Barcelona in words and links

I got back from Barcelona yesterday at noon. The trip was a success, in that I have always really wanted to go there, and I did not have a bad time. Having read Alain de Botton's excellent book The Art of Travel, I was primed for disappointment, or rather not to have absurd expectations so as to avoid disappointment. Also I went there determined not to do what Aimee used to call "tweaking" and which I am prone to anyway by temperament, and of course it is expected of me, as a middle-aged upper-middle-class woman travelling alone. I took only two changes of clothes and my toothbrush and of course my credit card (I'm not crazy) and I stayed in a hostel in the dead centre of the city. I flew EasyJet and I did not rent a car; it was a break on the cheap. Much Gaudi architecture was seen and inexpertly photographed (see next post) and I did a lot of walking, including the 92 stairsteps up to and down from the hostel. Also Sangria and both red and white Spanish wine were drunk. The wine was great, though very pricey in restaurants. Sangria - hmm. I guess it's OK as a mild tipple in the hot weather. The one paella I had was almost inedible, one of the worst things I ever had. Tapas on the other hand, was a great success. I had one posh (ish) seafood meal down by the harbourfront and felt massively ripped off. At least the seafood was fresh, but my God, you expect at least that as you sit right in front of fishing boats and pay a small fortune for a late lunch. But then there were no side dishes, no garnish, measly portions and they even charge you for the basket of plain french bread like from the supermarket, with butter or olive oil or anything. But I won't go on about it.
Barcelona is lovely, like a sort of older, wiser New Orleans. I had the Paul Simon line about "angels in the architecture" playing through my mind as I rambled around, planless, clueless, slightly intoxicated by the sunshine and wishing I could speak and understand Catalan. I tried but failed to pierce the veil of time and see it as it might have been in the Civil War with George Orwell mooching about in his curious mix of nerd and action hero (a little like me in my own head.)

Barcelona in snapshots

So, here are some pictures of Barcelona, mainly architecture and people-watching scenes:

Big business sees a chance for ethnic and class cleansing

Gary Younge, writing in the Guardian comment section, covers the resurgence of Jim Crow in a more subtle guise, as mostly poor and black Katrina evacuees struggle to vote. New Orleans mayoral elections this year see big businesses ex-friend Nagin as the only black major candidate against two white men who are better friends of big business than he proved to be. The mostly white neighbourhoods are far more resettled, and looking to expand their gentrification into the wastelands left behind. Evacuees in Houston, facing constant harrassment in a daily struggle just to live, now have to find a way to vote postal with no mailing address, or travel hundreds of miles just to exercise their right to vote.

Bye, bye, Scott McClellan

Don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

I really like the Queen

I really like that she does stuff like this. I would be very disappointed to find out that it was the brain child of some civil servant/courtier. It doesn't sound like that sort of thing, but like something she would just think would be "fun". Like, hey, I'm the Queen, I have been very very good for years, I am 80 years old soon, why not? And then we are watching - yawn - yet another "reality show" "competition", this one to see which famous celebri-chef will cook a grand birthday feast in June for HM and a few hundred guests. But get this, she doesn't choose the menu, the British public chooses it. These are the same people who vote which D-list celebs have to eat slugs in Australia, so I think it is mighty brave of her to agree to this. She is a game old bird, in a lot of ways. And you gotta respect that. I still don't want to swear allegiance to her, though.

Can you judge a book by its cover?

The Guardian Education section has this article about the old proverb "You can't judge a book by its cover". According to recent research, apparently you can. Well, at least, 77% of the time you can.

Piters and Stokmans's unabashedly bookish study, called Genre Categorization and Its Effect on Preference for Fiction Books, was published just a few years ago, in the journal Empirical Studies of the Arts. Their experiment builds on a pilot study Piters conducted in the mid-1990s. There, he found evidence that a book cover "has to visually represent what the book is about since that might be an important cue in identifying a book as belonging to a specific genre".

Of course, I couldn't help thinking, that's a pretty old proverb, and probably when it first started, book covers looked like this:-

Thousands Rally for Immigrants Across U.S. - Yahoo! News

There have been times lately when I have despaired for my country. News from the USA often speaks of a people who have lost their heart, their compassion and their greatness.This reassures me.

America's ghost town

A review of a hip hop video by Louisiana artist Juvenile is a forum for a searching look at embattled black New Orleans. Things are not really improving there, people, despite the fiery grass-roots spirit of a lot of black and white musicians and workers of all kinds. Valiant community effort will only get you so far against obstacles like these. From City Pages.

