Discovered Today! 01/01/2008

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 USB Thumb Drive Tricks

JohnHaller.com - John T. Haller's homepage

• More than a collection, a goldmine! the man's a genius and a scholar..:) - post by jillianm

dezeen - a design magazine

The Literature of British India  Annotated

The Literature of British India

J. K. Buda

Introduction

At the height of its glory, the British Empire encompassed nearly a quarter of the earth's land mass and a quarter of its population. Of all its possessions, none was more precious than India, the 'jewel in the crown' of Victoria's Empire. Other possessions may have been larger or more profitable, but with none of them was there the same deep relationship as that which existed between Britain and India, a relationship whose essence was so perfectly captured by James Morris:

India was different in kind from the rest of the Empire — British for so long that it had become part of the national consciousness, so immense that it really formed, with Britain itself, the second focus of a dual power. If much of the Empire was a blank in British minds, India meant something to everybody, from the Queen herself with her Hindu menservants to the humblest family whose ne'er-do-well brother, long before, had sailed away to lose himself in the barracks of Cawnpore. India was the brightest gem, the Raj, part of the order of things: to a people of the drizzly north, the possession of such a country was like some marvel in the house, a caged phoenix perhaps, or the portrait of some fabulously endowed if distant relative. India appealed to the British love of pageantry and fairy-tale, and to most people the destinies of the two countries seemed not merely intertwined, but indissoluble. [1]

This unique relationship found expression in a large body of English literature, so large as to constitute a genre in itself.

BBC - Radio 4 - Plain Tales from the Commonwealth - Episode 3/4 My Friend the President  Annotated

In the 1950s and 60s, many British people got caught up in the liberation struggle that was taking place in the colonies, and became close to the charismatic leaders of the independence movements. After independence, some were rewarded with political positions in the new governments. Aidan talks to white men and women who held high office under black African presidents - and in some cases became disillusioned as the lofty ideals became tainted with corruption and violence.

Aidan Hartley's Articles | Spectator Magazine

The Zanzibar Chest by Aidan Hartley  Annotated

We should have never come!' So said Aidan Hartley's father in his final days, rising from a bed made of mountain cedar, lashed with thongs of rawhide from an oryx shot many years before. His words spoke of a colonial legacy that stretched back over 150 years through four generations of one British family. From great-great-grandfather William Temple, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his role in defending British settlements in nineteenth-century New Zealand, to his father, a colonial officer in Africa in the 1920s and a builder of dams in Arabia in the 1940s, the Hartleys were intrepid men who travelled to exotic lands to conquer, to build, and finally to bear witness. In The Zanzibar Chest, Hartley weaves together his family's history, his childhood in Africa and the dark world of the continent's horrendous wars, which he witnessed at first hand as a journalist in the 1990s.

After the end of the Cold War, there seemed to be new hope for Africa but again and again-in Ethiopia, in Somalia, Rwanda and the Congo, terror and genocide prevailed. In Somalia, three of Hartley's close friends are torn to pieces by an angry mob. Then, after walking overland from Uganda with the rebel army, he saw the terrible atrocities in Rwanda, arriving at the sites and interviewing survivors just days after the massacres. Finally, burnt out from a decade of horror, he retreated to his family's house in Kenya, where he discovered the Zanzibar chest his father left him. Intricately hand-carved and smelling of camphor, the chest contained the diaries of his father's best friend, Peter Davey, an Englishman who died under mysterious circumstances more than fifty years earlier. Tucking the papers under his arm, Hartley embarked on a journey to southern Arabia in an effort not only to unlock the secrets of Davey's life, but of his own. He travelled to the remote mountains and deserts of southern Arabia where his father served as a British officer. He began to piece together the disparate elements of Davey's story, a man who fell in love with an Arabian princess and converted to Islam, but died tragically.

At once a modern and a historic love story, The Zanzibar Chest is also an epic narrative charting the fates of men and women who interfered with, embraced and were ultimately transformed by twentieth-century Africa.

