I wonder what algorithm the New York Times uses to display its banner ads? Apparently the Kerry flash ad has been showing for days, yet I have never had NYT display it for me (I got the url link from someone else); all I can get NYT to show me are ads for IQ tests & financial services. What are they trying to tell me here? I don't think I like it.

Who knew John Kerry could make a cheeky little ad like this? (You'll need to enable your Flash plug-in to see it, and here is the url link, if you want to download it.)

Hm. There are at least two other weblogs named "Exempli gratia" (here and here). Both of them antecede this one; though I do have more words, which hopefully is worth something.

It just goes to show you that the typical result of trying to be clever is looking like a fool, exempli gratia, what we have here.

A witty bit of fancy, for those of you who are fans of unorthodox orthography.

"A stand against pompous gasbags", Sandra Tsing Loh talks to Salon.com about her firing by KCRW public radio, the beginning of this month, over the word "fuck".

Incidentally, KCRW has since offered to hire her back; she declined.

The audio archives of her monologue, Loh Life, has been pulled off KCRW's website, but you can hear her on among other places, This American Life episodes 26, 45, 62, &c.

"Toast", a short story by John Haskell, read by the author on the March 12 episode of The Next Big Thing.

Apparently, the only "love" stories I can stand are those plain, skeptical tales which preferably, end badly, or at least on a slightly bitter note. For the same reason I dilute my lemonade with water until it is more bitter than sweet, and I write these fairly somber posts. It says something something about me, and let's leave it at that; enough exhibitionism already.

PF, commenting on the previous post: "Interesting stuff, that Rongorongo. But from that article it looks like a real crank magnet."

It is curious so many people are seeking magic in the same magical tokens that failed, and was abandoned by, the Easter Islanders. More interesting, for me, are two readings that can be constructed from the Easter Island story.

One is as a story of innocent self-destruction, by a people only dimly aware of the consequences. It is an ecological cautionary tale about what and what not to do, a lesson to learn from.

The other, much more sobering, is of a destruction driven by a cultural and socio-political machinery that took off with a life of its own, whose actions individual persons were hardly able to affect. Cultural revolution is impossible in the absence of catastrophe, and sometimes, as on Easter Island, it is a catastrophe impossible to recover from. Easter Island is not so much a lesson on what not to do, as it is illustrative of the limits of rational action.

The March 25 issue of The New York Review of Books includes an excellent essay and book review by Jared Diamond, on the decline of human culture on Easter Island.

What really struck me, aside from it being a literal case of paradise lost, was the inexorable socio-political logic behind the destruction. It was not simply a people hunting and logging themselves out of an island paradise; a greater part of it was due to the construction of costly religious and political displays, which both intimidated rival tribes, and kept the chiefs and priests in power. What followed: deprivation, starvation, cannibalism, revolutions, civil wars, the death of an once elaborate culture, is both sad and sadly, it seems, inevitable. It is a destruction that is both wanton and innocent. What was going on, and what must be done to stop it, must have been clear to the islanders at some point; at the same time it must have also seemed impossible to do anything else. The implications of this story for today is clear enough.

In the late 1700's, the Island's priests, impressed by the power of writing exhibited by the Spanish with whom they came into contact, sought to renew their lost prestige by inventing the Rongorongo script. When the magic of monuments failed, it was to the magic of words the islanders turned; but Culture, as magic and as power (however destructively wielded), turned out to be pretty frail stuff in the end.

What is meant, really, when terrorists "take responsibility" for some bloody deed? Certainly the people behind the bombings in Madrid today are not taking responsibility in the sense of willing to accept the legal consequences; you are sure they are doing their best to avoid being caught. Taking responsibility is what responsible people do when they take principled actions and are willing to face the consequences; this "taking responsibility" here is nothing more than a sadistic and cowardly calling of the score, and need to be called as such. This and other political euphemisms make the ugly and disgusting appear tolerable and even reasonable; that is all they are good for, and they need to go.

One can almost visualise The Economist's editorial staff pacing back and forth in the office, late into the night, trying to convince themselves that really, this Kerry fellow is not as lefty as he pretends to be...

想不到，但其实也想得到，《南方周末》有一天也会登出如此走狗的文章。中国媒体的良知真是比张报纸还薄。

Don't bother learning to read Chinese. Basically, a sycophantic commentary on the recent remark by the government in Beijing: "only patriots are fit to rule Hong Kong". The sad part is it was published in one of China's most liberal and socially conscious newspapers.

And I quote: "Patriotism, after Piety, is my least favourite virtue."

My gratitude to anyone who can spot for me the author of the quote, which sounds about right here.

红色新闻兵 Red Color News Soldier, an on-line exhibition of photojournalism by 李振盛 Li Zhensheng, taken during the Cultural Revolution.

Saw Gus Van Sant's Elephant last night. Ignoring the elephant here, I was reminded, more explicitly than I had thought about it before, how inane and completely anti-intellectual high school was. Not so much the students, which you expect and forgive for being shallow and naïve and a little dumb; it is the faculty, in their jaded contempt or sun-drenched earnestness, Socrates or Jesus, who put a bad taste in my mouth. I will make an exception for the librarians though, most of whom I encountered were genuinely book-loving people with little pretension (perhaps due to their low status in the faculty pecking order).

A terribly mean-spirited thing to say, I know, for many of my teachers, high school and elsewhere, were genuinely kind and helpful people, even if none of them was intellectually influential. But it is easy to dislike something in the collective abstract than in the concrete, atom by atom. One cannot help making such mistakes even if he is vigilant; it is at least helpful to recongnise them afterwards.

To do what is right, and what is kind — but what to do, when they are not the same?

NPR has a special section on Justice Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court papers, recently opened to the public.

The Supreme Court is by far my favourite part of the Government; it comes as close as you can in a democracy to having philosopher-kings.

Some astonishingly beautiful flash animations by 卜桦 (Bu Hua). If you can't read Chinese, just click on the images arrayed in the middle of the page; the first two, "A Seed's Journey" and "Cat", are particularly outstanding. Be patient with the slow download; it is well worth the wait.

I am a little reluctant to call them flash animations, which is what they are, because they do not feel at all similar to the glitzy, bandwidth-hogging stuff that stand in for content so many places else. These remind me of the Chinese and East European animated films of the 1960-80's, where animation was taken seriously as a visual art in the broad context of visual arts, from painting to sculpture to photography.

Can a film, or at least a short film, stand as a purely visual work of art minus the narrative? Western painting traditionally has had a strong narrative view, like glorified comic strips — think of the Sistine Chapel. But what is the narrative in the Mona Lisa or a Jackson Pollock? Why can't a canvas be viewed as a film with a single frame?

John Kerry as the one who "carries the hope of [the world]" — somehow I doubt it. But isn't it something when The Guardian is using Biblical language to speak against Bush.

The Economist has been more restrained in its disappointment, though last week's "The case for gay marriage" was fairly sharp. I am curious as to whom they will endorse in the end; I don't imagine that will be an easy decision, especially if Kerry keeps up the populist rhetoric.