Mumbai Massacre

(Mere Rhetoric:) Ongoing List Of Root Causes, Un-Islamic Religions Responsible For Mumbai Massacre

Popular site Europeana crashed - will reopen mid-December

On November 20th when Europe's digital library, museum and archive Europeana was launched, its server crashed due to a huge use of its server with 10 million hits an hour (!). They are promising that they will reopen the site in a more robust version and for now you can only see the project development site. The site will bring you digitised books, films, paintings, newspapers, sounds and archives from Europe's greatest collections. Worth to check it out again once they'll get back on-line, which should be mid-December.

For now, a taste of what's on the real Europeana site:

Jewish history in Jerusalem in pictures

Found this terrific old photo of Jews praying at the Western Wall (Wailing Wall) in Jerusalem (dated at 1896) in the LIFE archives.

And searching further I also found these interesting pictures:

"Arabs Sack The Holy City. Terrified young Jewish girl Rachel Levy, 7, fleeing fr. street w. burning bldgs. as the Arabs sack the Holy City after its surrender during Palestinian Civil war." - Israel, May 28, 1948

"Jewish families waiting outside their homes to be evacuated by Arab troops." - Jerusalem, June 1948.

"Rubble lying in the streets after Arab looting of Jewish homes." - Jerusalem, June 1948

You might wonder why they had to leave their homes in (East) Jerusalem in the first place and why their houses got looted and this part of the city sacked and why these pictures are not spread all over the world....
Soooo, for the sake of neutrality, I'll publish them :)

(note the caption stating Palestinain Civil War)

Li Xiaofeng's dresses

Talking about art. Li Xiaofeng made some beautiful porcelain (!) dresses:


Though I highly doubt that they are comfortable wearing...

Check out her website for more porcelain dresses.

Bon appetit!

"Who are these people?" you might wonder. Well, these faces represent death-row inmates who got executed in the United States. In case your further questions touch the subject of what they had eaten as their last meal, now there is a way to find out. In Canada. Downtown Toronto.

Artist Paul Kneale set up a last meals delivery service which provides clients with a replica of the last meal consumed by someone executed in the United States. It'll cost you 20 dollars which is the standard budget allocated by the state for the meal.

Go to the artist's website.

Perhaps you end up eating John Waynes Gacy's last meal replica. Not sure if the family and friends of the 33 victims of this serial killer are happy with this lugrubious piece of art.

Smile! And dance!

I'm shocked

How can a lawyer, a woman ffs, say such horrible stuff?

Call of Duty music

I have to admit that one of the favorite games I play is an "ordinary" shooting game: Call of Duty (or CoD) - and then especially the multi-player mode.
At the moment I own the second (WWII in Europe) and fourth (fictional war against terrorists) version. And soon the 5th (again WWII but in Asia) will be available, which I sure will buy!

The makers of the game sure know how to deal with graphs and it seems to get only better and better. But in this post I do not want to focus solely on the graphics and content of the game itself, but more on the music with which they surrounded the game. It's great! So far, for every version of Call of Duty, a different composer composed the music for the game. For the first version they hired Michael Giacchino and for the second one Graeme Revell. Lately I heard the music of Call of Duty 3, the only version of the game which was not made available for PC. It was composed by Joel Goldsmith, son of Jerry Goldsmith. For the fourth much was composed by Stephen Barton, but also Harry Gregson-Williams contributed. Unfortunately I cannot share the name yet of the World at War (or fifth) version of Call of Duty as this is stilll a mystery to me.

Anyhow, I believe I should let you hear some music from the CoD-games and I chose a piece composed by Joel Goldsmith for Call of Duty 3. Enjoy!

Get your brains to work

OMG, I found this highly addictive game... factory balls. Enjoy!

This... is a historic moment

Well, Obama won. That's a historic moment.

And another important historic moment to remember from the books of history (see all the way down this blog for more info):
Susan B. Anthony Breaks US Law to Vote (1872). She defied US law and voted in the presidential election, asserting that the 14th Amendment entitled her to do so. She was arrested and fined, but her actions drew great attention to the women's rights movement.

Who let the dogs out?

While US citizens are voting their new president, I believe it's time for a nice anecdote:

Following Barack Obama's election to the U.S. Senate (for Illinois) in 2004, Arizona Senator John McCain was asked whether he had met his new colleauge. "I spoke to him on the phone today," McCain replied. "I told him Harry Truman said the truest thing. He said, 'If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.'"

From: Anecdotage.com

I wonder how many dogs there are in Washington.

A beautiful sentence construction

This (whatever you want this to be) proved nothing except that nothing has been proven.

Stone throwing

Stumbled upon this article by Israellycool and thought it necessary to copy:

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A picture courtesy from Reuters shows AFP’s Palestinian photographer Hazem Bader (R) holding his bleeding head after he was hit by a stone hurled at journalists by Israeli settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron on October 31, 2008. Bader, 42, was taken to a Hebron hospital with his head bleeding. He was given eight stitches to the forehead and was to spend the night in the hospital. He was among a group of journalists who had gone to the house of a Palestinian that was damaged by settlers after Israeli security forces dismantled a nearby illegal Jewish outpost.

Oh, now the foreign press photographers see stones as a dangerous weapon that can seriously injure or even kill people?

Funny, because when the stone-throwers are palestinians, they are portrayed as heroic defenders acting against the odds. And I have certainly never seen a photo and caption such as the above, showing and describing the damage inflicted on an Israeli hit by a palestinian-thrown stone.

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And now for something completely different: