Posts

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Zimbabwe elections watch

For all the people who’ve landed on the previous post looking for news and found it utterly unhelpful and uninformative in terms of what’s actually happening, I do apologize, and some links that might be useful:

Global Voices Online Zimbabwe stories

Google News search for Zimbabwe

Google Blog Search for Zimbabwe

Technorati Search for Zimbabwe

Here’s a combination of the above (minus the Google Blog Search which wouldn’t work for some reason) all spitting out into a single RSS feed via Yahoo pipes:

{“pipe_id”:”emVUU1T_3BGOZ_TRouNLYQ”,”_btype”:”list”}

If you want to grab, clone, expand on or otherwise employ this pipe please feel free.

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And the Zimbabwe elections?

Don’t turn to the BBC News website for Africa for any answers – they’re stuck in July 2002. Sheeeesh.

Update: It’s the link from the map on the front page that isn’t working. All other links to the Africa page seem to be going through to the correct place. Complete with Zimbabwe story.

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links for 2008-03-30

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Drying bird

drying bird

Bad phone pic of print drying in dark corner of the study. It’s beautiful! That’s me reflected in the glossy silver paper. It’s pegged to last year’s calendar which is too lovely to get rid of.

A print! a print! It’s amazingly satisfying having a physical entity. Now it just has to dry quickly enough to make it into the frame before the framing shop shuts.

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A week (or so) in pictures

I keep forgetting my camera and then forgetting I’ve taken pictures on my phone instead. Here are some I discovered earlier.

birthday lunch

Birthday lunch at Cubana.

idli sambar (another birthday meal)

Another birthdayish meal, this time the long-lusted-for idli sambar at the haunt of my student youth Diwani Bhel Poori House. Their card machine wasn’t working, it was cash only, but they gave me half a free lassi since I didn’t have enough. Absolutely scrumptious and well worth the wait.

for acb (double impaling)

The single became double and then both disappeared overnight.

taking a bow

I like this elegant creature all the more for its not being all over my jacket.

big hips

One of the blustrous sunny days.

This is all displacement activity from actually printing out a completely different picture. But I must now bite the bullet.

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In passing

I have one spawn, or another, or both, about the place for the next month or so due to their mismatched school holidays. This may lead to diminished bloggage. Or may not.

I’ve unhobbled the rss feed entries on the basis that regular readers aren’t ad-clickers and therefore forcing them to come to the site is needless. Googlenauts don’t appear to click on ads either.

Why aren’t my daily delicious links plopping into daily blog entries in their previously seamlessly automated fashion, I ask myself. And I don’t have an answer.

The exciting ICA speed dating (next month) appears, it has been pointed out to me, to have only attracted female participants. Which is fortunate, possibly. When informed that I was attending such an event the spawn informed me that I wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend. Maizy has not vouchsafed her opinion on the matter but is generally thought to be similarly hostile. Mario’s brain is too small to contain anything as complex as an opinion. Or even a passing thought.

In light of the above my decision to provide myself with an iPod Touch is entirely justifiable as a non-disappointing birthday gift to self. Far from being disappointing it’s exceeded expectations and is deeply shiny. I can even carry around pdf knitting patterns on it. Just one small quibble so far – why aren’t different calendars displayed in their different colours? Part of the reason for getting one was the seamless calendar syncing with the desktop and thus keeping track of the two spawn’s different school timetables and social lives as well as my own vestigial appointments. On the Mac we each have a different coloured calendar. On the Touch all entries appear as grey and, furthermore, don’t specify anywhere to which calendar they belong. Why, I wonder, enable multiple calendar syncing in such a useless fashion.

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A loop in the fabric of time

Those instances where, when you’re in them and realise it and think, through the delight, that this moment, this particular configuration of the universe as apprehended in this instant is so exquisitely beautiful that it will live in me and be a constant source of joy available at will, like a rare scent to be unstoppered from the bottle of memory and stroked on the pulse points, conjuring on the brain’s skin and in the brain’s eyes and ears a waft of re-being in that pure ecstasy.

Or (of course a poet says it so much better) a Wordswothian time spot:

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

Thus early this morning when SecondSpawn sat cross legged on my bed, the diffuse brightness lighting his cheek and brow and lips and features of solemn concentration as he bent over his knitting, I curled and warm beneath my duvet gazing gazing gazing and so full of love that time and space and every dimension and all meaning converge and are held motionless in that moment.