Left Overs From The Hunger Games

Last night my family and I saw The Hunger Games midnight release.  It was a lot of fun though for us all to go we had to save up some…food alone…ugh, the prices.  We’ve really enjoyed the books and it’s been fun to go to the show after that…sort of the icing on the cake.  I thought all in all they did a good job adapting the story to the big screen…it’s quite a dark show though, make no mistake and the books…darker still.  I knew after reading the last book I really wanted to see the show.  Closing the back cover left me excited for what it would be like in the theater

.  If you’ve not read it I recommend it…three books…all worth the read. 

Okay, there’s The Hunger Games…where do the left overs come in?  Well, since I had limited time yesterday I kept some photos and waited until today to post.  The weather is really amazing right now

.  The skies are beautiful, the buds are beginning to show themselves and the sun has that warmth showing through that I’ve so longed for

.  The greens of spring have been quite slow to show but it is slowly making itself known

.  I love when the buds just start popping wide open…as of today these are much more open then in this photo

.  I�$99m ready for the bleak scene in our backyard to green up, I have to tell you…just look at the dead leaf remnants in our rocks

.  The house finches are so pretty to see.  I heard some chirping and looked up to see this handsome little fellow

.  It won’t be long and I’ll be in this spot taking pictures of the storms that roll by on the plains in the spring

.  This little ironwork bird is sitting and waiting for the warmer days to come

…I can hardly wait!  The dead leaves in the rocks will give way to our potted garden

.  This year we’ve got everything from egg plants to Asian peppers…it will be beautiful and tasty!  This is the beginning of every*walk I take around here…care to join me

?

Leavin' on a jet plane....

don't know when I'll be back again.
Wanna go?  3 seats left.
:)

ah, well.

Moving on......

Got my toes did by a munchkin

the other day!

:)

Have a great day!

Wordless Wednesday....

Have a great day!

:)

Wallpaper

I live without cash – and I manage just fine | Mark Boyle | Environment| guardian.co.uk

I live without cash – and I manage just fine | Mark Boyle | Environment | guardian.co.uk:

After managing a couple of organic food companies made me realise that even "ethical business" would never be quite enough, an afternoon's philosophising with a mate changed everything. We were looking at the world's issues – environmental destruction, sweatshops, factory farms, wars over resources – and wondering which of them we should dedicate our lives to. But I realised that I was looking at the world in the same way a western medical practitioner looks at a patient, seeing symptoms and wondering how to firefight them, without any thought for their root cause. So I decided instead to become a social homeopath, a pro-activist, and to investigate the root cause of these symptoms.

One of the critical causes of those symptoms is the fact we no longer have to see the direct repercussions our purchases have on the people, environment and animals they affect. The degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed have increased so much that we're completely unaware of the levels of destruction and suffering embodied in the stuff we buy. The tool that has enabled this separation is money.

Rysk blåstjärna...[Explore, Front Page 03.04.2012]

Tuesday toodles....

Have a wonderful day!

:)

Rescue Panther

Now Can We Start Talking About the Real Foxconn? - Bloomberg

Now Can We Start Talking About the Real Foxconn? - Bloomberg:

From the comments~

There are many kinds of truth. Just ask a novelist, an oral historian, an artist...or a playwright. My biggest fear with the explosion of the Daisey story has come true - he wove together multiple true stories into a story with a lot of truth to it, but which was not literally true, and since the inexactitude has come to light, almost every comment on this board has used this as an excuse to downplay the daily injustices that Chinese factory workers face.

So their lives are better than if they continued to farm - does that make it ok that MOST of them do not receive legal rates for overtime work? So Apple's a scapegoat when actually EVERYTHING YOU OWN was manufactured under illegal conditions - does that make Apple an angel? (Citation: I worked in Chinese factory consulting and am fluent in Chinese.) Whatever Daisey did, at least he cares about victims of injustice. The rest of you ought to be ashamed.

Cape Cod Theatre Project Will Offer Premieres by Mike Daisey and Neil LaBute - Playbill.com

Cape Cod Theatre Project Will Offer Premieres by Mike Daisey and Neil LaBute - Playbill.com:

Neil LaBute and monologist Mike Daisey will develop new works as part of the Cape Cod Theatre Project's 18th season this summer in Falmouth, MA.

Daisey (The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, The Last Cargo Cult, How Theatre Failed America) will develop a new piece that will launch the season with public performances July 5-7.

David Sedaris' family of characters | The News Journal | delawareonline.com

David Sedaris' family of characters | The News Journal | delawareonline.com:

News Journal: NPR's "This American Life," a radio program to which you have contributed, recently retracted Mike Daisey's controversial report on Apple factory workers in China after it determined that some of the information was fabricated. Do you think nonfiction writers have a license to embellish?

