 | Last login: 3 months agoHapax is a guy from Cork, Ireland. Who watches the lion suffer in his cage rots in the lion's memory. (René Char) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[Note: The text is always from the site reviewed, unless specifically indicated otherwise - hapax] |
- Hapax
 Mar 27, 4:05pm  (2 reviews) stumblers, internet, stumbleupon, web http://user.adme.in/blog/browse/u/Hapax- fresh fields & pastures new
exit
While I'm still using SU for bookmarking, I appear to have shifted to here for reviewing. Several reasons, including SU's apparent attempt to claim rights over content added by users like myself *, and the SU administrators' blatant and persistent negligence of their own rules **. No drama, just time to exit.
* 3.3 Your Content. By posting any Content on the Services, you hereby grant to us an unrestricted, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, perform, display, create derivative works of, and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution method (now known or later developed) throughout the world. Additionally, by posting any Content on the Services and making your Content available to others ("Third Parties") via RSS distribution, you hereby grant to all Third Parties an unrestricted, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to copy, display, and distribute such Content in any and all media (now known or later developed) throughout the world.
stumbleupon.com/terms/ [stumbleupon.com/terms/]
** Community Rules
Please respect them, and heed the guidance of our longer-term members, the group owners and moderators, and staff members. Breach of these rules, and failure to adhere to our Terms of Service may result in sanctions being applied to your account, or in its termination.
9. Reviews (or tags) should not be used to level personal attacks on other members - or the owners of, or contributors to the sites reviewed.
stumbleupon.com/aboutus/community_rules [stumbleupon.com/aboutus/community_rules]
That's the theory, here's the practice, apparently permitted from an SU-advertised "top stumbler":
Tag used by Starspirit, "stellareisacyberbully" reported many months ago through several channels, but without response.
Edit (Apr 3rd): While this page was visited several times by GMC several times since I posted, and though the offending blog was made private several times, thereby showing awareness of the issue, the breach of SU rules remains.
- Anhalt, István
- Mar 16, 6:21pm
 (1 review) music http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/i... - istván anhalt
set articulations
Anhalt's musical composition is strongly influenced by his study of the psychology of speech
. . . A keen interest in the extension and functions of vocal music, on which he has lectured and written widely, culminated in the book Alternative Voices. Often socio-linguistic in approach, this is a pioneering work of analysis of significant vocal writing after about 1945, and of striking insights into the kinds and powers of vocal utterance in art and society. In his own music Anhalt has been concerned with the range and variety of sounds which can be produced vocally and the ways in which a text may be treated structurally. A text may be presented in a straightforward manner where the music is a commentary on or a reflection of the meaning, but the text might also be treated less for the surface meaning of words than for the juxtapositions or the sounds and types of articulations which can be used as expressive means in a musical composition to project underlying meaning.
In Comments the unconventional text consists of miscellaneous newspaper clippings. The ordinariness of a weather report was set to sustained and richly textured music which, by the setting up of a conflicting musical gesture, suggests an interior drama behind the trivial exterior of the text itself; and the report of the death of a Balinese dancer following a European tour serves to focus through the music on the tension and on the potential for violence inherent in the sharp contrast of cultures and societies. Related to the spirit of place and time in Comments is Cento, 'Cantata Urbana,' a treatment of Eldon Grier's poem 'An Ecstasy.' The long poem was reduced by Anhalt to 25 lines and the text fragmented, the words themselves broken up so that recognition of sense is blurred and meaning becomes uncertain. In its carefully controlled abstraction, Cento portrays the tension and disjunction of modern urban life where elusive meaning bubbles to the surface only to sink back before it is grasped. The use of mixed media and the temporality of subject matter are continued in more complex ways in Foci, where words from a number of sources in a variety of languages form an important part of the texture of a piece to be performed in a planned visual environment. . . .
- The Zanj Slaves Rebellion, AD 869-883 | libcom.org
- Mar 11, 7:47am (1 review) history, slaves, africa, revolution, middle-east http://libcom.org/library/zanj-slaves-re...
- the zanj slaves rebellion
talking masks & animated instruments
What distinguishes the Zanj from numerous other slave rebellions cannot be measured in terms of numbers or the length of their struggle alone because one needs to bear in mind the aptitude displayed time and again in outmanoeuvring the ruling class. Instinctively they knew what needs to be done. That is not to belittle their numbers for this is one instance when quantitative comparisons are not misleading. The Spartacus Rebellion lasted for 3 years (73-71 BCE) and involved around 120,000 slaves. By contrast, the Zanj were 500,000 strong and maintained a marooned state for 15 years. Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise that their history has not been subjected to the gaze of Hollywood for the latter has an inbuilt tendency for de-memorizing and reifying proletarian resistance to class society. It is, therefore, left to us 21st century proles to re-create the world and times of kindred spirits separated from us by more than a millennium.
