Travel: Imperial Vienna

Prague: Panorama

Click on the image above to see a much bigger panorama of Prague/Praha

Travel: Prague

Le Monde: Russie et Georgie

To have a better understanding of the Georgian conflict, take a closer look at the picture above by double-clicking on it.

BBC: Touch Me I'm Karen Taylor S0207

And here it is, the last episode in Series 2 of Touch Me I'm Karen Taylor

Delta in the Future Now

Just received this in an e-mail from Delta Air Lines... The truly paperless future is almost here. eTicket was a great beginning but we still had to print out the boarding pass and now....



Here's one more reason to never leave home
without your BlackBerry, PDA or cell phone…
We're working with the Transportation Security
Administration (TSA) to make your Web-enabled
mobile device a paperless boarding pass,
and we would appreciate your help testing
the new process.

Here's how it works:

Check in for domestic travel departing
from LaGuardia Airport at our mobile Web site*

Checking bags? Just go directly to any
Delta baggage drop and drop your bags with an agent

Head to security where TSA will check your ID
and assist you in scanning your electronic pass
—you'll still need to follow the airport security guidelines

Zip to the gate and present your electronic pass
to the gate agent at the time of boarding**

Try it out on your next flight from LaGuardia.
Thanks for helping us develop industry-leading technology
to streamline your travel experience.

Some Enchanted Evening :)

Listening to: ABBA a la AC/DC

Music/Riff Raff/ABBA

How about that for a "novel" concept? Take the AC/DC tribute band and let them play ABBA songs! Recycling for the age of bloggers....

Tropical Storm Fay

I found these pictures on the web and could not resist posting them. See the names of the photographers in the

Aнекдоты <>du jour

Физическое и умственное развитие человека полностью заканчивается к
тридцати годам. К сожалению, все хотят жить дальше.

Одежду с заниженной талией, как правило, носят люди с завышенной
самооценкой.

Беда армии не в том, что среди генералов умные люди встречаются не чаще,
чем среди рядовых, а в том, что среди генералов они встречаются чаще,
чем среди политиков.

Just Seen: How God May See Us :)

brilliant!

Nice Parody on: Brief Encounter

Just Seen: Le Prix a Payer

Alors, un film formidable, avec des phrases incroyables - "Pas de cul, pas de flic", "on est tous ensemble, hein?" etc. C'est le meme thême de sex a la Spitzer dans le coin familial. Pour quoi justement paye-t-on cettes sommes enormes aux femmes si on ne peut plus les baiser? S'il y a des domestiques pour nettoyer le domicile, des écoles pour s'occuper des enfants, quoi au juste faisent-elles?
En plus, ce film a été ecrit par une femme! :)

a MUST SEE

Nature News: Spooky!

Click the image above and then click 'Open' to view a saved webpage from Nature News..

...The experiment shows that in quantum mechanics at least, some things transcend space-time, says Terence Rudolph, a theorist at Imperial College London. It also shows that humans have attached undue importance to the three dimensions of space and one of time we live in, he argues. “We think space and time are important because that’s the kind of monkeys we are.”

Just Seen: Our Daily Bread

Chicken	Chicks	Fish	Beef
Beef	Pigs	Pigs

So this is how our food is grown and prepared for consumption. Prepare to feel more vegetarian :)

NYT: Exercise and Depression

Mental Health: Exercise Is Found Not to Affect Depression
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Many people are sure that exercise improves their mood, and studies have suggested that exercise is almost as effective as antidepressants in relieving symptoms of depression. But a new study has found that even though people who exercise are less likely to be depressed or anxious, it is probably not because they exercise.
Dutch researchers studied 5,952 twins from the Netherlands Twins Registry, as well as 1,357 additional siblings and 1,249 parents, all 18 to 50 years old. They recorded survey data about the frequency and duration of exercise and used well-validated scales to uncover symptoms of depression and anxiety. The study was published Monday in The Archives of General Psychiatry.
Studying twins allowed the researchers to distinguish between genetic and environmental effects, and they found that the association of exercise with reduced anxious and depressive symptoms could be explained genetically: people disinclined to exercise also tend to be depressed. One does not cause the other.
This does not mean that exercise is useless in alleviating depressive symptoms. “Exercise may still be beneficial for patients being treated for an anxiety or depressive disorder,” said Marleen H. M. de Moor, the lead author of the study and a doctoral student in psychology at VU University Amsterdam. “But we couldn’t find evidence for a causal effect in the population at large.”

