sadara.be

as you’ve maybe noticed, i’ve changed the theme on my blog. the new theme, called ‘viala’, was written by david garlitz, who has made it freely available under the GPL licence – generous man. you can download it here.

also new is the flickr plugin, which is ‘Flickr Photo Album‘, written by joe tan, seen here asleep on a plane. this is a great plugin; i’ve tested quite a few flickr plugins over the last 2 or 3 years and this is the most comprehensive and trouble-free i’ve come across. installing it was a breeze – for which i’m very grateful. i stumbled a little when it came to customising the photoalbum pages to fit the viola theme, but in the end it was very simple.

No, not the gone with the wind, but a gone with the wind, a CD produced by a group of 4 mongolian musicians who used to busk around amsterdam. the lamb is william blake’s, as set by john tavener, and the unicorn (blue) is mercedes sosa’s. there’s mariza’s own fate, kevin ayers’ stranger in blue suede shoes (thank you … very much … indeed), etta james doing ella and barbara sukowa (one of margarethe von trotta’s german sisters) singing schubert, as recomposed by reinbert de leeuw. finally, one last song from gundula janowitz.

a couple of arias from vivaldi’s bajazet, kimya dawson, anouar brahem, j.j. cale, j.s. bach, souad massi, the lord’s prayer etc.

jona took this with his own camera when we stopped on the afsluitdijk on the way to schiermonnikoog – what a great photo! don’t you think?

a fascinating profile in the guardian today of a US journalist operating in iraq. there’s a brief discussion of the problem of journalistic ‘objectivity’:

In the introduction to his book ['Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq'], [Dahr Jamail] quotes the story of an indigenous Canadian hunter who was called to give evidence at an inquiry into a planned dam that would flood his homeland and destroy his traditional way of life. The hunter was asked to swear on the Bible that he would tell the truth, but he had never seen a Bible and wondered how this miraculous truth-telling instrument worked. “He spoke with the translator at length,” writes Jamail, “and finally the translator looked up at the judge. ‘He does not know whether he can tell the truth. He says he can tell only what he knows.’”

this story would make most epistemologists blanch. but so much the worse for most epistemologists.

link to an interesting site for independent journalism on iraq – electroniciraq.net