Beyond Rivalry - travel_and_place

Delusions, Illusions

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:12:00 -0500

Reading lots, between my inter-library loaned crime novels -- finished Tana French's The Likeness last week, am reading PD James' new Dalgleish novel, The Private Patient, now, and have Reginald Hill's The Price of Butcher's Meat to read afterwards -- and the arrival of the Wall Street Journal through the door slot almost every day, a little 6-month perk for having completed about 200 online surveys in the last few years ... I love the WSJ, its editorial board notwithstanding.

Here are a couple of recent gems from its pages:

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Destructive Delusions: How therapists and 'victims' seized on the idea of repressed memory, leveling false charges and ruining lives, by Theodore Dalrymple, a book review of Dr. Paul McHugh's Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind. Best lines:

"One of the most extraordinary outbreaks of popular delusion in recent years was that which attached to the possibility of 'recovered memory' of sexual and satanic childhood abuse, and to an illness it supposedly caused, Multiple Personality Disorder. No medieval peasant praying to a household god for the recovery of his pig could have been more credulous than scores of psychiatrists, hosts of therapists and thousands of willing victims."…

Out and About This Weekend

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:01:00 -0500

We spent most of Saturday driving around a part of the state a couple of hours away from us, where we used to spend a lot of time. Our main destination was an herb farm's pre-holiday sale, and we stumbled into a Christmas craft fair in a small-town B&B. The rain, which began on Thursday, was alternately a light mist, scattered and steady showers, and occasionally a torrential downpour, and it gave a blurry, atmospheric feeling to our journey of revisitation.

Below, a magpie duck, sheep happily eating, JB the llama, and an herb shed and garden sale area ...

1918

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:16:00 -0500

It was 90 years ago today that the fighting of World War I between the Allies and Germany ceased, on 11 a.m. on 11 Nov. 1918 -- now variously commemorated as Veteran's Day (U.S. only), Armistice Day, Poppy Day, and Remembrance Day. The Treaty of Versailles officially ended the war (and some would say laid the ground for the next one) when it was signed the next year in June.

I started thinking about what else was going on in 1918.

NOTABLE EVENTS

The Spanish Flu epidemic, coming in waves from 4 March 1918 to June 1920, infecting from 500 to 950 million people worldwide and killing 20 to 100 million people, likely quite a bit more than the number of people killed in World War I (8.5-10 million combatants plus about 10 million civilians, mainly of famine and illness other than the flu). The Spanish Flu was unusual in that it killed healthy adults (average age: 33) and spread even to the Arctic. It seems to have started in the U.S. state of Kansas.

The Sedition Act was passed in the U.S. at the behest of Pres. Woodrow Wilson and "forbade Americans to use 'disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language'…

The Bali Bombers, Mimesis and Me

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:50:00 -0500

I've been reading in recent weeks about the so-called Bali Bombers, three men -- two brothers (commonly called Amrozi and Mukhlas) and an Imam/computer technician -- who were tried and found to be instrumental in the killing of 202 people -- most of whom were foreign nationals, including 88 Australians -- -- at nightclubs in a tourist area on the Indonesian island of Bali [in green] in 2002, to protest the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. (Bali is overwhelmingly Hindu, however.) Another 209 people were injured. (More at Wikipedia)

For their roles in the crime, their execution, which may occur by this weekend has now occured, will be by ritualised firing squad on another Indonesian island, off Java, the spot (or perhaps three separate spots) in the woods already decked out with chairs and crosses, after five years of legal appeals that apparently the bombers themselves had no interest in, as they have said throughout that they are ready and happy to die as martyrs, preferrably by beheading, in the Islamic way. They admit the crime and show no remorse but have apologised for killing Indonesian Muslims during the attacks.

