Following on from Desperate Housewives on a Sunday night comes ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy. It’s got an amazing cast with Sandra Oh (Sideways), Patrick Dempsey who I know from Will & Grace, Katherine Heigl (Roswell) and the real star of the show, Ellen Pompeo who’s acting is far more subtle than her explosive name would suggest. It’s based around a group of newly graduated interns at a Seattle teaching hospital. Though the show doesn’t appear to try and have the same production values as others like ER, it has a directness and subtlty that evades many lesser shows.
I hope it’s carried forward because the start looks so promising.
Archive for March, 2005
Local residents and companies in the North Eastern Canadian provinces Tuesday began their annual cull of young seals - often born only days beforehand. With an estimated 300,000 to be harvested and skinned before the end of the season - 15th May, the Canadian government describes the seal population as “healthy and abundant”.
“It’s just horrific out there. There is blood all across the ice and seal carcasses as far as the eye can see,” Rebecca Aldworth, of the Humane Society of the United States
- The Guardian
The Canadian Marine Mammal Regulations, which govern the hunt, stipulate sealers may kill seals with wooden clubs, hakapiks (large ice-pick-like clubs) and guns. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, clubs and hakapiks are the killing implement of choice, and in the Front, guns are more widely used.
It is important to note that each killing method is demonstrably cruel. Because sealers shoot at seals from moving boats, the pups are often only wounded. The main sealskin processing plant in Canada deducts $2 from the price they pay for the skins for each bullet hole they find—therefore sealers are loath to shoot seals more than once. As a result, wounded seals are left to suffer in agony—many slip beneath the surface of the water where they die slowly and are never recovered.
- Humane Society of the United States Website
Brigitte Bardot sums up her feeling over the lack of progress, despite campaigns to stop the hunt, in a message to Prime Minister Paul Martin and the federal fisheries minister: “You are jerks.”
Why we have to speak for them
Canadian seal pup hunt begins
HSUS Seal Hunt Facts
Letter to Canada’s National Post, supporting the hunt
UPDATE:My friend Rachel comes back at me with an email containing this thought that I hadn’t put clearly into words:
Here is a question: If Canada is a land of plenty, i.e. have a huge surplus of resources etc, then why is it suggested the people who live on the coast have to cull seals to make a living? Simply sticking to old traditions because they’re traditions doesn’t mean they’re appropriate for the modern world.
The NYTimes has a really nice article about post dot-com entrepeneurs who’ve moved on from the web medium and are now living lives completely detached from the wired web. Most of interest is bluemountainart’s founder Jared Polis who has now joined the Colorado State Board of Education following his company’s buyout by Excite@Home.
Others featured, like Harry Knowles of aintitcoolnews are still around, but it’s the touching nature of the story that’s interesting - that these are people who - like celebrities - the casual browsers of the web will know and recognise. You remember when bluemountain would pound your yahoo email account with junkmail and you’d get messages from friends, through them, wishing happy Easter and Valentines… Now they’re passed and people have come to realise that physical cards are still the best and that the internet, though a social medium, just doesn’t work as a digital Hallmark.
France’s parliament has passed an amendment to raise the age at which women may marry from 15 to 18. This move is taken in order to block the (2003) estimated 70,000 adolescents living in arranged marriages. This phenomenon is mostly restricted to the immigrant communities of South-East Asian communities.
Although no statistics exist on the practice, most girls forced into wedlock are believed to be Muslims whose immigrant parents arrange a marriage for them in their native countries.
France has Europe’s largest Muslim minority of 5 million, or eight percent of its population. Most of them are of North African origin.
- Reuters
The amendment, approved by an overwhelming cross-party majority, is also backed by the justice minister, Dominique Perben, who said allowing girls to marry at 15 was “manifestly a false freedom”.
- The Guardian
The original law, part of the Napoleonic code enacted in March 1840. The code, also known as the Civic code, largely enforced liberal ideals such as equality before the law and property rights, but was also used to establish patriarchal rights - that of the husband being the ‘ruler’ of the household.
Though the act already maintains that citizens cannot be married without consent, this new law reinforces this by blocking all marriages under the age of 18. The origial civic law stood as follows:
- A man before the age of 18, and a woman before 15 complete, are incapable of contracting marriage.
- The government shall be at liberty, nevertheless, upon weighty reasons, to grant dispensations of age.
- There can be no marriage where consent is wanting.
