The Theme from “Shaft” Performed by a British Ukulele Orchestra. Now that's globalization for ya no? you betcha!
neatorama
plus while on the Anglo-theme: John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols) stars in a new television advertisement for Country Life butter.
http://www.270towin.com/
check poor 1984 - red states, blue state
Political Partyhttp://www.thesmartset.com/article/article09300801.aspx
The trashing of the White House that was Andrew Jackson's inauguration.
By Tony Perrottet
The symbol of American statehood a wreck. Drunken revelers in the lobby. Boozers romping through the bedrooms. And all this 140 years before JFK moved in.
Very sad. "insane recklessness by both banks and ordinary Americans:"
http://culture11.com/blogs/theconfabulum/2008/10/02/foreclosure-alley/
she didn't poop her pants. so basically she did great!
i was watching cnn - they had the little "turn the dial to say who you like or did not" for undecided voters in ohio and it showed women vs men. which is irrelevant because neither elects the president - i would have preferred an overall like/don't like graph at the bottom but...
she did well. she rescued herself from the couric interviews. but as i was watching the cnn undecided voters graph biden topped out many more times than palin did. in general she flatlined - especially on Iraq and other foreign issues. palin topped out ironically when she supported traditionally democratic ideas - anti-wallstreet, anti-corporate, anti-iraq-war, whenever she spoke for change (does she really have such a mental block about the last 8 years?), her ticker went up. i think all of those points might be good for
her but not, in the end, good for mccain or the republicans.
i think this will go down similarly to the first obama-mccain debate, no one was particularly thrilled and will call it a draw or a palin upset due to her low expectations but in a day or two or next week the polls will catch up and eventually side with biden, same as the ohio in studio undecideds did during the debate itself.
(plus - don't know what it looked like on other channels but on cnn there was this huge black box right in the middle of the screen between the two debaters - it looked like some kind of black out box for something indecent - what was that?)
* - hey - I sent my initial reaction above to Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic right after the debate and guess what - he quoted a line from it on his blog! anonymously but hey - that's still kinda sweet. look a little more than halfway down on this page :) http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/your-reaction.html
and finally the day after polling data on who "won" the debate:
CNN Biden 51 Palin 36
CBS Biden 46 Palin 21
FOX Biden 61 Palin 39
"The Great Schlep aims to have Jewish grandchildren visit their grandparents in Florida, educate them about Obama, and therefore swing the crucial Florida vote"
Expect all her usual offensive loveliness :)
The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo. Paid for by the Jewish Council for Education and Research, www.jcer.info,
not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Halle Berry, Jennifer Aniston, Tobey Maguire, Eva Longoria Parker Ellen DeGeneres, Forest Whitaker, Dustin Hoffman, Demi Moore, Sarah Silverman, Jonah Hill, Ashton Kutcher, Courteney Cox, Laura Linney, Natalie Portman, Jamie Foxx, Usher, Kyra Sedgwick and will.i.am.
homer simpson tries to vote
Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1
3rd Infantry’s 1st BCT trains for a new dwell-time mission. Helping ‘people at home’ may become a permanent part of the active Army
"the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act forbids the deployment of the United States Army on United States soil for domestic law enforcement. This was put into place to prevent a military dictatorship..."
Army Times Article in full below:
By Gina Cavallaro - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 16:16:12 EDTThe 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.
Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.
Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.
It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.
But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.
After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one.
“Right now, the response force requirement will be an enduring mission. How the [Defense Department] chooses to source that and whether or not they continue to assign them to NorthCom, that could change in the future,” said Army Col. Louis Vogler, chief of NorthCom future operations. “Now, the plan is to assign a force every year.”
The command is at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., but the soldiers with 1st BCT, who returned in April after 15 months in Iraq, will operate out of their home post at Fort Stewart, Ga., where they’ll be able to go to school, spend time with their families and train for their new homeland mission as well as the counterinsurgency mission in the war zones.
Stop-loss will not be in effect, so soldiers will be able to leave the Army or move to new assignments during the mission, and the operational tempo will be variable.
Don’t look for any extra time off, though. The at-home mission does not take the place of scheduled combat-zone deployments and will take place during the so-called dwell time a unit gets to reset and regenerate after a deployment.
The 1st of the 3rd is still scheduled to deploy to either Iraq or Afghanistan in early 2010, which means the soldiers will have been home a minimum of 20 months by the time they ship out.
In the meantime, they’ll learn new skills, use some of the ones they acquired in the war zone and more than likely will not be shot at while doing any of it.
They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.
Training for homeland scenarios has already begun at Fort Stewart and includes specialty tasks such as knowing how to use the “jaws of life” to extract a person from a mangled vehicle; extra medical training for a CBRNE incident; and working with U.S. Forestry Service experts on how to go in with chainsaws and cut and clear trees to clear a road or area.
The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.
The package is for use only in war-zone operations, not for any domestic purpose.
“It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it.”
The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.
“I was the first guy in the brigade to get Tasered,” said Cloutier, describing the experience as “your worst muscle cramp ever — times 10 throughout your whole body.
“I’m not a small guy, I weigh 230 pounds ... it put me on my knees in seconds.”
The brigade will not change its name, but the force will be known for the next year as a CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced “sea-smurf”).
“I can’t think of a more noble mission than this,” said Cloutier, who took command in July. “We’ve been all over the world during this time of conflict, but now our mission is to take care of citizens at home ... and depending on where an event occurred, you’re going home to take care of your home town, your loved ones.”
While soldiers’ combat training is applicable, he said, some nuances don’t apply.
“If we go in, we’re going in to help American citizens on American soil, to save lives, provide critical life support, help clear debris, restore normalcy and support whatever local agencies need us to do, so it’s kind of a different role,” said Cloutier, who, as the division operations officer on the last rotation, learned of the homeland mission a few months ago while they were still in Iraq.