For more details, see Testing Causality in the Association Between Regular Exercise and Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression

NYT: Genetic Map of Europe

Science Visuals: The Genetic Map of Europe
By NICHOLAS WADE
Biologists have constructed a genetic map of Europe showing the degree of relatedness between its various populations. All the populations are quite similar, but the differences are sufficient that it should be possible to devise a forensic test to tell which country in Europe an individual probably comes from, said Manfred Kayser, a geneticist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
The map shows, at right, the location in Europe where each of the sampled populations live and, at left, the genetic relationship between these 23 populations. The map was constructed by Dr. Kayser, Dr. Oscar Lao and others, and appears in an article in Current Biology published on line on August 7.
The genetic map of Europe bears a clear structural similarity to the geographic map. The major genetic differences are between populations of the north and south (the vertical axis of the map shows north-south differences, the horizontal axis those of east-west). The area assigned to each population reflects the amount of genetic variation in it.
Europe has been colonized three times in the distant past, always from the south. Some 45,000 years ago the first modern humans entered Europe from the south. The glaciers returned around 20,000 years ago and the second colonization occurred about 17,000 years ago by people returning from southern refuges. The third invasion was that of farmers bringing the new agricultural technology from the Near East around 10,000 years ago.
The pattern of genetic differences among present day Europeans probably reflects the impact of these three ancient migrations, Dr. Kayser said.
The map also identifies the existence of two genetic barriers within Europe. One is between the Finns (light blue, upper right) and other Europeans. It arose because the Finnish population was at one time very small and then expanded, bearing the atypical genetics of its few founders.
The other is between Italians (yellow, bottom center) and the rest. This may reflect the role of the Alps in impeding free flow of people between Italy and the rest of Europe.
read more
Data for the map were generated by gene chips programmed to test and analyze 500,000 sites of common variation on the human genome, although only the 300,000 most reliable sites were used for the map. Dr. Kayser's team tested almost 2,500 people and analyzed the data by correlating the genetic variations in all the subjects. The genetic map is based on the two strongest of these sets of correlations.
The gene chips require large amounts of DNA, more than is available in most forensic samples. Dr. Kayser hopes to identify the sites on the human genome which are most diagnostic for European origin. These sites, if reasonably few in number, could be tested for in hair and blood samples, Dr. Kayser said.
Genomic sites that carry the strongest signal of variation among populations may be those influenced by evolutionary change, Dr. Kayser said. Of the 100 strongest sites, 17 are found in the region of the genome that confers lactose tolerance, an adaptation that arose among a cattle herding culture in northern Europe some 5,000 years ago. Most people switch off the lactose digesting gene after weaning, but the cattle herders evidently gained a great survival advantage by keeping the gene switched on through adulthood.

анекдоты du jour

- Вы братья?
- Нет, мы близнецы.
- А что, близнецы разве не братья?
- Не всегда, мы например сестры.

****

Плохо, когда над мужчиной смеются, еще хуже, когда смеются под ним.

****

- Как дела у Коляна?
- Попался на взятке, пять лет дали.
- Да ты что!? Ведь только по-человечески жить начал!
- Да ребенку два года.
- А ребенку за что?

NYT: A Meat test

A Simple Test to Detect Nervous Tissue in Beef
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
To protect people against the human variant of mad cow disease, health experts say, it is crucial to keep central nervous system tissue of beef cattle out of the food supply. And that means controls and testing at slaughterhouses, where there is a risk that tissues will become mingled when animals are killed and processed.

