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editor
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 Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 6:01 pm Post subject: |
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BC Business
The U.S. beckons
Forget India and China: opportunities await in our backyard
By K. David Andersson
February, 2008
| Quote: | The recent spike in the Canadian dollar makes investment or expansion into the U.S. an attractive oppoortunity. For the first time in decades, Canadian businesses have a competitive advantage over their American counterparts when it comes to purchasing power. ...
Canadians (and citizens of Bermuda) are the most privileged of all those deemed "aliens" by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in that they are also classified as "visa exempt."
But while Canadians don't need a visa, they are nevertheless subjuect to inspection and admitted under various immigration categories.
Most Canadian business people travelling to the U.S. will require B-1 status, which allows individuals, on a temporary basis, to enter the US to sell their Canadian-made products, conduct market research or attend a trade show. Normally, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) does not issue any formal documentation of B-1 status, Canadians simply report their purpose for seeking entry to the CBP officer, and if the officer believes them, they are waived through the border.
Likewise, executives, managers and specialized-knowledge workers of Canadian companies that have a US subsidiary or affiliate qualify for expeditious inspection. " must provide a CBP officer with clear evidence of a subsidiary or affiliate relationship and of their role within the Canada/U.S. organization.
Canadians engaged in the free trade of professional services (including lawyers, accountants and engineers, for example) may be admitted with Treaty NAFTA, or TN status. ... individuals must present their academic or professional credentials to a CBP officer, along with an engagement letter from an American entity confirming their temporary employment in the U.S.
... Canadian business people who want to enter the U.S. to oversee their investment or trade with a U.S. entity will require an E visa ... for five years and can be renewed ... as long as ... qualifying .... relationship with the U.S. is active and visible. ... The application process ... is paper intensive and usually takes between two and three months. ...
And for those who don't want to worry about the hassle of starting a business or finding a job there, there is the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Pilot program. ... an individual would inveswt $500,000 into one of 16 U.S.-government-designated "regional centres" and expect to receive a permanent green card within two years. ... (-- p. 125) |
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| Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2008 11:52 am Post subject: |
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The Little Sister
Paperback
By Raymond Chandler
| Quote: | I got a cigarette out and lit it. I offered her one. She didn't want one. I wasn't in any hurry. Time seemed to have lost its grip on me. And almost everything else. I was flat out.
"You're going too fast for me," I said, after a moment. "You didn't know when you went to the Van Nuys that Steelgrave was Weepy Moyer."
"No."
"Then what did you go there for?"
"To buy back those photographs."
"That doesn't check. The photographs didn't mean anything to you then. They were just you and him having lunch."
She stared at me and winked her eyes tight, then opened them wide. "I'm not going to cry," she said. "I said I didn't know. But when he was in jail that time, I had to know there was something about him that he didn't care to have known. I knew he had been in some kind of racket, I guess. But not killing people."
I said: "Uh-huh." I got up and walked around the highbacked chair again. Her eyes traveled slowly to watch me. I leaned over the dead Steelgrave and felt under his arm on the left side. There was a gun there in the holster. I didn't touch it. I went back and sat down opposite her again.
"It's going to cost a lot of money to fix this," I said.
For the first time she smiled. It was a very small smile, but it was a smile. "I don't have a lot of money," she said. "So that's out."
"Oppenheimer has. You're worth millions to him by now."
"He wouldn't chance it. Too many people have their knives into the picture business these days. He'll take his loss and forget it in six months." (-- p-. 201) |
| Quote: | The Little Sister
Audio CD
Narrated by champion Chandler reader, Elliot Gould
There's a Hollywood fortune to be made remaking films based on Chandler's tough-talking detective series! Gould is still the best voice since Humphrey Bogart to give any of the author's famous trenchcoats new life. ESL students trying hard to lose the accent can practise classic American slang emulating Gould. We understand the BBC has another edition narrated by Ed Bishop. We'll give it a listen when we find one. Please check back soon for updates. |
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| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 8:35 am Post subject: |
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British Columbia
Magazine Subscription
Our history in pictures
From the gold-rush frenzy of 1858 to our growing Olympic fever in 2008, photographers have been there to capture a visual record of the making of British Columbia. Join us for a phtographic journey through the past 150 years.
By Jane Nahirnny
Summer, 2008
| Quote: | Cariboo Wagon Road
This iconic photograph of travellers on the Cariboo Wagon Road is synonymous with our province's pioneering history. Gold strikes along the Fraser River brought thousands of enterprising California prospectors northward in the spring of 1858 - so many that the British government hastily founded the colony of British Columbia that fall to establish its claim on the region.
From the Fraser, nugget hunters moved north to even greater riches in the Cariboo. Roadhouses, saloons, and whole towns popped up overnight, and the freshly minted colony invested more than $1-million to construct a good road between Yale, on the south Fraser, and the Cariboo gold fields.
