Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
Today was another day that didn’t leave time for much blogging. But I have been wanting to highlight Martin’s ever so appropriate comment (which was in fact his guess as to my response to the Iranian elections): Ahmadinewhatsit is exactly the kind of leader the US has been imagining Iran has for some time now…
For one current project involving the presentation of a program for an arts festival, I needed a way to present ’next’ and previous’ links within the results of a MySQL query. For example, the user might search for all artists who are sculptors and order the results by the artist’s last name. Ordinarily when building next/previous links I’m working without that level of sorting, and I ended up doing quite a bit of searching to find the best way to achieve this. ...
Former US Deputy Secretary of Defence, now President of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz has recently begun making his first big pronouncements in his new role. Sharing the strong emphasis on Africa that most big players are adopting in the run up to the G8 Summit, he has been touring the continent and making some very promising calls. According to this piece in the Christian Science Monitor, Wolfowitz is keen to support equal rights for women (because of their focal place in many developing world communities and families, women often play a more crucial role in development than do men), and harmonize the bank’s relationship with aid agencies “to reduce the administrative burden.” In other contexts he has been speaking of the need for western governments to practice what they preach in terms of free trade. ...
Juan Cole’s commentary on Middle Eastern issues over at Informed Comment remains essential reading. I was particularly amused by his response to Ayatollah Khamenei’s suggestion that the Iranian public had, by voting for the hardline candidate, “humiliated” Bush: that in some ways Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad are soul mates. For those of us who have been hoping for a gradual opening up of Iranian society, the election result is rather a blow and, despite the similarities Professor Cole points out, is only likely to increase aggression between Iran and the West in the short-term. ...
Capping off a walking tour of New York, our second night in the city saw us at two concerts: Susan Enan at Rockwood Music Hall, and Bell X1 at Sin-e. Susan moved to New York earlier this year, but the way she greeted almost every member of the crowd assembled in Rockwood Music Hall made it very clear that she’s settled in quickly. Rockwood sits right on the edge of the East Village and has been operating for about six months, hosting intimate musical gatherings in a bar-space that will accommodate maybe 50 people. ...
As I’ve touched on before, one of the areas I’ve been exploring as part of the Social Documents projects is ways of managing document revisions. With a major United Nations summit coming up in September (and the 60th anniversary of the charter on Sunday) I’d like my UN Charter site to be better equipped to handle any amendments to the charter that might be made, but as more and more public documents come online it will be important to be able to look back through their histories and see how they’ve evolved. ...
There was a qualifier clearly missing from my recent posts on the G8 announcement on debt cancellation. It’s not quite so clear what that qualifier should have been, but ‘public’ is probably close to the mark. The G8 announcement of “100% debt cancellation” only applied to those debts owed to a few multilateral bodies which are, effectively, extensions of rich governments. Debts that are effectively owed to the taxpayers in the world’s richer countries. ...
Our time in New York prevented me from following the first round of the Iranian Presidential elections in the detail I might otherwise have indulged, but I’m glad to be able to follow the run-offs a little more closely. It was disconcerting to wake up this morning to hear NPR continually referring to former President Hashemi Rafsanjani as ‘moderate.’ It’s the same sort of political spin that left this European bemused at the attacks on the “liberal”, “left-wing” Democrats in last year’s US Presidential election. When your opposition is quite that conservative, almost anyone can look moderate and liberal. ...
Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queens has been attracting a considerable share of critical attention. It’s not often that you get reviewers like Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir making statements like: A lot of filmmakers talk about bridging the gap between high-gloss pop spectacle and independent auteur cinema, but “Kings and Queen” is one of the best, and most alive, attempts to do that in at least a generation. The film tells the story of two ex-lovers. At the outset their paths are clearly divided, with Desplechin’s deft style-shifting providing most of the insight into who they each are, and the forces that drove them apart. As their stories unfold and become once more entangled, the style becomes more uniform, but the deftness remains. ...
The intention to blog has been with me all week, but yet again it hasn’t turned into action. Tomorrow, we set off for Rhode Island for Kate and Nathan’s wedding. From there we’ll head to Long Island and NYC for a few days’ break, visiting Sara, Susan, and others. The intention to blog while we’re away is here. Time will tell whether it turns into action.