That's a brotha!

with a "swagga! CNN anchors Kyra Phillips and T.J. Holmes discuss.

Nice touch, CNN behind the scenes with the music in the background! ;)

Welcome to the White House

Let me join in the hype of the 100 days of Obamas in the White House but not with analysis and premature judgment but with these pictures of life at the White House.

Callie Shell has spent much of the past 100 days working behind the scenes to capture what life is like at the White House. Shell, who works on contract for Time magazine, has been one of a very few photographers with personal access to the Obama family since Barack Obama announced his candidacy. ...via NPR

© Callie Shell / Aurora for TIME

Welcome to the White House
The President opens the door to the Oval Office for visitors.

The NPR story has some of the stories behind the pictures, as described by Shell. The photographs are collected in a slideshow for Time, with 101 pictures, no less.

© Callie Shell / Times

President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama share a moment in the Red Room of the White House along with adviser Valerie Jarrett and other staffers. "They had just a second together to say hi," says Shell, "and they have an amazing ability to tune the world out for just two seconds."

Also read the interview with Barack Obama from this weekend's NYT magazine. As always, ample proof that he gets nuance and has a way of delivering just the right words!

In the abundant silence we proceed into ourselves

This morning, I was reading Kevin Brockmeir's short story, The Year of Silence in The Best American Short Stories 2008 and I found these lines interesting.

The silence siphoned out of the city and into our ears, spilling from there into our dreams and beliefs, our memories and expectations. In the wake of each fresh episode a new feeling flowed through us, full of warmth and a lazy equanimity. It took us a while to recognize the feeling for what it was: contentment.

Aah...so, methinks my verbosity & prolificity at my blog, on facebook, and lately on Twitter, is perhaps merely a sign of discontentment? The year of my discontentment. (It's been more than a season; else I'd have put the title as "the winter of our discontent" ;))

And unlike the silence of the story, this one is not "plain and rich and deep."

The silence was plain and rich and deep. It seemed infinitely delicate, yet strangely irresistible, as though any one of us could have broken it with a single word if we had not been so enraptured.

And so it goes.... to paraphrase from another line from the story: "In the abundant silence we proceed into ourselves." (The line in the story is exactly the same except it uses "proceeded")

Update: Just finished the story. Lovely! The last paragraph of the story reads:

Every day the silence that had engulfed the city receded further into the past. It was plain that in time we would forget it had ever happened. The year that had gone by would leave only a few scattered signs behidn, like the imprints of vanished shells in the curst of a dried lake bed: the exemplary hush of our elevators, the tangles of useless wire in our walls, and the advanced design of our subway lines, fading slowly into antiquation.

Some day, hopefully all this discontent also recedes "further into the past" and "fades slowly into antiquation"!

--

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. - last line of The Great Gatsby nu F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the greatest American novel ever written!

Songlines Music Awards

As those following my music blog posts may know, I am a big fan of music from Mali. And it seems two Malian singers - Rokia Traore (see my blog post for some videos) and the blind husband-wife pair Amadou-Mariam (youtube video) have won major awards at the inaugural Songlines World Music Awards.

More details here. Seems ..

The Songlines Music Awards were established to continue the tradition of the now-defunct BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music, recognizing outstanding talent in world music.

Also, note the "newcomer" award winner -- an Indian musician, who I had not heard of before today.

Best Artist - Rokia Traoré   

Best Group - Amadou and Mariam  

Cross-cultural Collaboration - Jah Wobble & The Chinese Dub Orchestra 

Newcomer - Kiran Ahluwalia

To listen to Kiran's songs, go to her website. It starts streaming few of her songs, in full. On Twitter, she mentions recent collaborations for fusion with Italian aria and Hip-Hop. Interesting! Will need to explore further.

A Toyota that turned over its odometer

Do not watch TV and so not sure of how much MSM hyped the day yesterday but Jon Stewart said it best on the eve of the "mindless overkill" in the media to mark Obama's 100th day - it is "significant because that's when his warranty is up." Also this gem:

"Fact / Fiction / Promises / Progress ... they are all very nebulous concepts. If we are going to judge the president on an arbitrary timeframe, shouldn't we also have an arbitrary scale." 

How to judge a guy in 100 days (see after 2:30; initially some snark about Specter changing parties.)

