Man with Timbits, local trees

Physicists Successfully Store and Retrieve Nothing

"So storing a vacuum might sound ridiculously simple: Follow the same procedure but leave out the pulse, and you store nothing. However, Alexander Lvovsky of the University of Calgary in Canada and his colleagues and Mikio Kozuma of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and his group have stored a very peculiar type of nothingness called a "squeezed vacuum..."

We're in it with Bush

"In "The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar", Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang use precious insider knowledge to reveal just how much Canada's involvement in Afghanistan is about Iraq. We didn't go there out of concern for a poor, beleaguered people, not even to prevent terrorism, but because of an obsession with America. "Washington's reactions tended to be the exclusive consideration in almost all of the discussions about Afghanistan. ... The political problem, of course, was how to support Washington in its war on terror without supporting the war in Iraq. The answer to the problem was the so-called 'Afghanistan solution.'"

Without appearing to support the war in Iraq would have been more precise, because, in fact, our commitment to Afghanistan was very helpful to the Iraq war. In 2003, "Rumsfeld was aggressively looking for countries to commit troops to Afghanistan to free up U.S. forces for the coming invasion of Iraq." When we later volunteered for some "heavy lifting" in Kandahar it was, once again, because "the Bush administration wanted to concentrate its military resources in Iraq and Rumsfeld clearly wanted NATO allies to relieve American troops in the south."

As far as the Bush administration is concerned, Afghanistan and Iraq are one war, and we're in Afghanistan, under American command, to help them fight it..."

farewell Tarheel poet, publisher, photographer Jonathan Williams:--

"Every day I wrote a postcard to Jessie McGuffie, a friend of Ian's in Edinburgh, and these cards were later collected as a small book, Lines About Hills Above Lakes. One of the entries was a poem, "A 75th Birthday Maze," for Dame Edith Sitwell. It was an acrostic, and the impetus had come from visiting the ancient topiary maze gardens of Levens Hall, near Kendall. The notion was naturalistic, then, in one obvious sense-as form has been said to be nothing but an extension of content. However, cowbells in a Mahler symphony don't stay cowbells-there is the new, second formal content of art-and letters in a poem are not made out of clipped, shaped yews and beeches. One cannot be a man of letters, as we say, without coming to a recognition of
their look, as well as their sound and their various notations. Note, for example, that in the title, Lines About Hills Above Lakes, each word contains five letters, and that their initials make another five-letter word, LAHAL, of which I am very fond. Poets are happy with such simple pleasures found in the language's substance..."

more at Ron's

Don Akenson on St Patrick

"Converting the Irish was not a difficult business, Padraig soon realized, as long as one made it through the first three minutes, and he always did, God be praised. Padraig, steadfast soldier that he was, nevertheless swithered through the first sixty breaths in the presence of any king or aristocrat whom he had not previously encountered. Those were the moments when the Celtic warrior aspect of the Irish personality was dominant and that is a very binary sort of mind. Either the eminence in question practices his backhand and sends ones head rolling, to the great amusement of his retainers, or he turns into an overbearing host, laying on the crackling pig and homebrew in military quantities and spends the next seventy-two hours exchanging stories of heroes and gods. That's when you hook him..."

A Paper Joy


"He envisioned the print volumes living on as a niche, luxury item, with high-quality paper and glossy photographs — similar to the way some audiophiles still swear by vinyl LPs and turntables. “What you need people to understand,” he said, “is that it is a luxury experience. You want to be able to produce a lot of joy, a paper joy...”

War is Good for Business

"For all our northern bravado, we've always been a rump nation, first of Great Britain, now the United States; but foremost and ever lairded over by a wafer thin elite, the inheritors of a colonialism that never died. The sons and daughters of privilege in this country have survived atop the frosty pyramid of Canada's power elite by following one guiding principle: Adaptation. Tomorrow's vote in the House is more about a choosing up, in the face of an election pending only a single failed motion.

Pictured best perhaps as a gathering of rats upon a burning forecastle, readying for a stampede, jockeying now for the best line to reach the safety of the pier, tomorrow's vote in Parliament is about which will be the new Master of the White House, and how best to position one's self to serve?

Today, the prime minister exudes a smirking confidence, daring the Liberals for months to bring it on, and overturn just one of a series of nation-changing Bills already enacted, triggering an election. So far, the Liberals have played possum, no-shows for the most part, poking their heads up every now and then to take pot shots at more trivial Harper failures, and those of his ethically-challenged coterie, to little effect. One of the Bills allowed recently to pass adopts U.S.-style law and order reforms that initiate odious 'mandatory minimum sentencing,' (a complete disaster for the hundreds of thousands inmate-Americans, and the taxpayers burdened with the bill for private, for-profit prisons) and a generally hard-line approach to social management foreign for decades in liberal Canada.

The next vote failing will see billions upon billions more devoted for years more of the occupation of Afghanistan, and a quiet continuance of the smaller garrison patrol of 'Insurgent Haiti.' More importantly, if passed it will confer on the nation the dedication to a corporate military state for at least the next generation.

The bipartisan agreement between the controlling parties of the House of Commons for several decades on foreign policy, already a mirror image of the climate in Washington through all vagaries will remain despite the occupant of 1600 Penn. Ave., because the consensus among the similarly veneer-like elite in America is again agreed:

War is good for business.

So war it will be..."





via ::: wood s lot :::

Local trees

from Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Russian Mobster Tombstones

How Google Earth Ate Nanaimo

"I think it's pretty cool we're the Google Earth capital of the world," said Jakob Brzovic, 25, who works in a local electronics retail store. "I just wish somebody would have told me."

"For people who live out of town, it would be a great resource and tool," he added. "But, to be fair, if you've been living here your whole life like I have, you don't need to use Google Maps. You just use your brain."

not-even-the-vaguest-thing-to-do-with rock & roll EVER (even on the album Spector produced) Leonard Cohen gets in the Hall of Fame but somehow the Guess Who doesn't? Burton Cummings is a better poet, too...

Castro's Long Run... in U.S. Presidential Politics

"After all these years, only one "superdelegate" undoubtedly feels no pressure at all. Fidel Castro is the Methuselah of U.S. presidential politics. He is the only survivor among the major players from the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, not to speak of playing a role in every presidential campaign since. As Greg Grandin, the author of the indispensable Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, tells us, like a horn of plenty that never stops flowing, Fidel's aura never stops giving when U.S. presidential candidates need to outflank each other on the right..."

terrific Miles Champion poem in the new Brooklyn Rail--Typical Umbrella Fiasco

"capsules release time in stages/
endings pause to re-load more space..."

RM pointed out my hometown of South Wellington sort-of name-checked on p.125 of the 1961 Penguin of S. H. Steinberg's Five Hundred Years of Printing:--

"Every book or newspaper printed in the English language is immediately intelligible to the Cockney, the Canadian, and the Californian, and to every inhabitant of every Wellington, whether in British Columbia, Ontario, Cape Province, Shropshire, Somerset, New South Wales, New Zealand, South Australia, Western Australia, Kansas, Ohio, Texas--regardless of the variations of speech, local, regional, and national."

Ali Smith on Carson McCullers:--

"It's always wrong to sentimentalise McCullers - even on her own invitation - since her work is always an unexpected, uneasy combination of miraculous and brutal, always concerned with the marginalised and with social hierarchies, and is always more astutely and contemporarily political than it might on the surface appear to be..."

via Maud Newton & from out of Gowanus--the Reanimation Library

"The Reanimation Library is a small, independent library based in Brooklyn. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles across the country and given new life as resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists..."

sounds like the Manse!

Also: someone's splendid collection of ephemera...

Sarkozy & The King's Two Bodies:-

"When Sarkozy's situation is examined through this prism, his case is quite simple: Too much of the profane body and not enough of the sacred. The profane body is in fact dominant, taking over, swallowing up the sacred one.

Somehow, in his romance, his penchant for jogging, his displays of impatience, there is too much flesh, an overexposure of ordinary passions and pleasures, something never before seen in other presidential administrations: an unexpected eclipsing of the sacred body, which does not experience pleasure or passion, and demands both distance and respect..."

Local & Denman Island trees

nice to see EJ Hughes' great painting of Nanaimo Harbour made over into a jigsaw puzzle by the local Cobble Hill Puzzle Company in their "Canadian Artist" series...

Sunday songbird Bea Wain...

YouTube--Heart and Soul

Youtube--"Dancing in the Dark" with Larry Clinton Orchestra

a few seconds of YouTube - "Get Happy" with Larry Clinton Orchestra

an interview