Testing for the presence of central nervous system tissue has been a tedious affair, involving chromatography, polymerase chain reaction assays or other laboratory techniques. What has been needed is a simple test that can be performed on cattle carcasses or meat products rapidly and in real time.

That test may be close to reality. Scientists with the Department of Agriculture and Iowa State University report in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that they have detected nervous system tissue on cattle carcasses with a fluorescence-based method.

The technique devised by Jacob W. Petrich and colleagues takes advantage of the fact that nervous system tissues contain high concentrations of a compound, lipofuscin, that fluoresces when exposed to light. By analyzing the fluorescence with a spectrometer, the method can detect even small amounts of nervous system tissue on a carcass.

NYT: See the pyramids

See the Pyramids. Without the Plethora of Peddlers.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
CAIRO - Visiting the famed Giza Pyramids in Egypt has long been irritating for tourists who have to fend off peddlers relentlessly offering camel rides and trinkets. But the hustlers were gone Monday as Egypt began the first stage of an elaborate, $26 million project to modernize the area and make it friendlier to tourists. The changes also improve security with a 12-mile chain-link fence featuring cameras, alarms and motion detectors. “It was a zoo,” said Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief archaeologist, recalling the past free-for-all. “Now we are protecting both the tourists and the ancient monuments.”
The three Giza Pyramids have been unusually open for a 5,000-year-old Wonder of the World. The desert plateau on which they stand was once isolated. But as the capital has expanded, slums have been built right to the edge of the site, separated in places by only a low stone wall.
Tourists are barraged by peddlers selling statues and T-shirts. Visitors are sometimes followed by men on camels selling rides or photos, and rarely taking no for an answer. Young men even try to force their way into taxis carrying foreigners toward the pyramids, looking to steer them to nearby horse stables for a ride around the site.
read more

There are other security concerns. Bombings in Sinai resorts in the past four years have kept officials wary.
The new technology is intended to curb all sorts of security problems. The long fence around the plateau is 13 feet high at some points, and it is dotted with infrared sensors and motion detectors. “Intruders can’t jump over this,” said Kamal Wahid, the site’s general director.
Tourists will now enter through a new brick building, with half a dozen gates equipped with metal detectors and X-ray machines. Almost 200 closed-circuit cameras monitor people’s movements on the plateau.
“It looks clean and beautiful,” said Michael Schmidt, 43, a real estate agent from New York City. “They did a good job.”
Mr. Wahid said the phasing out of the hawkers would not be sudden or “unkind.” But as Mr. Hawass showed off the changes on Monday, trinket sellers were nowhere to be seen. Three camel riders in traditional robes stood at the edge of the plateau, waiting for tourists to come to them.
As a reporter walked up, one said, “Go away, the police told us not to talk to you.”
A second camel rider, who would not give his name for fear he could lose his permit, said: “I’ve been working here for 25 years. Now I don’t know if I will be here tomorrow. I have five children, a wife. What will happen to us?”
It was not clear whether the trinket dealers were pushed out just for the day or longer.
Once the project is complete, golf carts will drive tourists around the site, similar to systems in Luxor and other sites.
Exactly how much a future visitor will be able to roam around freely is unclear, but on Monday, Ramish Bissoon, a teacher from Trinidad, said he was not restricted. “I feel very comfortable and secure,” he said. “There are a lot of policemen around.”
Mr. Hawass said none of the innovations would diminish a visit. “We are giving back the magic of the pyramids,” he said.

