3 February 2008
3 February 2008
MUCKING OUT THE BLOGPILE…
1400 by Jeff Hess
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 How to make every word you write unputdownable.
3 February 2008
3 February 2008
FROM THE SANDBOX…
1200 by Jeff Hess
LT G: The gripe: A military tradition as time-honored as dehumanizing the enemy, as expected as giving your rifle a feminine name and persona, and as innate in the soldier”s soul as feeling abandoned by the kinsmen they fight for. After all, you don”t worry about the soldiers who bitch, you worry about the ones who aren”t bitching. Such comprehension doesn”t…
3 February 2008
FROM MY DAD…
0800 by Jeff Hess
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 chuckle I present: From My Dad.
3 February 2008
GOOD AFTERNOON MYANMAR…
0430 by Jeff Hess
Blogger Mies left Amsterdam on the 21 September 2007 and headed East shortly after the mass demonstrations that has become known as the Saffron Revolution. Four and a half months later he entered Myanmar. So far he’s posted from: Mu-se, Lashio, Hsipaw, Pyin U Lwin, Mandalay, Sagaing, Mingun, Paleik and Inwa.
From Mandalay he writes:
I am in Mandalay in Myanmar right now and I even found an internet place. The connection is very on and off (as is the electricity supply in Myanmar) but apart from this new entry I also managed to actually upload quite a few pictures, to support the entry.
[Snip.]
There”s not much to do or see in Ruili itself, so I cycled around for a bit, for example to the Myanmar border amongst other destinations around Ruili. The next day I found myself at this border again, this time going across with my tour group, meaning just my guide Htun and me. The Chinese border was easy, and because of Htun, so was the Myanmar border.
The first difference I noticed was the scale of the border post buildings: the Chinese being enormous, the Myanmar being a very small building less measuring less than 10 square meters, with a border officer dressed in his jogging suit. Very casual indeed. The tour included a taxi with driver to take me and Htun all the way to Lashio.
We filled up the gas, not at a petrol station, but at a small shack where they poured the gas from bottles straight into the tank. The drive to Lashio was relaxing – I had the front seat – and even the four checkpoints were not much of a hassle. A funny thing about driving in Myanmar is that although the majority of the cars here have their steering wheel on the right side of the vehicle, they also drive on the right side of the road: rather tricky while overtaking.
In Lashio I said goodbye to my guide and driver. I waited here a few hours for the bus to Hsipaw. Quite late did I arrive in Hsipaw, where the bus driver dropped me off at a guesthouse, where I found a room and went to sleep almost straight away (there was no electricity after 22h30 anyway, when the hotel shuts down the generator).
Where would you go adventuring?
3 February 2008
FROM MY CHAPBOOK…
0400 by Jeff Hess
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Midrash and Literature edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick.
The proper task of Midrashic or non-Midrashic exegesis is to keep the Bible from becoming literature. p. 9
3 February 2008
3 February 2008
TIME POWER: TODAY…
0001 by Jeff HessToday, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: You can increase your output as you increase your capacity to get accurate, clear, fast impressions of what is going on around you. James T. McCay. If we do not picture events clearly, we should not act. p. 114
2 February 2008
GOOD MORNING MYANMAR…
2030 by Jeff HessGoing underground, living on the lam, changing identities and never knowing where you’ll sleep this night can seem romantic until you have to live the life. Ashin Kovida, an accidental revolutionary of sorts, has discovered how frightening and dangerous it can be after he helped to set Myanmar’s Saffron Revolution in motion.
Mr. Ashin had no special preparation to become a freedom fighter; if anything, he had a typical, impoverished Burmese childhood. Born in 1983 in a village near Ann, a town in the eastern state of Arakan, he joined a monastery at age 12. His parents were farmers, and they sent him, their second son, to become a monk at the nearest monastery so that he could get an education. He lived there until 2003, then moved to Nan Oo monastery in Rangoon to pursue further monastic studies.
[Snip.]
