Newt Gingrich – The Man in the Moon

I’ve posted a lot of long, more technical posts as of late, but I could not pass this up. This is what went through my head when I heard about Newt Gingrich’s plans for the moon and I couldn’t resist working in out in iMovie. So, without further adieu, I present to you Newt Gingrich – Space Oddity.

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Admirable Women – Good Morning, Conflict Zone

Real, serious reporting is getting rarer by the day, replaced with sensationalistic garbage passed off as the unbiased and unvarnished truth even though it sometimes requires a suspension of rational thinking in order to accept. Still the are some brave people who are still willing to the story itself, no matter where it is taking place. You turn on the TV, channel surf until you find some real reporting, and there they are. And some are women. It sounds silly, almost diminishing at this point in history, to separate them from their male counterparts, especially considering I have never known it to be any other way. There have always been women reporting and the quality of their work has not varied from that of their male colleagues, however, while the work is of the same caliber and done in the same way, the job can be much different and it has nothing to do with those reporters. Some of the places where news is being made aren’t good places to be a woman, let alone a woman with a job which requires her to interact with men and be seen as an equal. That makes an already dangerous line of work much more perilous. Yet they still go. In many of these same places simply being both a reporter and a female is enough to endanger your life. In addition to the issues that face women specifically, there are also the problems faced by every reporter who is in harm’s way. Pushing the boundaries does make for edgy work, but it doesn’t make very popular with those with power and influence or with government officials. There is also the biggest danger – the danger that they will get on the wrong side of someone who has not qualms about injuring or killing them to keep them quiet. Below are some women who have endured much to deliver the news no matter how challenging or dangerous it was to report, or how unpopular it was with those with power and/or weapons. This post really doesn’t do justice to them or those who I was unable to mention, but I have tried to at least make a decent effort.

 

As and investigative reporter, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya covered stories of human rights abuses the plight of ethnic minorities. She spoke out against the way Chechen citizens were treated by the pro-Kremlin officials and military there. In one case she not only reported on the attack on an old people’s home in Grozny, but was able to help instigate the evacuation of its residents with her reporting and her popularity. She is probably best known in the West for her criticism of the Putin regime. She accused them of limiting civil liberties. As you can imagine, none of this earned her many friends in high places. She received death threats regularly. While in Chechnya in late 2001, she was interrogated, beaten, threatened with rape, and subjected to a mock execution. In 2004 she became very ill and many suspected that she had been poisoned. She recovered and continued reporting. In 2006, she was found dead in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow. Her murder remains unsolved and several others connected with her work were killed shortly after her death. This is an article written two years later about the difficulties of other Russian women in the journalistic field in the wake of her death.

Marie Colvin is a correspondent for the UK Sunday Times and has been one for over twenty years. She has cover conflicts in the Balkans, Chechnya, East Timor, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, and pretty much anywhere else things are blowing up. She was on CNN reporting from Libya last week. Though I can find tons of her work, I can’t find any biographical profiles. This piece, written in 2000 for the American Journalism Review, and this five-year-old article from the New York Daily News are the best I could do. I love her work because she goes places few will and stays after most leave. Such actions make good copy, but some with serious risk to life and limb. In 1999, Ms. Colvin lost her left eye while covering the Sri Lankan civil war in an incident which reads remarkably like a set up. Her work has not gone without recognition. In 2010, Ms. Colvin won the British Press Award for Best Foreign Journalist of the Year.

When many of us think of censorship we think of China. Indeed  it seems like they have quietly turned the systematic suppression of information into an art form. Such is the case with Tibetan writer and blogger Tsering Woeser. Her story is less violent, but no less important. Throughout her career she has been fired from her job as a reporter, interrogated, forced into “self-exile”, placed under house arrest, had her various internet accounts  and blogs hacked or shut down. Her movement within China as well as her ability to leave it are restricted and she is under constant surveillance. She has not stopped writing and has become one of China’s best sources of news about Tibet.

Nepalese reporter Uma Singh paid for her reporting on the turbulent politics of her country with her life in 2009. In her very brief career, she took on the problems of corruption and inequality, sparing no group or faction that bore guilt. A witness who overheard the brutal attack said one of the murders was yelling “This is for writing so much.” As far as I know, the crime remains unsolved. The writer of the article I linked to quotes a piece by Kanak Mani Dixit, editor of Himal magazine and I find this one statement tragically, beautifully, perfect. “Uma Singh died alone and amidst horrific cruelty, a fighter for democracy.”

