05w04:2 Freaky Fish Posted January 30th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 4 number 2 (freaky fish) ——————————————————————— Fish Off the Menu After Tsunami Fears | Jocelyn Gecker http://tinyurl.com/5l6zj “Top hotels in several Asian capitals have stopped ordering sea bass and sole from waters off their tsunami-ravaged coastlines to ease diners’ concerns about fish feasting on corpses. Some have turned to suppliers in Australia, while others are buying fish from Indonesian islands off the Pacific Ocean that were untouched by disaster ? dealing another blow to fishermen whose livelihoods were shattered by the giant waves.” Fish Discovered With Human Face Pattern | Local6.com http://www.local6.com/news/4112928/detail.html “A fish that has a pattern resembling a human face on its body was found in a pond in Chongju, South Korea, according to a Local 6 News report.” Reno man taken to hospital after self-castration procedure | Reno-Gazette-Journal http://tinyurl.com/6sex9 “A 50-year-old Reno man told authorities he castrated himself to lower his libido and learned of the procedure on the Internet, police said.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Sunday 30 January 2005 @ 2:45 PM
05w04:1 Painting Posted January 30th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 4 number 1 (painting) ——————————————————————— A Powerful Collector Changes Course | Alan Riding http://tinyurl.com/47os6 “In an article last weekend in The Sunday Telegraph of London, Andrew Graham-Dixon conceded that Mr. Saatchi could genuinely believe painting is now central to contemporary art. ‘It is also possible that, like a cannily contrarian fund-manager working in the equities market, he has simply decided that painting is currently an undervalued sector – and he has bet his portfolio on the proposition that it has a big recovery upside,’ Mr. Graham-Dixon wrote.” Some thoughts on the future of painting | Timothy Comeau http://tinyurl.com/6aq7k “As a 20th Century fashion, we can assume that in the future historians will be able to date our paintings by this look, just as easily as we can with past centuries. We know that the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries have style, a theme of subject matter, a look. In the 20th Century, painting became obsessed with itself as a viscous medium resting on a surface. We don’t know what 21st Century painting will look like – this century’s look has not yet developed. It seems that in a world where all of our images are perfectly rendered on screens, the human touch evident in brushstroke and viscosity is what makes painting valuable. It occurs to me then that perhaps the traditional tales of the rise of Modernism, and especially Ab-ex painting in the 1950s, ignores the concurrent development of television. These things make me think that this style has legs to go into the 21st Century. At the same time, we 20C folk are limited to thinking of everything as ‘human touch’ and go on and on about ‘humanity’ – this vast 19th C hangover of industrialization —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Sunday 30 January 2005 @ 2:40 PM
05w03:3 To Whom it May Concern Posted January 21st, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 3 number 3 (to whom it may concern) Joey Comeau has been writing satirical cover letters and sending them along for some time now, and they are all archived on his website, asofterworld.com. There’s no direct relation between him and I, although I’m sure we share an 18th Century grandfather. The link below is to the index of past cover letters, and a chance to subscribe to his mailing list. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Overqualified: A new letter every Tuesday | Joey Comeau http://www.asofterworld.com/oqindex.html “Looking for work is an exercise in selling yourself. You write cover letter after cover letter, listing the parts of you that you respect the least, listing the selling points that make you valuable in a buyer’s market. You leave out the little details that you tell yourself in the morning to make things okay. You don’t mention the way your heart flutters when you meet your lover’s eyes across the table, the way your feet felt like lead at your aunt’s funeral. You write cover letter after cover letter, listing the same store bought traits in the same wording, day after day, hoping to find another job. And then maybe one day you just snap a little. You sit down to write a cover letter, and something entirely new comes out. And you send it anyway.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Friday 21 January 2005 @ 6:49 PM
05w03:2 Popeye Said Dope was for Dopes Posted January 20th, 2005 by timothy. 1 Comment Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 3 number 2 (Popeye said dope was for dopes) Both these readings are from the December 2004 issue of Scientific American. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Current restrictions on marijuana research are absurd | Scientific American http://tinyurl.com/3z7xt “The human brain naturally produces and processes compounds closely related to those found in Cannabis sativa, better known as marijuana. These compounds are called endogenous cannabinoids or endocannabinoids. As the journal Nature Medicine put it in 2003, ‘the endocannabinoid system has an important role in nearly every paradigm of pain, in memory, in neurodegeneration and in inflammation.’ The journal goes on to note that cannabinoids’ ‘clinical potential is enormous.’ That potential may include treatments for pain, nerve injury, the nausea associated with chemotherapy, the wasting related to AIDS and more. Yet outdated regulations and attitudes thwart legitimate research with marijuana. Indeed, American biomedical researchers can more easily acquire and investigate cocaine.” The Brain’s Own Marijuana | Roger A. Nicoll and Bradley N. Alger http://tinyurl.com/3wqfd “Marijuana and its various alter egos, such as bhang and hashish, are among the most widely used psychoactive drugs in the world. How the plant has been used varies by culture […] Marijuana gained a following in the U.S. only relatively recently. […] Its psychoactive power comes from its action in the cerebral cortex. […] Marijuana clearly does so much because it acts everywhere. […] In 1992, 28 years after he identified THC, Mechoulam discovered a small fatty acid produced in the brain that binds to CB1 and that mimics all the activities of marijuana. He named it anandamide, after the Sanskrit word ananda, ‘bliss.’ Subsequently, Daniele Piomelli and Nephi Stella of the University of California at Irvine discovered that another lipid, 2-arachidonoyl glycerol (2-AG), is even more abundant in certain brain regions than anandamide is. Together the two compounds are considered the major endogenous cannabinoids, or endocannabinoids. […] The two cannabinoid receptors clearly evolved along with endocannabinoids as part of natural cellular communication systems. Marijuana happens to resemble the endocannabinoids enough to activate cannabinoid receptors. […] The results indicate that endocannabinoids are important in extinguishing the bad feelings and pain triggered by reminders of past experiences. The discoveries raise the possibility that abnormally low numbers of cannabinoid receptors or the faulty release of endogenous cannabinoids are involved in post-traumatic stress syndrome, phobias and certain forms of chronic pain. This suggestion fits with the fact that some people smoke marijuana to decrease their anxiety. It is also conceivable, though far from proved, that chemical mimics of these natural substances could allow us to put the past behind us when signals that we have learned to associate with certain dangers no longer have meaning in the real world.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Thursday 20 January 2005 @ 2:43 PM
05w03:1 The Enlightenment Posted January 19th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 3 number 1 (The Enlightenment) ——————————————————————— Group Think | Malcolm Gladwell http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_12_02_a_snl.htm “Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it ‘philosophical laughing,’ which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence. But there’s more to it than that. One of the peculiar features of group dynamics is that clusters of people w ill come to decisions that are far more extreme than any individual member would have come to on his own. People compete with each other and egg each other on, showboat and grandstand; and along the way they often lose sight of what they truly believed when the meeting began. Typically, this is considered a bad thing, because it means that groups formed explicitly to find middle ground often end up someplace far away. But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation.”Although this article begins with an history of Saturday Night Live, it also contains a history of the Lunar Society The Lunar Society | BBC Radio 4 http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/ram/inourtime_20030605.ram this links directly to a Real Media file and will launch your player. It is a radio discussion on the history of the Lunar Society that Gladwell wrote about French Enlightenment overrated, historian says | Chuck Leddy http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/08/29/RVG5H8BCEK1.DTL “Himmelfarb’s basic contention, one she supports with great passion and wide-ranging scholarship, is that the great 18th century French Enlightenment has been vastly overrated and that the British and American Enlightenments have been comparatively underrated. Her goal in writing this book is to ‘reclaim the Enlightenment … from the French who have dominated and usurped it’ and restore it to the British and Americans.” The Enlightenment | Robert Wokler http://www.colbud.hu/main/PubArchive/DP/DP46-Wokler.pdf “On the other hand, the same critics of an Enlightenment Project, […] commonly trace its conceptual roots to eighteenth-century philosophy. They are convinced that modernity was bred from the loins of the Enlightenment, out of its notions of the rights of man and its principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, which brought the age of feudalism to a close. If they are communitarians or post-modernists, they seldom hesitate to blame the Enlightenment for having conceived that monstrous child which our civilization has become, since they believe that, even while disposing of original sin, the philosophes of the eighteenth century actually committed it. The attempts of eighteenth-century thinkers to free human nature from the shackles of tradition are alleged to have given rise either to the empty desolation of atomistic individualism or to schemes of social engineering on a vast scale, or indeed to both at once. Such propositions, in different permutations, inform Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust. I mean to show here that both propositions—that the Enlightenment loved the thing it killed, and that modernity springs from the Enlightenment—are false.”PDF file, 115 KB PR men of reason | Anthony Daniels http://tinyurl.com/5ywge “We are all children of the Enlightenment, even if historical experience has taught us that rationality and benevolence do not necessarily go hand in hand, to put it mildly. The Enlightenment, indeed, could be regarded as a second expulsion from Eden: an imperfect Eden of cruelty and superstition to be sure, but one which at least contained a degree of stability and a number of comforting religious certitudes. Having eaten of the fruit of the tree of the Enlightenment, however, we cannot ever return to that imperfect Eden. We have been destined ever since to live in a permanent effervescence of expanding knowledge and competing ideas.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 19 January 2005 @ 11:18 PM
