Valazquez

las meninas--one of my favorite paintings. i saw it in person at el prado museo in madrid and it is so large it took my breath away.

The Burka makes women prisoners, says President Sarkozy

French parliament to consider burka ban
"The problem of the burka is not a religious problem. This is an issue of a woman's freedom and dignity. This is not a religious symbol. It is a sign of subservience; it is a sign of lowering. I want to say solemnly, the burka is not welcome in France," Sarkozy told lawmakers.
"The burka is not a religious sign. It is a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement," he added. "It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic."

Over a half century, the Burqa has shrunk from a ‘moving tent’ enveloping a woman to a head covering in the form of a more formalized Hijab and alternatively as a loose head scarf in Pakistan-India. This evolutionary path will, inevitably, unfold in Afghanistan if and when it begins to have peace, modern forms of governance and development.

Mohammad Qadeer is a Professor Emeritus of Queen’s University, Kingston and a Fellow of Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement, Toronto, Canada
http://iramz.wordpress.com/2006/10/05/the-evolution-of-the-burqa/

WE ARE ALL NEDA

"We did not throw rocks at them.
We cried, 'We want freedom.'
they shot us."

for women everywhere

She studied philosophy and took underground singing lessons — women are banned from singing publicly in Iran. Her name means “voice” in Persian, and many are now calling her the voice of Iran.


Women's Rights Photo Gallery

Incredible "Stuff"

Long Now

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

Guidelines for a long-lived, long-valuable institution

■ Serve the long view (and the long viewer)
■ Foster responsibility
■ Reward patience
■ Mind mythic depth
■ Ally with competition
■ Take no sides
■ Leverage longevity

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. It began with an observation and idea by computer scientist Daniel Hillis:

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."

Che Guevara’s Granddaughter Goes Commando for PETA

The granddaughter of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara is undressing for a new PETA campaign with the slogan “Start a Vegetarian Revolution.” With the permission of her family and a revolutionary spirit “in her blood,” 24-year-old Lydia Guevara posed nude, wearing only a beret and carrot-filled bandoleer that will hopefully inspire more vegetarians than her grandfather’s overexposed t-shirts inspire revolutionaries.
Is this a political tactic Ernesto would have employed had he the exposure and sexual appeal as Lydia? Doubtful. The commercialism of vegetarianism has gained so much popularity it is similiar to the "Go Green" movement, losing sentiment in favor of blatancy. Ah, the media takes everything I love and turns it into a friggin' movie.

Amy Winehouse is Brilliant

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
great cover.
great voice. i hope she gets her act together.

cool

antidote to media whirlwind
The book that takes 1,000 years to read.

belle

JR Art
BBC Video

The Anonymity Project

Click

Who is Orlan?

The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan, which started in 1990, involved a series of plastic surgeries in the course of which the artist started to morph herself with respect to some of the most well known historical paintings and sculptures. Supported by her Carnal Art manifesto, these works were filmed and broadcast in institutions throughout the world, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York. Orlan's goal in these surgeries is to acquire the ideal of beauty as suggested by the men who painted women. When the surgeries are completed she will have the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Gerome’s Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana from a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Orlan picked these characters, “not for the canons of beauty they represent… but rather on account of the stories associated with them.” Diana because she is inferior to the gods and men but is leader of the goddesses and women; Mona Lisa because of the standard of beauty, or anti-beauty, she represents; Psyche because of her fragility and vulnerability within the soul; Venus for carnal beauty; Europa for her adventurous outlook to the horizon, the future.

Many feminists have called Orlan an anti-feminist due to her goals and the means of reaching them. Instead of banishing cosmetic surgery, she embraces it; instead of rejecting the masculine, she incorporates it; instead of define her identity, she wishes for it to be “nomadic, mutant, shifting, differing.” She negates both patriarchal culture and the feminist ideal by creating her own identity for the future. As Orlan states, “my work is a struggle against the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as far as artists of representation are concerned), and God!”

Wikipedia

Supervolcano may be brewing beneath Mount St Helens

 IS A supervolcano brewing beneath Mount St Helens? Peering under the volcano has revealed what may be an extraordinarily large zone of semi-molten rock, which would be capable of feeding a giant eruption.

Lets face it: volcanos have only gotten cooler as I've gotten older.

Here is the the article

A song for your heart

Classic video from 1964!!

Great site for writers/teachers/thinkers

NOTORIOUS CONFUSABLES