Someone remarked that I tend to write scary diaries. Well, running out of water is kind of scary but I have other interests as well besides writing about food & water.

I have to confess that I am an ardent admirer of Jean Sibelius, the Finnish composer, whose music has haunted me since I was eleven. It started with "Valse Triste", a rather somber, short piece of music which was included in a collection titled "The best of Romantic Tunes of the 20th Century". I was hooked. I must have played that track thousands of times over the next years, possibly boring to death those around me. Then I came across "Finlandia" playing on the wireless, his signature composition, a stirring, nationalistic work that was designed to rouse Finnish's anti-Russian sentiments. A few years later, as a young man immersed in rock music and jazz, I stumbled across a box of cassettes containing his seven symphonies and became an aficionado for life. I couldn't help liking the man who wrote  this about the start of his 4th symphony: "the first chord must be struck hard, like destiny!"

Nowadays I am the only one that listens to him in the household so I bought a separate stereo system which I have placed in the almost soundproof conservatory where I can turn up the volume while I attempt to write and entertain the local bird population. And what a strange "bird" this man was.

Grampy is still the king.  His eyes light up when he sees me.  We have some time to kill before we can check into the campground so we head for the boardwalk.  I watch him savor the beauty of sand dunes and beach grass ten feet below us.  We arrive at the peak of the last dune and look out at the Atlantic Ocean.  I say "Do you like the beach?"  He melts my heart by looking at me with those wide innocent eyes and says it, beach, for the first time in his life.

 

The topic for next[editor's note, by Migeru] this month's ET film blog is

Contemporary Russian Film (1991-) : Everything But the Kitchen Sink.  

First, if you have not yet, please read the main introductory diary here.  Basically, you just see a movie and come back here and talk about it in a few weeks.

Now, I would like to take the time to answer some Freqently Asked Questions.
 

Promoted by Migeru

Last year, I set out a list of development goals I wanted to achieve or look into their potential. These were:

Continue and develop education program for high school students from Alexander Townswhip with the aim to get them to pass matriculation exams and put them into university.

Investigate the extent and/or develop a program for Street Outreach for street kids.

Investigate the extent and/or develop a (local) program of Food Banks for the poor, especially children.

Investigate and where able adopt the practicalities of living carbon neutral in South Africa - minus the car which remains (sad to say) an inherent necessity.

Investigate possibilities of creating a more comprehensive and modern Direct Aid scheme.

Report and rely on feedback from a familiar internet community...

Some six months later, I need to conclude that my second aim, development of Street Outreach, has failed totally.

... an entire encyclopedia written by unedited amateurs, not to mention ignoramuses, seemed destined to be junk.

Everything I knew about the structure of information convinced me that knowledge would not spontaneously emerge from data, without a lot of energy and intelligence deliberately directed to transforming it. <...>

How wrong I was. ... Both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites. It turns out that with the right tools it is easier to restore damage text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damage text (vandalism) in the first place, and so the good enough article prospers and continues. With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.

In his response to the Edge question: "What have you changed your mind about?", Kevin Kelly's remarks have a direct bearing on EuroTrib's current discussions about how to get our message to the wider world, in particular, via an ETpedia.

More provocative -- and debatable -- is what he says about the wider social and political dimensions of Wikipedia's transformative potential as a model for collaboration, productivity, even political organization.  I wonder if he is idealizing how Wikipedia really works by minimizing the amount of oversight and grunt-work that actually gets put in "behind-the-scenes" (despite his implication that Wikipedia eliminated the need for "a laborious process of top-down editing and re-writing" which existed in Wikipedia's antecedent version, Nupedia).

Panic over commodity shortages continues to emerge as the dominant factor in the global markets, with both end user and speculative buyers of corn, soybean, cotton, rice and a host of other commodities taking note of what's happening with the wheat shortcomings. Commodity markets are now seen as the main factor behind price rises. But rising fuel prices, Chinese demands and a lack of infrastructure to deal with extreme weather in countries such as Bangladesh and Australia have also played their part.

Farmers and food executives have appealed fruitlessly to federal officials for regulatory steps to limit speculative buying that is helping to drive food prices higher.  "Casino capitalism has taken a seat at the table of the poor" said EU Socialist Group leader Martin Schulz yesterday, "this is immorality carried to the extreme. This is why we need international controls on financial markets."

Meanwhile, some Americans are stocking up on staples such as rice, flour and oil in anticipation of high prices and shortages spreading from overseas.

Diary rescue by Migeru

Text moved below the fold - Weekend bump for your viewing pleasure! - In Wales

AP, Via MSNBC:

THERMAL, Calif. - At Las Palmitas Elementary School, nestled between rundown homes and fields of grapes, peppers and dates in Southern California, 99 percent of students live in poverty and fewer than 20 percent speak English fluently.

Las Palmitas and other schools in the Coachella Valley Unified School District are just the type policy makers had in mind when Congress passed the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 to shed light on the disparities facing poor and minority children.

Sorry, --not true. The law was intended to punish those who failed--to yammer  after the loosers. The mostly non-white loosers.

"I've been actually able to see my mom and tell her how much I love her and how much I miss her."

Jada Pointer's tummy ache was cured with a smile.

It was the perfect smile: her mom's. The 9-year-old from Perris hadn't seen that comforting smile in more than a year.

