Blogelstein!

(via noraleah: lemondifficult:bidenette: Le boom.

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:46:18 +0100

lemondifficult:bidenette:

Le boom.

"At some point the fact that you are being an expat ceases to be a matter of happenstance and becomes..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:22:47 +0100

“At some point the fact that you are being an expat ceases to be a matter of happenstance and becomes a personality trait. Or perhaps the personality trait is that you think that the fact that you are an expat is a personality trait.”

- On a personality trait

"You know what I need to do though? Put the phone down and ask myself who in the whole wide world is..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 03:34:00 +0100

“You know what I need to do though? Put the phone down and ask myself who in the whole wide world is supposed to take responsibility for what I write if I won’t do it myself.”

- Um…shit. Yeah. OK.

Go on vacation with Vic and leave your camera at home;...

Thu, 16 May 2013 03:33:38 +0100

Go on vacation with Vic and leave your camera at home; she’ll take care of the photos. You’ll also eat a lot of ice cream and laugh a lot of crying laughs.

Pretty good Google doc

Thu, 16 May 2013 01:16:13 +0100

Pretty good Google doc

Reading!

Sun, 12 May 2013 14:52:28 +0100

Reading!

"My brain had apparently been storing every unfelt scrap of happiness from the last nineteen months,..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 05:51:52 +0100

“My brain had apparently been storing every unfelt scrap of happiness from the last nineteen months, and it had impulsively decided to unleash all of it at once in what would appear to be an act of vengeance.”

- Hyperbole and a Half: Depression Part Two

The Millions : So That If I Died It Mattered

Fri, 10 May 2013 05:41:36 +0100

The Millions : So That If I Died It Mattered:

“I really tried hard to be the best person I could be. So that if I died it mattered.”

Spiersblr: On Conflating Your Job with Your Identity

Thu, 09 May 2013 15:56:32 +0100

Spiersblr: On Conflating Your Job with Your Identity:

“Producing good work has many benefits, and it certainly contributes to a stronger sense of identity and purpose. But fullness of self is about more than that. It’s about those ancillary but more direct questions: What are our interests? What are our values? Where did we come from, and where are we now?”

Physics Illinois alumnus recognized for lifetime of pioneering contributions to MRI | Department of Physics at the U of I

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:10:58 +0100

Physics Illinois alumnus recognized for lifetime of pioneering contributions to MRI | Department of Physics at the U of I:

He’s also a leading dad.

Such a gorgeous song, not just because Julian is my favorite*...

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:18:00 +0100

Such a gorgeous song, not just because Julian is my favorite* nephew.

*only; once his upcoming brother arrives, he will be my joint favorite.

Oh my gosh, I thought to myself, There is a man there in a state...

Mon, 06 May 2013 20:21:00 +0100

Oh my gosh, I thought to myself, There is a man there in a state of distress on the runway. Maybe he fell off his Segway and I am going to have to use my newly-acquired first aid skills to help him.

Really instructive content from ABCRadioNational.

Wed, 01 May 2013 08:56:00 +0100

Really instructive content from ABCRadioNational.

Yesterday we went to Jerusalem.

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:53:43 +0100

Yesterday we went to Jerusalem.

"Don’t you just hate it when you’re at a party and start making out with a cute guy or girl, only to..."

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 17:07:10 +0100

“

Don’t you just hate it when you’re at a party and start making out with a cute guy or girl, only to later discover at a family picnic that they’re actually your cousin? As it turns out, accidentally hooking up with a relative happens so frequently in Iceland that there is an official database, called Íslendingabók or “The Book of Icelanders,” that traces the family lineage of 720,000 Icelandic citizens.

Three engineers have taken it upon themselves to digitize the book, creating an app that helps prevent Icelanders from accidentally sleeping with their extended family. If you meet a hottie out at a party, you can simply bump your phones together to find out whether or not you’re related. The tagline for this helpful app? “Bump the app before you bump in bed.”

”

- Helpful New App Keeps People From Sleeping With Their Cousins | Betabeat (via new-aesthetic)

—-

!