(The original route, judge Matthew Baillie Begbie decreed, was "... utterly impassable for any animal except a man, a goat or dog.") Here, freight wagons on the Cariboo Wagon Road make the perilous descent down "Eight Mile Bluff" near Spences Bridge, circa 1867. (Photo caption, p. 35) |
| Quote: | James Douglas
right: History books call him "the father of British Columbia." As governor of the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, James Douglas defused the threat of American annexation, maintained law and order in the gold fields, built towns in the Interior and ordered the construction of the Cariboo Wagon Road. But few know the humble beginnings of the former fur trader and Hudson's Bay Company Chief Factor. Born to a Scottish plantation owner and a "free colored" woman in British Guiana (now Guyana), Douglas was shipped off to Canada at 16 to work in the Hudson's Bay Company. His wife, Amelia, was also of mixed blood, with an Irish-Canadian father and Cree mother. To end up as a knight and lady of the British Empire was an usual reward, observed historian and author John Adams in Old Square Toes and His Lady. (Photo caption, p. 36)
Old Square Toes and His Lady
Hardcover
By John D. Adams
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| Quote: | Saloons aplenty
left: Hotels and saloons, such as Nelson's Royal Hotel shown here in 1898, gave prospectors and pioneers a warm place to congregate over a glass of beer or whiskey. At the height of the gold rush in 1862, Victoria listed 60 saloons among its many business establishments. During its heyday in the mid 1890s, the mining town of Sandon, about 100 kilometres north of Nelson, offered its 4,000 to 5,000 residents 29 hotels, 28 saloons, an opera house, and one of Canada's largest red-light districts. By 1897, nearby Rossland had 7,000 people and 42 saloons. (Photo caption, p. 43) |
| Quote: | Far, far from home, we miners roam,
We feel its joys no more,
These we have sold for yellow gold,
On Fraser River's shore.
(Far From Home, a folk song from 1858, p. 58) |
| Quote: | Fraser River War
How British Columbia became a colony
The Fraser Gold Rush of 1858 attracted some 30,000 miners from America into the British-controlled region of New Caledonia. Propelled by liquor and gold fever, they overwhelmed the Fraser Canyon's Nlaka'pamux people, who had been collecting gold on the river's banks for years. Friction turned to anger, and anger to bloodshed. Accounts from the time allude to hundreds of deaths.
When word of the violence reached James Douglas, then governor of the British colony of Vancouver Island, he was gravely concerned. Already he knew a strong lobbgy of Americans citing 'manifest destiny' sought to annex New Caledonia. The killing of U.S. citizens in the Fraser Canyon would only fuel their fervor and could prompt the 1,500 American troops stationed across the border to charge north to protect their compatriots.
To keep any of this news from reaching London, Douglas suppressed official accounts of the Fraser River War, and hurried to the mainland to meet with frightened miners who were demanding protection.
By the time he arrived, the worst was over. Chief Spintlum had successfully advocated peace to his fellow Nlaka'pamux chiefs and, in meetings with militia leader Henry Snyder, had negotiated an end ot the violence. Douglas helped to cement the truce by allocating land along the river to the native people in verbal agreements - generous settlements that were ignored by susequent government officials.
To ward off further threats from the Americans, Douglas worked with British officials to create the Crown colony of British Columbia in November, 1858, and served as its governor for five and a half years. (-- p. 59) |
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| Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 11:36 am Post subject: |
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Deadeye Dick
Paperback
By Kurt Vonnegut
| Quote: | His way up the stairs to the hotel proper was blocked by a Haitian painter, who had fallen asleep while waiting for a tourist, any tourist, to come back from a night on the town. He had garish pictures of Adam and Eve and the serpent, and of Haitian village life, with all the people with their hands in their pockets, since the artist couldn't draw hands very well, and so on, lining the staircase on either side.
Felix did not disturb him. He stepped over him very respectfully. If Felix had seemed to kick him intentionally, Felix would have been in very serious trouble. This is no ordinary colonial situation down here. Haiti as a nation was born out of the only successful slave revolt in all of human history. Imagine that. In no other instance have slaves overwhelmed their masters, begun to govern themselves and to deal on their own with other nations, and repelled foreigners who felt that natural law required them to be slaves again.
So, as we had been warned when we bought the hotel here, any white or lightly colored person who struck or even menaced a Haitian in a manner suggesting a master-and-slave relationship would find himself in prison.
This was understandable. (From Chapter 15, pgs. 118-119) |
STILL MORE Impossible Odds from the book:
| Quote: | According to Fred T. Barry, a Jew named Joseph of Arimathea took Christ's goblet when the Last Supper was over. He believed Christ to be divine.
