==pla|\|ing lakes==

Thursday, November 04, 2004

test

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test

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Saturday, September 04, 2004

R.I.P. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross [See username/password for the NYT at left, for this and other links to Times articles]

Perhaps the most important advocate of a new more compassionate treatment of the dying.

Definitely on my list of the greatest people of the 20th century.

Whatever scientists think about her views of life after death, they continue to be influenced by her methods of caring for the terminally ill. Before On Death and Dying, terminally ill patients were routinely left to face death in a miasma of loneliness and fear, because doctors, nurses and families were generally ill equipped to deal with death.

Dr. Kübler-Ross changed that for many, though by no means for all, dying people. By the 1980's, the study of dying became part of medical and health-care education in United States. "Death and Dying" became an indispensable manual, both for professionals and family members.

[...]

In 1962, she became a teaching fellow at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver. A small, outwardly shy woman who spoke with a heavy German accent, she was nervous when asked to fill in for a popular professor and master lecturer. At first, she was ignored.

But the hall became noticeably quieter when she brought out a 16-year-old patient who was dying of leukemia and asked the students to interview her. Now it was they who seemed nervous.

When Dr. Kübler-Ross prodded the students, they asked the patient about blood tests, chemotherapy and other clinical questions. Finally, the teenager exploded in anger and began posing her own questions.

What was it like not to be able to dream about the high-school prom? Or going on a date? Or growing up? "Why won't people tell you the truth?" she demanded.

When the lecture ended, many students had been moved to tears.

"Now you're acting like human beings, instead of scientists," Dr. Kübler-Ross said.

A bit late but notable enough anyway.

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Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Anti-Flag never bought the shrubspell

"A couple of years ago, we were the only band on Warped going, and I'll be blunt, 'Fuck George Bush and fuck politicians who like George Bush,' " says charismatic bassist-singer Chris #2, calling from a sunbaked Phoenix tour stop. "That time was so bizarre for us. We had people inside the punk movement, that we considered friends, giving back our T-shirts, sending back our records, and totally buying into the nationalism movement. I don't know if they thought George Bush had suddenly taken genius pills, but people who'd previously been demanding a recall were giving him their blind faith."

That's not the case today, and not just because Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 has given Americans something to seriously think about. As the casualties--and the wartime atrocities--mount on both sides, a whole lot of people have become outraged at what's transpired in Iraq over the past year.

"We've been saying all along that on September 10 George Bush was an asshole and on September 12 he was an asshole," Chris #2 says. "This year on the Warped Tour there isn't a band that's not saying that same kind of thing, which I think is awesome. I'm glad that popular sentiment on the tour is a progressive one."

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Nice Shockwave video on surveillance culture from the ACLU

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Looks like we're back

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Thursday, July 01, 2004

Just added A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family by Peter Dimock to my wish list [Literary Saloon]

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Nice long J G Ballard interview [American Samizdat]

Jeannette Baxter: The majority of your novels can be read as provocative celebrations of the transformative and transgressive powers of the imagination. In Millennium People, however, the imagination is spectacularly lacking. Your cosy phrase "the upholstered apocalypse" gestures, rather worryingly, towards an imaginative and critical impasse of sorts, doesn't it? Is this decay in the life of the mind a terminal state of affairs?

J G Ballard: Nothing is ever terminal, thank God. As we hesitate, the road unrolls itself, dividing and turning. But there is something deeply suffocating about life today in the prosperous west. Bourgeoisification, the suburbanisation of the soul, proceeds at an unnerving pace. Tyranny becomes docile and subservient, and a soft totalitarianism prevails, as obsequious as a wine waiter. Nothing is allowed to distress and unsettle us. The politics of the playgroup rules us all.

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change. When Markham (not JGB) uses the phrase "upholstered apocalypse" he reveals that he knows what is really going on in Chelsea Marina. That is why he is drawn to Gould, who offers a desperate escape.

My real fear is that boredom and inertia may lead people to follow a deranged leader with far fewer moral scruples than Richard Gould, that we will put on jackboots and black uniforms and the aspect of the killer simply to relieve the boredom. A vicious and genuinely mindless neo-fascism, a skilfully aestheticised racism, might be the first consequence of globalisation, when Classic Coke® and California merlot are the only drinks on the menu. At times I look around the executive housing estates of the Thames Valley and feel that it is already here, quietly waiting its day, and largely unknown to itself.

Millennium People is still basically unpublished in the US, though the UK edition is available at the above link from amazon.

Spike Magazine's Ballard site.

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Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Abu Ghraib protester in Boston charged with crimes which could mean more jailtime than any soldier involved in the atrocities will get

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Email eavesdropping OK'd by Appeals Court

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Unique "national treasure" archaeological site in Utah finally revealed by Utah rancher

For more than 50 years, rancher Waldo Wilcox kept most outsiders off his land and the secret under wraps: a string of ancient settlements thousands of years old in near perfect condition.

Hidden deep inside eastern Utah's nearly inaccessible Book Cliffs region, 130 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, the prehistoric villages run for 12 miles along Range Creek, where Wilcox guarded hundreds of rock art panels, cliffside granaries, pit houses and rock shelters, some exposing mummified remains of long-ago inhabitants.

The sites were occupied for at least 3,000 years until they were abandoned more than 1,000 years ago, when the Fremont people mysteriously vanished. The Fremont, a collection of hunter-gatherers and farmers, preceded more modern American Indian tribes on the Colorado Plateau.

What sets this ancient site apart from other, better-known ones in Utah, Arizona or Colorado is that it's been left virtually untouched, with arrowheads and pottery shards still covering the ground in places.