How to Judge a Guy in 100 Days

Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

ending with this gem about judging Michelle Obama's first 100 days "stack up":

Jon does the action of shooting himself and then quips: "Its the first lady. Really? You are going to grade the first lady. f you are the first lady and you don't sit on Mr T's lap (picture of Nancy Reagon on Mr T's lap in the background), you get an A. The bar is not that high" :)

(Picture via.)

The clip is followed a short 100 Days Rockin' Eve video.


Also these two videos from yesterday's show:

Grading Obama -  Larry Wilmore never thought a black guy in charge would take all the fun out of being black.

And then Jon Stewart "puts it to bed" with an interview with Pulitzer Prize Winning Author and Presidential Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin [1], who believes Obama is in FDR territory after his first 100 days.

Jon starts this interview with this gem:

"Why are we treating him like a Toyota that turned over its odometer"

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

Meanwhile on Fox News, Karl Rove - just the person to judge Obama - opines

on the "big spending liberal". Sigh! 

Also, it seems U.S. Senator Russ Feingold released a "100 Day Rule of Law Report" to examine the new administration’s efforts to reverse the Bush administration’s eight year assault on the rule of law.

[1] Goodwin's book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, has been on my to-read list for some months now but I found her most of the humorous moments in that delightful interview come from Goodwin. Not too much snark from Jon himself. That's the greatness about his show. He riffs and indulges in great show-n-tell during the initial monologue but when interviewing, he lets the people who have come on show talk. Unlike O'Reilly and others who are on TV only to let their voices be heard; not their guests; who, if they say anything counter to the host's opinions, get talked over and if that does not work, then muted. No such hussy fits on the Daily Show. Just great humor, some snark, and a good chat to follow.

The infinite variety and mystery of life

Impressive project. Emphasis mine.

Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth, according to a new study that helps narrow the location where humans first evolved, probably near the South Africa-Namibia border.   The largest study of African genetics ever undertaken also found that nearly three-fourths of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to West Africa. The new analysis published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.  "Given the fact that modern humans arose in Africa, they have had time to accumulate dramatic changes" in their genes, explained lead researcher Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.  People have been adapting to very diverse environmental niches in Africa, she explained in a briefing.  Over 10 years, Tishkoff and an international team of researchers trekked across Africa collecting samples to compare the genes of various peoples. Often working in primitive conditions, the researchers sometimes had to resort to using a car battery to power their equipment, Tishkoff explained. 

More at the link above. Also this kinda related study from the Scripps Research Institute. Variety, thy name is life!

A group of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has set up the microscopic equivalent of the Galapagos Islands—an artificial ecosystem inside a test tube where molecules evolve to exploit distinct ecological niches, similar to the finches that Charles Darwin famously described in The Origin of the Species 150 years ago. As described in an article published in an advance, online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the work demonstrates some of the classic principles of evolution. For instance, research shows that when different species directly compete for the same finite resource, only the fittest will survive. The work also demonstrates how, when given a variety of resources, the different species will evolve to become increasingly specialized, each filling different niches within their common ecosystem.

Uber-cool! Again, More at the link above.

--

“In the time of your life, live - so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite variety and mystery of it.” - William Saraoyan

Horse Sense

Ever feel like indulging equine dreams & going clip-clop clip-clop? Me Neither! But if you do, give yourself horse legs :)

I know.. I know.. none of the grace of the supreme horse. As the saying goes: 


It is not enough for a man to know how to ride; he must know how to fall.  ~Mexican Proverb 

And not enough for a (wo)man to know how to look like a horse, must know how to trot/gallop! :) 

--

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.  ~W.C. Fields

Searching for an ever-escaping mutuality

In researching a poet every day for my tweets on Twitter in celebration of National Poetry Month, I read some of Langston Hughes' poetry over the last two days. In comparison to those poems, the struggles of the African American people have manifest itself in such a different voice through the poems of Amiri Baraka, (formerly known as Leroi Jones). The rhetoric (of the 1960s civil rights movement) of anger, political rebellion, and angst over the African American identity is captured well in his poetry.


I ran into Amiri Baraka's poetry when I started reading poet Adrienne Rich's book A Human Eye, day before yesterday night. It is a collection of essays on Art in Society (1997-2008) and includes a wonderful essay (originally published in the Boston Review) about the poetry of  Amiri Baraka. Writing about Baraka's poems in The Dead Lecturer (out of print; most of the poems can be read in this collection), she writes:

It is the book of an artist contending first of all with himself, his sense of emotional dead ends, the limits of poetic community, the contradictions of his assimilation by that community, his embrace and rejection of it: searching what possible listening, what possible love or solidarity might exist out beyond those contradictions. It is the book of a young artist doing what some few manage or dare to do: question the foundations of the neighborhood in which he or she has come of age and received affirmation.