Some brigade elements will be on call around the clock, during which time they’ll do their regular marksmanship, gunnery and other deployment training. That’s because the unit will continue to train and reset for the next deployment, even as it serves in its CCMRF mission.
Should personnel be needed at an earthquake in California, for example, all or part of the brigade could be scrambled there, depending on the extent of the need and the specialties involved.
Other branches included
The active Army’s new dwell-time mission is part of a NorthCom and DOD response package.
Active-duty soldiers will be part of a force that includes elements from other military branches and dedicated National Guard Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Teams.
A final mission rehearsal exercise is scheduled for mid-September at Fort Stewart and will be run by Joint Task Force Civil Support, a unit based out of Fort Monroe, Va., that will coordinate and evaluate the interservice event.
In addition to 1st BCT, other Army units will take part in the two-week training exercise, including elements of the 1st Medical Brigade out of Fort Hood, Texas, and the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade from Fort Bragg, N.C.
There also will be Air Force engineer and medical units, the Marine Corps Chemical, Biological Initial Reaction Force, a Navy weather team and members of the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
One of the things Vogler said they’ll be looking at is communications capabilities between the services.
“It is a concern, and we’re trying to check that and one of the ways we do that is by having these sorts of exercises. Leading up to this, we are going to rehearse and set up some of the communications systems to make sure we have interoperability,” he said.
“I don’t know what America’s overall plan is — I just know that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that are standing by to come and help if they’re called,” Cloutier said. “It makes me feel good as an American to know that my country has dedicated a force to come in and help the people at home.”
———
Correction:
A non-lethal crowd control package fielded to 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, described in the original version of this story, is intended for use on deployments to the war zone, not in the U.S., as previously stated.
I've always liked Bill Maher. He's hilarious and usually very perceptive. I even didn't think the quote from the 911 era that got him fired from his show at the time wasn't particularly untrue or offensive. He has never been one to skirt controversy but with his new movie he is darn near begging controversy to run him over with a bus.
he's go the usual movie website with the trailer:
http://www.lionsgate.com/religulous/
and then he's also got this site http://www.disbeliefnet.com/ - a parody of beliefnet.com, which is actually quite a moderate forum for believers of all sorts that i think makes a real effort to balance the fundies and the liberals and ration them out equal space. for instance i always really liked this post on beliefnet - 'I Prayed for Their Souls Since I Could Do Nothing for Mine'
The story of a Russian Orthodox priest with a drinking problem--and a special ministry.
By Kyriacos C. Markides
expect to hear tons and tons of controversy over this film, espescially as talk radio and Fox News will end doing their usual service as free advertising in the name of moral outrage.
for those south jersey and philly folks of a certain age this can bring back a flurry of fond memories:
click to hear the original radio jingle! :)
"only a few decades ago, every New Jersey kid, young and old, would associate Asbury Park with beaches and entertainment.
Long torn apart by class and race conflicts, and further destroyed by corruption and greed.. the last few years have seen Asbury become one of those alleged cities making a comeback.
But if that comeback is occurring is still a matter of debate. With half-completed projects, investors that pull back their money, abandoned buildings dotting the landscape, and cookie-cutter townhouses in the making; in Asbury Park.. there ain't no garuntee of a comeback."
http://current.com/items/88809883_failed_and_forgotten_asbury_park_nj
Trenton Police say a man who calls himself Emperor El Bey must get rid of the two horses he's keeping in his urban backyard. El Bey says his half of the duplex is an embassy for the sovereign Abannaki Aboriginal Nation and immune from Trenton ordinances.
http://www.wcbs880.com/pages/2933151.php?
well, i don't think that's very fair - they should find someone else due to her "conflict of interest."
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=76645
of course, the website that the article is on is hardly objective itself :(
secondly in preperation for tomorrow night's VP debates:
Palin Proved to Be Formidable Foe in Alaska Debates
Despite Gov. Palin's recent travails, Democrats seem to be raising expectations for her performance. "We've looked at tapes of Gov. Palin's debates, and she's a terrific debater," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told reporters Saturday. "She's obviously a skilled speaker. We expect she'll give a great performance next Thursday."
She was a sensation as a candidate for governor two years ago, excelling in about a dozen debates during a primary bid against a sitting governor and later in the general election against a former governor attempting a comeback. In both rounds of voting, she was in a three-way race, the only woman running against two older men. A newcomer, she radiated "change" -- and stood out with trademark attire, such as a chic scarlet blazer that became almost her debate uniform.
he impacted me in many ways. maybe later i will share some stories from him and me in this post. most of him is now in the grand canyon:
here is ablog dedicated to his memory:Always settle scores at noon
And other lessons learned at the movies
Robert Fulford, National Post Published: Tuesday, September 09, 2008
The great thing about Paris is that you can always see the Eiffel Tower from your room, whether you're an artist in a tiny garret or a millionaire in a first-class hotel. Just look out the window and there it is. We who have spent much of our lives at the movies know this to be a fact, having seen it demonstrated on many occasions.
That's a perfect example of Movie Wisdom, the information we absorb inadvertently while sitting in the dark. We may go to the movies to enjoy the actors and the stories but the experience also enlarges our view of the world. In early autumn, when the Toronto International Film Festival comes around again, it reminds me of how much the movies have taught me.
Fans of traditional western movies, for example, know that the gunmen on the American frontier settled their disputes fair and square, meeting in one-on-one main-street pistol duels, ideally at noon. I was shocked when Elmore Leonard said he made it a rule to omit that scene from the western books and movies he wrote. He claims no one would ever be so foolish as to do that.
While his opinion may seem reasonable on the surface, it appears overly literal to me. I'm sticking with the Movie Wisdom version. It has tradition behind it.
