For your enjoyment

Please enjoy this.

Des Esseintes on Baudelaire

"But Baudelaire had gone further; he had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had pushed his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, had penetrated those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish.

There, near the confines where aberrations of the intellect and diseases of the will sojourn, - the mystic tetanus, the burning fever of wantonness, the typhoids and yellow fevers of crime, he had found, hatching in the gloomy forcing-house of ennui, the appalling reaction of age on the feelings and ideas.

He had revealed the morbid psychology of the mind that has reached the October of its sensations, detailed the symptoms of souls challenged by grief, set apart by spleen; had demonstrated the ever encroaching caries of the impressions at a time when the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth are faded; when there remains only the barren memory of miseries endured, of tyrannies suffered, of vexations undergone, in intelligences crushed by an incongruous fortune.

Happy Mother's Day

A brief glimpse of lean in the early seconds of this conversation on Meet The Press:



Did Dodd's comment signal a departure so drastic that Russert was unable to avoid becoming momentarily bent, askew, jarred, to the point of silence, eyes adjusting to the parallax? Was the effect intentional? subliminal? Where, indeed, can we locate the meaning of motherhood within this exchange? What is at stake when Russert simply chooses to turn his eyes downward, towards the material comfort of his papers?

The other 6 minutes 45 seconds with Dodd (on Obama) are also interesting, while the rest of the show (scroll down at video.msnbc.com) features a severely
leaned Terry Mcauliffe struggling to compensate for the Clinton campaign's most recent (and ongoing) disasters, during which Russert seems to shed stunned moments of silence for hardball political journalism.

I deserve credit

"Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who fathered seven children with his daughter while keeping her imprisoned in his cellar, has complained of receiving a bad press and not being given credit for keeping his dungeon family alive for more than two decades."




"Fritzl, 73, claimed that media coverage was “unfair” and “entirely one-dimensional”, given the fact that he did not kill his daughter and the children he produced with her during 24 years of sexual abuse in a subterranean bunker in Amstetten."

A Better Tomorrow

A different kind of homework for Singapore students: get a date

"The courses are an extension of government matchmaking programs that try to address the twin challenges embodied in a falling birthrate: too few people are having babies, and too few of those who are belong to what Singapore considers the genetically desirable educated elite.

Over the past 25 years, the mating rituals organized by the government — tea dances, wine tastings, cooking classes, cruises, screenings of romantic movies — have been among the country's least successful social engineering programs."

Marriage & War

THE soldier, Ms. Rheem said, is trained to endure extremes. When it comes to problems in the marriage, “He is saying, ‘We are not really at the worst-case scenario,’ ” Ms. Rheem said. “For the spouse, it is like: ‘Yes, we are. To you, it is a small thing, because it is not life, or death, or bleeding. But if we don’t talk about these things now, it may feel like we are bleeding. I’m bleeding.’ ”

Alan Watts

"What is the essential difference between the world of nature and the world of man?"

"[Nature's] aesthetic forms somehow appeal more to me than the forms that man has created."

What about the case of the Highlands? Is manicured nature some combination of both elements? Does human engineering in the form of gardening and organization enhance the aesthetic beauty that Watts mentions? Or do human attempts to engineer nature simply obscure natural beauty?