SONG OF THE WEEK - "Better Than"

Lake Street Dive - Better Than

I am in love with this song.  Sometimes the saddest of songs can make me the happiest.  This song has a tinge of the melancholy, but its beautifully tempered tug-along tempo, the gorgeous wistful voice of Rachael Price, and the ambivalence of the lyrics, defeatist yet challenging, makes for a smiling, saddened joy.  The joy of an adult who's comfortable in not knowing what's right, who's loved and lost and carried on.  This is a song that makes you want to close your eyes and drift, only to open at the end, with a sigh, and a slight smile.

Harper's Weekly Review - Top Fives

I get Harper's Weekly Review in my inbox, weekly.  It's a genius compilation of the week's most prescient, awkward, dark, or hilarious occurrences.  Somehow it has been many a week since I've actually read one, and I am currently unemployed so rather than do something useful I am going to peruse all my unread Review articles and share the most interesting things I come across.  As happens with the internet, if I read too much from too many sources it all becomes a jumble and I can't remember anything I've done or read for hours.  

So this here will hopefully make this endeavor less useless.

July 9th

1. The regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, which was conducting a ten-day offensive on the city of Homs, urged Morsi to recognize that “the overwhelming majority of the Egyptian people reject him.”

http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/syrian-government-says-morsi-should-realise-egyptians-reject-him-and-step-aside

2. France and Portugal denied Evo Morales airspace on suspicion he was carrying Edward Snowden.

3. Conservative lawmakers in Costa Rica appealed to President Laura Chinchilla to veto a bill they’d accidentally voted for that modified the Law of Young People to allow gay marriage, and male anti-abortion activists gathered at the Texas State Capitol with signs reading “I regret my abortion.” 

http://www.ticotimes.net//More-news/News-Briefs/Costa-Rican-legislature-accidentally-passes-gay-marriage-legalization_Wednesday-July-03-2013

http://wonkette.com/521673/something-needs-to-be-done-about-all-these-men-in-texas-having-abortions-because-none-of-them-are-happy-now

4. Biologists determined...that male hawk moths ward off predators through the ultrasonic jiggling of their genitals. http://news.sciencemag.org/2013/07/scienceshot-vibrating-genitals-may-ward-predators?rss=1

5. Students primed with unconscious thoughts of death were found to write funnier New Yorker cartoon captions. 

July 16th, 2013

1. George Zimmerman escaped consequences.  “The only one who was injured at all, except for the gunshot,” said Zimmerman’s attorney, “was George Zimmerman.”  Sigh.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/12/george-zimmerman-defense-trayvon-wasn-t-injured-except-for-the-gunshot.html

2. Texas, Illinois, and North Carolina passed bills restricting abortions and Ireland passed its first ever law legalizing abortion for medical reasons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/us/texas-abortion-bill.html?_r=0
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/11/north-carolina-motorcycle-abortion_n_3582006.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/world/europe/lawmakers-in-ireland-pass-limited-abortion-bill.html

3. "Corrections officials in California threatened to punish more than 12,000 prisoners conducting a hunger strike to protest long-term solitary confinement by placing them in solitary confinement."
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/11/local/la-me-ff-prison-strike-20130712

4. "...the Mexican town of San Agustín Amatengo elected as mayor a man who’d faked his own death." 
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/12/dead-man-mayor-mexican-village

5. "Police arrested an Ohio man for the fifth time for having sex in public with a rubber pool float, firefighters in Ibiza used a buzzsaw to free the penis of a 51-year-old German tourist from a sex toy..."
http://gawker.com/ohio-man-arrested-for-fucking-pool-raft-again-738847745
http://gizmodo.com/sad-mans-penis-trapped-in-sex-toy-takes-buzzsaw-two-h-757897496

(and in other news I spent a week in Colombia's Amazon region with Matthew Dwelly)

July 23rd, 2013

1. Detroit applied for Bankruptcy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10190640/Motor-City-Detroit-files-for-bankruptcy-with-100000-creditors.html

2. The Vatican offered plenary indulgences to the Pope's Twitter followers.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/16/vatican-indulgences-pope-francis-tweets
http://www.france24.com/en/20130718-pope-offer-indulgences-twitter-followers

3. "Dubai pardoned a Norwegian woman who had been sentenced to 16 months in prison for having sex outside of marriage after she was raped on a business trip."

http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/22/world/meast/uae-norway-rape-controversy

4. "Virginia attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider reinstating the state’s Crimes Against Nature law, which bans oral and anal sex."
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/07/18/ken_cuccinelli_the_republican_candidate_for_governor_in_virginia_wants_to.html

5. "...a shirtless man armed with a loaded pistol and 171 rounds of additional ammunition was arrested outside the White House. “I was only going to fire,” he said, “a couple of shots.”
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/18/19544727-gunman-near-white-house-was-only-going-to-fire-a-couple-of-shots

Manizales

Blogspot just told me I've reached my photo quota. So...sometime I'll figure out a way to keep sharing pictures in some sort of fun format.

Manizales is a few hours north of Cali, in the Central Andean Cordillera. It was a very very cool visit, aside from breaking my arm skateboarding (1st arm break!)

The city was littered with amazing commissioned art.

Silvia

Last four day weekend, after recovering from my birthday celebrations, Mel and I made it down to Silvia. It's a big town or a small city, bordering on a 18,000 hectare Indigenous Resguardo, where a huge Guambiano community thrives and has managed to keep its culture and lifestyle pretty well intact. It was beautiful, nestled amidst mountains and surrounded by rivers. I think we both got a lot out of being outside Cali, outside a city in general, and around such a cool climate and beautiful natural landscapes.

Piandamo welcomes you.

Little town en route to Silvia.

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Pretty much right off arrival we took an impromptu walk up the western mountainside, which proved to be the exact right thing to do.

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