Wednesday, 07 June 2006
Jon Stewart Trounces Bill Bennett
Last night conservative douchebag Bill Bennett managed to tear his fat ass away from the slot machines long enough to appear on the Daily Show, where John Stewart took Bennett to school on the issue of gay marriage:
Bennett: Well I think if gay..gay people are already members of families...
Stewart: What? (almost spitting out his drink)
Bennett: They're sons and they're daughters..
Stewart: So that's where the buck stops, that's the gay ceiling.
Bennett Look, it's a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man and a women.
Stewart:I disagree, I think it's a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.
It's all downhill from there. Seriously, don't miss this one. It'll make your day.
Posted by flow Frazao on June 7, 2006 at 06:03 PM in America, Culture, Current Affairs, Television, US News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Monday, 06 February 2006
Weird Earls - Art Edition
- Stephen Wiltshire - The Tokyo skyline drawn from memory by an autistic/artistic savant.
- Myranda Didovic - In February 1995, this artist/strange person, working in conjunction with nutritionists at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, took a crap that measured 26 feet in length.
- Ben Frost - Ben Frost is a painter, performance artist and illustrator who currently lives in Australia
His work explores themes of alienation, dispossession, and perversity that exists behind the facade of contemporary western society. By subverting mainstream iconography from the advertising, entertainment and political spectrum he creates a visual and conceptual framework that is bold, confronting and often contraversial.
- David Hasselhof - There are no words to describe art of this magnitude.
Posted by flow Frazao on February 6, 2006 at 01:42 AM in Culture, Weird Earls | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sunday, 15 January 2006
Stop Me If You've Heard This One
I'm not usually into this type of thing, but this really has got to be the best blonde joke ever.
Posted by flow Frazao on January 15, 2006 at 09:35 PM in Culture, Weird Earls | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Thursday, 12 January 2006
Food for the Ears
Some stuff I've been listening to that's worth mentioning:
- The Beastles - dj BC presents The Beatles vs. The Beastie Boys (follow link for mp3s)
- Live From Iraq - 4th25
It took only a few ambushes, roadside bombs and corpses for Neal Saunders to know what he had to do: turn the streets of Baghdad into rap music. So the First Cavalry sergeant, then newly arrived for a year of duty in Sadr City, began hoarding his monthly paychecks and seeking out a U.S. supplier willing to ship a keyboard, digital mixer, cable, microphones and headphones to an overseas military address. He hammered together a plywood shack, tacked up some cheap mattress pads for soundproofing and invited other Task Force 112 members to join him in his jerry-built studio. They call themselves "4th25"—pronounced fourth quarter, like the final do-or-die minutes of a game—and their album is "Live From Iraq." The sound may be raw, even by rap standards, but it expresses things that soldiers usually keep bottled up. "You can't call home and tell your mom your door got blown off by an IED," says Saunders. "No one talks about what we're going through. Sure, there are generals on the TV, but they're not speaking for us. We're venting for everybody."
Watch their video here, if you can stand it. Not a film clip for the meek, which is why it probably won't get much play on MTV. And that's a shame, because these guys are to Iraq what Jimi Hendrix was to Vietnam.
Posted by flow Frazao on January 12, 2006 at 10:19 PM in Culture, Iraq, Music, War on Terra | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sunday, 28 November 2004
Losing Languages
When I was in Cambodia in 2001, I was staying in a guesthouse on the beach in a town called Sihanoukville. It was late at night, probably around midnight or so, and I got to talking with one of the kids who worked as a waiter there. If I had to guess, I'd say he was probably around 18 years old.
He told me that he was from Phnom Penh, and his uncle knew the owner of the guesthouse. He told me how lucky he felt that he was able to get this job where he worked from 6 AM until 12 midnight every day of the week. When he went home at night, he stayed in a room with five other Cambodians who all worked for the same guesthouse.
The most incredible thing though, was what he said when I asked him how much he made working at his job. His salary was 0. He made no money at his job. He told me that his payment was the moments he could steal every day when he got a chance to speak English to tourists. In this way, he hoped to learn enough English to find a different job someday.
Obviously, the drive to learn English is strong all over the world. The internet and the global economy have positioned English as the international language. But at what price? Is it worth the effort to preserve languages? Are languages and culture intristically linked?
I don't know the answers to those questions, but here's an article illustrating some of the repercussions of linguistic homogenization.
However, in the years following their first contact with the outside world, in the early 80s, they have begun to commit suicide, drinking their own curare. Out of a population of only a couple of hundred, just this past summer eight adults and teenagers committed suicide in the same day. No one fully understands why this people is beginning to kill itself. But the answer seems to be related to their sense of fragility and smallness as a people, the idea that their language, culture, and values cannot compete with those from the outside. It is as though they take the death of their community literally.
For many people, like these Amazonian groups, the loss of language brings loss of identity and sense of community, loss of traditional spirituality, and even loss of the will to live. To save languages like Banawá, Pirahã, Suruwahá, Oro Win, and hundreds of other endangered languages around the world will require a massive effort by linguists, anthropologists, and other interested individuals. We need, as a minimum, to identify which languages are endangered around the world, to learn enough about each of them to produce a dictionary, a grammar, and a written form of the language, to train native speakers of these languages as teachers and linguists, and to secure government support for protecting and respecting these languages and their speakers. A daunting task. But a vital one for all of us.
If you find this stuff interesting, here's another article on the subject from the NYT.
Posted by flow Frazao on November 28, 2004 at 04:04 PM in Culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack