I saw this link on Presentation Zen today for a wonderfully postmodern film, Le Grand Content. This short film offers an interesting perspective and commentary on meaning-making and thinking along with the ubiquity of PowerPoint.

According to the authors:

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.

The January issue of Out Magazine had an article on nine neglected classics, books selected by today’s literati, as "queer reads." As a qualitative researcher, I wonder what criteria were used for this list, not to mention why these people were asked to select them.

Regardless, they are:

1. The Inheritors by William Golding
2. Nebraska by George Whitmore
3. The Story of Harold by Terry Andrews
4. Fadeout by Joseph Hansen
5. The Last Puritan by George Santayana
6. The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
7. The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White
8. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
9. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Well, seems this list gives me an interesting selection of books to read, especially since I do not read many books identified as being gay (though the Out article did not qualify what this may mean in this case).

I have always been fond of the work of Willa Cather, and often think about her when I pass 5 Bank Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, where she lived while she wrote her classic work listed above. I hope she smiles down on me as I walk by, as I have spent many a time reading the plaque in her honor in that very location.

Did anybody else see this article in Monday’s New York Times - New York Rabbi Finds Friends in Iran and Enemies at Home. The rabbi attended a recent conference in Iran that, among other things, debated the Holocaust. His group believes the Holocaust has been exploited to justify the existence of Israel. It is about Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, who is the spokesperson for a small anti-Zionist group, Neturei Karta, in the New York area.

I found this story fascinating, since I never heard about Orthodox Jews (complete with hats, beards, dressed in black, etc.) who were anti-Zionists. That just goes to show that today, on the celebration of Martin Luther King, civil rights still take many forms by many different people. I suppose that injustice can happen even within communities that, on the outside, appear so homogenous.

Happy MLK Day, as it reminds us that things are often so much more complicated then they seem on face value. I suppose both silence and voice can go both ways.

Last night I saw The First Emperor, a new opera at The Metropolitan Opera by Tan Dun starring Placido Domingo. While the opera had a somewhat slow First Act, the music held enough promise to keep me for the Second Act, one with one of the more memorable choruses I can recall. It was eerily mesmerizing, with the sadness and emotion common to most operas I have attended. For an opera in English (with a little Chinese as well), the chorus piece was astounding.

NY gas smell sends 19 to hospital NEW YORK (Reuters) - A powerful, mysterious smell of gas wafted through much of Manhattan and parts of New Jersey on Monday, forcing building evacuations and a temporary suspension of commuter train service before dissipating by mid-afternoon.

Here we are, more than 12 hours later, and there is still no clear answer as to what caused the smell of gas. When I got to work I had to wait two hours to get in, since my office building was evacuated. With such a strong smell of gas in Manhatten, the boroughs of New York, and even New Jersey, it is amazing to me that there is still no idea what caused this smell. I usually have a great deal of confidence in our Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, but his claim that the gas was not harmful and of unknown origin just does not sit well with me. Why can’t I help thinking there is some cover-up of something? Gas cannot just appear, be smelled by millions of people (literally), and be of unknown cause. Hmmm.

Do you use Movable Type as your blogging software? Do you want your feedback to count and influence how Six Apart works with the growing world of plug-ins? If so, you may want to take the new Movable Type Plugin Survey where they are trying to learn about the plug-ins people use on their MT blogs.

Now is the chance to help the development community make a better product, especially if they know what we want (before we leave for the free, open-source WordPress!).

I just registered for Northern Voice, the two-day, non-profit personal blogging conference that's being held at the UBC main campus in Vancouver on February 23-24, 2007. Glad Nancy at Full Circle Online Interaction Blog recommended it recently.

I remember reading about last year's conference and wished I could attend, so this year will not miss it!

Did anybody see this and have the eerie feeling people can be worse than we want to believe? I recall reading about Stanley Milgram’s controversial Yale experiments and both a sick feeling in my stomach as well as a feeling that perhaps entire groups of people who have done horrible crimes against humanity, while claiming they were "just following order," are really no different from most people.

Last night’s recreation was worth seeing and causing me to be disturbed again. ‘Primetime’ Re-Creates a Famous Experiment to Understand How Ordinary People Can Perform Unthinkable Acts.

So, Eliot Spitzer is our new governor here in New York. While there are no shortage of jobs I prefer to never have, this is certainly one of them. After all, with his campaign pledge of "Day 1, Everything Changes," he has made a similar group of promises that are echoed by many politicians seeking to address the ills that their predecessors have struggled with and sometimes caused. Yes, Spitzer has a track record of hard work and has earned the respect of many, but politics in New York is a world unto itself is is notoriously slow at change. I wish him the best for his task and hope these promises, whatever they mean, make for a better place to live and work.