To further expand on that, here are some words from Baraka himself from the preface to the Baraka Reader:

My writing reflects my own growth and expansion, and at the same time the society in which I have existed throughout this confrontation. Whether it is politics, music, literature, or the origins of language, there is always a historical and time/place/condition reference that will always try to explain why I was saying both how and for what.

To quote from the Adrienne Rich essay again:

And it is a book, not an assemblage of occasional poems: a soul-journey borne in conflictual music, faultless phrasing. Music, phrasing of human flesh longing for touch, mind fiercely working to decipher its predicament. Titles of poems are set sometimes in bold, sometimes italics, implying structures within the larger structure. Drawing both on black music and the technical innovations of American Modernism, Jones moves deeper into a new poetics, what the poet June Jordan would name “the intimate face of universal struggle.”

But intimacy is never simple, least of all in poems like these where “inept tenderness” (“A Poem for Neutrals”) searches for an ever-escaping mutuality. 

And identity is never simple either. In contrast to Hughes' poems, which incorporated into poetry the aesthetics of the blues as the experience of a race, Amari writes in his poem, Notes For a Speech:

African blues
does not know me. Their steps, in sands
of their own
land.

..

My own
dead souls, my, so called
people. Africa
is a foreign place. You are
as any other sad man here
american.

Like Adrienne Rich writes about his poem, An Agony. As Now., which deals with existential anguish but in a "surround of social hatred":

Here is self-wrestling of a politicized human being, an artist/intellectual, writing among the white majority avant-garde at a moment when African revolutions and black American militance seemed to be converging in the electric field of possible liberations. Experiencing the American color line—that deceptively, murderously, ever-shifting, ever-intransigent construct—as neither “theme” nor abstraction, but as disfiguring all life, and in a time when “revolution” was still a political, not a merchandising term, Jones’s poems both compress and stretch the boundaries of the case. “

Also this poem, which is included in Rich's essay:

  / the society
                           the image, of
                           common utopia.
                               / The perversity
                               of separation, isolation,
after so many years of trying to enter
     their kingdoms,
now they suffer in tears, these others,
     saxophones whining
through the wooden doors of their less
     than gracious homes.
The poor have become our creators. The
     black. The thoroughly
ignorant.

               Let the combination of morality
and inhumanity
begin.

Like Rich writes:

The poem’s structure spirals like a staircase, where “the society / the image, of / common utopia” turns sharply into “The perversity / of separation, isolation,” this turn signified by a full-stop and capital letter. And, since the poet is located between worlds, there is a necessary ambiguity to the pronouns, the “they” and the “our.” 

There is much more to read and enjoy, not only in Baraka's poetry but also in Rich's essay. I leave you to go read it in its entirety.

Related Reading: Essay in Dissent magazine on Amari Baraka's life and poetry.

Patrick Blower at the Guardian has a livedraw animation celebrating Obama's 100 days.

Issues galore, the weight of expectations, naysayers prematurely dismissing his administration as a failure (< 7% of his 4-year tenure done to date; < 3.5% if one hopes, like I do, that he will get 8 years).

Seems...

President Obama to spend 100th day in spotlight

The White House wants you to know that Wednesday is just like any other day. 

But for those who insist on highlighting President Barack Obama's 100th day in office, the White House will play along.The president will mark Wednesday's milestone with two high-profile events, both designed to highlight the accomplishments of his fledgling administration.

And so it goes.

(Picture of Obama with Washington looming in the background is © AP/Charles Dharapak)

The crazy dog

First dog Bo Obama stars in his own children's book

Video at above link provides details of how the Obamas are finding him a "little crazy".

Details on the book from NYT:

He has already been the subject of obsessive news media coverage, and now he will be the subject of a children’s book. Bo the Portuguese water dog who recently became the first presidential pet in the Obama White House, is the star of “Bo, America’s Commander in Leash,” expected in stores by the end of the month. Mascot Books, a small independent publisher in Herndon, Va., specializing in titles based on university and school mascots, is rushing the book out to capitalize on the fervor surrounding the Obamas’ new dog. “Bo” is written by Naren Aryal, a founder of Mascot Books, and illustrated by Danny Moore, one of its employees. Mr. Aryal said he and Mr. Moore had been working on the project for about two months, leaving space for pictures of the dog, once it was chosen. Mr. Aryal said the Obamas’ two daughters aren’t named in the book because he wanted to protect their privacy.

and more via Denver Post. 

