Poshdeluxe

merry christmas, xangaland.

December 22, 1997. People wrap up their Christmas shopping and soak up the holiday glow. In Mexico, a paramilitary death squad armed with machine guns and machetes slaughters forty-five defenseless Mayan Indians, mostly women and children, as they pray for peace in a makeshift chapel near their refugee camp in the village of Acteal, Chiapas.

They had said, “We are prepared to die for this cause, but not to kill.” And when their time came to demonstrate this, they did. On the day of their burial, as we bit our tongues to hold back our rage, a woman commented to me in a low voice, “What cowards the assassins! Why did they choose this weak and defenseless group to kill?”

I did not respond, but I kept thinking about this. Today I think I understand a little better. They are by no means a weak and defenseless group, though they may have been seen that way by their attackers. A group like this, armed only with love and truth, is the most dangerous and threatening to defenders of the status quo, because it more effectively unmasks their injustice.

~Oscar Salinas

la la la. all i want for xmas is…

eyeball jewelry?

um, no. gah just looking at this picture gives me the heebie jebbies.

but apparently some people do.

i learned about this concept and a lot of others from “the year in ideas”
printed in the new york times magazine. they publish a list every year
of random new ideas, some incredibly useful, others just downright zany.

such as acoustic keyboard eavesdropping:

the escalating high heel shoe:

underwear for animated people:

the wandering museum:

and here’s an excerpt about one of my favorites, skin literature:

Most artists spend their careers trying to create something that will
live forever. But the writer Shelley Jackson is creating a work of
literature that is intentionally and indisputably mortal. Jackson is
publishing her latest short story by recruiting 2,095 people, each of
whom will have one word of the story tattooed on his or her body. The
story, titled ”Skin,” will appear only on the collective limbs,
torsos and backsides of its participants. And decades from now, when
the last of Jackson’s ”words” dies, so, too, will her tale.

oh, and what about a “singable national anthem”? come on, you know we’ve ALL been thinking about this one:

Here’s a little-known fact about the melody of ”The Star Spangled
Banner”: before it was our national anthem, it was a
belt-it-out-in-the-pub drinking song. According to Ed Siegel, a
psychiatrist in Solana Beach, Calif., this may explain why most of us
sound like a bunch of yodeling drunks when we sing it. And he has found
a way to fix this.

Not long after the song became the national anthem in the
1930’s, a committee of musicians, congressmen and military officials
wrote a code specifying that it be played in the key of B flat major.
The problem is, most people can’t sing it in B flat major. ”It’s just
too high,” Siegel says. ”And what does it say about this country that
no one can actually sing our national anthem?” His solution: Lower the
key.

Siegel changed the key of the national anthem while running a
support group for recovering alcoholic veterans. ”I didn’t know what
key it was supposed to be in,” says Siegel, who plays piano strictly
by ear. ”I just played in a key everyone could sing, because I wanted
to show that they could lose inhibitions without drinking.” In the end
everyone sang, and no one sounded drunk.

In June, Siegel persuaded his City Council to pass a resolution saying
”the federal government should establish the key of G major as the
song’s official key.” He claims that ”The Star Spangled Banner” has
contributed to a nationwide decrease in singing, because Americans are
routinely embarrassed by how badly they sound hollering it out. ”This
has caused a form of post-traumatic stress disorder in our culture,”
he says. ”People freak when asked to sing.”

Of course, changing the song’s key doesn’t fix its absurdly
wide range, and the new lows will be too low for some. ”People can
mumble those parts if necessary,” Siegel says. ”But everyone should
be able to hit the high notes — that’s where it gets exciting.”

It’s no small detail that the song’s highest note — the one
most people can’t reach — is the word ”free,” as in, ”land of the
freeeeeeeeee.” Siegel says he figures the government would want to do
whatever it could to allow everyone in the country to hit that note,
and he has sent repeated requests to the Pentagon for change. So what
does the Pentagon think? ”Huh?” a Pentagon spokeswoman says. ”We
didn’t even know the Pentagon had any say over the national anthem.”

i have a feeling i like this quiz result b/c it’s relatively
flattering… in a nerdy science way. actually, now that i think about
it, i can see this being HUGE at biology camp– every kid wears their
molecule on a t-shirt… rivalries ensue, until the groups must learn
to work together in order to fight off a deadly virus… resulting in a
harmonious biosystem enjoyed by all.

[whoah where did that come from? must be a bit of the old rice geek in me. now i must return to my calm water state]

You
are water. You’re not really organic; you’re neither acidic nor basic,
yet you’re an acid and a base at the same time. You’re strong willed
and opinionated, but relaxed and ready to flow. So while you often seem
worthless, without you, everything would just not work. People should
definitely drink more of you every day.

Which Biological Molecule Are You?
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