as a student i was pretty fuckin' cocky. my ego was monstrous. i thought i knew everything about my community and what being a leader was all about. king kong did not have shit on me... then you came. leveled me at passing glance. i strolled through the doors of historic filipinotown and you were my welcoming mat. laid flat with open arms and you absolutely devoured me. you made me realize that everything i knew and followed didn't mean shit in your world laced with real problems and real leaders.

   but i fed on your manuscripts of activism and mannerisms, a reality shed like deprived hunger. i wanted to soak all the knowledge you sponged from these living walls and i became addicted. gasolined this fire like never before; and i now know. i have taken what you have given me. learned from your leaders and i am re-birthed. humbled. ready to learn. willing to take on this world.

thank you for everything you have taught me. i owe you one, seriously.

- your community outreach organizer, 2007-2008

(спустя неделю, ни с того ни с сего)
Что ты говоришь?
Что я говорю?
Что ты говоришь!? все так сложно... Мало того, что ничего не показывает, так даже ни какая музыка не звучит

Clerk to the Council
Mrs. H. Trustam
30 Armstrong Close
Wilstead
Bedford
MK45 3EJ
Tel:  01234 743598
Email:  h.trustam@btinternet.com

27th June 2008

Eco-Towns Team
Housing & Growth Programmes
Department for Communities and
Local Government
2/H9 Eland House
Bressenden Place
London
SW1E 1DU

Dear Sir/Madam,

Proposed Eco-Town in The Marston Vale, Bedfordshire.

With reference to the above proposals regarding the construction of Eco Towns within Marston Vale, Marston Moreteyne Parish Council are firmly opposed to the proposals.

Public Consultation:    The consultation period on the proposals has been too short and lack of publicity and public consultation by both the Government and developers does not leave local residents any other choice but to believe that the scheme is being fast tracked through.

Coalescence of Villages:  Marston Vale primarily consists of villages which all have their own identities and communities, of which Marston Moreteyne is one.  The proposals will in effect create urban sprawl between Bedford and Milton Keynes and these communities will be lost forever.  The quality of housing is poor and the housing styles are totally out of character with the surrounding area and will not blend in.  Proposals for tower blocks are more in-keeping with cities not villages.

Employment:  The scheme focuses on housing for existing jobs in the area; however historically the area has low employment and thus it would mean that the new Eco Towns would be dormitory towns for the thousands of new residents who would have to commute long distances to travel from work to home.  This is in total contradiction to the vision of the Government for an Eco Town and would equate to an increase in the carbon footprint to those residents living in the Eco Towns.

Infrastructure Deficit:    Lack of investment in infrastructure required for the creation of a new sustainable community will place a burden on the existing roads which are already heavily congested; namely the A421.  Although the road will be improved in the next few years, the planned improvements will not have taken into consideration an increase in 30,000 – 50,000 people and their associated transportation needs.

Greenfield Land:  The O&H Development seeks to build on greenfield land which is not despoiled but open green space and farm land.  The development encroaches on the Green Sand Ridge which is one of our prized areas for natural beauty.  The proposed development on greenfield land contradicts Government guidelines for planning, and Government directive points to development of brownfield sites first.

The proposals for Eco-Towns in the Vale are in addition to the already allocated increase in housing for the Vale.  Marston Moreteyne already has 480 new homes allocated to be constructed and the majority of other villages will also see a dramatic increase in housing over the next few years.  Local services and roads will be stretched to accommodate these additional residents let alone those of the Eco Town.

The Eco Towns would be better suited to where regeneration is required and unemployment is high, not in a beautiful unspoiled area such as Marston Vale.

Yours faithfully,

H. Trustam

Mrs. H. Trustam
Parish Clerk

   i did take a few classes at my college. could of easily minored in it if i wanted to. but you my friend, exquisite. just talented. to quote that i view life like you view sheet music is the greatest overstatement in the history of overstatements. but i'm still learning here so bare with me. it took me a couple years but i've had my fair share of harana experiences and kareoke warm up exercises. in conclusion, i am exactly the most gifted music appreciator of all time. as a matter of fact, i'm the dean of the music appreciator college.

that's about as far as it goes. let me just leave it at that.

- audience member, row 9

As you can see my head is not unduly large. It is not cretinous. Compare it to Gertrude Stein's bushwacker visage. Remember Max Klinger rarely tells the truth. This Ekatrina Degot is some kind of fright-bag from Moldavia and I do often urinate in outside when inside does not conform to my pissquali needs. So you would were you me me you ghastly MLA circle-jerk concilitory, or committee level wanker.

