Looking for Hemingway

by Tony Castro

In the fall of 1975, when my wife decided she wanted a divorce, I moved into a quaint, though dilapidated cottage in an obscure rain forest corner of River Oaks where the only amenity was being awakened every morning by a raccoon rummaging through our kitchen.

The address was 8 Ashbury Place, and it belonged to a struggling novelist named Peter Heiney, who through his connections at Women’s Wear Daily was forever entertaining young debutantes with double last names and lineages to names in Texas history books.

I was too depressed with self-loathing, pity and half-baked plans about moving to Paris in search of Hemingway or, at least, a reasonable facsimile of personal oblivion. To his credit, Peter didn’t try to dissuade me and instead indulged my delusion. His previous roommate who had inhabited my bedroom, he enlightened me, had once sat on Hemingway’s lap in some grand villa in Spain. His parents had been wealthy American expatriates who entertained Hemingway, A. E. Hotchner and the group that followed Hemingway when he was there for the running of the bulls...

www.laindependent.com

Seismologists Detect A Sunken Slab Of Ocean Floor Deep In The Earth

Halfway to the center of the Earth, at the boundary between the core and the mantle, lies a massive folded slab of rock that once formed the ocean floor and sank beneath North America some 50 million years ago. A team of seismologists led by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, detected the slab by analyzing seismic waves reflected from the deepest layer of the mantle beneath an area off the west coast of Central America...

www.terradaily.com

This Place is Not a Place of Honour

If you look at it just right, the universal radiation warning symbol looks a bit like an angel. The circle in the middle could indicate the head, the lower part might be the body, and the upper two arms of the trefoil could represent the wings. Looking at it another way, one might see it as a wheel, a triangular boomerang, a circular saw blade, or any number of relatively benign objects. Whatever a person's first impression of it may be, someone unfamiliar with the symbol probably wouldn't guess that it means "Danger! These rocks shoot death rays!"

The U.S. Department of Energy has been grappling with that problem recently, as they designed the warning markers to use at Yucca Mountain and at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) nuclear waste storage facilities. There's no telling who might be around to exhume our radioactive sins in future centuries, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandates that warnings be erected which will warn away potential intruders for the next 10,000 years, whomever those intruders may be.

www.damninteresting.com

I'm Flying!

Once upon a time there was a little boy who was raised in an orphanage. The little boy had always wished that he could fly like a bird. It was very difficult for him to understand why he could not fly. There were birds at the zoo that were much bigger than he, and they could fly. "Why can't I?" he thought. "Is there something wrong with me?" he wondered.

There was another little boy who was crippled. He had always wished that he could walk and run like other little boys and girls. "Why can't I be like them?" he thought. One day the little orphan boy, who had wanted to fly like a bird, ran away from the orphanage. He came upon a park where he saw the little boy, who could not walk or run, playing in the sandbox. He ran over to the little boy and asked him if he had ever wanted to fly like a bird...

continued at:
www.inspirationpeak.com

The Next Green Revolution

How technology is leading environmentalism out of the anti-business, anti-consumer wilderness.

For decades, environmentalists have warned of a coming climate crisis. Their alarms went unheeded, and last year we reaped an early harvest: a singularly ferocious hurricane season, record snowfall in New England, the worst-ever wildfires in Alaska, arctic glaciers at their lowest ebb in millennia, catastrophic drought in Brazil, devastating floods in India - portents of global warming's destructive potential. Green-minded activists failed to move the broader public not because they were wrong about the problems, but because the solutions they offered were unappealing to most people. They called for tightening belts and curbing appetites, turning down the thermostat and living lower on the food chain. They rejected technology, business, and prosperity in favor of returning to a simpler way of life. No wonder the movement got so little traction. Asking people in the world's wealthiest, most advanced societies to turn their backs on the very forces that drove such abundance is naive at best.

www.wired.com

The Resurrection of Al Gore

One evening last December, in front of nearly 2,000 people at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium, Al Gore spoke in uncharacteristically personal and passionate terms about the failed quest that has dominated much of his adult life. Save for his standard warm-up line - "Hi, I'm Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States" - there was hardly a mention of the White House. Instead, during the next 90 minutes, Gore had plenty to say about thinning polar ice caps, shrinking glaciers, rising carbon dioxide concentrations, spiking temperatures, and hundreds of other data points he has woven into an overpowering slide show detailing the catastrophic changes affecting the earth's climate. The audience was filled with Silicon Valley luminaries: Apple's Steve Jobs; Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt; Internet godfather Vint Cerf; Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang; venture capitalists John Doerr, Bill Draper, and Vinod Khosla; former Clinton administration defense secretary William Perry; and a cross section of CEOs, startup artists, techies, tinkerers, philanthropists, and investors of every political and ethnic stripe.