Joseph brought the goblet to the Crucifixion, and some of Christ's blood fell into it. Joseph was arrested for his Christian sympathies. He was thrown into prison without food or water, but he survived for several years. He had the goblet with him, and every day it filled up with food and drink.
So the Romans let him go. They couldn't have known about the goblet, or they surely would have taken it from him. And Joseph went to England to spread the word about Christ. The goblet fed him on the way. And this wandering Jew founded the first Christian church in England - at Glastonbury. He stuck his staff into the ground and there, it became a tree which bloomed every Christmas Eve.
Imagine that.
Joseph had children, who inherited the goblet, which came to be known as the "Holy Grail."
But sometime during the next five hundred years, the Holy Grail was lost. King Arthur and his knights would become obsessed with finding it again - the most sacred relic in England. Knight after knight failed. Supernatural messages indicated that their hearts weren't pure enough for them to find the Grail.
But then Sir Galahad presented himself at Camelot, and it was evident to everyone that his heart was perfectly pure. And he did find the Grail. He was not only spiritually entitled to it. He was legally entitled to it as well, since he was the last living descendant of that wandering Jew, Joseph of Arimathea. (From Chapter 20, pgs. 173-174) |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 8:33 am Post subject: |
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Lexus
Magazine for Luxury Hybrid Owners
An interview with revered eco-activist David Suzuki inspires a trip across eastern Canada in an LS 600hL. It's a journey that celebrates the power of one articulate voice. The series continues ...
The Innovator
By Olivia Stern
Second Quarter, 2008
| Quote: | LEXUS: I understand you interviewed about 30,000 Canadians on you "If you were Prime Minister" tour. What impressed you about these encounters?
DAVID SUZUKI: Across the country, people want to protect nature and wilderness. People want a carbon tax, they want Canada to meet the Kyoto target, and they want efficient, affordable public transit. People were pumped, they wanted to do something, and I hope our political leaders are getting the message.
Since the tour culminated on Parliament Hill, what was the government's response to the campaign?
I met with all the leaders of the opposition parties. Prime Minister Harper refused to meet me, for the third time. He's not been interested in meeting me. He's PM, so I guess he's got more important things to do. The opposition parties said, "Great! That's terrific! We agree!" We're at a remarkable moment when all three opposition parties, plus the Green Party, are all on the side of, "We've got to do something." But the government in power says, "We can't risk the economy."...
What would you do if you were PM?
... I would immediately impose a carbon tax. I would immediately look for the overall distribution of wild areas and impose a moratorium on any development until we create a national strategy to protect biodiversity. I would immediately talk about using taxation creatively. We should be taxing the things that we don't want, like pollution, and we should be pulling back on taxes on things we want to encourage, like income. We've got to use taxation creatively, and we've got to commit Canada to very concrete, serious targets for emissions: I would say we ought to aim at 50 per cent reduction below 1990 levels by 2030. And by 2050, we've got to be down to more than 85 per cent reduction below 1990 levels. (emphasis added) (-- pgs. 42-43) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2008 11:23 am Post subject: |
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What's the carbon footprint of MASSIVE housing failures worldwide?
Again, the 'scientists' stack the odds against buyers, wilfully blind to the PANDEMIC! of housing failures due at least in part to ill-considered energy-saving provisions?!
Heat
How to Stop the Planet
from Burning
Hardcover
By George Monbiot
| Quote: | Like Bush, the Conservatives have also cut or suspended their funding for energy efficiency programmes and other means of preventing climate change. Environment Canada is beginning to look like the Environmental Protection Agency in the US: an official body whose staff are treated by the government as enemies of the state.
I don't blame you, the citizens of Canada, for this. Not all of you, at any ratel. I know that many Canadians are just as angry about these policies as we are in Europe. An opinion poll by Decima Research showed that 59% of those surveyed believed that Canada should not withdraw from the Kyoto protocol, while only 31% supported Harper's position. The provincial governments of Quebec, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador have vowed to stick to the terms of Kyoto, whatever the federal government might do. The will have to do it without help, however, as Harper has cut their environmental funding. In June 2006, 1400 Canadian mayors committed themselves to cutting greenhouse gases by 30% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. It's not nearly enough, but it still puts Harper and his flock of chickens to shame.
While in the temperate parts of Europe the graver impacts of climate change will be slow to arrive, in Canada they are already knocking on your door. The Arctic is warming much more rapidly than lower latitudes, with serious consequences for the culture and subsistence of your native peoples; for biodiversity and for infrastructure: already roads and airstrips which will cost billions of dollars to replace are bginning to sag and split as the permafrost melts. As the tundra warms up, it could release the massive store of methane and carbon dioxide it contains, greatly accelerating global warming.