NYT: Hospitals pay homeless

By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: August 9, 2008
LOS ANGELES — An investigation into what the authorities say was a scheme that used homeless people to bilk tens of millions of dollars from federal and state health insurance programs began four years ago with a tip from a rescue mission employee.
The employee, Scott Johnson, who works for the Union Rescue Mission in the heart of Skid Row, said he had noticed vans and cars loading up homeless people.
“Sometimes they were so full of people that they put people in the trunks of cars,” Mr. Johnson said Thursday as he passed out bottles of water to the homeless. “I wondered what was going on, so I called the state authorities.”
Mr. Johnson said security cameras on the mission building captured what he initially thought were ambulances illegally discarding patients.
His tip in 2004, and those recordings, prompted state and local officials to investigate.
In October 2006, Los Angeles police officers videotaped an ambulance “dumping” five homeless patients. They later determined that the patients had been recruited as “human pawns in a scheme by hospitals, doctors, ambulance companies and others to defraud” health insurance programs, according to the city attorney’s complaint.
And on Wednesday, federal agents raided three private for-profit hospitals — Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center, City of Angels Medical Center, and Tustin Hospital and Medical Center in Orange County — in connection with an alleged fraud scheme involving federal Medicaid and state Medi-Cal health insurance programs. Agents arrested Dr. Rudra Sabaratnam, owner and chief executive of City of Angels Medical Center, and Estill Mitts, who is accused of recruiting patients from his Skid Row storefront church, the 7th Street Christian Day Center. Mr. Mitts posted $25,000 bond and is confined to his home. Dr. Sabaratnam posted $700,000 bail Thursday night.
In a 21-count grand jury indictment, the men are charged with conspiring to take and receive kickbacks for referrals and to commit health care fraud. Mr. Mitts is also charged with money laundering and tax evasion.
read more
Skid Row residents said the ambulances arrived each morning heralded by hospital patient recruiters who offered food, cigarettes and sometimes cash, to the homeless people who call these grimy downtown sidewalks home. Patients were paid as much as $30, court papers say.
Residents said recruiters, also known as runners, would call out like street salesmen for anyone who had a multicolored Medi-Cal eligibility card: “Red, white and blue! Let it do what it do!”
A little later, the vans would leave Skid Row bound for one of the three hospitals. Some of the homeless people would receive medical treatments, court papers said, whether they needed them or not.
Investigators said recruits often received no medical care at all, or in some cases received faulty health care, as in the case of one person, identified as Recruit X, who court papers said was “given a nitroglycerin patch for her non-existent cardiopulmonary condition.” The treatment caused a dangerous drop in blood pressure that made her ill, investigators said.
She was recruited repeatedly, court papers said, and for her cooperation was paid money that she used to buy crack cocaine.
After the trips to the hospitals, vans dropped off their recruits at the same Skid Row street corners, court papers said.
Those accused of being involved in the alleged scam billed Medicaid and Medi-Cal for thousands of fake treatments, according to lawsuits filed by the Los Angeles city attorney, Rocky Delgadillo, and Thomas P. O’Brien, the United States attorney for the Central District of California. According to the lawsuits, Los Angeles Metropolitan, City of Angels and Tustin hospitals paid Mr. Mitts $1,600 to $20,000 a month and paid salaries to patient recruiters he managed.
Mr. O’Brien said the private hospitals were trying to keep beds occupied at the expense of taxpayers.
Although Medicare scams are relatively common, Mr. O’Brien said they usually implicated small clinics or doctors’ offices. The scale and duration of this enterprise is unusual, investigators said.
“These allegations involve individuals in a complex arrangement involving shell companies, kickbacks, bogus contracts with the people committing fraud and hospitals covering up kickbacks,” Mr. O’Brien said.
Los Angeles Metropolitan and Tustin Hospital issued a joint statement on Wednesday saying they were cooperating with the investigation. City of Angels could not be reached for comment.
On Skid Row few people were surprised by the arrests, and nearly everyone was familiar with the recruitment of patients.
Johnny Reed Jr., a wheelchair-bound musician who belts out songs a cappella on the sidewalk calling himself The King of Gospel, said he was recruited once.
“They gave me a little money,” Mr. Reed said. “And I went with them to the hospital. They treated me for my arthritis.”
Anthony Pitts, 50, who lives in a government-subsidized apartment building in Skid Row, said he heard the recruiters each morning. Mr. Pitts, a military veteran, said that he did not need Medicaid but that plenty of his friends were on the system and had been picked up by recruiters.
“They come down every morning with four or five people, they fill up their van and take them to the hospital,” Mr. Pitts said. “When they come back they give them money — sometimes as much as $150 or $200.”
Also implicated in county and federal court papers were John Fenton, chief executive of Los Angeles Doctors Hospital Corporation, a subsidiary of Pacific Health Corporation that owns Los Angeles Metropolitan and Tustin hospitals; Daniel Davis, chief executive of Tustin; and Robert Borseau, an owner of Intercare Health Systems, which owns City of Angels. More arrests are expected, said Mr. Delgadillo, the city attorney.

