That’s 1:07 of your life that you’re never getting back.
Above, the good citizens of San Francisco fighting their very own War Against Drugs in 1914. Those are opium pipes they’re burning, and that’s City Hall rising in the background. And yes, this is another find from the excellent Asian Art Museum blog. You should really check it out.
Also: that is a not inconsiderable number of opium pipes. Just sayin’.
Pat Buchanan, that execrable paleoconservative, recently attended an “English-only” conference at which he continued his vicious, paranoid, and blatantly racist attacks on Sonia Sotomayor.
In fairness, the conference organizers made no claims to holding a “Correct-spellings-only” conference.
A few pieces worth reading:
Laura Secor has been posting some excellent analysis to the New Yorker’s Newsdesk section. Her latest is very interesting:
I think there is still a battle being waged for the hearts and minds of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij. Successful nonviolent movements in other countries have depended on the cooptation of the rank and file in the armed forces; one remembers the moving scenes of Serbian riot police embracing demonstrators. Of course, the Serbian opposition spent months working up to that. In the summer of 2000, when Slobodan Milosevic’s government issued a statement to the army saying that the student activists were terrorists, an activist told me that he and his friends retaliated by sending care packages to soldiers in the hope that “in the key moment when he orders them to shoot on us, they won’t listen.” The success of Serbia’s democratic movement was not only that it deposed a rancid dictator but that it united, at least momentarily, a divided and scarred society.
Roger Cohen has an excellent piece of first-person reportage in the Times. Here’s the lede, describing what he saw Saturday:
The Iranian police commander, in green uniform, walked up Komak Hospital Alley with arms raised and his small unit at his side. “I swear to God,” he shouted at the protesters facing him, “I have children, I have a wife, I don’t want to beat people. Please go home.”
And Robert Fisk has been providing daily updates in the Independent. From his latest:
But reacting as all revolutionaries do even decades after they have come to power – for the spectre of counter-revolution remains with them until death – Khamenei chose to paint Ahmadinejad’s political opponents as potential mercenaries, spies and agents of foreign powers. Treason in the Islamic Republic is, of course, punishable by death. But Khamenei’s political alliance with his very odd and hallucinatory president may have sprung from fear as much as anger.
That last, of course, is via Ronan the Red.
UPDATE: A friend sends a link to a Tumblr page he’s put together aggregating coverage of the events in Iran. Check it out.
Above, two examples of the nine-planet crest of the Hosokawa clan, as seen in the Asian Art Museum’s new exhibition Lords of the Samurai, via the museum’s excellent new blog. The exhibition, which I saw when it opened this week, is just fantastically cool, and the crest, which appears over and over again, is just a small part of it.
Now I know what you’re saying: “H, my friend, how could this ancient crest depict nine planets when Pluto wasn’t discovered until 1930? Are space aliens involved? Or perhaps time-traveling robots?” This is Japan we’re talking about, of course, and one should not immediately discount science fiction-related explanations. Read on for more examples of the crest, and the answer to this pressing question.
Do yourself a favor and check out Andrew Sullivan’s blog for coverage of what’s been going on in Iran. Sure, some of it’s been over the top, and some of it’s incredible (meaning not credible), but a whole hell of a lot of it is informative, insightful, dramatic, and fascinating. The gathering of professional reporting, youtube videos, expert commentary, tweets and emails from the scene presents an event like this in a way I’ve never seen. Puts cable news to shame, and shows how rapidly the media is changing.
Not that old media is completely gone away. The Times’ Lede blog has also been very good.
Longtime readers will know of my fascination with this topic. But this, via Kottke (who else?) is simply mesmerizing: some enterprising young person in LA has created a 15 minute extended meditation on Shatner’s greatest film moment.
For the first 30 seconds, you’re thinking it’s trivial. For the next 30, you’re annoyed. At about two minutes in, you’re halfway to enlightenment, sweartogod. I wish the whole thing was online.
For those of you of the book-learned persuasion, two links I’ve come across in the past few weeks that I’m sure you will enjoy. First up, the Economist’s style guide. Sample goodness, from the “Some Common Solecisms” section:
Acronym: this is a word, like radar or NATO, not a set of initials, like the BBC or the IMF.
Critique is a noun. If you want a verb, try criticise.
Oxymoron: an oxymoron is not an unintentional contradiction in terms but a figure of speech in which contradictory terms are deliberately combined, as in bitter-sweet, cruel kindness, sweet sorrow, etc.
That, my friends, is some quality pedantry.
Up second, a spelling contest, from a 1955 issue of Esquire, of all places. These are supposed to be words most often misspelled by some group of smartypants. According to the magazine, in the 1950s, the median score was six, twelve put you in the ninetieth percentile, and eighteen “put you on the level of a university English professor.”
I took it at work, and got ten out of 20 right. Two co-workers also got ten right, but not the same ten, and they’re both smartypants.
Consider this a challenge, and leave your score in the comments. The words, spelled sortakinda phonetically, are after the jump.
No cheatin’.
Yet another in a continuing series of photographs of our President that make me smile.
Seriously, what do you think those two are thinking?
The Chinese government seems pretty determined to stop any commemoration of the ‘89 Tiananmen Square protests, which happened twenty years ago today. This, of course, is terrible on multiple levels. But I don’t understand why they (who care so much about how they’re perceived around the world) continue to make such hamfisted decisions, just from a PR perspective.
On the other hand, that one of the tactics they’ve chosen to carry out this policy is plainclothesmen wielding umbrellas is sorta hilarious.
I understand that the repression these guys represent is no laughing matter. But why is the face of totalitarianism so often just plain ridiculous?