Library Books

Alexandria Library: Z722.5 .P3 1952a (Suz/Allen)
So the Witch Won't Eat Me (fear in children) Natural Sciences StacksWS 350.5 B651s 1978

Greek: pa817 r6- suz?

Performance Traditions Among African American Teachers lc 2731 j44 Odegaard?

The Changing Korean Village HN 730.5 a8 p3

Bilingual Taiwanese minority stories- East Asia Lib. DS 799.42 T359
Finnish Grammar PH 131 K2913 suz
Introductory Grammar of Amharic PJ 9211 L47 suz
simple approach to OT hebrew pj 4567.3 s56 Suz

Suzzallo/Allen Stacks BF789.D4 M33

The Years of Silence are Past: Hinshaw WM207 H665y

BF 697 I678

Anthropology of the Old Testament: (Suz) BS1199.M2 W6413 1974

Adam in myth and history : ancient Israelite perspectives on the primal human GN281 .C343 2000

Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci BV3427.R46 S66 1984


A Brief History of Ancient Astrology
Odegaard Stacks
BF1674 .B43 2007

There is this:
Richard J. Clifford, Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and the
Bible (= CBQMS 1994). It has some technical stuff in it, but should be
usable.

Unfortunately, it does not appear to be in our library, and Amazon shows
only 4 used copies between $150 and $200! Yikes!

You might find it more interesting just to read some texts in translation
for yourself. Check out James Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts relating
to the Old Testament. Suzallo, BS 1180.P83 1955

Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman

http://www.throwdownyourheart.com/ Documentary and CD on Banjo and its origins in West Africa

http://www.nexttonormal.com/home (Musical)

Lists for future reference!

Hearing Voices
Radiolab
Living on Earth
The Changing World
Kitchen Sisters
Latino USA
Humankind
Youth Radio
New Dimensions
America Abroad
Backstoryradio.org
Humankind
State of the Reunion

Chinese Phonology:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/etymdict.html

Been a long time...

Well, well, I haven't posted here in a while. I am currently enjoying a week and a half long break from school. Then it's back to the Chinese characters. Hmmm... what else? I will have surgery in August. Yay for uterine fibroids! So please feel free to send me lots of chocolate and good books to read to keep me happy then!

More later, maybe!

The Blind Owl

The Blind Owl is a Pahlavi era novel by Iranian author Hedayat. In its first few pages, you might be tricked into disappointment, thinking "oh here we go again, another man-hits-rock-bottom-because-of-failed-love-with-gorgeous-woman story." But you will soon realize that you are inside of the head of a man very similar to Beckett's Molloy... more like Molloy if he had been less OCD and more bipolar and forced to live around others. The book has this beautiful repetition of certain sentences that turn different places into the same places, different people into the same people, recurring, haunting this poor man through his life or many lives.

Don't read it before you go to bed, though. You will have frightening dreams!

"What is the law? No spill blood!"

(School keeps me busy, but hello, and I SWEAR I will email certain folks in Norway, Australia, and King County as soon as spring break gets here!)

I live with an angel, a bodhisattva. In 17 days I will reach 25 years old, the age when Warrick warned me our dispositions are set in stone. I'm still scrambling to find the root of why I am so filled with the constant impulse to hate and criticize so many things, as if they were black and white when I know damned well that all is grey. I am a typical priveleged American, and I am also well informed enough to hate the word "intellectual", but lack just enough information to render myself "too big for my britches", hating all the freshman college girls for wearing Britney Spears sunglasses and spider leg thin heels on shoes, hating Americans for swallowing high fructose corn syrup like it was oxygen, hating myself for constantly criticizing the Korean bastardization of the English language and of Western things like bread. I draw blood on a bodhisattva while migrant workers are left to die in a shipping box a few states away, never to pay back the debts that got them here.

A white haired Persian cat sits chewing on things like vaseling dandelions, pork ribs, and the idea that suburban whites are really doing a favor to poor workers on some other planet by buying fair trade coffee.

I choke it down, it makes me shit instantly. The nutrient rich golden piss of people in America who think they're poor while owning things like TV's and sodapop.

(Are we for real?)

Alan Qoa and the Secret History

Here is an article on something our professor talked about in our Central Asian history class the other day:

The Secret History of the Mongols - great epics, heroic tales of man and superman

The Secret History of the Mongols
THE Secret History of the Mongols (Mongyol-un ni'uca tobca'an) is the earliest surviving literary monument of the Mongolian people. Its author is unknown, and although it is widely thought to have been written in 1240, both its original title and the exact date of its composition are still matters for debate.
What is beyond doubt is the fact the The Secret History is a historical and literary document of major importance. Not only does it recount the genealogy of the early Mongol khans and the life and times of Genghis Khan, founder of a unified Mongol state, it also paints a vivid and accurate picture of the nomadic Mongol way of life and provides rich source material for an understanding of Mongol society in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Soviet Academician Boris Vladimirtsov has described The Secret History as a "history-chronicle" retold in epic style and "impregnated with the aroma of the steppe". A British scholar, David Morgan, has pointed out that whatever hesitations historians may feel about the work as a strictly accurate record of historical events, there can be no doubt that it provides a unique and authoritative insight into the way of life, patterns of thought and beliefs of the thirteenth-century Mongols.
Genghis Khan, the warrior who united the Mongol tribes
The Secret History may be divided into three parts--a genealogy of the ancestors of Genghis Khan, stories about the life of Genghis Khan, and a short section on his son and successor Ogodei.
The first part records the legendary history of Mongolia as reconstructed from very ancient oral traditions--myths and legends, stories and accounts of historical events. It opens with the legend that the forefather of the Mongolian people was "a bluish wolf which was born having [his] destiny from Heaven above", whose "spouse was a fallow doe".(1) The image of the wolf appears in the mythology of many Eurasian peoples, closely connected with ancestor cults of the tribal chief or the founder of a clan.
The following well-documented genealogy of the Mongol khans exalts the glory of the "Golden Horde" and is the genealogical basis for studies of the early history of the Mongolian people.
The main theme is developed in the second part of the epic, in which legend and myth give way to more reliable historical data. Although the narrative continues in the epic style, it begins to assume the characteristics of a chronicle. An ancient Eastern system of chronology, based on a twelve-year animal cycle, is used to date events in the history of the numerous Mongolian tribes and their unification into a single state by Genghis Khan, the central figure of the story.
Genghis Khan is portrayed not only as a legendary hero and warrior, the embodiment of the "steppe aristocracy", but also as a great political figure and statesman who decided by his "iron will" to put an end to the discord among the Mongol tribes, where anarchy prevailed:

The Heaven with stars
Was turning round about.
The many peoples were at strife.
Not entering into their beds,
They were spoiling one another.
The earth with crust
Was turning backward and forward.
The whole nation was at strife.
Although the main hero of the story is Genghis Khan, one of the greatest conquerors in world history, the author does not seem to attach great significance to his military campaigns against other countries, as if he had deliberately ignored that aspect of Genghis' career. On the other hand, he constantly stresses to readers and listeners the benefits and privileges to be enjoyed within a centralized Mongolian state.
The third, much shorter, part of The Secret History summarizes the reign of Ogodei (1228-1241), the second great khan of Mongolia. It is thought to be a later addition to the main text.
The cult of Light
A work of great literary merit, The Secret History is a unique phenomenon in the history of nomadic peoples. It has been compared to monuments of world literature such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Alexander Romance literature, the French Chanson de Roland, and the Russian Lay of Igor's Campaign.
The Mongolian people lived at a crossroads of world communications and it would be a mistake to assume that such an epic could have been created by them in isolation from other civilizations. The script in which it was written had its origins in Phoenician, Aramaic and Sogdian systems of writing. Close examination of the text reveals traces of religious and mythological concepts of ancient Oriental peoples, especially the influence of the Zoroastrian-Manichaean cult of Light. This cult is reflected in the Mongolian legend of the immaculate conception of Alan-qua, the foremother of Genghis Khan's clan, by the "Father-Light". Alan-qua recounts her experience in the epic:
Every night, a bright yellow man entered by the light of the hole at the top or [by that] of the door top of the tent and rubbed my belly. His light was wont to sink into my belly. When he went out, like a yellow dog he was wont to crawl out by the beams of the sun or moon.

To read the rest, visit here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1989_Sept/ai_8067509

School

I'm not sure how often I'll get to post here, now that school has started, but I'll try my best. I'm taking three classes. Chinese, History of Central Asia and Iran, and Labor Studies. As part of the labor studies class, I will be volunteering two hours per week with the Firefighters' Union downtown!

I owe a lot of people emails, but as I've just come down with a cold, I'll be saving correspondence for later this weekend, I hope.

Radio Show on Controversial Use of Anthropologists by US Military

http://wamu.org/programs/dr/07/10/10.php

Locker Room School

Education can be everywhere we look. We are taking it in all the time. Many of these things we learn, we never share with other people. Take the things you learn in a women's locker room, for example. I go to a gym every day (with mixed feelings on so many different levels and planes). I think a place like a gym locker room is an important place for me as a young woman. At first, I felt a little uncomfortable seeing all these female strangers walking around nude in the locker room. Women from many different countries come to this locker room, and I realized that so many of them seem to feel infinitely more comfortable in their own bare skin than I do. Curiosity has since overtaken my discomfort. I now remember how much I learned about what would happen to my body as I grew up when I went into women's locker rooms at the public swimming pool with my mother when I was a little girl. I remember how I would stare, as children do, at shapes that I knew I would one day take on myself. Now I'm too culturally trained to stare, but I do learn so much from the corner of my eye. Most men probably have some fantasy idea of what a women's locker room is like, but that couldn't be further from the reality. In a women's locker room, you will see long tangles of red, blonde, and black hair in shower drains. You will see that young women with the most cookie cutter attractive bodies and faces actually have so many interesting and unique differences under their clothing. (The media would call these flaws, I call them refreshing realities.) You will also see the sacrifices of motherhood and grandmotherhood weighing on women's bodies. You will see the most interesting birthmarks. You will see bruises in the strangest places. If you are a woman, you will see everything that you have been and that you will be. You will see so many American women try to hide their own bodies behind towels, no matter what their age, shape or size. You might catch yourself doing the same, but then stop, realizing that someone might learn a little more about their own life from watching yours out of the corner of their eye.

Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed

If you are interested in the topic of maintaining biodiversity on this planet, I highly recommend that you read Manifestos on the Future of Food & Seed, edited by Vandana Shiva. It is published by South End Press www. southendpress.org

Here is an excerpt from Shiva's introduction to the book:

"Terre Madre was a gathering of small producers who refuse to disappear in a world where globalization has written off diversity of species and cultures, small producers, local economies, indigenous knowledge. Not only are small farmers and local food communities refusing to go away, they are determined to shape a future beyond globalization. As Granny Almanac, the Italian Minister of Agriculture and Forestry stated in his introduction to `Terra Madre?:
What is original and truly revolutionary about Terra Madre is that by selecting the Food Communities least susceptible to industrial process ? hence distinctive for the authenticity and quality of their produce ? it attempts to place small-scale food producers at center stage.
Diversity is the ground for the turn around of our food systems ? diversity of crops, diversity of foods, diversity of cultures. Diversity is both the resistance to monocultures and the creative alternative. Building on our uniqueness and variety is our strength, a strength that can be eroded only when we give up on it ourselves.
Another paradigm of food. "

To read the complete article, visit: http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2004-11/26shiva.cfm

Biomimicry: Using biological adaptation as a model for sustainability

Here's an excerpt from an essay on biomicry by Janine Benyus:

"Another of my favourite examples is the humming-bird, an organism about the size of my thumb. It flies up to thirty-five miles an hour (faster than you can get around most cities in a cab) and migrates about 2,000 miles a year. Those journeying down the eastern flyway reach the lip of the Gulf of Mexico and then pause for a while, fuelling up on 1,000 blossoms a day. Finally, they burst across 600 miles of open water without stopping, on a whopping 2.1 grams of fuel. And that's not jet fuel: it's nectar.
But here's what amazes me even more: in the process of fuelling up, the humming-bird manages to pollinate its energy source, ensuring that there will be nectar next year - for itself, for its offspring, or for completely unrelated species of nectar feeders.
In the process of meeting their needs, organisms manage to fertilise the soil, clean the air, clean the water, and mix the right cocktail of atmospheric gases that life needs to live."

