04w22:1 Followups Posted May 23rd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 22 number 1 (followups) ——————————————————————— Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection | Indiana University http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/cushman/index.jsp “Charles Weever Cushman, amateur photographer and Indiana University alumnus, bequeathed approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slides to his alma mater. The photographs in this collection bridge a thirty-two year span from 1938 to 1969, during which time he extensively documented the United States as well as other countries.” Followup to the posting (04w20:2) on pre-1945 colour photography. Virtual Worlds | Edward Castronova http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=294828 “In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world called ‘Norrath’, populated by an exotic but industrious people. About 12,000 people call this place their permanent home, although some 60,000 are present there at any given time. The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath’s currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many. The population is growing rapidly, swollen each each day by hundreds of emigres from various places around the globe, but especially the United States. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new world is its location. Norrath is a virtual world that exists entirely on 40 computers in San Diego. Unlike many internet ventures, virtual worlds are making money — with annual revenues expected to top USD 1.5 billion by 2004 — and if network effects are as powerful here as they have been with other internet innovations, virtual worlds may soon become the primary venue for all online activity.” Followup on the Walrus Article by Clive Thompson (04w21:1) on the economics of internet gaming. (The paper that started it all). Sticking up for painting | Franklin Einspruch http://www.artblog.net/?name=2004-05-19-16-38-painting “I could go on, but my point is that even someone as pro-painting as I am recognizes that art is not a zero-sum game between painting and all other media. Maybe this Gopnik article is a reaction to David Hockney’s recent statements about the superiority of painting, but Gopnik’s thesis is flawed for the same reasons that Hockney’s is. Every medium has particular strengths and weaknesses – otherwise artists wouldn’t prefer one over the other – and all media can be used well or used badly. Gopnik’s attitude is as conservative as Hughes’s, just the other way around. To praise art for being unlike painting is as ridiculous as criticizing it for being unlike painting, and the Post article full of ridiculousness […] Gopnik has an additional problem here that makes him sound desperate while Hughes sounds authoritative – Hughes is writing about a committed painter, Gopnik is not.” Followup to the last posting loosely related to painting. —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Sunday 23 May 2004 @ 2:23 PM
04w21:1 Posted May 18th, 2004 by timothy. 1 Comment Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 21 number 1 Never mind goodreads, these articles are so hot that if they were women I’d flirt with them. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Game Theories | Clive Thompson http://www.walrusmagazine.com/article.pl?sid=04/05/06/1929205&tid=1 “As Castronova stared at the auction listings, he recognized with a shock what he was looking at. It was a form of currency trading. Each item had a value in virtual ‘platinum pieces’; when it was sold on eBay, someone was paying cold hard American cash for it. That meant the platinum piece was worth something in real currency. EverQuest’s economy actually had real-world value. […] When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. – higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. […] The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia. It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn’t even exist.” Lessons from Homer | Ian Brown http://tinyurl.com/2tcb7 “I was reading Homer’s Iliad when the pictures from Abu Ghraib began to appear. […] One moment I was swimming through 15,693 lines of hexametric verse — long stretches of which-god-did-what-infantile-thing-to-whom, interrupted by splurts of eye-poking gore and knockout stanzas of shattering beauty about rage and revenge. The next I was trying to decipher a digital snapshot of — well, what was that square of interlocking human flesh supposed to be? […] As war atrocities — next to, say, King David’s habit of collecting the foreskins of his victims, or the 500 innocents slaughtered at My Lai in 1968, or even compared with the Chechen trick of sniping at Russians from behind a wounded Russian prisoner strung up in a window — the abuses at Abu Ghraib seemed relatively mild.