Sunday, August 21, 2011

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.

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Saturday, August 20, 2011

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.

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Wednesday, August 17, 2011

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

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Saturday, August 06, 2011

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.

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Thursday, August 04, 2011

Hellooo!

Hellooo! by kiddonne
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 by kiddonne
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

Monday, August 01, 2011

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.

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