Barcelona

I am going to Barcelona for May Day. I will post more later when I have the time. Oh, yes, there will be pictures.

The left hand of God

Here is an interview with Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun magazine, briefly a policy adviser to Pres. Clinton, and now the author of The Left Hand of God - Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. This is from an online magazine about the environment called The Weekly Grist.

The lonesome death of Rachel Corrie

A play based on the life of Rachel Corrie was cancelled in the US. Billy Bragg has written a song about it, to the tune of Bob Dylan's haunting and memorable ballad, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll". You can download it from The Guardian.

Swami Beyondananda calls for up-wising

This is priceless - and necessary.

In 2005, Americans had to face the sad realization that the Bush Administration's "pro-life" stance appears to be limited to the unborn and the brain-dead. Despite being panned by critics everywhere, the Iraqi Horror Picture Show continued its run, as thousands and thousands of born fetuses - ours and theirs -- lost their right to life. While we may or may not have saved face by staying there, we have most definitely lost ass. And we've been assured we'll be stuck in that morass until -- well, until there's no more ass to lose.

The next logical step

A few years ago, I read and reviewed a very clever SF novel called Jennifer Government. Some people reading this book might have thought: clever premise, but it can't happen here. Oh, yeah? I just hear about how Target (a private corporation with which I do have some personal history, I confess) is now making a nice little profit on selling forensic services to police and FBI, because of course a private company can afford to have the highest state-of-the-art facility when it is needed to protect their property. How long before the next logical step, and the police will need to charge crime victims so they can afford the fees to use the high-tech labs they contract for from private corporations?

Blogkeeping - meta-blog me

I still occasionally indulge in the blog-related sport of link tracking. If I click on the counter at the bottom (and I think this will work for you too, if you're interested. No? Thought not.) I can choose to view the last 100 page hits by the referring page. The vast majority of them are search results and this is where it gets interesting. Two things of interest to me are trends and being number one for "obscure" searches. In the trends world, there was a time when I got a lot of hits for searches on Jive Turkey (a turkey restaurant in NYC that I mentioned in passing on Deborama's Kitchen) and Aimee Tyler, a minor soft-porn actress or model or something (I had a really hard time finding a picture clean enough to link to on a family-friendly blog.) This was because of the caption to the family reunion picture, where my daughter Aimee and my nephew Tyler just happened to be standing next to each other. These two entities must have fallen out of fashion because I hardly ever see these search terms any more. Almost from the beginning, I have had tons of hits from people who try to widen their pathetic horizons by typing the word "sex" into a Yahoo or Google search. In fact, for at least the past two years, this has accounted for about 40% of all hits and at least 50% of search result hits. My ranking in terms of where in the list Deborama falls has moved up steadily from low three figures to 88th to 30th (with Yahoo.) This result only happens if the searcher uses the directory function rather than searching the whole web. I guess commercial online sex shops don't use the directory, which is really stupid of them. If you search "the web" for sex, you get 558 million hits, but if you search the Yahoo directory, you get less than 2000. I am not sure where Deborama falls amongst the 558 million, but it is there, although obviously this list is very volatile. Now, here's an interesting trend. After sex, the highest number of search hits are for people searching for recipes, hitting Deboramas' Kitchen. And by far, at least 90%, are searching for a recipe for hash-browns. Who knew? And of course, although these anonymous searchers have no way to know this, I actually do have one of the best hash-browns recipes in the world.
On the other track, there a few interesting searches where a Deborama blog comes out at number one. For instance, I have a super-meta-links page called Deborama's Fund of Knowledge and it comes out first on a search for "fund of knowledge". I will try not to let that go to my head. In the recent statistics, there is another of those serendipitous hits; I posted a link to a story in Fried Green al-Qaedas about a veteran's hospital in the late 1970s that mentioned the phrase "POW mentality". The first hit on the search term was my post, the post I linked to was number four and the main American POW-MIA website was number five.

Supersize my paycheque!