Over the last 25 years or so the movies have also taught me that there's no such thing as a good man who is also rich. Years ago, a rich man of good character would occasionally show up in a movie, though always in disguise. If several young women working in a department store met by accident a man who appeared to be poor, he would later turn out to be the store's owner. But since stores are now owned by giant corporations, it's been many years since the movies depicted a capitalist with admirable qualities. Today rich men spend most of the time hiring lawyers to save their drug-dealing, murdering sons from justice.
As for corporations, we know they never follow their own stated principles. What they do, mainly, is poison the public with industrial waste.
It's not hard to follow the plot of a movie, once you have a little practice.
For instance, you can be sure that the nicest, sweetest, most helpful character who appears in the early scenes will likely die before the end (providing he or she is not a star).
As soon as we identify someone as a CIA agent, we know he's concocting an evil plot. He's almost certainly the member of a rogue faction in the agency, scheming to place its candidate in the presidency.
If we are watching a movie about people in Biblical times, we can expect that they will sometimes wear ragged clothes but their teeth will always be perfect.
If a baseball player goes up to bat in Yankee Stadium, he can always spot his girlfriend, sitting somewhere in the crowd, so that they can exchange loving glances before he wins the game with a home run. If a detective disregards his superior's orders and sneaks illegally into an office in search of incriminating information, he will almost certainly find it in the first file drawer he opens.
Mordecai Richler, in his novel Cocksure, depicted a young woman who took Movie Wisdom a little too seriously. She was confident that when telephoning the police in an emergency she needed only to dial a single number; she assumed the scene would then fade out and sirens would soon be heard in the distance. Because this was in an earlier time, 1968, her romantic life was also somewhat constricted. She knew that lovemaking consisted of a single passionate kiss, nothing more, followed by a slow fade.
Chauncey Gardiner, played in 1979 by Peter Sellers in Jerzy Kosinski's film Being There, had the same problem. A simple-minded gardener employed by a rich man, he knew nothing of life except what he learned by watching television during his free hours. When he was fired and forced to live on his own, he became famous for his wise sayings ("Spring is a time for planting") but had trouble managing personal relations. When Shirley MacLaine tried to interest him in a love affair, he found it impossible to meet her expectations. Films on television had not shown him how.
Even so, it's in the matter of romance and courtship that Movie Wisdom provides the most helpful guide to life. It teaches us that if a man and a woman intensely dislike each other when they meet, they will soon fall in love and marry. It warns us that if a girl has sex just once, she'll for sure get pregnant, particularly if she's only 16. When a baby is about to be born, the important thing is to boil a lot of water. Who could do without this information?
The late Pauline Kael, many years ago, was asked how movies affected political opinions. They had no influence on politics, she said, but in private life they were crucial. She could remember when the first great performances of Cary Grant in the 1930s transformed the behaviour of boys. By his example, Grant taught boys the essence of suave behaviour on a date. No one ever did anything nicer for girls. "Every boy became a better date," as Kael recalled.
When screen directors began to choose elegant restaurants as the favourite setting for emotional encounters, they instructed us on proper conduct in public. We learned that it is permissible, in fact it is sometimes mandatory, to order a big meal and eat almost none of it. Certainly it is a fast rule, obeyed by all movie characters, that no one ever finishes a drink unless they are ordering another one. We also discovered that when two male friends have a beer together, at least one of them, after his first gulp, will wipe his mouth on his sleeve.
Emotional difficulties will often arise between men and women, and Movie Wisdom can help us there, too. For instance, if a woman becomes hysterical, you slap her, for her own good, and that quickly straightens her out. I know all that. I learned it at the movies.
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
so i decided this blog is nice and all but it needs a regular boost of personal info from me, every body's uncle matt. I'm gonna do it towards the end of each month (besides any other stories like the flip story or whatnot).
well, September is almost over and it was rough month but now that it's done im so glad - with each passing week i could feel another weight drop off my shoulders... like, i could physically feel it drop off! so I'm going to do a run down of all that has come to pass - to include:
my DUI hearing
my Bankruptcy hearing
my Social Security hearing
and some other stuff i did:
DUI: i got pulled over in January of 08 for DUI - it was totally stupid and totally my fault and i told the officer that. at the end of our evening together the officer even said that he would make a special notation in the report that i was very co-operative and not totally plastered acting. so, ages and ages went by and i never got a notice to go to court - 7 months later i got the notice - come to court. i got a public defender and went to court. i was totally freaked for the entire weekend before court. this is my second DUI and i was petrified that i would be totally spanked by the state.
Well, it went ok, more or less. I lost my license for 2 years but that doesn't change my day to day life too much right now since i haven't had a car since march due to finances and such. i got the NJ state surcharges to pay. But i got a very low fine from the court itself which is great. but in place of this low fine i got 30 days community service. the court in the county where this happened said i will eventually get a letter from Gloucester county telling me where and when to show up for my community service intake interview. again - trying to look at this in the best light possible - i had been planning as part of my therapy to do volunteer work as my next step in re-broadening my horizons. so, in the end i felt ok about it i guess?
Bankruptcy: I also stopped working some time ago due to mental health issues (panic and agoraphobia with depression and a couple other more minor diagnoses). so needless to say i burnt through all my savings paying for treatment before medicaid kicked in and as a result i also stopped paying all my old credit cards. when i first wasn't able to pay anymore i owed about 9,000. by last month that amount had become 22,000 due to interest and penalties. anyway, another lawyer (did you know it costs almost 1000 to go bankrupt? kind of an oxymoron of sorts cause of course you don't have a 1000 if you are bankrupt, but i was able to scratch it together from here and there). i went through that government hearing in yet another dull, depressing government building with way too much fluorescent lighting. i walked out debt free but also unable to borrow any money for another 7-10 years. based on my experiences with credit and how they treat you i think that might be more of a blessing than a punishment.
