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February 10, 2009
The Vimy Ridge Memorial is a common destination for Canadian travellers in France. As previous visitors have discovered, however, it is not the easiest place to reach once you get off the train. Thankfully, there's been help in the form of the
Welcome Man (Windows Media embedded video --clip starts at 11:30). Over the last 13 years
Georges Devloo has met the train at Vimy every day, where he offers free transportation to the memorial to confused and lost Canadians seeking to pay their respects. In this time, it's been estimated that M. Devloo has given rides other assistance to over 1,200 Canadians. Today, we
said au-revoir to "
le grand-père de Vimy".
posted by aclevername at 6:32 PM PST - 25 comments
"You take the gatekeeper and you confuse his mind. You threaten him and you throw him in the middle of nowhere. Then nobody knows where the gate is. As soon as you lose the whereabouts of the gate, then you have a culture going downhill. What keeps a village together is a handful of "gays and lesbians," as they call them in the modern world. In my village, lesbians are called witches, and gay men are known as the gatekeepers." The
Dagara people of Burkina Faso.
[more inside]
posted by pinothefrog at 11:21 AM PST - 49 comments
Tragedy of the anti-commons is the opposite of tragedy of the commons - it's when too many owners create grid-lock, nothing can get accomplished. It exists everywhere from copyright law, tech patents, music industry, airport runway expansion,
medicine, etc.. it is pervasive across all aspects of modern capitalist societies. The concept was coined by Professor Michael Heller who published a book in 2008 called
The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives. In an excellent
Authors@Google video, Michael Heller explains what it is and how it undermines capitalism, in particular over the past 30 years with increased privatization.
posted by stbalbach at 8:27 AM PST - 55 comments
Feel like listening to a concert tonight? Something
classical? Or maybe
folk is a bit more your style?
World?
Jazz? Nearly every day, two or three more live concert recordings are added to CBC Radio2's '
Concerts on Demand' library, with nearly 900 concerts now in the list. Each concert is given just as presented live, and you can either stream the whole thing, or choose track by track. Timings are given for all the music, and photo galleries and full descriptions and credits round it all off. All in all, it's a fabulous presentation, and there is more music here than you will ever be able to keep up with!
posted by woodblock100 at 7:32 AM PST - 22 comments
A tale of two countries Some time ago, the french & German tv channel
Arte had created an internet extension devoted to audio only,
Arteradio. This website contains hours of audio creations. This is the place where you can listen to
The first radio drama /la première fiction radio /in two languages and one version /en deux langues et une seule version /a BBC-ARTE Radio coproduction /enregistrée à Paris et London /recorded on location /diffusée en hertzien /broadcasted on BBC Radio 4 on February, 4th, 2009 /online on arteradio.com.
You can also listen to
McKenzie Wark, or to
the moment of silence created on September the eleventh 2002, to
Steve, to
English pupils in Paris, to
Susan George, to
Dean Hurley commenting his work, and then dive into the complete unknown, and pure French sounds, like
these testimonies about masturbation, or about
la chanson, like a Paris
postcard, or even a
street snapshot.
posted by nicolin at 7:05 AM PST - 3 comments
