Year: 2007
Two Films
Posted on May 15, 2007 in Film Reflections Stigma
We have here a relic of an age where the function of the mentally ill was to create an Other, an antagonist, not to give us insight into the nature of the faces we wear.
Why the Silence
Posted on May 15, 2007 in Daily Life Uncertainty
Happy are those who get the metaphor.
Friday Xenartha Blogging – Pygmy Anteater Gymnastics
Posted on May 11, 2007 in Xenartha
Because word says that Youtube may not last long (oh despair!), best look at this video of a pygmy anteater (Cyclopes didactylus) now.
21+21+5 Meme
Posted on May 11, 2007 in Memes
REVISED
This wasn’t begun as a meme, but I am stealing it and making it one.
Twenty One Things that I Like
- My wife
- Fiona
- Boadicea
- Southern Utah
- San Francisco
- [[W.S. Merwin|W.S. Merwin’s]] poetry
- Nikon lenses
- Holy Jim Falls
- My friends C, G, G and L
- [[Juliette Binoche]]
- [[Roberto Benigni]]
- Funny cat videos
- [[Rhinoceros|Rhinos]]
- My Pocket Buddhist Reader
- [[7 Faces of Doctor Lao]]
- Cemeteries
- Sausages
- Mountain Lions
- Cacti
- [[Synesthesia]]
- The [[Chaparral]]
Twenty One Things that I Hate
- Dissociation
- Deep cleaning
- Owen Wilson
- Geodon
- Working for someone else
- Dog shit
- Manipulative borderlines (No, Maggs and Sid, not you)
- Heavy metal
- Country Music
- Willie Nelson
- Clint Eastwood
- Mountain bikers who don’t let you know that they are coming
- Name-droppers
- People who are impressed by name-droppers
- Snoops and stalkers
- Ronald Reagan Memorials (so much for a man who did so little)
- Scientologists
- Fundamentalism of All Types
- [[Richard Dawkins]] and his brand of atheism
- Trolls
- Dubya Stickers
Five Things That I Have A Love-Hate Relationship With
- The Bible and Christianity
- Bipolar Disorder
- Money
- Memory
- Psychotherapy (it’s supposed to be that way, right?)
Now for the part that makes it a meme. List the heritage of the meme on your site. In other words, who you got it from, who they got it from, etc.:
- Bipolar Guy
- Joel Sax
- Name
- Name
- Name
Add your name at the bottom, drop the name at the top. Let your source know that you did it. If you like this meme, do it. No fingering people. Finger up to five people.
Fingered/Tagged:
[tags]memes,identity[/tags]
Guest Bloggers Sought
Posted on May 10, 2007 in Site News
My father is staying under my roof for the first and last time. He’s in a box that measures about ten by eight inches that we’re keeping out of reach of the cats. This is prefatory to a trip we’ll be taking from the nineteenth to the twenty-fifth of this month in which we’ll be taking the ashes to a family niche in Salt Lake City.
I don’t known if we’ll be able to find Internet Cafes in places such as Cedar City, Utah, so I am recruiting guest bloggers. If you have never blogged and want to get your hands dirty or want to entertain my peculiar readers, just drop me a message.
And, yes, I promise to tell the tale and share photos. It’s me, Dad, Lynn, and the Nikon.
Five of Mine
Posted on May 10, 2007 in Memes Thinking
This list will probably not resemble the “thinking blogger” lists that others have compiled in that I have eschewed the mainstream and selected members of various invisible cultures. Part of this is because I don’t want to cover the same old ground that everyone else is bound to cover, part of this is because I have a more open view to what constitutes “thinking” and want to present some unsung bloggers to people.
- Comic book, lesbian, and stuffed animal culture has an advocate in Teresa of In Sequence. This Los Angeles resident revels in materialism without gushing over cuteness: she seeks out the different and describes odd corners of the collector’s world.