Social Security Hearing: oy, where do i start? really it starts in 1997 when i had my first bout of panic attacks and agoraphobia but after a couple weeks hiding in my bedroom (it was scary to even go downstairs to the fridge and i would run if i had to) it passed somehow. hooray! then in 01 the panic attacks (they may or may not be what you think they are - i think they need a better name but...) started to creep back in, slowly, but surely. by 04 i quit my last full time on the books job because i was having too much trouble keeping it together. but i thot - hey - maybe i just need a break? maybe after a couple months i will get better again. so i sold my house in Pittman and moved on over to the Moore family compound back in williamstown. i kept waiting for it to get better "in a couple more months" and it didn't.
it got worse. it got to the point that by January 06 i was having a hard time leaving my trailer at all, i could go into the yard but anything further would likely cause a panic attack. i had difficulty being a passenger in a car, going to any sort of restaurant, movie theaters were out of the question and supermarkets existed to be run through at top speed. i realized i had hit a sort of rock bottom and dug out the yellow pages and called the county mental health hot line. this was a good thing but at the time it seemed like a death sentence: "call this number" called - "oh you really need to call this number" called - "ok, we can put u on our waiting list, we should have an appointment open in two months." figure that's crazy and call another service - same thing.
eventually by march i got an appointment. the therapist i had was great i thot. she was like something from a movie or such: a very dignified older (40s or 50s?) black woman with her hair in a turban. we did a bunch of crazy exercises; go to border books and sit for 10 minutes (me in borders covered in sweat!) etc. she was very insightful and not all like "well it's your fault you dumb ass" - she said for instance - "maybe you have a predisposition for anxiety that never would have shown up if you grew up and lived in italy or spain or anywhere where the pace is less frantic. nj is one of the worst places possible for someone who is easily overwhelmed."
in the first three months i made a great deal of progress. but then i sort of plateaued. 
and on the plateau i have been since then. me and colleen living on a mesa of one sort or another :) ! so the therapist - she told me to apply for Social Security almost as soon as i started therapy. her words after our first meeting "you have a severe mental health problem." yikes! so in spring 06 i trekked on over to the SS office in glassboro.
this is one of the catch 22's about getting treatment for agoraphobia and panic - the last thing u want to do is go out to these government offices and sit in a room full of people while the tv blasts at you and various children run around screaming and throwing things. well i did it. i applied. little did i know it was all some sort of game - like Chinese checkers or battleship.
needless to say more than two years later i finally got to have my hearing. the "judge" looked like Santa. he seemed very fair but also very difficult to read. very few if any reactions as i spent an hour or so answering my lawyer and his questions. he had all sorts of medical documents before him as well - these days there is a cd with all of your records in PDF format and there are two computers and two monitors, one for you and your lawyer and one for the judge. your lawyer and the judge can both control it and zoom back and forth between your various humiliating documents. anywho, by the end i was a twitchy sweaty mess but i got through it. i was super worried when me and my lawyer and her boss who had actually come along to do all the talking(?) sat me down in the foyer. i asked - well, how did we do? they both seemed a bit doubtful, well, the vibe i got was more than doubtful it was awful.
they said i would get a letter anywhere between two weeks and two months from then. after two weeks i made a daily habit of running ou tto the mailbox 3 times a day to see if an answer had come. that didn't end up how my answer came. my lawyer called me and asked me how i was doing? she said it in such a way that i knew she was wondering if i got the answer yet. i said i dunno - do you have any info for me? she said yes, good news, and i had a horrible day so far so to give you some good news is a nice thing. anyway i was approved - i found out friday morning. retroactive to when i first applied.
now i get to follow through with the tentative plans i had of starting to take some classes at GCCC and then on from there and various other financial quandaries find themselves fixed.
what is ultimately interesting for me at this point is that, yes, i was elated for a few hours after i got the decision, but since then i have been in a weird place, like my entire world is shifted and i have been hiding under the covers for the bulk of the last few days just trying to process what this means and what it will allow, ask phil, louie, mike, giovani, hans and anyone who has tried to have anything to do with me since friday. i wouldn't nescessarily call it a depression, but my behaviour has mimiced typical depression type behaviour the last few days, an odd and unexpected development.
What Else Happened: I crashed my mountain bike and lost a tooth. don't know what will happen about that but for the time being i look like one of Sarah Palin's hockey kids. or a meth addict - either one.
I did lots of painting and arranging and decorating of the trailer.
I argued repeatedly with coco over whether he really needed to go potty in the middle of the night or was just faking it, which he does some times you know!
I watched some dvds - family guy season 1, someone to eat cheese with, something else i forgot. and also watched lots of project runway which i was completely caught of guard about being swept into cause i usually get the heebie jeebies whenever i see a "reality" show.
I spent allot of time in the mornings "misting" the patches of moss in my 10 foot by 50 foot yard. i want all the grass to die and the moss to take over everything and then to have lots of other shade loving stuff like azaleas, rhododendrons, laurels and several not too tall evergreens. there is a small spot in the back of the yard that gets tons of sun - so that will be for veggies - the rest a challenge: a shade garden!
trying to think of interesting things that happened in September is really hard... well, for now i will leave it at this. maybe add some tomorrow or later tonight or later next week or ....
the entire drunken history channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/DrunkHistory
All from http://weburbanist.com:
Abandoned buildings, properties and places take on remarkably different aesthetic character and are treated differently from one culture to the next - particularly in Asian nations where beliefs about the cultural roll of architecture or the whims of a dictator can vary greatly. From South Korea to North Korea, Cambodia to Thailand and Azerbaijan to Hong Kong here are seven amazing oriental and subcontinental abandonments from the Near East to the Far East, from skyscraper hotels and pod cities to shopping malls and amusement parks and everything in between.
