After only a few posts, it’s too early to tell if this blog from Lebanon will be interesting/valuable, but for now there are some good images and a brief history that I probably shouldn’t admit contains more than I knew before.
Kristin?
Author: Julia
hot scalia action
This article pretty much speaks for itself.
santorum
I don’t know enough about the Democratic candidates for US Senate to have picked a favorite (I figure I have some time, since the election isn’t until 2006), but it’s clear to me that Santorum needs to go. Here’s one synopsis of why:
Daily Kos :: Definitive Rick Santorum Diary: Your Talking Points
My personal dislike for Santorum is all based on things that I can’t find links for, but you might be able to find your own reasons for disliking him right on his own website. He is, I guess, a pretty typical Bushite, complete with talk about the culture of life, activist judges, and how liberals encourage pedophilia and man on dog action. The normal stuff.
Bob Casey’s the candidate who currently appears in the best position to defeat Santorum. Here’s a list of other announced and potential candidates, some of whom might be more palatable.
I’m pretty much of the “anybody but Santorum†mindset.
next generation
Ohhh. The newly redesigned Corvette has been announced. The word, I think, is sexy.
untitled
The Untitled Project is a series of photographs of urban settings accompanied by a graphical text layout. The photographs have been digitally stripped of all traces of textual information. The text pieces show the removed text in the approximate location and font as it was found in the photograph.
It’s really interesting to me what we can fill in on our own, and what our eyes keep looking for. I went through looking first at the image alone, then at the text, and then the two together. I think adding the words made the biggest difference on this one.
freedom on the march
The UN has released its third annual Arab Human Development Report. According to the New York Times, the report says that Arabs don’t have very much freedom. I would say that while this is an issue that needs attention, it does not come as a surprise.
More interestingly, the article notes that our lovely president tried to suppress the report because it suggests that “the United States and Israel have also played a part in suppressing Arab freedom.â€
Don’t like that someone’s saying you’re restricting freedom? Restrict their ability to say it. Seems to me like that’s a classic and time-honored strategy.
progress, finally
Iraqi political parties have finally begun to select leaders. From the NYT:
The assembly is expected to name Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader, as president; Adel Abdul Mahdi, a prominent Shiite Arab politician, as vice president; and Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, the Sunni Arab president of the interim government, as the other vice president.
viaticum
I assume that everyone has, by now, heard of the Pope’s death.
On my way into town tonight, I noticed that the flag at Bob Evans was at half mast, and wondered who’d died. Now I know.
I hope that…the heaven Catholics believe the Pope deserves is a reality for him. For all of us.
Wildwood Writers’ Festival
One of the perks of being a student (as opposed to having one of those “job†things) is that if I feel like skipping class, I can. It doesn’t happen often, but when I heard that Jack Veasey and Barbara DeCesare were going to be reading on campus as part of the Wildwood Writers’ Festival, well, it was clear that I wouldn’t be attending my Macroeconomics class. And when I subsequently heard that Gene Hosey was going to be reading immediately after that, Comparative Politics went out the window. And so it happened that my morning yesterday was spent listening to some very fine poets.
The combination of poets was wonderful. Jack with an incredible gift for seeing the world from the inside out, treating his subjects with such an honesty, gentleness, and disarming wit that they themselves become the poems, riding on his tender eloquence. Barbara with her frank cynicism and ebullient reading style, shattering expectations and illusions. Gene with his jaded hopefulness, recognizing absurdity and challenging us to keep going anyway (maybe this is Camus’s definition of hope?).
And then there was Joe Weil, the surprise of the day. I don’t know how many people there were already familiar with him (someone must have been, right?), but I’d never heard of him. This guy, it turns out, is real and raw, funny and moving, and one hell of a poet. I hope some of the local hosts are able to get him to come back.
The biggest drawback to the event was that so much of the audience was required by their professors to be there. While it meant that the room was pretty full for most of the day, it also meant that the energy level was lower than it could have been. I also didn’t attend the open reading the followed the last session of the day, so I don’t know what that was like. If you were there, post a comment and tell us how it went!
Today is the second and final day of the festival. I’m half considering going in at noon to hear Philip Billings, who I’ve heard is good, but, ultimately, will probably not end up doing so. So if you do, let me know how he was.
Antique Porn
This is a very interesting site, but not work safe. It’s erotica/porn/general nudity since the invention of photography. It’s amazing how what we think is beautiful has changed over just 120 years or so. Not only are the body shapes very different, but even many of the faces would be considered ugly by today’s standards.
Other random shots I thought were interesting: