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)