Found in my electronic chapbook.

One very preliminary study has used transcranial magnetic stimulation over the temporal lobe to induce the sensation of being visited by the muse – an experience presumably linked to drive more than talent. p. 77

From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer”s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

Suspecting that there might be crates of automatic rifles and ammunition buried among the bags of rice and other relief supplies sitting on planes read to take off for cyclone-ravaged Myanmar, the generals withheld landing permission while thousands died. It took them six days to grant permission. President George Bush acted faster to Hurricane Katrina.

From The Australian:

With up to 100,000 feared dead and one million missing, Thailand today said it had convinced Burma”s secretive junta to accept US assistance, almost a week after Cyclone Nargis devastated the country.

Thailand’s Supreme Commander Boonsrang Niumpradit said Rangoon had agreed to allow in US planes that have been participating in joint Thai-US military exercises.

“We have helped the Americans to talk to the Myanmar (Burma) government to allow US planes … to fly humanitarian aid to Myanmar. They just agreed,” he said.

A US embassy official confirmed the decision, and Boonsrang said the first flights could leave Thailand within a day or two.

“They were very suspicious that the Americans would do more than just distribute relief supplies, but we helped convince the Burmese to allow the Americans in,” Boonsrang said.

The decision is a surprise given the huge distrust and acrimony between Burma’s generals and Washington, which has imposed tough sanctions to try to end decades of military rule.

However, international pressure had been building on the junta to throw its doors wide open to an international relief operation for the worst cyclone to hit Asia since 1991, when 143,000 people were killed in neighbouring Bangladesh.

Aid has been trickling into one of the world’s most isolated and impoverished countries, although experts feared it would be too little to cope with the aftermath of Nargis.

The storm pulverised the Irrawaddy Delta with 190km/h winds followed by a massive tidal wave on Saturday.

Three planes loaded with vital UN emergency supplies for Burma’s cyclone victims were delayed today, awaiting clearance from the military government hours after they were due to land, UN officials said.

“They need assistance today. They needed it yesterday,” Tony Banbury, Asia regional director of the UN World Food Program, said in Bangkok.

“They can’t wait and they shouldn’t be asked to wait until tomorrow, and it’s crucial that food, water, shelter and medical supplies need to go in right away.”

Another WFP official said the three planes were waiting on tarmacs in Bangkok, Dhaka and Dubai with 38 tonnes of supplies.

The WFP officials said they believed one Thai commercial cargo plane had landed in Burma’s main city of Rangoon with seven tonnes of high-energy biscuits.

In a rare move today, Burma’s Southeast Asian neighbours today pressured the junta to unlock its borders to allow aid in.

Association of Southeast Asian Nations chief Surin Pitsuwan said the junta needed to work with the international aid community “before it’s too late”.

“It’s very much a matter of urgency,” he said.

Surin said regional governments, working through the Jakarta-based ASEAN secretariat, were “trying to communicate (to Burma’s regime) the sense of urgency and the flood of goodwill that is being offered”.

Member countries of ASEAN – which groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Burma, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – are generally reluctant to comment on other members’ internal affairs, according to the group’s closely held principle of non-interference.

WFP spokesman Paul Risley said aid agencies normally expect to fly in experts and supplies within 48 hours of a disaster, but nearly a week after the cyclone, few international relief groups have been able to send reinforcements into Burma.

Witnesses reported that villages were destroyed and people fought for survival by clutching trees as the storm brought walls of water charging inland from the sea.

Reports of cyclone damage in a country that used to be the world’s largest rice exporter added to worries about tight global supplies of the grain.

The UN Office of the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said 5,000 square kilometres of the Irrawaddy delta were under water.

The government insists it has enough rice reserves, although the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said damage to crops and storage buildings in the delta could mean that Burma will need short-term imports and miss its 2008 export targets.

If you want to help, here’s one suggestion.

Cindy Zawadzki wrote:

As far as cronyism, Ohio Democratic Politics is not the Walmart. There is a limited number of people interested and qualified for the job, they all know each other. There is no getting around that.

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Keystone Seven.

Robert Stein wrote:

Even before they win the presidency and wider margins in the Senate and House, Democrat leaders are undermining the campaign promises of Obama and Clinton by making it clear that the next Congress won’t follow through on even their watered-down proposals.