1) The Lawless Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong
http://weburbanist.com(Images via MirageStudio, DoobyBrain, MissMeneses and StanleyNG)
In the rogue ungoverned Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong things were so tightly packed that trash blocked off parts of buildings and many occupied apartments literally never saw the light of day. Like something straight from a William Gibson novel, there were no police or building codes - there was no law. For nearly 50 years this slice of Hong Kong was allowed to exist and grow independently due to a legal technicality. After the Japanese left following the second World War squatters swarmed to fill the space, with the population at 10,000 people (living on seven acres) by the early 1970s - a combination of dissidents, outlaws and both organized and disorganized criminals. Professionals who couldn’t get a license set up shop, criminals hiding from the law thrived, and the self-organized community grew to 35,000. Then in 1993 everything changed - no one wants to deal with this lawless place anymore and it is promptly destroyed and turned into a park.
2) The Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea
(Images via: Pbase, NomadLife, MyNinjaPlease and Vanibahl).
The Ryugyong Hotel in the capital city of Pyongyang, North Korea, was supposed to be a record-setting testament to the power, pride and ingenuity of one of the most totalitarian and self-insulating nations in the world. The building, meant to be a core monument to the strength of North Korea, was added to city maps and stamps before it was even half-built and was all set to be the tallest hotel in the world. At first the project simply ran out of funding, then as the low-quality concrete of which it was built began to sag and crack the sobering reality began to set it: the structure would need a massive overhaul to ever be completed. Now it goes unmentioned by tour guides, absent from maps and stamps, a symbolic blight towering on the capital city skyline.
3) The Pod City of San Zhi, Taiwan
(Images via Cypherone and Yusheng)
Rumors abound regarding this legendary abandoned pod city (aka ‘UFO town’) of San Zhi, Taiwan, which was supposedly built by the government of Taipei to be a luxury resort for expensive holidays on the water. Built in the 1970s or early 1980s the modularity of the designs has raised retroactive suspicions that perhaps these stacks were intended to be built vertically over time. Theories on the abandonment of this massively strange undertaken range from poor insulation in a difficult climate, the dissolution of business partnerships, the failure of a regional real estate bubble or even that so many workers died during construction that the place was abandoned as haunted - unable to be destroyed out of a cultural taboo on interfering with the homes of spirits and lost souls. See it from above using Google Maps.
4) The Abandoned City of Agdam, Azerbaijan
(Images via SeamlessTerritory and Lofiversion)
Once a capital city with over 150,000 people Agdam, Azerbaijan has been variously treated as a ghost town, a no-man’s-land and a military buffer zone in a troubled area of the world. In the 1990s it was vandalized and largely destroyed during Armenian occupation, its buildings looted and gutted and its mosque completely covered in graffiti. Currently considered part of Armenia this husk of a city sits in the heart of an area that is at the core of conflicted set of nations from Russia in the north and Georgia in the northwest to Armenia and Iran in the soutwest and south. It also sits at the curious geographical intersection of Europe and Asia, ambiguously defined as being part of both or either one of these continents. Given turmoil in the region it is unlikely to be rebuilt anytime soon - if ever - and its citizens have been displaced in all directions with little likelihood of returning home.
5) Bokor Hill Station in Phnom Bokor, Cambodia
(Images via Theo Wright, Klein Matt and Lenchik)
Bokor Hill Station is located on the mountain of Phnom Bokor, Cambodia and accessible only by a long trek across an overgrown dirt road to an elevation of 3,000 feet. At the top? The remains of a 1920s French retreat that has been deserted since the second World War including a hotel, casino, church, police station, post office, royal residences and other support structures. And today? The damage from mortar shells can be seen in shattered windows, crumbling staircases and decimated walls. The Khmer Rouge removed everything of any value - including the very wiring in the walls of the buildings. The ruins were later taken over by the Vietnamese in the 1970s before they were finally and permanently abandoned, though land mines in the area remain a danger to visitors who stray from the beaten path. Originally built due to the relatively temperate climate and wonderful views to the coast the area still boasts great sites from waterfalls to jungles and a vast array of wildlife.
6) Opko Land Theme Park in Opko, South Korea
(Images via Jon Dunbar)
Once a thriving amusement park Opko Land in Opko, South Korea was abandoned after a young girl was killed in a tragic accident while on one of the ride’s. Though the park was shut down and deserted the family of the unfortunate victim was never compensated for their loss. Most of the structures remain more-or-less intact including roller coasters, bumper cars, a pool building and various smaller rides. The top image above was taken from the highest point of the roller coaster - an ambitious location to seek out and shoot from given the partial disrepair of so much structural elements in this abandoned amusement park. One would think they would go all the way and destroy these buildings before some adventurous building infiltrators and urban explorers hurt themselves.
7) Chiang Shopping Complex in Chiang Mai, Thailand
(Images via Tupsumato)
The Five Chiang Shopping Complex is a beautiful series of interlocked wooden structures that once constituted one of the most magnificent malls in Chiang Mai, Thailand, a city which (including sprawl) has nearly a million inhabitants. The city attracts many tourists each year who are drawn in part to local handcrafted goods such as umbrellas, jewelry and woodcarving - some of which is evidenced in the wooden decorations, balconies and terraces of this deserted shopping center. The complex was an international joint project that fell victim to conflicting political opinions and a depressed Thai economy and now sits remarkably intact but closed, locked and boarded and utterly unused. However, the local guards are reportedly quite friendly and a few kind words can let you slip past and get some essential background questions answered.
Also check Out these Other Abandoned Wonders of the World.
7 Abandoned Wonders of the World
7 (More!) Abandoned Wonders of the World
7 Abandoned Wonders of America
7 (More!) Abandoned Wonders of America
7 (Even More!) Abandoned Wonders of America
7 Abandoned Wonders of the Former Soviet Union
7 (More!) Abandoned Wonders of the Former Soviet Union
7 Abandoned Wonders of the European Union
This spa in Isreal is offering a massage where you get to feel all sorts of snakes crawl on your body - indiana jones would NOT approve - “People either like it a lot or they hate it,” the spa owner says. oh, really?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1844564,00.html
who does this make you think of - the smile most of all?