Chouchou Namegabe never intended to shake the Democratic Republic of the Congo with her radio news broadcasts, but that is what she does. In a nation where rape and other atrocities more sadistic than most horror film scenarios are committed against women and are considered perfectly acceptable weapons of war Ms. Namegabe gives these women as voice by airing their graphic stories and by co-founding the South Kivu Women’s Media Association, an organization which advocates gender equity in all areas of life and women’s involvement in the media.

Claudia Duque, an investigative reporter from Radio Nizkor in Columbia who works on politically and socially taboo subjects, has spent years being hunted by her country’s secret police. She has lived in exile three different times but she always returns to Columbia. In the early 2000’s, she was researching the murder of political humorist Jaime Garzón, she discovered that the Administrative Department of Security (DAS) had tampered with evidence in the case. Since then she has continued to receive death threats relating to that case. A contract hit had been put on her and her daughter has been targeted as well. Last year she disclosed documents that indicate that the Columbian president was aware of the DAS actions taken against her, 15 other journalists, and 300 other people including political opponents.

Jila Baniyaghoob is the editor-in-chief of the website Kanoon Zanan Irani (Iranian Women’s Center) and a freelance journalist reporting on the social and political issue facing her highly restrictive country with a particular focus on women’s issue. She’s been beaten up, arrested, and jailed numerous times and has spent a significant portion of her career getting fired for shedding light on issues that many found taboo. She has spent time in Evin prison in Tehran, including a stay in a wing run by the Intelligence Ministry where she was interrogated and placed in isolation. Most recently, in July of 2009, she was arrested for covering the protests. She was sentenced to a year in jail and was banned from writing for thirty years. She was released on bail after a month.

Iryna Khalip is a reporter and editor at the Minsk office of Novaya Gazeta, the same newspaper that Anna Politkovsaya worked for until her death. She has been beaten, interrogated, and arrested, and is kept under surveillance. Her most recent arrest came after the recent elections in Belarus in which the current president, of whom Ms. Khalip is an outspoken critic, won a fourth term in office with a landslide 80% of the vote which many in Belarus and around the world found questionable. After his victory, Ms. Khalip and her husband who had run against him in the elections were both arrested. The government also questioned whether the grandmother the couple’s son was living with was able to properly care for him, a statement many interpreted as a veiled threat to take the boy from his family. After over a month in prison, she was released at the end of January 2011, but immediately put under house arrest. She still may face a 15 year sentence. Her husband remains in prison.

Sahar al-Haideri was a reporter in Mosul who courageously covered the rise of Islamic extremism in her city. She discussed some of their more absurd beliefs like how certain vegetables, which they saw as representing different genders, had to be served on separate plates – and the their ugly, brutal tactics when it came to the subjugation of women like so-called “honor killings” and the targeting of well-known professional women for assassination by extremist organizations. Not all of her work was focused on women, but much of it was. There are links to some of it here. She had moved her family to Syria, but she herself returned to Mosul to continue her work. In June 2007 she was gunned down as she left her home .

Anges Taile gives a voice to many problems that many in her country of Cameroon find hard to discuss. Her broadcasts on corruption, separatist aspirations among some in the English-speaking community, and issues regarding the army earned her threats on her life. In 2006, she was abducted from her home at knifepoint, beat her severely, nearly strangled her to death, and left her for dead in a ditch. For a time she was unable to speak. Once her voice returned, she was back to reporting. In 2008, she reported on the riots in Chad. She was one of the few journalist from outside the country to cover the riots and her reports were retransmitted for those outside Cameroon.

If you watch the news here in the US with any regularity, you’ve probably seen Christiane Amanpour. She gained notoriety for her work in the first Gulf War and the Bosnian War. During a telephone interview with Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader hung up on her in one of her more memorable interview moments. She’s been just about anywhere news has been breaking for about the last twenty years. She has interviewed Tony Blair, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Prevez Musharraf, Hillary Clinton, and Mikhail Gorbachev among many, many others. Two weeks ago she once again got a big assignment – interviewing Muanmar Gaddafi and his sons as the Libyan Revolution raged.

Following in her father’s footsteps, Aye Aye Win does not shy away from danger in order to report on protests and other events not covered by the state media in Burma (which the governing military junta calls Myanmar). She and her husband, also a journalist are constantly monitored by the government. This has led her to become adept at using disguises in order to blend in with large crowds. The government’s harassment of her, she gives a voice to all sides in her pieces. In 2000, she traveled with pro-democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi until she was stopped from doing so. She is also one of only a handful of women involved in Burmese journalism – at the time this article was written there were only five.