05w02:2 Good Reading Posted January 13th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 2 number 2 (good reading) Today is Goodreads 1st birthday, and to celebrate, here is an article on autodidacticism. But before that, I feel I should acknowledge the following people who have in some way helped Goodreads over the past 12 months: Instant Coffee, Sarah Hollenberg, Izida Zorde, Chris Hand, Andrew Kear, Sally McKay, and Jennifer McMackon, thank you. As well, I should thank the following who have allowed Goodreads to host their content free of charge: AA Bronson, Andy Paterson, Greg Bear, Mark Kingwell, and Reid Cooper, it is much appreciated.Also, last weekend in the National Post, RM Vaughan wrote an article about artists using the internet, and included Goodreads. With his permission, the article can be seen here. – Timothy ——————————————————————— The Classics in the Slums | Jonathan Rose http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_urbanities-classics.html “…like so many postmodern critics, Professor Smith could be naively confident that she was in full possession of the facts, even without the benefit of research. But her theory had no visible means of support. Whenever it was tested, the results were diametrically opposed to what she predicted: in fact ‘the canon’ enabled ‘the masses’ to become thinking individuals. Until fairly recently, Britain had an amazingly vital autodidact culture, where a large minority of the working classes passionately pursued classic literature, philosophy, and music. They were denied the educational privileges that Professor Smith enjoyed, but they knew that the ‘great books’ that she derided would emancipate the workers. […] Kurt Wootton taught English at a Providence high school where the students were almost all black and half of them dropped out before graduation. He assigned them Richard Wright’s Black Boy and jazz by John Coltrane, which they found hopelessly irrelevant. Then he organized ArtsLit, a summer program that brings students from Rhode Island’s worst high schools to the Brown University campus to study and perform Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, GarcÃa Lorca’s Blood Wedding, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And these long-dead authors clearly sent the kids a message, as high school teacher Richard Kinslow found when he had his ESL class prepare a production of Macbeth. One of his students was the type who got suspended about once a week, but he would sneak into school for the daily rehearsals. His motivation was precisely the same as Edith Hall’s. ‘These kids had never been actively involved in any part of school except gym and art,’ explained Kinslow. ‘Doing Shakespeare honored them. If you want to talk about self-respect and pride, it made a big difference.'” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Thursday 13 January 2005 @ 2:23 PM
05w02:1 Roadsworth Posted January 12th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 2 number 1 (Roadsworth) Those of you in Montreal will be familiar with Roadsworth, the stencil artist who has made a name for himself by decorating the streets and getting arrested at the end of November. If you’re a regular reader of the Zeke’s Gallery blog, you’ll also be familiar with the story, as Chris Hand has been coordinating the effort of publicizing his predicament. This issue of Goodreads reproduces an article on the subject that was published last week in the Globe and Mail, and links to one of the Chris’ entries where he offers a 6MB mp3 file of an interview he did on a Montreal radio station. – Timothy ——————————————————————— When the stencil his the road | Reid Cooper http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/reidcooper/ “The seriousness of the charges and the potential punishment, however, has to be seen in light of the overwhelming support for Roadsworth’s images. Chris Hand, the director of Zeke’s Gallery on the Plateau, who is organizing public support for Gibson through his webpage, says he was ‘surprised about how many people thought the art had been done by the city.’ Bernard Lamarche, writer for Montreal’s Le Devoir, says ‘It is absolutely shocking that there is a criminal attitude against his art. They should hire him to do more of this around the city to acknowledge their supposed willingness to be a cultural centre.’ Jonathan Achtman, a resident of the Plateau says the art ‘makes the streets more pleasant. By arresting him instead of aligning themselves with him, the city has squandered an opportunity to show itself as the progressive city that I like to think I live in.’ Even the political adviser to the Mayor of the Plateau Mont-Royal borough, Richard Coté says, ‘Roadsworth’s work makes people smile.'” More Free Roadsworth | Chris Hand http://zekesgallery.blogspot.com/2004/12/more-free-roadsworth.html within the text there is the link to the audio file Roadsworth Gallery | Mike Patten and Zeke’s Gallery http://mikepatten.ca/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=roadsworth photo gallery —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 12 January 2005 @ 10:23 PM