From the LabourStart mailing list, I heard about the quixotic battle of New Zealand fast food workers in the organisation called Unite to organise a union for minimum-wage workers at McDonalds, as well as KFC, Burger King, Pizza Hut and a call centre. The group has already coordinated the first ever strike at Starbucks.
McDonalds is represented in negotiations by the infamous union-busters Teasdale Associates. They successfully busted a service-workers union attempt to organise fast-food workers in the 1990s, but the government of New Zealand is likely to be more supportive of labour than was the US government at any time in the last thirty years. An attempted strategy of giving exclusive pay-rises to non-union members backfired when Unite won a legal challenge against it. See, in America they probably would have got away with that.
In related breaking news, a journalist was assaulted by a McDonalds negotiator. See the Unite website, supersizemypay.com, for more on that and other Unite issues and campaigns.

Kirbe-e-e-e-e-e PUCKETT!

Another obituary and another tragically young passing - I found out that Kirby Puckett has died at the age of 45 through the City Pages online (I am a little late reading it, though and it is a week since his passing.) Kirby Puckett brings back memories of the two Twins wins in the World Series, and the first one I experienced, I think it was 1987, I attended the victory parade with my son Carey who was 8 or 9 at the time. I remember being overwhelmed by the size and energy of the crowd (and a passing wistful wish that you could get anything like that kind of crowd for a peace demonstration.) And I remember seeing tough little guy Kirby, in an open-topped limo with his team-mates, his bald pate gleaming above a plush mink coat. There is a certain kind of exuberant classless, tasteless classiness that poor boys (or girls) with hearts of gold exhibit when they hit the big time that I just love, and Kirby had that to the nines. The linked tribute describes his dynamic style of play so I won't try to top that. But he was a true Minnesota hero.

Penzance, St. Ives, Mousehole, Newlyn, Land's End and Porthcurno

We are having a great time here. We are staying in a four-storey Georgian Terrace with a smashing view of the harbour of Penzance and St. Michael's Mount. It is easy walking distance from anything you want, from charming seafarer's pubs where the dog is welcome and the beer is warm and strong, to a fancy deli with great local produce, to a little cafe that serves hevva cake and pasties and crab sandwiches. The weather was great for two days, then rained for two, and is now OK (and very sunny). This morning we drove in the direction of Land's End, failed to visit the Telegraph Museum because it's closed, and happened upon a gorgeous and completely deserted beach. I have provided one picture of the beach as a taster. I have tons of pictures of varying quality. We buy fresh seafood at a fishmonger attached to the wholesale fish market in Newlyn and cook it in our pretty well-equipped kitchen; so far we have had scallops, gurnard and sea bass for dinner.
Yesterday in the rain we went to St. Ives. I got no pictures there, but I will try to find some; it's amazing, and I wouldn't want to try to drive there. We went to the Tate and I had a revelation about JMW Turner, who I had never at all appreciated before. There will be more later, both words and pictures.

Devastation

Is it a sign of my advancing years that this blog seems to be turning into an obituary blog? Granted, it's a good one, and the esteemed people who have passed away in the three years I have been blogging fill me with feelings of awe and respect and sometimes, inadequacy.
Linda Smith - she was five years my junior, I had enormous respect for her political mind, self-possession and acerbic wit. And I didn't even know she was ill. Died yesterday of ovarian cancer at the bright young age of 48. Life is just not fair.

Bittersweet, like the coffee

And like Blanche Dubois, depending on the kindness of strangers. It's New Orleans first post-Katrina Mardi Gras.

Flying kills

George Monbiot is never one to mince words, and todays column in the Guardian is a classic example. The uncompromising headline above, Flying Kills, is prelude to an uncompromising look at the massive impact that air travel has on the planet. It looks unflinchingly (well, maybe a little flinchingly, in fact) at the disparity in income levels between those who use the air the most, those who can barely ever afford to, and those who suffer most from the consequences and the article is especially unsparing of those who know perfectly well how harmful it is but have no intention at all of changing their own behaviour. Then of course, from the personal to the political, there is the institutionalised support for the continued growth (a new Heathrow every five years) and the almost total lack of viable alternatives, whether in modes of travel or fuel for aircraft.

I need a holiday!