Sedaris: There was only one time in my life when I wrote something for "Esquire" as a journalist. I went to a morgue in Phoenix and spent 10 days there. I don't want to be a journalist. It does not interest me. What are you going to do if comedian Chris Rock gets up on stage and says his father beat him until he was black and blue? Are you going to fact-check that? I don't think humor writers should be journalists. I embellish as much as I can get away with.

I Got The Blogger App!

Hey there guys! So I recently purchased an iPhone and just yesterday I decided to get the Blogger app! I gotta admit, the app is well laid out and super easy to use. I can now keep you guys updated on the cool stuff that I find or that are happening around the world. Thank you guys for sticking around.

Spring...

signifies Hope!

We had a lovely Easter.  My brother took four generations of women out to dinner, (he's a brave man) and a long drive afterwards through some beautiful scenery south of St. Augustine.

My sis-in-law, her mom, Patti and I.  "Granny"

is 87 and a hoot.  She kept us laughing the

whole time.  My brother just drove shaking

his head back and forth.  :)

Speaking of Mike, please keep him in your

prayers; they're doing more tests today

to determine why his heart rate doesn't

increase while they run stress tests.

HOPE+FAITH my favorite words for today!

I hope you had a wonderful Easter!

:)

New Header

I thought I would leave this for awhile as my header.  One of my sons just came back from a visit  to NYC to see a relative and some friends. While there and while touring various places, he went to Hyde Park and there..behold!  A street with my name.  Even spelled correctly with an "e" on the end.

I am getting ready to go work out and not sure of the rest of the day but you can be sure that it will be busy.

Have a happy!  xox

Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’ - NYTimes.com

Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’ - NYTimes.com:

As for my nightmare vision of a world splintered by addiction to stupid games, Lantz had a different perspective. He said that he liked to think Drop7 was not only addictive but also, on some level, about addiction. Games, he told me, are like “homebrew neuroscience” — “a little digital drug you can use to run experiments on your own brain.” Part of the point of letting them seduce you, as Lantz sees it, is to come out the other side a more interesting and self-aware person; more conscious of your habits, weaknesses, desires and strengths. “It’s like heroin that is abstracted or compressed or stylized,” he said. “It gives you a window into your brain that doesn’t crush your brain.”

I tried to think about what — if anything — I had learned from this window into my brain. Like their spiritual forefather, Tetris, most stupid games are about walls: building them, scaling them, knocking them down. Walls made of numbers, walls made of digital bricks, walls with green pigs hiding behind them. They’re like miniature boot camps of containment. Ultimately, I realized, these games are also about a more subtle and mysterious form of wall-building: the internal walls we build to compartmentalize our time, our attention, our lives. The legendary game designer Sid Meier once defined a game as, simply, “a series of interesting choices.” Maybe that’s the secret genius of stupid games: they force us to make a series of interesting choices about what matters, moment to moment, in our lives.

How Can We Know The Way?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jesus’s disciples felt confused when he talked about going away. “You know the way to the place where I am going,” He told them. Thomas voiced the question burning in all their minds: “Lord we don’t know where you’re going. So how can we know the way? Jesus’s answer was simple and direct: I am the way, the truth and the life. No one goes to the Father except through me.”

It may be popular to claim that many paths lead to God, but that contradicts what the Bible teaches. Jesus taught that access to God can only come through placing our faith in His sacrificial death and resurrection. The way is clear and open to everyone, blocked only by a person’s unwillingness to believe. There is no alternate route. People who denounce the gospel as narrow minded miss the wonder that God provided a way for us to come to Him at all.

Jesus is more than the path to salvation and eternal life: He shows us the way to live a life of true meaning and purpose. Nurturing our relationship with Him and following the directions in God’s Word are the only way to travel. We may be temped to let our life be guided by sources that seem more exciting, but we’ll only end up feeling confused.

Jesus answered him, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one goes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6

 

 

I want to wish you all a Happy Easter as we celebrate the Life, the death and Resurrection of our Savior, Jesus Christ , The Son of Almighty God.

For God so loved the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son that who so ever believes in Him shall not perish but have Ever Lasting  Life. John 3:16.

 

Love and Care

Dianne :)

Happy Easter

Happy Easter everyone.

Like the sun on this flower, He is Risen.

Corporations Flee Right-Wing ALEC: Yet Another Win for Progressives « 2012 The Awakening

Corporations Flee Right-Wing ALEC: Yet Another Win for Progressives « 2012 The Awakening:

With all the hubbub over Mike Daisey’s unfortunate embellishments in his spoken-word performance about Foxconn workers, it became easy to lose sight of the truths in Daisey’s work: namely that factory workers at Foxconn do routinely endure unacceptable conditions to make the products that we, as consumers, enjoy on a regular basis. We created the market for those workers’ jobs, and then we allowed our beloved tech companies to get away with not enforcing labor rules as strictly as they should. It’s a situation that was not okay before Daisey infamously lied to This American Life fact-checkers, and it is a situation that is not okay now.

