fourth edition

“..there is beauty in everything. What ‘normal’ people would perceive as ugly, I can usually see something of beauty in it” – Alexander McQueen
British fashion designer, Alexander McQueen committed suicide today. He was only forty years old. McQueen was one of the very, very few who deserved to be called a genius in his chosen [...]

J.D. Salinger has died. I wonder what unpublished works he has left behind?

Yes, it continues to be cold. The novelty of snow has long worn off. My sole source of weather-related amusement is the media who insist 60,000 people will die in the Big Freeze, the British Army is being set in and the beginning of food shortages lead to soaring prices. Yesterday night BBC News ran [...]

“Denmark is losing its reputation for being a good world citizen.” – Naomi Klein
Danish police arrest 150 demonstrators as world leaders arrive at Copenhagen conference. Mainstream groups such as Friends of the Earth have been barred from the conference centre (“Every delegate from the international environmental campaign group arrived at the centre this morning to [...]

Twenty years ago today my mother woke me up early. She was crying. Last time she woke me up crying, Olof Palme had just been assassinated. This time, though, my mother’s tears were not angry, horrified and sad tears. She was crying with joy. The Berlin Wall had fallen.
I went to school that day. My [...]

.. and they lived happily ever after – they being the knitter and her own Liesl.
I frogged a scarf I knitted last year but only wore twice and miraculously I got an entire top out of my three re-purposed skeins of Noro Iro. Liesl is a magical pattern, I think.
Right now I’m really using [...]

What happened to churches as places of sanctuary, Denmark? Was it really necessary to get combat-clad police to raid a church at 2am in the morning? Are leading politicians serious when they say “it was a lot more gentle to do the raid at night; imagine what a scene it would’ve caused by day” [...]

Dead Ronald Reagan appears to wife, Nancy:

She told Vanity Fair magazine: “At night time, if I wake up, I think Ronnie is there, and I start to talk to him… And I see him.”
(..)
And she mentioned that the present First Lady, Michelle Obama, called for advice on running the White House.
Mrs Reagan’s suggestion was to [...]

Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas doctor, was shot today in his local church. Apart from being a family doctor, Dr. Tiller also ran an abortion clinic. He had previously been shot and wounded by a pro-life* activist. His clinic had also been the target of a bomb.
(*pro-life? I’m pro-choice which doesn’t make me anti-life. I [...]

R.I.P., Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
It is difficult to calculate the impact of Sedgwick’s scholarship, in part because its legacy is still in the making, but also because she worked at a skew to so many fields of inquiry. Feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis and literary, legal and disability studies–Sedgwick complicated and upended them all, sometimes in ways [...]