I am sure my few remaining faithful readers are weary of my apologies for not blogging as often as I used to. Is it age, work, stress, or a combination of the three? I was using my new fitness regimen as an excuse for awhile, but as often happens, I have already slacked off a bit on that. I haven't totally dropped it, and my intentions are to keep it up. I missed yoga for three weeks in a row, while my yoga teacher, Mitch, was in India on a training holiday-cum-retreat. I am going back tonight to yoga. I joined the workout-all-you-want plan at Sketchley Hall, my saviour of fitness place, but so far have only attended one class and blown off three, so not a very good start. But I have been fighting off some kind of exhaustion/illness thing. Saturday night it peaked, whatever it was (probably hormonal) and I went to bed at 5:30 pm, slept till 10 pm, got up and ate a bowl of cereal, back to bed at midnight and slept till 7:30 Sunday morning. I have felt much better ever since.
And it's a good thing, too, because I am finally taking an actual holiday! The last one was 11 months ago, when I went to Atlanta. On Saturday, DH and I set off for a week in Penzance. I am taking my laptop, and there are rumoured to be wi-fi hotspots in a couple of cafes and pubs in the town, so I can possibly blog from there. I am taking my camera, too, so there will be pictures.

And here is where it will be . . .

Penzance.

Saudi girls just wanna have fun

In Veil Power (The Guardian) Brian Whitaker deconstructs the myths and truths about the place of women in society in Saudi Arabia. Many of the practices that the West assumes are Muslim "law" and oppressive and hateful to women are, in fact, customs backed up by an often tortured interpretation of the Koran and the choice of women more than of men. The underlying assumption in cultures throughout the Middle East is that sex is an overpowering force, that women cannot help but be temptresses, and that men cannot possibly control their lustful natures in a sexually unsegregated society. This not only leads to women having a completely separate existence, but it leads Arab men into serious trouble when they travel or migrate to or work in the West, where there is an assumption that men are responsible for their own behaviour towards women. So, what's in it for the women of regimes like Saudi Arabia where the "Muslim" way of life is so entrenched that it hardly matters that it's not actually enshrined in law. Well, for one thing, they get better parties.

Who do you think I am?

Go to http://kevan.org/johari?name=Deborama and tell me what I'm like. By the way, I didn't pick the adjectives, they are part of the model.

Saving Private Henrietta

Behind the seemingly benign world in which we live there are several unimaginable holocausts going on. This is a truth many of us live with daily, and the medical men call it, inaccurately, depression. I have seen depression up close and it is various and at time elusive, but what this is, is existential angst. You cannot possibly survive if you are prone to existential angst and are also an idealist-perfectionist, that is, if you think that for naught the struggle aught availeth if the problem cannot be totally solved. Schindler could have done nothing if he had required of himself saving every victim, or even every victim he saw. Fortunately for me, I am not an idealist-perfectionist. As a "Hindu trapped in the body of a Methodist," I combine serene fatalism with robust pragmatism.
Today I am referring to the holocaust of the chickens. Please don't think I am joking here, for the suffering of chickens is appalling, is wide and deep; and it is cruel anthrocentricism to think that chickens don't matter just because they look a little foolish to us. I was gladdened beyond description to learn that the UK has an active and practical battery hen rescue operation in place. I urge everyone who can to get involved to the best extent they can. Please don't be immobilised (nor delude yourself) just because we cannot save all the chickens.

I heard the birds

This is all about me, my body, my ears and eyes. Specifically about my ears. At the age of merely 49, I had cataract operations on both eyes. As a result, my vision went from cloudy and problematic to excitingly clear and the best visual acuity without glasses I have had since my teenage years. A few weeks ago, at the still relatively young age of 53, I had hearing aids fitted for both ears. This too has been subtly life-changing. But, whereas I was extremely excited the first time I went out with my eye-patch 24 hours after the first cataract operation to see the dramatic differences in colour, light and texture, and I still, four years later, love to gaze at the night sky where I can more or less make out, I would guess, 30 to 40 percent of the stars, I did not immediately get that sense of wonder and awe from the improvement to my hearing. I could tell the difference; I could hear a lot of creaks and rustles, the Muzak at the dreary little shopping centre in Hinckley, cars overtaking me and the nearby conversation of boring strangers, all of which had been silent to me before. But last evening, temporarily back on the trains while my ride-share guy has a brief holiday, I heard the dusk chorus (if that's even a term) of birds in the little strip of wilderness alongside Leicester train station. The birds had always been there, but I had never heard them over the buzz of the busy train station. At last, I have the wonder of near-perfect hearing.

What happens when kids are raised vegetarian

That's my boy sitting there with all that meat.