To read the whole article, visit: http://www.resurgence.org/2005/benyus230.htm

Do Not Mail List & Western Pharmaceutical Companies In China

My friend Per Terje inspired me to look for this, and I was happy to find it does exist! Reduce the amount of junk mail that comes to you! Register your address here, though for some of these, they ask payment:

https://www.directmail.com/directory/mail_preference/
https://www.optoutprescreen.com/opt_form.cgi
http://www.41pounds.org/

This one stops catalog mailings:
http://www.catalogchoice.org/

Here's a link to send Congress a message requesting a government sponsored "Do Not Mail List", but who knows how effective these things actually are:
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/newdream/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=5076&t=default.dwt

Also, here's an interesting article:

Western drugs sell slowly in herb-happy China

Colleen Cheng and Angel Chen, Chinese marketing executives in their 30s, should be the ideal customers for U.S. and European drugmakers. So far, they are a tough sell. Glued to cell phones at an expensive Beijing restaurant, the working moms would fit in at any cafe in New York or London with their fluent English and stylish clothing. They spend hundreds of dollars monthly on herbs, acupuncture and supplements. What they don’t buy are Western pharmaceuticals, like Johnson & Johnson’s cold medicine Sudafed and Sanofi-Aventis SA’s sleeping pill Ambien.


“With Chinese medicine, it is all about balance,” Cheng says. For a cold, she boils ginger root in Coca-Cola. Rather than take a sleeping pill, Chen drinks Chinese white wine. “The effect of the Chinese medicine is very slow, but we continue to take it because we believe it is better for our overall health,” Cheng says. While China’s middle class has fallen for Buick cars and Starbucks coffee, medicines made by Western drugmakers haven’t caught on as quickly. The average Chinese spends $10 a year on pharmaceuticals compared with $900 for each American. The world’s biggest drugmakers, including Pfizer Inc., Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline Plc, need to court customers like Cheng and Chen as sales growth slows in the mature U.S. and European markets.

Read more at: http://www.telegram.com/article/20071230/NEWS/712300333/1002/BUSINESS

I have to try

Maybe this is the most pointless task I could pursue, but there is always that little weakly glittering thing at the bottom of Pandora's box.
http://windofourlittlewings.blogspot.com/

Benazir Bhutto-From BBC

Benazir Bhutto killed in attack Pakistani former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in a suicide attack.
Ms Bhutto had just addressed an election rally in Rawalpindi when she was shot in the neck by a gunman who then set off a bomb.
At least 16 other people died in the attack and several more were injured.
President Pervez Musharraf condemned the killing and urged people to remain calm so that the "nefarious designs of terrorists can be defeated."
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack.
Ms Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), had twice been the country's prime minister and had been campaigning ahead of elections due in January.

It was the second suicide attack against her in recent months and came amid a wave of bombings targeting security and government officials.
Nawaz Sharif, also a former prime minister and a political rival, said her death was a tragedy for "the entire nation".
"It is not a sad day, it is [the] darkest, gloomiest day in the history of this country," he said, speaking at the hospital where she was taken.
The United Nations Security Council is to meet for emergency consultations shortly to discuss the situation in Pakistan after the killing.
Scene of grief
The attack occurred close to an entrance gate of the park in Rawalpindi where Ms Bhutto had been speaking.
Read more here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7161590.stm

Trillium

Public sectors fail, private sectors fail. Some cheery economists believe that non-profit organizations will step in to fill in the holes. Others say the market will do it by itself. Either technologies that could fill those holes will advance and become cheaper/more efficient, so investing will naturally be funneled towards them, or humans will once in a while deviate from the generic economic formula of making decisions based on self-interest alone. An example of investing for both self interest and for reasons that computers and economic models don't usually predict: http://trilliuminvest.com/ I met a lady who worked for this company a few years ago. It was the first hopeful thing I had come across in a long time. Otherwise, how else could anything (other than some beautiful supervirus) rein in the Foucauldian decentralized power mess of the world. (There is absolutely no single person, thing, or event to point fingers at, or to uproot.)

What you can learn from someone who’s trying to hide from the world on the floor of a bus.

My friend Warrick says that a person’s personality is pretty well set by the time they turn 25. If that’s the case, I’ve got about 3 months to wring some bitterness out of myself and cram a little more compassion in. I have a heart that’s filled with so much impatience and criticism. But I heard something on NPR (half of what moves me on a daily basis comes from NPR these days) yesterday that made me think twice about sneering when people say “being kind is truly the most important thing we can do on this earth”.

I heard photographer Michael Nye speak about his “Fine Line” project. He got to know people around his city who are considered to have mental illness. He photographed and interviewed them. You can see his project at this site: http://www.michaelnye.org/fineline/photoaudio.html
The words that made me think more about kindness came from the lady in the photograph on the bottom row that is second from the left.