Previously, my blog post, The lucky dog, about the top dog. Leave you with this video of Bailey, the dog that played dead (on Letterman).






:)

The opposite of a poem

Tripping on some interview excerpts at the Paris Review archives, I ran into an interview with the "confessional" poet, Anne Sexton, from the Summer of 1971. They are talking about Sylvia Plath, whose life and suicide has been much discussed in the decades since her death in 1965. (Unfortunately, the Paris Review interview, is among the few that are not part of the wonderful archive online.)

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it.

Anne wrote about Sylvia's death:

Thief --
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,
the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,
the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,
the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,
the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?

Sadly, Anne Sexton herself was to commit suicide three years later.

On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Kumin to review Sexton's most recent book, The Awful Rowing Toward God. Upon returning home, she put on her mother's old fur coat, locked herself in her garage, started the engine of her car and committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Also see this fourteen-minute video (2 parts) where we see Anne Sexton at home reading, talking about poetry and about her family.

I myself will die without baptism,

a third daughter they didn't bother.

My death will come on my name day.

What's wrong with the name day?

It's only an angel of the Sun.

Woman,

weaving a web over your own,

a thin and tangled poison.

Scorpio,

bad spider ?

die!

Also, you can read some of her poems here and here and read more about Anne Sexton's life and career. Or better still read about her life, in her own words (some great pics too at the link.)

--
“That ragged Christ, that sufferer, performed the greatest act of confession, and I mean with his body. I try to do that with words” - Anne Sexton

Know where to turn off the button

Found via kottke.org

Love and hate are the same thing

Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I'm resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button."

That's Marshall McLuhan. (via submitted for your perusal)

You just have to wait

In my previous post, I wrote about a Paris Review interview with the current US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan. In the same interview, she is asked about her partner of 30 years, Carol and how the two are coping with Carol's cancer.

Here are some excerpts which I found particularly moving.

KR: When I first met Carol, I was so glad to find somebody I could really talk to. There were people who I could drop a stone down and hear it go plunk really fast. But I could drop a stone down Carol and never hear it hit the bottom.


I: How are you two coping with Carol's illnes?
KR: I was just down at the store this morning, and a man was talking on his cell phone and he was saying, It wasn't just a camping trip; it was a survival class. And I was thinking how funny that was, because I'm having a survival class at my house. You don't have to go out and get it. It will come to you. We're all having a suvival class; you just have to wait.

(Emphasis mine.)

Unfortunately, Carol lost her battle with cancer and passed away  in January this year. RIP, Carol Adair. Peace and strength to Kay Ryan as she deals with the loss.

P.S. Loved this line that Kay Ryan says later in another context about living an ordinary life. "I think extravagance in your life takes the energy from possible extravagances in your mind." Even if its just a 1 line post, I think that almost deserves its own post!

Poetry has its balms

Loved these lines about poetry by Kay Ryan, who was appointed the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2008, in an interview in Paris Review.

Interviewer: Do you feel that part of the laureate job is to convince the reading public that poetry is useful?

KR: It's poetry's uselessness that excites me. Its hopelessness. All this tal of usefulness makes me feel I've suddenly been shanghaied into the helping professions. Prose is practical language. Conversation is practical language. Let them handle the usefulness jobs. But of course, poetry has its balms. It makes us less lonely by one. It makes us have more room inside ourselves. But it's paralyzing to think of usefulness and poetry in the same breath.

And so it goes. My daily poetry tweets over on twitter are anything but useful but now I know they serve a purpose - they are a balm which help me make room within myself. 

From later in the interview, this lovely excerpt:

I: Why do you think writing attracted you?

KR: It's a way of thinking unlike any other. Brodsky considers poetry a great accelerator of the mind and I agree. Thinking takes place in language, and it's hard to say whether the language is creating the thinking or the thinkng is creating the language. If I don't write poetry, in the profoundest way I have no way to think.

I: How do you find the subject in a poem

KR: I don't know if I'm interested in combating an idea or just loosening it up. You have to make some room for your mind. You have to open something up. And you can't just slam it from the other side. You can't say, That's not right. This is right. You start fluffing it. You open up the picture, so you can know two things at once.

