
from a bubble from the ground, comes the metolius river.

With a backpack, $700 and a copy of a “Lonely Planet” guidebook, I landed in Delhi for a two-day decompress before what I thought would be an arduous trip to Dharamsala, my first stop in the Himalayas and the home of Tibet’s exiled Dalai Lama.
Delhi is everything the guidebooks describe, multiplied by 10. Crowding the streets are one-legged beggars, sacred cows freely roaming heavily trafficked boulevards and vendors hawking everything from brightly colored silk saris (clothes worn by Hindu women) and Spiderman undergarments to wooden statues of the Hindu god Ganesh and laminated pictures of Mother Theresa.
The most unforgettable part of the experience is the smell. Imagine the most unthinkable human decay and add to that exhaust pouring from hundreds of thousands of vehicles. Now add to that several hundred gallons of disinfectant. They don’t call it “Smelly Delhi” for nothing.
You can find the rest of this post here.
In honor of the "mess" we've made of Mesopotamia (apologies to Jon Stewart), this week's featured diety is Gilgamesh.
...He is the precursor of Heracles and other folk heroes. Gilgamesh is the son of Ninsun, a comparatively obscure goddess who had a palace-temple in Uruk. His father in the King-List is mysteriously described as 'lillĂ»', which may mean 'fool' or a demon of the vampire kind, as well as being a high-priest of Kullab (part of Uruk) . On other occasions, he refers to Lugulbanda as his semi-divine 'father'. Gilgamesh is fifth on the King-List and reigned in Uruk around 2700 BCE (or some hundred years or so later) for 126 years (his son reigned a mere 30 years). He was famous as a great builder and as a judge of the dead.
The Epic of Gilgamesh was preserved on clay tablets which were deciphered in the last century. It contains the adventures of the great King of Uruk (southern Babylonia) in his fruitless search for immortality and of his friendship with Enkidu, the wild man from the hills.
Most of the poems of this epic were already written down in the first centuries of the second millenium BCE, but probably existed in much the same form many centuries earlier. The final recension, and most complete edition, comes from the seventh century library of Assurbanipal, antiquary and last great king of the Assyrian empire.
This post may also be found here.
What I implied— and I stand by this —is that rage and sadness are no excuse for imprecision, especially on a subject as important as this is. Because, I'm fairly certain, you're wrong about all terrorists, even terrorists in Iraq, being "the worst kind of human being from top to bottom." Some of these people, like you, are reacting to rage and sadness. And not the rage and sadness of seeing someone they don't know murdered over a grainy internet feed; the rage and sadness of seeing their entire family killed by a bomb that dropped out of a U.S. airplane.
In an effort to court female voters, Bush now has wife Laura touting his failed education policy in a campaign ad. As I mentioned previously, I wrote an essay for Big Bush Lies about the unfunded mandate scam referred to in polite company as "No Child Left Behind." Edited by Jerry "Politex" Barrett of BushWatch fame, the book includes 20 essays about George W. Bush written by academics, legal experts, financial leaders, activists, and journalists. You can order it directly from the publisher, Riverwood Books.
In the meantime, if you want to know what's wrong with the ad and with Bush's education policy, this FactCheck.org article is a must read. And here's my "poetic" take on the same topic:
Mis-Education President
By Madeleine Begun Kane
Bush swore he'd leave no child behind,
A very worthy goal.
Instead, he left the states a great big budgetary hole.
States' rights must be preserved, Dub said.
The states know what is best.
Then signed a law he failed to fund, which makes them test, test, test.
Bush said they have to test to prove
That kids learn what they must.
Then handed out a budget that betrays our nation's trust.
The rest of my Mis-Education President is here.
One woman told her attorney that she was forced to disrobe in front of male prison guards. After much coaxing, another woman described how she was raped by U.S. soldiers. Then she fainted.
James Tiptree, Jr. [was] the most commonly used pseudonym of Dr. Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon (1915-1987), a clinically trained psychologist and a former operative of the C. I. A. Her father was a lawyer and world traveller and her mother was a world-famous geographer and author of more than thirty travel books. Much of her formative years were spent in Africa and India and her first career was that of a graphic artist and painter. She then joined the Army and spent most of World War 2 in a Pentagon sub-basement, working in photo intelligence for the Army Air Corps. It was there she met her second husband, Huntington Sheldon.
