The Why of It: Cab Chat

The Why of It: Cab Chat

The Why of It: The Princess & The Hunger Circus

The Why of It: The Princess & The Hunger Circus

The Story of Alexander Supertramp

In April 1992, Christopher McCandless arrives in a remote area of the Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska and sets up a campsite in an abandoned bus. At first, McCandless is content with the isolation, the beauty of nature around, and the thrill of living off the land. He hunts wild animals with a .22 caliber rifle, reads books, and keeps a diary of his thoughts as he prepares for himself a new life in the wild.

Two years earlier in May 1990, McCandless graduates with high honors from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Shortly afterwards, McCandless rejects his conventional life by destroying all of his credit cards and identification documents. He donates nearly his entire savings of $24,000 to Oxfam and sets out on a cross-country drive in his well-used, but reliable Datsun to experience life in the wilderness. However, McCandless does not tell his parents Walt and Billie McCandless nor his sister Carine what he is doing or where he is going, and refuses to keep in touch with them after his departure, leaving them to become increasingly anxious and eventually desperate.

At Lake Mead, Arizona, McCandless' automobile is caught in a flash flood causing him to abandon it and begin hitchhiking instead. He burns what remains of his dwindling cash supply and assumes a new name: "Alexander Supertramp." In Northern California, McCandless encounters a hippie couple named Jan Burres and Rainey. Rainey tells McCandless about his failing relationship with Jan, which McCandless would rekindle. By September, McCandless stops in Carthage, South Dakota to work for a contract harvesting company owned by Wayne Westerberg , but he is forced to leave after Westerberg is arrested for satellite piracy.

More on the film here, more on the book here.
Basically, it's impossible not to be fascinated with this story, for all its good and bad.

Some Week's End Reading

Critics of CSR ratings, such as Scott Nova, Executive Director of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), argue that they give audiences a false sense of security regarding actual company progress on CSR in industries in which none of the companies is in compliance with minimum labour standards.
Others, such as Tim Connor, former Labour Rights Advocacy Coordinator of Oxfam Australia believe ratings can play a positive role, "More effective government regulation is critical, but voluntary efforts like ratings systems can still play some role in ratcheting up compliance with labour standards," says Connor.
Can CSR ratings help improve labour practices in global supply chains?, a new paper published by the Maquila Solidarity Network (MSN) and the Project on Organizing, Development, Education and Research (PODER), examines the potential of rating systems to drive improvements in supply chain labour practices. Through interviews with CSR experts, representatives from companies like Levi's, Gap and others that have been rated on supply chain labour issues, labour rights advocacy groups, and rating system developers, the paper highlights some key challenges facing rating systems and how some rating systems have tried to overcome, or at least minimize, those challenges.


The challenge of ratings in global supply chains

Although all rating systems struggle with finding appropriate indicators, weighting their results, making their process reliable and credible, and getting their message to the right people at the right time, ratings of labour practices have the additional challenge of capturing workplace realities in complex, global industries. While consumers and investors may assume that CSR rating systems measure actual corporate practice, including labour practices at the factory level, for the most part existing systems have limited access to reliable, timely and comprehensive data about labour practices in global supply chains.
"We are still a long way from getting systematized on-the-ground factory data," says Conrad MacKerron of As You Sow, which released its first ratings of apparel company supply chain labour practices in November 2010.

Read the full feature here or download the study here.

Train Ride Reading

The greatest hindrance in bettering our understanding of the world is our natural tendency to cling to outdated ideas.

- The Astrophysics Spectator, May 2006

On Lying & Collateral Damage

The film features a high concept narrative set in an alternate reality in which there is no such thing as lying and everything said is the absolute truth. In this world people make blunt, often cruel statements, including those that people would normally keep to themselves. There is a lack of religious belief, and the absence of fiction results in a movie industry limited to lecture-style historical readings, and advertisements as bluntly truthful as the people are.

from Wiki



I've enjoyed the Edward Norton moment & the Coke ad one in particular.

Hellooo!

Hellooo!, a photo by kiddonne on Flickr.

a closer look at one of the fence's guardians;
of course there was posing involved, what would you have expected?
wouldn't you have done exactly the same, if you were in their paws?

Fence-sitting

Fence-sitting, a photo by kiddonne on Flickr.

described as "a popular activity amongst Sibiu-based cats"
spotted in March 2011, at the border of spring

On Page 87

Peter used to say that an artist’s job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble.
If you’re at work and every table in your section is waiting for something, but you’re still hiding out in the kitchen sketching on scraps of paper, it’s time to take a pill. When you present people with their dinner check and on the back you’ve drawn a little study in light and shadow—you don’t even know where it’s supposed to be, this image just came into your mind. It’s nothing, but you’re terrified of losing it. Then it’s time to take a pill.
“These useless details,” Peter used to say, “they’re only useless until you connect them all together.” Peter used to say, “Everything is nothing by itself.”

