Waxy buildup.
Jul. 1st, 2003 11:10 amFirst, the necessity: Katharine Hepburn is gone, and I, for one, loved her work. I never did appreciate her younger work with Spencer Tracy, but her work on materials like A Lion In Winter or The African Queen will always be with us.
I'm rather amused that the only newspaper to report on why there will be no public eulogy or ceremony about her funeral was USA Today: Hepburn was an atheist and believed such eulogies did not do the deceased any good.
Apparently, Hepburn's atheism was so controversial among churchgoers that the Church Fundraising Association had to footnote "proof" of her lack of religion in their report on celebrity religious affiliations. It's on page 16 of her autobiography: "I'm an atheist, and that's it."
The Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas has had an unexpected side-effect: Tom Delay and George W. Bush can now shake hands again. It's no longer illegal in their home state for a prick to touch an asshole.
More bad news from India. Several years ago in Gujurat a mob attacked a Moslem mosque and tore it apart with their bare hands. The Hindu-dominated state "acquisitioned" the land. While there's been a back-and-forth legal battle, all of the land around the former mosque has been bought by Hindu nationalists and plans were put forward to create a Hindu temple "courtyard" showing the ruin of the vanquished mosque-- if they're not allowed to own the mosque property outright.
Last summer, construction of this "courtyard" (fence) began, and the Friday after groundbreaking several young Hindu construction workers, all nationalists and mostly working for free, were drunk and attacked a Moslem girl at a train station and raped her. The resulting battle ended with the train being set on fire and 57 Hindus killed.
A few days later, what can only be described as a pogram broke out, and in the following week-long riots, 2000 Moslems were killed. Several Hindu organizers of the riots were identified, arrested, and put on trial.
They've all been aquitted.
Human-rights observers claim that the witnesses were threatened or bribed into recanting their original claims.
Cuba last month sentenced ten men to five-year prison terms. Although their convictions were for violating "state security provisions," nobody disagrees on what their crime was: they ran libraries. Independent, non-state-owned libraries where books like 1984 and Atlas Shrugged could be checked out, along with non-fiction on market economics and biographies of Martin Luther King.
The Americal Library Association, which made such a big deal about the "internet filtering software" law and has been screaming mad about protecting "the right to read," has refused to issue a statement condemning the convictions. Mark Rozenweig, head of the ALA Social Responsibility Roundtable even went so far as to say, "There's no pretense that these people were librarians. I've got books in my home too but that doesn't make me a librarian. These people are dissidents."
Apparently, it's okay with Mr. Rozenweig that dissent is a crime in Cuba. Would it shock anyone to learn that Rozenweig is also chief librarian of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies?
I've got the first draft of nntprss up and running. It's a nifty little java program that allows one to read LiveJournal as it were just another newsfeed using a traditional Usenet reader like GNUS. Unfortunately, it doesn't do the right thing with the dates of entries (is that NNTPRSS's fault or LJ's? I haven't figured that out), but it does give them in the right order. Coolness!
I'm rather amused that the only newspaper to report on why there will be no public eulogy or ceremony about her funeral was USA Today: Hepburn was an atheist and believed such eulogies did not do the deceased any good.
Apparently, Hepburn's atheism was so controversial among churchgoers that the Church Fundraising Association had to footnote "proof" of her lack of religion in their report on celebrity religious affiliations. It's on page 16 of her autobiography: "I'm an atheist, and that's it."
The Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas has had an unexpected side-effect: Tom Delay and George W. Bush can now shake hands again. It's no longer illegal in their home state for a prick to touch an asshole.
More bad news from India. Several years ago in Gujurat a mob attacked a Moslem mosque and tore it apart with their bare hands. The Hindu-dominated state "acquisitioned" the land. While there's been a back-and-forth legal battle, all of the land around the former mosque has been bought by Hindu nationalists and plans were put forward to create a Hindu temple "courtyard" showing the ruin of the vanquished mosque-- if they're not allowed to own the mosque property outright.
Last summer, construction of this "courtyard" (fence) began, and the Friday after groundbreaking several young Hindu construction workers, all nationalists and mostly working for free, were drunk and attacked a Moslem girl at a train station and raped her. The resulting battle ended with the train being set on fire and 57 Hindus killed.
A few days later, what can only be described as a pogram broke out, and in the following week-long riots, 2000 Moslems were killed. Several Hindu organizers of the riots were identified, arrested, and put on trial.
They've all been aquitted.
Human-rights observers claim that the witnesses were threatened or bribed into recanting their original claims.
Cuba last month sentenced ten men to five-year prison terms. Although their convictions were for violating "state security provisions," nobody disagrees on what their crime was: they ran libraries. Independent, non-state-owned libraries where books like 1984 and Atlas Shrugged could be checked out, along with non-fiction on market economics and biographies of Martin Luther King.
The Americal Library Association, which made such a big deal about the "internet filtering software" law and has been screaming mad about protecting "the right to read," has refused to issue a statement condemning the convictions. Mark Rozenweig, head of the ALA Social Responsibility Roundtable even went so far as to say, "There's no pretense that these people were librarians. I've got books in my home too but that doesn't make me a librarian. These people are dissidents."
Apparently, it's okay with Mr. Rozenweig that dissent is a crime in Cuba. Would it shock anyone to learn that Rozenweig is also chief librarian of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies?
I've got the first draft of nntprss up and running. It's a nifty little java program that allows one to read LiveJournal as it were just another newsfeed using a traditional Usenet reader like GNUS. Unfortunately, it doesn't do the right thing with the dates of entries (is that NNTPRSS's fault or LJ's? I haven't figured that out), but it does give them in the right order. Coolness!
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