Everyone’s beloved VP pick, Sarah “Mooseburger” Palin, joins other luminaries such as Rick Santorum in having her own eponymous entry in the excellent Urban Dictionary.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=palin
Gotta love the English language!
Saw this on CNN today:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2008/top25s/qualitylife/skinniest.html
Almost all the Bay Area counties are featured: Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara. Yet the one place in California most known for its body-image consciousness - Los Angeles - is prominently absent. What gives?
Among all the tributes being posted for George Carlin everywhere, I picked out the following, on a topic many of us love - the use and abuse of language. Here he is then; cerebral, irreverent, profane, and very funny. Thanks for the laughs, George!
Saw this story related to one of our own today. Some bloggers were surprised to see their content ripped off and posted on another site without their permission. When confronted about it, the site - which claims to be THE premier destination for Kerala tourism online - responded in true Mal (now there’s an appropriate bi-lingual pun) fashion with a torrent of misogynistic abuse. Read on and weep.
http://myinjimanga.blogspot.com/2008/06/stealing-threat-cyber-stalking-abuse.html
The funniest thing is that these same buffoons run a matrimonial site. With such a criminal mindset among its highest executives (the Shiva guy quoted extensively in the link above is their director of operations), who can bet against matrimonial pictures being used on their porn sites? I’m sure these guys have some director of Photoshop operations as well. Methinks this is a promotion just waiting for some sharp cyber-crime sleuth. Tourism, misogyny, matrimony, and porn - all in a day’s work for the fine people at Kerals.com. Buyer beware.
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“You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish.”
The quote is Orson Welles talking about the cathedral at Chartres, and it’s from the movie “F for Fake” but it could just as easily have been about the topic of this post. Borobudur - a tapestry of stone, a rich stone forest, an epic chant. I’d read about Borobudur in history textbooks, as the lesser known sibling of Angkor Wat, and I’d long had a desire to visit the temple and see for myself if it matched up to its formidable reputation. Earlier this year, an anthropologist friend researching urban planning in the nearby Javan city of Jogjakarta urged me to visit, and I did not need to be asked twice.
Borobudur is located about an hour away from the city of Jogjakarta in East Java, brooding over the surrounding paddy fields. It is rather too close for comfort to the active volcano Gunung Merapi, and the latter has over the years been a constant concern for the safety of the temple. However, Borobudur has survived not only the vagaries of Merapi’s explosions and numerous earthquakes, but even human attempts to destroy it. It still stands largely intact, a testament to the endurance of faith.
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One of my favorite channels on youtube recently seemed to end with the following episode. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that there will be more, but if this was the last, what a way to go! If you haven’t seen any, check out all the episodes. They all tell part of the story so watching them in sequence is recommended.
On my first day in the Indonesian city of Jogjakarta, my friend, anthropologist and all round Matahari, Sheri, handed me a map of the city with illustrations showing the various points of interest. My eye was immediately drawn to a little picture of a birdcage in the bottom left corner, right next to the famous Kraton - the palace of the Javanese sultan. It said Pasar Burung which means ‘bird market’. “It’s a market”, Sheri deadpanned, “for birds.”
I’m a sucker for markets. Some of my best times have been spent in the teeming bowels of some native marketplace. Long ago, when I used to work in Delhi, I would scarcely glance at the ramparts of the Red Fort on my way to the old city bazaar, where I spent many a happy hour gorging on kebabs, lingering in motorcycle repair shops and browsing used bookstores. Bazaar over cathedral any day; twice on market day. More recently, a meal of roast pig and boiled corn from the marketplace at Otavalo will linger long in my memory. Small wonder then, that as soon as I’d dumped my bags at the Lilik, I hotfooted it across town to the Pasar Burung.
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Welcome to the future!
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