- The New York Times & Log In
- Nov 17, 2008 3:45am (1 review) science, arts, france http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/arts/d...
- deyrolle
emporium of dead beasts
Inside Deyrolle, part taxidermy shop, part museum, in Paris, shortly after the fire in February.
When a fire ripped through Deyrolle, the beloved taxidermy establishment here, early one morning last February, it was as if a dagger had been plunged into the heart of Paris.
Deyrolle has always been more than a shop on the classy Rue du Bac. Founded 177 years ago by Jean-Baptiste Deyrolle, a well-known entomologist, Deyrolle has been a natural history emporium with the look and feel of a museum, except that just about everything was for sale.
Deyrolle's stuffed menagerie -- from black crows to big-game animals -- its cases of butterflies and beetles, its signature pedagogic posters and century-old prints have made it a place of pilgrimage. . . .
Ninety percent of the shop's stock, including most of the animals, a celebrated fossil collection, an antique skeleton of a Nile perch and a 19th-century diorama of more than 100 birds, was lost. The dark-wood cabinets that housed birds, butterflies and beetles went up in flames. . . .
"Deyrolle was the place in Paris you'd first come as a child, then later bring your friends, then your fiancée, then your own children and your grandchildren," Mr. de Broglie said. "How could people close their eyes and let it disappear? It would have been impossible.". . .
One French woman donated 50 boxes of butterflies. A Frenchman gave back the head of a bull he had bought at Deyrolle a few months before.
Artists and photographers who had drawn inspiration from one of the most celebrated taxidermy sites in the world donated their works. Christie's Europe offered to sell those items as a fund-raising auction, waiving its commission along the way.
Since the fire, Mr. de Broglie has reopened some of the rooms in the multistoried, 4,300-square-foot space. The back corridors still smell of smoke, but new animals are slowly moving in: a giraffe, a lion, an ostrich, a camel, a zebra, a tiger, a peacock, among many others. . . .
- Unexploded Bombs in Germany: The Lethal Legacy of World War II - SPIEGEL...
- Oct 20, 2008 1:11am (4 reviews) europe, germany, warfare http://www.spiegel.de/international/germ...
- defusing
even the birds stop singing
The devastated center of Dresden after the February 1945 attack on the city. The Allies dropped 1.9 million tonnes of bombs to destroy Germany's industry and crush public morale during the war. The raids killed an estimated 500,000 people.
Nazi Germany was first to launch massive air raids on civilian targets in World War II with devastating attacks on Warsaw and London. But, it reaped what it sowed as the Allies waged a five-year campaign of aerial bombardment during which they dropped 1.9 million tons of bombs to destroy Germany's industry and crush public morale. The raids killed an estimated 500,000 people.
Most estimates for the percentage of unexploded bombs range from 5 to 15 percent -- or between 95,000 and 285,000 tons. As Germany hastily rebuilt its cities after the war, authorities didn't have the time or the means to locate and dispose of a large part of that tonnage.
As a result, a deadly legacy has lain dormant beneath Germany's streets ever since.
"In the last few years we've found that the detonators we take out of such bombs are increasingly brittle," Weise said. "Recently we've had three extracted detonators go off with a pissssh sound while they were being transported away, all it took was a bit of vibration. One day such bombs will be so sensitive that no one will be able to handle them. We may have to stop defusing them as soon as next year.". . .
"When you're on your own in that pit with the bomb in the middle of a city, it's strange how everything suddenly goes totally quiet," said Weise. "Sometimes even the birds stop singing. That's always the point when you feel edgy. After the Potsdam bomb last month I thought, you've been lucky so many times, that's the last one today, now you'll stop."
Unexploded bombs are getting increasingly unstable and are continuing to claim lives. In October 2006, a construction worker was killed when his bulldozer struck a bomb while he was cutting the tarmac of a motorway near the city of Aschaffenburg in southern Germany. Eyewitnesses said the explosion tossed the bulldozer through the air like a toy.
In Brandenburg alone, a total of 10,733 tonnes of munitions were disposed of between 1991 and 2007 at a cost of €259 million. At the Brandenburg detonation ground, munitions are either exploded or have their explosives removed and are sold as scrap metal.
- George Tooker Biography
- Oct 14, 2008 2:36pm (1 review) arts http://www.progressiveliving.org/artists...
- george tooker
defacing
. . . Tooker was clear from the beginning that he had no interest in minimalist art, of the sort that abstraction dictates. Very much to the contrary, he was instead bent on creating "maximalist" art. He has said that "in one kind of painting I'm trying to say 'this is what we are forced to suffer in life,' while in other paintings I say 'this is what we should be.'"
