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November 10, 2004
Arafat is dead. I cannot help to think that the fact that he had an iron grip on the PLO for so long made this issue so hard to resolve...but maybe after all this time there CAN be a final resolution on the question of the Palestinian state? Will we see massive internal warfare amongst his followers after he gets put in the ground? Interesting times, indeed.
posted by PeteyStock at 9:11 PM PST - 114 comments
YELLOW PERIL "Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government--which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."
Sax Rohmer's tales of the sinister
Dr. Fu Manchu and his arch enemy
Sir Denis Nayland Smith of the British Secret Service (the nephew of
Sherlock Holmes whose name is also
invoked in
Thomas Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow), have fascinated readers and
cinemagoers alike for
the best part of the twentieth century. Two things make Fu Manchu all the more monstrous a villain: his proximity to the West, and his intellect. His base is in
Limehouse, the
Chinese area of London. So by allowing him to live in the country, England is vulnerable to
his insidious plans (and so becomes a validation of strict immigration policy). His intellect comes from Western learning, and it is often emphasized that he has been educated in a University. So we see the evil Asian as using the West's own knowledge against it.
It is up to Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie to stop Fu Manchu's plans in each story. As Smith remarks in
The Hand of Fu Manchu, "the swamping of the white world by Yellow hordes may be the price of our failure."
(more inside)
posted by matteo at 5:44 PM PST - 16 comments
Time-Life Navigation: "a synthesis of five inter-related elements: organization evolution (main change vehicle); life design (main change beneficiary); work life (career) evolution (main change initiator); financial investing (the golden goose); and a life navigation system (the action sequencer)."
Huh? While a bit more easily parsed than the famous
TimeCube, I'm not sure where this falls on the sanity scale. If you paste the text into Notepad, sans all the crazy font effects, it begins to seem less bug-eyed. Crazy theory or just crazy web design? Wait, here's a
site map graphic to clear it up...
posted by Tubes at 5:43 PM PST - 1 comments
Do little people go to heaven? ...The scientists who have come up with these new Floresians do not count them among the ancestors of man, but among the collateral branches which died out, like the Neanderthals, only later. The suggestion is that the Floresians are, like us, rational animals. Now Christians believe that man (I mean homo, of course, not vir) is a special creation of God. Would these Floresians be in the image and likeness of God too, with immortal souls to be saved or lost, capable of praying to God and going to heaven? asks Christopher Howse.
posted by y2karl at 10:55 AM PST - 90 comments
Night Windows Gorgeous images of night-time urban Japan (Japanese titles, English alt tags, 1024x768 images available). Includes:
sleeping bullet trains,
trams,
cats,
Tokyo Harbour tunnel,
bridges,
tail lights,
Narita airport,
offices,
Mount Fuji, Tokyo Disneyland (
1,
2,
3,
4,
5), and many more.
posted by carter at 10:26 AM PST - 13 comments
Enough Is Enough: It's time to stop dancing to "Hey Ya!"
"As of today, November 10, 2004, it is one year since 'Hey Ya!' was released in the UK. So all you Beyonces, and Lucy Lius, and babydolls, GET OFF THE FLOOR." Further proof that
Popjustice is the world's greatest pop magazine, if their
review of Girls Aloud's What Will The Neighbours Say? with
Neighbours-cast-members-out-of-ten ratings scale didn't already convince you. Oh, and
"note to DJs: This is not an excuse to start playing 'Crazy In Love' again."
posted by logovisual at 9:19 AM PST - 10 comments
Editors Suck! Freelance writers will feel this author's pain. (Via Mediabistro. I believe registration is required. Sorry.)
posted by Man-Thing at 7:38 AM PST - 20 comments
Political discourse in these desperate days is - as we all know - very much a no-holds-barred affair. We have come to expect that political debate will be nasty, personal, based on appeals to emotion, and largely divorced from consideration of real-world consequences of the positions claimed.
Still, I hope we can agree that some rhetorical flourishes are simply unacceptable in civil society. Like this piece of vileness from Adam Yoshida, imagining that "
the future of the Democratic Party [is] providing Republicans with a number of cute (but not that bright) comfort women." You read that right: "
comfort women." Left, right, or center, I hope we can all agree that we are within measurable distince of moral surrender if this sort of rhetoric goes unchallenged. Or is this really what we've come to?
(Via
Atrios, upon whose summary I cannot improve.)
posted by adamgreenfield at 7:24 AM PST - 62 comments
Arundhati Roy's call for action, on accepting the Sydney Peace Prize. (That's action from
us specifically). I often find Roy's speeches overblown, overcooked and one-sided, and if that kind of rhetoric bothers you then you might want to skip this link. But she does speak lyrically, and I find it hard to argue against what she says this time.
posted by iffley at 3:27 AM PST - 7 comments