I love reading interviews with writers and poets! Love the way they think. Love the way they phrase answers. Delectable bits abound! (I flitted between "Poetry has its balms" to "poetry a great accelerator of the mind" to "know two things at once" for this post title!) 

Go pick up the Winter 2008 Paris Review issue and read the interview. Or, if you cannot get your hands on that issue, go to the Paris Review Interview Archive Index and enjoy interviews with the masters of the past. (Past interviews are archived for free as pdf files. (Thank you, Paris Review, for sharing these gems for free.)

Folk Art meets Safe Sex

Anand Ramchandran of Son of Bosey fame points us to this hilarious safe sex awareness video from India.

It is not supposed to be funny but supreme WTFness and hilarity is guaranteed if you watch it. :)

One Man, Multiple Facets

Pulitzer Prize Winner for Feature Photography
Damon Winter, The New York Times - Awarded for his memorable array of pictures deftly capturing multiple facets of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
Above picture: Barack Obama campaigning during a rainstorm in Chester, Pennsylvania, on October 28, 2008.

(Other than the Obamas,  all heart-breaking pictures from Haiti, Kenya, and Indonesia in that series of award winning pics. Phew!)

Also see this collection of photographs from the rotating collection at the White House. Click here to read a slide-show essay about a collection of photographs selected from the walls of the White House.

Photograph by Pete Souza/White House

These two are my favorites... I mean the pictures, not the Obamas. :)

 

Photograph by Pete Souza/White House

Michelle Obama waits as the president, background, signs the guest book upon their arrival to Prague Castle, April 5, 2009, in the Czech Republic. Photograph by Pete Souza/White House

The ambitious pigs

Next they take over the world! :)

Actually its a story of pigs that escaped when their lorry broke down yards from the slaughterhouse. (Hat tip, BD for the link.)

--

“Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig.” - Albert Einstein

The Obama Effect

Seems Obama has an effect on everything, including travel  to Europe this summer!

Here's some advice to Americans who still have a nice vacation budget:

Like who?  Hedge fund managers and others who made millions and do not care about the current economic woes? Anyways, lets continue to the topic at hand.

Take advantage of the "Obama Effect" and visit Europe, particularly Prague (the best bargain city). But those who detest tourist traps still might want to give Paris a good leaving-alone.

..

The Obama Effect? According to the survey, the recent election of Barack Obama has left Europe awash with rampant congeniality toward Americans. In fact, 44 percent of survey respondents suggested that Obama's election has helped gentle the condition of even the snootiest of Continental waiters and alchemized them into more amiable and thoughtful hosts.

If you really have some vacation money, go read up the articles for the survey details and suggestions for cities with bargains, tourist traps, helpful locals, and clean cities!

Dispelled in mid-air & dissolving like clouds

Am tweeting about Wallace Stevens today and in addition to his wonderful poetry, I am finding so many great quotes by this esteemed Modernist poet. Here is one that I liked:

To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time;   nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing. Since we have always shared all things with them and have always had a part of their strength and, certainly, all of their knowledge, we shared likewise this experience of annihilation. It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure, we, too, had been annihilated. It left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness. What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or of the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. They were not forgotten because they had been a part of the glory of the earth. At the same time, no man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the non-participant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed; and whether it was so or merely seemed so still left it for him to resolve life and the world in his own terms.

The passage is from Stevens' essay "Two or three ideas" (from Opus Posthumous; NYT Review). Though written in prose, it is supposed to be "a great hymn to absence and to the heroically human self."

Words maketh the man..

.. but actions speak louder than words!

Anyways, I found this here and HAD to have it for my Obama series! :)

More typographical portraits here.

From an overclothed blindness to a naked vision

Read this in the the write-up for the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemparary Poetry (vol 2)*

Dylan Thomas...

.. liked to speak of his poems as narratives, as in his reply to a questionnaire in 1934: "Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, moment from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labor put into the creation of the poetry. My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light."

Emphasis mine, to highlight the beautiful words that capture the essence of poetry.

Later in the write-up, this quote from Dylan Thomas:

"I make one image, though "make" is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be made emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess -- let it breed another; let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict. Each image holds within it the seed of its own destruction, and my dialectical method, as I understand it, is a constant building up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the same time . . . The life in any poem of mine cannot move concentrically round a central image, the life must come out of the center; an image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions . . . Out of the inevitable conflict of images . . . I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem."

Lovely!

