frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
[personal profile] frandroid
The Dig - How Zohran Won w/ NYC DSA

If you're like me in the left, you're excited that Zohran Mamdani has won the NYC democratic nomination for mayor, esp. in light of the insane amount of vitriol and Big Money put against him. So Daniel Denvir decided to interview the co-chairs of his campaign. They discuss how this absolutely did not come out of nowhere, but is the culmination of years of running smaller campaigns and capacity city building on the part of NYC DSA. One of the top organizers there cut her teeth on the Obama 2008 campaign, so you could say that the seeds were first planted there.

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On a related note, I dislike the tag #PodcastFriday now because I do my write ups on most OTHER days. :P. I created this tag in the mold of #FollowFriday tag from Twitter's early days, but meh. :). Sometimes I bank them but this episode is totally exciting to listen to.

Latin American art at the Walters

Jul. 6th, 2025 08:29 pm
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[personal profile] microbie
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore recently unveiled a new collection of Latin American art, so yesterday we went up to take a look. Latin America is huge, of course, and the exhibition is not that large, so it's not surprising that there are gaps, chiefly South America from Venezuela to Argentina. The areas now known as Mexico and Peru were well represented. The galleries were full of visitors, so hopefully the museum will do more in this area.

Most of the exhibits were old, but here is one of the contemporary pieces: Wak'a del Agua, by Kukuli Velarde, created 2022-223
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From the placard: "Velarde references the Inca tradition of stacking stones to mark a place as a sacred, sentient being--a wak'a in the Quechua language of the Andes."

These vessels are from the Nasca and Moche (sea lion) cultures (Peru), ca. 200 BCE to 800 CE. The lobster and the fisherman are favorites.
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Beans as decorative motif (also Nasca culture, 200 to 300 CE):
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A llama (Chancay culture, Peru: 1000-1470 CE).
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A stone sculpture from the Jama Coaque culture (Ecuador, 300 BCE to 800 CE)
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I would like to know more about this object, also from the Jama Coaque culture and roughly the same period as the piece above, but the only description was "snuff tray." The case was labeled "Formative Cultures."
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The painted dipper on the left is from the Recuay culture (Peru, 1 to 600 CE); the one on the right is from the Moche culture (Bolivia, 500 to 800 CE).
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Stirrup vessels from the Cupisnique culure (Peru, 1200 to 500 BCE)
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My first Canada Day

Jul. 1st, 2025 03:44 pm
ioplokon: Dade from the movie Hackers looks out a window (dade plane)
[personal profile] ioplokon
I really need a Canada icon...

Anyway, it's my first national holiday as a semi-Canadian. I am working because I love to get time & a half, but did still want to celebrate in some way so I am:

  • Reading Dynasties and Interludes, a gigantic history of Canadian electoral politics.

  • Registering to become an organ donor & stem cell donor and making an appointment to donate blood.

  • Watching a documentary about mining.


I may also try to go see the fireworks later, though I would rather see fireflies...

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
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[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

June reading

Jun. 29th, 2025 10:44 pm
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[personal profile] microbie
The Hymn to Dionysus, Natasha Pulley

I didn't enjoy this one as much as her other books; I'm not sure whether I wasn't in the right frame of mind or whether the book just wasn't as good. It definitely didn't seem as well written, and most of the plot points were confusing. There are some of Pulley's usual touches--automata (here called marvels); a tall, lithe male protagonist who is nevertheless awkward and shy; a precocious child who befriends the protagonist. I did learn that Dionysus was not just the god of wine; he was also tied to agriculture (especially vines), insanity, religious fervor, and probably other things. The tag line is "a man needing a god to remind him how to be a human," which I didn't get at all.

The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food, Mark Kurlansky

Kurlansky has probably earned the right to publish a book that seems to have taken very little time or effort, and not just because it's short. The first half of the book is onion trivia in no particular order and without editing, such that one sentence appears twice in a paragraph and some facts appear more than once. The second half of the book is onion recipes, mostly very old ones that don't have a lot of appeal to modern palates. For example, there's a recipe for an onion pie that includes placing slices of hard-boiled eggs over the onions. 

Memphis, Tara M. Stringfellow

A debut novel about three generations of Black women from about 1950 to the 2000s. My main complaint is that there was very little about the city of Memphis aside from one of the women meeting her future husband while working in a store that could have been Stax's Satellite record shop and another woman's comment that there was always music around in Memphis. If you've read any contemporary fiction in the past 5 years, you've read a book like this: it jumps around in time, there's plenty of trauma, and the uplifting part is supposed to be that the family endures.

The Soul of Malaya, Henri Fauconnier

This book came out in 1930 and reflects the entrenched racism and exploitation underlying colonialism. Fauconnier wrote very lyrically about the native jungle of what's now Malaysia yet also wrote that the Chinese were always devious, the Tamils were lazy, and so on. The protagonist works on a rubber plantation (which was created by burning the jungle) while getting life lessons from the plantation's owner and sleeping with wife of one of his Malay employees. I put this one in the recycling bin.

The Indians of Texas: From Prehistoric to Modern Times, William W. Newcomb, Jr.

A much more even-handed account than I was expecting for a book that came out in 1961. I hope that we know more about the Native Americans of this region than Newcomb knew in the 1950s; there was a lot of hand-waving and guessing for some of the groups that left little in the way of artifacts or interactions with Europeans. One thing that Newcomb mentions that I hadn't realized is that the Plains Native Americans became expert horse riders in a very short span of time--maybe a hundred years. They had about another 100 years before they were relegated to small plots of land and unable to keep their traditions. 

This is not actually MY spine

Jun. 28th, 2025 09:55 am
maeve66: (x-ray)
[personal profile] maeve66
Kaiser has selfishly not shared photos, x-rays, images of my cancer-riddled torso.

But.

I think I want to name my main T-6 spine tumor Keir Starmer. I hate him so very, very much.
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