- Reading Manica’s Moon Moods will give you insight into farts and the joys of bipolar sex as well as the absurdities of working life in an island community endearingly known as Bumblefuck.
- You’ve often heard me mention Bill the Lawyer, who is a criminal attorney in Cleveland, Ohio. He shares the blog Nothing But Love::Back from the Edge with his wife Stacy. Cynicism is Bill’s high art as evidenced by this passage:
- I love to touch base with Francis Strand, an American who lives in Sweden so he can enjoy connubial bliss with his Scandinavian husband. His How to Learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons takes you into his sometimes enviable life:
- Finally, Nancy Gandhi’s Under the Fire Star is worth it for those who want the perceptions of another outsider, this one living in Chennai, India:
Recent excerpt commenting on photos by Barry Ulrich: I find a lot to admire in these photos, but I was particularly drawn to the faces of people while shopping. Ulrich has captured that moment of intense decision-making in consumers’ expressions, which I recognize from my own experience of shopping. I know that look has been on my face, and I’ve seen it often on people around me. But captured in photos, the expression appears catatonic.
Recent excerpt: The Archer and I were sitting on the couch a few months ago and I had my legs draped over him, lazily talking about anything and everything when I started to laugh. Guess what happened? That’s right. I farted. Not a little fffttt fart but a POP fart. You know the kind. Luckily though, my POP farts are in no way dangerous. The real dangerous ones come with no warning to bystanders. My sister has banned me farting in her house as she says it takes two days to air the place out after I leave. Her threat works as she has promised to tell the Archer how vile I am if I continue farting at hers. So she is safe.
Recent excerpt: Husband: Hey, look at this, dear!
Wife: What? Tell me before I go insane, honey!
Husband: The admission fee to Glacier National Park in Montana was doubled to $50.
Wife: Wow, dear! It must be twice as good now! Let’s go there!!
Husband: It must be quite an experience. Why else would they raise the price so high?
Wife: We’re guaranteed to have a great time! I’m feeling faint from the excitement!
Husband: Don’t swoon now, my lovely! I can’t wait for that exhilarating feeling driving in the wilderness on the Going-to-the-Sun Road!
Recent excerpt on a trip to Vietnam: C. the fashion photographer got held up at passport control: It turns out that while Swedes don’t need a visa if they stay less than 15 days, Italians are a whole different ball of wax.
So they deported him back to Kuala Lumpur. And we all decided we may as well go with him. So we raced through the airport, upstairs to the departures hall, getting our boarding passes and luggage rechecked, running back through the outgoing passport control and onto the same plane that we had come in on, all faces turned to us, everyone a bit suspicious….
The Swedish word for the day is visum. It means visa.
Recent excerpt: The New York Times has a piece that takes off from the infamous kisses which Richard Gere bestowed on the cheek of Shilpa Shetty on stage in India recently — kisses which led to both of their effigies being burnt in demonstrations by Hindu fundamentalists (although it’s clear from the video that Shetty is trying politely to avoid his intentions; at the end she said in Hindi, “This is a bit too much.” I know this because we have been forced to watch the same clip again and again for days on the TV news.)….
What would we do without such grave issues to ponder?
Thanks to marj for including me on her list and requiring me to perform this meme.
Give the FDA Back Its Teeth
Posted on May 10, 2007 in Accountability Medications Psychotropics
If you’ve been burned by Zyprexa or another drug that the FDA failed to monitor properly or are just a drug consumer, send this email message to your representative:
As a constituent deeply concerned about the government’s recent failure to ensure the safety of several prescription drugs, I strongly urge you to co-sponsor HR 1561, the Enhancing Drug Safety and Innovation Act of 2007.
HR 1561 would address this and other major gaps in our drug safety process, which many of the nation’s top researchers, doctors and consumer groups have said is broken. In fact, the Institute of Medicine issued a report highly critical of the FDA’s ability to perform its drug safety mission. Several of the IOM’s well-reasoned recommendations are included in this legislation.
