giulio3
Originally uploaded by giulio13.

People from all over the world (even from Norway) requested some photos of me, so here it is one.
It was taken in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

past, PRESENT , future

In his 1961 study, “Disasters and Mental Health: Therapeutic Principles Drawn from Disaster Studies,” sociologist Charles Fritz asks an interesting question: “Why do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?” One of the answers is that a disaster shakes us loose of ordinary time. “In everyday life many human problems stem from people's preoccupation with the past and the future, rather than the present,” Fritz wrote. “Disasters provide a temporary liberation from the worries, inhibitions, and anxieties associated with the past and the future because they force people to concentrate their full attention on immediate moment-to-moment, day-to-day needs.” This shift in awareness, he added, “speeds the process of decision-making” and “facilitates the acceptance of change.”


Rebecca Solnit

I never thought I'd miss Nixon.

Written on one of the signs in the antiwar demonstration
downtown Washington. For the first time in a decade,
protest groups had a permit to march in front of the White House.

Charming people

I’m reading this book, gift from a friend (who’s also a bit my hero, since he crossed the Sahara on a motorbike).

'To say that people have been charming, as Hahn had been all his life, is simply to say the they’ve developed a reflex to do what put individuals around them at ease. It says nothing about their having a moral compass deeper than that.'

D. Bodanis. 'E = mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation.'

Italian villa

Ancient villa discovered thanks to internet maps

An Italian computer programmer has discovered the remains of an ancient Roman villa after browsing maps and photographs downloaded from the internet.
Luca Mori was looking at Google Earth images of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a shaded oval area more than 500 metres (1,640ft) long, which marked the path of an ancient river.

He reasoned that curious rectangular shadows nearby must be a buried structure and alerted the National Archaeological Museum of Parma. Ceramic fragments found at the site indicate a Roman villa.

David Adam, Wednesday September 21, 2005
The Guardian

Comic D.L. Hughley, on his late-night Comedy Central show last weekend, took on looters who had stolen electronic equipment in a flooded city with no power. "What are you going to do with a 42-inch plasma TV? Drag it to the roof?" he said. "Take me back! I forgot my remote!"
Hughley, who is black, can get away with jokes that would raise eyebrows if told by white comedians. In an interview, he said one of his staff members had asked if it was too soon to laugh at Katrina.
"That's sort of a silly question," Hughley said. "Day 15 is too soon, but Day 16 is all right?"

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. (hum, REALLY??)

and then....

The firewall for one of the dorms has a major disk failure, and you are still at work at 8:15 on a Friday night.

Then you want to take Friday out back, make it dig it's own grave and then shoot it in the head.

Then Saturday will love you.

Friday I'm in Love

I don't care if Monday's blue
Tuesday's grey and Wednesday too
Thursday I don't care about you
It's Friday, I'm in love

Monday you can fall apart
Tuesday, Wednesday break my heart
Thursday doesn't even start
It's Friday I'm in love

Saturday, wait
And Sunday always comes too late
But Friday, never hesitate...

I don't care if Mondays black
Tuesday, Wednesday - heart attack
Thursday, never looking back
It's Friday, I'm in love

Monday, you can hold your head
Tuesday, Wednesday stay in bed
Or Thursday - watch the walls instead
It's Friday, I'm in love

Saturday, wait
And Sunday always comes too late
But Friday, never hesitate...

In the world there is nothing more submissive
and weak than water. Yet for attacking that
which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

Lao-tzu

Oh, my dear, lovely Barbara!

Former first lady Barbara Bush was visiting flood evacuees at a Houston relocation site. Most of the evacuees were already living as homeless before Katrina. "Oh, so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

Too bad, Jeff!!

I think you look more cool - and even smarter - with the glasses...

John Roberts has what I call "Republican Hair."

For the first time in my life, I got contact lenses. That's right, no more glasses! Well, actually, I still wear them 50% of the time, but still. I spent 16 years wearing glasses and finally got sick of wiping them off when it rained and not being able to see anything when I swim. Oh, you also get tired of wearing prescription sport goggles when you're playing ice hockey, too. Contacts rule!

Failure 1.

I sometimes think the best thing that ever happened to me was, at the time, the worst: I flunked out of college. I did so for the usual reasons -- painfully bored with school and distracted by life itself -- and so I went to work for an insurance company while I plowed ahead at night school. From there I went into the Army, emerging with a storehouse of anecdotes. In retrospect, I learned more by failing than I ever would have by succeeding. I wish that John Roberts had a touch of my incompetence.

Instead, the nominee for chief justice of the United States punched every career ticket right on schedule. He was raised in affluence, educated in private schools, dispatched to Harvard and then to Harvard Law School. He clerked for a U.S. appellate judge (the storied Henry J. Friendly) and later for William H. Rehnquist, then an associate justice. Roberts worked in the Justice Department and then in the White House until moving on to Hogan & Hartson, one of Washington's most prestigious law firms; then he was principal deputy solicitor general, before moving to the bench, where he has served for only two years. His record is appallingly free of failure.

By Richard Cohen, Thursday, September 8, 2005.
washingtonpost.com

Confucian story

The story begins in the usual manner, with the king asking his faithful minister, Gun, to save the country from rising waters. Unfortunately, Gun is an arrogant guy and thinks he can control nature. For nine years he labors, building dam after dam to stem the raging tide. As each dam falls apart, the waters rage ever stronger. Eventually, the king wises up, banishes Gun, and orders Gun's son, Yu, to have a go. A humble man, Yu quietly studies the problem and concludes that attempting to constrain nature is futile. Rather than build dams, he gently channels the flood waters into an irrigation system. The crops bloom, the waters recede, the people are saved and Yu is anointed king.

By Ellen Ruppel Shell, Sunday, September 4, 2005.
The Washington Post.

Ugh

All comments on G's last post were spam.

They have all been deleted. Except the one about the tarps, cause it is very odd. An odd spam is slightly amusing. Just slightly though.

Ok it's not amusing at all.

Let's see, I am tuckered out, have been working nonstop 12+ hour days since the last post on my site.

My bag was stolen out of my car on Thursday night. With it went 2 pairs of sunglasses, a USB card reader and the power chargers for my cell phone and iPod. My checkbook was in the bag too, but a kind lady at Fidelity found it in the Public Garden and mailed it back to me.

The good thing about the relentless hours at work is that I have not had time, until today, to sit down and catch up on all the depressing shit happening in New Orleans.

Go donate some money.

Or watch this footage of Messenger passing by the planet in August.

Headlines from CNN

• 'Urban warfare' in New Orleans

• Houston's Astrodome full, turns away refugees

• New Orleans survivors live among corpses

• FEMA head: Working in "conditions of urban warfare"

• Armed gangs attempting rapes, police warn

•'Thousands' dead


It's just hard to believe what happened and what's happening in New Orleans

Guns everywhere... but in churches and courtrooms

Feel free to bring guns everywhere... but in churches and courtrooms!

Read what this joker (a judge indeed!) says...


"Literally, you could walk into this courthouse with a MAC-10 under your coat (MAC-10 = machine gun with a rate of fire of 1100 rounds per minute!!!), and no one would know it until you pulled it out," said Circuit Court Judge Darren Peckler. "I'm not opposed to guns. I own guns. But there's something about carrying a gun into churches and courtrooms" he said.
David Finkel. Washington Post Sunday, June 5, 2005.