Meanwhile, their family and other supporters are surging towards the…

Factory Farming Reforms and Greyhound Racing Ban

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:01:00 -0500

Yesterday, both animal-protection ballot questions brought to U.S. voters passed, in California and Massachusetts:

California's Prop 2 won big yesterday, with an estimated 63% of the vote. When it goes into effect in 2015 -- giving factory farms time to change their practices -- it will "halt the inhumane confinement of animals on factory farms," ending "the practice of confining certain animals raised for food in crates and cages so small the animals can barely move. Prop 2 requires that factory farms provide enough space for animals to stand up, turn around and extend their limbs. It applies to breeding pigs, egg laying hens and veal calves." (You can read it all here) Similar though narrower measures passed in 2002 in Florida, when voters acted to phase out two-foot by seven-foot metal gestation crates that confine breeding pigs; and in 2006 in Arizona, when voters banned both gestation crates and crates used to confine veal calves. More at HSUS.

About 56% of Massachussetts voters approved Question 3 yesterday, which will "phase out the inhumane practice of greyhound racing by 2010." The Humane Society of the U.S. reports that "since 2002, there have been 841 reported injuries at the two Massachusetts tracks,…

Beware Bored Octopi

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:16:59 -0400

Otto the octopus wreaks havoc:

"A octopus has caused havoc in his aquarium by performing juggling tricks using his fellow occupants, smashing rocks against the glass and turning off the power by shortcircuiting a lamp....

"'We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out a the 2000 Watt spot light above him with a carefully directed jet of water.' ...

"'Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better - much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants.'"

What Makes You So Desperately Unhappy?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:04:00 -0400

Admit it. Certain things make you desperately unhappy, and you don't know why -- the Sbarro at the mall, the taste of Jolly Ranchers in winter, the woman in the Buick station wagon you saw at the KwikTrip, the Food Network after ten p.m.

In 100 words or less, please answer the question, "What makes you so unhappy?" in the comments field [at his site]. Selected answers will appear in Dean Bakopoulos's new novel, My American Unhappiness, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in late 2009 or early 2010.

I'm not the first to say it, but, hey, way to outsource the novel!

Poignant

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:35:45 -0400

This is the sort of little news story that is most poignant for me, most "pricking" or "stinging," that makes me gasp, tear up, simultaneously hate this cruel, careless world and send my heart out to those involved, animal and human alike:

WOODFIN, North Carolina (AP) -- Police in North Carolina had to halt traffic on a highway to help a mother bear get to her cub after it was struck and killed by a vehicle.

Police said the cub was struck Tuesday afternoon and the driver didn't stop.

Officers in the western North Carolina town of Woodfin halted cars for about 20 minutes after the mother bear had failed twice at trying to get her 80-pound cub off the busy highway.

Sgt. Dawn Roberts says officers stood with rifles while others pulled the cub to the side of the road near the mother. She says the mother bear grabbed the cub by the scruff of the neck and ran off into the woods to tend to it.

Hospice at the Carlyle!

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:32:23 -0400

THIS IS WHAT I WANT. OMG. Imagine.

"Even as she was dying, she would take walks in Central Park in the daytime, and in the evening sit in a back booth in Bemelmans Bar, looking at the whimsical illustrations of New York City on the wall by the artist Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeline children's books, and listening to Mr. Harris play. She loved Cole Porter, and she would pass requests to the waiter."

Quotes Out of Context

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:00:00 -0400

Or, why I'm an Anglophile.

From the Sept. 2008 Oldie:

"[Duncan] Campbell recalls bumping into former bank robber Bobby King in a pub. 'He had done an Open University degree in prison. He was reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I mentioned this to another bank robber I knew who'd also done an OU degree and, without blinking, he replied, 'Not her best.'"

From Maureen Lipman's essay on appearing in a regional production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, with her dog, and her dog's understudy: "Chichister audiences accepted a black Labrador in rural Russia with the same aplomb as they'd accepted the barkless dog of the African Congo. ... Our favourite comment on the production was made by two white-haired ladies wearing floral dresses as they left the theatre: 'Well, I thought it was very enjoyable, didn't you, Mary? But why on earth they had to set it in Russia is beyond me.'"

Jeremy Lewis writing about 'prolific playwright and diarist Simon Gray,' who died in August: "But he was also extremely funny. Writing in the Observer, Claire Tomalin recalled how Harold Pinter sent the cricket-loving Gray a poem he had just written, which read 'I saw Len Hutton in…