Discovered Today! 12/30/2007

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Coudal Partners

A Brief Message: Notify the Next of Kindle  Annotated

What no one seems to get through their thick skulls, even after untold millions of dollars have been wasted on the concept: PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN. Why is that so hard for someone as obviously smart as Jeff Bezos to accept? The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a “thing” in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to. But books were always physical objects, and the printed book as a piece of technology has yet to be improved upon. And won’t.

The Daily Swarm

Filter-Mag.com

Shorpy Historical Photographs | The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog

Afternoon Focus

Genocide Without End? The Destruction of Darfur

By Eric Reeves

AS GENOCIDAL destruction in the Darfur region of western Sudan enters its fifth year, we must accept not only the overwhelming disgrace of such prolonged human agony but register important shifts in the nature of the destruction—the appearance of new and different threats to the existence of both Arab and non-Arab populations in Darfur. Genocide is evolving in Darfur, mutating, and perhaps only now reaching the point of greatest human destruction.

Zimbabwe - Dissent Magazine Annotated

ZIMBABWE was known as the “jewel of Africa,” as Samora Machel, the Marxist president of Mozambique, told Robert Mugabe when the new nation won its independence in 1980. As the second-most-industrialized country on the continent, the former Southern Rhodesia already had a decent infrastructure, including roads and railways (“You were lucky to have had the British,” another Mozambican leader told Mugabe, no doubt wistfully); an energetic, talented, book-hungry populace; and democratic institutions such as a relatively free press and a functioning judiciary. The problems, of course, were immense: there was the need to recover—economically, psychically, spiritually—from over a decade of brutal civil war; and there were vast disparities between whites and blacks in wealth, education, skills, and land ownership. But in addition to having had some historic, manmade luck, Zimbabwe was naturally lucky, too: beautiful, mineral-rich, and astoundingly fertile. Zimbabwe’s vast, sophisticated commercial farms were ingeniously irrigated and passionately tended; they produced, and often exported, fruits, flowers, peanuts, grains, tobacco, cotton, coffee, poultry, pigs, and some of the best beef in the world. Doris Lessing, who was raised in Southern Rhodesia, called the country “paradise,” and she is among the least sentimental of writers.

Beginning in 2000, most of the country’s commercial farmers, who were white, were driven from their lands, violently and without compensation; hundreds of thousands of black farm workers have, consequently, also lost their homes, livelihoods, and access to medical care—particularly devastating in a country where at least one-fifth of the population is HIV-positive. The newly appropriated farms, many now in the hands of Mugabe’s cronies, lie in ruins: and so in what was once the breadbasket of Africa, famine looms for millions.

The World Bank has called Zimbabwe’s woes unprecedented for a country not at war

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, the journalist Peter Godwin paints a portrait of an imploding Zimbabwe that is alternately tender and furious. But it is a portrait that is also startlingly, almost willfully, partial, and it sent me looking to Zimbabwe’s complex past—exactly the place Godwin refuses to go—in an attempt to understand its present despair. And to try, too, to find voices other than those of Zimbabwe’s liberal whites—not because their views are wrong or unimportant, but because there is much that they cannot tell us.

Excerpt from Dissent Magazine

Justice Denied in Bosnia

By Courtney Angela Brkic

Before the war, you worked in an office. You took care of your parents, who were getting older but still managed to tend their vegetable garden and read the newspaper every day. For your daughter’s ninth birthday, you bought her a bicycle. Your teenage son played soccer for a local team, and when you could, you went to cheer him on.

When the war started, you could not believe that such a thing was possible in this day and age. “It’s the twentieth century,” you told your husband in disbelief. You did not understand how people could kill their neighbors. You blamed their politicians for this sudden contagion of nationalism. People will come to their senses, you reasoned, even as things got worse.

Finally, you sought refuge in the town—the one the United Nations had disarmed and subsequently declared “safe.” You reasoned that if UN troops had disarmed it, they intended to protect it. It is only logical, you thought. And eventually several hundred Dutch troops were deployed there. You did not speak their language, and they did not speak yours, but they stood between you and those who wanted you dead.