May 29, 2010 archive

OPEN THREAD

Sort of cross-posted at DKos as Friday Evening Photo Blogging: Lion Cubs Today!

I took a little trip to the African veldt today.

Oh okay, I never made it out of the Bronx. Today I went to see the three new lion cubs that were born on January 27th and made their public début this week. So give a roaring welcome to Nala, Adamma and Shani as they get used to their new digs. Their big sister Moxie is a very good baby sitter for these 25 pound kittens.  

BUSTED!

Nineteen Seibu Railway employees were caught cheating the system out of more than ¥1.5 million in scams involving commuter passes.

A 44-year-old woman and her male friend in Iwate were detained for fraudulently pretending to be doctors when they tried to get jobs at a local hospital.

After golfer Yuko Mitsuka was penalized two strokes and fined ¥2 million for slow play at the World Ladies Championship in Ibaraki, she quit the tournament in a huff and then pulled out of her next 11 scheduled events.

A survey ship from Taiwan was warned by the Coast Guard after sailing over 300km inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone in the waters off Kagoshima Prefecture.

Nagano Prefecture’s Matsumoto Juvenile Prison is selling T-shirts designed by the inmates that feature a pair of hands gripping the bars of a jail cell.

A new book revealed that a former SDF officer was given hush money by the Japanese government because he had inside knowledge of the 1973 kidnapping of future South Korean president Kim Dae Jung by Korean agents in Tokyo.

Police in Tokyo asked website operators around the country to delete sites that refer users to child porn on the web.

I can’t get this out of my mind.

And yesterday I saw you standing by the river,

And weren’t those tears that filled your eyes?

And all the fish that lay in dirty water dying,

Had they got you hypnotized?

And yesterday I saw you kissing tiny flowers,

But all that lives is born to die.

And so I say to you that nothing really matters,

And all you do is stand and cry.

I don’t know what to say about it,

When all your ears are turned away,

But now’s the time to look and look again at what you see,

Is that the way it ought to stay?

This week’s selection is a hauntingly beautiful number written in 1947 by eden ahbez, an American songwriter and recording artist from the 1940s to the 1960s, whose California lifestyle greatly influenced the hippie movement. Beginning in the 1940s or earlier, ahbez wore sandals, white robes, shoulder-length hair and a beard, uncommon choices in those days. He camped out below the “L” of the Hollywood sign above Los Angeles, studied Oriental mysticism, claimed to survive on three dollars per week, slept outdoors with his family and subsisted on vegetables, fruits and nuts.  He passed away in 1995, just shy of his 87th birthday.

The song was recorded by Nat “King” Cole, remained a #1 hit for eight weeks in 1948, and subsequently became a pop and jazz standard.  The lyrics describe a fantasy of a “strange enchanted boy…who wandered very far” only to learn that “the greatest thing…was just to love and be loved in return.”  The first two measures of the song’s melody are similar to that of Antonin Dvorak’s 1887 “Piano Quintet No. 2 in A, Op. 81.”  It was not known if ahbez was familiar with Dvorak’s work.  The title of the song was derived from a Los Angeles-based group of which ahbez was a member.  

In an earlier May ’70 post, I described how, the day after the Kent State massacre, NYU students seized a government-funded computer and demanded the school put up bail for one of the Panther 21, political prisoners eventually exonerated.

The Courant Institute wasn’t the only NYU Downtown turf occupied by rebel forces during the student strike. This piece is about the basement of Kimball Hall, a dormitory there. This was an occupation that I played a small role in and that my old ‘rade Lee, with whom I consulted before writing this, was central to.