The good news is that activists have made at least some headway in campaigns targeting Apple for its lax enforcement of labor rules in China. Both Daisey’s story and a subsequent investigation in the New York Times helped prompt a new wave of public interest in Foxconn worker conditions earlier this year (we can thank Daisey for that). Change.org supporters and other activists ran with that interest, pulling in more than 250,000 signatures for a petition targeting Apple and organizing protests around the world.

Soon after, watchdog group the Fair Labor Association released a new report on worker conditions at the plant, finding “at least 43 violations of Chinese laws and regulations, and numerous instances where Foxconn defied industry codes of conduct by having employees work more than 60 hours a week, and sometimes more than 11 days in a row,” according to the Times. In response, Foxconn said it would “work with Apple to carry out [a] remediation program, developed by both our companies.” Although there is legitimate concern about how much of an impact these changes will have, and when they will be implemented, the changes could, per the Times, “signal a new, wide-reaching change in working conditions throughout China.”

It may not be enough, but it is a significant step forward that activists (and yes, Mike Daisey) should celebrate.

Actor slits his own throat as knife switch turns fiction into reality | Stage | The Guardian

Actor slits his own throat as knife switch turns fiction into reality | Stage | The Guardian:

An actor slit his throat on stage when the prop knife for his suicide scene turned out to be a real one.

Daniel Hoevels, 30, slumped over with blood pouring from his neck while the audience broke into applause at the "special effect". Police are investigating whether the knife was a mistake or a murder plot. They are questioning the rest of the cast, and backstage hands with access to props; they will also carry out DNA tests.

Things went wrong at Vienna's Burgtheater as Hoevels' character went to "kill himself" in the final scene of Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart, about Mary Queen of Scots, on Saturday night

It was only when he did not get up to take a bow that anyone realised something had gone wrong.

On this Easter weekend....

I wish you many blessings,

and happy hearts.

....

On Cornish's Decision

I was asked earlier this year to give the commencement speech for Cornish College of the Arts graduation ceremonies. In advance of the Retraction episode of THIS AMERICAN LIFE going public, I reached out to Nancy Uscher, Cornish's president, and told her what was going to happen.

After the show aired we talked, and I agreed with her that it would be best that I withdraw from the ceremonies. I was asked for a statement, which I sent her on March 27th, and which I stand by. Here's that statement:

"A graduation is a day for the students who are stepping out into the world as artists in their own right. I would hate to see anything distract from their day, and so I respectfully withdraw from Cornish's graduation ceremonies this year. My best wishes to the young artists—I hope to see you out in our culture, making works that shake and stir us, and I hope you have a fantastic graduation."

I had been told that they would make the announcement with my statement, and that it would be a low-key, mutual parting of the ways without recriminations. This was made very clear to me by Ms. Uscher.

I have been asking Cornish often when they were going to make their statement. They've been uncommunicative and cagey—Nancy dodged my emails, and delayed until their statement was out this morning. When I called Karen Bystrom, the communications director, she passed the buck back up to Nancy, the same person who had been calling with supportive calls until her board told her not to, and who then drafted a statement condemning me after seeking my honorable withdrawal, which I gave her willingly.

I've apologized for what I've done wrong. Cornish's choice to grandstand on my back, when they had a very open statement from me withdrawing almost two weeks ago, is their choice. I applaud their embrace of "professional integrity"—it's unfortunate that they didn't exercise that integrity in this case.

But I certainly forgive them—I know what it's like to be caught between different sets of obligations, and how the pressure of public scrutiny can help us make unfortunate choices.

There is a lesson here for the artists that are graduating, but I do not think it is the one Cornish thinks it is teaching.

...

A Letter From An Audience Member

A letter I received yesterday from an audience member:

***

Mike,

I saw your show about a month ago and I want to you and thank you. The show was great, and I have a deeply personal connection to the topic of labor in China.

Mike, the reason I'm writing is that I was a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in China from 2001-2003 and I witnessed the destruction and injustice of Chinese labor practices. The experiences I had have stuck with me and I am so grateful to you for addressing them in your work. I went to Bates and I studied in China three times while I was a student before joining the Peace Corps, and today I work in Chinatown. I have been intimately connected to China for 15 years now.

I am not a story teller, so I cannot convey this memory with the emotion that it still holds for me, but I will try. My Peace Corps town was not a prestigious town among Peace Corps towns in China, it was poor by comparison. Lu Zhou is its name. It's an industrial town near the border of GuiZhou. My friends there tell me it was prestigious 1,200 years ago for its alcohol industry, but not as much now.

