Sewers of Babel : kerinth

It is only by the dimming of the screen, the removal of all the displays and means of writing that I can now see what the point is.

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Calling more wholly
on the feeling obliquely
set against a pulsing universe - not my own -
but known discreetly
at nightly meetings
that fled their tents by charge of dawn.

I the last sortie
against the First Field Army's
advance, that would dark chaos uncrown,
and leave me no adversary to talk or stare down.

img copyright w.gedney
Here's an interesting link via plep that highlights many of the features of panhandling that are shared throughout many cultures, but also some specifically Indian types.

While the beggars of the temples, churches, and mosques need not travel, the beggars of shops and households have to wander a lot. The beggars have to care about their attire just like actors and performers. People who beg in the name of the religion have to grow beard, wear saffron (kavi) clothes and ash. The fortune teller Bhils wear peacock feathers and other make-ups. The Budabudakis who do not know about their next meal, but can tell customers what lies in the decades to come wear Zari Rumal, and apply ash on the forehead to give them a holy look. Devadasis (temple women) wear turmeric powder, flowers, and kumkum. The transvestites (impotent men dressed as women) have altogether different, yet distinct style. They are clean shaven and apply fashionable cosmetics. They have acquired artificial feminine postures and dances. The beggars who use animals for fund raising have to decorate their pets, too. They have to buy caps for the monkey, jingle bells for the cow, and decorative clothing for the bull. [...]
In our society most people give to beggars more to earn punya (divine credits) rather than out of feelings for the beggar. It is not uncommon to see a housewife toss a coin through a window to the beggar after the husband has chased him away. As long as we do not shun this fast track to heaven , no law or reform can stop the profession of begging.

Beggars must closely monitor the public displays of decency, for they are being used just as the magnanimous donors are; they are representatives of condescending human kindness emblematic of and necessary to a successful moral and financial citizen. Thus the panhandler has a rationale or ideology established behind their need; it may feel better to give money to a parent trying to pay for gas to get to work, rather than a transient alcoholic trying to feed their disease. Or vice versa, depending on the approached bystander's life experience. I like how developed the different subgroups are in India, formalized.
i have a feeling that I'm overlooking the suffering and insatiate shuffling of this milieu. I hope I am not glossing over it too lightly, but being a story-writer without any agenda or editor i feel like it would be didactic to always choose the basic human-interest angle on every story. These groups and people who have much ground to gain to reach our standards of economic and technological well being are still people creating, and i think the systems they create are not any less responses to the human question (the large questions at least) as those bleeding-edge self-referential world-conscious systems that try to flex their savvy. So that's enough for me too. G'day.

In the boxing ring, elevated, harshly spotlighted, men are pitted against each other in one-on-one mirrorlike combat in order to release energies in themselves and in their audience that are demonic by the standards of ordinary—or do I mean noncombative?—life. The triumphant boxer is Satan transmogrified as Christ, as one senses sitting amid a delirium-swept crowd like the one that cheered Mike Tyson on to victory.

Ah America, land of optimism. As the powers that came before and during (and perhaps after) our ascent to empire are predicted to drop over the next 40 years or so, the United States keeps on truckin. This article from The Economist predicts that the United States (outside of any economic, domestic, or foreign policy disasters) will be able to sustain this growth by developing a suburban-alliance sprawl of sub-city communities like this one outside of Houston:

At the Woodlands, a 28,000-acre (11,300 hectares) planned community north of Houston, you can buy a three-bedroom family home on a quiet wooded street for $130,000. By comparison, the median house price in San Francisco is over $700,000. The Woodlands has good schools, 145 miles (235km) of hiking trails, golf courses designed by the three greatest retired golfers in the world, and a cluster of oil and high-tech firms.

Hmm. Well, at least Americans can celebrate about their birth-rate numbers: 2.1 children per woman, well above the EU's 1.47 or Japan's 1.25 (which seems to be on the rise this year).

Keep updated on the approximate population of the US with this tool, the Census Bureau American FactFinder

Quote from the photographer:

This place was taken out of commission by King Henry VIII on account of it being a wee bit Catholic and the monks not recognising said King as head of the Church in Britain. So King Henry had it burned down.

The Wikipedia Article

Wordsworth's Poem Tintern Abbey (or more correctly Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey)

Norton Anthology online supplement on the poem and Romantic-era tourism.A quote:

William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey (NAEL 8, 2.258–62) has been described as a tourist poem in which the center of attraction, the famous ruined abbey, is out of sight "a few miles" downstream; a nature poem in which, after the opening paragraph, there are almost no images of nature; a political poem in which most of the speaker's political, social, and economic beliefs lie unexpressed between the lines; a religious poem in which what seems to be unmediated contact with a pantheistic deity (for example, "we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul . . . [and] see into the life of things," lines 45–49) is soberly, even logically, explained in terms of tourist postcard chitchat ("How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, / O sylvan Wye," 55–56; "Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods," 102–3).

Finally the Poem Itself in excerpt:

If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft,
In darkness, and amid the many shapes
Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart,
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee

Wordsworth is hymning to Nature that is unavailable in its entirety or past naivete, yet all buildings under our sun will be tintern abbeys in their time.

No, this is not necessarily a sign for product placements to come. At some point we all must become comfortable with the limited scope of our expertise, and be willing to pontificate on that point for the benefit or bane of humanity. Also, i thought it cute that the official web site has no link to or images of this product, and so we (along with bevnet) would be the first results.

So how does the thing actually taste and function? There is an established form for energy drink reviewing which I eschew here. Instead the bullet points will highlight impressions:

• Just as powerful as other Rockstar drinks, with the same pseudo-stimulant and stimulant ingrediants and amounts. Must be a taste upgrade then.
• Taste = sugar. Syrupy grape/guava, unidentifiable taste that reminds me perhaps of grape dimetapp. No pulp like the citrusoid rockstar.
• More of a medicinal aftertaste than dimetapp, though.
• Ah, guava. There you are, you pungent devil. With an effect similar to that of mango, the guava helps me imagine swallowing a gopher-spiked wine.

And that's about it. I am not sure I would recommend this to first-timers - Rockstar Guava seems to be mainly growing the post-clubbing agebracket that feels the need to "naturalize," in this case spiking an unholy juice/herbal supplement blend with massive amounts of sugar. If it is sugar you need, try SoBe Gold or Amp. The guava pulp does not define the energy drink revolution! The counterrevolutionary parties will be amputated from the body public!

once again, this was not a product placement. thank you for your time

Play it! Reminiscent of Stunt Copter for Mac System 6, with different physics at play:

via mefi

A tremor, 4.2 on the Richter scale, was detected in northeastern North Korea at 10:36 pm EST (USA). Soon afterwards a press release came from the NK government, excerpted here:

The nuclear test was conducted with indigenous wisdom and technology, 100 percent.

It marks a historic event as it greatly encouraged and pleased the KPA [Korean People’s Army] and people that have wished to have powerful self-reliant defense capability.

It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it.

While the spin on the test will most defintely be debated, there remains the fact that North Korea (depending on the veracity of their report) has joined the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, People's Republic of China, India, and Pakistan as the only countries to have tested a nuclear weapon. How this plays out in the fields of diplomacy, military aggression, and proliferation will determine how this test is remembered in the context of history.