If voters want health care, they will have to hold their Congressional candidates’ feet to the fire by letting them know that they are really hurting and not being treated right by the clients of the health care lobbyists who are blocking reform. Better yet, they should brush aside all the nonsense about “socialized medicine” and get a national conversation going about a single-payer system.

Everyone should know the deadly consequences of the pill and similar contraceptive products- they cause chemical abortions. Therefore, American Life League, along with Pro-Life Wisconsin and Pharmacists for Life International Associate groups, calls all pro-lifers across the country to speak out on Protest the Pill Day ’08: The Pill Kills Babies, scheduled for the Griswold anniversary of Saturday, June 7.

Anyone know of counter-demonstrations planned for Cleveland?

Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

[Caroline] Glick is representative of a certain strain of mainly-American Jewish thinking: She believes that all criticism of Israel is illegitimate; she believes Jews who disagree with her are traitors to her cause; and she conflates the settlement movement with the entire Zionist project.

I believe that it is possible to stand against the settlements and stand for Israel at the same time. This is actually the position of millions of Israelis, including the “far-left” — in Glick’s estimation — David Grossman. Grossman has given a great deal to his country.

I would hazard a guess that he’s given more to Israel than Caroline Glick has. Caroline Glick can take shots at me all she wants, but she’s on much shakier ground when she goes after Grossman.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog brain bump I present: From My Dad.

If you want to help the people of Myanmar.

Dear Friends and Family:

I”m sure you have seen the devastation that has been caused by the cyclone that hit last Saturday. Yangon continues to be without power, phone service, or running water. I am writing this at a US Embassy computer.

During the storm I was in my basement while seven, three-story-high trees in my yard were uprooted, falling away from my house. My house no longer has a porch roof and a few window panes, but the main structure remains. All non-essential family members of US Embassy employees have already evacuated. The US Embassy has strongly urged all US citizens to leave within a week. I plan to return to the States May 17th since our school is closed, having suffered structural and water damage.

The past few days my friends and I have been buying hundreds of kilos of rice and oil for distribution; my office is filled with sacks of rice. I was able to deliver a care package to one of my workers” families when I visited his village yesterday.

Here in Yangon the city roads are beginning to open as the debris is starting to be cleaned up. The city looks like a war zone; even during the day, it is difficult for me to navigate my neighborhood roads not just because of the downed trees electrical lines, but because I get lost. Major landmarks such as transformer lines, business signs, trees, and even some buildings are no longer there. All the century-old, beautiful trees that made this city so unique among other SE Asian cities are no longer standing. Continue Reading »

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Singing and melody are closely tied to the right hemisphere”s ability to produce and recognize prosody, the intonational and emotional component of speech. (Chanting is an ancient example in which the distinction between singing and prosody blurs.) p. 76

From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer”s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

There is no convenient time to be struck by a Cyclone (we call them Hurricanes in the Western Hemisphere), but Cyclone Nargis tragic death toll — 40,000 and climbing — is likely to be horribly multiplied because it has devastated Myanmar’s primary rice growing region in the Irrawaddy delta. Tens of millions were counting on that rice.

From ABC Rural:

The International Rice Research Institute is warning the cyclone in Burma will put further pressure on an already tight supply of global food stocks.

A cyclone hit Burma’s key rice growing region, the Irrawaddy delta, west of the capital, Rangoon.

The World Food Program is already facing a shortfall in food aid, thanks to low crops in Australia, and other rice-exporting countries limiting their trade of rice stocks.

The Institute’s Beth Woods says the situation will also influence the price for rice, and no country will go unaffected.

“So anything that knocks production and export capacity in South East Asia doesn’t just affect South East Asia,” she said.

“It’s likely to make the situation for a lot of very hungry, very poor people in Africa worse as well.

“So we are really a very interconnected global economy these days.”

I’m doing my best right now to find out what the best course of action for individual Americans might be to help those most in peril in Myanmar. I’ll post as soon as I find possible solutions.

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Personal Development, Canine-Style.