[…] All over the United States, intellectuals of once-firm conviction, from Michael Ignatieff on the left to Andrew Sullivan on the right, were having meltdowns. […]I read the passage one last time, and put the The Iliad down. Already the moral valence of the Abu Ghraib affair was reversing itself, as the al-Qaeda beheading of an American named Nicholas Berg darkened the Internet. The Abu Ghraib jailers were creepy, but America’s enemies were judged creepier. “ A Troy boy’s epic pecs | Rick Groen http://tinyurl.com/2uvwu “Troy takes all the wind out of Homer’s sails. This is an epic made by a modernist who doesn’t believe in epics. Doesn’t believe in the honour of battle, or the status of a tragic hero, or the ideal of romantic love, or the dictates of an omnipotent god. What’s left? Not mythology, to be sure, but a rather bland sociology lecturing us on the realpolitik of power and the human waste of war. Now, such a contemporary sermon is well and good…” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 18 May 2004 @ 1:24 PM
04w20:1 Jan Herman's 'Straight Up' Posted May 9th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 20 number 1 ( Jan Herman’s “Straight Up”) Jan Herman’s blog, Straight Up, is this selections good read. Below are links to specific entries which caught my attention, but I’m sure you’ll be prompted to browse and find things on your own. – Tim ——————————————————————— ACCUSED OF TREASON, BUT KEEP IT UP | Jan Herman http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives20040501.shtml#77960 WHAT LANGUAGE ARE WE SPEAKING? | Jan Herman http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives20040401.shtml#76539 “Which reminds me. Have you heard of the NO-CARB Diet for 2004?” DISSING FLUXUS | Jan Herman http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives20040401.shtml#76759 EQUATIONS AND RELATIONS | Jan Herman http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/archives20040401.shtml#77335 —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Sunday 09 May 2004 @ 10:53 PM
04w18:3 Einstein vs. Asian Boys Posted April 27th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 18 number 3 (Einstein vs. Asian Boys) ——————————————————————— From Companion’s Lost Diary, a Portrait of Einstein in Old Age | Dennis Overbye http://tinyurl.com/ys8vy “Around Princeton she was known as Einstein’s last girlfriend. She cut his hair — shocking as it might be to imagine anyone tampering with that wispy cosmic aureole. They sailed together until the doctors took his boat away. They went to concerts together. He wrote her poems and letters bedecked with jokes and kisses. And he called her several times a week to chat about the day.” NOTE:NYT articles are usually only available for a week, so read this soon if you want to catch it before it gets archived, when it becomes for sale. A Dangerous Surplus of Sons? | David Glenn http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i34/34a01401.htm “In a new book, Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (MIT Press), Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer warn that the spread of sex selection is giving rise to a generation of restless young men who will not find mates. History, biology, and sociology all suggest that these ‘surplus males’ will generate high levels of crime and social disorder, the authors say. Even worse, they continue, is the possibility that the governments of India and China will build up huge armies in order to provide a safety valve for the young men’s aggressive energies.’In 2020 it may seem to China that it would be worth it to have a very bloody battle in which a lot of their young men could die in some glorious cause,’ says Ms. Hudson, a professor of political science at Brigham Young University.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 27 April 2004 @ 4:42 PM
04w15:1 The East Coast with the Most Posted April 6th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 15 number 1 (the east coast with the most) ——————————————————————— Financial woes could close Atlantic arts mag | Phlis McGregor http://www.cbc.ca/arts/stories/artsatlmag20040405 “Atlantic Canada’s visual-arts community is watching anxiously, as a growing financial crisis surrounding Arts Atlantic magazine may jeopardize the future of the 27-year-old publication. […] The magazine, which relies on subscriptions, advertising and government grants to stay afloat, has suffered from a both a rising debt load and the elimination of some of its grants. The lack of revenue has forced the magazine to temporarily shut down production. These troubles are similar to those at many other Canadian magazines, said Gordon Laurin, chair of the magazine’s board. ” For $47.5-million, these Rooms should be full |Lisa Moore http://tinyurl.com/3gpu7 “Here’s the situation: We have a brand new $47.5-million facility in the heart of downtown St. John’s that would rival any arts centre in Canada. It is magnificently designed, offers gorgeous exhibition space, expert curatorial staff, state-of-the-art conservation laboratories and atmospherically controlled storage space. For more than a year, the staff of each of the three divisions of The Rooms have been working to create innovative arts and educational programming. They have been packing up the province’s substantial art collection, as well as museum artifacts and archival holdings for the big move to the new site. There was to be a gala opening this June. And now that everything is all packed up and ready to go, the opening of The Rooms has been cancelled for at least a year, as many as 30 staff members have been handed pink slips and more layoffs are scheduled for the near future.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 06 April 2004 @ 10:37 PM
