A couple of white wood-hole ladders outside a house in the Acoma Pueblo which is a 12th century “Sky City” built by Native Americans in New Mexico. There are still people living full time on the 367 ft sandstone mesa. I found this a mystical and spiritual place despite the clatter of hordes of fellow tourists.
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I still don’t know what the real purpose of this exercise was but the new seven wonders of the world has been announced (on 7/7/07 no less) and they are:
I have visited the first three and don’t know why the Christ statue is in this list. It’s definitely awe inspiring but surely there are more impressive “wonders” to put on this list in its stead? Angkor Wat? The Acropolis? The pyramids of Giza? In any case, I don’t think we can limit the wonders of the world to merely seven. It might have made sense in the ancient times but not now.
Curiously enough, I haven’t been to the Taj Mahal just yet.
I wasn’t born then (no, really) but the summer of 1967 came to be known as the “Summer of Love.” This was when young people looking for a new social experience descended in droves to San Francisco, especially the Haight-Ashbury district and gave birth to the hippie counterculture movement. It was a time for free sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. No one embodied that time better than bad girl rocker Janis Joplin. Joplin and a bunch of other rock stars of the time including guitar legend Jimi Hendrix and incomparable beauty Grace Slick lived near Haight-Ashbury. Even today, you can see the remnants of those hippie days while strolling down the district with its motley collection of tattoo parlors, bong selling joints, and tie-dye clothing shops.
In today’s Journal, frequent hunter and washed-up rocker Ted Nugent opines [subscription] that this time should be re-classified as the summer of drugs. The Motor City Madman has choice words for the likes of Joplin: “I often wonder what musical peaks they could have climbed had they not gagged to death on their own vomit.” He also weighs in on what the hippies did to themselves: “Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.”
Soulless rock music? For someone who mostly delivered crappy music, the Nuge shouldn’t be the one judging that. Drugs or not, the music of Joplin and co still incites passion in every rock music fan. It’d be easy for me to dig up a nice performance by Joplin on youtube to accompany this post but instead, I’ll leave you with one of the best covers of Joplin’s songs ever performed: by soul wunderkind Joss Stone and a bald but fabulous Melissa Etheridge at the 2005 Grammy Awards.
When the book replaced the scroll…
Mohandas Gandhi died fifty-nine years ago today. He was killed by a lone gunman, Nathuram Godse, who fired three bullets at close range. The South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) has put together a page with links to PDF files of the original press (mostly from The New York Times) coverage on that day.
Check it out here.
Recently, I read a fascinating book called “A Tale of Two Valleys: Wine, Wealth and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma” by Alan Deutschman. The book chronicles the author’s stay in Napa and Sonoma at the mansions of his rich Silicon Valley friends. There he engorges on the daily lives of the locals from cheese makers to cult winemakers such as Jean Philips of Screaming Eagle. The book offers a rare glimpse into the real life battle brewing between long-term locals and the fresh nouveau riche arrivals. It’s an easy read and highly recommended for those interested in wine and the quirky goings-on in the two valleys.
While we have often been to Napa, Mendocino, and some other wine regions in California, we hadn’t really visited Sonoma before. We had driven through the valley once without stopping at any of the wineries. Spurred on by the book, I thought the Thanksgiving weekend was a good time to head out to Sonoma. In the seven hours we spent there, we visited four wineries and learned a bit about this region.
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Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations. The title says it all. I haven’t finished reading the book. I have very little free time these days and the book is not exactly an easy read. But I can already tell you that it is a most excellent book. The kind of book that I will come back to in years to come.
The book is a reprinting of an earlier edition with some new updates. The author Michael Walzer among other things is a moral philosopher. He is particularly concerned with practical philosophizing and avoids the metaphysical. For example he presupposes the existence of a moral world about which rational people can reason about using a shared vocabulary. He does in the beginning expound a little bit about this, but moves on to the main topic of the book.
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Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. A day when families and friends get together to eat a meal primarily consisting of a bird I really despise: turkey. Before last weekend, I knew only a bit of the history of this holiday. It was the captivating documentary “Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower” from The History Channel (premiered last weekend) that provided a full account. The documentary is a re-enacted version of the Pilgrims’ journey to North America interspersed with interviews of historians and surviving members of the Wampanoag tribe.
Thanksgiving is a holdover from the Harvest festival celebrated in Britain at the end of each year’s harvest (hærfest means autumn in old English). In the fall of 1621, almost a year after they had set foot on Plymouth in modern Massachusetts, 52 Pilgrims, and 90 Wampanoag Indians gathered for a three-day feast to celebrate a successful harvest. They had waterfowl and wild turkeys, bass, cod, mussels, corn, lobsters, grapes etc. The Wampanoag also presented the colonists with five deer that they had hunted and killed. If only venison was the food of choice on this holiday instead of turkey!
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