I taught at a teachers college outside the city along the banks of the Yangtze. It was not the type of school that drew students from great distances. It was kind of a Chinese community college. Most of my students came from farm families. On holidays my students went home and picked tea leaves. Many students had siblings who were not allowed to go to college, because the families could pick only one child to go to school.

One morning I walked out of my Soviet style concrete dorm and found a bunch of students waiting to get onto busses parked in the center of my campus. The students each had bed rolls and a back pack. These represented their life's possessions. We were in Sichuan and the busses were bound for Shenzhen, a journey of over a thousand miles. The students were mostly sixteen to eighteen year old girls and they were traveling to the factories. They weren't abandoning their studies officially, but I learned later that these students wouldn't return. They had no money. They were traveling "free of charge" thanks to the companies in Shenzhen. It was a one-way ticket. What happens to a seventeen year old Chinese girl with no money a thousand miles from home?

I couldn't comprehend what was going on. Those students were my charges and they were so vulnerable and innocent. They looked like little kids. I was only twenty-one and to me they looked like babies. They were kids.

I am an English teacher now and I often give my students the poem Chicago by Carl Sandburg. There are dark references in that poem to prostitution, murder, starvation, and abuse. My Chinese students understood that poem well because industrial US America in that age isn't very different from China today.

That day when the busses took my students away has been in my memory for ages. Your performance brought some attention to this topic and I'm very grateful for it. Ira Glass seems to have missed the point if you ask me.

Thanks again,
Brian Knudsen

Hazy London

flickr.com

Did You Do Your Homework?

Live 2.0 » Did You Do Your Homework?:

I’m also pointing out this show because of the Mike Daisey thing from a couple weeks ago, and I want to point out something important: what Aaron is doing, though serious and reflective of reality, does not pose AS reality. He’s never going to get in trouble for saying things that aren’t true in his show because he’s not trying to make us think they ARE true. This is obvious to everyone in the world, except Mike Daisey and his defenders.

I'm not sure how I get mentioned here—I agree that this is true, that Aaron's work is clearly theater. I'd say that all theater is representational, by the act of it being theater.

If Aaron takes liberties with things that happened in real life in his show, it’s totally expected and within the “contract” of the show. We get that it’s not a literal re-telling of what he saw as a substitute teacher. Little things like comic exaggeration and funny voices are a clue to that.

This might be part of the nuance people like Jim aren't gathering—though I certainly agree I've crossed my own lines, the theatrical performance of AGONY/ECSTASY has a *lot* of comic exaggeration and vocal technique. It is abundantly clear that it is theater. This doesn't remove my obligations in any way, and I have previously talked about falling short in this work, but the idea that I sit at a table and intone like Edward R. Murrow is really not what's happening at my shows.

Mike Daisey, quite deliberately, talks like a reporter and liberally intermixes facts with fiction in a way that we have no reason to believe he’s shifting from one to the other, and because of the specificity of his accusation against certain people and institutions, we assume he’s telling the truth. And he knows it.

I do not know what "talks like a reporter" means, but I am presuming it is the THIS AMERICAN LIFE style used in the radio adaptation. And has been clear from the outset—I think that was a flawed choice, and their style, adapted into my performance, is part of that.

GRUBB STREET: Truth and Theatre

GRUBB STREET: Truth and Theatre:

In the weeks since the revelations there has been a great lamentation and rending of garments about this, a strange form of kabuki dance in which people a shocked, simply shocked, that a writer misrepresented himself. But the story feels more nuanced than at first blush and several of the actors involved are acting out of character.

Marketplace, the way the script it supposed to work, should have sprung this on TAL with an expose that shows up and challenges their facts. Instead, they offered what they learned to TAL and gave them the chance to break the story on their own. That's nice, but its not normal.

TAL, were it a traditional media company, could have stonewalled (we stand behind our sources), then, when overwhelmed, squeaked out innocuous retractions and then redesigned their site, so that the offending piece mysterious would go down the memory hole. They instead did ANOTHER show on their mistake.

And Daisey himself could have doubled-down in the best media tradition, and thrown his translator under the bus. Of COURSE she disagrees with me, she's in a country committing all these labor abuses! Reduce it to he said/she said, which makes the media believe things are balanced. Instead, he admits to some sins, stands by his badly-damaged word on others, and seemed to be honestly trying to figure out where things went wrong. In the end, he apologized on his own blog.

It seems almost precious in the modern media world. We have a media where daytime talkers and morning shows go off at length with obvious falsehoods, pounded into believable shape through continual repetition. Where political candidates will tell blatant lies, get called on them, then go off to their next speech to tell the same lies again. Where a lot of reporting is pressured by time constraints to little more than rewriting press releases and canned interviews filtered to the speaker's talking points and the audience's expectations. And here we have a passion for finding out the truth. In the wake of these revelations, there seems to be a lot of pearls being clutched by a lot of sensible souls.