Farida Nekzad is the co-founder and managing editor of Pajhwok Afghan News, the leading independent news agency in Afghanistan, and the vice president of the South Asia Media Commission. In whichever role she finds herself in, she keeps a special focus on women’s issues. Her stories of acts of repression and violence against women, including those committed by the warlords known as mujahedeen have led to calls for her death. In 2006 she barely escaped a kidnapper. She was taking a taxi from one job to another when she noticed the car wasn’t going the right way. She jumped from the vehicle, sustaining minor injuries but living to write another day. She now switches cars and changes her schedule often to try to stay safe. She also sleeps in different rooms in her home. She continues to write and publish pieces that highlight the obstacles faced by Afghan women and she supports and encourages women to become journalists.

This is Tal al-Mallouhi. She’s from Syria. She is not a journalist. She was summoned to appear in Damascus for interrogation, presumably for some blog posts. Yes, blog posts. Tal al-Mallouhi is a 20-year-old blogger and also prisoner of conscience in Syria. She was jailed in Damascus and two days later, State Security agents went to her home and confiscated her computer, books, cd’s, and other personal items. She was held for months without charge and was then sentenced to five years in prison for espionage. So what was subversive content was she filling her blog with? Poetry and some thoughts on politics, many of which were about the Israel/Palestine situation. She was doing what I and many others – perhaps even you – do all the time. She is still in prison. The US State Department, among many, many others, has called for her release.

On this women’s day, rather than talk about some politician or starlet. I thought it was more important to highlight women fighting for the right to do what many of us take for granted and fighting to better their world in the process. I realize some of these women are obscure and that’s sort of the point. The South Kivu Women’s Media Association is on Facebook, but there are only 22 people following what they do even though so many people thing that I attacks on women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are beyond appalling.

If what I’ve written here interests you, these group have far more information than I can supply you with. This is the link to Reporters Without Borders a nonprofit, international organization focused on freedom of the press around the world. This is the link to the Institute of War and Peace Reporting and this one for the International Women’s Media Foundation. This isn’t the celebratory Women’s Day post I had thought about putting together but I think it’s more important.

Happy Women’s Day (It’s belated. Sorry!) from me.

Admirable Women – Fount of Wisdom

The first time I ever heard of Dr. Maya Angelou I was in second grade. I was sitting in front of a TV along with the rest of my classmates watching Bill Clinton being sworn in as the 42nd President of the United States. I didn’t know what I liked about the poem she’d written called On the Pulse of Morning which she was reciting for the nation that day. To this day I have no clue what drew my seven-year old self to it enough for me to remember it now, but that was the best part of the whole, long thing for me. (Second-grade-me wasn’t very impressed by the new President himself, by the way. I thought he was goofy and had a funny voice.)

Now that I’m grown enough to fully appreciate her poetry and the life experiences with which she has filled several autobiographies, Dr. Angelou is, in my opinion, one of the most accomplished individuals in this country. It isn’t merely how far she’s come in her life, her fame, or  her wealth, but the way she uses her experiences to inspire others to try to rise above whatever obstacles they face. Some of us are lucky enough to have had exceptional people cross our path who have helped us along life’s way. Dr. Angelou attempts to do that for us all – or at least those who feel like picking up her books. Sort of a wise grandmother to the world. It is a mission summed up in the introduction to her latest book, Letter to My Daughter, and, since it’s always nice to have some storytime, here is that introduction read by one of this country’s most inspiring and admirable women.

Cooking Channel vs. Food Network – Cooking Channel Wins!

I’m in total foodie mode… and I’m loving it.

I visited a culinary school last week and, as I’m trying to figure out how I can get a hold of tuition money legally, what does my channel surfing lead me to but the Cooking Channel. It’s a younger, more “indie” version of the Food Network and, in my humble opinion, it blows them out of the water. There are more baking shows and more internationally themed shows – there’s even one about Vietnamese food that runs on Sunday mornings. I like Vietnamese food, so that’s a plus for me. They also run old school stuff in the afternoon – Julia Child and the Galloping Gourmet There are the usual big names, Mario Batali, Nigella Lawson, and Ina Garten (the Barefoot Contessa) among others – but the best bit, the one that seals the deal for me is that on Saturdays at 10 pm they run the Two Fat Ladies.