PS. I never double-click on mouses. Do you?

Grabbe, Here.

Also, to one Herr A. C.,
This is a journal published and edited by a large number of hard working and thoughtful people: writers, scholars, and intellectuals. We have no idea about your wanting to, or not, wanting to publish in the the New Yorker. Getting one's facts straight is a long term project one might call philosophy, historiography, history of ideas, or Red Stick Rub Down.
Regardless, we were not writing about you; we see no reason for conflict with you.
We would like to press upon you our best regards.
Max Klinger, Christian Grabbe et al.

I think I only have a few minutes here before we leave, which means no more correspondence until Saturday at least.  My regur

...

That was all that was, apparently, of a correspondence post I was trying to make last...Thursday.  I had written over a paragraph-and-a-half more before I hit "send", whereupon I discovered that McDonald's had dropped its hammer and shut me out from the free connection I had found.  Turns out the "att" network was part of McDonald's somehow.  Lucky for me, I guess, that portion of the post was saved, thanks to beautiful, beautiful Wordpress.

The reason for my correspondence, as I think I might have mentioned but am not sure and am not going to go back to check right now, was that I was in a special place, a magical place, without Internet.  The place is called Zook & Lyter's.  I've been going there ever since I was born, every year, once a year.  I love it there.  Plenty of people, like my brother, may find it boring.  But I just love it up there.  It's the most serene and beautiful place I've ever been, and there's nothing big to it.  It's not a tourist trap.  It's just, there.  Seven cabins by the Juniata River.  A see-saw, sandbox, some swings, some monkey bars, all for the kiddies.  Two docks, canoe rentals, a nearby access area; it's great for fishing, something else we used to do every year with my now late Poppop.  But I don't recommend the sandbox.  It's dirty in there, man.  Beautiful water, beautiful tree-covered mountains just beyond it, beautiful fields and landscapes in general.  White squirrels, though we didn't see any this year.  We did see a skunk though.  And I drove!

I really love Zook & Lyter's.  I'll never get tired of it.  I got the raw inspiration that I expected I'd get when I was up there, but I couldn't make anything of it.  It was too raw.  It came and went before the week was over.  Most of the time I played Super Nintendo games on the laptop.  Though, I did get a summer AP Art assignment started.  I just need to shade some stuff now.

There are Amish there, too.  Now, everytime I say that to someone, they think, "Oh yeah, Lancaster".  NO.  It's not Lancaster, damn it.  It's about an hour or two WEST of Lancaster.  Yeah, undisturbed Amish.  People misunderstand the Amish.  They don't like photos because it's too vain to have a photo taken, not because it'll steal their soul.  They can use electricity, as long as things are battery-operated.  They have a phone.  I mean, they do business with non-Amish.  They get rides in cars.  You don't know Amish.

Or maybe you do.  I don't know.  I don't know you.

We are sitting here resting our bones on the dock of the bay, watching the tide role away. Obama is in Camel-Land; Putin and Skorskzy were last seen watching The Dark Knight in Queens; Wild Bill has been hiding out in bowling alleys; and we are suggesting the Nobel Prizes for Peace and Literature be retired, or at least given a last call of many decades. Otherwise Albert Gore might win it for the skinflick based on the opera/libretto, based on the documentary, and does anything make you feel more narcoti and stoned ou than World Climate Change? Image Mr. Rogers speaking truth to power about Climate Change. Indeed, consider Mr. Rogers speaking truth to power about anything. Also, we Guam Islander HerderSchlegelHegelLudwigTieck crowd have to ask is: Consider the memory of tan-lines to remain in the mind as opposed to tattooes. And then tell us hoot hoot hoot wrote the big book of love?

IN AAALL WORLD, ONLY FOR ME SECRET

2. urban humanity like crowded veins. tire tracks sprawled on god's operating table after an 8 hour struggle

3. historic filipinotown breathes community as daily vitamins during foggy sunrises

4. vermont and sunset, the birth of my story

5. my lolo's essence growing plants in his backyard watering grandchildren and their laughter

6. funkheads loungin' to radiohead splitting musical theory by way of amoeba specs

7. the ricochet of tuesday night cafe-ing in a tokyo business suit

8. a glancing graphic vibrancy bombed on dusk timing. my muted car reflects the front page italics 

9. the soulful whispers of bluesy; buried from piles of paperwork and sandcastles

10. how i am continually humbled by what you are

this is why you will always come first to me. 

los angeles.
au revior.

Let's start with a canonical example, and a truth-schema. The example that Davidson likes to use is <'snow is white' is true iff snow is white>, which corresponds to the Tarskian schema <'p' is true iff p>. The quotation marks denote a sentence token, while p in general is a proposition. Thus, we can say <'schnee ist weiss' is true iff snow is white>, because 'p' is a sentence (in German, in this case), and p is a proposition. Davidson does not find the obvious problem all that problematic; he assumes that if something is the case, then any statement of that is true.

This is a classic correspondence theory. If I say that 'snow is white,' the statement is true if and only if it is actually the case that snow is white. The world is not represented by my sentence, but when I apply truth conditions to it I treat that truth value as if it were determined by something other than the contents of my belief; namely, the world.

Of course, some Davidsonians (I'm thinking mostly of Rorty here) might respond by saying that if radical interpretation is true, then I'm never getting at the facts without interpreting them, which yields a coherence theory of sorts, one in which the truths of our beliefs rest on other beliefs (he qualifies this in the afterword). This, of course, doesn't mean that truth is relative. It merely means that we don't have some sort of pre-linguistic connection to the world, at least as Davidson and Rorty read it.

Davidson, in "Radical Interpretation," gives as a condition for checking the truth of Convention T is to see whether it entails a T-sentence for every sentence of the langauge, and then to test those sentences. We only need, as he puts it, "an adequate sample." Thus, we return to a correspondence theory in which the truth of sentences are determined by the world. If we cannot check the adequacy of our theory of truth by checking the T-sentences, we shouldn't adopt the theory (as Davidson says). In the context of radical interpretation, though, we take truth as primitive and extract a theory of interpretation for a natural language from that. Of course, by assuming that people have mostly true beliefs (we have to, according to Davidson, but that's neither here nor there), we are going to find that Tarski's theory does entail a T-sentence for every sentence of the language, which forces us to not look at our beliefs, but rather at the world for the truth-values of sentences. If we had no way to check if the beliefs of others were true, our assumption of the principle of charity would be unfounded in any case.

We cannot seem to escape the idea that the Tarskian theory leads to a correspondence theory, even if people like Rorty or Davidson himself deny that the theory is a correspondence theory. But if truth is not truth by some form of correspondence (even if it's a limited correspondence like Davidson's), then I don't know what to make of the idea of truth. Truth is a property of sentences and propositions, to be sure, but if truth doesn't have a relation to the world, then it's an empty concept of truth.

But maybe it all doesn't matter after all. Maybe all what matters is what feels right and what feels wrong. There's no objective truth anyway, just different opinions, maybe a majority's viewpoint, but why should that fit to everybody? So the key is to find the people you share the same understanding, or the people you're willing to accept and those, that accept you, of course. Perhaps, sometimes, what feels right, is right even if the norms tell otherwise. Leaving pathology out, right or wrong is your personal business, exclusevly.
Besides, what would be a better teacher than the mistakes you've made on your own? And what would give more information than things not feeling right? Or the opposite - feeling perfect!

I remember a bus trip to Tartu with S. I remember one thought she shared - making other people happy is great, but making yourself happy is important. So sometimes it happens that what makes you happy, doesn't have the same effect on other people and that something that needs to be accepted. Having one unhappy person is enough damage, no reason to have two. Especially since happyness would be achievable for the both, but being stuck in a situation wouldn't allow them to come to that.

I lost an earring. Again. I hate losing just one of the pair. This time it was one of the golden ones I. had gave me. I wondered what that meant, losing one now. Would that fit to an allegory of what is lost and never to be found?
Then again - to the hell with it. I lost an earring that I found very functional. Period.  Only thing it means is, I need to get new ones. 'Cause sometimes a sigarette is just a sigarette.

Still, I know I've made the right decisions.  They just feel right. I have no objective proof, but this is not a science. They don't even feel easy. But who cares. Sweet and sour is the safest choise in Chinese cuisine, why not in real life?

Remark: the source of the title is Sinatra

holla.

- me

without you i became stronger. put on this facade like i knew what the fuck i was doing. i studied life like chapters in a history book. i wanted to become the mentor that you never were, to those who needed it. i grew contempt in my disposition. with no footsteps to follow, i would move on.

today, you're merely a relic to me. i'm all grown up now.

but...

sometimes i would stop and i would look out my window next to my display of picture frames and keepsakes and i would imagine. what life would be like if you were here. all these years. in my life.

if only you really existed.

(original)
...Ну, что ж,
Отмечу, в жизни у меня прогресс!
Со мной поздоровалась одна девица
Но почему-то начали глаза слезиться
Наверно поросто атмосферный пресс!?...

Ха-ха! Ха?

That’s right.  Ever.  And it’s not even close.  This is a film in a class so distinctly its own that it barely can be squeezed into the existing parameters of how we define a movie.  It so outdoes everything that’s come before that it is almost like watching some new, far superior form of entertainment unlikely ever to be duplicated.

Imagine what it was like when Socrates first put ink to parchment and world was blessed with the story of Oedipus.  Or imagine the reaction when the curtain was rung down on the opening night of Romeo and Juliet.  Or imagine the final notes of Don Giovanni crashing down on the audience at its premiere.  Can you?  I can.  I was at a showing of WALL·E at the local multiplex last weekend.

Every frame, every moment, is sublime perfection.  It conveys the full range of human emotions through a cuddly array of robots and cockroaches and clips from Hello Dolly and corpulent chair-bound successors to the human race.  The gorgeous visuals coupled with tender sentiment, uproarious slapstick, tear-jerking romance, whiz-bang action, profound depth, and dazzlingly inventive creations work seamlessly to produce the most insightful, enjoyable film the world could ever have dared to dream possible.

Were Shakespeare, Van Gogh, and God to cosmically collaborate on a piece of art, it’s not much of a stretch to guess that it would resemble WALL·E, or more probably fall a hair shy.  In the history of man’s creations, a countdown of sheer perfection now literally goes: the Mona Lisa, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Campbell’s Soup can, Michelangelo’s David, and Pixar’s WALL·E.  Hell, when thrown into competition with nature’s creations, only peacock feathers, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the human earlobe come remotely close to this animated vision of wonder.

To try and remain spoiler-free, and therefore not rob you of any of the joy, amazement, or mind-expanding enlightenment you will receive in the viewing of this masterpiece, here is some attempt at a frame of reference.  The narrative Pixar has created makes Hamlet look like Ernest Scared Stupid. 

The visuals!  Glory be, the visuals make the aurora borealis seem like a dull row of lampposts gone haywire.  The inventive soundtrack and vocal work rivals the best attempts of Tchaikovsky and Brahms.  And the hilarious comedic performances shames previously considered geniuses like Chaplin and Keaton into certain obscurity and oblivion.  A thousand years from now the great inventions of our age will be universally accepted as the printing press, the personal computer, and Pixar’s crowning achievement.

Before straining the limits of credibility with excessive hyperbole and risking extreme exaggeration, let me just close by saying that were I given a choice between bringing my loved ones back from the dead, discovering a cure for cancer and herpes, ensuring world peace and harmony, knowing true happiness and how to attain it, and being assured of the existence of and my someday admittance to heaven, or being in possession of a DVD loaded with deleted scenes and making ofs for and assurance of a sequel to WALL·E, I’d debate it for about six seconds, and then I’D CHOOSE WALL·E.

-          Produced and distributed by the publicity department of the Walt Disney Company, Pixar Animation Studios, and the Ad Council

Even from distant Guam we feel we must enter in on this discussion of the disgraceful New Yorker cover of 21 July 08. It may well be arch and funny in a Northeast Corridor sort of way (see our Intellectual Life of Cape Cod pages), but the result is poisonous, calumnious, stupid, and too fucking cute for words. Should you be taken in by that schwammerei about "the politics of fear," and "the two serious articles about Obama," read Rebecca Mead's article about Galt Niederhoffer's novel, The Romantics, in the same issue, or is it actually just a truly disgusting enthuse about Rich Bitches and their shoes. The above follows an inane piece of piss and drizzle about Harold Bloom and A-Rod. Which is to say, finally that there is more to social life and political philosophy than Seven-Sisters-Jane-Austen chicks sniffing their armpits before putting down the little red handbag. Are highly-educated Northeast Corridor people getting the drivel they need this summer? It appears so.
While we're at it (rant, denounce, shift lumber, vituperate) why is Seymour Hersh not called out for the little gossip-monger tyro that he is? He is, in his own way, as big a wind-bag as Bloom.
Finally, remember that male-slug from Dartmouth who played at cowboysamshepardstud and "just really wanted to publish something in the New Yorker?" He was chewing tobacco and you we were eating curds and whey. But then, we digress...
And Now For a Further Seven Hundred Pages on Something by John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates On Whatever it is they Want to Drone on About .

The Editors, Der Zuschauer

Hi, I would like you to reconsider posting a link to VELORUTION. They have published a blog that is very racially offensive. If anyone knew that you helped Velorution advertise by providing them with a link through your site - its possible that some people that you know, would be extremely disappointed.