The other interesting thing I heard on the same radio show was about the documentary “The Bridge”. The maker of the film had heard that the Golden Gate Bridge is the number one suicide spot in the world. People worldwide travel there to die. So he and his crew filmed the bridge every day for one year. Apparently they stirred up a lot of controversy, but also a lot of awareness with the film.
http://www.thebridge-themovie.com/new/index.html

Robotic Camel Jockeys of Qatar

Qatar is a tiny little Persian Gulf country on a peninsula sticking off of the eastern side of Saudi Arabia. My friend Ivanhoe told me about this last night. (It's an old news story, but I hadn't heard about it.)

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0715_050715_robot_jockey.html

July 15, 2005—Technology met tradition this week, when a camel race in Doha, Qatar for the first time featured robots at the reins. On July 13, workers fixed robotic jockeys on the backs of seven camels and raced the machine-mounted animals around a track. Operators controlled the jockeys remotely, signaling them to pull their reins and prod the camels with whips.
This feat of technology was also a development in human rights. Racing-camel owners in many Persian Gulf countries traditionally use children as jockeys, sometimes as young as four years old. Faced with pressure from human rights groups, Qatar outlawed the practice last December and looked to technology to keep the races running.
Officials approached the Swiss robotics firm K-Team, which came up with a compact solution. The new robot jockeys weigh 57 pounds (26 kilograms) and cost about U.S. $5,500 each.
The market for these robotic riders may soon be growing. In April the United Arab Emirates announced that it too would use robots in camel races. And in May, Oman declared a ban on child jockeys, effective this fall.
Sheik Abdullah bin Saud, the Qatari official in charge of the robot project, told the Associated Press in April that the goal of the program was to "improve the speed, the weight, the aerodynamics, to reach the ultimate goal of completely phasing out children used as jockeys."

Richard Grossman on Alternative Radio

I just listened to a talk by Richard Grossman on Alternative Radio(http://www.alternativeradio.org/) called "Rolling Back Corporate Power."

He compared the struggle abolotionists in the 1800's faced in fighting against the status quo of what was and wasn't constitutional with the struggle modern American communities face in fighting for the constitutional rights of humans over corporations. As it stands now, because of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company ruling the Supreme Court made in 1886, corporations have the rights of citizens under the U.S. Constitution. If you've seen the documentary "Trading Democracy" (http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/tradingdemocracy.html), that kind of corporate status, given by our constitution and by NAFTA, might make you feel as nervous as I do about the whole mess.

Here are some websites related to Richard Grossman:
http://www.poclad.org/
http://www.zmag.org/intgrossman.htm
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/TCoB.html
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1993/08/mm0893_06.html

Can small stirrings of butterfly wings steal the breath of CEOs thousands of miles away?

Even if you leave no forwarding address when you move, all the credit card mail offers find you.

I had a credit card by the time I turned 18 years old. By the time I was 23 years old, I was choking on my breath when I tried to sleep at night, not knowing how I was going to pay my credit card bills. There was this moment where I actually froze in my steps in the middle of walking, because I suddenly realized that the total of my credit card debts combined was now equal to 2/3 of my yearly income. I made some life changes immediately, and now, one year later, I have paid my credit cards off entirely and will never have another one again.When those mail offers come, I now do something with them. I tear up the offer and wrap a strip of paper around it, on which I write "Please pass this message on to your supervisor: Please stop charging your customers outrageous fees and interest rates in order to fund these mailings, which offer only to ruin people's lives at the cost of our forests. WE ARE TIRED OF IT." Then I put the torn up offer into the "No Postage Necessary if Mailed in the United States" envelope that they sent with the offer, and I mail it to them.

It's a dumb experiment. I want to see if the offers stop coming.

Corporations have the rights of citizens. I don't think real people can compete anymore.

Dream

Sleeping outside at night with a group of people, I awoke to find my throat partway slit and festering, as if by the hands of aliens. Yet what had really happened was a massive guerilla movement across the USA, and a stray bullet had grazed my neck while I was sleeping.

In the daylight, we could see the guerillas moving north in buses along Aurora Avenue. Some guerillas were civilians, some were uniformed military men who had gotten fed up with the military. The two types were in seperate buses, but all held weapons, pointed out the window toward us... not with the intent to shoot, but rather, to announce that they were taking control of the place.

I felt the delicious thrill of adventure and a smug pleasure at knowing this GREAT government was being overthrown in 48 states, simaltaneously.