I used to watch this with my grandmother, on PBS I think, ages ago. It a blend of comedy and cooking that is really fun to watch. Jennifer Patterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright, two plump, British matrons, drive around the English countryside on a motorcycle (one rode in a side car) and cook and laugh – at themselves, and other, and always at vegetarians. The ladies use butter and lard and cream and everything else you shouldn’t eat, their jokes get a little bawdy at times, and either one is liable to break into song or verse at any time. It’s too politically incorrect to have been made here and when it ran on Food Network a while back it was heavily edited. I only saw two episodes on the Cooking Channel, but they seemed to be the full episodes. This makes a big difference with this particular show because, unlike Rachel Ray and other popular TV chefs, these two don’t bombard you with a never-ending stream of dialogue. They talk when they have reason to, so once someone starts clipping away dialogue, it can get pretty sparse. Even if the heavy, very traditional recipes laden with high calorie ingredients sound out-of-place and unsuited for our super high paced lives, the show’s emphasis on local, fresh, natural ingredients will sound very current.

So far, I’m enjoying the Cooking Channel and it’s fresher style and approach to creating an entire lineup dedicated solely to food. It definitely seems geared to a different crowd than Food Network. Maybe its younger people, maybe it’s more of a difference in tastes, but whatever the difference, I’d definitely suggest checking it out.

On a more personal, but still very “foodie” note, I have another large baking project for my family. My uncle’s turning fifty and I’ve been asked to make the cupcakes. I’m throwing in port wine taralli for added deliciousness. A portion of both cupcakes and taralli will be gluten-free. There will be pictures, but I honestly don’t know when they’ll show up. They’ll just surprise you one day.

Kitchen Archeology – No, This Is NOT About Cleaning My Fridge!

While hunting for lost recipes my mother sort of remembers writing down twenty years ago, I made a discovery – a tattered old cookbook that was printed in 1882. It has no cover and is really in poor shape. It was way in the back of a drawer in my kitchen and probably hadn’t seen daylight in a dozen years or so. Even reading it is interesting. It really shows what kind of effect 118 years has on a language. It is for that reason that I’ve chosen to share one of its more interesting recipes with you. It is taken, exactly as written, from Successful Housekeeper: A Manuel of Universal Application.

Cottage Beer

Take a peck of good wheat bran and put it into ten gallons of water with three handfuls of good hops, and boil the whole together until the bran and hops sink to the bottom. Then strain it through a hair sieve or a thin cloth into a cooler, and when it is about lukewarm add two quarts of molasses. As soon as the molasses is melted, pour the whole into a ten-gallon cask, with two tablespoonfuls of yeast. When the fermentation has subsided, bung up the cask, and in four days it will be fit to use.

Now, I’m not going to start a micro-brewery in my garage or anything, but I’ll admit the thought did cross my mind briefly. If anyone does try this, let me know how it is.

Family History On a Plate

Last November my cousin got married and I made her wedding cake, which was actually a collection of gluten-free red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing. This recipe like so many others is on a small card stuffed in a cookbook in my mother’s kitchen. The chances of it getting lost are high and there are plenty of other recipes that my mother and I love and use often that are old, raggedy looking, and in similar random locations just waiting to be misplaced or used as scrap paper by my father who wouldn’t recognize a recipe if it jumped up and did a tap dance on the counter. There are some fragile ones that are decades old and written in my grandmother’s handwriting. She passed away a few years ago and I would be very upset if these old, brittle bits of yesteryear finally crumbled while in my possession. Others are locked securely in recesses of my mother’s mind. I once searched my house for over an hour trying to find her apple pie recipe only to have her tell me that it had never been written down to begin with. We have some beautiful cookbooks that I’d rather not see spattered with oil and stuff because they got in the way when I was making something delicious and messy. In short, this situation has to change.

With this in mind, and because my unemployment gives me nothing but time, I’m copying down all of the favorites old and new and making two archives of them – one for me and one for my mother. It will make sharing them easier and I’m sure my aunts will have a few to add to our collection. This will also give me a chance to make some of my favorite foods for no reason which is always good. I’m always pulling new recipes off the internet and now they won’t end up in some corner of a drawer never to be seen again.

Essentially, I’m writing my own cookbook.

Taralli – My Culinary “Mission Impossible”

What’s a taralli? Well, aside from delicious, this is the definition Wikipedia gives is this.

