Thursday, March 17, 2005

To all of those whom I have to share the road with....

Please, put down the hamburger, newspaper, cigarette, or mascara, leave disciplining the kids until you get home, turn down the radio so that I can hold a normal conversation in my own car, and for God's sake, HANG UP THE DAMMED CELL PHONE!!!

Maybe then you'll be able to stay in your own lane (yes, we each have one), stop at stop signs, and keep up with the normal flow of traffic. I'm just saying....

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Dumbest Thing I've Read in a Long Time

Perhaps this isn't so very unusual, but the response to it has me thinking. Several weeks ago in a city near here some idiot stalked and killed his estranged wife and her female friend in front of their three children. He followed them in their SUV, forced their vehicle to the side of the road, opened the door and shot his wife in the back as she attempted to run away. And then he went back and shot her friend, for good measure, I suppose. Fortunately for society, the man soon thereafter died when he crashed his own SUV while attempting to flee. Two innocent women dead and three children scarred for life.

Then yesterday I read in the opinion column of our local newspaper that it was all the government's fault for not allowing the wife to carry a concealed weapon in order to protect herself. Now the issue here wasn't that she'd applied for a concealed carry permit and been turned down (she had not), but that, I suppose, it's okay for a mother of three to carry a loaded firearm in her car with three small children. In fact, the writer went to far as to condemn the government for not allowing ALL adults to carry concealed weapons. Silly me, I thought the problem here was that THE HUSBAND DID HAVE A GUN, NOT THAT THE WIFE DIDN'T. After all, he's the one who actually did the deed.

Am I off base here?

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

For those who wondered....

Dada or Dadaism [French, from dada, child's word for a horse] Nihilistic movement in the arts that flourished chiefly in France, Switzerland, and Germany from about 1916 to about 1920 [and later -ed.] and that was based on the principles of deliberate irrationality, anarchy, and cynicism and the rejection of laws of beauty and social organization.

The most widely accepted account of the movement's naming concerns a meeting held in 1916 at Hugo Ball's Cabaret (Café) Voltaire in Zürich, during which a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the word dada; this word was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities, which were engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I.

In the United States the movement was centered in New York at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, "291," and at the studio of the Walter Arensbergs. Dada-like activities, arising independently but paralleling those in Zürich, were engaged in by such chiefly visual artists as Man Ray and Francis Picabia. Both through their art and through such publications as The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada, the artists attempted to demolish current aesthetic standards. Traveling between the United States and Europe, Picabia became a link between the Dada groups in New York City, Zürich, and Paris; his Dada periodical, 291, was published in Barcelona, New York City, Zürich, and Paris from 1917 through 1924.

In 1917 the Dada movement was transmitted to Berlin, where it took on a more political character. The Berlin artists, too, issued Dada publications: Club Dada, Der Dada, Jedermann sein eigner Fussball ("Everyman His Own Football"), and Dada Almanach.

In Paris Dada took on a literary emphasis under one of its founders, the poet Tristan Tzara. Most notable among Dada pamphlets and reviews was Littérature (published 1919-24), which contained writings by André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and Paul Éluard. After 1922, however, Dada faded and many Dadaists grew interested in surrealism.

From: http://www.peak.org/~dadaist/English/Graphics/

Other good sites:

http://www-camil.music.uiuc.edu/Projects/EAM/Dadaism.html

http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/

http://members.aol.com/ArionS414/dada.html

M.L.