[size=18]All this, I realise, is hardly likely to boost your self-image. But in other respects we look up to you. [u]Your R-2000 building standards are a model the rest of the world would be wise to adopt. ... (footnotes omitted) (emphasis added)(-- pgs. xi-xii) |
Here we go AGAIN!
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| Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2008 12:42 pm Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Fidel’s Heir
The influence of Hugo Chávez
By Jon Lee Anderson
June 23/08
| Quote: | ... In May, 2007, Chávez ordered the nationalization of pumping and refining facilities in La Faja owned by foreign oil companies. The move was one of a series of measures that Chávez had taken to increase Venezuela’s share of oil revenues, including increases in royalty payments from 16.6 per cent to 33.3 per cent, and its ownership stake from around forty to at least sixty per cent. (As recently as 2004, these companies were paying royalties of one per cent of the oil’s value.) Most of the oil companies, including Chevron and B.P., agreed to the terms; ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil did not, and pulled out.
ExxonMobil had been pumping as many as a hundred and twenty thousand barrels a day out of La Faja. Seeking compensation, the company secured injunctions from judges in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands that froze up to twelve billion dollars in overseas assets of Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or P.D.V.S.A. Chávez, decrying “imperialist aggression,” threatened to cut off all oil sales to the United States. Analysts estimate that if he should ever make good on that threat the price, which has already risen vertiginously, would spiral even farther upward. (A London court later overturned the British injunction, in what was seen as a major victory for Chávez, but the legal fight continues. ExxonMobil will not say publicly how much it asked for, except that the sum is “multiple billions of dollars.”) ... (emphasis added)
Five years ago, Chávez took direct control of the state oil company, P.D.V.S.A., after sitting out a two-month strike by its union. He fired more than eighteen thousand employees, replacing many of them with his supporters. Since then, he has used P.D.V.S.A.’s revenues to fund his most revolutionary schemes, which include the so-called missions to Venezuela’s poor. Rafael Ramírez, the P.D.V.S.A. chief, told me that Chávez intended to use P.D.V.S.A. as the vehicle for transforming Venezuela from an “oil sultanate to a productive society within a socialist framework.” Like a state within a state, the oil company has begun to replicate or supersede many of the functions of the national government. New P.D.V.S.A. branches oversee everything from agriculture to shipping, construction, and food distribution. “The plan is to make P.D.V.S.A. like Gazprom,” Ramírez told me, referring to the Russian energy giant, “but with a social role.” ...
Chávez began our conversation by asking, “Tell us, why didn’t Saddam put up more of a fight when the Yankees invaded?” Before I could reply, General Rangel said that the Americans had successfully degraded Iraq’s air-defense system in the run-up to the war. Chávez looked at me for confirmation, and when I agreed he smiled, and said that, just in case the Americans were thinking of doing anything similar to Venezuela, he had bought an air-defense system from Belarus. (In the past four years, Venezuela has spent four billion dollars on foreign arms purchases, mostly from Russia.) The Belarusian system probably wasn’t the most sophisticated in the world, Chávez said, but it was what Venezuela could get: “We do what we can to defend ourselves.” ...
Since 2001, Cuba has received shipments of subsidized Venezuelan oil, estimated to be worth $2.5 billion a year, in exchange for the services of thousands of Cuban teachers, sports instructors, and doctors, who work in Venezuela’s slums and rural areas. Thousands of Venezuelans are studying in Cuba, and more than a hundred thousand Venezuelans with eye problems have been sent to Cuba for specialized medical treatment. In 2004, Chávez and Castro signed a sweeping trade deal that eliminated tariffs between their countries, and simultaneously committed themselves to Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, or ALBA, which means “dawn” in Spanish. ALBA is intended to counter the “neoliberal” trading bloc envisaged under the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas. (Bolivia, Nicaragua, and the small Caribbean island nation of Dominica have since joined ALBA.) Chávez has become Cuba’s primary benefactor while positioning himself as the inheritor of Fidel’s mantle. ...
Venezuela outspends the United States in foreign aid to the rest of Latin America by a factor of at least five. Last year, U.S. aid amounted to $1.6 billion, a third of which went to Colombia, mainly to fund Plan Colombia, a drug-eradication program administered by the U.S. security contractor DynCorp. Chávez, meanwhile, pledged $8.8 billion for the region. This included subsidized oil for Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia; the purchase of public debt in Argentina; and development projects in Haiti. (Chávez has, in addition, provided discounted heating oil to poor Americans through Citgo, the Venzuelan state oil company’s U.S. subsidiary.)
There is also evidence that Chávez has fostered a relationship with the Colombian Marxist guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC. The FARC operates along Venezuela’s border with Colombia and holds hundreds of hostages—civilians, soldiers, and politicians—in secret camps. Chávez has, at times, publicly distanced himself from the FARC, most recently last week, but the group’s espousal of Bolivarian ideals, and its strategic position, appears to have tempted him into seeing the organization as a means, if only by proxy, of confronting the U.S.; Colombia is one of America’s closest allies in the region. ...
