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"

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.