Revise, Revive, Recycle: A Season in Theater, So Far | The House Next Door

Revise, Revive, Recycle: A Season in Theater, So Far | The Hotse Next Door:

Monologuist Mike Daisey's been brought low by bothersome things called facts, but his The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs featured one untarnishable sequence. Daisey described accurately the use of 430,000 workers at Foxconn, the Chinese factory where Apple products are made. "That can be a difficult number to conceptualize. Instead think about how there are twenty-five cafeterias at the plant. Now you just need to visualize a cafeteria that seats thousands and thousands of people. I'll wait."

Daisey's righteous condescension has its prickly pleasures. Sensing many, like me, had figured they'd gotten the point without bothering to visualize, he prodded, "You can do it. Try visualizing a cafeteria from your youth. Really, I'll wait." And again, sensing slackers, he reprimanded us, like daddy in the driver's seat, with "I will turn this show around." Duly warned, I got the picture in my head. "Okay. Now. What I want you to do now is push the walls outward…over and over and over until it holds thousands of people. Now, imagine 25 rooms, all that size, all next to each other."

The communal realization was a rare rush. I fear moments like this will now be even harder to come by. Leaping to a new idea requires trust. I hope the price of Daisey's theatrical fabrications is just the hiring of fact-checkers and, one can hope, a reality check on his own ego.

"I Wish You to See Your Own House on CNN!": 15 Jokes from the Siege of Sarajevo | Slog

"I Wish You to See Your Own House on CNN!": 15 Jokes from the Siege of Sarajevo | Slog:

Today is the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Siege of Sarajevo, the longest artillery siege—even longer than the Siege of Leningrad—and one of the most infamous in modern history. It was brutal, with a poorly equipped citizenry going into old war museums to find working rifles and ammunition.

A Stranger reader in Sarajevo, Amir Telibechirowich, wrote us a few weeks ago to ask whether he could send a series of jokes from the siege era as his form of commemoration. This is from a city where an underground radio station "celebrated" the day that the siege became the longest by playing the Queen song "We Are the Champions." (Another station, he told us, would begin broadcasts with: "'Good evening to all three of you out there who still have batteries for the radio set.' Of course, this was referring to the fact that electricity was gone in most of the city back then.")

Some of these jokes are grim—very grim. But they were the product, Amir says, of people trying to stay sane in extremely grim circumstances.

Jenny Mullins and Sarah Knobel Review, Washington, DC - washingtonpost.com

Jenny Mullins and Sarah Knobel Review, Washington, DC - washingtonpost.com:

There's an element of vanitas symbolism in Mullins's show, which is called "Gold for the Price of Silver" and which the artist has described as a critique of American consumerism and excess. That old art-historical trick - seen most often in still lifes of the 16th and 17th centuries - uses pictures of live flowers and the bounty of the harvest to hint at their opposites: death and scarcity.

It's essentially the same trick that monologuist Mike Daisey used in his theatrical show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." In that show, which returns to Woolly Mammoth this summer for a brief remounting, Daisey contrasted our love for Apple's gorgeous devices with thoughts about how they're made.

Mullins's work never feels didactic or scolding. There's no tone of schoolmarmish superiority here. If she wants us to contemplate the rot that hides behind the beautiful things we crave, it's only because she craves them, too.

Odds & Ends

Man, I don’t know how many times the weather will dip back to nasty temps and grey skies but I have to admit I’m tired of it.  I was going to go out again and see what I could see but the cool temperatures just sapped my interest in things outside today so I’ve only got a few pictures from earlier this week to share today.  It’s really no surprise to see it get nasty like this before Easter.  This has happened many times before.  The good news remains that it can’t last.  I love to see the triumph of the sun over the gloom.  It gives the sky sort of an angelic appearance that really ministers to me.  The brightness creates a silhouette from our trees that always draws my attention .  I keep feeling that there’s a theme here.  Never in my life have I ever had such a sense of dark things waging a war against all that’s right and true but somehow beyond all the dark tendrils reaching up to drown the light there’s the strength of God’s promise coming to pass beyond it that will surely overtake it all .  This is a season when there’s either many religious posts or themes of colored eggs.  For me I don’t mind the eggs as long as we all remember what the season is really about and frankly the religious for a day thing doesn’t do much for me.  Where would we all be every day if Christ had not sacrificed himself for us all and been raised again from the dead?  However you chose to celebrate I pray you’re blessed.  I thank God for giving His son for us all and making this life worth living. 

spelen

In The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, actor Christopher Willard tries to "dig past the inaccuracies" - Denver Arts - Show and Tell

In The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, actor Christopher Willard tries to "dig past the inaccuracies" - Denver Arts - Show and Tell:

For most people, this will be the first chance to see this show in its entirety. What should they expect?