The summit (in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, where some twenty Latin-American leaders were gathering to address the crisis between Colombia and Venezuela) began the next morning, in a convention center set among the
resort hotels and casinos on Santo Domingo’s seafront.
... The session seemed close to breaking down. Then Chávez spoke. He began by telling stories, goading the others and drawing them in. In the nineties, he said, he had been accused of giving arms to Bolivia’s President, Evo Morales, who was then a cocalero activist and a congressman, and to another indigenous Bolivian leader, Felipe Quispe. Chávez said to Morales, “Evo—I think Quispe’s even more radical than you.” Morales smiled modestly.
Chávez said he found ironic the accusation that he was providing three hundred million dollars to the FARC, since he had recently financed a three-hundred-million-dollar gas pipeline for Colombia—he and Uribe had attended the groundbreaking together. Chávez looked across at Cristina Kirchner, the President of Argentina, whose populist, left-of-center government is supportive of his. “Witness the infamy that was invented that I had sent suitcases full of dollars to Cristina.” (Last August, a Venezuelan-American businessman travelling to Buenos Aires was found to be carrying eight hundred thousand dollars in undeclared cash in his suitcase. Although Chávez has denied it, the widespread assumption is that he was secretly financing Kirchner’s Presidential campaign.) “And now it’s suitcases in the jungle!”
By now, many of the leaders were laughing. Chávez had created an atmosphere of entente cordiale, and momentarily blunted Uribe’s charges against him. “I could have sent plenty of rifles to the FARC,” Chávez said. “I could have sent them plenty of dollars—I will not do it, ever.” ... (--- pgs. 46-57) |
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| Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2008 10:09 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | 'If you are wondering what happened to us all, you might consult the poems of Irving Layton.' -- Leonard Cohen (From the front page of Globe Review in the otherwise dull, pedestrian, self-important Globe and Mail Jan. 5/06) |
Selected Poems
Paperback
By Irving Layton
Preface by Wynne Francis
| Quote: | On Being Bitten by a Dog
A doctor for mere lucre
performed an unnecessary operation
making my nose nearly
as crooked as himself
Another for a similar reason
almost blinded me
A poet famous
for his lyrics of love
and renunciation
toils at the seduction of my wife
And the humans who would like to kill me
are legion
Only once have I been bitten by a dog.
(--p. 54) |
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| Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 8:55 am Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
The Critics
Her Own Society
A new reading of Emily Dickinson
By Judith Thurman
Aug. 4/08
| Quote: | Dickinson came to Higginson in the guise of an unpublished novice, though by this point—middle age (she died at fifty-five)—she had composed hundreds of poems. Among them are some of the greatest ever written in English, but an English unique to her—an unworn language. It revives sensation at the extremities of feeling that, in most lives, habit and cliché have numbed. Few voices are more solitary than her first person, yet few are more intimate: she writes I to I. Richard B. Sewall, whose critical biography, “The Life of Emily Dickinson” (1974), is still unsurpassed, classed her with George Herbert, Wordsworth, the author of the Psalms and of Job, and, in her eerie genius for metaphor (a comparison that isn’t impertinent), Shakespeare.
It is hard to believe that Dickinson didn’t know who and what she was, even if no one else did. She kept her poems in a bureau drawer, sewn into bundles. But she had shared a few with her closest friends, among them her sister-in-law and Samuel Bowles—a driven man, famously attractive, like her new pen pal, and the editor of an influential newspaper, the Springfield Republican. Bowles had already printed three lyrics anonymously. She enclosed one of them in her note to Higginson (who then lived in Worcester) with three others:
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning—
And untouched by Noon—
Sleep the meek members of the
Resurrection—
Rafter of Satin—and Roof of Stone—
Grand go the Years,
In the Crescent above them—
Worlds scoop their Arcs—
And Firmaments—row—
Diadems—drop—
And Doges—surrender—
Soundless as Dots,
On a Disc of Snow.
...
