My favorite two Baudelaire stories.
Some good attention is coming to Rwanda's national health plan.
From the National Center for Missing and Exploited Stanzas:
The eve is thine which even now drops down,
To carry peace or care to human will,
And in a misty veil enfolds the town.
From a recent Trib article reproduced in the Times, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “Letter from China: In Search of a Modern Humanism in China,” NYT, May 13, 2010:
“A healthy society needs truthful voices,” he said. “And truthful voices come from truthful people.”
China, he said, sorely lacks that. To solve its problems, it needs more open discussion and more self-critical thinking. “A lot of people say a lot of things, but they don’t believe these things, they are just echoing other people. China is full of noise, but it’s silent. You don’t hear real voices.”
I don't know enough about it to be able to tell if there's irony here or not. For those of you who read Chinese, here's a writeup of the controversy.
Several major life events have conspired to keep me away from printculture for so long and I've found it exceedingly difficult to get back into the writing game, despite telling myself that I should really just sit down and get started. So here I am. How to start?
The biggest game changer was the birth of our child last summer TWO summers ago. In fact, the printculture cohort has been having something of a baby boomlet, with two recent arrivals and one more scheduled to make an appearance very soon.
Family patriarch D. Ray White, murdered in 1985, is a dancing legend and folk hero in these parts. He was profiled in the PBS documentary “Talking Feet,” and was a master at inventing clever scams to counter “company town” corruption and poverty: he is said to have had his entire family declared mentally ill, to collect government aid funds.
Interesting people. I hope I'm not related to any of them.