* This two volume set is precious. I'm reading a library copy (for the second time in my life - had read it 3-4 years back once). Some day I need to buy it - $37.50 for the 2 volume set is not that expensive, given how much treasure is in here!

The cosmos is all it is, or ever was, or ever will be."

friend emailed me about this news snippet today about a story from... once upon a time!

 

Its the tale of a primordial blob 12.9 billion light years away! Stunning stuff, no?

This image of the Himiko object, the most massive object ever discovered in the early universe, is a composite and in false color.

So, how many of you have seen much of Sagan's Cosmos? I do not think I saw the show much in India; though I vaguely remember they showed it on Sunday's in the late 80s. From all I have read and heard, it is quite the show and a must-see. (Though an apples-to-orange comparison, it ranks right up there with David Attenborough's show Living Planet, which they also showed in India in the 80s, in terms of wonderful TV shows to watch in teenage years...and then again every few years till you die! I believe, modern cinematography has far surpassed the Living Planet experience recently with the Planet Earth series in 2006. The same friend recommends you watch the UK version, narrated by David Attenborough, if possible instead of the US cable television edition narrated by actress Sigourney Weaver).


Btw, it seems you can watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on hulu.com now.

The groundbreaking, and for many of us, life changing documentary “Cosmos” is now available on Hulu. The 13 episode series premiered in 1980 and it is estimated that it has been viewed by over a billion people. If you have never seen it or just want a refresher, head over to Hulu today

For those of you who cannot view videos on hulu, it also seems to be on Google Video also.  Start here - The Cosmos Part 1 The Shores of the cosmic ocean - and then go find the other 12 episodes via a search or under Related Videos.

Also this..

Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan - Episode 1: "Wanderers"

In 1996,  Sagan recorded a partial audio version of his 1994 book "Pale Blue Dot". Often described as the "sequel" to Cosmos,...

Or you can read the book via google-books or if you want to buy a 7-DVD set and have $100 to spare, buy it on amazon! ;)

For now...go just hear the intro to Cosmos. Awesome introduction to this awesome universe!



The words:

"The cosmos is all it is, or ever was, or ever will be."

seem so appropriate for today as we read the above news from "once upon a time". :)

Not all about the economy

For those of you who, like me, have been worried about the economy.. worry not! Its not all about the economy.

Our cult-like loving of all things O may actually come handy when it comes to the mid-term elections.

Or so opines Nate Silver, Nate Silver, the guy who gained fame with his presidential election predictions at Fivethirtyeight.com. In an article in the Esquire about predictors to look for in the midterm congressional elections, he writes:

“Congressional elections are not all about the economy.Rather, they’re all about the president. The correlation between the president’s Gallup approval rating immediately prior to the midterms and his party’s performance has been very strong. In fact, once the president’s approval rating is accounted for, knowing about the economy doesn’t tell anything more about how to predict the outcome of the midterms. 

 

Obama better continue to keep that approval rating right up there in the mid 60s! :) Btw, it seems  President Barack Obama averages a 63% approval rating for his first quarter in office -- the highest since President Jimmy Carter.

Veena Reddy - Marathon Runner

Btw, I saw this girl at the Boston Marathon yesterday. I figured she probably made it well within 3 hours. (Anything within 3 hours is an absolutely amazing time in my books!). She went past us in 2.30-2.35 or so... while the winners (women) had gone past us at 2.20.

The last name indicates she is of Indian origin. Hence it perked my interest.

And sure enough, a quick Google search for Reddy gave me the desired info.

Veena C. Reddy, United States, 2:45:46

She came in 16th yesterday!

IMPRESSIVE! A job well done! Like I said.. she HAD to have done it within 3 hours! (Btw, I had never heard of her before yesterday.)

Also, some career notes (last updated 2008)

Reddy was a member of the track and tennis teams at the Moses Brown School in Providence, RI, but took time off from running while studying at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She later joined the cross country and track teams at Wesleyan, and entered her first marathon while in college, which turned out to be a painful 3:40 experience. She has since dramatically improved her time, placing sixth at the 2004 Ottawa Marathon (2:49:14), and finishing as the sixth American at the 2004 New York City Marathon (2:49:55) while starting behind the elite field. She set her marathon personal best at Grandma’s Marathon in Minnesota in 2006, finishing fifth in 2:41:30. She rounded out her marathon season with a strong 20th-place finish at The LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon in 2:42:03. Reddy, who ran the Boston Marathons in 2002 and 2003, has already qualified for the 2008 Olympic Team Trials in Boston with her performances at Grandma’s.