Taralli are an Italian snack food, common all over the southern half of the Italian Peninsula. A cracker similar in texture to a bread stick or a pretzel, taralli can be sweet or savory. Sweet taralli are sometimes glazed with sugar. Savory taralli may be flavored with onion, garlic, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, fennel, pepper or just salt. Sweet and plain taralli are often dunked in wine.

I had seen some of the sweet ones a while back and finally weakened enough to go out and buy some – something I usually don’t do because they’re expensive and, given my major weakness for baked goods, they don’t last long. I had, however, gotten the image of me enjoying a of couple glazed taralli and my morning coffee so ingrained in my mind that the obvious downsides didn’t faze me. Off I went to the closest grocery store – a small independently owned place where I always, Always, ALWAYS see sweet taralli… except for when I show up looking for them. I went to the next nearest grocery store – a Stop & Shop – and still no sweet taralli. If I’d have wanted the peppercorn ones, I’d have been set, which just made the situation more annoying.

Before I go on, allow me to explain why not finding a single lone tarallo (singular form of taralli) is such a shock. I live in New Haven county Connecticut – well within the metro-area where Italian-American everything is commonplace. The town I live in does not have its own high school – it’s part of a district – but it does have not one, but two places to get good pizza. If I’m honest, I could’ve driven to an Italian bakery and bought the taralli. There are a couple good bakeries around, but they aren’t as close as those grocery stores were and I was getting sick of driving around with nothing to show for it, so I went back home to go on an online recipe hunt. I had decided to try my hand at making them.

Traditional Italian baking is usually pretty easy – it can be time-consuming sometimes, but it’s not a difficult process as a rule. There are often few ingredients and the variety comes from the addition of different flavorings and such as opposed to an entirely different process for each recipe. A perfect example is when you walk into a coffee shop and you see seven different kinds of biscotti. The difference is not in how they’re made – they are all biscotti – but in the flavoring. One’s almond, one’s lemon, one’s dipped in chocolate, ect, ect… The difficulty comes in finding traditional Italian recipes. No one writes cookbooks full of these kinds of recipes. You find books with really elaborate versions of some of these things or, more irritatingly, how to fake Italian food with things like ketchup and canned soups. That, in my opinion, is an abomination. I’m cool with all sorts of things in life, but do NOT try convincing me that Campbell’s tomato soup even remotely resembles my homemade marinara sauce. I will think less of you as a person if you do.

My recipe hunt yielded a few good results most notably an italian food blog turosdolci.wordpress.com which is full of some delicious-looking recipes as well as beautiful shots of Italy. My urge to book a flight was almost as strong as my urge to bust out the baking utensils. Baking won only on economic grounds. Anyway I found this post about taralli and this post that was my inspiration – a sweet taralli made with red wine. I gathered my ingredients and about 35 minutes later my home smelled like heaven and I had taralli that are far better than anything I could’ve bought. Me being who I am I had to fiddle with the recipe a little. I used a Ruby Port instead of a red wine and the results are fabulous. Whatever brilliant soul decided, ages ago, that wine belonged in a baked snack deserves to be canonized. I also showed my mother the site and now she’s got baking plans that stretch to Christmas after seeing a few recipes for biscotti and other treats. I have plans to attempt some gluten-free versions of these things. My cousin is allergic to gluten – a cruel fate in a family like mine – and I’ve had a fair bit of success with substituting in gluten-free flours with little to no difference in taste. It’s health food everyone wants to eat. I’ll keep everyone appraised of the results of my gluten-free experimenting.

I will close this post with a warning regarding these snacks – they are addictive. To say I’ve eaten more than my fair share is an understatement to say the least. It isn’t just me, or the rest of the humans in the house for that matter, Tosca, my shiba inu, is now a fiend for them. She will climb, jump, and do everything else in her power to get a hold of some. This is unusual because she isn’t generally one to do this… unless you leave grilled beef unattended, and then it’s over. Tosca is an accomplished taralli thief.

I will try to post more good recipes (or links to good recipes) in the future.

Another Great Idea That Won’t Get Me Money

I received a really insensitive email from a company I was applying to work for. I had contacted because I was having some trouble finishing the application process on their website. I’m not in the mood to go into details, but suffice to say it made me furious. I will be emailing them to express this since I can’t finish my application, but I have yet to be able to draft a message that doesn’t start off with “Dear Butt-Head…” or something equally insulting (and usually more profane). I refuse to look foolish even in an email and even though their opinion of me does not weigh on my mind one bit. I am just simply better than that. I was looking for something to do that would occupy me and help me cool down because it’ll take forever otherwise. I thought about baking, but a second or two in front of a full-length mirror cured me of the desire for cake, cookies, and most other treats, so I decided to dig out some yarn and crochet a scarf. Yep, crochet a scarf in the near 100 degree weather we’ve been having. I was on Etsy looking for a scarf pattern that doesn’t look like something you’d see at an old folks’ home, when I found this.