AP: Pakistani Wrestling

Photos by AP/Emilio Morenatti

Invisibility Cloak?

Scientists in the US say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people invisible. Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around 3D objects making them "disappear". The materials do not occur naturally but have been created on a nano scale, measured in billionths of a metre. The team says the principles could one day be scaled up to make invisibility cloaks large enough to hide people.
Stealth operations
The findings, by scientists led by Xiang Zhang, were published in the journal Nature and Science. The new system works like water flowing around a rock, the researchers said. Because light is not absorbed or reflected by the object, a person only sees the light from behind it - rendering the object invisible. The new material produces has "negative refractive" properties. It has a multi-layered "fishnet" structure which is transparent over a wide range of light wavelengths. The research, funded by the US government, could one day be used in military stealth operations - with tanks made to disappear from the enemies' sight.

The article is by Jason Valentine, Shuang Zhang, Thomas Zentgraf, Erick Ulin-Avila, Dentcho A Genov, Guy Bartal and Xiang Zhang, “Three Dimensional Optical Metamaterial Exhibiting Negative Refractive Index”

Плакат du jour

Just Seen: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

a very bleak Romanian movie about abortion, in case you wondered what the title really means... The character of the girl who is seeking an abortion was just so annoyingly stupid with her little lies, manipulative simpleton facade that I could not watch the movie past 70 min... Everyone else in the movie is pitch perfect, so give it a try. But why is it a Golden Palm Winner at Cannes? - beats me...

Train Crash near Prague

A view of the wreckage of the international EuroCity Comenius train that crashed into a part of a reconstructed road bridge, that fell down just before the passing train, in Studenka, some 360 kilometers east of Prague, Czech Republic, on Friday, Aug. 8, 2008. Seven people died and at least another 67 were injured. (AP Photo/CTK, Petr Sznapka) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

NYT: What We Ate and What We Eat

Compare the American diet from the 70s to the current one by clicking on the image above...

BBC: Touch Me I'm Karen Taylor

Another episode from Karen...

NYT on Boredom

You’re Bored, but Your Brain Is Tuned In
By BENEDICT CAREY

Even the most fabulous, high-flying lives hit pockets of dead air, periods when the sails go slack. Movie stars get marooned in D.M.V. lines. Prime ministers sit with frozen smiles through interminable state events. Living-large rappers endure empty August afternoons, pacing the mansion, checking the refrigerator, staring idly out the window, baseball droning on the radio.
Wondering: When does the mail come, exactly?
Scientists know plenty about boredom, too, though more as a result of poring through thickets of meaningless data than from studying the mental state itself. Much of the research on the topic has focused on the bad company it tends to keep, from depression and overeating to smoking and drug use.
Yet boredom is more than a mere flagging of interest or a precursor to mischief. Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.
In a recent paper in The Cambridge Journal of Education, Teresa Belton and Esther Priyadharshini of East Anglia University in England reviewed decades of research and theory on boredom, and concluded that it’s time that boredom “be recognized as a legitimate human emotion that can be central to learning and creativity.”
Psychologists have most often studied boredom using a 28-item questionnaire that asks people to rate how closely a list of sentences applies to them: “Time always seems to be passing too slowly,” for instance.

