Ran Jak Diary

To the Lighthouse beach

The beach and dunes where Virginia Woolf based her novel To the Lighthouse will be sold at auction today. Details from BBC News.

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French workers fight like bankers

From MaxKeyser.com...  Goldman and other bankers threatened to destroy the markets unless the population paid them out $700 billion.  French workers play by their rules it seems.  It helps that the French population will have sympathy for them, unlike what would happen in other nations (ahem).

Workers at collapsed French car parts maker New Fabris threatened on Sunday to blow up their factory if they did not receive payouts by July 31 from auto groups Renault and Peugeot to compensate for their lost jobs. New Fabris was declared in liquidation in April, so the workers stand to get no redundancy money, although they are entitled to draw state unemployment benefit. Details from Reuters.

The financial flogging continues

Mexico Builds Border Wall To Keep Out US Assholes

Norbert Bisky, Kampfstrand

 

From the collection

Oil on canvas
74½ x 106¼in. / 189.3 x 270 cm.
Painted in 1999

Preparing for Van Gogh

Van Gogh's entire correspondence -- 600 letters in Dutch, 300 in French plus brilliantly accurate English translations and illustrations galore, will be published in October. The entirety will be on the web ad in a six-volume slip-cased set of books. I can hardly wait!

Berlusconi's fools

   

Cynicism accompanied by self-righteousness and snobbery gave Berlusconi a victory during the G8 meeting. When Berlusconi chose l'Aquila as the site, their carping began. Heads of governments would be subjected to impossible summit conditions, they barked. After shocks would shake the summit into a disaster, they cackled. Berlusconi could not be trusted to run a decent summit in Rome, let alone in the rubble of earthquake-wrecked l'Aquila, they howled. In the end, the G8 meeting worked for Berlusconi because the hecklers had it all wrong. The G8 is an arcane club of despots and demagogues dressed up as democrats. But they, including Berlusconi, learned from Mussolini that when the world is watching, they must make the trains run on time. Berlusconi pulled it off and his arrogant journo-hecklers played the fool. Italy cannot free itself from Berlusconi until critics face facts.

Jan Fabre, Orgy of Tolerance

Jan Fabre's Orgy of Tolerance

Festival d'Avignon

Since we have too much of everything, too much comfort, too many images, sounds, too much food, sex, as well as too much misery, too many emotions or good feelings, Jan Fabre wanted to be situated exactly where this spills over, gathering the excesses to turn them into forms that are themselves excessive. And since everything is recycled faster and faster, including pleasure, ideas, revolution or subversion, his new piece is at the heart of everything that moves, that communicates, to make the signs circulate even faster, with a phenomenal destructive energy that goes as far as farce, as far as nonsense. The orgy of the title is the ecstasy, the orgasm of consumption: giving yourself pleasure, sometimes literally, by keeping your place in licentiousness, excess and spending, preferably with a lot of zeroes. Tolerance? It means wondering if something, today, can still shock: are we ready to accept anything? Our society is both extremely precautious in certain fields but in the end, enormously tolerant about most others. This allows Jan Fabre and his nine performers, to roll out on stage violent laughter which contaminates everything and respects nothing. Orgy of Tolerance proposes a series of rituals that run down our freshly hatched century. There, the bodies are regularly seized by animal reflexes, but animals that are buyers, put in competition before the products they need, as though subject to an uncontrollable addiction. And when, on the contrary, they languish and rest, it is to better sink into the ceremony of the sofas, those comfortable tokens of intimate well-being, on which we delicately set ourselves down to watch television – and let violence and barbarism enter –, on which we endlessly talk among friends in a weary and sententious tone, often to escape boredom, sometimes to speak about horrors in all good conscience. There is absurdity in this show that oscillates between farce and Monty Pythonesque humour, between the Brechtian cabaret and the devastating happening. As if an absurd, but nonetheless rigorous plot could make it possible to press even harder on the accelerator and joyously crash the world into the wall.

Dutch prison for underage innocents

The Netherlands is the only country in Europe to lock up underage illegal aliens who have committed no crime. What a pathetic fact!  Read this from NRC Handeslblad.

The New Avengers

Luuk and Ted introduced me to The New Avengers when the series was at its peak of popularity. Starring are Patrick Macnee as John Steed, Gareth Hunt in the role of Gambit and Joanna Lumley as the vivacious Purdey. It has just arrived on DVD.

Murdoch, Tories in UK's worst scandal

Here's an audio report from the Today programme.

Extending life - dramatically

A drug discovered in the soil of a South Pacific island may help to fight the ageing process, research suggests. When US scientists treated old mice with rapamycin it extended their expected lifespan by up to 38%. The findings, published in the journal Nature, raise the prospect of being able to slow down the ageing process in older people.

Read a BBC News report.

Google's threat to my Mac

"People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files." 

Those words are from Google's announcement today that it will unveil an instant-on OS next year. If it works, I'm ready to quit Mac.

Walter Stoehrer, Abstract composition 1

- From the collection.

Defying the cabal

 
You don't have to be a conspiracy freak to know there is a cabal of bankers, industrialists, politicians and media magnates that did not expect the outpouring of emotion for Michael Jackson that began as soon as word of his passing flashed around the world. This cabal had nearly managed to turn Michael Jackson into an un-person in the US during the 1990s, by painting him as a child molesting pervert, despite the fact that there wasn't enough evidence to put him on trial for anything. 

A billion persons have taken part in tributes to Michael Jackson. There has never been anything like this memorial to the greatest star of them all -- a massive outpouring of public grief of his death and public celebration of his music. 

Before you know it, the cabal will be back, flinging smut and insinuation. Why? Michael Jackson was more than the biggest star on earth. He was a non-conformist, who gave hope to those whose individualism is despised by a cabal demanding sameness of us all. 

“I want his children to know, there wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with.”
- Al Sharpton

Preferring life in the DDR

More than half the people of eastern Germany declare life was better in the former DDR. Massive anti-DDR programming on German television in recent months convinced many easterners that they were wrong to have turned their territory over to the west.