The London 2012 artistic director, Danny Boyle, a gritty film-maker, has apparently turned the £27 million spectacular into a traditional view of the British countryside including live farmyard animals. The Olympic Stadium in Stratford will feature 12 horses, three cows, two goats, 10 chickens, 10 ducks, nine geese, 70 sheep and three sheep dogs. I hope they manage to include my favorite English anthem/hymn "Jerusalem" at some point in the proceedings!
In the midst of life we are in death. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
[Book of Common Prayer]
Photo of Memorial opposite movie theater: Barry Gutierrez/Associated Press
We saw "Dark Knight Rises" at the family-oriented 49-er drive-in movie theater in Valparaiso, Indiana, last night.... http://www.49erdrivein.com/It was an eerie reminder of the terrible Colorado theater massacre a few minutes after midnight this past Thursday, that killed 12 people and wounded 58. Today's New York Times has an article about the massacre which talks about the heroic actions of some people and "the ferocious uncertainty of life" in recounting the death of a six-year old girl at the movie theater: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/us/in-darkened-movie-theater-heroes-in-life-and-in-death.html
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. - D.H. Lawrence
The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations … where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket … where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing.- Raymond Chandler
According
to both the Mayan and Hindu calendars, 2012 (or something very close)
marks the transition from an age of darkness, violence and greed to one
of enlightenment, justice and peace. It’s hard to see that change just
yet in the events relayed in the major media, but a shift does seem to
be happening behind the scenes; and this is particularly true in the
once-boring world of banking.
In
the dark age of Kali Yuga, money rules; and it is through banks that
the moneyed interests have gotten their power. Banking in an age of
greed is fraught with usury, fraud and gaming the system for private
ends. But there is another way to do banking; the neighborly approach of
George Bailey in the classic movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Rather than
feeding off the community, banking can feed the community and the local
economy.
According to Al Jazeera, Barack Obama has not been a particularly good president...but the United States could do worse. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/07/2012715121236211572.html Pressure is also building for Mitt Romney to release additional tax returns. A new USA Today Gallup poll suggests that a majority of Americans (54%) think he should release more than the two years of returns he has agreed to make public. The fact that he won't do this makes me think there is something fishy or potentially explosive in them. Bill Clinton has stated that he thinks Romney should release a decade of tax returns.
Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal has written an analysis of a recent Mitt Romney campaign gaffe...in which Romney allowed himself to be photographed on a red jet ski with his wife during their July 4th vacation. Given that most of the Americans who Romney hopes will vote for him are struggling to just get by, Henninger points out, this photo is likely to rub some people the wrong way and was perhaps not the wisest thing to do in campaign year.
Mayor of Baltimore. Photo : Leigh Vogel/Getty Images
This is going to be interesting: Baltimore is lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit that alleges that banks including Barclays, Bank of America, HSBC, JP Morgan and UBS conspired to fix a set of key interest rates – the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor – costing the city millions in the process. Firefighters, services for the elderly, school programmes – all these and more are being cut as a direct result of the actions of colluding bankers, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake claims. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/19/baltimore-libor-financial-crisis
The alleged rate-rigging lowered the value of public and private pension funds and dealt a massive blow to the public's trust in the market and in the capacity of large financial institutions to police themselves. If the biggest banks were secretly rigging the market to enrich themselves at their clients' expense, how can anyone feel certain they're not being fleeced. I'm intrigued to see where all this leads -- and will other cities/entities follow suit if Baltimore is successful.
This great blog (link below) is the result of a July 21/22, 2011 NSF workshop on building communication skills to bring scientific thought, reasoning, and results in non-technical form to a lay audience. http://icyseas.org/The blogger - Andreas Muenchow - works at the University of Delaware as a sea-going physical oceanographer whose puzzles range from the physics of river discharges in Argentina, Siberia, and Delaware to ice-ocean interactions and glaciers off northern Greenland and Canada. He also dabbles in statistics, ocean color remote sensing, computer modeling, and writing.