read more
High scores in these tests tend to correlate with high scores on measures of depression and impulsivity. But it is not clear which comes first — proneness to boredom, or the mood and behavior problems. “It’s the difference between the sort of person who can look at a pool of mud and find something interesting, and someone who has a hard time getting absorbed in anything,” said Stephen J. Vodanovich, a psychologist at University of West Florida in Pensacola.
Boredom as a temporary state is another matter, and in part reflects the obvious: that the brain has concluded there is nothing new or useful it can learn from an environment, a person, an event, a paragraph. But it is far from a passive neural shrug. Using brain-imaging technology, neuroscientists have found that the brain is highly active when disengaged, consuming only about 5 percent less energy in its resting “default state” than when involved in routine tasks, according to Dr. Mark Mintun, a professor of radiology at Washington University in St. Louis.
That slight reduction can make a big difference in terms of time perception. The seconds usually seem to pass more slowly when the brain is idling than when it is absorbed. And those stretched seconds are not the live-in-the-moment, meditative variety, either. They are frustrated, restless moments. That combination, psychologists argue, makes boredom a state that demands relief — if not from a catnap or a conversation, then from some mental game.
“When the external and internal conditions are right, boredom offers a person the opportunity for a constructive response,” Dr. Belton, co-author of the review in the Cambridge journal, wrote in an e-mail message.
Some evidence for this can be seen in semiconscious behaviors, like doodling during a dull class, braiding strands of hair, folding notebook paper into odd shapes. Daydreaming too can be a kind of constructive self-entertainment, psychologists say, especially if the mind is turning over a problem. In experiments in the 1970s, psychiatrists showed that participants completing word-association tasks quickly tired of the job once obvious answers were given; granted more time, they began trying much more creative solutions, as if the boredom “had the power to exert pressure on individuals to stretch their inventive capacity,” Dr. Belton said.
In the past few years, a team of Canadian doctors had the courage to examine the fog of boredom as it thickened before their (drooping) eyes. While attending lectures on dementia, the doctors, Kenneth Rockwood, David B. Hogan and Christopher J. Patterson, kept track of the number of attendees who nodded off during the talks. They found that in an hourlong lecture attended by about 100 doctors, an average of 16 audience members nodded off. “We chose this method because counting is scientific,” the authors wrote in their seminal 2004 article in The Canadian Medical Association Journal.
The investigators analyzed the presentations themselves and found that a monotonous tone was most strongly associated with “nod-off episodes per lecture (NOELs),” followed by the sight of a tweed jacket on the lecturer.
In a telephone interview, Dr. Rockwood, a professor of geriatric medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said when the material presented is familiar, as a lot of it was, then performance is everything. “Really, what it comes down to,” he said, “is that if you have some guy up there droning on, it drives people crazy.”
Dr. Rockwood and his co-authors have followed up with two more related reports and attribute the inspiration for the continuing project to Dr. Patterson.
Early on in one of those first dementia lectures, he went out cold.