From The New York Times Magazine
Wanna know all about uma thurman's cool dad? check it out below:
By RODGER KAMENETZ
TALL AND IMPOSING, IN A DARK BLUE SUIT and bold red-and-yellow tie, Prof. Robert A.F. Thurman, a former Tibetan Buddhist monk and New Yorker to his bones, marched to center stage at Carnegie Hall. Thurman, who is also the president of Tibet House, was introducing the organization's annual benefit concert. He announced to the sold-out house, with a certain wry hilarity, the Tibetan New Year of the Fiery Rat. He praised the evening's performers, Michael Stipe and Emmylou Harris among them, for "putting a shield of poetry around the heart of a suffering people." Later on, Thurman kicked and shuffled his way across the stage, eyeing his feet nervously, arm in arm with the singers Natalie Merchant and Patti Smith as Dadon, an exiled Tibetan balladeer, led them in a Tibetan New Year's dance. After the concert, Thurman rushed upstairs to introduce reporters to one of his daughters, the actress Uma Thurman, and to Harrison Ford, hosts of the late supper party to come. There, Thurman held forth energetically, in a swarm of rock stars, models, movie stars and other wealthy patrons of Tibet House.
When I asked him how a meditative Buddhist type could handle so much action, Thurman said, "There's a stereotype that Buddhism is quietistic: leave the world, drop out -- drop dead basically." Then he laughed and talked about how meditation can also release enormous amounts of energy. Thurman enjoys his contradictions. To him, Buddhist enlightenment is "the tolerance of cognitive dissonance, the ability to cope with the beauty of complexity."
Cognitive dissonance is Thurman's way of life. Though a highly respected scholar -- he is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University -- Thurman can also come on like a dharma-thumping evangelist. In fact, he has emerged as the most visible and charismatic exponent of Tibetan Buddhism in America: he is a prolific translator and writer ("Essential Tibetan Buddhism," an anthology of key texts in translation, was just published by HarperCollins), a powerful advocate for the liberation of Tibet and the Dalai Lama's cultural liaison to America.
In San Francisco recently, he talked four hours straight over lunch until a vacuum cleaner made it clear that the restaurant was completely empty. We then raced across town in his rented red Mustang, and he spoke for another three hours on dharma, the Buddhist teachings, at the California Institute for Integral Studies. His lectures are multivocal psychodramas. Prof. P. Jeffrey Hopkins of the University of Virginia, Thurman's colleague and fellow translator, calls him "the Red Skelton of Tibetan Buddhism."
Thurman's large head is framed with wavy, reddish blond hair, which curls back over his ears in wings. After a while you notice that his right eye roves, while the left stays fixed. Ask one question and Thurman's booming, reedy tenor rises off at odd angles and zooms into open rhetorical space. Speaking about the Buddha after his enlightenment, for instance: "He was a seething energy field. His skin was all gold. You know this little tuft of white hair, this third eyebrow that he had? It came into its own finally, like a transistor -- zzzzzz -- and light rays would beam out all over the place."
Thurman, at 54, seethes with energy himself. Natalie Merchant, a family friend, remembers Thurman singlehandedly clearing a huge boulder from his country house in Woodstock, N.Y.; his son, Dechen, recalls his father shimmying up a tree with a chain saw, cutting off a limb that was threatening to crash into a window. "He was a monk, and monks take 252 vows," says Thurman's wife, Nena von Schlebrugge-Thurman, who serves as the treasurer for Tibet House. "And a lot of those vows have to do with not thinking about yourself and being there to help other people. He has developed a bad tendency to say yes to everything. So the entire family is joined together in a desperate effort over all these years to get him to cut down on these things, and he's become much, much improved lately."
Well, maybe. In the past two years, Thurman published a new translation of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead," wrote the text for a picture book called "Inside Tibetan Buddhism" and published "Essential Tibetan Buddhism." Another book, on Tibetan politics, is in the works. A few years ago, he helped mount a major traveling exhibit of Tibetan art, "Wisdom and Compassion."
Thurman says he believes that the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism -- as lived by the present Dalai Lama -- can help save us all. Among Thurman's greatest passions is Tibet House, which he, along with the actor Richard Gere and two others, founded in 1987 at the Dalai Lama's request. It serves as a cultural embassy for an occupied nation; among other projects, Tibet House is creating a museum without walls -- a library and an archive of artwork and ritual objects -- that could eventually be returned to Tibet, and is sponsoring a peacemaking conference in California, to be attended by the Dalai Lama.
In his earlier years, Thurman felt little obligation to support the Tibetan political struggle. "I thought, Tibet had done me the kindness of preserving the dharma from ancient times in India and handing it to me," he says. "I woke up to how callous that was about 15 years ago and decided that I could try to repay their kindness, by helping to get the world's attention focused on this massive injustice."
Thurman, with his intellect, savvy and high-profile connections, is particularly qualified to undertake such a task. Yet as a young man, he spent years as a celibate monk. As he tells it, in his 20's, Thurman was as intensely set on leaving the world as he now seems to be on changing it.
THURMAN GREW UP IN A HOUSEHOLD shaped by romance and drama. His mother, Elizabeth Farrar, dropped out of college to pursue an acting career; his father, Beverley, left his doctoral studies at William and Mary to follow Elizabeth to New York, and wound up working as an editor for the Associated Press. Augustin Duncan, the dancer Isadora's brother, conducted weekly dramatic readings in the Thurmans' home, where Robert and his brothers read parts alongside guests like Laurence Olivier. But Thurman also sneaked comic books inside his Shakespeare folio. In April of his senior year at Phillips Exeter, he ran off with a friend to enlist with Fidel Castro. Fortunately, Thurman says, for the revolution's sake, the boys were turned back at Miami. Exeter expelled him for that adventure and he waited out a year in Mexico before entering Harvard in 1959.
