All the election coverage is freaking me out. I needed a break. Here's the inspiration.
(Click the image)
10/31/2010
09/14/2009
Name this collage of Obama tattoos!
Felt like being creative - now my little creation needs a title.
12/20/2008
As the worm turns in ...
Did you happen to catch that 'statement' made by Blagojevich yesterday? Setting aside his legal justifications, political machinations and personal considerations, there's something terribly wrong and not just in Illinois - it's happening everywhere. I'm not so naive to think American politics hasn't always had its share of bad apples, but it seems to me the worms are winning and democracy is being spoiled. I have several ideas why that is and what to do about it, but I'd rather hear yours.
08/31/2008
Here we go again.
01/29/2008
Talk, talk
Marie Smith Jones was the world's last Eyak speaker - by the time she died last week, she could use her mother tongue only in her dreams. But the loss of a language is not just a personal tragedy, says Mark Abley, it is a cultural disaster.
Some deaths come as a shock. The death last Monday of Marie Smith Jones did not. She was 89, blind, a heavy smoker and a recovering alcoholic, who had borne nine children and buried two of them. People had been expecting her death for years.
By "people", I mean linguists. Most residents of Anchorage, the Alaskan city where she spent her final decades, had never heard of her. Even after she addressed a UN conference on indigenous rights, she managed to maintain her privacy. Yet among the advocates for minority languages, Jones was famous. A few of them knew her by a different name: Udach' Kuqax'a'a'ch', a name that belonged to the Eyak language and means "a sound that calls people from far away".
Jones is thought to have been the last full-blooded member of the Eyak, a saltwater people of southern Alaska. When the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, it spilled 240,000 barrels of crude oil into their traditional fishing grounds. More important, Jones was the last person to speak Eyak fluently. She had held that melancholy distinction since her sister's death in the early 90s. Her passing means that nobody in the world can effortlessly distinguish a demex'ch (a soft, rotten spot in the ice) from a demex'ch'lda'luw (a large, treacherous hole in the ice). It means that siniik'adach'uuch' - the vertical groove between the nose and upper lip, literally a "nose crumple" - has fled the minds of the living.
Are such arcane details significant? Jones thought so. Asked by Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker how she felt about her language dying with her, she replied: "How would you feel if your baby died? If someone asked you, 'What was it like to see it lying in the cradle?'" Jones added that she hated reporters. A fisherman's daughter, who had worked in a cannery from the age of 12, she could not then have imagined how many journalists she would meet in old age.
The Eyak language has no offspring - no close relatives of any kind. Kolbert wittily described it as "the spinster aunt of the Athabascan language group". Linguistic evidence suggests the Eyak people split off to become a separate culture roughly 3,000 years ago, travelling downriver to a salmon-busy coast. In verbal terms, Eyak's nephews and nieces include the Apaches of the dry south-west, familiar to us from westerns. Link
It's a long article and merits reading, so follow the link. The basis of this story is so skewed, I don't know where to start. Let's start with communication.
Pictures, words, language are tools of communication. That definition demands an understanding between parties. Be it between you and another or simply a conversation with yourself, some form of conceptualizing thought into some means of transfer, language is just a tool. Once that conversation ends - there is no further need of that tool.
This woman had no one left with whom she could engage in conversation in her native tongue. The reasons why that was so are many, but boil down to one thing - the tool was either antiquated, archaic or no longer useful. Why then, should we lament its passing? I submit we shouldn't.
The desire to latch onto old lost things merely for the sake of preserving the unusable or outdated is all well and good if one is talking about furniture, art or ... tradition, but language is only valuble in its utility. Beyond its use as a tool to communicate - it is worthless. The stuff of history and old stories. Latin comes to mind. Other than historical perspective and its incorporation into and the foundation of later language - Latin has no value. And some obscure tongue spoken by some small isolated tribe in some godforsaken place has even less.
Language is a mutable, ever changing, constantly evolving thing. It's natural for the old to be replaced by the new and nary a tear should be shed. Personally, I find the desire to try and 'keep a language alive' analogous to demanding that stone axes be used instead of steel hammers. Stupid. And ever so ethnocentrically self indulgent.
There was a time very long ago that I wanted to be a linguist/semanticist. I'm glad I didn't. To endure the strivings of such as this article and its authors would have just plain pissed me off.
01/12/2008
Take two of these and call me in the morning ...
How can it be proved that a patient is lying when they say that they have a cognitive problem, such as memory or concentration problems or anxiety? There are many people who exaggerate their injuries and even feign them in order to receive more money from insurance companies or obtain a sick leave, according to a pioneering research in Spain. This research was carried out in the Department of Personality, Assessment and Psychological Treatment of the University of Granada by Doctor Raquel Vilar López. The conclusions of her study, which focused on patients who suffered from head injuries, speak for themselves: nearly half of the people who go to court feign psycho-cognitive disorders with the objective of profiting from this in some way. They are not hypochondriacs or overanxious or obsessive patients, they just lie in order to receive some sort of compensation, as for example money. They are the so called ‘simulators’.