She was discharged in 1946 having obtained the rank of Major. The Sheldons attempted a business venture, which failed. They both then joined the newly formed C. I. A., her husband retaining his position with that agency when she resigned in 1955. She attended college sporadically for many years, and also taught statistics and psychology. She obtained her doctorate in experimental psychology in 1967. The following year her first SF story - "Birth of a Salesman" - appeared in Analog (as by Tiptree), although she had previously published a story in The New Yorker under her real name as early as 1946.
Her pen-name was derived from a brand label on a jar of marmalade - don't bother looking for that label in your supermarket unless you live in England - and her most convincing argument for its use was that her business colleagues would be sure to censure her if they knew she wrote science fiction. Her true identity was not known for many years by even the editors who purchased her stories. She never met or spoke on the telephone with anyone connected with publishing, and all correspondence was directed to a post office box in rural Virginia. In various letters to editors, fanzines, and other writers an outline of her biography was given, and although her work included several sensitive and sympathetic female characters, it was generally assumed that Tiptree was male. I have never been sure exactly when and by whom her deception was discovered, but it did not occur until sometime in 1976, around the time of the death of her mother. As late as 1975, Robert Silverberg, in his introduction to Tiptree's second short story collection, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, would make this very bold and now obviously incorrect remark:
"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female,
a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something
ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing."
This was for a collection that included a story which in retrospect should have given us unmistakable clues as to the gender of the writer. The title itself is quite ironic - "The Women Men Don't See" - and the story is a veritable microcosm of the man/woman dilemma. The narrator is a male who escorts two women toward their rendezvous with an alien spacecraft. He is unable to understand their motives, but it is evident they view the adventure as merely trading one set of alien masters for another which may prove to be more tolerable. This story was nominated for a Nebula in 1974, but Tiptree withdrew it from competition. She would later reveal to Ursula LeGuin her reason for doing so was the many remarks concerning the story being an example that a man was capable of writing interesting and sympathetic female characters, and a prize for the story would have only added to the deceit her pseudonym had already created.
[Strickland]:
Along with "The Women Men Don't See," her second collection includes several other impressive stories, most notably two award winners, "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death" (Nebula) and "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (Hugo). The latter is considered by many to be the first of the cyberpunk tales, long before William Gibson arrived on the scene. Others that I would recommend are "All the Kinds of Yes" and "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain." STAR SONGS OF AN OLD PRIMATE was the next collection, published in 1978, a little more than a year following the revelation of Tiptree's true identity. The most notable story is again an investigation into the gulf between the sexes. "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" won both the Hugo (in a tie with Spider Robinson's "By Any Other Name") and Nebula awards as the best novella published in 1976.
[Strickland]: Even though her persona was penetrated mid-way through her writing career, Tiptree/Sheldon will forever remain an intriguing mystery. She rarely spoke of her personal life, and never of her work for the government, so it is through her fiction we must attempt an analysis of her philosophy and her legacy. Sadly, the end of her life was as tragic as the previous years had been enigmatic. In failing health herself, she fulfilled a promise she had made to her now blind and bed-ridden husband years before.
Mom, soldier and Hopi Indian: 'She fought and died valiantly'
By Jeordan Legon
...A gentle snow swept across Arizona's Painted Desert April 5, the same day the Pentagon announced the death of Pfc. Lori Piestewa.
The soldier, a mother of two believed to be the first American Indian woman ever killed in combat, was the pride of the Hopi Indians living in Tuba City, Arizona. In this tightknit town of 9,000, the unseasonable flurry signified Piestewa's spiritual journey home.
"In the Hopi belief, when one is deceased, they come back home. They visit the family, their community through the moisture," Hopi Tribal Chairman Wayne Taylor told reporters after the snowfall. "And this is what happened just a while ago. So I think we were blessed today."
MOTHER'S DAY PROCLAMATION
Julia Ward Howe
27 May 1819 to 17 October 1910.
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, "Disarm, Disarm!"
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
Nor violence indicate possession.
Politics: Ben & Jerry's rocks the vote
As the mother of a teenage daughter, figuring out activities that give ME a break, are nearby, don't involve computers and cell phones...