In the course of their friendship, Higginson tried to lead this “wayward” sport of nature, whose rhymes were off, whose rhythm he called “spasmodic,” whose lines were strung tensely between dashes, and who claimed the modern privilege of refusing to signify what others expected her to mean in “the direction of rules and traditions.” (Her credo was “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.”) After Dickinson’s death, in 1886, Lavinia asked Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin’s beautiful and ambitious mistress, to edit the poems, and Higginson to help her, lending the project his prestige. (Only ten brief lyrics had appeared in her lifetime, grudgingly surrendered, and without a signature. One was attributed to Emerson.) Todd sometimes went further than Higginson would have liked in taking liberties with Dickinson’s syntax, punctuation, and even her choice of words. He approved and took part in the cleanup, however. Their anthology was published in 1890, and reviews were mixed (some ecstatic, more disdainful), but almost immediately Dickinson acquired a cult following, mostly among women. They showed up in Amherst, asking directions to the Homestead, the Dickinsons’ Federal manor on Main Street, which has since become a museum. The collection quickly went through eleven editions and was followed by seven others, a memoir by Mabel Todd’s daughter, four volumes of letters, endless speculation about the poet’s secrets, and the rise of a myth. By the nineteen-fifties, Dickinson was part of the canon (almost no one graduates from high school without having read her). Her complete works—nearly eighteen hundred poems, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, and letters, edited by Johnson and Theodora Ward, three volumes of each—were enshrined in annotated editions that restored their formal integrity, revealing the magnitude of her power but also the depths of her strangeness. (-- pgs. 68-72 |
| Quote: | | Note to ESL students: There's a good number of sound recordings of dear Emily's work - poems and letters - but we've not heard even one. We'll do our best to find a few. Please check back soon for updates. In the meantime, Ms. Thurman's article - actually a book review - is a wonderful introduction to the poet and her work. |
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 9:42 am Post subject: |
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The New York Times Magazine
But not without the dull clunker daily
Will Dad Ever Do His Share?
Some fathers do. And throw over their old lives. And draw up elaborate charts. Inside the equal parenting movement.
By Lisa Belkin
June 18/08
| Quote: | Social scientists know in remarkable detail what goes on in the average American home. And they have calculated with great precision how little has changed in the roles of men and women. Any way you measure it, they say, women do about twice as much around the house as men.
The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work.
But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.
The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.
“And the most sadly comic data is from my own research,” he adds, which show that in married couples “where she has a job and he doesn’t, and where you would anticipate a complete reversal, even then you find the wife doing the majority of the housework.”
Housework, in this context, is defined as things like cooking, cleaning, yardwork and home repairs. Child care is a whole separate category — one that is even more skewed. The social scientist’s definition of child care “is attending to the physical needs of a child — dressing a child, cooking for a child, feeding and cleaning them,” Blair says. It doesn’t include the fun stuff, like playing and reading and kissing good night.
Where the housework ratio is two to one, the wife-to-husband ratio for child care in the United States is close to five to one. As with housework, that ratio does not change as much as you would expect when you account for who brings home a paycheck. In a family where Mom stays home and Dad goes to work, she spends 15 hours a week caring for children and he spends 2. In families in which both parents are wage earners, Mom’s average drops to 11 and Dad’s goes up to 3. Lest you think this is at least a significant improvement over our parents and grandparents, not so fast. “The most striking part,” Blair says, “is that none of this is all that different, in terms of ratio, from 90 years ago.” (-- pgs. 46-47) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2008 1:16 pm Post subject: |
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Full Moon
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | 'Pigs," said Lord Emsworth, raising his voice a little and enunciating the word more distinctly.
Plimsoll explained that what he had been intending to convey was that his name was Plimsoll.
'Oh, is it?' said Lord Emsworth, and paused awhile in thought. He had a vague recollection that someone had once told him to do something - what, he could not at the moment recall - about someone of that name. 'Well, as I was about to say, I am just going down to the sty to listen to my pig.'
'Oh, yes?'
'Her name is Plimsoll.'
'Is that so?' said Tipton, surprised at this coincidence.
'I mean Empress of Blandings. She has won the silver medal in the Fat Pigs class at the Shropshire Agricultural Show twice -- '
'Gee!'
'-- in successive years.'
'Gosh!'
'A thing no pig has ever done before.
'Well, I'll be darned.'
'Yes, it was an astounding feat. She is very fat.'
'She must be fat.'
'She is. Extraordinarily fat.'
'Yessir, I'll bet she's fat,' said Tipton, groaning in spirit. No lover, who has come out to walk in the moonlight and dream of the girl he adores, likes to find himself sidetracked on to the subject of pigs, however obese. 'Well, I mustn't keep you. You want to see your pig.'
'I thought you would,' said Lord Emsworth. 'We go down this path.' (-- pgs 82-83) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 3:19 pm Post subject: |
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America, I Like You
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | Only once - here comes that story I was speaking of - have I heard a butler laugh. On a certain night in the year 1903, when I had been invited to dinner at a rather more stately home than usual and, owing to the friend who has appeared in some of my stories under the name of Ukridge having borrowed my dress clothes without telling me, I had to attend the function in a primitive suit of soup-and-fish bequeathed to me by my Uncle Hugh, a man who stood six feet four and weighed in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds.