…I came across this photo on flickr and now I’m feeling quite queasy. Can that really be only one person’s hair? I really don’t understand this anyway - why would anyone ever want to do that to themselves. It’s just….
I think I have to go and lay down.
Originally uploaded by @pepper
It’s old news online, but a British artist who goes by the name of Banksy, has been placing paintings he’s created into the exhibits of major art galleries including the MoMA, the Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Museum, all in New York. He walks into the galleries dressed as a retiree in a coat and hat, finds his spot and, with the aid of an accomplice, places his piece of work on the wall with a tag describing the piece, whilst his accomplice photographs the scene which is ongoing. He’s also got a large catalogue of graffiti work which is always clever and at times disturbing.
Link to woostercollective breaking the news of the charade…
Banksy.co.uk homepage
At the bottom of his website he has the disclaimer:
Banksy is a fictional character and in no way endorses any form of criminal behaviour whatsoever.
Citing the inequity of the property taxes he pays on his homes in Omaha, Neb., and Laguna Beach, Buffett said the California cap on property taxes imposed by Prop. 13 “makes no sense.”
Prop. 13 passed 25 years ago with 65 percent of the vote, and an entire generation of Californians believe that voting for the measure is the best single vote they’ve ever cast. The proposition rolled back property taxes and limited their annual increase to 2 percent.
- 2003 SF Chronicle
This is what has happened in Washinton State - the wealthy with their large houses and palacial pools, cars and ocean views have apprehended all recent attempts to raise tax, to fund education and to give a better life for children of the state. As Stephen Pierzchala says:
My kids were going into the highly underfunded, if not malnourished and dying, system of non-education in California that resulted from one of the greatest breeders of inequity in the modern world — Proposition 13.
I don’t know if the world is awake to this at the moment, but over the last couple weeks Radio1 (BBC Music station in the UK) has been trailing OneClick, the cool and ‘hip’ alternative to Five Live’s ‘Up All Night’, which is a ‘global’ news magazine - meaning, in practice, that they carry a lot of American content as that’s the part of the world that’s actually awake from 1AM in the morning. Anyway, I always liked OneClick, but for some reason they’ve ditched or been ditched by Miquita Oliver, the magazine’s previous host. Now the radio show is hosted by one Bethan Elfyn, a voice which will I’m sure be easier to get used to hearing that it is to get used to spelling. I’m sure it’ll still be grand but, not quite the same.
Perhaps she’s just been far too busy with the details of SingStar Popworld: karaoke loveliness from the Sony stable that is ready for another swat at the tween market from May. and once they’d worked their magic the first time, creating a game that lets little girls sing along to their favorite Pop Idol tracks, they’ve gone one step further and let Miquita and Simon, from the Channel 4 Popworld show, wreak their havoc on the product. It’s sure to get millions of sales…link
Miquita, you will be missed.
A stunning collection of interview video to accompany a Washington Post article about the DC Gay and Lesbian Liason Unit. The team is led by Sgt Brett Parson, a hilarous and resilient man who flies in the face of stereotype to come across as funny, sensitive and strong whilst on the job. In resistance to hazing within the police department, he cut out and pasted on the locker doors of his colleagues, 375 picutres of sexual acts between men, after someone had pasted the same between two women on his locker door.
Washington Post video
Washington Post article
Topic A:
‘The world economy is no longer a set of interacting national economies, but a single global economy.’ Discuss.
It’s my topic of thought for the trip to London. It’s pretty easy to show that global economies are more interrelated than they used to be, what with global finacial crisis like Japan in 1999 and so forth, but it’s hard to show that the world is really one large economy. I think I’d have to conclude that the world has certain elements in its economic structure that link countries together, but that because states can still act independently of one another, one cannot conclude that the world consists of simply one large economy.
Topic B:
To what extent is the nation-state entering a period of crisis? How important is globalisation in causing this?
I’m guessing that whilst I like the thought of the first essay more - it’s rather general and would mean I could do lots of reading about economics, I think this essay would be easier to answer - you just have to show that there is some crisis, but that there was no time when the nation-state was not under threat. When has ‘the state’ ever been secure? So globalisation will have a role in causing the new crisis - a crisis of global integration but it’s a role less severe perhaps than other factors of the past - namely rulers who would take it upon themselves to conquer other states because they just wanted to… Although… now we do have Bush.
Thoughts on the back of a postcard.