Coretta Scott King

The widow of Martin Luther King, Jr. passed away in Mexico yesterday. She was a giant in the world of civil rights, human rights and the peace movement. Her body arrived in Atlanta today. NPR has a musical tribute, which is appropriate, since before becoming Mrs. Martin Luther King, she was set for a career as a concert artist.
Here is the official schedule for memorial events in Atlanta. A bit of controversy arose over funeral arrangements. Mrs. King's body will lie in state in the Georgia Capitol Rotunda, then a public viewing at Ebenezer Baptist, followed by a musical tribute / memorial service across the street. But the official funeral will be at suburban megachurch in Lithonia GA, some miles outside Atlanta, an establishment where Mrs. King's daughter Bernice is an elder. Eventually, CSK will be interred beside her husband at the King Center for Non-violence but she will be temporarily buried at a large cemetery until a new crypt can be prepared.

Guardian on the cancellation of The West Wing

Bye bye Bartlet. Josiah we hardly knew ye. David Remnick, in the Media Guardian, takes the measure of TWW, albeit affectionately:

In between the riffs of snappy repartee, Bartlet's noble satraps would step to centre stage and unburden themselves of some of the most mind-bendingly un-ironic speeches about virtue and public life since Tacitus carried a briefcase.

Yeah, maybe so, but some of us need that in these cynical times.

The Last Place on Earth

City Pages, the weekly newspaper of the Twin Cities, has an in-depth story about the fate of the last wave of Hmong immigrants to come to Minnesota - rampant homelessness. Whereas many Hmong came to the Twin Cities and made a fairly decent life, starting in the early 1980s, those arriving in the 21st century, often to be with their extended families, are finding terrible unemployment and an impossibly tight housing market.

Sweet Victory: Huge Win for Wal-Mart Workers

Get your latest Wal-Mart news here. Wal-Mart and its many transgressions has been a recurrent theme of this blog, another theme that I have been regrettably neglecting in recent months. I will try to do better.

Excuse me, weren't you in the Fall?

Dave Simpson is trying to track down everyone who has ever been a member of Mark E Smith's band, The Fall. Although I am not personally very familiar with The Fall, I plan to get more familiar with them, because I like what little I have heard so far. The late John Peel liked the band so much that he said all other rock bands should be measured against them. This article attempts to give an insight into the surreal world of the band, which was a sort of despotism of anarchy, shaped by the cruelly creative whimsy of Smith. The 42 people who used to be in The Fall all have stories of being abandoned in bars, flown to Europe for a gig and then sent home before it started, or hit on the head with chairs when Smith thought their style was becoming too "slick". Sounds like fun, eh?

Massive puppy boom in aftermath of Katrina

Gulfport MS has a puppy crisis. Amongst the survivors of hurricane Katrina are a lot of dogs, some homeless, some still with their owners although both are without proper housing. I expect nature's drive to repopulate after a disaster has taken hold of the dogs, and the animal shelter is now overwhelmed with an unseasonal glut of puppies, as well as the numerous strays still being picked up in the abandoned neighbourhoods and environs of the devastated coastal town.

Blogkeeping

I have finally started the job of rehabilitating my broken book review blog. I have taken the lazy way out: I copied in the modified template I use for this blog and now I am in the process of adding back in the margin stuff. So Deborama's Book Reviews and Store is at the moment more readable again but is still somewhat "under construction". As soon as I have it looking nice and get some of my huge backlog of posts up there (mostly book reviews) I will do the same for Deborama's Kitchen. So, fans of my auxiliary blogs (all both of you) - be patient and good things will come.

City Pages - the restaurant scene in the Twin Cities

This is something I keep up with, in a lax and desultory fashion. I don't know why. I no longer live in Minneapolis and I probably never will again, but in some part of my heart, I can never leave. And then they don't really have a restaurant "scene" around these parts, do they? They just barely have restaurants at all, what I would call restaurants, anyway. So Minneapolis now has two kosher restaurants, even though only an estimated 2% of the Jewish population there keep kosher. (And the Jewish population isn't that large, either. NYC it ain't for all its aspirations.) But of course, in the Twin Cities, only a small minority of their clientele are even going to be Jewish.
I miss eating out.
(Cross-posted at Deborama's Kitchen.)

Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons

There is a brilliant commentary article by Richard Drayton in today's Guardian.