04w14:1 Blogs Posted March 30th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 14 number 1 (blogs) ——————————————————————— On Blogging, Paul Martin and Changing the World | Mara Gulens http://tinyurl.com/2ry9q “Much more than simple online rants, Web logs actually fulfill the primary role of the Internet, claimed Mark Federman, chief strategist at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and the co-author of the recently published McLuhan for Managers — New Tools for New Thinking. […] Blogs are an example of the new reflexive response to globalization. Connected individuals respond to what they see and make their views known. At times they even organize themselves into instant masses of people, sometimes with powerful effects.” Notes on blogging | Terry Teachout http://tinyurl.com/2uejj “1. It’s almost impossible to explain what a blog is to someone who’s never seen one. That’s the mark of a true innovation. […] 6. Blogging puts professionals and amateurs on an even footing. That’s why so many professional writers dislike and distrust it. […] 10. Blogs will be to the 21st century what little magazines were to the 20th century. Their influence will be disproportionate to their circulation.” Guest Posting — Toby Thain | Michael von Blowhard http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/001375.html#001375 NOTE: This post is about digital photography, as Michael has posted an email he recieved from an Australian professional photographer on the difference between digital vs. film. However, the thoughts expressed in the intro are interesting in themselves, and from that I take this teaser. – Tim “In my years of following the arts, the biggest story has seemed to me to be the digitification of culture. […] I went into the culture field wanting to yak about books and movies (etc), and to add some product of my own to the culture stream. Instead, wham: along came computers — and for the last 15-20 years, what’s been most visible in the arts is the way that the various fields are reconfiguring themselves as digital waves sweep through them. We wouldn’t have rap music if music hadn’t gone digital. Magazines, ads and television wouldn’t look the way they do if it weren’t for computers. Bookselling superstores depend on databases. Copyright, distribution, the final experience of culture itself — all are up for grabs because of digital technology.” Tables of Contents | Michael von Blowhard http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/001340.html “Before it’s useful, a ToC now has to be its own intense media experience. I’d argue that these super-ultra-hyper ToCs are also intense electronic-media experiences. Their values — flash, twinkle, fwoof — aren’t the values of traditional magazines; they’re values that come from TV and computers. Tatyana may disagree with me on this, but I’ll also venture that the newfangled ToCs are functions of the computer age. In the first place, of course, Quark and Photoshop are the tools that make this kind of layout possible. In the second place (and as a simple fact of the media biz), the computerizing of the corporate media has given concept people — producers, editors, and designers especially — more power than they used to have, while it has taken power away from such content people as directors and writers. A consequence is that boxes, graphics, visuals, and themes — stuff that producers, editors and designers love — have become an ever more prominent part of our media life. When you buy a big-budget magazine, you’re buying boxes, graphics, etc: a lot of overproduced showbiz, an artifact akin to what the contempo moviebiz is selling.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 30 March 2004 @ 4:11 PM
