How, in the wide world, did harlequin, effeminate doppelgänger that he is in comparison to the virile and adolescent Arlecchino, become associated with Rugby, of all things?
UPDATE: In an e-mail conversation with the UK Harlequins, the story becomes clear. All the other teams named Harlequin followed after this original. In 1870, the Hampstead Football Club was renamed. The decision to use Harlequin was made to keep the initial H and a dictionary was used to select the new name. Check out the club history page at the NEC Harlequins Offical Site.
Designer Cristina Bisland invented an inflatable polyurethane doll called the GO-DO. Kids can inject the doll with a liquid to change the doll’s body shape and size.
Of a vegetarian diet comprised of foods only found within 100 miles:
“It turns out it’s both difficult and expensive. Local grains don’t exist, except for a few heritage grains. Yes, there are local free-range cows and chickens, but the animals are raised on non-local feed. In summer, BC’s abundant farmer’s markets serve them well, but many of the supermarkets still sell much shipped produce, except for, say, local organic salad mix at $17.99 a pound. Summer, of course, only lasts so long.
And here’s the kicker: Vegetarianism doesn’t work well because soy isn’t grown locally. So they’re forced to ask this question: ‘Does vegetarianism fit into a local, sustainable diet?’ And the answer isn’t clear at all.”
Soy isn’t really a show-stopper, but it’s a big part of the protein intake of most vegetarians these days. Other alternatives are plentiful, but are they plentiful within 100 miles of one’s residence?
“Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has changed the title of her forthcoming book to Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. The premise is that the 16th president governed very effectively by putting many of his political rivals in his Cabinet.
This caught my eye because of the way in which Mary Parker Follett writes about Lincoln in her “The Teacher-Student Relation”
“kathleen writes: ‘Florida’s Pensacola News Journal will no longer be sold at the local Wal-Mart. Editor Randy Hammer noted: ‘Some managers at Wal-Mart didn’t appreciate a column Mark O’Brien wrote in June 2005 for the Pensacola News Journal about the downside of the cheap prices that Sam Walton’s empire has brought to America… The Wal-Mart manager said he and his stores couldn’t tolerate a newspaper that would print the opinions of someone who was as mean and negative as Mark O’Brien… and he wanted the newspaper to get its racks off Wal-Mart lots. But he also said that if I fired Mark, we could talk about continuing to sell the newspaper at his stores.
The article itself, available here, points out that communities are forced to pay for Wal-Mart health care via taxes because employees are unable to pay. This is an externality that Wal-Mart has managed to transfer to the public. Because that cost is delayed and distant from the price tag on the goods in the store, the public generally fails to recognize that these are connected.
“Each time an airline schedules a flight, it doesn’t take into account the backups it causes by crowding the airspace. The dynamic generates a tragedy of the commons, in which each of the companies vying for runway slots has an incentive to overschedule.”
Here’s a perfect example of how recognition of the system dynamic is important. There’s also a clear incentive, a competitive advantage to struggle at maximizing use of the resource instead of fixing the system via 2nd order changes. By staying within the known system, there’s a known set of rules by which competition can take place. It’s a case of plausible deniability, or at least willful.
So, the entities in the system, keep the system going. Perhaps they don’t realize they are in it, but I suspect they know full well. They have agreed that this shall be the field of conflict, and so keep the system running.
“That is because South Carolina has been chosen as the place for hundreds, even thousands of Christians to move to, in hopes of impacting the government. But people who live here have mixed opinions about the Christian Exodus…”
So this move is to South Carolina. What ever happened to the call for libertarians to move to some state? I recall that they identified a state in which they would locate.
Here’s an example of the kind of mobility I was thinking about before, perhaps. People move to be near a community in which they wish to participate. In Michael Albert’s Parecon he proposes local councils and communities which determine their own rules for work and life. My primary objection to Parecon was in this fact: communities could decide to be racist. The claim that self-organized communities would be enlightened in some way, seems to be false. Self-organizing isn’t sufficient, apparently.
The potential for developing xenophobic community is a reason to be skeptical about social organization along bio-regions, or any other form of regionalism. One might think that means I suppose Globalization, but I’d rather there be social instead of economic globalization. The term “Globalization” has too much baggage from a specific political-economic agenda.
For example, the Free Trade movement is one in which global connections are made, but it is not “Globalization” as it would be. It seems to me that what proponents mean by “Globalization” is that corporations are to be larger than the entities which might regulate them. The railroad lawyers managed to allow corporations to organize across state boundaries, which they had not before. Then, when national government was able to enforce behaviour, the corporations moved multi-national … that’s the progression. Now the WTO and various treaties subjugate national governments to an economic cartel.
I’ve gone off topic.
This move toward regionalism is something that is also reflected in Garreau’s Nine Nations of North America from ‘81. However the regionalism occurs, the more insular, the more xenophobic, I suspect. At some point, it may be a chicken-or-egg on whether the regionalism or the xenophobia came first.