Crochet suddenly looked a lot cooler. I bought the pattern and when out and got what I’d need… almost. I forgot the stuffing for my little stuffed ninja dude.
This morning I woke up with a mission – buy stuffing for my new little toy. It was too early to go out though, so I settled in watching BBC America’s morning news and thinking. What in the name of all that’s good and right with the world is a twenty-five-year-old going to do with a 2.5″ stuffed ninja? What had I been thinking? Why did I waste very limited resources on something so stupid? Granted, it wasn’t a lot of money – I’d probably spend more on one trip to Starbucks – but it was the principle of the thing that got to me. There was also the issue of what to do with all the extra yarn. I couldn’t justify the creation of one ninja let alone a whole army of them. Then I got an idea – donate some of my crocheted creations around the holidays. I am now a humanitarian… sort of.

I like making things, particularly scarves, but I always wind up with more than I can use and I really have no use for toys, except for the fact that making them will keep me for dwelling on how pathetic my prospects for work are, so I try to keep my crocheting to a minimum. This way I can make as many things as I want, keep only what I need and then use the remaining yarn to make more stuff that will fill a need someone has. I like feeling like I have a purpose and have long ago realized that the things I like to do will never make me any money, so, while I have no real work, I can indulge in something I like to do and simultaneously elevating myself from the category of Waste of Grey Matter. Sweet!

I will probably try to sell a few items at some point and my mother has already requested a pair of ballet-style slippers with ribbons and first pick of everything else in exchange for supplying me with yarn and other necessities, but otherwise this is about me trying to do something good and make use of my vast tracts of free time.

My Fascination With Other Cultures – World Peace Playing Itself Out On My Bedroom Wall

As we grow up, we realize that some of the things we aspired to become as children won’t ever be possible for some reason or another. I am no different. I will never be a veterinarian because I’m terribly squeamish. I will never be a French teacher because, to be a French teacher you have to study copious amounts of French grammar, which I find no more interesting or enjoyable than sitting around studying English grammar. To put it another way, I’m thankful for many things – “spell check” is one of them. I have also determined that I will never become a diplomat, namely Secretary of State, as I wanted to be when I was young. Madeleine Albright is someone whom I have admired since she became Secretary of State. I was very young during the 1992 election but watching the campaign (the first one I really remember) got me thinking about “running for” First Lady as Hillary Clinton had. I didn’t realize that Hillary Clinton’s behavior during that election had a whole lot more to do with her as a person than it did with how one becomes First Lady. Ah, youthful naiveté. Once I realized that the only qualification for First Lady was marrying some guy who was elected president and when I saw how a First Lady was treated, I quickly decided that was not for me. The Secretary of State didn’t seem to get kicked around as much and it was a position which could affect real change in the world. Making the world a better appealed to me greatly. It still does and I’ve always taken quite an interest in politics, world events, social anthropology, and foreign policy but I’ll never have the qualifications or connections needed to be appointed Secretary of State. I mean, I have a B.A. in Theater and Media Arts – that’s not exactly dripping with diplomatic potential. There is also the fact that I’m not one to hold my tongue. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be a better choice than, say…

John Bolton - Two-Toned Walrus

him, but I don’t think I’d be at the top of anyone’s shortlist for the position.

 

Despite all of that, my interest in other cultures (and their politics) persists unabated. I suppose, all things considered, that I shouldn’t be surprised that my little paintings are taking on a multicultural feel. I blame it on Ovation TV running the entire art history miniseries This Is Civilization last week. (Yes, I am that much of an arts geek, thank you very much!) The first was a mhendi design

– not this one, but a mhendi design – a staple of my doodle repertoire – which I’ve already sketched out. But then islamic geometric patterns,

and Israeli hamsas,

and african designs (this one’s from Mali)

all looked quite inspiring. I’ve decided to do more looking into designs from different cultures and there is so much out there for me to enjoy and glean ideas from. The final project – all the little canvases together like a patchwork quilt on some sort of mounting which has yet to be designed – will be an interesting blend of modern and traditional styles… provided, of course, that I don’t ruin it or give up.