Baaba Maal

Last night I saw a show by Senegalese musician Baaba Maal. It was a pretty amazing show. Amazing music. Amazing dancing. Standoffs between the drummers and the dancers. Basically, Baaba Maal is amazing.

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

It was 1959 at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Dr. Milton Rokeach had three patients, who all thought they were Christ. So he started them on a regimen of group therapy together, and eventually wrote a book about it. The book has been reviewed, excerpted, required as reading for psychologists, and taken as a parable for current world politics; the Ypsilanti State Hospital has apparently been turned over to be a research facility for Toyota.

Blogging on Russian pop music

Google blogsearching for 'Russian "pop music"' turns up the following random general, webness; some of it more relevant to the Ukraine.

Hapag-Lloyd

I see container ships saying Hapag-Lloyd at work all the time, so I looked them up. It's a big German company, originally Hapag and Lloyd, which merged and have successively taken over various other companies, most recently Canada Pacific. And they also run a cruise line and an airline in Germany.

WHO on Chernobyl

Twenty years later, if you didn't get thyroid cancer and aren't suffering long-term from the mental trauma of evacuations, you'll probably be okay. That's what WHO says, anyway.

I have no idea what you're talking about...

...so here's a bunny with a pancake on its head.

Oh, Those Rascally Russians

and their complete and utter lack of regard for Western copyright laws

middle-aged Mother Earth

"In order to put geologic time in a framework we can understand, let us divide the earth's age by 100 million. Then we can consider that Mother Earth is forty-six year old, a middle-aged lady in whose past we have a strong and intimate interest."
pg. 26, Fundamentals of Oceanography, 2nd Ed., 1996, Duxbury & Duxbury, Wm. C. Brown Publishers, Dubuque, IA