05w01:3 Tsunami Articles Posted January 4th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments ood Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 1 number 3 (2 tsunami articles) ——————————————————————— Nature’s way | Simon Winchester http://www.guardian.co.uk/tsunami/story/0,15671,1382849,00.html?gusrc=rss “The eruption of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883 not only caused a catastrophic tsunami that killed tens of thousands, it also helped to spark a revolution. Twenty-three years later, a huge earthquake destroyed San Francisco, with equally far-reaching consequences. Simon Winchester on how natural disasters can change the world.” Quake Angel | Duncan Larcombe http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/37579.htm “‘I think it’s phenomenal that Tilly’s parents and the others on the beach are alive because she studied hard at school,’ said Craig Smith, the American manager of the JW Marriott Hotel where Tilly’s family was staying.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 04 January 2005 @ 7:30 PM
05w01:2 A Letter from Her Father Posted January 3rd, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 1 number 2 (a letter from her father) Prada Princess is the moniker and blog of an anonymous New Yorker, who recently came into a substantial trust fund and is obsessed with Lindsay Lohan. Her blog chronicles her problems with her family, her attempts to buy property rather than continue to “waste money on rent”, and more than one entry is in response to the nasty comments she receives for being such a rich bitch. Her father, understandably, is dismayed, concerned as he is about his daughter’s irresponsibility. Prada Princess has shown herself to be thin skinned, superficial, compassionless, and not that bright, and her father has written her a letter, which she has posted on her blog. – Timothy ——————————————————————— A letter from my Father | Prada Princess http://pradaprincess.blogspot.com/2005/01/letter-from-my-father.html “Besides your indolent treatment of your finances and family, my other chief concerns is the way you treat your time which is more valuable than any amount of money in the world. Money can be lost and gained but time can only be lost. I lie awake at night with this fear that you will not have found your way and end up becoming a spinster who lives alone with her 20 cats becoming bitter and angry with the realization that any opportunity to create meaning in your life is long past. Your trust fund does not give you the right to do anything you want. It is an actually responsibility that has been given to you. And you are failing miserably in fulfilling it. As parents we have failed in raising you properly and now your life is entirely out of our hands and we are helpless to to assist you. […] I beg of you to please wake up and think very hard about who you are and what you are doing with your life besides focusing on dreams that will never come to fruition. You have many years ahead of you, please you use them in a productive manner and review your life. The last thing I want to do is compare you to your older sister. But my heart wells with great pride with her accomplishments. I am not telling you to become a doctor, get married to a lawyer and raise a family in Palos Verdes. If you yearn to become a doctor and get married then do it. If you desire to become an English teacher at Exeter that’s fantastic too. But on this New Year please pick a path and walk it.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Monday 03 January 2005 @ 6:02 PM
05w01:1 05 Posted January 2nd, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 1 number 1 (05) ——————————————————————— Name that Decade | Timothy Noah http://slate.msn.com/id/2111435/ “By not coming up with a name, society has created a serious rhetorical problem that spills over into the social sciences. […] Because there is no name for the present decade, people seeking to describe the spirit of the times often resort to substituting the name of the entire century (or, in extreme cases, the entire millenium). This is pompous and stupid. […] Imagine somebody attempting to define the 20th century in January 1905. He would know nothing about the rise of Soviet communism and German fascism, and therefore nothing about the butchery of Stalin and Hitler. He’d know nothing about mass production of the automobile. He would never have heard of Albert Einstein or his theory of relativity. He might resist having his home wired for electricity, out of the common fear that it was more dangerous than gaslight. He would likely consider the United States to be a lesser world power than Great Britain and France. He’d have no idea that the airplane would soon become an instrument of war and, eventually, a vehicle commonly used for ocean crossings. He would never have listened to a radio, or watched television, or gone to a movie theater and heard the actors speak. If he visited Philadelphia, he’d be dazzled by its wealth and sophistication. He would, in short, have none of the information he needed to describe accurately the coming century.” Miraculous visions | The Economist http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3518580 “Then, in 1905, a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein found the way forward. In five remarkable papers, he showed that atoms are real (it was still controversial at the time), presented his special theory of relativity, and put quantum theory on its feet. It was a different achievement from Newton’s year, but Einstein’s annus mirabilis was no less remarkable. He did not, like Newton, have to invent entirely new forms of mathematics. However, he had to revise notions of space and time fundamentally. And unlike Newton, who did not publish his results for nearly 20 years, so obsessed was he with secrecy and working out the details, Einstein released his papers one after another, as a fusillade of ideas.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Sunday 02 January 2005 @ 5:08 PM