After the souped-up climatology lecture, a smaller crowd dined at the Schwab Center on campus. There, at tables topped with earth-shaped ice sculptures melting symbolically in the warmth of surrounding votive candles, guests mingled with Gore and his wife, Tipper, along with experts from Stanford's Woods Center for the Environment and the business-friendly Environmental Entrepreneurs. The goal: to enlist the assembled leaders in finding market-driven, technological solutions to global warming and then, in quintessential Silicon Valley style, to rapidly disseminate their ideas and change the world. "I need your help here," an emotional Gore pleaded at the end of the evening. "Working together, we can find the technologies and the political will to solve this problem." The crowd fell hard. " ...

www.wired.com

Sharing E-mail addresses ...

GOOD INFO FOR EVERYONE WHO SENDS E-MAILS

Do you really know how to forward e-mails? Half of us do; half do NOT. Do you wonder why you get viruses or junk mail? Do you hate it? Every time you forward an e-mail there is information left over from the people who got the message before you, namely their e-mail addresses.

As the messages get forwarded along, the list of addresses builds, and builds, and builds, and all it takes is for one poor sap to get a virus, and his (her) computer can send that virus to every e-mail address that has come across his computer. Or, someone can take all of those addresses and sell them or send junk mail to them in the hopes that you will go to the site and he will make five cents for each hit. That's right, all of that inconvenience over a nickel! How can you stop it? There are four easy steps...

1) When you click on forward an e-mail, DELETE all of the addresses that appear in the body of the message. That's right, DELETE them, by one of two methods.....one, backspace them, starting at bottom addresses that appear before the actual message, or HIGHLIGHT ALL the address, then click the Delete button, whatever it is you know how to do. It only takes a second. But you MUST click the "Forward" button first, then you will have full editing capabilities on the body and headers of the message. If you don't click on "Forward" first, you won't be able to edit the message at all.

2) Whenever you send an e-mail to more than one person, do NOT use the To: or Cc: columns for adding e-mail address. Always use the BCC: (blind carbon copy) column for listing the e-mail addresses. If you do this none of the addresses you send will show up in the message, only the addressee's address will show. If you don't see your BCC: option , click on the "To:" and your address list will appear.

When you click on the address, it will automatically Hightlight, then Cick on "BCC:" When you send to BCC: in this manner, your message will automatically say "Undisclosed Recipients" in the "TO:" field of the people who receive it.

3) Always DELETE the "fw" that appears in a subject line each time an item is forwarded.

4) ALSO when forwarding : Forward the LAST window you open up and not from the person you got it from, because the boxes wil l just keep getting longer to open, plus, all the people's e-mail and names show up most of the time. I don't want my info shared - DO YOU?!?

Let's help stop the junk mail and the viruses!

Da Vinci Code Actor: Bible Should Have Disclaimer Saying 'This Is Fiction'

If "The Da Vinci Code" was already feeding the flames of controversy with its challenge to the basic tenets of Christianity, actor Ian McKellen managed to pour a refinery tank's worth of gasoline on the fire on this morning's 'Today' show, asserting that the Bible should carry a disclaimer saying that it is "fiction."

Matt Lauer, in his second day "On The Road With The Code," was in Cannes for the film festival, where the Code will have its debut. It has already been screened to some critics, who have given it decidedly mixed reviews.

As I reported here, NBC reporter Melissa Stark yesterday dipped a timid toe in the sea of controversy when she interviewed Code director Ron Howard, asking how he reacted to the controversy the movie has created . . . for the Church! Sounding more like a sensitivity trainer than a Hollywood director, Howard offered up some ambiguous prose about it being healthy thing for people to engage their beliefs...

newsbusters.org

Four Out Of Five Homeless Canadians Don't Live On The Street

They live in cars. They find temporary beds in church basements or abandoned buildings. They sleep on somebody's couch. They are seniors on fixed incomes. They are adults with full-time jobs. Many are children.