Until now, in Spain no reliable system existed to detect if a person was faking their symptoms. For this reason the study by Vilar López coordinated by Manuel Gómez Río and Miguel Pérez García is so important: for the first time, Spanish health professionals have a set of reliable tools to prove empirically if a patient is lying when they declare, for example, that their memory problems renders them unfit for work.
The work by this researcher has validated a series of ‘tests’ which, when used on patients without them being aware of it, detect which patients are simulators and which are not. These neuropsychological tests were included in a three-hour-long battery of neuropsychological tests which assesses other cognitive aspects of the patient in order to disguise the actual tests and in this way obtain the desired information.
Raquel Vilar López explains that in her research she adapted a series of tests that where already known in the United States – a country with a long history of work in the field of neuropsychology – to the Spanish context, because "the neuropsychological tests cannot be extrapolated without adjustments from a context to another”. The percentage of patients who suffer from head injuries that feign symptoms is nearly the same as that obtained by the American researchers.
The study carried out in the UGR also included a method which has become very popular recently due to several television programs: the lie detector, an instrument which registers the physiological responses of blood pressure, heart beat, breathing rate and galvanic skin response. Vilar López used this equipment with a group of 80 Psychology students as the “analogous group”, that is, as no patient would admit being a simulator, a group of people without any disorders were asked to fake them in order to confirm the validity of the test. Furthermore, 54 actual patients were analyzed by the doctor. These patients belonged to different departments of the University Hospital Virgen de las Nieves in Granada. The researcher explains that “although the lie detector itself has no scientific rigor, it could be an efficient instrument if combined with other tools, as for example the tests that we have validated”. Link
Let's review. Remember all the fraud involved with Katrina and FEMA? Certainly you're aware of the almost daily revelations about fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and welfare. You have, no doubt, heard about all the fraud perpetrated by illegal aliens, identity thieves and hackers. Out legal system is already stretched beyond its ability to function fairly due in large part to frivolous lawsuits and medical malpractice litigation. Our jails and prisons are filled to beyond capacity. Medical and insurance fraud cost this nation more money than national defense. Litigation adds 30% to the price of everything.
01/10/2008
In the battle of the sexes - I'm a conscientious objector
Item: Hillary Hates Men ...
A swarm of biographers in miners' gear has tried to plumb the inky depths of Hillary Rodham Clinton's warren-riddled psyche. My metaphor is drawn (as Oscar Wilde's prim Miss Prism would say) from the Scranton coalfields, to which came the Welsh family that produced Hillary's harsh, domineering father.
Hillary's feckless, loutish brothers (who are kept at arm's length by her operation) took the brunt of Hugh Rodham's abuse in their genteel but claustrophobic home. Hillary is the barracuda who fought for dominance at their expense. Flashes of that ruthless old family drama have come out repeatedly in this campaign, as when Hillary could barely conceal her sneers at her fellow debaters onstage -- the wimpy, cringing brothers at the dinner table.
Hillary's willingness to tolerate Bill's compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause -- which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition. Link
Item: Liberated Women Seized the Day ...
Hillary Clinton is preparing to ride a wave of support from women into the next stage of her contest with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination.
Her extraordinary and unexpected comeback in the New Hampshire Democratic primary was driven by women voters in record numbers. They largely shunned her in Iowa last week but came flooding back on Tuesday to make her the first woman to win a presidential primary. Yesterday she claimed to have “liberated” women politicians, after a campaign in which she revealed a previously unseen passion and personal empathy.
More primary voters turned out in the Granite State than ever before, as a clear gender gap opened up with 57 per cent of voters in the Democratic primary being women. Of these, 46 per cent backed Mrs Clinton compared with just 34 per cent for Mr Obama. Among female voters aged 40 or more, she won 70 per cent support.
Mrs Clinton played down claims that her tearful appearance in a Portsmouth coffee shop on Monday had been the catalyst for the turnaround in a contest that Mr Obama had expected to win easily. Instead, aides said that a more personal and open approach had allowed voters to see the “real Hillary Clinton”. Link
Item: Hillary Liberated Women by Crying ...
The Obama camp is arguing that Senator Clinton's stunning comeback from the brink of defeat, after she was trounced in Iowa, was a fluke and due to women sympathising with her.
Senator Clinton, reflecting on her emotional moment on Fox news, agreed it had made a difference.
"Maybe I have liberated us to actually let women be human beings in public," she said. "You know, we are. Let's be that."
Senator Obama, beaten into second place in New Hampshire, said he had never believed the election would be a cakewalk and signalled his campaign would now get tougher. "We have to make sure that we take it to them, just like they take it to us," he said.
"I come from Chicago politics," the Illinois senator vying to be the US's first black president said.
"We're accustomed to rough and tumble. I don't expect this to be a cakewalk." Link
Eeeeee. I got a bad bad feeling about this. I look back on my lifetime of chauvinism and sexism and have to ask myself - 'Do I REALLY deserve this?' I mean, I wasn't THAT bad. Not like Bubba. Do I get any slack for being a nice guy most of the time or is it UP AGAINST the WALL MOTHERF*CKER for all men - period? (sic).