In order to draw in elements of the controversy, I will be truncating the work to allow for discussion of what has transpired (Daisey allowed adaptation to all who wanted to present his work). It would be a very long evening if I presented the unedited piece and this other aspect of the public reaction. I will endeavor to present a balanced representation of the work and a reporting of the controversy. Daisey claims to have now trimmed six minutes from the monologue, removing all inaccuracies and elements that he is not comfortable presenting as the truth. I have asked him to share those cuts but am still awaiting a returned e-mail to learn what he has cut from the work.

How did you feel on first learning of the revelations that Daisey had misrepresented certain fictionalized elements as fact?

My first reaction was "What was fabricated?" I had been researching Steve Jobs and Foxconn, and learned that the stories of the suicides and hexane poisonings were corroborated by journalists and other reputable reporting outlets. I suspected that some of Daisey's own observations might have been fictionalized and, indeed, that turned out to be the case. I initially questioned continuing on with the presentation, but then I saw the opportunity to create a learning moment (what Daisey is experiencing now) and the chance to add another layer of conversation to the piece. What happened (is happening) at the Chinese factories needs our attention and demands to be addressed. This presentation is one way to do that, and digging past the inaccuracies to get to the heart of the piece helps us get there.

Everything About This Gary Busey Heaven Story Is My Favorite | Videogum

Everything About This Gary Busey Heaven Story Is My Favorite | Videogum:

We were shooting this movie—which is a horrible movie—and he was supposed to come back from the dead. And he of course, Gary Busey, supposedly had done this—he’d been in an accident and died and came back. He showed up on a set made to look like Heaven, and he looked around and said, “I can’t play this scene.” They were three days behind at this point. But Busey said, “It’s nothing like this. I’ve been to Heaven and it doesn’t look like this. That sofa’s all wrong. That mirror is ridiculous. They don’t even have mirrors!” It was ridiculous.

He was completely nuts about the design of Heaven.

Just the Facts | The Journal

Just the Facts | The Journal:

There is a black-or-white tone to Mr. Glass’ statements, that suggest that there isn’t a gray area here: it either all happened, as stated, or it’s a work of fiction. It’s the “strictly speaking” part of this that hangs me up, because there is some gray in creative nonfiction. I’m fine with the fact that Mr. Daisey included dialogue in his work, speaks as if he’s been in dorm rooms he has only seen from the outside, and guesses high on the number of workers he’d interviewed (since he says he doesn’t remember the exact number). And—this is where I’ll commit what some see as a mortal sin—if it made for a better narrative, I’d prefer to get the story that way, so long as he cleaved to the essential truths (not the facts) of his work.

My first political cartoon

In your Easter bonnet...

with all the frills upon it,

you'll be the grandest

uh, uh (person)

in the Easter parade!

:)

G-R-O-A-N

Oh whoa nelly.  It HAD to be done so I went out and did it.  What?  Weeding.  Those weeds were just choking the flower beds running along the front of the house.

I went out to eat with my colleagues and when I got home..it was just about high noon. I saw the weeds and just came in the house..made a tiny pony tail (shorter hair now) and tied a bandanna around my forehead (it was VERY sunny and hot) put on knee pads and headed out with my tall kitchen garbage can, the garden fork and my leather gloves.  Oh. my. goodness.  I pulled weeds till I really did cause my broken wrist that has healed of course, to protest.  I decided to use my right arm the way I would have had I not broken it.  It's a little swollen and hurts a bit but hey, it has to cope.  I worked out there for over an hour and gave up after emptying that can two times.  I will do the upper flower bed (oh, my back) in a few days. It is choked fully with weeds. I spread the Preen and it worked last year so it will work again.

I went to the garden section of a store late in the afternoon and bought a tomato plant and a sweet red bell pepper plant as well.  Just one each..container planting again.  It has been VERY successful for me for several years now.  Tomato is in the dirt but I ran out of soil and will have to go get some tomorrow for the pepper.  I was supposed to work out today but I will assume the weeding about fulfilled the obligation.

