Archive > February 2003
“On February 13, 2003, teams of artists and activists postered New York City with thousands of copies of snapshots from Baghdad. Quiet and casual, the snapshots show a part of Baghdad we rarely see: the part with people in it.
“The snapshots were taken by a friend of ours who just got back from Baghdad working with the Iraq Peace Team. Yes, he saw Iraqis suffering and struggling. But he also saw Iraqis dancing and laughing. This moved him because laughing under the weight of the UN sanctions and the threat of an absurd war is no easy task. We were moved because the people in the pictures remind us of our friends & family.
“Thousands of snapshot posters now pepper Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.
“We want to show New York the people who will get both liberty and death in one fatal stroke if this war begins. We want you to show them in your city. The entire snapshot collection is online as pdfs. Print them out and poster them anywhere and everywhere.”
Thanks as always to the Everlasting Blort for alerting us to JOHNNY JETPACK! I’m not sure the fields of either art or science can move beyond this masterwork.
New study finds dyslexic children’s brains operate more like those of normal readers following training designed to help them hear sounds in words.
Let me say that again: human behavior and human biology are related.
“In the early morning hours of Nov. 15, 1953, an amateur astronomer in Oklahoma photographed what he believed to be a massive, white-hot fireball of vaporized rock rising from the center of the Moon’s face. If his theory was right, Dr. Leon Stuart would be the first and only human in history to witness and document the impact of an asteroid-sized body impacting the Moon’s scarred exterior. Almost a half-century, numerous space probes and six manned lunar landings later, what had become known in astronomy circles as “Stuart’s Event” was still an unproven, controversial theory. Skeptics dismissed Stuart’s data as inconclusive and claimed the flash was a result of a meteorite entering Earth’s atmosphere. That is, until Dr. Bonnie J. Buratti, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Lane Johnson of Pomona College, Claremont, Calif., took a fresh look at the 50-year-old lunar mystery.”
Something to read and tuck away for next Valentine’s Day…
What happens when a public hysteria dies out? It seems that everyone agrees to simply not talk about it any more. Y2K created a huge stink – I confess I thought something would ‘happen’ – and now Y2K is all but forgotten.
But what about Kelly Michaels, Gerald Amirault, Bernard Baran and Patrick Figured? All of them are currently in prison as a result of the public hysteria of the 90s, ‘ritual abuse.’ The satanic panic has subsided but they remain in prison, for things that they did not do and in fact no one did. Dozens of other people were ‘lucky’ enough to only serve extended prison sentences and lose their homes, friends, family and jobs – they are now out of prison and free to be ‘registered sex offenders’ in their community for the rest of their lives. With so much genuine misery in the world, it is criminal that some people are punished for crimes never committed and other people are made ‘survivors’ who were never victims.
The history of music has finally been written.
Uchronia: The Alternate History List is an annotated bibliography of approximately 2200 novels, stories, essays and other material involving the “what ifs” of history.
This image suggests CNN has some problems in the science department.
Some of us are still wondering… “KENNETH, WHAT IS THE FREQUENCY?“
What’s it like to be a homosexual in Pakistan, or in Afganistan, or in Egypt? How about where you are?
Computer plays Tetris with Another Computer.
You have just been replaced with a machine.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. recently said: “When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.
“And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of grievances, “ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,” as the saying goes.”
eantsy, tiny, small, average, big, giant, huge, dude. Make sure you have your relative sizes of things down pat.