They're The Hidden Homeless

Most often, because we don't see them on the street, they're out of sight and out of mind. Raising the Roof, Canada's national charity dedicated to preventing and reducing homelessness, has launched a national public education campaign to build awareness and understanding of Canada's hidden homeless...

www.hiddenhomeless.ca

Oh, Say, Can You See Xenphobia In A Land of Immigrants?

A Hot Issue In Bush's Low-Life America

"One of the important things here is that we not lose our national soul," George Bush

Was George Bush speaking of some truly shattering event in American affairs? Perhaps the imprisonment and torture of thousands of innocent people? Perhaps the lack of democratic legitimacy in his own coming to power? No, what Bush was describing is a version of the American national anthem in Spanish - Nuestro Himno (Our Anthem) - which was played on American Hispanic radio and television stations recently.

Now, in many countries with multi-ethnic populations, most people would see this as charming and flattering. Canada's anthem has two official versions, French and English, and were a group of immigrants to offer it in Ukrainian or Mandarin, most Canadians would be tickled. It would undoubtedly be featured on CBC. But in America,the broadcast of a Spanish version of The Star Spangled Banner has aroused a somewhat different response. Charles Key, great great grandson of Francis Scott, offered the immortal words, "I think it's despicable thing that someone is going into our society from another country and … changing our national anthem."

"This is evoking spirited revulsion on the part of fair-minded Americans," offered John Teeley, representative of one of innumerable private propaganda mills in Washington commonly dignified as think-tanks. Mr. Teeley continued, "You are talking about something sacred and iconic in the American culture. Just as we wouldn't expect people to change the colors of the national flag, we wouldn't expect people to fundamentally change the anthem and rewrite it in a foreign language."

A foreign language? There are roughly thirty-million Spanish speakers in the United States. The analysis here is interesting: an immigrant singing an anthem in his own language resembles someone changing the national flag. This argument does, perhaps unintentionally, reveal the real concern: Hispanics are changing our country, and we don't like it...

www.canadiandemocraticmovement.ca

Secret Yale Club May Have Stolen Geronimo's Skull

HARTFORD, Conn. — A Yale University historian has uncovered a 1918 letter that seems to lend validity to the lore that Yale University's secret Skull and Bones society swiped the skull of American Indian leader Geronimo.

The letter, written by one member of Skull and Bones to another, purports that the skull and some of the Indian leader's remains were spirited from his burial plot in Ft. Sill, Okla., to a stone tomb in New Haven that serves as the club's headquarters. According to Skull and Bones legend, members — including President Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush — dug up Geronimo's grave when a group of Army volunteers from Yale were stationed at the fort during World War I. Geronimo died in 1909...

www.latimes.com

Giant Wind Turbines

Floating wind farms placed far offshore could lead to affordable electricity -without cluttering the view. Huge turbines mounted on floating platforms could make wind power competitive with fossil-fuel-generated electricity. These advanced wind turbines, which are in development, could be situated far from the shore, too, avoiding battles with onshore residents who object to the presence of large wind farms.

GE has announced a $27 million partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop 5-7 megawatt turbines by 2009, each of which could power well over 1,000 homes. Supplanting the company's current 3.6 megawatt turbines, these giant energy factories should make wind power more economical, since the major cost of building and installing offshore wind farms does not depend primarily on a turbine's size, but on the number of them that need to be erected. By 2015, GE could have even bigger, 10-megawatt turbines, according to Jim Lyons, leader of advanced technology for GE's wind energy business.

Making the turbines larger, however, comes with technical challenges. The new turbines will be mounted to towers rising 90 to 95 meters and will have rotors measuring 140 meters in diameter. Imagine a structure larger than a football field rotating at a leisurely ten to twelve revolutions per minute. To decrease the weight of the massive rotor blades and tower, GE plans to use composite fibers, as well as alternatives to the weighty gearboxes now used to transfer energy from the rotor to the electrical generator.

www.techreview.com