Even as I dressed, the things seemed roomy. It was not, however, until the fish course that I realized how roomy they were, when, glancing down, I suddenly observed the trousers mounting like a rising tide over my shirt front. I pushed them back, but I knew I was fighting a losing battle. I was up against the same trouble that bothered King Canute. Eventually, when I was helping myself to potatoes and was off my guard, the tide swept up as far as my white tie, and it was then that Yates or Bates or Fotheringay or whatever his name was uttered a sound like a bursting paper bag and hurried from the room with his hand over his mouth, squaring himself with his guild later, I believe, by saying that he had had some kind of fit. It was unpleasant experience and one that clouded my life through most of the period 1903-4-5, but it is something to be bale to tell my grandchildren that I once saw a butler laugh. (From To the Critics, These Pearls, pgs. 106-107) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 2:09 pm Post subject: |
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Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Hardcover
By Julian Barnes
| Quote: | | Fear of death replaces fear of God. But fear of God - an entirely sane early principle, given the hazard of life and our vulnerability to thunderbolts of unknown origin - at least allowed for negotiation. We talked God down from being the Vengeful One and rebranded Him the Infinitely Merciful; we changed Him from Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party. We levered up His graven image, put it on runners, and dragged it to a place where the weather was sunnier. We can't do the same with death. Death can't be talked down, or parlayed into anything; it simply declines to come to the negotiating table. It doesn't have to pretend to be Vengeful or Merciful, or even Infinitely Merciless. It is impervious to insult, complaint or condescension. 'Death is not an artist': no, and would never claim to be one. Artists are unreliable; whereas death never lets you down, remains on call seven days a week, and is happy to work three consecutive eight-hour shifts. You would buy shares in death, if they were available; you would bet on it, however poor the odds. When my brother and I were growing up, there was a minor celbrity called Dr Barbara Moore, a long-distance walker and propagandizing vegetarian who thought she could outface nature; she once told a newspaper, a little ambitiously, that she would have a baby at 100 and live to be 150. She didn't get even halfway there. She died at seventy-three, and not at the hands of an anxious bookmaker either. Oddly, she did death's work for it, starving herself into extinction. That was a fine day on the exchange for death. (-- pgs. 69-70) |
| Quote: | | ... We are indeed all going to die, and death is absolute and God a delusion, but even so, that makes us the lucky ones. Most 'people' - the vast majority of potential people - don't even get born, and their numbers are greater than all the grains of sand in all the deserts of Araby. 'The set of possible people allowed by our DNA ... massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.' Why do I find this such thin consolation? No, worse than that, such a disconsolation? Because look at all the evolutionary work, all the unrecorded pieces of cosmic luck, all the decision-making, all the generations of family care, all the thissing-and-thatting which have ended up producing me and my uniqueness. My ordinariness, too, and yours, and that of Richard Dawkins, yet a unique ordinariness, a staggeringly against-the-odds ordinariness. This makes it harder, not easier, to give a shrug and say philosophically, Oh well, might never have been here anyway, so may as well get on enjoying this little window of opportunity not granted to others. But then it's also hard, unless you're a biologist, to think of those trillions of unborn, genetically hypothetical others as 'potential people.' I have no difficulty imagining a stillborn or aborted baby as a potential person, but all those possible combinations that never came to pass? My human sympathy can only go so far, I'm afraid - the sands of Araby are beyond me. (-- p. 116) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 4:23 pm Post subject: |
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Chuck Amuck
The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist
Paperback
By Chuck Jones
| Quote: | With my fascinated nose waffled against the rust-brown screen of our second-floor sleeping porch, I watched him tiptoe through the dune grass and yellow oyster daisies to the foot of our back porch, then look appraisingly up at me and utter a single laconic "Mckgnaow."* (From James Joyce's Ulysses, but Johnson said it first).
He moved into our house that morning, bag and baggage. The bag was that cat bag all cats live in, one of the few characteristics he shared with other cats. He sat fat and walked thin like other cats, but the resemblance to other cats stopped there.
His baggage was what appeared to be a very old, very used tongue depressor, fastened securely about his neck with a bit of tarry string, bearing in violet indelible ink the crude inscription: JOHNSON. Whether this was his name, that of his former proprietors, or his blood type we unable to determine, since he discussed his past not at all and responded to the name Johnson as well as any other, which was not at all...
... Mark Twain said that if you carried a cat home by the tail you would get information that would be valuable to you all your life. Such information could more conveniently be obtained by meddling with Johnson's tongue depressor.
