Friday, November 21, 2003

What a Welcome!!!

Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly:0), these comments are not reported in TV channels and mainstream media.

While the TV news shows, George Bush shaking hands with Tony Blair, visiting the Queen, waving to camera, etc., the media completely overlooked that, during this visit to UK:

1. the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, publicly called the President of USA the "greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen", on the eve of his arrival to UK.

and

2. the Queen's son, Prince Charles, described George W Bush as "a mad man", and "American policies in middle east complete madness", at a time when the latter is visiting UK an invited Guest of the State!!!

So, apparently, it is not just the 100,000 anti-war protestors (who marched through London last night, and are often shown as peripheral to mainstream society) who think that there is something wrong with the "powers-that-be"

Sunday, November 09, 2003

101 Ways to Get Educated

There are more than one ways in which one can get educated. This is a list which I found on the net... pretty insightful (though it does not add to 101:0):


  1. Grow enough grain for one loaf of bread -- and make and eat the loaf
  2. Answer ALL the questions of a 3 year old for a week
  3. Spend a day alone in a wild place
  4. Follow your trash to its final resting place
  5. Collect food and blankets and spend a day giving them to homeless people taking the time to stop and talk about life
  6. Help in the birth of a lamb, cow, or horse
  7. Visit a slaughter house (try to withhold judgment)
  8. Organize a rite of passage ceremony for an adolescent, someone at mid-life, or yourself
  9. Switch genders for the day
  10. Build a house (your own, or for Habitat for Humanity)
  11. Ask a low rider how the lifters on their car work
  12. Apprentice yourself to someone you've always wanted to learn from
  13. Take a picture of you and all your stuff in front of the place where you live. Compare it to the pictures in Peter Menzel's Material World
  14. Read the sacred texts of another tradition
  15. Imagine your most delicious relationship and then go first
  16. Work for a week on an assembly line
  17. Spend a week without stepping in a car. Pay attention to how your town looks from a bike, bus, or sidewalk
  18. Exchange tutoring with a teenager - math or bicycle repair in exchange for Web browsing, skate boarding, dance, or ??
  19. Go to someone else's church, synagogue, or place of worship
  20. Go on a vision quest
  21. Take a dance class from a different culture
  22. Interview the oldest person you can find; record the conversation
  23. Interview a child
  24. Imagine a day in your life 15 years from now
  25. Plant and care for a tree
  26. Ask yourself, "What if everyone in the world behaved the way I am behaving?"
  27. Get the names of the favorite books of your dentist, grocery store clerk, mother, co-worker, and your minister/rabbi/priest or spiritual guide. Read those books
  28. Pretend to be someone else on the Internet
  29. Trace your water supply back to its source - and follow it down the drainpipes to its destiny
  30. Finger paint
  31. Spend a day in a neighborhood where you've never been before - without carrying any money
  32. Ask your friends, and your ex-friends, to anonymously send you a list of your five best and five worst character traits
  33. Live for a day off your garden
  34. Channel surf for an evening; ask yourself what about the programs is drawing people
  35. Be quiet for 5 minutes per day; increase gradually to 20
  36. Ask a young person what's on his or her mind and heart, and listen (don't try to 'fix it')
  37. Figure out when and on what part of your dwelling the sun's rays fall at different times of year (for extra credit: calculate the photovoltaic potential of your roof)
  38. Take a year off
  39. Read a foreign newspaper
  40. Meditate on the life of your unborn grandchild
  41. Talk to the janitor
  42. Assume that everything is your responsibility, if not your fault
  43. Examine a handful of compost or rich soil under a microscope
  44. Go without food for three days
  45. Watch a child being born
  46. Write a creation myth
  47. Visit an observatory, and look at the stars through a big telescope
  48. Map the creeks, streams, and rivers in your watershed
  49. Choose six jobs that interest you; find someone to interview for each and spend a day working alongside them
  50. Watch a snail
  51. Find out what percentage of the world's financial wealth is owned by the top 50 corporations, and how much by the 50 wealthiest people
  52. Visit the emergency ward of a major hospital
  53. Sleep outside under the stars
  54. Discuss these questions with a friend : If the Universe is finite, what happens at its edge ? If it's infinite, how did it get there ? If the Universe started 15 billion years ago, what was there before it started? Does time go on forever ?
  55. Visit a spiritual healer
  56. Find out what the clerk at the grocery store is thinking about
  57. Follow your electric wires to the source of the electricity
  58. Learn to line dance
  59. Spend two hours with a counsellor exploring your life
  60. Pick three trees of different species and spend an hour meditating under each one
  61. Go on a week-long solo journey by bus, bike, or foot to a place you've never been; listen to the people you meet
  62. Learn how to build a wall
  63. Fall in love
  64. Take a bicycle to pieces and put it together again
  65. Visit a Native American reservation and talk with the people you meet about their past and future
  66. Learn how to give a good massage
  67. Spend a day watching a state or provincial legislature at work
  68. Calculate how much carbon dioxide your family is adding to the atmosphere each year
  69. Ask a good friend to share the most important lessons he or she has learned about sex and how to make love
  70. Perform menial or repetitive work at a job that lasts at least a week
  71. Read primary sources on history, science, social science (that is, avoid the authors who are interpreting the work of others)
  72. Carry all your trash around with you for a week. At the end of the week, weigh it all
  73. Write an episode of one of the current top-rated sitcoms on commercial TV; explain the story line to a friend
  74. Repair a damaged relationship
  75. Start that band/garden/book/art movement you told yourself you'd always do
  76. Throw the biggest party you can; try to get someone from every decade dancing
  77. Ask your parents about their relationship
  78. Refuse to do meaningless work for one week
  79. Offer to help your child's teacher
  80. Admit that you don't know and ask for help
  81. Tell people how you are really doing
  82. Go to a punk rock or hip-hop show
  83. Sell your car and go to India
  84. Seek out a friend of a different race & class
  85. Ask people what they are planning to do about the year 2000 computer bug
  86. Calculate the total miles traveled from the towns labeled on food cans in your pantry
  87. Ask a kid about divorce
  88. Teach yourself to play guitar
  89. Go to the industrial section of town and see how much free stuff is available (go dumpster diving)
  90. Make a movie about your neighborhood
  91. Visit the nearest creek once a week for a month and notice changes along the banks, in the water flows, in the pools
  92. Collect dumpling recipes from around the world; throw a dumpling party
  93. Imagine yourself looking back on your life at 90 years of age: what are the highlights? Who has been most important? What do you wish you had done?

Now go out and do those things, thank those people and live those highlights.