With colourful make-up of bright yellows, startling whites and rich earth-reds, flamboyant accessories and extraordinarily elaborate decorations, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the designs in these images originated in the fevered mind of some leading fashionista. Yet far from the catwalks of New York, London or Paris, these looks are the sole creation of the Surma and Mursi tribes of East Africa’s Omo Valley.
Inspired by the wild trees, exotic flowers and lush vegetation of the
area bordering Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan, these tribal people have
created looks that put the most outlandish creations of Western catwalk
couturiers to shame.
Out of Africa: The incredible tribal fashion show inspired by Mother Nature
The New York Times has a fascinating story about Japan’s Lost and Found culture… apparently small lost and found centers exist all over Japan which allow citizens to return things they found on the street to the recipient. It’s interesting because $23 million in cash was returned to a lost and found center in 2002. Talk about about a civics lesson.
Anywhere else perhaps, a shiny cellphone fallen on the backseat of
a taxi, a nondescript umbrella left leaning against a subway door, a
wad of cash dropped on a sidewalk, would be lost forever, the owners
resigned to the vicissitudes of big city life. But here in
Tokyo, with 8 million people in the city and 33 million in the
metropolitan area, these items and thousands more would probably find
their way to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Lost and Found Center. In a
four-story warehouse, hundreds of thousands of lost objects are
meticulously catalogued according to the date and location of
discovery, and the information put in a database.
Link to full article
One hundred and sixty-five eminent thinkers, researchers, and communicators, at the annual request of the edge.org website, answered the following question: “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?” Many of the names here are well known to the interested public—the physicist Freeman Dyson, the “genome decoder” Craig Venter, the biologist Richard Dawkins (author of the controversial book The God Delusion), the Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman. Other participants, such as actor Alan Alda or the musician Brian Eno, may be surprising departures, but are just as interesting. And there are a number of science journalists, as well, including Steve Connor of the Independent, Roger Highfield of the Telegraph, and Philip Campbell, editor of Nature. The following are some examples of the ideas that they are re-evaluating.
History Shows That Famous Thinkers Also Get It Wrong. And they admit it
Just came across a brilliant collection of illustrations by an artist, depicting superheros and their normal alter egos. Pretty damn good work, I’ll say. Here’s what the artist had to say about Superman:
I feel that a mixture of Warren Ellis Clark Kent and Cris Reeve’s portrayal of him in the Superman films to be the best disguise. When you mix that up you get a clumsy, head sunked between the shoulders, Bowlegged, slightly stuttering, might of been a nerd in highschool, cowardly Clark. I not only see the confident exterior when he puts on the red, blue and yellow tights but sort of a exhale. The chance for him to breath and be himself. To me Superman is truly who he is.
Link to More Pictures.
Source: Andy Singer’s No Exit.
A short but interesting opinion piece likens consumerism to religion. It’s certainly not the first time this comparison has been made…after all it seems that consumer and the woman of faith have the same goals: to seek happiness, contentment and true freedom.
The subtext of cultural change in the past 30 years has been the way the market has seeped into every sector of life and come to define how we think of who we are and what we do. We are consumers, feeding the great insatiable maw of the consumer economy.
Is it too much to suggest that consumerism has become a kind of alternative faith, a religion of sorts? Religions are characterized by some vision of a good life, by their rituals and by a particular language. Consumerism seems to be developing all three apace.
Consumerism is a greedy society’s religion
No context for the picture, I think it might have been a Red Cross stunt of some sort.
National disgrace: In a picture from a German archive never before published in Britain, the England football team give Nazi salutes in Berlin in 1938.
On May 14, 1938, in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, the English football team were blackguarded by the Foreign Office and the Football Association into giving the “Heil Hitler” Nazi salute before a friendly game with Germany. It was a piece of contemptible cringing rendered even more pathetic and futile because Hitler, who hated sport, didn’t bother to turn up.
But that picture of impressionable footballers obeying orders from mutton-headed apparatchiks went round the world and became a lasting source of shame to this country. This was, after all, just weeks after Hitler had annexed Austria and came at a time when plans for the Final Solution were well advanced.
Was Hitler made more reasonable by that salute, or by the willingness of the world to offer him a massive propaganda boost two years earlier at the Berlin Olympics by turning up without a squeak of protest? Of course not, which leads to some interesting parallels with today. (link to the full article)