Thank you for your consideration

Ashley Hosten

My answer:

Hi Ashley,

I hadn't checked Velorution for a while, thanks for drawing my attention to this particular post. It is certainly a dishonest and discriminatory piece, which I don't support, particularly his generalization of how ' The Dutch recognise the problem they have and openly talk about it: dark-skinned immigrants do not cycle and that lowers the standards of the nation'.

1) he implies that only dark-skinned immigrants don't cycle.
a) non dark-skinned immigrants do cycle?
b ) actually, regardless of some polarizing fear-mongering politicians, the Dutch government subsidizes cycle lessons for immigrants, specifically for women, as bicycle use is cost-efficient (important), it's a social factor (very important) and liberating (and we know how much of a emancipating symbol the bicycle has been in early 20th century (before women won the right to vote). Why change something that works, right?
c) from my personal observations: rather the majority than the minority of (1st/2nd and 3rd generation) of immigrants (most naturalised) uses the bicycle.
2) even if his dribble was fact, not cycling doesn't lower the standards. I can't make any cheese out of this bit.

So, in conclusion, I don't know what the hell he's talking about. I've now decided to post this e-mail exchange on my blog, to let others know. And take him off my blogroll, of course.

best,

Marc

[Update]

I think I can put this issue to rest by adding Velorution's commentary on my post/e-mail:

P.S. Below the fold are some of the emails I have received. I would like to single out one remark that is characteristic of the prevalent hypocrisy. Amsterdamize called my previous post “dishonest and discriminatory” and claims that “rather the majority than the minority of (1st/2nd and 3rd generation) of immigrants (most naturalised) uses the bicycle.” How come then, one has to look very hard among the hundreds of photographs he publishes, to see a dark face on a bike. Who is the racist now?

Velorution, I'm the last one to see things in black and white, whether it regards people or things written down. I read your post twice, because the first time I wasn't sure whether you were being ironic, sarcastic, or anything else. Maybe I missed a few things that would clear this thing up. Misconception is a rotten thing, certainly on the internet. Hence, I read it again.

There's absolutely no wiggle room for misinterpretation. You are an ill-informed, generalizing, discriminatory and dishonest person. With this comment, I would add 'delusional' and 'plain dumb' to it, as well.

No, you got it right, I'm not going to dignify this utter bullshit any further. I'd be lowering my standards.

I leave you with a related discussion on the CycleChat forum.

Update: Velorution added this and this post to its buckle. I commented the following (waiting for it to appear):

"Well, Andrea, mea culpa? Hardly. Your earlier and apparent intellectual laziness is now pretty clear. You should have thought twice before lumping together many false characterizations and let your bigotry shine through. When you attempted to point out my 'racism' and 'hypocrisy' because you hardly saw any 'black people' in my 'hundreds of photos', I could hardly restrain myself from unleashing a DOS-attack on your 'quaint' little online bike shop. But then I thought you just weren't worth having a normal discussion with, let alone lose my temper over. Reading your previous posts and this one I feel totally at ease. My outrage was well founded. You're so dishonest and inconsistent it's hard to fathom you can run a business. You basically go from trashing, abusing and discriminating immigrants/black people (or let's just say 'not your kind'), to disingenuous backpedaling and (post-related) factual distortion, ending with a half ass and badly baked mea culpa.

It's so transparent, it's not hard to feel sorry for you. If you still wonder why I added 'intellectual laziness' to the list...my best guess is that you look at pictures the same way you look at those 'other people': commonalities. Well, I hate to break to you, but a 'melting pot' isn't called that for nothing. How can you tell (more and more) these days who's an immigrant, 1st, 2nd, 3rd generation, or anything else? I can't. (But I know you were looking for those burkas, sure) But then again, what is black, what is brown, what is yellow? I don't single them out, maybe because they're just people of Amsterdam and they just happen to be there when I click, regardless. I don't see how London can be any different from Amsterdam, which demographics have also changed gradually but consistently.

The only conclusion I can come up with is that you haven't. I sincerely hope you will."

Photo link 1, Photo link 2, Photo link 3, Photo link 4, Photo link 5, Photo link 6, Photo link 7, Photo link 8, Photo link 9, Photo link 10, Photo link 11, Photo link 12, Photo link 13, Photo link 14, Photo link 15

I could go on, but do you see what I mean? Do you?"

i'm going to miss you, you little rat.

you cute little rat.

- the household dog whisperer