04w12:2 Posted March 17th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 12 number 2 ——————————————————————— The Perpetual Adolescent | Joseph Epstein http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/825grtdi.asp “The people in those earlier baseball crowds, though watching a boyish game, nonetheless had a radically different conception of themselves than most Americans do now. […] they thought of themselves as adults, no longer kids, but grown-ups, adults, men. How different from today, when a good part of the crowd at any ballgame, no matter what the age, is wearing jeans and team caps and T-shirts […] Life in that different day was felt to observe the human equivalent of the Aristotelian unities: to have, like a good drama, a beginning, middle, and end. Each part, it was understood, had its own advantages and detractions, but the middle–adulthood–was the lengthiest and most earnest part, where everything serious happened and much was at stake.[…]Today, of course, all this has been shattered. The ideal almost everywhere is to seem young for as long as possible […] One of the many tenets in its credo–soon to become a cliché, but no less significant for that–was that no one over 30 was to be trusted. (If you were part of that movement and 21 years old in 1965, you are 60 today. Good morning, Sunshine.)” Marketplace of Ideas: But First, The Bill | William Osborne http://www.artsjournal.com/artswatch/20040311-11320.shtml “As an American who has lived in Europe for the last 24 years, I see on a daily basis how different the American and European economic systems are, and how deeply this affects the ways they produce, market and perceive art. America advocates supply-side economics, small government and free trade – all reflecting a belief that societies should minimize government expenditure and maximize deregulated, privatized global capitalism. Corporate freedom is considered a direct and analogous extension of personal freedom. Europeans, by contrast, hold to mixed economies with large social and cultural programs. Governmental spending often equals about half the GNP. Europeans argue that an unmitigated capitalism creates an isomorphic, corporate-dominated society with reduced individual and social options. Americans insist that privatization and the marketplace provide greater efficiency than governments. These two economic systems have created something of a cultural divide between Europeans and Americans.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 17 March 2004 @ 10:54 PM
04w12:1 The Corporation Posted March 15th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 12 number 1 (The Corporation) ——————————————————————— Review of “The Corporation” | What is The Message? http://tinyurl.com/2q2mm “First, let me say that the film is worth seeing for a lot of reasons. […] While I wouldn’t call the reportage exactly balanced – this is a film promoting a definite point of view – it isn’t all Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky all the time either. In particular, the testimony by Ray Anderson, Chairman of Interface, Inc., one of the world’s largest carpet manufacturers, clearly demonstrates the good that corporations can do, and provides part of the answer to the problem proposed by the film’s premise. […] The widely-publicized set piece is the ‘diagnosis’ of an archetypal corporation as a psychopath. […] But the examples are clearly selected to prove the point, essentially begging the question. What struck me as ironic was how the film decried corporations for using manipulative advertising and marketing techniques to attract customers, while simultaneously using the same methods to make its own points, especially the incriminating diagnosis.” What CEOs can learn at daycare | Jim Stanford http://tinyurl.com/3ae3c “In fact, my only disappointment was the gradual realization that this nurturing and generally peaceful environment was completely different from the real world that my daughters were destined to inhabit. At daycare, they learn to be compassionate and co-operative human beings. But capitalism does not reward compassion and co-operation; it is driven by acquisitiveness and individualism. The rules of the game change once you leave daycare, and so do the teachers who enforce them. […] How ironic that we train our children first to be good, social human beings, only to later demand that they act like acquisitive, hard-hearted machines. Personally, I prefer the approach that rewards co-operation and compassion, and that produces an environment in which everyone succeeds. If toddlers can learn to do it, why can’t the rest of us? ” How to Lead Now | John A. Byrne http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/73/leadnow.html “In truth, this is the stuff of Leadership 101: drawing the very best out of people by making the emotional bond every bit as important as the monetary one, feeding the soul as well as the wallet. But as profits have plunged and unemployment has soared, nurturing and innovative approaches to leading have fallen by the wayside, replaced by tougher, more autocratic, and more egocentric styles. Inspirational leadership has come to be lumped in with the fripperies of the bubble: the snazzy dotcom digs, the office concierge, the take-your-dog-to-work days. In many workplaces, the message has changed from ‘What can we do to keep you happy and keep you here?’ to ‘You’re lucky to have a job, so sit down and shut up.’ […] But if the recent period of excess and arrogance has taught us anything, it’s that leadership must return to the principles that are practiced by people like 49-year-old Cadagin. […] Katzenbach, who has long studied high-performing organizations, thinks that it comes down to one core issue: building pride. ” The Morality of the Market | Jerry Z. Muller http://www.techcentralstation.com/011504A.html “One perennial pitfall in thinking about the moral effects of capitalism is issue of comparison. When philosophers ask about the morality of capitalism, they too rarely ask ‘compared to what’? Of course capitalism is morally inferior to many a philosophical utopia. […] But the flip side of the cash nexus is first of all the freedom and self-determination that comes from having cash, and second the fact that relations based on cash do not involve the total subordination of one individual to the will of another […] there are plenty of good arguments about the moral hazards of a market society. But there are also good arguments about its moral advantages, and these should not get overlooked in discussions about globalization. Many of the moral advantages and conceptions of selfhood that those in capitalist societies take for granted are due in no small part to capitalism itself. ” —————————————- Long urls made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Monday 15 March 2004 @ 10:48 PM
04w11:1 Patrick Moore vs. Vandana Shiva Posted March 7th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 11 number 1 (Patrick Moore vs. Vandana Shiva) ——————————————————————— Eco-Traitor | Drake Bennett http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/moore_pr.html “Patrick Moore has been called a sellout, traitor, parasite, and prostitute […] Moore helped found Greenpeace and devoted 15 years to waging the organization’s flamboyant brand of environmental warfare. […] He derides today’s activists as philosophically unmoored and blindly technophobic, and he offers an alternative philosophy that not only accepts but celebrates humankind’s growing ability to alter the planet. […] ‘As I like to say, maybe it’s time to figure out what the solutions are, rather than just focusing on problems.’ […] When I understood sustainable development,’ he recalls, ‘I realized that the challenge was to take these new environmental values that we had forged and incorporate them into the traditional social and economic values that drive public policy. In other words, it was a job of synthesis.’ ” Battle for Biotech Progress | Patrick Moore http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17889/article_detail.asp “The campaign of fear now waged against genetic modification is based largely on fantasy and a complete lack of respect for science and logic. In the balance it is clear that the real benefits of genetic modification far outweigh the hypothetical and sometimes contrived risks claimed by its detractors. […] For six years, anti-biotech activists managed to prevent the introduction of G.M. crops in India. This was largely the work of Vandana Shiva, the Oxford-educated daughter of a wealthy Indian family, who has campaigned relentlessly to ‘protect’ poor farmers from the ravages of multinational seed companies. In 2002, she was given the Hero of the Planet award by Time magazine for ‘defending traditional agricultural practices.’ Read: poverty and ignorance. It looked like Shiva would win the G.M. debate until 2001, when unknown persons illegally planted 25,000 acres of Bt cotton in Gujarat. The cotton bollworm infestation was particularly bad that year, and there was soon a 25,000 acre plot of beautiful green cotton in a sea of brown. The local authorities were notified and decided that the illegal cotton must be burned. This was too much for the farmers, who could now clearly see the benefits of the Bt variety. In a classic march to city hall with pitchforks in hand, the farmers protested and won the day. Bt cotton was approved for planting in March 2002. One hopes the poverty-stricken cotton farmers of India will become wealthier and deprive Vandana Shiva of her parasitical practice. ” Poverty & Globalisation | Vandana Shiva http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_2000/lecture5.stm “Who feeds the world? My answer is very different to that given by most people. It is women and small farmers working with biodiversity who are the primary food providers in the Third World, and contrary to the dominant assumption, their biodiversity based small farms are more productive than industrial monocultures. This deliberate blindness to diversity, the blindness to nature’s production, production by women, production by Third World farmers allows destruction and appropriation to be projected as creation. Take the case of the much flouted ‘golden rice’ or genetically engineered Vitamin A rice as a cure for blindness. It is assumed that without genetic engineering we cannot remove Vitamin A deficiency. However, nature gives us abundant