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Monday, June 28, 2004

"I never even called the wrong woman beautiful. And then this happened."

Officials and experts in Sicily still can't explain a plague of electrical foul-ups in Canneto di Caronia (they stopped after a complete re-wiring of the village) & keyless car remotes won't work in parts of Las Vegas [The Anomalist]

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3000 held in secret network of jails worldwide in US "anti-terror" effort [MeFi]

Few escape the ghost network of detention facilities, which range from massive prison camps such as that at Guantanamo Bay to naval vessels in the Indian Ocean, so accounts of life inside the new gulag are rare.

One of the most harrowing stories concerns a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, who was arrested by US authorities in late 2002 during a stopover in New York, on suspicion of terrorist activities.

After several days of questioning, the 34-year-old IT specialist was flown to Jordan, where the CIA passed him on to local security officials. He was repeatedly assaulted in Jordan before being driven to Syria, where he was kept in solitary confinement in a 6ft by 3ft cell for several months and repeatedly beaten with cables. All charges were dropped on his release. Arar said last week that he was 'trying to rebuild [his] life'. 'I never did anything to make me a suspect. I could not believe they would send me back to Syria, but they did,' he said. 'They sent me back to be tortured.'

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The Tapeworm Collective: sharing sound files to create collaborative mp3s [Metafilter]

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The Observer's new 80 Bright Young Things (they did this 25 years ago; this is for the UK, BTW)

Shami Chakrabarti, 35
Human rights advocate
Shami Chakrabarti sees herself, 'to some extent, as a recovering lawyer'. Since becoming director of Liberty 10 months ago, she has sought to communicate her belief that human rights are not merely the business of lawyers, but central to a healthy society's values and sense of self-identity. Trained at the LSE before being called to the Bar, Chakrabarti worked for five and a half years at the Home Office. She combines a commitment to human rights with an appreciation of the difficulty of the decisions sometimes faced by governments. 'It's too easy in this job to feel like a professional teenager, pointing out what's wrong, what I'm against,' she says. She cites 'being a mother' as one reason why she cares so much about human rights, and adds that motherhood has given her a greater confidence. 'I'm not sure I'd have put myself forward for this job if it hadn't been for that sense of empowerment.' Appalled by widespread beliefs (as seen, for example, in attitudes surrounding the Soham case) that human rights are somehow at odds with child protection - or indeed, counter terrorism - she is determined to persuade us that, on the contrary, they are vital to both. Beyond that, she says, she has 'no grand plan. But persuading people of that is an awesome task, and also a privilege'.

Dominic Cooper, 25
Actor
TV roles in Band of Brothers and Down to Earth got Dominic Cooper noticed, as did his Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Then Nicholas Hytner gave him major roles in two of the National Theatre's most important productions. Those who saw His Dark Materials, or Alan Bennett's History Boys, know this was no gamble - Cooper is one of our most talented young actors. The next Jude Law?

Chiwetel Ejiofor, 27
Actor
Chiwetel Ejiofor's versatility impresses almost as much as his talent. Electrifying on film, in Dirty Pretty Things and Love Actually , he's equally accomplished on the stage, TV and radio. Now heading for Hollywood to work on a science fiction script for Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Joss Whedon, Ejiofor's prospects are excellent - he's even been suggested as the first black James Bond.

Helen Walsh, 26
Author
At 23, Helen Walsh wrote her first book, Brass, at the kitchen table of her mum's house while coming off antidepressants. The shocking, fearless honesty of the book, which drew on her experiences and studies of drug addiction and the sexual subcultures of Liverpool and Barcelona, saw Walsh compared to Irvine Welsh. An original and compelling writer.

These are people of the moment, but I doubt we'll remember many of them in 25 years (even if you're English)...

Ejiofor was quite good in Dirty Pretty Things, the only one of the sampling above I've heard of.

Director Christopher Nolan made the list too, though the Insomnia re-make (I liked the Norwegian original with Stellan Skarsgård much better) and his apparent involvement in the Batman franchise are disappointing after the wollop of Memento, one of the best films of recent years.

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Sunday, June 27, 2004

Learned about 2 new tools for sharing content: Furl and amplify.com

The former looks particularly interesting for bloggers, since you can store pages that might suffer "link rot". Though -- as Amy Gahran mentions on her Contentious blog -- it's in beta and may well be a subscriber service eventually.

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Saturday, June 26, 2004

Georgia is trying to loot the estates of deceased nursing home residents to pay for their care

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Iain Sinclair's introduction to the Folio Society's new edition of H G Wells' The War of the Worlds [Literary Saloon]

Wells has received insufficient credit as a writer of rhythmic, incantatory prose, long-breath paragraphs to cut against his tight journalistic reportage. The War of the Worlds makes the journey from sensationalist incident to moral parable. Wells predicts an era when fiction and documentary will be inseparable.

I always thought Wells was a lot of fun to read, and clearly a visionary.

The text is available online in several places, though if I had the bucks, I'd love to have this and some of the other Folio Society editions (they seem to run aound $35, not bad considering the apparent quality of the books, and they have introductory discount offers).

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TCM is running famous title director Saul Bass's Phase IV this Wednesday, which many people found pointless, but I might check out anyway (since it's not available anywhere else)

It's an oddball SF thriller about ants getting a little too smart.

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Since their £300 (about $546) funeral stipend has been abolished in a government tax-cutting move, Germans are setting up appointments in Polish and Czech crematoriums to make sure they can afford um death

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