...when the forces of nature Bjork Gudmundsdottir enwraps it self, the partners [the trio] fly high and deep into the core of the jazz-pop of the fifties to the extend that they escape time and space. Listeners will get an unique opportunity on this CD to experience the mysterious and random meeting of umbrellas of the past and sewing-machines of the present, on the keyboard. Katie rocks in Bjork's disguise. Bjork is Bella telephone-operator and Adda Ornolfs. Bjork is Ingibjorg, Sigrun and Soffia. Bjork is. The lyrics span old and classic realms of passion. These are the final scenes of Electra and Oedipus. It is man's wish to kneed together, from time and space, their own special dream-dough. Here is where the dream comes true. Enjoy. (From Bjorkish.net)
“Despite the vast differences in their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labour Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their faeces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine."
Dennis Barry, Dothan, Alabama
My dad and my sister did an amazing job arranging a number of lovely surprises for my Mum, one of which was the treble clef cake. The guy who made it did a bang-up job except for failing to notice there are five lines on a stave and not four.
My Dad holding my nephew Gregor. I was really struck by the different colours and textures of their skin (less obvious in this copy than in the original, which I might post on Flickr). I think it makes for an aesthetically pleasing contrast.
Laura spent lots of time playing with Gregor, as did we all since he's so much fun at the moment, but I think they formed a special bond.
Gregor in a gigantic chair. I think it speaks for itself.
Ruth and Laura in a spare moment - when we weren't running around refreshing drinks or organising food - having a natter.
Infuriatingly, I didn't manage to get many decent shots of my Mum, this one is the best I can muster (and I had to modify it a bit). This is partly because she was darting around talking to so many people, and partly because I found myself shooting into the light all the time. I still have so much to learn about photographing people.
I suspect that most non-compassionate omnivores are simply unaware of what happens to the animals whose meat they eat. Luckily, I have just given the readers of this blog the means of disabusing themselves of any misconceptions they might understandably have about how modern farm animals are often raised. As a result, ignorance will not suffice as a justification. Moreover, neither will simply pointing out how delicious meat is. After all, I have not suggested that people should not eat meat at all. I have only suggested that certain forms of meat eating are morally suspect. Indeed, if anything, the meat produced by small family farms that treat their animals well and do not pump them full of hormones and antibiotics should taste better than meat produced by confinement agriculture--plus, it's better for you. This leaves cost as perhaps the main justification for eating factory farmed meat. But I am skeptical that enough moral mileage can be gotten out of cost alone to justify the practice under consideration. Would the people in this country really be that worse off if they ate meat a little less often? The statistics concerning obesity suggest we could all stand to eat a little less of nearly everything (except perhaps fruits and vegetables!). So, what (if anything) justifies non-compassionate omnivorism?
Chapter 19
This chapter makes the Jerry Springer Show look like Winnie the Pooh. The Sodom business is worse than I ever imagined. Two male angels visit Lot's house in Sodom. A crowd of men (Sodomites!) gathers outside the house and demands that the two angels be sent out, so the mob can rape them. Lot, whose hospitality is greater than his common sense, offers his virgin daughters to the mob instead. Before any rapes can happen, the mob is blinded by a mysterious flash of light. The angels lead Lot, his wife, and daughters out of the city, and God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with brimstone. Lot's wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. (God may have listened to Abraham's rebuke, but He surely didn't heed it. What of all the innocent children murdered in Sodom and Gomorrah? What of Lot's innocent wife?)
But the chapter's not over. After the attempted mass gay rape, the father pimping, the urban devastation, uxorious saline murder, it looks like Lot and his daughters are finally safe. They're living alone in a cave in the mountains. But then the two daughters—think of them as Judea's Hilton sisters—complain that cave life is no fun because there aren't enough men around. So, one night they get Lot falling-down drunk and have sex with him. Chapter 19 poses what I would call the Sunday School Problem—as in, how do you teach this in Sunday school? What exactly is the moral lesson here?
Robert Greenwald's [documentary]... builds a picture of the devastating impact Wal-Mart culture has had on the landscape of small-town America, and is having on the wider world. Greenwald... shows how the homey store created by Sam Walton in the Fifties, now the world's wealthiest corporation with a revenue of nearly $300 billion, blights almost every aspect of American life.