HR 1561 will simply give the FDA more tools to do its job, rather than relying on the only real tool it has now: removing a drug from the market. By giving the FDA this additional authority, you can help ensure patients who need a drug know about its benefits and its risks, and with their doctor, make an informed decision.
The bill would allow the FDA to enforce labeling changes, safety studies, and take other actions to protect the public if safety concerns arise. It also will ensure drug companies can’t hide clinical trials that may show a drug has a serious side effect or is no better than a placebo.
Please take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to show the public that Congress takes seriously its commitment to getting safe and effective drugs on the market by supporting HR 1561. None of these measures will slow the flow of important, life-saving drugs to patients.
Rather, a strong bill will help ensure that the medicines my family takes are as safe and effective as possible, and will restore our faith in the nation’s drug approval process.
Needless to say this is yet another legacy of the Republican Congress that ruined the nation from 1994 to 2006. There’s a lot of fixing to do, so don’t hesitate to press for your personal safety.
[tags]health,accountability,pharmacy,pharmacology,FDA,drugs,consumers,medications,psychotropics,reform[/tags]
None Dare Call It a Season
Posted on May 9, 2007 in Weather
Two days ago, it was in the nineties and now folks have taken to putting light sweaters on at night. I felt like a fool when I went downstairs and heard our air conditioning roaring, so I turned it off and opened the windows. The mis-scheduled winds that seemed to carry the hot air and dump it over the Spectrum Center have stopped. Nothing makes sense. If it snowed while temperatures were in the eighties, I would yawn and not be surprised.
[tags]weather,southern california,orange county[/tags]
Dream
Posted on May 6, 2007 in Dreams
My father is running crazy in the kitchen, wielding knives, throwing punches, kicking people out of the house who have done no harm to him.
Friday Xenartha Blogging – Armadillo Festival
Posted on May 4, 2007 in Xenartha
If you happen to be in the vicinity of Hamburg, Arkansas, you can find pleasure in the activities of the Armadillo Festival which takes place this weekend.
Who needs cats or squids when the Xenartha combine the best qualities of both?
Toilets and Film
Posted on May 3, 2007 in Film
The most memorable of the films that I have watched recently has to be Notes on a Scandal, notable for having a sympathetic villainess. There’s a fair bit of humor along the way in this tale of a art teacher who is doubly victimized by a fifteen year old boy and an older teacher who sees her job and her love life as matters of control.
Volver is a film by Pedro Almodovar for which Penelope Cruz was nominated as Best Actress. I’ve noticed in European films that they’re not afraid to show all sides of life. Sex is often mentioned in this regard, but directors also do not hesitate to take the camera into the watercloset for an obligatory “taking a shit” shot (which also happens in Notes. In America, we get the obligatory “push the bully back” shots which doesn’t happen all that often in real life, does it? When it does, we usually end up in jail for it.
Another Pedro Almodovar film that we watched was Dark Habits which was about a convent of nuns given over to rescuing desperate women and self-abasement which took the form of taking on odd names such as Sister Rat of the Sewers. The nuns like to shoot up with heroin or take acid so they can have visions. Not Almodovar’s best work, but amusing.
Michael Palin wrote the script for The Missionary which starred the former Monty Python star and Maggie Smith who, for reasons unknown, has never appeared on any list of prominent anorexics to my knowledge. Color Me Kubrick, starring John Malkovich, relates the true story of an utterly inept con man who passed himself off as Stanley Kubrick.
I liked Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen’s mockumentary about Emmet Ray, purported to be the second best jazz guitarist. Samantha Mortensen does a miraculous job of playing a mute who is probably less idiotic than people make her out to be. I don’t recall any toilet scenes which is surprising because Allen aspires to being a European style auteur.
[tags]film,Pedro Almodovar,Woody Allen,cinema,movies[/tags]
