It’s a boy! Or a girl! (Not sure yet.)

There’s a new baby giraffe at the Memphis Zoo. They’re not sure whether they’ve got a boy giraffe or a girl girafffe. I suggested to my friends who just arrived into town (they’re Gustav evacuees from New Orleans) to visit our fine zoo to see the lil’ baby.

Saturday morning cartoons

The dirty drunken cousin responds

I think King Willie might have had it right when he coined the slogan shaking off the haters. How dare people come to our city and do the disgusting touristy things that none of us actually does (like go to Beale Street – at least for anything other than the New Daisy), and then have [...]

Tennessee is so humane

Pregnant inmates in labor will no longer be restrained, meaning that they will be relatively free to move their bodies as they push watermelons through they eyes of needles. We are so evolved.

Prime Minister Pollyanna

I learned this week from an interview on Smart City that Bhutan has ten national ministries devoted to achieving Gross National Happiness. They have Gross National Happiness conferences. I think I’d like to attend one of those sometime. Occasionally I stumble upon some really great idea that is completely guilt-free and hedonistically oriented toward benevolent [...]

To be or not to be

That was the question on this week’s Le Journal podcast. One of the stories featured a young man of 24 years with a genetic disorder (I think…at least that’s what I heard in my broken French – not much opportunity to practice speaking and listening ’round here) who killed himself by overdose. I think. I [...]

What’s in YOUR water?

Many years ago I reported on the connection between water and oil. Rebuked, ridiculed, relegated to the circular file. Nobody believed me. And now I am starting to feel a bit vindicated. Everyone seems to be talking about water – from Hurricane Katrina to the Aceh Tsunami to the Rio Grande to this.
It’s probably true [...]

Netflix: Guerillas in Your Midst

I saw the Battle of Algiers for the first time in 2003, after the second Iraq War had already begun. We received it from Netflix this week. Several years before first seeing the movie, I was doing some media consulting for an accompaniment project for human rights workers abroad (i.e., outside the U.S.) and the [...]

Good Hygiene

42There’s been a lot of amusing news of late.
Another Bigfoot hoax. Apple the cow makes friends with an apple-loving bear. A penguin is knighted.
Today I’ve been thinking about the hadron supercollider. I listened to a TED podcast today by physicist Brian Cox and was completely wowed. TED is one of my favorite things in the [...]