and diverse sources of vitamin A. If rice was not polished, rice itself would provide Vitamin A. If herbicides were not sprayed on our wheat fields, we would have bathua, amaranth, mustard leaves as delicious and nutritious greens that provide Vitamin A. The devaluation and invisibility of sustainable, regenerative production is most glaring in the area of food. While patriarchal division of labour has assigned women the role of feeding their families and communities, patriarchal economics and patriarchal views of science and technology magically make women’s work in providing food disappear. ‘Feeding the World’ becomes disassociated from the women who actually do it and is projected as dependent on global agribusiness and biotechnology corporations. ” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Sunday 07 March 2004 @ 12:48 PM
04w09:1 Jesus Harry Potter Christ Posted February 23rd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 9 number 1 (jesus harry potter christ) ——————————————————————— Boobs, blood and Bible-bashing | John Patterson http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1151479,00.html “Here we go again with the same old hypocrisy. Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, which features a fair acreage of flesh, and whose politics are avowedly of the 1960s left, gets slapped with an NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board, thus guaranteeing a drastic narrowing of its audience and a lowering of its profitability. Meanwhile, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, a medievally reactionary Bible-basher drenched in the literal blood of the mythical Lamb, featuring extensive, non-sex-related applications of scourge and lash, close-ups of nails being hammered through flesh, and a bloody spearing or two, gets pushed out to 3,000 screens nationwide under the more inclusive R-rating, which means newspapers will carry its ads, and children will be allowed to see it. ” Eichmann in Hogwarts: Harry Potter and the banality of evil. | Julian Sanchez http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1568/6_35/109085444/p1/article.jhtml “Umbridge and Fudge may be power hungry, but their malevolence is not the raw nihilism of a Voldemort. Umbridge is particularly insufferable precisely because her transformation of Hogwarts into an increasingly regulated panopticon is motivated by an apparently sincere self-righteousness. A central theme of The Order of the Phoenix, then, is what Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil.’ The bureaucrats are doing good by their own lights, following orders. Former Hogwarts prefect Percy Weasley is a case in point. In the past, Percy served as comic relief, a stuffed shirt whose obsequiousness toward authority figures was matched only by his imperiousness toward younger students. Now Percy is a Hogwarts graduate and assistant to Minister Fudge, and his blind affection for his masters leads him to join the smear campaign against Harry. The transition from buffoonish to sinister is seamless. ” It’s all Greek to Harry Potter | BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/beds/bucks/herts/3469023.stm “Mr Wilson said writing the book had its challenges. ‘Everybody asked me, what’s the Greek for Quidditch? ‘What’s the Greek for bludger and snitch and all these other technical terms that JK Rowling has invented?’ […] The classics teacher showed the ancient Greek version for the first time this week at Scott School in Bedford, where he read to the children. One of the pupils told BBC Look East: ‘I didn’t know what he was saying, but I did recognise a couple of words and it did make us laugh.’ ” Mel’s Maligners | George Neumayr http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=6170 “Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is provoking religious slights — on Christians. Diane Sawyer’s Primetime interview with Gibson dripped with an insulting condescension toward Christianity, a condescension liberals would regard as bigoted were it aimed at Judaism or Islam. Sawyer, brows furrowed, looking almost in a state of physical pain, felt free to question Gibson’s faith with a surely-you-can’t-believe-that? air. As Gibson spoke about such things as his belief in the Devil and the Holy Spirit, Sawyer’s face registered a wincing incredulity. She looked like a horrified anthropologist who had just stumbled upon some grotesque religious sect. […] Talk show hosts usually coo over the convictions of artists and believers. Not so with Gibson. His convictions are so in need of correction that Sawyer, suddenly an art monitor, demanded to know why he didn’t make a different movie. ‘You could have made a life of Jesus,’ a nice and fuzzy movie without the crucifixion, Sawyer told Gibson.(The fatuousness of Sawyer reached its bottom when she referred to the movie as an ‘anti-date movie.’)” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Monday 23 February 2004 @ 2:49 PM