Lincoln Kirstein, an advocate of Tooker's art from early on, has written with rare insight that Tooker's approach "assumes the durable products of this art are expressions of ideas rather than a craft or the demonstrations of self-love or self-pity. It accepts painting as a triumph of the orderly, the intelligent, and the achieved, rather than as a victim of the decorative, the fragmentary, or the improvised. It assumes the human mind is obligated toward synthesis, and that, at its most interesting, establishes order rather than disorder, from infinities of observable phenomena. . . .These pictures are essential rather than anecdotal. They attempt to define qualities and conditions independently of their designers' appetites. . . . Their reference moves outward toward a universal legibility rather than inward toward a limited correspondence.". . .
source for images
- New Deal Network Photo Library
- Oct 13, 2008 1:10pm (1 review) history, photography, children, cities http://newdeal.feri.org/library/browse_p...
- arnold eagle & david robbins,
one third of a nation
Slum conditions in the congested East Side and Charles districts of New York City, May to August, 1938
- Language Log & Who Has the Biggest Dictionary?
- Oct 10, 2008 2:18pm (1 review) linguistics, asia, china, dictionaries http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll?p=6...
- enlarging the dictionary
men of character
The East Asians have an ongoing contest propelled by dictionary size envy. Everybody wants to see who can produce a dictionary with the most entries. The Koreans at Dankook University have just pulled off the amazing feat of compiling a dictionary that has outstripped anything yet generated by the Japanese or the Chinese themselves. After 30 years of labor and investing more than 31,000,000,000 KRW (equal to more than 25 million USD), the South Koreans have just published the Chinese-Korean Unabridged Dictionary in 16 volumes. This humongous lexicon contains nearly half a million entries composed of 55,000 different characters. . . .
It is essential to point out that there will never be an end to the compilation of ever larger single character dictionaries, since the Chinese writing system is essentially open-ended. People invent new characters for their own names; every time a new element is discovered, a new character is created for it (e.g., LAO2 鐒 for lawrencium); special graphs must be coined for topolect morphemes; etc. This vast proliferation of characters poses numerous challenges and problems, including the following:
1. how to order and locate them
2. how to identify each of them with a specific code designation (not even Unicode -- which has assigned the vast majority of its code points to Chinese -- can keep up)
3. the fact that many of these "different" characters are actually just variants of other characters, including forms that were popular at diverse moments in history, but then became obsolete
Above about 30,000 characters, we usually don't know the sound or the meaning (or both) of most characters. Furthermore, most of the characters in these mega-dictionaries can only be attested as having occurred once in history, and that often in lexicons of obscure characters! I liken the situation to junk DNA in the human body -- there are an awful lot of junk characters out there clogging up the writing system. While it may be an understandable obsession for East Asian lexicographers to compete to produce the most comprehensive and, above all, BIGGEST dictionary of characters, I do not think that custodians of electronic codes should feel obliged to follow suit, especially when the frequency of characters over 20,000 (or, for that matter, over 10,000) is so infinitesimally small. . . .
- BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | The man who reads dictionaries
- Oct 9, 2008 9:40am (16 reviews) linguistics http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magaz...
- reading the dictionary
cachinnator in the wry?
Ammon Shea spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary - 20 volumes, 21,730 pages and 59 million words - and he rates poring over a dictionary as enriching as reading a novel. Why?
. . . "I've always enjoyed reading dictionaries and they are far more interesting than people give them credit for. And I think everything you find in a great book you would find in a great dictionary, except for the plot.
"All the normal emotions - grief, happiness and loss - exist in a dictionary but not necessarily in the order that you would think.". . .
- Poetry Foundation: The online home of the Poetry Foundation
- Oct 6, 2008 4:28pm (1 review) poetry http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/...
frank stanford
the snake doctors
I was in the outhouse
I heard somebody at the pump
I looked out the chink hole
It was the two fishermen
They stole fish
One man gave the other one some money
He flipped a fifty-cent piece up
I lost it in the sun
I saw the snake doctors riding each other
The other man said “You lose”
He took something else out of his pocket
It shined
They had a tow sack
I thought they were cleaning fish
I looked up
I saw the snake doctors riding each other
I took my eye away
It was dark in the outhouse
I whistled
I heard the pump again
It sounded broken
I looked out the chink hole
It wasn’t the pump
It was the pig
The guitar player cut them out
The midget helped him
“Pump me some water, midget” he said
The pig ran off
The guitar player washed off his hands
The midget washed off the nuts
He got a drink
My eye hurt
He laughed
He cleaned the blood off his knife He wiped
it on his leg
He started singing
The dog tried to get the nuts
But the midget kicked him
The guitar player picked them up
He put them in his pocket
The dog went over to the pig
He licked him
I pulled my pants up
I went outside
I got the pig
I walked over to the pump
I said “Don’t you ever lay a hand
on this pig again”
The guitar player laughed
He asked me if I wanted the nuts back
He took them out of his pocket
He spit on them
He shook them like dice
He threw them on the ground
He said “Hah”
The midget stomped on them
I had the pig under my arm
He was bleeding on my foot I said
“Midget, I got friends on that river”
. . . . .
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