Personal Notes:
Reddy was born in Rhode Island and attended the Moses Brown School in Providence where she ran track. She attended Wesleyan University where she received her bachelor’s of arts degree. She later earned her master’s in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and works as an architect at Ballinger Architects in Philadelphia.

Difference between the impossible and the possible

I had a great outing all day first at the Boston marathon & then celebrated the birthday with dinner with friends.

Most amazing sight at the Boston marathon today - Richard Whitehead. Incredible trail-blazing 3:02 hour marathon run by this indomitable man!

You ask why 3:02 is trail-blazing when the winner Deriba Merga of Ethiopia did it in 2:08:42? Go see this pic.

Please credit Rob Larsen with a link to Drunkenfist.com, if you use this picture anywhere

Another picture via Boston Globe

©Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff

He was blazing by in sub 2.5 hours when I saw him at the 23-24 mile mark or so. It seems in 2008, Whitehead completed 4.5 marathons over a 6-week period in 3 continents -- achieving marathon on marathon personal best's of 3hrs 54m (Kilimanjaro), 3hrs 39m (Rome), 3hrs 36m (Georgia) and finally 3hrs 22m (London). Seems he broke the 3 hr barrier recently at the 2009 Rome marathon in March, improving on his 2008 time of 3:38.59!

Also check out Rick Ball.

P.S. More stride-by-stride updates and pictures through boston.com. [Sorry no pictures from me as I forgot to take my camera but I am hoping Boston.com's Big Picture site will have some gems soon!]

Listed below are the top 10 men and women. (Notice the odd man out in top 10! :) Ryan Hall's third place was the best finish by an American since Meb Keflezighi's third in 2006. His Olympic marathon teammate Brian Sell of Woodbury, Pa., finished second among Americans, in 14th place with a time of 2:16:31. Patrick Rizzo of Rochester Hill, Mich., was the third US finisher, right behind Sell in 15th with a time of 2:17:05.)

Slow race today because of strong headwind, btw.

Here are the official times for the top 10 men's finishers:

1. Deriba Merga of Ethiopia, 2:08:42
2. Daniel Rono of Kenya, 2:09:32
3. Ryan Hall of Mammouth Lakes, Calif., 2:09:40
4. Tekeste Kebede of Ethiopia, 2:09:49
5. Robert Kiprono Cheruiyot of Kenya, 2:10:06
6. Gashaw Asfaw of Ethiopia, 2:10:44
7. Solomon Molla of Ethiopia, 2:12:02
8. Evans Cheruiyot of Kenya, 2:12:45
9. Stephen Kiogora of Kenya, 2:13:00
10. Timothy Cherigat of Kenya, 2:13:04

Salina Kosgei, 32, of El Marakwet, Kenya, captured the women's crown in the 113th Boston Marathon, edging defending champion Dire Tune, 23, of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia by less than two seconds. Kara Goucher, 30, of Portland, Oregon, finished third, several seconds after Tune. The 2:32:16 time posted by women's winner Salina Kosgei of Kenya was the slowest time recorded by a woman in Boston since monetary prizes started in 1986.

The top 10 finishes in the women's division:
1. Salina Kosgei, 32, of Kenya: 2:32:16
2. Dire Tune, 23, of Ethiopia: 2:32:17
3. Kara Goucher, 30, of Oregon: 2:32:25
4. Bezunesh Bekele, 26, of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: 2:33:08
5. Helena Kirop, 32, of Kapenguria, Kenya: 2:33:24
6. Lidiya Grigoryeva, 35, of Cheboksary, Russia: 2:34:20
7. Atsede Habtamu, 21, of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: 2:35:34
8. Colleen De Reuck, 45, of Boulder, Colorado: 2:35:37. With this finish, De Reuck won the women's Masters Division.
9. Alice Timbilili, 26, of Moiben, Kenya: 2:36:25
10. Alina Ivanova, 40, of Cheboksary, Russia: 2:36:50

Notable: A third American, Sheri Piers, 37, of Falmouth, Maine (Joan Benoit's town) finished in 11th place with a time of 2:37:04.

Last but not least...here are the times for the wheelchair races:

MEN
Ernst Van Dyk of South Africa, 1:33:29
Masazumi Soejima of Japan, 1:36:57

WOMEN
Wakako Tsuchida of Japan, 1:54:37
Diane Roy of Quebec, 2:01:27

I believe Van Dyk (who was miles ahead of the guy who came 2nd when they passed by us at the 23-24 mile mark) has been winning the wheelchair race for many years!