Whew.  Back is stiff but otherwise OK.  My knees suffered a lot  despite the knee pads as they were so gravely injured last June.  They have not fully recovered.  I went out taking photos day before yesterday and kneeling around on the ground and getting up so many times did a bad number on my knees.  I will have to find something to help me up so I don't have to use my left knee (worst one) as a push-up help.  Other knee is almost as bad so really, I need to guard both.  Hard to get on the ground and take photos when your knees are messed up.  :-(

XO

Tech Guys Should Just Keep It Techi | Tommi Stough

Tech Guys Should Just Keep It Techi | Tommi Stough:

Having grown up in the land of bullshit, the one ability it ingrained in me is to think for myself - and I did exactly that the whole time Daisey made headlines with his fascinating and unconventional freakshow. I knew from the get-go Daisey was full of bullshit - in fact, I have to admit that he's much better at it than most, including moi. But that's ok. It's not as though - even for a sec or two - that I thought that he wasn't anything other than a bullshit showman. Isn't that what American't has given the world in the past (insert time frame here) years? And even though his bullshit stinks like all others, at least anything he says or does on a stage in a theater will harm no one yet might just get some to think - with or without a few things thrown in that ain't quite truth. Now get this. Can you imagine a land of bullshitters starting to actually think? Hats off to Daisey for such an achievement. An achievement, in and of itself, that is practically a miracle in the land of be-me, be-like-me or else you lose, sucker! With that in mind. The be-like-me guys on the panal of this show should have never talked about this. Seriously. You should have just ignored it, fellows. This has been out of your league since 1984 became like 1984. Or you should have provided a bit more praise. It would have been that easy - praise the bullshitter. Indeed, there is something to the adage: keep your mouth shut if you don't want people to know how … how you might be lacking in the ability to be objective.

hars

I Re-Watched Titanic So You Don't Have To. You're Welcome.

I Re-Watched Titanic So You Don't Have To. You're Welcome.:

Titanic is three hours and 14 minutes long, which—fun fact—is longer than the actual journey of the Titanic. It is sooooo ballsy to just assume people will watch your movie for three hours and 14 minutes! Especially when everyone already knows exactly what happens in the end (spoiler: the boat is Keyser Söze). Sorry, Epcot Center, I'mma let you finish, but James Cameron's balls are like the giantest balls of all time. It would take three hours and 14 minutes just to walk around the circumference of James Cameron's balls.

Anyway, here's what happens in Titanic.

pole dancer

Union Square: Now The Very Model Of A Modern Major Police State: Gothamist

Union Square: Now The Very Model Of A Modern Major Police State: Gothamist:

"Ask yourselves," one young protester implored a cluster of stoic young officers, "Why are you here? There have been fights and drugs here in Union Square forever. It's never been shut down. But as soon as someone wants to stand up for a political cause there are tons of cops here." Another activist, Caleb Maupin, told us, "They make up the laws as they go along here. One night they say we can't have cardboard. Another night we can. Tonight there's fewer people here so they push us all the way off the sidewalk. But I've seen much worse than this tonight."

hhhjhh

John Biggs

John Biggs is a writer for TechCrunch who penned a series of rhapsodic articles about Foxconn. His latest is an old journalist's trick—if you have nothing new to say, repackage someone else's content.

In his latest, he uses me as a tool to bludgeon his way into making this assertion:

Arguably the process of making anything isn’t very glamorous, but compared to what could be in China, other parts of Asia and, in fact the rest of the developed and undeveloped world, Foxconn is a relative paradise. Workers are given room and board, a stipend to live off-campus if they want, and workers often want more work, not less. Foxconn is on par with any manufacturing center anywhere else in the world, including the U.S. The only difference, obviously, is the pittance workers are paid.

John Biggs—champion of the relative paradise!

This barely deserves refuting. The NYT series, the NPR reporting on the iPad factory explosions, SACOM reports, even the FLA report that just came out last week—none of these paint the picture Mr. Biggs is describing above. None of them describe a workplace that is on par with U.S. manufacturing.

Then Biggs reveals—there are places worse than Foxconn in China. Of course, no one doubted this—not I, nor anyone else has actually ever said that Foxconn was the worst employer in China—but it makes a nice flourish.

He links to a really excellent series being done by Adam Matthews on conditions in factories across China, and it is great work. On this Mr. Biggs and I are in agreement.

Then Mr. Biggs says of conditions at these factories:

It happens, it will continue to happen, but it won’t happen under the bright spotlight of world attention that is being shone on Foxconn specifically.

First, I don't accept this nihilism. Things don't have to continue to happen—things can change. In fact, change is a constant in this world. It can take years, it takes hard work, it takes activists, it takes public attention, it takes economic shifts, it takes everything—but it's work worth striving toward, and worth talking about.

Second, John is upset that so much attention is on Foxconn. But he's quoting from reporting that is getting wide distribution and readership *because* of the attention on Foxconn. Far from limiting the work that's happening, greater attention has increased the amount of reporting, and it is increasing the amount of public attention that reporting receives.

I've apologized for where I've gone wrong, but the conversation that has begun in earnest in the public space about Chinese manufacturing was *unimaginable* a year ago. You can see that in the WSJ analysis of what the changes at Foxconn are going to mean to the rest of Chinese manufacturing. What's happening now, and how it is covered, how it is read and cared about by the public, matters.