“Devising and using a new term for ‘podcasting’ that doesn’t use ‘pod’. Good luck with that, considering that everyone — everyone — who is publishing podcasts is already calling them ‘podcasts’.
[Update: According to this story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Microsoft employees are pushing ‘blogcasting’ as a ‘pod’-free alternative.]“
What about “enclosures” for that name? That’s the actual tag in RSS, I think. And, the enclosures are part of blogs themselves, or at least within feeds.
Then again, there’s the Firefly “wave” thing … that could be used to mean anything that is sent. Why have specific names for each type? I want it to be agnostic so that no one gets stuck thinking the only thing that can be send is an audio file, or just audio and pdf, or whatever. It’s an all around mechanism.
Also, I’d rather see that everyone adopt bittorrent links instead of actual files enclosed. Also, I’d like to see enclosures treated like mime parts under IMAP, where each can be downloaded independently, not required as in attachments under POP.
Update: yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking. files aren’t included in the feed, links are enclosed which can be used to get to files.
“Scholastic, the book’s American publisher, has set a print run of 10.8m, almost equivalent to the total sales in the country so far for volume five.”
Just like last time, the numbers for this book are going to be insane in comparison to the previous book, and make other books cower in fear and shame. The article goes on to point out something that I’ve forgotten. There’s only one more book after this one.
Then it’s on to re-prints and who knows what. No doubt, although Rowling is not going to keep on with Harry Potter books, that something else will come from her pen. Can she do it again? How far will she wander to find another book idea, which I would think she might already have. After all, with a clear timeline, one would likely not help but speculate on the next thing.
Than again, planning for the future is often the thing that gets missed.
“Dystopic pockets of inequality and dirt inhabit the not so shiny bits. Ask a gathering of leading thinkers in the worlds of architecture and design, and you get a rather different picture. Some 70 million people a year migrate from the country to cities. That is about 130 a minute, says Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow Cities. Many of these set up home in squats, put together from scarce materials, if put together at all. There are a billion squatters in 2005. By 2050, that figure will reach three billion. At this rate, our future cities may turn out to be quasi-temporary, low-tech shacks, missing the basics of human life, such as water and electricity, still belching out the waste of fuels that warm the globe.”
That’s a mighty number of squatters. The article continues with a typical McDonough story about ecologically sound future development. That’s not to say that the notion of a living city should be ignored. I mostly agree, but there’s something persistent about the presence of squatters.
The area that used to be SoDo in Seattle, which I suppose now is SoStad or something, was the home for a very large Hooverville, so large they, apparently, formed a union in order to represent themselves to the government.
I just re-watched Blade Runner. In the graphic novel Fray, by Joss Whedon, there’s the division of upper and lower cities which I clearly remember from The Fifth Element, also.
What is it here? In Barbara Erhenriech’s Nickel and Dimed, I started to see the way in which property ownership was being heavily eroded in the class of economically challenged. Some even taken to live in motels because they were unable to make the kind of financial leap to renting a space for real. So, there’s contingency workers living in contingency spaces.
Corporations, mostly hiring temp or contingency workers, have contingency buildings. Instead of owning or building, they lease space. They could dissolve, in a flash, into just a holding company, perhaps.
I wonder, sometimes, if the future of the city isn’t to embrace, even more, this notion of contingency living in some fashion. I wonder what that future would look like that embodied a mobility so uncertain. Is this the future of Snowcrash where Hero lives in a storage shed? Or, is it a cyclical return to the migrations of hunter gatherers in a future where income and work and life are once again variable to seasons and luck?
Reminds me, also, about a Zine I used to have, and may still have, that outlined how to squat. It actually included information about squat toilets too.
In a continuing attempt to figure out how I became who I am, I am sometimes given a break.
My TIVO recorded the movie Brubaker. I remember watching this movie as a child, in the cinema. (I almost wrote “theatre” there.) Re-watching this movie, I have a strong feeling that it was part of why I am who I am. The relationship to authority, and principle are things with which I tend to agree.
I wrote down a section of dialog from the movie that struck me in relation to concepts of conflict resolution.
A: No way to compromise?
B: On strategy, maybe. Not on principle.
A: Damn it, I agree with you!
B: No. No, you don’t.
That struck me because of the mention of compromise. Currently, I am reading works by Mary Parker Follett. (She’s someone you should know about, but probably don’t. Even Wikipedia only has a stub for her.) One notion that she maintained is that compromise was not something that should be accepted. There is what she called a “plusvalent” solution to conflict, which was the best word she had for the idea. Patrick Hill uses the term “tertium quid” for this notion. The notion is that there is a solution to most conflict that meets the needs of all parties, another way which is neither the demand of one nor the other.
The first Starbucks he got to had heard he was coming and had already safely evacuated its Portland mugs back across the river.
“It was because of you,” manager Melanie Goodman admitted. Pollard gave her a hug.
The next Starbucks wasn’t so lucky. It had two Portland mugs on display. Pollard bought them both, walked over to a garbage can by the front door and smashed them to bits.
