The Emptiness

Notebook erotica

I need to go to Rome, quite urgently. And I didn't even know until a moment ago.

Cartoleria Pantheon, established 1910, is tucked away on a small street beside the Pantheon in Rome. I stumbled across it while on Easter break in 2003, and what a treasure for someone like me! The walls are lined with blank hand-crafted leather books, photo albums, and sketchbooks in many sizes and styles. They also sell old writing supplies - desks, fountain pens, blotters, and ink.

papersnobbery » cartoleria pantheon

Torture as return to the normal

'The assertions by Mr Allawi simply underline the catastrophic failure to have a proper strategy in place for the post-war period in Iraq.'

Indeed.

Kubrick's still image work.

There's a new collection of Stanley Kubrik's still image work out, "Stanley Kubrik, Drama and Shadows" by Rainer Crone. It looks fabulous.
(See review in The Guardian.)

Killing people

USA is coming up on execution no. 1000. (997 executions on, the US still loves the death penalty.)
It's interesting to read an editorial from Taipei on the subject - since Chinese affairs naturally have a special weight for Taiwan. Even though the editorial is syndicated from New York. And 1000 executions are not that big a splash in the sea of blood that was the 20th century.
Anyway: USA, death penalty, China, what was the word I was looking for? Hypocrisy.

Israel-Libanon

There seems to have been very little reaction to the brewing Israel-Libanon conflict. The Daily Star calls for support of the Libanese free press, something that I think can have nothing but good consequences. Exposure of events, and the perception of events, can only bring stability to the situation.
The latest development is almost beyond belief. What other country would violate a neighboring state's airspace for a propaganda operation? The USA, I guess.

"In the early hours of Wednesday morning, a warning from Israel - in the form of thousands of leaflets - drifted down from the sky into the streets of Beirut and South Lebanon. Just before dawn, Israeli war planes and combat helicopters violated Lebanese airspace (again) to deliver a message to the Lebanese people: "Hizbullah is causing enormous harm to Lebanon." The Arabic note, signed by the state of Israel, also suggested the Lebanese political party and resistance group wants the "return of destruction."What are we to think of the reminder in our hands that the Israelis can invade our territory at will by flying war planes over our country and our capital and drop whatever they like - whether propaganda or bombs - on the heads of our civilians?"

The Daily Star - Editorial - Israel's message to Lebanon from above only adds insult to injury

technorati tags: israel, libanon, politics

Delicious irony

The irish poet Pat Ingoldsby trips up an introduction to poetry for students:

“ Do that again and I’ll break your bleedin’ face for you!”
“ You and what army you puffed up little sparrow fart!”
The two men faced on another across a table-tennis table
and tabled a motion expressing dissatisfaction
with the wobbling of unstable table-tennis tables.
They steadied it by inserting under one of the legs
a paperback copy of King Arthur And His Knights
Of The Round Roast And A Pound Of Dripping.

Question One: There is no giraffe mentioned in this poem. If there was, for what do you think it would be a metaphor?

Question Two: How do you think it possible for one of the protagonists to break the other’s bleedin’ face when it is clearly
not bleeding yet. Does it matter?

Read the full poem and other delicious stuff  here: http://www.patingoldsby.casey-ellis.com/patspboc.html

technorati tags: poetry ireland

Let's think about bird flu

Let's think about bird flu, or more properly "avian flu", A(H5N1) for a moment. This disease affects birds, and can spread to humans. WHO noted 122 reported cases in humans up to november 1, 2005. 62 led to death. That gives a scary (although decreasing) 50 % mortality rate.
The total number of cases is still relatively small however, in part due to very aggressive culling of poultry in east Asia to prevent the disease from spreading. 100 million birds were slaughtered after the first outbreak in december 2003.
The first infections in humans were reported in january 2004. WHO has marked one early case in Thailand as a possible human-to-human transmission incident. The virus can replicate in pigs, indicating an increase in virulency from the previous outbreak in 1997.
Researchers were able to show in february that the global outbreak of "spanish flu" in 1918 was probably due to a bird flu-like virus mutating to allow for human-to-human infection. And that pandemic caused 25 million deaths. (About 12,5 million in India.)
So: The worst case scenario is that the current strain of bird flu mutates, spreads among humans globally in a couple of weeks and kills... well, estimates differ. 2 to 8 million is a conservative figure. A pandemic would supposedly hurt the global economy, but it's hard to find any numbers on that. It could kill many more, but predictions are unreliable.

So, doomsday? Sadly, no. Worth attention, planning, research? Sure. But...
4500 people where killed or severely injured in accidents with vehicles in Sweden last year according to Statistics Sweden, and may I point out that road safety in Sweden is a Big Thing. The figure globally is 1,2 million. That's 3200 deaths every single day. 1600 deaths before you've even eaten your lunch.
Small arms kill 500 000 every year, 32 000 in the US notably.
So if the aim is to rapidly prevent something that kills humans it would seem smarter to look for other things than flu. Avian flu is a possible big killer, and viral pandemics are Bad and Scary things, but there's no shortage of other threats to deal with. And they don't get the attention they deserve, even though you're more likely to get run over on your way to work than to catch a deadly disease from dark Vietnam.
Bird flu, bird flu, bird flu. Genèva is host to a global summit on the subject, beginning today.
It would just be nice to see this kind of interest for the old, steady, boring, rising threats to human safety. Just out of a hat: nuclear proliferation, genocide, war for oil, a global environment on the brink of catastrophic failure, AIDS, poverty and drugs.
Good luck on that. Run the numbers before stocking up on vaccine.

Lions

Lion,
originally uploaded by Niklas Dahlin.

Happy 'een, everybody...

Sleep tight!

Just something to help us swedes sleep well at night:

Over 110 of Russia's decommissioned nuclear submarines still have operating nuclear reactors, which, according to Russian designs, means two reactors per vessel or more than 220 individual reactors. There is nowhere to put the liquid waste or to store the spent fuel, so the reactors have to keep operating with only skeleton crews.

Chernobyl is nothing compared to this.