Jayne Doodles

Live-blogging Game Two

I'm packing up my apartment this afternoon for moving this week, and the World Series is on while I try to reduce my bookload.  I've been quite successful so far - I moved into this apartment with 18 boxes of books (!) and so far am forecasting about 9 boxes moving out.   

So, unrelated to moving, don't read this if you're one of those people that doesn't want to know anything at all about the game until you can see the whole thing.

Whew!  Top of the third, and the last five minutes were quite exciting.  Astros were up one at the end of the first, and the White Sox scored twice, although they would have gotten three if whatsisname hadn't tagged first before going on to second.  And they wouldn't have gotten two except that the Astro shortstop bobbled a pop-up, so they managed to score.  Luckily Houston tied it up and now we're here in the third. 

I'm a little worried about Pettitte - several hits the last couple of bats, and he just threw something into the dirt.  I don't know much about this team's pitching, though, so I'll just have to leave it at that...

UPDATE AND SPOILER:

Well, the Astros didn't quite manage to pull it off, although a credible effort, to be sure.  The White Sox will be enjoying a riotous celebration in Chicago tonight, that's for sure.

udzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I am convinced that my brain is about the size of a lima bean right now, and more-than-likely is also the exact same consistency of that vile vegetable.   Today is Friday; thank heavens!  I'm about to fall over on my keyboard and just afjsssssssssssssseaioslllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllrdiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisl;iffffo;aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaao;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Well, you get the picture.  It's been a long week, full of data entry and seemingly simple requests from superiors that end up taking four hours because nobody actually knows how to do what they're asking...and of course, nobody keeps notes from the last time they did it, because why would we do that?  Continuity is non-existent here.  I'm always reinventing the wheel.  And the harness.  And the cart.

If you've been wondering where I've been in blog-terms, go visit Stackable Bards.  Most of my posting is being done over there for the nonce while we firmly establish the setup and tone of our joint venture, and I haven't had the time or energy to update my own blog.  Don't fear!  I'm not giving this up, not by a long shot.  I'm just rearranging my time for a bit, so there's just a lot more over there that you'll find interesting if you're looking for more reading and entertainment than what's been here for a week or two. 

Warm fuzzies to everyone - and have a lovely weekend.  I spy pina coladas rounding the bend...

Book Meme

My friend TF6S did this meme in September, and I've had it all set up for a couple weeks now, but had some trouble with the html.  So, I've redone the whole thing finally, and here's what comes of it.  This is a list of 110 banned books, and I've bolded the ones I read, and italicized the ones I've read only in part.

1 The Bible

2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

4 The Koran

5 Arabian Nights

6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

17 Dracula by Bram Stoker

18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin

19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne

21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

25 Ulysses by James Joyce

26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

27 Animal Farm by George Orwell

28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

29 Candide by Voltaire

30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

31 Analects by Confucius

32 Dubliners by James Joyce

33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

35 Red and the Black by Stendhal

36 Capital by Karl Marx

37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire

38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence

40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair

44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding

47 Diary by Samuel Pepys

48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus

55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X

57 Color Purple by Alice Walker

58 Catcher in the Rye

59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke

60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison

61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck

64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau

67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

69 The Talmud

70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau

71 Bridge to Terabinthia by Katherine Paterson

72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence

73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles

76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck

78 Popol Vuh

79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

80 Satyricon by Petronius

81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

83 Black Boy by Richard Wright

84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu

85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George

87 Metaphysics by Aristotle

88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin

90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner

93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin

95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig

96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown

100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines

102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau

103 Nana by Émile Zola

104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck

109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg

110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

The Smurfs at War

UNICEF has created what has to be the most brilliant campaign ad they've ever done (h/t to N.Z. Bear.)

The short film pulls no punches. It opens with the Smurfs dancing, hand-in-hand, around a campfire and singing the Smurf song. Bluebirds flutter past and rabbits gambol around their familiar village of mushroom- shaped houses until, without warning, bombs begin to rain from the sky.

Tiny Smurfs scatter and run in vain from the whistling bombs, before being felled by blast waves and fiery explosions. The final scene shows a scorched and tattered Baby Smurf sobbing inconsolably, surrounded by prone Smurfs.

The final frame bears the message: “Don't let war affect the lives of children.”

Designed to raise awareness (and money) for rehabilitating child soldiers in Burundi, UNICEF is hoping that the shock of seeing the cute little blue guys felled will keep people from being apathetic about their needs.

While I applaud any efforts to provide for child soldiers that have been brutalized and conscripted into armies and terrorist groups, I can't help but wonder why UNICEF doesn't also attempt to raise awareness in Belgium about the main issues perpetuating the need for these soldiers.  Perhaps this is because more than 70% of the world's diamond business is done in Antwerp?

The Secretary-General...noted that, in countries including the [Democratic Republic of Congo], “The illicit exploitation of natural resources, in particular diamonds, gold … coltan and timber, in zones of conflict, has … become a principal means of fuelling (sic) and prolonging conflicts in which children suffer the most”.  (Quote taken from the Report of the UN Secretary General on Children and Armed Conflict, 2003; emphasis mine.)

We wouldn't want to disrupt commerce, now, would we?

Often, the same illegal arms dealers who provide the weapons and ammunition to these rebel movements also facilitate the transport and trade of the gold, diamonds, and other natural resources controlled by the rebels.  The revenue is used to fuel their fights and provide luxuries to rebel commanders, and control of the area solely for the resources more often than not becomes the goal of rebel and government forces alike.  In the context of a movie review, David Pratt of Scotland's Sunday Herald has recently taken a look at the illegal arms process and its impact on regional conflict in areas like Burundi, Rwanda, and other war-torn African nations.

If they can get away with it, underage soldiers are recruited by government forces for their "special abilities" as well:

“'Children make good fighters because they are young and want to show off. They think it is all a game, so they are fearless' - this is how a rebel commander fighting the government of President Laurent Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo, justified the use of children in his ranks...”

“…Acucena mentioned that the Mozambican government always took the rights of children into account during the conflict. Thus when the first compulsory conscription law was introduced in 1978 it specifically prohibited the conscription of children under 18 years into military service. However, in a war situation the enforcement of this clause was not always possible. Unofficial estimates show that some 23% of the army were children under the age of 18.”  (from an article by Antonio Gumende, emphasis mine.)

                        ***************************

The intersection of political conflict and economic gain is nothing new, but the tragedy of child soldiers, kidnapped, brainwashed, terrified, raped, beaten, and abused, should not go unnoticed in the great swarm of human rights abuses that the world is faced with every day.

                        ***************************

For more information about the use of children as soldiers around the world, see the 2004 Child Soldiers Global Report here.  Also see articles Gunplay I and Gunplay II by Kevin Sites, this post at Mornings Come Down, info on the LRA in Uganda, this piece at Black Looks, and this post at Two and Two Makes Five.