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap. On The Writing On The Wal — the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar — Jonathan Rees, Robert Feinman, Peter Sayles and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

WAL-MART REJOINS FOOD-PANTRY FOLD… Two years after Wal-Mart stopped allowing food pantries to pick up perishable foods from its stores, the company has reversed itself. Following a successful pilot program in St. Louis, Wal-Mart will duplicate the program at 560 of its 600 American stores. Keep reading…

WHICH ASSHAT WAL-FLACK IS YOUR FAVORITE…? I propose contest of sorts for The Writing On The Wal”s bloggers and readers: what ludicrous verbiage from a Wal-flack has made you spew coffee or embarrass yourself in public with your uncontrollable laughter? It just seems to me that they’re becoming sillier and sillier. Keep reading…

WAL-JOBS WON”T SAVE THE ECONOMY… The gnomes were dancing in their offices yesterday after the news that only 20,000 fewer Americans lost, and couldn”t find new, jobs last months. Wall Street had expected the number to be more like 85,000. Employment, however, isn”t what it used. to be. Keep reading…

IS WAL-BANK OUT BANKING THE BANKS…? While the banking industry has successfully kept Wal-Mart from getting a banking charter, Wal-Mart has found a number of ways to steal a march on the bankers and, in a recession economy, figured out how to make more money off of money. Keep reading…

AT THE WALLY PLEX… There are sound stages on Hollywood”s back lots smaller than Bentonvile”s behemoth”s, so it”s no surprise that budding video talent has been sneaking cameras in at odd hours. And now for the midnight show at the Wally Plex featuring ProductionsCosmo. Keep reading…

HOW WAL-MART GIVES AWAY MONEY… For its most recent fiscal year, Wal-Mart posted $378,799,000,000 in revenues. In that same time frame, the company is touting its largess to its hourly employees of $1.2 billion last year. That”s a whopping 0.32 percent of sales. Keep reading…

THE SWISS DON”T GET SATIRE… Corporations hate when defense attorneys go venue shopping for sympathetic juries (just read John Grisham). But Wal-Mart has shown that it”s not above doing a little venue shopping of its own; going all the way to Switzerland to find a sympathetic judicial ear. Keep reading…

WAL-MART SAVES YOU $8 A YEAR… Jonathan posted yesterday about, and the news wires are all a twitter over, Wal-Mart”s latest prescription drugs program. In September 2006 trumpeted its $4, 30-day prescription drug program. Now it wants people to rejoice over a $10, 90-day program. Keep reading…

CAN WAL-MART REALLY GO ALL STEALTHY…? Given the number of Wal-Marts that haven”t happened in recent months, and the opposition that has thrown the company back from a major urban beach head,does Wal-Mart really think it can slip by its critics by building Big Box Stores To Be Named Later? Keep reading…

Kelley Bouchard wrote:

Portland City Councilor Kevin Donoghue wants to examine whether ice cream trucks are a community asset or noisy neighborhood distraction.

Donoghue, who represents the East End and Casco Bay islands of District 1, said he has heard complaints from some of his constituents and wants to know what other people think.

“Are ice cream trucks sacred like fresh apple pie and high school football or are they unwelcome nuisances we tolerate?” Donoghue asked today in an e-mail sent to “Friends of District One.”

My vote is for the latter.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog brain bump I present: From My Dad.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

All the works of the spirit are made with corrupt bodies. p. 73

From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer”s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

As I expected, the military dictators are delaying the vote on their sham constitution because of the death and destruction wracked by Cyclone Nargis. But, surprisingly, the generals are yielding to external pressure; most likely because they desperately need foreign assistance to restore the order necessary for them to maintain their own control.

From the Associated Press:

Bowing partly to international demands, Myanmar’s junta decided Tuesday to postpone voting on a new and long-awaited constitution in areas hardest-hit by a devastating cyclone as the death toll soared.

For the rest of the country, however, polling stations were expected to open Saturday as planned. The decision drew swift criticism from dissidents and human rights groups who question the credibility of the vote and urged the junta to focus on disaster victims.

“They should suspend the referendum completely and devote all their national resources to the affected areas,” said Debbie Stothard, head of the Southeast Asian human rights group ALTSEAN-Burma. Myanmar is also known as Burma. “They really need to prioritize … and make sure that no more people die from exposure or from malnutrition or illness.” Continue Reading »