The 600 Years

I haven't had the best of luck embedding vimeo videos onto the blog, so here's hoping this works.

From Kottke, here's an awesome projection piece captured on video (he called it "video mapping," I have no idea what the correct term is) celebrating the 600th birthday of a clocktower in Prague.  It's kind of long, but well worth sitting through.  Also, you might have to slip your brower into fullscreen mode to get the entire video onto your screen.



The piece is called The 600 Years, created by the macula.  Pretty amazing.

Finding (and Losing) a Whole New Language

A National Geographic expedition to into northeastern India has made a pretty amazing discovery; linguists have unearthed a whole new and unique language.  Sadly, it appears this newly-discovered tongue (called 'koro') is already on it's way out:

Only around 800 people are believed to speak the Tibeto-Burman language, and few of them are under the age of 20, according to the researchers who discovered Koro during an expedition as part of National Geographic's "Enduring Voices" project.The language, they said, has never been written down.
"We found something that was making its exit, was on the way out," said National Geographic fellow Gregory Anderson, one of the leaders of the expedition that discovered Koro.
"If we had waited 10 years to make the trip, we might not have come across close to the number of speakers we found," he said.

The Enduring Voices is fighting a losing battle, attempting to record and preserve as many of the 6910 known human languages as possible before they're lost to the ages.  According to the article, around half of them are already endangered.  Talk about a bittersweet job description.

Landing a Newspaper Job the Hunter S. Thompson Way

I followed a link to the full story from Kottke, it's too good to not pass on.

Here's an excerpt from a letter written by Hunter S. Thompson, sent to the Vancouver Sun in hopes of landing a job writing for the paper:

By the time you get this letter, I'll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I'll let my offer stand. And don't think that my arrogance is unintentional: it's just that I'd rather offend you now than after I started working for you.

I didn't make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he'd tell you that I'm "not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person." (That's a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)

Nothing beats having good references.

Apparently the letter's one of many reprinted in The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967.  Kind of embarassed to say I haven't read this one yet.

People of the Book

Brown University's Ted Widmer had a piece published in the Boston Globe a few weeks ago focusing on the historic relationship between the Founding Fathers and non-Christian religions (and locally unpopular denominations at the time, like Catholicism).  As the media circus from last month illustrates, religious tolerance is as much a powder-keg issue as it has ever been. 

The religious right loves to take the position that the US is a Christian nation, and that Christianity should be the dominating religious influence within the country.  Even if that means denying other religious institutions their own rights.  And a lot of the vitriol stems from a more modern belief (especially by members of the Tea Party) that religious intolerance is somehow connected the founding principles of the country.

Not true, as Widmer has gone to some lengths to illustrate.  In fact, two of the Founding Fathers actually owned their own copies of the Koran:

No book states the case more plainly than a single volume, tucked away deep within the citadel of Copley Square — the Boston Public Library. The book known as Adams 281.1 is a copy of the Koran, from the personal collection of John Adams. There is nothing particularly ornate about this humble book, one of a collection of 2,400 that belonged to the second president. But it tells an important story, and reminds us how worldly the Founders were, and how impervious to the fanaticisms that spring up like dandelions whenever religion and politics are mixed. They, like we, lived in a complicated and often hostile global environment, dominated by religious strife, terror, and the bloodsport of competing empires. Yet better than we, they saw the world as it is, and refused the temptation to enlarge our enemies into Satanic monsters, or simply pretend they didn’t exist.

Funny how Fox News never brings this up, isn't it?  Read the entire article if you get a chance, it's a fascinating look at the tolerance and respect of all religions that went into founding our country.