Eddie: There are many things that we have experienced here, some of them good, some of them bad, and some of them, well, just there. But there’s one thing about being with a group of guys that have become like brothers, and that’s the ability to just have a good time despite whatever situation you find yourself in. That is one of the greatest things I’ve noticed…
Today I got a hit on my countries counter from Vatican City. As a very lapsed Catholic (as best I know I’ve only been in a Catholic church twice, once to be christened and once with a girl friend when a chunk of ceiling fell and nearly took me out) I’m sure I’m on some kind of Vatican hit list, but I never figured they’d get around to me.
As most of you have figured out by now, my dad isn’t the only one who sends me fun stuff via email. Victor, another regular reader has decided make some of us laugh this morning. Don’t worry, there still plenty of stuff to come From My Dad, but occasionally I’ll toss a few from the reast of you into the hopper as well.
Just in case you weren’t feeling too old today, this will certainly change things. Each year the staff at Beloit College in Wisconsin puts together a list to try to give the faculty a sense of the mindset of this year’s incoming freshmen. Here’s this year’s list:
The people who are starting college this fall across the nation were born in 1989.
They are too young to remember the space shuttle blowing up.
Their lifetime has always included AIDS.
Bottle caps have always been screw off and plastic.
The CD was introduced the year they were born.
They have always had an answering! machine
They have always had cable.
They cannot fathom not having a remote control.
Jay Leno has always been on the Tonight Show.
Popcorn has always been cooked in the microwave.
They never took a swim and thought about Jaws.
They can’t imagine what hard contact lenses are.
They don’t know who Mork was or where he was from.
They never heard: ‘Where’s the Beef?’, ‘I’d walk a mile for a Camel’, or ‘de plane, Boss, de plane.’
They do not care who shot J. R. and have no idea who J. R. even is.
McDonald’s never came in Styrofoam containers.
They don’t have a clue how to use a typewriter.
[Special notice: as of last night, I have completed updating the posts for three out of four of my Myanmar series: Good Afternoon Myanmar, Good Night Myanmar and Don’t Forget Burma. I encourage you to surf backwards to catch up as I did.]
The Dali Lama has chosen not to march, but two other Buddhist abbots — U Pannya Vamsa, from Penang, Malaysia, and U Uttara from London — have decided that sitting and praying is insufficient as long as their brothers are suffering and dying in the prisons of the military dictators of Myanmar.
From the Asian Tribune:
Two venerable Buddhist abbots… are journeying on a worldwide tour, which includes Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, India, Europe and the United States to gain support from leaders around the world for political change urgently needed in Burma.
An immediate summit between Burma’s military junta and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is now sought in order to commence a genuine reform in Burma. They criticized the reconciliation process sponsored by the United Nations which was too slow to create such a favorite meeting. They believed that waiting for United Nations to mediate and solve the crisis in Burma is unacceptable.
The abbots get it. Waiting for the big boys to act can leave you cold and hungry.
Burmese monks from all over the world have formed the International Burmese Monks Organization, under the leadership of two Senior Monks, Masoerain Sayardaw (Great Abbot of Masoerain Monastery in Mandalay and New York ) and Penang Sayardaw U Pannya Vamsa. The two abbots helped to set up the International Burmese Monks Organization in Los Angeles in October after monks in Burma were killed in street protests in September 2007.
If even monks can organize, what our problem?
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 Parallels and Paradoxes by Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said.
EWS: “… Look at the desire for authenticity in the performance of eighteenth-century music in the last thirty years. It”s all about a reaction to the plush sound of great orchestras, and the purists want these new reedy things grinding away to say, This is the way Bach really sounded, not the way Furtwängler used to do Bach with the Berlin Philharmonic. So, it”s really about a contest in the present over a construction of the past…” p. 126
Today, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: Projects coming at you from all directions can easily fall through the cracks. You need a place for them because somewhere down the line they may become significant. That place is your grass-catcher list. p. 68
From the outside it looks like the military dictators of Myanmar are adoptng a Chinese (natch) water torture strategy when it comes to arresting dissadents: opting for the slow, relentless arrest of select individuals that might pass underneath the attention of watching media or foreign governments. Fortunately, no one’s buying it.
From Reuters:
Ninety-six activists have been arrested in Myanmar since November despite the junta’s pledge to a U.N. special envoy that the crackdown would stop, Amnesty International said on Friday.
Many of those arrested were trying to send evidence of the bloody suppression of anti-junta protests last September, in which at least 31 people were killed, to the outside world.
“Four months on from the violent crackdown on peaceful demonstrators, rather than stop its unlawful arrests the Myanmar government has actually accelerated them,” Amnesty said in a report.
Can there be any standard other than when one is not free, none are free?
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 The Four Laws of Simplicity, and How to Apply Them to Life.
J.R. Salzman: Something that is incredibly lacking at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is a traumatic brain injury care facility. I have TBI. I didn’t know I had TBI until my Nar-Sum (narrative summary) was composed and ready to be turned in for my med board, seven months after I arrived. Not once during my 8.5 month stay at Walter Reed did I have a doctor…
As most of you have figured out by now, my dad isn’t the only one who sends me fun stuff via email. Cailin, another regular reader has decided make some of us laugh this morning. Don’t worry, there still plenty of stuff to come From My Dad, but occasionally I’ll toss a few from the reast of you into the hopper as well.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the first and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
How oppressed does a poet have to be before they resort to hiding acrostic protest messages in love poems published for Valentine’s Day? The military dictators in Myanmar belatedly found the answer to that question in the February edition of a popular magazine titled The Love Journal. The generals are not happy.