Nine-year-old Albert Gonzalez held onto his mother's long hair like it was his lifeline. The boy from San Bernardino twisted it, tasted it, tangled it through his fingers and plucked a strand or two to save for later.

"I need it, Mommy," he said, gripping a strand in his hand. "I need it to take home."

These are the stories of the kids who take the annual Mother's Day bus ride to visit their moms in California's prisons.

In the meta thread, Ephemera said:

Things I would like to see are diaries about social/cultural/political trends that are occuring not just in one country, but across Europe. Diaries about the emerging 'European space', as it were, above the national, but below the global.

linca said:

Is there knowledge about EU-wide trends in sociology/culture ? I read a bit of sociology, but pretty much all of it is France-centered. There are EU-wide stats, but stats don't make political and social analysis all by themselves.

The advantage of ET is that each could bring knowledge about his own country ; and that sometimes happen in some diaries. But is that enough to identify EU-wide trends ?

Now in serious questions of sociology and culture we don't have many resources. But if ET is a building block of a future European public sphere then popular culture is important too.

My dear fellas. Europe is so Doomed

It has been a long time (like, a day, or even more) since anybody wrote a Europe.Is.Doomed diary, and an even longer time has passed without me introducing newcomers to the "NARRATIVE".

It is about time that we recall again all our conventional wisdom about reality, enlightenment and anthropology 101 with the excuse of a wonderful wonderful, really wonderful (or the "wond") tale about mortgages and the European economic world.

Today, we will visit a textbook example of how narratives interact with each other to create semi-structural myths which in turn can get close to losing internal coherence.

Yes.. the "Europe.Is.So.Doomed" narrative strikes again in a mindblowing attack leading to this MY HUMBLE POSITION PAPER.

The Republican party is facing another bad election cycle.  Some of the reason is simply the stars aligning against it, but the larger reason is the miserable results of its policies.

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

Whoo! Saturday bump up! - In Wales

EcoNoticiario # 5 covers a broad range of topics: health of forests and wetlands in Spain and Cuba, a whole range of environmental news from Colombia, the effects of drought, rising energy costs and volcanic eruptions in Chile, and the ongoing farmers' strike in Argentina.

[I have been writing about the Spanish water crisis in a separate series of diaries. For the latest news see my recent diary: Ten Things America Can Learn From Spain's Water Wars.]

Your environmental word of the week:

sequía-drought

[As always: All translations are mine.]

I have rarely detested someone in my life as much as I detest John McCain. When I lived in L.A. (89 to 94) I traveled quite a bit throughout the States. Once driving with my family to visit a friend in Hillsborough (NM) we stopped overnight in Tucson. After finishing a meal in the hotel where we stayed, I wandered about and spotted the lounge, it was empty and thought that it would be a good place for a nightcap and quiet enough for my daily bout of crosswords. The bar was tendered by a man who would have been in his late seventies. Coming from a hotelier family, I thought, this is cool, must be the owner or a close relative (my own great grandfather used to do a spot of bar tending at the tender age of 81, kept him sharp, used to say).

Anyway I got my drink and instead of making a beeline for a table I stayed at the bar and sort of started a conversation with the usual opening lines, weather, surroundings etc...he asked me where I was from and what kind of line I was in and we got to talk about work ethics in the hotel industry. I mentioned that my great grandfather did cover a lot of jobs in his lifetime, from gardening to filling in for a sick dishwasher to bar tending and that's when he said that he had only a few months experience in the hotel world.

Like in most former parts of the Soviet Union, Russian is a widely spoken language in the Baltic state of Estonia, and a significant portion of the Estonian population are ethnic Russians who immigrated during the Soviet-era. Estonia is a small country, home to about 1.3 million people. Approximately 26% of those are Russians. Finnish author and journalist Leena Hietanen has written a book provocatively entitled Viron kylmä sota, Estonia's cold war, in which she takes Estonia to task for its treatment of the Russian minority living in Estonia.

Let me introduce you to the latest episode of the longest-running soap opera in Hungarian politics.

The main character of the series: Tamás Deutsch, member of the inner cabal of the main opposition party Fidesz.

Co-star of the latest episode: Lajos Für, onetime defense minister in the first freely elected government.

Episode teaser: what to do when you're Jewish and your father-in-law joined a far-right paramilitary?

Part of the irregular Countdown to $200 oil series.

Oil price breaks through $126 a barrel

Crude oil prices surged on Friday, breaching $126 a barrel for the first time and putting pressure on Opec, the oil producers' cartel, to increase output in an effort to lower global energy costs and prevent further inflationary pressures.

The new record came a day after Abdalla El-Badri, Opec's secretary general, suggested the cartel would not increase its output in spite of a 100 per cent jump in oil prices in the last 12 months and warnings it could hit $200 a barrel.

Since hitting $100 in early January, the oil is up 26% in 4 months. Coincidentally, another 2 increases of 26% in 4 months will bring us to mid-January 2009 and almost exactly to $200 oil.

This ball, our ball. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals--and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me-- nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Promoted by Migeru

Disregard of.

This diary isn't even intended as funny. It is about deadly accidents.

On my railway, in recent years, there has been an upswing in accidents involving young people that resulted from the utter disregard of basic safety rules. While even with the upswing, we are speaking of the behaviour of a microscopic subset of the total youth population, thus the outer end of a spectrum, there is still some underlying development here.