More Intelligent Design madness

Excerpts from a follow-up story to the recent court decision (see previous post) knocking down a school district's policy of teaching ID as science:

Both sides are looking to Kansas as the most likely new battlefield in the culture war over education. Last month, the state's education board voted for new teaching standards, redefining science to include the supernatural [italics mine - because I am just dumbstruck] and encouraging Kansas science teachers to question the validity of evolution in their classrooms. If a local authority within the state accepts the board's recommendation and changes its school curriculum to play down evolution, it could trigger another legal battle.
Steve Abrams, the Kansas board chairperson, told The Associated Press that the Pennsylvania and Kansas cases were very different. In Dover, science teachers had been made to read out a statement in biology class pointing to holes in evolution theory and recommending pupils look into an intelligent-design library textbook called Of Pandas and People.
Abrams said the Kansas board was not specifically advocating intelligent design, only questioning evolution. . .
Meanwhile, a federal appeals court in Georgia is considering the case of an Atlanta suburb that had stickers put into biology textbooks, describing evolution as "a theory, not a fact".

Trust Georgia to take the lazy way out. Stickers in textbooks! When I was in the Georgia schools, they would have suspended you for doing that, and now the administration is doing it, and smirking behind their hands at the heathens in the "fed'ral gummint".

Antievolution idea can't be public school class, judge rules

Good news, good sense. I reckon that "intelligent design" is not false on its face, the way hard-core believers in the religion I call scientism believe. But it is not science. And it is not religion either. It is something almost unheard of in the 21st century, a little thing the ancients used to call "philosophy". And Grid knows, we can't be teaching that in the public schools. Wouldn't that be confusing?
By the way, G. Trudeau has a really trenchant observation on the implications of disbelief in evolution. Perhaps, in the trenches of medical care, there are nothing but atheists? (Another negative consequence of the death of philosophy, imho.)

Political Angels

The Guardian Backbencher, a weekly satirical political online newsletter, has these four fabulous cartoon angels on offer for free. Just download any of the four PDF files and paste onto thin cardboard, cut it out and assemble it for your "holiday" tree. More politically correct than Birmingham's Winterval and funnier than a drunken Santa Claus.

Buy your way into heaven!

Weekly Grist is a "tree-free" (that is, online only) weekly environmental magazine, and they have hit upon a very clever fund-raising strategy. They are selling officially authorised Indulgences which can be offset against any environmental sin. And, unlike the original, pre-Reformation catholic church indulgences, they can be purchased on the installment plan, so they are not only available to those who have loads of dosh (which of course you get by committing more sins.)

It's a dog's life

Some people are so stressed out by their jobs that they have a whole separate blog to bitch about how bad their job is. Up until about a year ago, I really liked my job, although I have never liked the 2 to 3 hours of train commuting and certain other specific peripheral aspects of it. However, in the last year, the department of the large, mostly profitable international company I work for has been beset with diminishing revenue, lay-offs, the departure of the most capable, the selecting out of some of the less capable, interpersonal stresses, the madness of paranoia, and general decline in morale. I think a lot of us "left behind" are somewhat in denial about how stressed we are.
A co-worker of ours is blind, and he is accompanied to work each day by a guide dog (I will call the dog Sarah - not her real name.) She is relatively young and new to her job, having replaced another dog who retired last year. She is usually quite sober and professional, though she occasionally "breaks the rules" a bit to show affection. So, this evening, as usual on a Friday, about half of us got ready to leave at the stroke of 4 pm. Much switching off of computers, putting on of coats, nonchalant behaviour, lest the management would think us too eager to leave. But Sarah, bless her, picked up the vibe - and ran with it. Tongue hanging out, foolish doggy grin, bounding around the room from desk to desk. She was ecstatic that it was Friday, and she didn't care who knew it!

City Pages - Sgt. Briggs's War

The Twin Cities' weekly newspaper City Pages tells the story of yet more underestimated and underfunded support for US soldiers in Iraq through the story of one Iowa man, grievously injured in Iraq, hurriedly retired from the National Guard and now receiving care at the VA hospital in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis VA is one of four new "polytrauma" treatment centers set up to handle the new complexes of injuries that soldiers are experiencing (and surviving) in 21st century warfare. But how are they going to cope with the incoming flood of veterans from this war on the one hand, and massive funding cuts on the other?

Thinking nationally and acting pro-actively . . .

In Which parts of the U.S. have put themselves in nature's way? the online environmental magazine Weekly Grist attempts to predict where the next Katrina-style disaster for the US might occur. Complete with interactive topgraphic map and scary symbols.

