Some of you may have been following the discussions surrounding the recent return of an adopted Russian child to Russia by its overwhelmed American mother ( Read more... )

Most fascinating recent article on the gender specifics of human sexuality, esp of desire.

Only the Swiss would feel strongly enough about their performance for top managers to forgo some of their compensation as "punishment" for the bad state of their corporations.

Since 1989, when I returned from North Carolina to Vienna as a preparatory career move from computer science to theology, I had been desirous of a copy of Heliand, an old Saxon poem from the 9th century that retells the Gospel in terms of Germanic knighthood ideals ( Read more... )

In the movie The Ark, someone asks about the name of a German composer, and his colleague replies, "Aren't all composers German?"

I sort of shared that sentiment, until I recently purchased a CD with 20 famous Soprano Arias for the children, and lo and behold, it's dominated by Giacomo Puccini (8 out of 20), followed by Giuseppe Verdi (2), and ( Read more... )

You have to wonder about the teenage target market of a show where the warrior gals take as long to get ready for the fight as a teenager does to prepare for a party.

On the other hand it is hard to argue with the snappy lines; my favorite is:
I am Sailor Moon, I triumph over Evil, and that means you!

I like the clarity in that sentiment. ( Read more... )

One of the main problem with raising children is that you cannot control the focus of what it is that your are communicating. They will see what seems relevant to them and be happy to take that as the point of the message, whatever it was that you thought you might be communicating.

Case in point: Babar. Babar is highly entertaining for children, ( Read more... )

(To the tune of My Bonny is over the Ocean ... apologies if you have a Culloden participant in your gene pool.)
The dump truck is getting the diapers
the dump truck is fetching the peels
the dump truck is taking the newspaper stacks
and puts all that garbage on wheels.

Chorus:
Take it, take it, oh take all our garbage away, away!
Take it, take it, ( Read more... )

On of the defining books of my life is The Social Construction of Reality by American sociologist Peter L. Berger and German sociologist Thomas Luckmann. In a straightforward and compelling fashion it makes plausible how the process of communicating culture from one generation to the next affects its social construction and explains both continuity ( Read more... )

I had ranted some time back about the misleadingly Romantic image of Native Indian culture that the new Smithsonian was projecting. Now the new National Geographic article on the Rise and Fall of the Mayan culture spells the internal conflicts, the over-exploitation of the environment and the Euroasian style of dealing with ones' opponents out in ( Read more... )