From The BBC:
The Burmese authorities have arrested a well known poet, who published a love poem with a hidden message criticising the country’s military leader.
Poet Saw Wai’s work – titled February the Fourteenth – was published in a Rangoon magazine, The Love Journal.
Taken together, the first words of each line read: “General Than Shwe is crazy with power.”
I think it’s also telling that the magazine’s readers quickly found the hidden message, but the government censors did not.
Maybe we should start paying more attention to the poems in The New Yorker?
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 Parallels and Paradoxes by Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said.
DB: “… But the element of sound is very different. In other words, when you talk about music, you”re not talking about interpretation in the same way that you would talk about the text at all…. I don”t think there is a real interpretation of music as such. You have to start with the physical realization of the sound. You don”t talk about the physical realization of the word in a poem.” [I disagree. JH]
EWS: “No. You wouldn”t call it physical realization, but the word I would use would be actualization. If you look at a poem, like this, which has a text, these are words that are completely inert; they mean nothing until you actualize and read them. And then, when you read them, you”re realizing them. I would say that is a rough similarity.”
DB: “Yes, but you don”t have to deal with physical laws. With sound, you have to deal physical laws, where there”s the effect of sound in a room, the space and time, all these things. You don”t have that as a reader.
In other words, the equivalent would be to read a poem or to read a score, but to actually perform it, or even play it at home, involves a physical act that requires a musician to have understanding and knowledge of the physical side of music, which has to do with acoustics, which has to do with overtone, which has to do with harmonic relationships….
But there is a physical aspect. And you cannot get to metaphysics without having gone through physics before. This is the singular phenomenon of musical performance. And this is why I believe that the word interpretation was misused and understood by many people, I think, in a false way: in other words, how do I interpret this?
How do I make it my own? How do I make it not only Beethoven but I make it my own? But you can”t. It doesn”t really exist that way.” p. 117-118
Today, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: As you proceed to manage your day, you will discover two essentials for managing it well: a period of solitude for planning and a set of guidelines to make your planning fruitful. p. 67
I love a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone. I cut my teeth on Jim Garrison and 100 mpg carburetors when I was still in high school. It’s easy to get hooked. Conspiracies are like heroin (just ask Chris Carter). Mostly they’re BS. Sometimes there’s a grain of truth. And sometimes you just can’t tell.
Like this bit from Gaimes BlowBack NewZ:
Burma’s “Saffron Revolution,” like the Ukraine “Orange Revolution” or the Georgia “Rose Revolution” and the various Color Revolutions instigated in recent years against strategic states surrounding Russia, is a well-orchestrated exercise in Washington-run regime change, down to the details of “hit-and-run” protests with “swarming” mobs of Buddhists in saffron, internet blogs, mobile SMS links between protest groups, well-organized protest cells which disperse and reform. CNN made the blunder during a September broadcast of mentioning the active presence of the NED behind the protests in Myanmar.
The conspiracy runs deep and long.
The concert-master of the tactics of Saffron monk-led non-violence regime change is Gene Sharp, founder of the deceptively-named Albert Einstein Institution in Cambridge Massachusetts, a group funded by an arm of the NED to foster US-friendly regime change in key spots around the world.
Sharp’s institute has been active in Burma since 1989, just after the regime massacred some 3000 protestors to silence the opposition. CIA special operative and former US Military Attache in Rangoon, Col. Robert Helvey, an expert in clandestine operations, introduced Sharp to Burma in 1989 to train the opposition there in non-violent strategy. Interestingly, Sharp was also in China two weeks before the dramatic events at Tiananmen Square.
Can’t you just hear Det. Steve Crosetti asking the question?
And why is all of this happening? Oil.
Geopolitical control seems to be the answer. Control ultimately of the strategic sea lanes from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea. The coastline of Myanmar provides naval access in the proximity of one of the world”s most strategic water passages, the Strait of Malacca, the narrow ship passage between Malaysia and Indonesia.
The Pentagon has been trying to militarize the region since September 11, 2001 on the argument of defending against possible terrorist attack. The US has managed to gain an airbase on Banda Aceh, the Sultan Iskandar Muda Air Force Base, on the northernmost tip of Indonesia. The governments of the region, including Myanmar, however, have adamantly refused US efforts to militarize the region. A glance at a map will confirm the strategic importance of Myanmar.
It does make an odd kind of sense. With the shuttering of the Navy’s primary Western Pacific base at Subic Bay in the Philippines, the reach of the U.S. Navy was moved back to Japan, which is still on the right side of the ocean, but hardly in the neighborhood of the Straits of Malacca.
But we don’t normally make friends with democracy movements because they tend to be too interested in things like democracy. I would more quickly believe that we were supporting the generals. That’s more the style of the United States and the CIA. Just ask anyone who remembers Mohammad Mosaddeq.
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 10 Questions.
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