This is not the country that I once knew

Former US President Jimmy Carter's article in last week's Observer is a strong and unequivocal condemnation of the current administration's abrogation of international treaties and agreements, and the inevitable forteiture of international respect and credibility that follows. And, as a man of faith (a faith far more demonstrable and sincere than that of Mr. "God-told-me-to-attack-Iraq" Bush), Carter also deplores the increasing militarism and fundamentalism of American Christianity. A must-read article.

My yoga retreat weekend

This post is a little late in coming. I got back from my weekend Sunday night, intending to post right away, with some nice pictures. But I have a "new" laptop and thus I had a few technical glitches (or maybe just senior moments - DH, don't say a word!) And I had a terrible Monday night experience courtesy of Central Trains and Midland Mainline, although I forgive Midland Mainline because they apologised and sent me home in a taxi. (Other than that little bit, I don't want to talk about it.)
So, the Dru Yoga Centre near Bangor in Wales, is very lovely. Pure air and water, vegetarian foods, gentle vibes, warm and cosy "chalets". I particularly enjoyed the walk through the rolling countryside to a nearby bubbling stream (or small river). The yoga was OK too, although I only attended half the sessions; after all, I was there to relax. There will be a link for all the pictures soon.

Experian study analyses Katrina impact

Experian USA will be conducting a study to track the outstanding payable balances of 635,000 businesses, the large majority of which are small businesses employing fewer than 50 people. The data will be broken down by major sector, SIC codes, and size and age of the businesses, as well as geographically. So far, it is known that businesses in the affected areas had outstanding payables of $40 billion. Repayment on invoices and debt is a way of tracking business recovery.
This is a good thing, but only a fly's-eye view of the whole economic picture, in my opinion. (Trust me! I have a bachelor's degree - in Economics!) In order to pay off debt and try to claw a way back into the marketplace, many small businesses will slash staff. This will of course have a ripple effect. Already my relatives in the area tell about the impossibility of booking any motel accommodation for at least a year. They were all snatched up in the first weeks by insurance, consulting and construction firms flocking into the Gulf region to work on, and no doubt profit from, the recovery. I have nothing against profit, of course, but this does rather leave the remaining residents "high and dry" (sick wordplay, I confess) when it comes to jobs and housing. The study is not measuring any of this, but somebody should be.

Wanna piece of this?

First, a jab to the nose! Then a hook to the temple! Next, knight takes bishop on D5! Testing both brains and brawn, it is supposedly the ultimate alpha-male sport.

Yes, it's . . . chess boxing! Deborama is absolutely fascinated by this new international sport that started out life as a very subtle performance art piece and now nets its artist-founder a tidy little income.

Finding My Religion, by Diablo Cody

Diablo Cody's all-purpose lapsed-Catholic (but not totally lapsed) confession of faith in City Pages is incredibly moving, despite the clever, hip, former-sex-worker tone. Read every word, there are some real gems of writing there.

CIA Tour with Ginger Bear

I kid you not!

More than 300 years of the Raj . . .

. . . and the British have no idea about curry! There is a joke about a British lad (of, say, 50) who has had a curry late at night, after a marathon drinking session in one or more pubs, nearly every Friday night of his adult life. Then one day he has one for lunch. And is appalled at how unpleasantly hot and pungent it is! And British men, in particular, do not know how to make curry. They are always very proud of their fiery creations, with loads of half-cooked onion, tinned tomatoes, extra chili, and a huge wad of raw madras curry paste dumped in at the last minute. It's more of a trial by ordeal than a meal deal, let me tell you. (See the excellent cookbook Cooking Like Mummiji, touted on these pages, for lessons in a better way.)
The catering service at my place of employment is officially "celebrating Diwali". Far be it from me to criticise their attempts at cultural sensitivity, but today they featured a Beef Madras. Besides being Diwali (or near to it, anyway) it is also into the last few days of Ramadan. So who exactly is going to eat this Beef Madras, amongst the Indian and Pakistani members of our workforce? Hindus (hello!) don't eat beef (if they are devout) and Muslims don't eat lunch during Ramadan (if they're observant.) So there you go. All the British lads can "celebrate Diwali" by devouring sacred cow cooked in a manner that would make Mummiji blanch. I saw one of our Asian or British Asian employees or contractors special-ordering a Vegetarian Madras, so I popped into the queue behind him and said "I'll have what he's having." But our "chef" is a British lad and it was - well, pretty bad. All hot and sour where it should have been pungent and alluring, no subtlety, loads of onions. Nice try, but no banana.