Last night New Zealand passed a bill allowing legal same-sex...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:33:00 +0100

Last night New Zealand passed a bill allowing legal same-sex marriage, which prompted jubilant spectators watching in the gallery to start singing the New Zealand love song “Pokarekare Ana.”

TUNE!

drymouth: I was in Herat, hosted by the Italian forces a couple...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:39:24 +0100

drymouth:

I was in Herat, hosted by the Italian forces a couple of months ago. Faced with a dearth of stories sticking with the military, I “unembedded” myself. This is where you sign a bunch of papers saying you’re leaving the care and protection of whatever forces you’re with and heading out on your own. If misfortune should befall you, you or anyone cannot claim damages from the Italians or Americans or whoever you were originally accompanying.

Herat is known as a safe city. This is, of course, a relative term, but in general, the main threat here is kidnappings of wealthy Afghan businesspeople. Military institutions, such as the Provincial Reconstruction Team have been attacked and the Heratis also love a good protest, but it’s largely quiet and surprisingly well-developed and beautiful. A beautiful blue mosque is a popular attraction, as well as the recently repaired Herat citadel.

I met up with a local Afghan female journalist, named Massouma. Like many working Afghan women, she had a number of jobs: journalist for ISAF’s Dari-language radio station; women’s rights activist; blog circle webmaster and “homemaker” (as the Americans would call it). Of Hazara ethnicity, which by and large offers its women more freedoms in terms of working, she and her husband took me for pizza and one of the more upmarket restaurants and then to a school that they’d founded and built, purely from their own salaries.

The school was originally meant to be a profit-making business. But, in choosing the cheapest plot of land, they soon discovered that the reason the price was so good was that the surrounding area was prone to flooding and, therefore, had a large population of Hazara refugees from Iran. These were people, who had escaped the fighting before 2001 and had returned to no jobs, homes or were forced to eke out a living in the city, as there was little to no work in the countryside.

She told me how taking on 100 students from these refugee communities, as a free school, presented its own peculiar problems. Many of the children would bring knives to school, have bad hygiene or malnutrition. They had no social skills and would resort to violence or crying. The parents were not much better. Massouma and her small team of female teachers had to start at the beginning, with social behaviour classes for the children and handicraft classes for the mothers; giving them a chance to raise money in the bazaar with their wares and also keep them from gossiping in the schoolyard.

Registering the school with the Ministry of Education, she was told the students had to have a uniform. The cheapest option, on visiting the market, was to buy the kids imported Chinese sweatshirts of bodybuilders. Unable to afford to take on more than 100 children, she decided to make the school a permanent two grade institute, which would move up as the children grew older. They started at kindergarten and grade one, now the children are at grades two and three.

Thanks to some funding from the US, they hired an English teacher and now the majority of the children are beyond the level usually accorded to their age. However, the second floor of the building is yet to be completed and there’s no heating for the winter months.

Massouma tells me her ambition is to keep renewing the curriculum, year on year until the kids graduate and then found the first free university. However, with funding pulling out already, even prior to the complete 2014 withdrawal of foreign forces, it’ll be a tough job for Massouma and her husband to continue their pet project.

Anyhow, the footage I took from my coincidental meeting with Massouma made it into a wider piece by my colleague, @jaketupman, on female entrepreneurs.

On the weather | Jean Hannah Edelstein

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:35:14 +0100

On the weather | Jean Hannah Edelstein:

When no one was looking, I punched the air

dogsontrains: DOGS ON PLANES! Here’s @NotOurCat’s guide dog on...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:26:00 +0100

dogsontrains:

DOGS ON PLANES! Here’s @NotOurCat’s guide dog on a plane.

Arthur and I constantly listened and sang along to a couple of...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:39:16 +0100

Arthur and I constantly listened and sang along to a couple of our grandpa’s Tom Lehrer LPs when we were kids, which meant that I knew all the words to most of his songs, including the really salty ones, and including this one, even though I still don’t really know who Wernher von Braun is. Gosh, that must have been cute. Today is Tom Lehrer’s 85th birthday. Happy birthday, Mr Lehrer!