NYT: Airlines charging for pillows now

Coffee, tea, and now pillows

JetBlue Airways said Monday that it planned to begin charging for pillow and blanket sets on flights of two hours or longer. The $7 sets, which passengers can keep and reuse, include a 10-by-12 inch pillow, a fleece blanket and a $5 coupon for Bed Bath & Beyond. Buying the sets will be the only option for airline slumberers who do not tote their own; pillows and blankets will no longer be distributed free.
Last week, US Airways began charging $1 for coffee and tea and $2 for bottled water and soft drinks, a step already taken by some European carriers. Several airlines have begun charging passengers to check luggage and book tickets using their frequent-flier miles. JetBlue tried to put a green spin on the move, portraying the kits as environmentally friendly.
“Replacing our old, recycled pillows and blankets with this state-of-the-art, high-quality take-home kit is an eco-conscious, health-conscious and customer-conscious decision,” the general manager for product development, Brett Muney, said. But in the end, the decision was driven by economics, the latest move by airlines to find revenue wherever they can to combat record prices for jet fuel, which is up 71 percent from a year ago, according to the International Air Transport Association. Long a feature of commercial plane travel, pillows and blankets began disappearing on domestic flights in 2005, when the industry was hit by a wave of bankruptcy filings.
To be sure, $7 seems to be a reasonable price. Bed Bath & Beyond offers travel pillows on its Web site that range from $3.99 for a cotton-polyester version to $79.99 for a Tempur-Pedic foam model. And the sets are bound to assure passengers that their sleepy-time accessories are not full of germs, a concern among some health experts. JetBlue’s move to sell pillows and blankets has been long in the making. In 2006, David Neeleman, the airline’s founder and former chief executive, said JetBlue was thinking about selling them in an effort to catch up to other carriers in finding ways to produce revenue.
This year, JetBlue began charging $10 to $20 for seats with extra legroom and doubled its fee to change a ticket to $100. It also began selling refundable tickets, which can cost tens of dollars more than its nonrefundable tickets.
The refundable fares and extra legroom were an effort by JetBlue to attract more business travelers, rather than the vacationers who have been its focus since it began flying in 2000. Whether travelers will want to buy pillows and blankets, too, is yet to be seen.

New Yorker: On Sudden Insights

Eureka Hunt

Why do good ideas come to us when they do?


to read the article click the image above or here

Poem du jour

Trouble
by Matthew Dickman

Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills
to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter
hung in the Tahitian bedroom
of her mother’s house,
while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes
you can look at the clouds or the trees
and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.
The performance artist Kathy Change
set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves
out of the music industry forever.
I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears. The French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped
from an apartment window into the world
and then out of it. Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead
roles, leaped off the “H” in the HOLLYWOOD sign
when everything looked black and white
and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932. Ernest Hemingway
put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho
while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree
and overdosed on phenobarbital. My brother opened
thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body
until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like
the way geese sound above the river. I like
the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.

Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter
brought her roses when she was still alive,
and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite
in his own mouth
though it took six hours for him
to die, 1887. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned
and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf. If you are
travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially
on a train. Andrew Martinez, the nude activist, died
in prison, naked, a bag
around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer
Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.
Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues
after drawing a hot bath,
in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.
Larry Walters became famous
for flying in a Sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled
weather balloons. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet
and then he landed. He was a man who flew.
He shot himself in the heart. In the morning I get out of bed, I brush
my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
I want to be good to myself.

New Yorker: Superbugs

Click on the image above to read the article in Adobe PDF format.

US Airways to charge for drinks

US Airways Group Inc. will become the first major American airline to charge for coffee and sodas Friday. Many passengers may still get beverages for free.
The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA is objecting to collecting the $1 and $2 fees for non-alcoholic drinks, which US Airways is imposing to counter record fuel costs. Should travelers balk, they probably won't have to pay, the union said.
"We're trained to keep order on an airplane and defuse confrontation," the president of US Airways' AFA chapter, Mike Flores, said yesterday in an interview. "If it takes giving a free beverage to somebody to do that, so be it. I expect there will be flight attendants who just give everything away." The union's complaints mean the airline will set a new industry standard while relying on employees upset at having to implement it.

Aнекдот du jour

Не ходите, дети, в Бутово гулять -
Там живет ужасный Идикасюдаблять!

NYT: All For Sale

Big Blue Project

Please visit the Real World website to learn more about this project and the wonderful music Peter Gabriel wrote with his friends. and as a teaser listen to the first track: (and, yes, it can be listened to as a message to "you" too :) )

BBC: Touch Me, I'm Karen Taylor

More from Karen Taylor... Yes, 38 Double F. That's all you need to know.