I'm thinking this election does NOT bode well for white men. Ya gots your angry womens on one side and your angry black folks on the other - both sides seeking some sort of reparartions. Personally, I am inclined to go with making monetary pennance for slavery ...
Continue reading "In the battle of the sexes - I'm a conscientious objector" »
10/02/2007
09/29/2007
Let's all try and be a bit more sensitive ...
A reader sent me a very funny joke, which I will include below. It made me laugh out loud and I set out to find an image to go with it. I had a few ideas, none of which satified me, so I decided to do a collage - making these collages is very therapeutic for me, and Friday was a bad day. I needed some therapy.
I entered the word 'turban' into the Google search page and came up with a method I wanted to use. I try to make each collage a bit different in 'how' it's put together. I decided to crop to the actual figure this time - you may well imagine just long that process took - but like I said - therapy.
Turbans are not the sole province of Muslims. Of we all know that Sikhs also wear them. And after 9/11, Sikhs were mistaken for Muslims, in fact one was murdered and several were beaten. This got me to thinking about something I used to think about every hour of every day - racism and prejudice and how both are spread.
I enjoy an ethnic joke as well as the next guy, I'll laugh out loud too. But I never tell ethnic jokes - I'll listen and laugh, but I just don't repeat them. And not for any great sense of righteousness or sensitivity, either. Mostly because, when I was a teenager I made fun of someone's race and unbeknownst to me - they heard it. And then they confronted me about it immediately. I was doing an imitation of what I thought 'niggers' talked like, even though I was raised in Idaho and never actually met a black person until I went into the Navy. I based my slurs on Amos & Andy, I yelled 'em at the top of my lungs, much to the glee of all who heard except for one kid.
He was a foot taller than me and he could've have kicked my ass easily, but my words had so hurt him that all he could do was grab me by the shoulders, with tears in his eyes and shake the crap out of me, in front of a now gathered crowd of those kids who'd been laughing moments before. He was crying uncontrollably.
I had never before experienced just how hurtful words can be. Oh sure, my parents would yell at me, other kids would taunt me, but I always had an escape. The target of a racial slur can't change color - there's no excape and that makes the harm even more hurtful. I thought about all this as I was cropping images to include in that collage.
After that incident, I vowed to myself to never make anyone hurt that bad. Over the years, I listened to ethnic jokes and cringed sometimes, looked around make sure nobody was being targeted. If someone WAS being targeted specifically, I would fight back for them. But I still laughed - I am not politically correct - I just don't want to hurt anyone.
After I became a thinking adult, something dawned on me. Racial stereotypes are perpetuated in several ways. A father passing down his own fears to his children. Coworkers spreading rumors based on innuendo and falsehoods. I realized that jokes can also help maintain a racial stereotype and that's when I stopped passing them along, no matter who was listening. I considered it my own personal contribution to making the world a better place.
After 9/11, we had a new enemy and a new target for derision and humor. Muslims. I have used some slurs myself - in the heat of anger or in the face of fear. Neither terribly good excuses. While I was doing the collage I realized that a lot of the derogatory terms we use for Muslims also apply to Sikhs.
That got me to thinking even more. We ARE at war, and I will submit we may be at war with an entire religion. Or, that religion may have just been hijacked by fanatics. I think it's the latter. But I cannot be sure yet. I COULD be sure if moderate Muslims turned on those fanatical elements and crushed them. And until that happens, I'll continue to deride the entire religion. Derision, satire, mockery and humor are tried and true weapons against any enemy and also provide an much needed outlet for the personal frustration we all feel. Especially considering that we are so seemingly helpless or unable to get and kill the bastards who are actually causing the problem.
But we must be careful to not hurt or alienate people or cultures who have absolutely nothing to do with the war on terror and are, in fact, great allies. During WWII, there was no finer fighter than the Gurka and they wear turban-like head gear. Today, Sikhs side with us and provide troops for the United Nations when called upon to do so. They have been one hell of a good friend and ally.
So in the future, I will not make derogatory slurs which might offend our friends. If I feel the need to be of that mind, I'll try a little harder and draw upon my education to come up with something even more insulting to the specified target, without basing it on race or ethnicity.
I hope by setting this example, that you, the reader, will consider carefully and chose your words wisely. Try and think of words which will accomplish the same goals but not offend or hurt an unintentional or innocent human being mistakenly. We all have enough education to come up with the right phrases and idioms so as to not perpetuate strereotypes based on race, religion, ethnicity or sexual inclination. Just put your minds to work and think of new and more refined methods of insulting our common enemy.
Two families move from Pakistan to America. When they arrive the two fathers make a bet to see - in a year's time - which family has become more Americanized.
A year later they meet again.
The first man says, "My son is playing baseball. I had breakfast at McDonalds, and I'm on my way to pick up a case of Bud. How about you?"
The second man replies, "F*ck you, towelhead.09/26/2007
The Face of Evil
