Go Elton!: "Elton sat down at the piano, but before he began to play, shot back:
'This night is about charity - not washing your dirty political laundry.
I love America, but if you want to know why the world hates America, I can give you two words: Dennis Miller.' "

Mallarme reviewed in Guardian

Tonka Literature

After inconclusive and scanty evidence of visits from our local bear last fall, I was pleased to find abundant scat, black as truffles, in three heaps along the railway tracks, his customary trail... Clearly the bear had been at the abundant windfall plums, fermented in the warm September sun, big time. An involuntary shudder all that's left of my flight response. More nervous about being mistaken for a bear than being confronted by one. Lots of horsie evidence, a good thing, it means the solid upper-middle class has some stake in the right of way. It's as if the horses get to decide where the parks go.

lucid re-cap of Blair vs. Beeb

365 Days Project features Larry Krone

Baja to Vancouver

from the Fantastic in Art and Fiction.....

Thomas Rowlandson's Danse Macabre

The hermit and the bear

The beaver and fox promenade

Slavoj steamed at Verso:
"In an interview appearing in Critical Intellectuals on Writing, a volume published this summer by the State University of New York Press, Mr. Zizek complained that Verso had been unenthusiastic about his 400-page theoretical magnum opus, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology. The press asked him to make it shorter, he says, and to include more obscene jokes. "

thanks to Metafilter for the two below...

GREAT Top 100 Films list

Weird Gardens

CONVERSATION BETWEEN D'ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT: "Diderot: I think that is so; that has made me sometimes compare the fibres of our organs to sensitive vibrating strings which vibrate and resound long after they have been plucked. It is this vibration, this kind of inevitable resonance, which holds the object -present, while the mind is busied about the quality that belongs to that object. But vibrating strings have yet another property, that of making other strings vibrate; and that is how the first idea recalls a second, the two of them a third, these three a fourth and so on, so that there is no limit to the ideas awakened and interconnected in the mind of the philosopher, as he meditates and hearkens to himself amid silence and darkness. This instrument makes surprising leaps, and an idea once aroused may sometimes set vibrating an harmonic at an inconceivable distance. If this phenomenon may be observed between resonant strings that are lifeless and separate, why should it not occur between points that are alive and connected, between fibres that are continuous and sensitive? "

Jonathan Edwards @ 300: "Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these places are not seen"

William Steig 1907-2003

Great picture of Tommy Douglas

Tommy Douglas A Remarkable Canadian: "The North American Medical Establishment tried to defy Medicare, Douglas's top priority project, and Saskatchewan became an intense battleground. This turbulent time was marked by the Doctor's Strike as the physicians of the province protested socialized healthcare. However, the striking doctors were no match for Douglas. When the dust settled with the resolution of the strike, Medicare in Saskatchewan was born. Douglas showed Canada two things: that it was possible to develope and finance a universal Medicare system and that the medical profession could be confronted. Had Douglas not have made these first ground breaking steps, national Medicare would never have happened."

Welcome to the Tommy Douglas Website
a great Canadian, Tommy was our MP in Nanaimo (then considered a very safe NDP seat!!) during the 70's. I met him a couple of times and remember the iron grip of his ex-bantamweight boxer's grip, the calm yet room-filling clarity of his speech...I wasn't sure Kiefer was up to playing his grandpa until some of the stuff he had to pull on "24" last year....

Kiefer to play grandfather Tommy Douglas
this was my idea!!

lovely old movie theatres in Sheffield

vote for the top Scottish album of all time
for me either the Average White Band's second album or John Martyn's "Solid Air"...

but when I lived in Scotland (68-72) the universally encountered albums were

1. Something by Andy Stewart or Kenneth McKellar
2. Jim Reeves "Greatest Hits" (red cover)
3. Mario Lanza "The Student Prince"
4. Hank Williams "Greatest Hits" (yellow cover with guitar against a chair)

Spy pictures of suffragettes revealed
weapons of mass enfranchisement

happy Birthday Sidney Paget, illustrator of Sherlock Holmes

Please Hold (UK) message megamix

Character Actor Index

Why no one really cares about prison rape. By Robert Weisberg and David Mills: "So accepted is assault as part of prison life that an outsider might conclude that on some basic, if unarticulated level, we think it an appropriate element of the punishment regimen. Perhaps we believe that allowing prisons to be places of horrific acts will serve as part of the utilitarian deterrent effect of criminal sentences. Or perhaps we recognize that prison rape and assault are an unavoidable byproduct of the rape and assault in society generally, so that our goal here is not utilitarian but retributive: that is, even though we cannot eliminate rape and assault, we can at least reallocate them. Thus, when we purport to incapacitate convicted criminals, what we are really doing is shifting to them, the most 'deserving' among us, the burden of victimization."

new blog "tufluv" reviews luke vibert and more: "Indulge me and imagine this: ‘YosepH’ (WhaT’s WitH ThE CapitaL ‘H’?) is like an archeologist sometime after the next Ice Age drilling into a block of permafrost. Within it he finds encased a perfectly-preserved acid-box, with it its once-owner cryogenically frozen with his fingers stuck to the quaint little machine’s knobs (It must have been one of those ‘flash’ ice ages, you see). Once they’ve thawed him, the guy is unable to do anything but tweak his knobs, making these fucked up, funky, squiggly noises that amaze the future people. Only, the time in the ice has sorta slowed his whole motion down a gear – it’s kinda fatigued and frosty yet sorta tender and loving. "

Gilgamesh tomb believed found

Some virus today.

Keats to Leigh Hunt from Margate, May 10 1817: "Before I come to the Nymphs I must get through all disagreeables - I went to the Isle of Wight - thought so much about Poetry so long together that I could not get to sleep at night - and moreover, I know not how it was, I could not get wholesome food - By this means in a Week or so I became not over capable in my upper Stories, and set off pell mell for Margate, at least 150 Miles - because forsooth I fancied that I should like my old Lodging here, and could contrive to do without Trees. Another thing I was too much in Solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought as an only resource. However Tom is with me at present and we are very comfortable. We intend though to get among some Trees. How have you got on among them? How are the Nymphs? "

TCB Baby! Bruce Campbell's Elvis movie

Core Sample site

words to remember from Lawrence Rinder as I prepare to attend and write about the big Core Sample show in Portland, which opens 11 Oct.: "The saddest thing going on these days in Portland is the yearning for recognition from afar, the aspiration to an imagined normalcy which seems to motivate a number of up and coming art enthusiasts. When you have a chance to be anything, why would you cultivate, as Jef Jahn advises, the tepid success of a Julie Mehretu or even the vapid stardom of a Matthew Barney? And why the cloying need to be appreciated by someone from out of town? Athens (Greece, not Georgia) had far fewer citizens than Portland and you can bet that they didn't measure their success by the sheen of their reputation in Corinth. "

D U B S E L E C T O R really great flash

MIT for free

Bobby Womack (flash)

Donny Hathaway

Top Ten Silliest Historical Sites in America