“What’s he doing?” one employee, or “barista” as Starbucks calls them, asked another.
“That’s the mayor of Vancouver and he’s breaking up the Portland coffee mugs,” the other replied.
“Sweet,” said the first.
So he bought them, and then smashed them? And here I was going to go on a rant about the way that this story was being treated differently than it would have been if it had been an activist instead of a mayor. Although the buzz on this fails to mention he bought them, and is playing it as if he went crazy and started to vandalize the place.
The reaction of the employees is very amusing.
There’s something in this that reminds me of conversations I had about the nature of local identity in the Pacific Northwest. The last bit in the article questions whether there is a problem with Portland, Maine. When I was helping to develop strategy for a Seattle ISP, I made a point to talk about the nature of competition. A Seattle ISP was at a distinct disadvantage in another town, like Tacoma or Everett. There seemed to me to be a significant culture that wanted local services, instead of regional services. At some level, there’s an acceptance of national services, so that means the middle range of a service, between start-up and national, is disabled in this region.
The competition between the Portland Winterhawks and the Seattle Thunderbirds is an example. There’s been, as long as I’ve paid attention, a pretty much sure bet that there would be fights on the ice between those two teams, and very vocal responses from the stands. Obviously, this isn’t too much of a surprise for Hockey, but the level of engagement and competition between the teams was more than any other teams in the league.
This kind of collective individualism, a reflection of the way the individuals themselves act but on the organizational level, seems to be strongly reflected in the culture of the western states, distinct from what I experienced in other states. This organizational culture of individualism seems to be pervasive.
“Officials from Antioch University visited twice in the spring and again on Thursday. The Ohio-based liberal arts school has a campus in Seattle and has launched a market study in Olympia to find out whether there’s enough demand for a branch here, how large that branch might be and what programs it might offer.”
That’s the first I’ve heard of that, but very interesting. The article talks about the potential for two new branch campuses in Olympia. I’ve also noticed the UW advertising the Tacoma campus on a billboard on Harrison.
Evergreen is supposed to increase enrollment by 1000, which adds to the 4500ish already. That’s a significant increase, especially when connected to any competition in town. However, Antioch would likely be primarily a graduate school. I think that would be a great addition to the city. Evergreen has been struggling over the addition of a business program and I seem to recall that they have had alumni promise money for an MFA program. Both the MFA and the business program, from what I understand, have significant resistance from some of the faculty.
This is about Yelm’s gag rule on “walmart” … I’m sure McClellan would love to have an official gag on the topic of Rove, but he seems to be shutting people down pretty effectively …
Disney and producer Jerry Bruckheimer have enlisted Chow Yun-fat for Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Variety reported. Chow will play Capt. Sao Feng, a notorious pirate who plays a major role in the second sequel to 2003’s Disney blockbuster, the trade paper reported.
It is the Hong Kong native’s first English-language role since 2003’s Bulletproof Monk.
Pirates 2 and 3 are shooting back to back, with production scheduled through January.
I think it’s great that he is being cast, but sad that it’s for this. He is a great actor and has been cast in some films that are … well, good but bad at the same time. When I heard that Chow was cast in part 3, I wondered what the heck happened to part 2, but now I know that too.
Bullet-Proof Monk had a great deal of potential. I don’t think that it followed through. For films from Holywood, I think the last thing that Chow was in that delivered for me was The Replacement Killers. I watched Chows entrance scene over and over, it was entrancingly good. Sure, maybe the rest of the movie didn’t live up to that first scene, but what a scene! That scene alone justified the entire rest of the movie for me. It’s on par with the first segment of The Professional for me, although The Professional delivers consistently through the entire film – an astounding work that is a standard to which others just shouldn’t be compared in fairness.
“The company has been taking orders for the book at more than one per minute since its release date was announced last December. In the United Kingdom, Amazon.co.uk has received 350,000 orders for the book.”
An order a minute since last December? The Harry Potter books are just bogglingly different by orders of magnitude than other books.
The town council barred residents from mentioning Wal-Mart at meetings, prompting a challenge by civil libertarians who said a “free and accountable” government depends on a citizen’s ability to voice concerns openly.
The retailing giant has an application pending to build a superstore, spurring controversy in the small town about 15 miles southeast of Olympia.
In a letter to the council, American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Aaron H. Caplan said his group believes it is unconstitutional to ban any mention of Wal-Mart at council meetings. The term “big-box stores” also is banned, as is “moratorium.”
Of course, this was in the AP, but I am amused that this appears in a Texas paper. Anyhow, it’s a big deal in Yelm too. I knew about the trouble in Lacey, but did not realize there was something going on in Yelm too.
If there’s noises in Yelm and Lacey, then there is much more reason to think that those concerned about Wal-Mart moving in to Olympia have reason to raise their voices. That is so even if they are told not to worry.
Where are all of the candidates? Why aren’t South Sound residents stepping up to challenge the sitting city council and school board members in the fall election?
Candidates seeking public office must formally file their declaration of candidacy the week of July 25.