Whatever else it represented, that bit of tongue depressor was Johnson's sole possession: his entire estate, his chattel, his treasure. It was all he had to leave to his eldest son, and he treated it as a sacred object. Any attempt to remove it resulted in what can only be described as a physical threat of the most nerve-racking implications. Touch his treasure and Johnson simply went into a lightning somersault, coupled with a full-bodied, four-footed karate chop, in which the meddler suddenly found his hand caught in an inverted cat vise of sixteen needle-pointed claws, the offending hand flat against Johnson's stomach, his eyes cobra-like, scythe-like slits of pure malevolence - one of Johnson's feline canines caught on his lower lip, its amethyst point devoid of dentine, sharp as a scalpel, blue as a diamond. At this point the disturber of the sacred tongue depressors was unharmed, but the slightest move elicited a corresponding slight extension of those sixteen curved stilettos. It was not unlike having one's hand in a boxing glove full of fishhooks. If one wanted to get out - and one did - it would require the minimal help of four fearless human assistants of fantastic manual desterity. It was possible to escape only if these assistants moved with split-second, simultaneous accuracy to pull Johnson's paws apart. This method allowed one to escape with only minor wounds, but the safest yet most unnerving way was to wait it out until Johnson had made up his mind that you were only kidding. This might take from five minutes to a half hour and few people had that kind of courage or were that free of panic or hysteria. So most unfortunates tried to snatch the hand free immediately upon being trapped, with results too bloodily ineffectual to be described. Only a half grapefruit gently dropped over his face like an ether cone would relax Johnson enough so his claws, like spines of a cactus, could be individually picked from the threatened extremity.
While half a grapefruit would anethetize Johnson, the most interesting way of serving Johnson his passion fruit was to present it to him in its glorious entirety: a whole unsullied, uncut, large grapefruit. ... (-- pgs. 14-19) |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 12:38 pm Post subject: |
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The Post-American World
Hardcover
By Fareed Zakaria
| Quote: | We are now living through the third great power shift of the modern era. It could be called "the rise of the rest." Over the past few decades, countries all over the world have been experiencing rates of economic growth that were once unthinkable. While they have had booms and busts, the overall trend has been unambiguously upward. This growth has been most visible in Asia but is no longer confined to it. That is why to call this shift "the rise of Asia" does not describe it accurately. In 2006 and 2007, 124 countries grew at a rate of 4 percent or more. That includes more than 30 countries in Africa, two-thirds of the continent. Antoine van Agtmael, the fund manager who coined the term "emerging markets," has identified the 25 companies most likely to be the world's next great multinationals. His list includes four companies each from Briazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan; three from India; two from China; and one each from Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa.
Look around. The tallest building in the world is now in Taipei, and it will soon be overtaken by one being built im Dubai. The world's richest man is Mexican, and its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese. The world's biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, its leading refinery is under construction in India, and its largest factories are all in China. By many measures, London is becoming the leading financial center, and the United Arab Emirates is home to the most richly endowed investment fund. Once quintessentially American icons have been appropriated by foreigners. The world's largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. Its number one casino is not in Las Vegas but in Macao, which has also overtaken Vegas in annual gambling revenues. The biggest movie industry, in terms of both movies made and tickets sold, is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Even shopping, America's greatest sporting activity, has gone global. Of the top ten malls in the world, only one is in the United States; the world's biggest is in Beijing. Such lists are arbitrary, but it is striking that only ten years ago, America was at the top in many, if not most, of these categories.
... in fact, the share of people living on a dollar a day or less plummeted from 40 percent in 1981 to 18 percent in 2004, and is estimated to fall to 12 percent by 2015. China's growth alone has lifted more than 400 million people out of poverty. Poverty is falling countries housing 80 percent of the world's population. ... In .... China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, Kenya, and South Africa - the poor are slowly being absorbed into productive and growing economies. For the first time ever, we are witnessing genuinely global growth. ... It is the birth of a new global order.
A related aspect of this new era is the diffusion of power from states to other actors. The "rest" that is rising includes many nonstate actors Groups and individuals have been empowered, and hierarchy, centralization, and control are being undermined. Functions that were once controlled by governments are now shared with international bodies like the World Trade Organization and the European Union. Non-governmental groups are mushrooming every day on every issue in every country. Corporations and capital are moving from place to place, finding the best location in which to do business, rewarding some governments while punishing others. Terrorists like Al Qaeda, drug cartels, insurgents, and militias of all kinds are finding space to operate within the nooks and crannies of the international system. Power is shifting away from nation-states, up, down, and sideways. In such an atmosphere, the traditional applications of national power, both economic and military, have become less effective.
The emerging international system is likely to be quite different from those that have preceded it. One hundred years ago, there was a multipolar order run by a collection of European governments, with constantly shifting alliances, rivalries, miscalculations, and wars. Then came the bipolar duopoly of the Cold War, more stable in many ways, but with the superpowers reacting and overreacting to each other's every move. Since 1991, we have lived under an American imperium, a unique unipolar world in which the the open global economy has expanded and accelerated dramatically. This expansion is now driving the next change in the nature of the international order. ((From the chapter entitled, The Rise of the Rest, pgs. 2-4) |
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Last edited by editor on Sun Jan 11, 2009 11:47 am; edited 3 times in total |
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