Life Before Death by Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta

This sombre series of portraits taken of people before and after they had died is a challenging and poignant study. Schels and Lakotta recorded interviews with the subjects in their final days, revealing much about dying - and living.



Alzheimer's by Sloan Breeden

(Go to "Projects" and click on "Alzheimer's)

I've been going through recent clips from the Daily Show and the consistency in brilliance is astounding. Stewart and his writers have unfailingly found ways to mock and challenge the state of the world today with great humor and insight. What particularly amazes me is his choice of guests, which encompasses many non-mainstream authors with intellectual messages that deserve the public's attention.

Among the many many gems (a congressional hearing on Second Life, a racial dialog, news coverage of the Olympic torch in San Francisco, and interview with Steve Coll, author of Ghost War), I find this one the most akin to my usual reaction to news of the kind and yet is absent from discussions in the media:


By the way, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones make such an awe-inspiring couple on screen! If they are half as funny in real life, their children might suffer from stunted growth due to excessive laughing...

Another year has passed, and that means... we've got another batch of curious book titles!


"Closure" wins oddest book award

By Jeremy Lovell
Reuters

Self-help manual "If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs" won this year's oddest book title competition, The Bookseller trade magazine said on Friday.

The book took an impressive one-third of the 8,500 votes cast online in The Bookseller's 30th annual competition.

Runner up "I was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen", the story of a fictitious World War Two pilot forced to bale out over the jungle, polled a distant 20 percent.

"'If You Want Closure', makes redundant an entire genre of self-help tomes. So effective is the title that you don't even need to read the book itself," said the magazine's deputy editor Joel Rickett.

The winner beat stiff competition from other shortlisted titles including the somewhat niche "Cheese Problems Solved" and "How to Write a How to Write Book" and the rather provocative "Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues".

The annual competition was launched in 1978 at the Frankfurt Book Fair when it was won by the memorably titled "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice".

Since then, with the exceptions of 1987 and 1991 when no award was granted due, according to Rickett, to a lack of oddness, the weird and wonderful titles have flowed thick and fast with some eyebrow raising winners.

"Joy of Chickens" took the 1980 title, with "The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling" in 1983, "Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual" in 1990, "Living with Crazy Buttocks" in 2002 and "Bombproof Your Horse" in 2004 are but a sample.

However, the 1997 winner "Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition" does stand out among the glittering array, and in September this year the public will be asked to vote for the oddest of all the winners.

"That and 'Nude Mice' probably remain among the weirdest, but it is a strong competition," said Rickett.

"And the quality of weirdness does seem to be improving in part as technology allows greater access to publishing. Certainly we are getting more titles coming forward," he added.

With an illustrious cast, a brilliant script writer, and a colorful, larger-than-life subject, Charlie Wilson's War is a movie that could have been so much more.

Unfortunately, among the illustrious cast, only Hoffman fulfilled the potential of his character among the trio. Hanks is simply far too clean and upright to be the swinging alcoholic congressman; given the impeccable casting in other Sorkin movies, I am convinced that there are better candidates for this character. Roberts' character is underwritten, without history, motivation, nor surprises.

As for the story, well, the history was obviously not as simple as it was told in the movie. I'm greatly disappointed by the lack of depth in Sorkin's simplistic script, which lacks even his signature intelligent banters. There could have been more emphasis on the roles that ignorance, domestic politics, and previous diplomatic snafus played in the formation of US foreign policy and the country's consistently dismal performance in long term nation building. While the ending poignantly reminds the audience of the current predicament in Iraq, attention should also have been drawn to how the Talibans and Bin Laden rose from the ashes of the Soviet-Afghan war as a result of the US desertion, which eventually led to 9/11 and right back to the Iraq mess we have today.

With any luck, perhaps the (American) audience may start asking themselves what kind of country does the US want to be: Should the US be promoting, keeping, or "making" peace? Should she be the world police and fight the good fights (and body bags in return) in remote countries? Can pre-emptive strikes ever be justified? How is homeland security affected by the US invasions into other countries? What moral and legal authority does the US have on its own that would allow it to go out unilaterally and perform "nation building"? What are the roles of military and diplomacy when the battle has been won but the war ain't over?