South African Ernst Van Dyk breezed to his record eighth win in the men's wheelchair race of Boston Marathon. Van Dyk led from the first mile Tuesday and finished in 1 hour, 33 minutes and 29 seconds. Van Dyk extended his own record for victories in the men's wheelchair division and matched women's wheelchair racer Jean Driscoll's record for most Boston Marathon victories ever. Van Dyk has won eight of the last nine Boston Marathons, with his only loss during the streak coming in 2007. His easy victory was also the slowest of his eight wins. His previous slowest time was 1 hour, 28 minutes and 32 seconds.

P.P.S. Found some more amazing pictures through the boston.com website. Might as well share them here!

Stan Vancelette, 72, finished his 33d consecutive Boston Marathon.

(© Globe Staff/Matthew J. Lee)

And then there was this amazing guy!

Forty-eight-year-old Paul Gaunt, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, completed the Boston Marathon.

(© Globe Staff/Matthew J. Lee)

Btw, there were MANY such army kids.... all had huge heavy bagpacks on their back. Impressive!

With full packs and in boots, members of the US Army crossed the finish line.

(© AP Photo)

I did not see this woman but that's pretty amazing too!

Leslie Nordin of Hingham wore a blindfold as part of her fundraising effort for Perkins School for the Blind, as well as her son Sawyer. She was guided by her husband Dayron. Family members said Nordin raised $30,000.(©  Globe Staff/John Blanding)

Btw, after all these awe-inspiring pictures, you can now go enjoy some funny scenes from the marathon too.

And flickr has lotsa pictures, of course..
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"Success is not measured by what you accomplish but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds." - Orison Swett Marden

"The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person's determination." - Tommy Lasorda 

"The only good luck many great men ever had was being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck." Channing Pollock

No stranger to faltering and fear

Picked up a book by Willa Cather called Obscure Destinies at the library yesterday. Randomly opened it and came upon this paragraph that starts the short piece, Two Friends.

I loved it and decided to share it here.

Even in early youth, when the mind is so eager for the new and untried, while it is still a stranger to faltering and fear, we yet like to think that there are certain unalterable realities, somewhere at the bottom of things. These anchors may be ideas; but more often they are merely pictures, vivid memories, which in some unaccountable and very personal way give us courage. The sea- gulls, that seem so much creatures of the free wind and waves, that are as homeless as the sea (able to rest upon the tides and ride the storm, needing nothing but water and sky), at certain seasons even they go back to something they have known before; to remote islands and lonely ledges that are their breeding-grounds. The restlessness of youth has such retreats, even though it may be ashamed of them.

Not sure if one is ashamed to go back to such retreats but so it goes...

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"Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others."-Robert Louis Stevenson

A verbal earthly paradise

Just ran into this in reading an old essay by the poet, Mark Doty, my poet of the day. (Like I mentioned earlier, I am putting up a few tweets every day on Twitter about a chosen poet for each day this month to celebrate National Poetry Month.)

"We want a poem to be beautiful, that is to say, a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play, which gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our historical existence with all its insoluble problems and inescapable suffering; at the same time we want a poem to be true…and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly."- Auden

That's from Auden's book of prose, The Dyer's Hand. You can read a 1963 review of the book by poet, John Berryman. (Thanks to the New York Review of Books for putting up these old issues online. We would never be able to read these old gems otherwise!)

You can find a good collection of quotes from Auden's poetry via Wikiquotes.

Also, it seems, Auden was a big fan of Tolkien and his Lord of the Ring books! See his NYT Reviews of the first and third books. (Donald Barr wrote the review for the second book.)

Dubya does Dallas

Not that there's anything wrong with it.... but I thought he looks gay here! :)

President George W. Bush Comes Home (Yo, Dubya)  

So they’re back. Fifteen years after leaving us for the Texas Governor’s Mansion, Laura and George W. Bush have returned to Dallas. Not since the Jonas Brothers bought a house in Westlake have so many North Texans gossiped about their new neighbors. When the former leader of the free world moves to town, there’s a lot to talk about. In the following pages, five writers explore how the Bushes will affect our lives in Dallas—from why China might be our new BFF to how to survive an encounter with the Secret Service. Let’s be careful out there.     

Hat tip to Gautam John for the link.