It is hard to say which part of the film is most shocking. There are the interviews with the owners of father and son stores in middle America who watch their life's work destroyed overnight by the arrival of a Supercenter. There is the footage from squalid Chinese sweatshops, where workers live in slave conditions to fuel the aggressive discounting that Wal-Mart (slogan 'Every Day Low Prices') prides itself in; there are the testimonies of former store managers forced to cut overheads every month by understaffing and underpaying and denying health cover to 'associates' (which is what they call the workforce); there are the antiunion Swat teams that fly in on private jets from headquarters in Arkansas to target and harass any individuals who make a motion to join a union; and there is the unbelievable litany of murders and rapes and muggings that have occurred in Wal-Mart car parks because the company refuses to shell out on security.
[...]
At Becton the Asda 'colleagues' (as they are known in Britain) seem happy enough to help, but it is hard not to notice the difference between someone who has been incentivised into 'welcoming you' and someone who does so because they want to... I wander the aisles for a while, beset by a familiar kind of superstore despond, take notes of prices which compare unfavourably with those at the market, and hope in vain to see a couple of colleagues chatting to each other, which is considered 'time theft' by Wal-Mart HQ.
There is something in all vast supermarkets' relentless demonstration of choice that seems to suggest the opposite. Asda colleagues may have pockets of pride and so on but, in among the deals of the week, I find it's hard to get a few headlines out of my head. The one about the store being fined nearly a million pounds in the North East because it attempted to bribe employees to leave their union. The one about the store in Leicestershire where, in a panic about illegal immigrants, any colleague with an 'odd-sounding name', even those who had worked nearly 20 years at Asda, was told over the store tannoy to report to the manager's office with their papers. I collected a basket of shopping, but didn't fancy the queue, so I headed back to Queen's Market.
[...]
[Says a market stall vendor] "What people don't realise is that the women who come here shop to cook. Ninety per cent of them don't work, but they do know how to cook. They will buy 10 kilos of onions, 10 kilos of potatoes, just for the week. They don't want any convenience food. We are told repeatedly that is what the government wants: home cooks.
[...]
Neil Stockwell sees the same indications that it is the beginning of the end for him. 'We've been told we have to close now at six o'clock for example,' he says. 'We used to go on, on a summer evening, as long as we wanted. Me and my grandad used to drive out of here at midnight. Lovely summer's evening we'd be selling grapes, oranges, lemons. For some reason Asda will be allowed to stay open all night. Explain that to me?'
[...]
1,306 the number of convenience stores currently owned by the Big Four (Sainsbury's, Asda, Tesco, Morrisons).
54 the number of convenience stores owned by the Big Four in 2000.
22% the percentage by which independent stores in the UK declined between 2001 and 2005.
40% the percentage of Britain's small independent grocery stores predicted to be lost by 2015.
£850,000 the amount Asda were fined by a British court this February for offering illegal inducement to try and get workers to leave their unions.
1.6 million the number of women who have sued Wal-Mart in a US court for gender discrimination, the largest class action suit in history.
I think the Gargoyle belongs to Tom, along with the thermometer thingummyjig. It's so hideously kitsch I almost like it.
Tom's pet fish Thor, who has been entrusted to our care while Tom is away in New Zealand.
The reports from the Pentagon and the White House are somewhat chilling. Not only do they suggest the president is prepared to use a tactical nuclear weapon to hit underground bunkers, but that he hopes that "saving Iran" will be his legacy.
Philosophy is an abstract and theoretical discipline. Because of this, many outside it (and not a few within it) think that it has little impact on the everyday life of people. This has been especially accented in recent years, as increasing standards of professionalisation mean that philosophers tend to write explicitly just for others in their field and leave the general public in the dark. Nevertheless, philosophy has always had an impact on human culture, shaping currents and tendencies, supplying ideologies, vocabularies and concepts and offering ideals that penetrate to all aspects of society. For example, the works of Aristotle and Aquinas influenced a great number of people over many centuries through the mediation of the Catholic Church. The dialectics of Hegel, turned on their head by Marx, reached a multitude through various socialist movements. The existentialists' analysis of nihilism, meaninglessness and boredom pervaded the literature and cinematic culture of the twentieth century. (From 'Relativism' by Paul O'Grady, Chesham: Acumen, 2002, page ix)
