"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Couple of Guys, Middle of Nowhere

 , , , , , , , 0

Just saw this commercial for Google Chrome and Angry Birds on television:

 

“It’s a simple metric….”

“Are you angry, Peter? You look angry….”

I use Google Chrome (beta) almost exclusively and have since shortly after it was launched. It’s come a long way, especially in the last year. I rarely use IE or Firefox anymore, and even then just to do a browser check when I’m toying with web page changes.

I played Angry Birds once on my iPhone … for about five hours. Then I removed it.

Not that is wasn’t fun … it WAS fun … but the time I spent with it seemed to qualify as “lost time” ….

“Games of that sort are designed to grab your attention…. But apart from a few isolated images, or a little thrill of achievement when you scored points, you come away with no memories. It is as though a black hole had swallowed up this piece of your life.” – Stefan Klein, The Secret Pulse of Time

A Sunday Morning Look to the Heavens

 , , 2

“We pointed the most powerful telescope ever built by human beings at absolutely nothing, just because we were curious, and discovered that we occupy a very tiny place in the heavens.”

Just because we were curious….

You’ll often hear people say that the size and complexity of the world and the universe around us makes our individual lives seem petty and unimportant by comparison. Yet I’ve always believed that the opposite is true….

If I said that the fact that you are one of the 6.7 billion people alive today, sharing in the legacy of the many more billions who have come before you, on a single planet among hundreds of billions of galaxies full of planets — is something that makes your life more significant, not less … would you understand what I mean by that?

David Satter on Natalya Estemirova

 , , , 0

From this interview with the International Affairs Forum:

IA-Forum: [Would] you please comment on the recent murder of Natalia Estemirova?

 

Mr. Satter: This is part of a whole string: Stanislav Markelov, Anna Politkovskaya… One of the signs of the cruelty or the lack of morality of the Putin regime is the fact that their protégé, Kadyrov, is really absolutely free to murder anyone he wants to, to torture, to kidnap with complete impunity; whether it’s in Chechnya, whether it’s in Russia, whether it’s in Vienna; as long as he keeps the situation under control for the leadership in Chechnya. This was a woman who was monitoring the human rights situation in Chechnya. She was a colleague of Markelov, who was a colleague of Politkovskaya. So who’s behind it? We know that Kadyrov said the people who are disappearing are being murdered. These are people who are his opponents and enemies.

 

And don’t expect any serious effort to investigate. When Markelov was killed along with Anastasia Barburova—in broad daylight near the Christ the Savior church on a crowded street—no one thought it worthy of comment until nine days later when Medvedev did an interview with Novaya Gazeta and said something. This shows the character of the regime. Bearing that in mind, an American president should not bend over backwards to praise Putin and to praise the Russian leaders. They are not deserving of that.

Original source: Satter on Obama at La Russophobe.

Frank McCourt: “They thought I was teaching … I was learning.”

 , , , , 0
As he put it in “Teacher Man,” his third volume of autobiography:
Instead of teaching, I told stories.
Anything to keep them quiet and in their seats.
They thought I was teaching.
I thought I was teaching.
I was learning.

Good words to live by: teaching is learning.

Full story here on Frank McCourt’s teaching (and learning and writing) methods from the New York Times:

McCourt: A Storyteller Even as a Teacher