That spring, he married Christophe de Menil, heiress to a considerable fortune and fine-art collection. In the late spring of 1961, while Thurman was changing a flat on his car, the tire iron slipped and destroyed his left eye. It was a turning point; Thurman realized he did not want to waste his life "drinking Champagne and staring at Rouaults." He made a young man's vow -- fed by his readings of Nietzsche and Buddhist texts -- to act on his highest aims. "I was ready to go to the East," he says, but "my wife was nervous, scared of the whole thing. I then started identifying with Buddha, left my wife and child and went over there. I was very sad about that, but I felt -- even as a father -- what's the use of not being enlightened?"
Dropping out of Harvard, Thurman wandered toward India through Turkey and Iran, "like a beggar." His mother thought he was crazy, but his father, for whom St. Francis was a spiritual ideal, defended him. "You're doing what I always wanted to do," his father said.
"I was already by about that time like St. Francis," muses Thurman. "I had an empty socket, long hair and a scraggly beard. I wore black baggy Afghani pants, a T-shirt with a white shawl thrown around me and leather sandals." In India, he was hired to teach English to exiled tulkus -- young reincarnated Tibetan lamas. "I was in heaven, because the minute I met the Tibetans, I knew they had what I wanted."
But Thurman was called back to New York by his father's sudden death. He visited the Lamaist Buddhist Monastery of America, in Freewood Acres, N.J., and met his first guru -- a 61-year-old Mongolian monk, Geshe Ngawang Wangyal. (Geshe is a monastic title indicating years of advanced study.) Thurman was moved by the monk's quiet intensity and began to study with him. "That was a rebirth for me," he says. "I learned to speak Tibetan fluently in 10 weeks."
Thurman helped his mentor build a temple. He meditated. "I'm not saying I attained nirvana -- I still don't know what that is -- but I attained a sense of relief," he says. "I still had many of my bad egocentric habits, and one of them was that I fanatically wanted to be a monk, because I wanted to live like this for the rest of my life."
Geshe Wangyal advised him against this career move, but he agreed to take Thurman with him to Dharamsala, India. "Since you are so stubborn, I'll tell the Dalai Lama you want to be a monk," he said. "Maybe he'll think that's not a bad idea."
THUS BEGAN AN EXTRAORDINARY relationship. Thurman was 23, the 14th Dalai Lama, 29.
"You don't really study with the Dalai Lama," Thurman says. "If you're under his protection in the community, he assigns this or that teacher. He wanted to see me a lot. I soon found out it wasn't to teach me but because I spoke Tibetan. Basically he got my Exeter and Harvard education over that year and a half. We met once a week. Every talk I'd say, 'What about this problem in madhyamika thought?' And he'd say: 'Oh, talk to blah blah about that. Now what about Freud? What about physics? What about the history of World War II?' "
Thurman was personally ordained by the Dalai Lama in 1965, becoming the first Western Tibetan Buddhist monk. He returned to the United States with a shaved head and maroon robe: "Uma said recently, after seeing a photograph of me in my monk phase, 'Oh, look at Daddy -- he looks like Henry Miller in drag.' " That phase lasted only about a year. Geshe Wangyal asked Thurman if he thought the world truly needed -- or wanted -- a white geshe. "He convinced me that the alternative was to become a Protestant monk," Thurman says. "That is, a professor."
Thurman met Nena von Schlebrugge, Timothy Leary's former wife, at a party in New York, and they were married in 1967. (They have four children and now live in Manhattan near Columbia. ) Thurman returned to Harvard, completed his degree and enrolled in graduate work at the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. "I created the field of Buddhology," he says. "I just wrote it down on the form and they said, 'We don't have this field here, but I guess it's all right.' "
Tibetan, Zen and Theravada are the three most popular forms of Buddhism among Westerners today. Of the three, Tibetan Buddhism is probably the most difficult and exotic path, with its emphasis on prostrations, visualizations, guru worship and deity yoga, in which the practitioner identifies with Tibetan deities as a path to higher states of consciousness. Tibetan Buddhism now has four main groupings, of which the Geluk, the Dalai Lama's order, is considered the most philosophical and scholarly.
Thurman's major contribution to understanding Tibetan Buddhism is his translation of "The Essence of True Eloquence" (now published as "The Central Philosophy of Tibet"), by the 14th-century Tibetan sage Jey Tsong Khapa. Thurman had returned to India in 1970 to work on this project, spending hours with the Dalai Lama, who provided the benefit of his personal notes. Thurman speaks of translation in Tibetan terms as lotsawa -- "a world eye," or window on a new world.
To some observers, a tremendous opening of the Buddhist "world eye" has occurred in the West over the past 30 years. Tibetan Buddhism in particular has been well served by pioneer professors like Thurman and Jeffrey Hopkins, both of whom have established successful graduate programs. A new generation of Tibetan textual scholars has come forth, and mainstream publishers produce a steady flow of translated Tibetan dharma texts.
Much of the interest must be attributed to the tremendous appeal of the Dalai Lama. But other Tibetan teachers have influenced the West, including Chogyam Trungpa, who founded the Naropa Institute, in Boulder, Colo., and Sogyal Rinpoche, author of the best seller "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying." The success of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, a slick magazine devoted to contemporary dharma and profiles of prominent Buddhists, has also contributed to the movement.
But no wave arrives without some froth. Donald S. Lopez, a professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan and the author of "Prisoners of Shangri-la," a forthcoming study of the effect of Tibetan Buddhism on the West, refers to a recent J. Peterman catalogue as a case in point: "They're selling something called a Tibetan shaman's jacket. The first line of the ad said: 'It's official. Crystals are out. Tibetan Buddhism is in.' "
Tibetan Buddhism has also attracted its share of celebrities, most notably Richard Gere, who serves on the board of the International Campaign for Tibet, a political action group in Washington. Gere is a frequent visitor to Dharamsala and a serious student of the Dalai Lama's. On the other hand, few of the celebrities who attend Thurman's Tibet House benefits are actual Buddhist practitioners, as they made clear. "Just because people want to help Tibet," Thurman says, "doesn't make them Buddhists."