As he tells it, Mr. Ashin’s activism wasn’t originally part of a national movement; rather, it evolved from a grass-roots level, organically. After several monks were beaten during a Sept. 5 protest in Pakokku, a city in central Burma, Mr. Ashin and his fellow monks were so outraged that they printed and distributed pamphlets demanding an apology from the government. Mr. Ashin says he spent Sept. 10-13 wandering the streets of Rangoon with a bag full of pamphlets, distributing them to major monasteries.
“We demanded that the government apologize [for what happened in Pakokku],” Mr. Ashin explains. “If there was no apology by Sept. 18, then the monks would take to the streets. On Sept. 18 there was no response. On Sept. 19, my colleagues and I thought we needed an organization to organize the protests and keep them on the right track.”
Thus the Sangha (Monks) Representative Committee — an organization that would soon become the nexus of the demonstrations in Rangoon — was born. The committee was composed of 15 volunteer monks, aged 24-28, who had met each other during earlier protests in August and September. “Everyone was invited,” Mr. Ashin says. “I did not even know the names of the others — most of them used nicknames for their security.”
Mr. Ashin was elected chairman, and the committee agreed to meet every morning at 9 a.m. at the East gate of the Shwedagon Pagoda — Burma’s holiest shrine and the temple from which Aung San Suu Kyi addressed her followers during the protests of 1988. Its purpose?
“The committee was there to control the demonstrations and make sure they were peaceful,” he tells me. They wanted “just to help the people, and to show how much people are suffering. The monks did not have any political objectives. We want for people to have a right to fight for power… the monks just paved the way for them.”
And I ask myself, whose way I paved?
2 February 2008
MUCKING OUT THE BLOGPILE…
1400 by Jeff HessI’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 Three Basic Steps to Get Your Desire with the Least Effort.
2 February 2008
MY COMMENTS…
1336 by Jeff Hess
Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.
1319 while i was looking for the light
1331 my fear
1347 The Power of 10 Minutes
2 February 2008
2 February 2008
FROM THE SANDBOX…
1200 by Jeff HessThe Usual Suspect: You won’t see me kissing ass. You won’t see me putting on a show bitching at other Joes to impress higher-up. You won’t see me at an NCO board, because I’ve definitely scrapped the idea of shooting for Sergeant. That ain’t me. I won’t be a Yes-Man. I won’t take shit and smile about it. I will do what I can to keep myself out of trouble, generally…
2 February 2008
FROM MY DAD… VIDEO WEEK…
0800 by Jeff HessI 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 chuckle I present: From My Dad.
2 February 2008
GOOD AFTERNOON MYANMAR…
0430 by Jeff HessLocking up a poet and a blogger seems to have given the generals in Myanmar a false sense of their power. Word out of the country is that the military dictators are attempting to prevent an American invasion by keeping copies of Sylvestor Stallone’s Rambo IV out of the country. The effort is not meeting with a great deal of success.
From Reuters:
“People are going crazy with the quote ‘Live for nothing, die for something’,” one resident said, referring to the tagline of the fourth Rambo installment, which opened in the United States this week.
Even though it received lukewarm reviews, it is likely to be a sure-fire hit with opponents of the junta, with some even hoping it could spur a change of regime in the impoverished southeast Asian nation.
“This movie could fuel the sentiment of Myanmar people to invite American troops to help save them from the junta,” one Yangon resident told Reuters by e-mail.
The Myanmar people should be careful what they wish for.
2 February 2008
FROM MY CHAPBOOK…
0400 by Jeff HessMy name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Midrash and Literature edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick.
“The Struggle for the Text” by Geoffrey H. Hartman. “And the bewildered Gymnast/ Found he had worsted God.” from “A little East of Jordan,” by Emily Dickinson. p. 5
2 February 2008
2 February 2008
TIME POWER: TODAY…
0001 by Jeff HessToday, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: While imaginative rumination is basic to effective time management, irrelevancy and obsession are devastating. p. 114
2 February 2008
FROM MY CHAPBOOK…
0000 by Jeff HessMy name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Midrash and Literature edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick.
Anamnesis: The recollection or remembrance of the past. [36]
