bill. (Incidentally, besides oozing oil and smarm, doesn't Treasury's Paulson(photo) looks like he's trying to pick her up?)


2. via Raw Story:

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."

2b.And then there's Huckabee's thoughts (via 1115.org)on the Easter bunny (of destruction):

Now, everybody can look back and say, ‘Oh, well, we didn’t find the[WMD] weapons.’ It doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Just because you didn’t find every Easter egg didn’t mean that it wasn’t planted.

Of course his use of the word "planted" suggests a tin ear as well as a straw brain, conjuring up as it does images of doctored evidence. Anyway, you'd imagine such aberrant thinking would disqualify a candidate in the eyes of his supporters, at least with(ahem!) most constituencies...

3.I note that very little fuss has been made regarding the absense of Obama and HRC from the FISA extension vote, where they could have helped protect Chris Dodd's position(and the Constitution's). But dang it, what if that pesky John Edwards had snuck in a win in their absense if they went to do the jobs they were elected to do?

CORRECTION: My mistake-- the vote has been postponed to tomorrow, Monday 28 January, with 36 no votes presently. Noes from Obama and HRC would only bring the total to a still-vulnerable 38, but their votes tend to affect those of others.

Finally: I've been fitfully working on two longer posts, one on Dennis Kucinich's recent withdrawal from the race and another on Gaza(and Pan-Arabism). I promise to have them up soon.

Sunday evening

photo:Copyright Brendan I. Koerner

1942 DeSoto

photo via ned

from "learn to say ain't"(2005)

(via mike gerber)

John Rogers:
let's talk image. When I first started out on the road, I was a skinny guy with a big nose, a Boston accent and a Physics degree telling jokes in bars out West. I was hitting a wall of resistance in a lot of rooms. One night in Rawlins, Wyoming, the headliner -- a sweet road comic named "Boats" Johnson -- took me aside.

"You're a good joke writer. I mean, damn, there's some smart stuff in there."
"Thanks. But, uh..."
"They don't like you much." Boats handed me a beer. "Second show. Longneck. Always a longneck. Bring it on stage. Sip from it every now and then."
"I don't really drink on stage --"
"Fine. Fill it with water. Don't bring attention to it, just sip from it."
I shrugged. "Anything else?"
"Yeah. Learn to say 'ain't'. Don't change the jokes. Just learn to say 'ain't' every now and then."

The shows went, much, much better after that. I told the same gun control jokes, the same pro-gay marriage bits, the same making-fun of the culture wars jokes. But now I was killing.

There are two lessons to be taken from "Learn to say 'ain't'." First, the fundamental dynamic in all crowd interaction is us vs. them. Period. It's sad. Oh well. Get over it and win.

Now, the fine line here is that, the audience also always knows when you're being dishonest. That's worth hitting again. When you are on stage, the audience's collective mind can tell when you're not being yourself. And even more importantly, they can tell when you're lying to be one of "us". (Like Kerry hunting, or Dukakis in the tank). Changing yourself to fit the audience would be the wrong lesson to take from "Learn to say 'ain't.'" No, the lesson Boats was teaching me was that there's no problem with relaxing a bit and showing that you're not one of "them." He was teaching me that connection is a half-way game -- just extend out a little, and the audience will come the rest of the way. They will extend the boundary of "us" if you advance toward it.
[...]
Kerry was so, so far outside of "us" that, frankly it was a testimony to how badly Bush has screwed up that he even got THAT close.

there's a lot more and you should go read all of it.

Arnie n' GWB

I hate to admit this photograph from the BBC amuses me, suggesting as it does that Arnold is annoyed by something Junior is saying.



meanwhile, here's the mustaches of the nineteenth century blog.

the possible return of Friday middle eastern pop star blogging

photo of Dina Hayek(link appears to now be corrupted.)

all electric, no bills

photo(andreadoria.com) of the Ile de France leaving New York Harbor, circa 1936.


When I was a kid I loved animals, and big motorized machines of every type, whether it was an airplane or Jackie Stewart's Tyrrell Formula One car or the big ocean liners of yesteryear. It never occurred to me that my holding these parallel interests might somehow be ironic.

I wanted, for example, to someday fly on the Concorde, which last flew in 2003, so I guess I missed my chance. The big ocean liners are mostly gone too, but like the Concorde they're strictly a niche consumer good for the wealthy. I wonder sometimes if the ghosts of Concorde and the old gran luxe ocean liners are a sort of D.E.W. line for a society that still believes that technology will rescue us from today without requiring us to do anything about our multiple bad habits.

Speaking of French things (and motorized machines, etc.), the 24 hrs of Le Mans is taking place this weekend, and there's a pretty good chance that a diesel-powered racer will win it outright. The rules have been finessed for this year to allow a diesel powered car to be competitive, and Audi and Peugeot decided to field diesel-powered entries to meet said rules.(The scuttlebutt, incidentally, is that because of the massive investments these two companies undertook to make competitive diesel racers, they're concerned that the rules stay the same for a few years so as to not render their cars obsolete in 2008. After all, only one company team can win Le Mans at a time.) I still love motorsports like I did when I was a kid, even if I can see the politics I wouldn't have understood when I was seven or eight.



photo: greatoceanliners.net

addendum: oh yeah-- Audi won.

Abbe, limbo

Or, maybe Ms. Abbe's wondering, how low can he go? Actually the photo is from 1955, so GWB hadn't caused much trouble yet and she wasn't wondering nuthin' bout him.*




* On the other hand even this poll is in the (more recent) past, insofar as the congress of late appears intent on catching up(or down) with the president.

Alvis TE-21

photo: the "mousehole"

Alvis was a British auto manufacturer(1919-1967). The TE-21 was one of their last models, built from 1963-66. Only 348 or 349 TE-21s were made.

Louis Agassiz rejected Darwinism

photo: U.S. Geological Survey

And you can see what happened to his statue.

wikipedia sez: After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Stanford President David Starr Jordan wrote, "Somebody—Dr. Angell, perhaps—remarked that 'Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.'"

speaking of Wikipedia, perhaps you've heard of conservapedia, a wiki knockoff. They bill themselves as a "corrective" to the supposedly P.C. tone of Wikipedia. I don't quite know what to make of it, as some of the entries seem to have a satirical undercurrent, and I mean besides the unintentional sort you might expect. Presently they're recording the number of page views at the bottom of each entry. Here are some tallies, as of approximately 11pm central time:


Kelo desicion 15 times
Joseph McCarthy 273x
Rudy Giuliani 179x
Hillary Clinton 5781x
Charlton Heston 12x
(blogger)Jon Swift 1,130x

1,130 views? Either that's his mom, or somebody's pulling a swift fast one. I wonder how many people read Jon Swift and think he's a conservo, a la Ayn Clouter. Ayn, if you're reading this, please come visit and make fun of me if you feel the urge.

Of course, given its collaborative nature(like all wikis), it may be both a sincerely conservo venture and a put on. They've just started out, and lots of things and people still don't have entries, like John Wayne. Yeah, I know.