As a scholar, Thurman is especially critical of fuzzy thinking in popular Buddhism. As an example, he cites a 1992 article in Tricycle by Helen Tworkov, the magazine's editor, in which Tworkov acknowledges strong anti-abortion teachings in Buddhism but also writes that "dharma teachings can be used to validate either pro-choice or anti-abortion politics." To Thurman, "that's simply incorrect. It's the taking of life. The fundamentalists do have it emotionally right -- the killing of fetuses is a mass massacre from the Buddhist point of view. It is not a fuzzy issue in Buddhism."
Some of the confusion among Westerners has arisen, Thurman says, because Buddhism was introduced in this country primarily as a meditation technique. "Western people who were anti-Christian or anti-Jewish were thinking of it as a system that seemed religious but didn't have a lot of rules," he says. "That is simply wrong. In Buddhism, the foundation of meditation is a strong ethical system."
To Thurman, Buddhism is primarily an educational program, and the monastery remains the Buddha's great social invention. The monastery made spiritual seeking a credible alternative to the military ideal and fostered a nonviolent religious revolution in India. When Buddhism was wiped out there during the Muslim invasions of the 8th through 12th centuries, the monastic ideal and its philosophical curriculum found refuge in Tibet.
As Thurman sees it, the ultimate triumph of Buddhist monasticism came with the rule of the fifth Dalai Lama, known as the Great Fifth, who assumed power in 1642. "For the first time in Buddhist history, a monastic took the throne of a nation," Thurman writes in "Essential Tibetan Buddhism." "The military was gradually phased out, with three centuries of relative peace, a unique, mass monastic, unilaterally disarmed society." While some scholars, including Donald Lopez, see a danger in overidealizing Tibetan history, Thurman remains unabashed. He says he believes the current Dalai Lama is taking Buddhist teaching onto the world stage.
Thurman and the Dalai Lama share a relationship whose warmth and depth is palpable. I saw them together in 1990 in Dharamsala at a meeting between the Dalai Lama and a group of Jewish rabbis and scholars. While the Tibetans treated their leader with extreme reverence, Thurman openly teased him, laughing and making him laugh, tweaking the Buddhist master for being too modest.
Thurman feels that the Dalai Lama, in his continuous nonviolent struggle for Tibetan autonomy, provides a new definition of heroism. Humans have succeeded on this planet in the past, Thurman argues: "because people have been heroic enough to sacrifice their lives for a group. At this moment, with the development of nuclear weaponry and technology, heroism has to be redefined as developing the power not to blow up in hatred." That, Thurman asserts, "is the Dalai Lama's teaching to the planet."
Presenting the concert at Carnegie Hall, Thurman passionately echoed this idea of "cool heroism": "We who claim we want peace should not reward violence. We should reward those who insist on making peace their method as well as peace their goal."
Still, while the post-concert party was raging around him, I thought of the young man who set off for India in Afghani pants and returned as a Buddhist monk. With so much lecturing, writing and advocacy, does he miss the quiet, contemplative life?
"There are things you can't develop in yourself if you just meditate apart from people. . . . " Thurman shouted above the din. "You have to get out there where people annoy you and injure you. Then you have to take and tolerate that injury. As the Dalai Lama would say, If there's no enemy, then you can't develop tolerance. And if there are no people who need gifts, then you can't develop generosity."
A Tibet House donor approached, and Thurman turned to greet him. "Being a Buddhist does not mean leaving the world," he called over his shoulder, "it means. . . . " And whatever else he wanted to add got swallowed up in the crowd.
Rodger Kamenetz is the author of "The Jew in the Lotus," a best-selling account of Jewish-Buddhist dialogue. With the film maker Laurel Chiten, he is working on a documentary based on the book.
From The New York Times Magazine
yes, she graced our fair city this weekend, she was also at tony lukes for a photo op in the Daily News with willow :)
FWD: Obama is the Antichrist
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/104/story/220041.html
"Mayor of Fort Mill, South Carolina forwards email claiming the presidential candidate could be the harbinger of the apocalypse."
from www.snopes.com:
Contrary to popular belief, the New Testament book of Revelation (not "Revelations," as it is commonly rendered) does not provide a laundry list of signs for identifying the appearance of an anti-Christ. In fact, it neither uses the term "anti-Christ" nor describes such a figure —Chapter 13 of that book merely recounts the appearance of "beasts," who are depicted in animalistic terms (as rendered in the King James version of the Bible):
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.
And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.
And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast?"
via the buzzfeed: "The New York Sun has an interesting article about how prepared salad bars can be misleading in terms of nutrition and calories. Don’t let me anywhere near that section of Whole Foods if I’m actually hungry. At least there’s some sense of portion control when you order a Popeyes meal combo."
... but is it really fair to pick on whole foods when tons of supermarkets have these?
lets remember:
Whitest Kids U Know: It's illegal to say...
All Things Considered, September 27, 2008 - "As a member of the multiplatinum rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flea wouldn't seem to need higher education to further his career. But the bassist has just enrolled as a freshman at the University of Southern California's music program."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95101406
Huffpost says: "On Tuesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered an "incendiary" speech that was incoherent, meandering, and endless. Enjoy!"
Plus some other silly funny pics I haven't seen yet:
https://www.voteforchange.com/
Finding out how to vote is now quick and easy.
Using this tool you can:
* 1. Register to vote.
* 2. Request to vote absentee.
* 3. Find your polling location.
This should only take about 3 minutes.
https://www.voteforchange.com/
