I think all gentiles should stand up and tell all our Jewish brothers and sisters that we will never again let happen to them what was done to them in the last century by people of our ilk. And that we will defend them at all costs. No 2, that position has no integrity if we will not do the same for Palestinian people. They need to know and not trust us when we say that we will defend them if we don't defend those people who are in worse shape right now. The religion I was brought up in teaches us that we will be judged by the way we treat the least among us and we've lost our way on the Christian end of things. I think the hell that has developed in the occupied territories is now back page news in America, and I think it needs to be front page news because it's partly the core of what needs to be addressed with all the issues around September 11.
[Source: Guardian UK]
My mother sent a pre-Christmas present for the baby. "Open long before Christmas," the card reads. The wrapping paper is autumnal and reminds me that we will be in the tropics for Thanksgiving. Pictures of autumn leaves, harvest scenes, pheasants.
The other night, out of curiosity, I asked my wife, "How many of your grandparents grew up on farms?" "Three," she reckoned. Same here. Six of eight were born into a world so different from my own suburban upbringing. Do we even know what it means to give thanks for a bountiful harvest anymore?
I think it plausible that there is a hereditary sense of attachedness to the land; an attachment that slips away the further we uproot ourselves from our agrarian past, but at the same time calls out for a return to older values. I am not sure I could return to my roots in Midwestern America, but I feel the call of land, somewhere.
We are saving my mother's gift for the 1st of December, when we return from our holidays and open the first frame on our advent calendar.
Today is my daughter's first birthday. Amazing how the first year passes; how she grew from being an all-needy infant to having a real personality.
We have to decide soon what to do about the MMR triple-vaccination. She has already had the measles jab, so it is less of a stretch to think that she could get the others done individually, although we do not yet know where this might be done.
For me, looking in her eyes, at the bright spark of recognition, interest and attention, it seems hardly worth the risk that there could be some problem in the combination of the vaccines that would cause her to 'develop' autism.
I know very little about autism, and do not wish to offend in my ignorance (thus the 'quotes' above). Not long ago I had a lengthy discussion with a man whose daughter was autistic, and he was passionately convinced of the MMR link. It made me think how little concern you give to the plight of others until it happens close to you. And how people whose suffering is high-profile tend to go on and advocate on behalf of their fellow sufferers. It's rather rarer to have the unafflicted take such initiatives on their own, no? Food for thought...
Yann Martel won this year's Booker Prize, twice, kinda. And now he's being accused of lifting the idea from a Brazilian writer who published a similar title decades before. What's interesting is that he has admitted to knowing about the book and being inspired by it. And that he has managed to insult the original writer, Moacyr Scliar, by calling his story "a brilliant premise ruined by a lesser writer." 'Ems feudin' words.
I usually wind up reading the Booker winner. Well, usually because we were living in London and had ready access. But we're here in Brazil - not exactly caught up in this kerfuffle - but I've got a lot on my plate just now and will probably wind up giving this one a miss. Might be interesting to see if the other title, Max and the Cats, is even in print here.
Having left my dictionary at home this morning, I was struggling for a particular form of the subjunctive for the irregular Portuguese verb "to come" - vir. I googled, and Wow! I found Orbis Latinus. This is a very detailed site covering the Romance languages. Although there are some holes in the coverage, this is the most comprehensive coverage of the subject(s) that I have come across since my interest turned to learning Portuguese. This is one of those sites I could lose a few hours browsing. For instance, look at this page on the history of the Portuguese language.
Distributed Proofreaders is so completely in line with my views on bringing more information into the public domain that I signed up immediately after I came across the article on Slashdot, and I've now added their URL to my front page. I just did my first page for them - from Life in Mexico by Frances Calderon de la Barca.
The discipline of logging every web-article you find interesting and spelling out your reaction takes the journal in a very different direction, because unlike the private life-events of a diary, every weblog-reader can share the exact same experience of reading the web-article, and so know exactly what you're reacting to. -- Jorn Barger, Robot Wisdom
Jorn Barger is one of the originators of the concept of the weblog, or at least he is one of the first to put the idea into practice. I admire the cleanness of his weblog; his unwillingness to add bells and whistles that overwhelm the simplicty. It is the words that matter. I thought about keeping my weblog that way, but in the end decided that the ability (and ease) of posting via Blogger, especially from here in Brazil, outweighed the desire for simplicity. And, in truth, Blogger is pretty low overhead.
Development based on high per capita energy quanta and intense professional care is the most pernicious of the West's missionary efforts - a project guided by an ecologically unfeasible conception of human control over nature, and by an anthropologically vicious attempt to replace the nests and snakepits of culture by sterile wards for professional service. The hospitals that spew out the newborn and reabsorb the dying, the schools run to busy the unemployed before, between and after jobs, the apartment towers where people are stored between trips to the supermarkets, the highways connecting garages form a pattern tatooed into the landscape during the short development spree. These institutions, designed for lifelong bottle babies wheeled from medical centre to school to office to stadium begin now to look as anomalous as cathedrals, albeit unredeemed by any esthetic charm. --Ivan Illich