Sadly, China is far from the time when workers can unite and fight back. That time is coming, and Daisey probably did more to hinder its coming than any other activist, here or abroad.

We'll see.

Well played, @mdaisey by Matthew Panzarino

Well played, @mdaisey by Matthew Panzarino:

That would have been that, if not for a message from Steve a few minutes later. Daisey had not only seen his Tweet, he had retweeted it.

I think that there's something to be said for someone who owns the public opinion about them, good or bad, and faces up to it. Yes, it could just be that Daisey is happy with anything that keeps his name out there, but I don't think so. I think that there is an important lesson in this about acknowledging that there is a person behind any scandal or news story.

Sometimes people make a mistake, willful or not. In Daisey's case, probably both. An initial desperate desire to make a point about the way that western consumer culture affects Chinese workers led him to lie. That lie then took on a life of its own and he perpetuated it.

But that doesn't mean that there wasn't a life lived outside and around that lie that didn't have a positive influence. Both people who have known Daisey personally and who have merely heard him speak have said that he is a supremely gifted orator.

I still believe that what he did in speaking untruths about what he found in China did harm to the issue at large. That sucks, frankly, because it is an important one. But Daisey knew that it was important and lied to try to bring attention to it. And, even though it was very wrong, It is also very human.

And Daisey hasn't crawled into a hole. He didn't shut down his blog or his Twitter. And he's owning what people are saying about him.

For that I say, well played @mdaisey.

Has Mike Daisey Disappeared From the Internet? - Business - The Atlantic Wire

Has Mike Daisey Disappeared From the Internet? - Business - The Atlantic Wire:

It's odd timing for Daisey to be disappear. Whatever you think of his decisions leading up to the This American Life retraction, he deserves at least some credit for facing the storm, going on TAL, answering questions, and reworking his show accordingly. He hasn't shirked so far, so why go away now? The last thing Daisey posted on his blog, via Google's Cached version, is an excerpt from a favorable review of his show on Blurt, a blog from Vermont indie weekly Seven Days. It's almost as if a pro-Daisey backlash to the backlash has started. Seems an odd time to jump ship, which is why we're wondering if he was hacked. We've reached out to Daisey to ask what's going on, and will certainly update when and if we hear from him.

Submitted Without Comment

Rain Rain Go Away

Thunderstorms, hail and high winds and torrential rain.  So, what else is new?  At least they aren't tornadoes.  Those will be coming any time again.  We've not had a month without one this year.

Tomorrow we colleagues both working and not will be gathering making lots of talk and having a great time.  I'll look forward to it as I always do.

I know that only Terry and I watch DWTS so I will ask you Terry, what do you think?  That was an emotional time they all had last night.  There are about 3..all men but that one classical singer and Maria M..can't spell it, that I like and hope will win.  Driver, the young Hispanic, the Cuban gorgeous hunk is THE best of all the men with the Hispanic young boy right up there with him.  The rest, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Let me know what you think Terry.  I smiled at your FB comment Monday when you said you were logging off to watch the show.  I did too.  :-)))

Blurt: The Seven Days Staff Blog: Mike Daisey Returns to the Stage in Burlington

Blurt: The Seven Days Staff Blog: Mike Daisey Returns to the Stage in Burlington:

One defense Daisey has offered is that his work comes across differently in the context of journalism. This turned out to be true. The excerpt of "Agony and Ecstasy" featured on "This American Life" was a small part of Daisey's monologue. If you listen to his story about visiting China, it does sound like "journalism." But in the 90-minute-plus theatrical monologue, it's a slice of a larger work with multiple storylines — some more journalistic than others — that intertwine throughout the show.

Exaggeration happens in other parts of the piece, too — unless American business execs really do talk like Chewbacca and tech journalists really do derive sexual pleasure from Apple keynotes. (Maybe those aren't too farfetched.) But these moments of exaggeration and embellishment happen in the context of comedy, where they're excusable and perhaps necessary. But not when you're tugging your audience's heartstrings.

Those other parts of the show also endear Daisey to the audience — at least to those of us who attend as geeks and not necessarily as theater lovers. Who hasn't freaked over an Apple event that effectively relegates one of our devices to the annals of history? Or rushed out to buy a new-and-improved thing even when we're not quite sure what the improvement is? Daisey's work has been praised for exposing the conditions in overseas factories, but this part of the show seems equally important. The cycle of upgrades, trade-ins and new releases is our reality — and it's hard to see past it when you're in it. The tech blogs don't address it, not when there's a mockup of a new iPhone to speculate over.

Daisey's monologue is art, and memoir. It may not be journalism, yet it exposes truths in its own way.

Are your feet ready for spring?

I'd break my durn neck in all these!

LOVE THESE!

How about you?

:)