On Scribd.

Historic Great Ocean Road

When explorer Matthew Flinders reflected on Victoria's south western coast he said "I have seldom seen a more fearful section of coastline".
These sentiments were shared by many a ship's captain as he 'threaded the eye of the needle' guided by the Cape Otway light. So difficult was this passage, and frequently treacherous the conditions, that more than 50 ships including the 'Schomberg'(1855), 'Loch Ard (1878), Falls of Halladale' (1909), and 'Casino' (1932), were lost.

Post-Jungian Reflection

A Delight of Introversion

Memories, Dreams, Reflections is insightful and humane and a tale of the humble individual facing larger societal patterns. Or at least partly so.
While leaving praising aside, it's quite accessible to understand why Jung became the founder of analytical psychology - and intriguing to learn about the details of his interaction with Freud and the rest of the scientific community.
The manner in which he manages to hold on to his modesty while elevating the human psychology to religious heights can't but impress. In someone else's words:

Throughout his life and as an analyst, Jung developed a refreshing ability to stand outside himself and to bring so much of his unconscious material into consciousness.

Sillanpää

So one day, quite some time ago, I had decided to give Finnish writers a chance. And what better start than a Nobel prize novelist, right?
Thus I chose Sillanpää's Maid Silja, a referential work for the time; also representative for the author's overall distinction of "deep understanding of his country's peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature".

The book shows nothing of my expected - why? - feminist sprouting of those particular Northern realms; instead, it's a simple and dramatic narrative of Silja's life in a certain given set of historical circumstances.

Big themes raise their heads and cross the path of the narrative - poverty and infant mortality, civil war and the brutal alternation of reprisals, the crossed purposes of love ... Somehow, the main character retains integrity, courage, and a sort of good cheer, even in the face of premature death. The intensity of life, although brief, is like the few summers that are imprinted on the heroine's mind.

[from here]
And so it ends, with a distinct sensation of having depicted life's small and large cycles alike.
It left me wondering how different might our great grandparents' lives have been back in the glory days of Bolshevik inception.

Strength in What Remains

That 63-year-old Tracy Kidder may have just written his finest work — indeed, one of the truly stunning books I’ve read this year [i.e. 2009] — is proof that the secret to memorable nonfiction is so often the writer’s readiness to be ­surprised. [...]

While reporting his 2003 best seller, “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” a fitfully earnest book about a character almost impossible to love too much — Dr. Paul Farmer, leader of a global campaign to eradicate preventable disease — Kidder stumbled across a spectral African refugee who had signed on with the doctor’s organization, Partners in Health, as a bit player, a guy helping out, answering e-mail, “performing any jobs that needed doing.” His name was Deogratias, or “thanks be to God” in Latin.

“Strength in What Remains” is Deo’s story. And what a tale it is, opening from a passenger seat in an airliner in war-torn Burundi, where Deo, then 24, is leaving behind what once seemed a promising life in Africa as a third-year medical student. It was 1994. Burundi and neighboring Rwanda were exploding in civil wars, in which Hutu and Tutsi were slaughtering one another in one of the 20th century’s most horrifying conflicts. With the help of the privileged family of one of his med-school friends, Deo is able to escape the carnage, bound for America.

If intrigued, here's the remainder of the NY Times review.

Taking a Note

Greg Mortenson is the co-founder of nonprofit Central Asia Institute www.ikat.org , founder of Pennies For Peace www.penniesforpeace.org , and co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Three Cups of Tea www.threecupsoftea.com , and author of the bestsellerStones into Schools www.stonesintoschools.com .

In 2009, Mortenson received Pakistan’s highest civil award, Sitara-e-Pakistan (“Star of Pakistan”) for his dedicated and humanitarian effort to promote education and literacy in rural areas for fifteen years.

Several bi-partisan U.S. Congressional representatives nominated Mortenson for the Nobel Peace Prize this year. The award recipient is chosen by a secret process and announced in October.

- after having listened to Three Cups of Tea earlier this year.
Text from here.

Change of tone

that glorious piece of work needs to be done tonight, so..

On the playlist

trying to get some work done tonight, I've accidentally come across the Faint's albume (and tune), so here's a remembrance of tonight



posting this youtube video reminds me of just how many changes youtube's been through recently; either that, or I might have been neglecting it for prolonged periods of time.

A Top 10 for the week

Consider this topic: Overworked? No Way: 10 Countries With the Best Work-Life Balance. Now consider possible common sense answers. I thought they were pretty obvious.

Jack Kevorkian's Death

Stumbled upon the news as presented by the BBC - which brought back plenty of memories.

Later edit: Just as I was writing of stumbling, the SU digest suggested a reading to match: God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian - as mentioned here (at number 10).

JBA: When the going gets tough.. [re-edited]

courtesy of my flickr, certainly