These are the topic that I believe form the premise of war. To me, good war movies always prompt the audience to think about some of these questions. Charlie Wilson's War is, of course, not a generic war movie, but it has such great potential (and Sorkin!) to ask the above. Without doing so, the movie fails to highlight the significance of Charlie Wilson's actions and becomes merely a shallow tale of a slightly eccentric congressman and his illicit lover.

Further readings:

• Ghost Wars, a comprehensive history of the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan
• Fiasco, regarding another instance when the US forgot to plan for the aftermath before waging a war

Another league table that investment bankers would never generate. Massive rounds of layoff have become the standard knee-jerk reaction to strategic mistakes made by the senior management. The insecure executive and workers are therefore encouraged to be more risk-taking during the good times, which invariably lead to more calamitous downfalls. It is a sad state of affair, exemplifying the many problems of unbridled capitalism.

Firms and jobs cut

1. Citigroup – 6,200
2. Lehman Brothers – 4,990
3. Bank of America – 3,650
4. Morgan Stanley – 2,940
5. Washington Mutual –2,600
6. Merrill Lynch – 2,220
7. HSBC – 1,650
8. Bear Stearns – 1,550
9. WestLB – 1,530
10. UBS – 1,500
11. Goldman Sachs – 1,500*
12. National City – 900
13. Credit Suisse – 820
14. Royal Bank of Canada – 500
15. Fortis – 500
16. Wells Fargo – 500
17. Wachovia – 443
18. Deutsche Bank – 370
19. JPMorgan Chase – 100

TOTAL – 34,463

The above table shows jobs eliminated by the biggest banks and securities firms since the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in July 2007. The figures are based on company disclosures.

* Goldman Sachs said on Jan. 25 that its job cuts reflected the
firm's policy of weeding out underperformers.

I positively feel fortunate that the enigma of religion is unfolding during my life time. Although my knowledge in this vast space is highly limited, I am feeling more and more comfortable with my little theory that organized religion was bred by the need to satisfy man's biological need for religiosity and continuously strengthened by its effectiveness during the group selection process.

The article below is difficult to excerpt since it is long and contains many experiments and hypotheses. I invite you to take a few minutes and go through the original article to see for yourself. My previous post on religion can be found here.



Where angels no longer fear to tread
Mar 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition


BY the standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum... [which] will be spent on the search for God Himself—or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.

“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

The experiments it will sponsor are designed to look at the mental mechanisms needed to represent an omniscient deity, whether (and how) belief in such a “surveillance-camera” God might improve reproductive success to an individual's Darwinian advantage, and whether religion enhances a person's reputation—for instance, do people think that those who believe in God are more trustworthy than those who do not? The researchers will also seek to establish whether different religions foster different levels of co-operation, for what reasons, and whether such co-operation brings collective benefits, both to the religious community and to those outside it.

有一次，跟銘漢哥在中環吃午飯，在一家意大利館子用膳。

我告訴他，這家館子挺有詩意，晚上會放一塊黑板在門外，用粉筆寫着：“Slow dining with Italian cheese”。

銘漢哥想也不用想便說：“咁慘！？”

****

亂馬½是我最最喜愛的漫畫。高橋留美子實在搞笑得不能想像。其中有一個角色叫畢克雷．夏爾達，是法國格鬥飲食的傳人。格鬥飲食除了講求速度以外，還要保持優雅的食相，即是在過程中不能讓人家看到嘴部的動作。畢克雷吃得極快，旁觀者往往只見到他面前的食物突然消失，和一絲閃光在他的嘴角稍縱即逝。



銘漢哥一家都有夏爾達的真傳。每次我和他們吃飯都會變成飯桌上的loner，因為他們在我拿起飯碗、開始夾餸那幾秒之内就已經把自己的食物吃得乾乾淨淨。和我家人吃飯的時候，我爸媽常常見他停了手，都特意着他多吃一點，就算他也已經撫着肚皮說飽。我唯有指出他面前堆積如山的骨頭作為證據，爸媽才會相信。

****

當然，我是那種恨不得每餐都能吃上三個小時的人。

這種細節是拍拖的時候發現不了的啊，嘻嘻。