music and depression, tulip harvest, like training

Music may help ease symptoms of depression

Music therapy might help ease the symptoms of depression, though its effectiveness as a stand-alone intervention is not certain, according to a recent review of five small studies.

Four of the studies found reduced depression symptoms in participants receiving music therapy compared to those who did not. The fifth study did not find any difference.

Because the of the various and inconsistent ways the music was used – some patients listened while painting, some while engaged in other activities, they did not find a definitive cause and effect, only a correlation. Still it does seem that many patients liked the idea of music being incorporated into their treatment. For someone severely depressed to take an interest is a good indication that those providing the therapy have found a way to engage the person, a good first step. Perhaps solving Rob’s dilemma from High Fidelity, which came first the music or the misery.

tulip harvest

Those people 

Pittinsky’s research suggests that negative and positive attitudes are not opposite ends of a spectrum, but at least partially independent – that all the tolerance training in the world would not instill affection for a group. Pittinsky’s investigations – conducted among diverse populations in the Middle East, New England, and elsewhere – suggest a novel approach to transforming relations among social groups.

Instead of merely training people to hate each other less, Pittinsky says, it may be time to teach them to like each other more.

“Would you want to be tolerated?” Pittinsky says. “The synonyms are even worse – to endure, to put up with. . . .We can and must do better than tolerance.”

Sounds like a concept that I would have latched on to in my teens, maybe even college, but I’m at the stage where I’d  settle for everyone just gritting their teeth and putting down that AK-47.

to suffer is to suffer, broken wall, pardon the witch

“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you’re getting this down.” ~ Woody Allen

broken wall 

Bid to gain pardons for ‘witches’ 

It is thought some 4,000 people, mainly women, were prosecuted and often put to death for witchcraft.

The last Witchcraft Act conviction was in 1944 when Scottish medium Helen Duncan was imprisoned for allegedly disclosing World War II secrets.

She told a seance a warship had sunk before the news had been released.

If you predicted that a ship was sunk in 1944 your prediction was bound to come true. Duncan might well have been insulted that some people are claiming that its ridiculous to call her a witch and having the powers that one presumes go along with being a witch. So in a strange way pardoning her does an injustice to what she believed herself to be. Government bodies on the other hand have no business promoting witchcraft as a serious phenomenon worthy of prosecution on behalf of the people.

trash saving lessons, old growth forest, how to attack senator obama

Man Saves His Trash For The Entire Year

The 35-year-old Berkeley caterer said he has saved every piece of trash he has generated over the past year to see how much garbage one person creates. In his case, it was about 96 cubic feet.

Once in a while I’ll forget trash day and end up with two weeks worth of trash and I thought that was bad. If he mad each cubic foot into an actual block and piled one on the other he’d have a pile almost 30 meters high. The container below is 27 meters long. Note the size of people by comparison.

old growth forest

Mark Halperin a journalist(?) at Time magazine gives advice on how to attack Senator Barack Obama,

5. Make an issue of Obama’s acknowledged drug use. 6. Allow some supporters to risk being accused of using the race card when criticizing Obama. … 11. Emphasize Barack Hussein Obama’s unusual name and exotic background through a Manchurian Candidate prism.

Inspired by the obviously high journalistic standards of Mr. Halperin a clever commenter at The Nation climed in with his own suggestions,

#12 he’s a black panther

#13 he eats with chopsticks

#14 he plans to grow an afro once in the white house

#15 all federal employees will be made to wear dashikis.

#17 – Once shot a man in Reno…just to watch him die!

# 23 – He’ll get you, my pretty…and your little dog too!

# 24 – He’s done far worse than kill you. He’s hurt you. And he wishes to go on… hurting you. He shall leave you as you left him, as you left her. Marooned for all eternity, in the center of a dead planet. Buried alive… buried alive.

#31 he’s a HIP-HOPER

#32 he’s off to see the wizard

#33 he wears ruby slippers to bed.

stories of the macabre, orange transitions, mixed media group

Stories of the macabre. The short version is that there are basically two groups of people that need in one case and want in another, skin grafts. The ones that need the skin grafts are burn victims or others that have been disfigured in accidents. The other group is composed of people that need a little cosmetic touch up. Some of those cases deserve some sympathy as we certainly live in a society where appearances mater, but ethics sometimes requires prioritizing. People whose lives are in danger deserve priority over the cosmetic cases, unless you’re  Steve Kirby, a venture capitalist with a large stake in Collagenesis Inc., a company that makes a bigger profit on selling skin to cosmetic surgeons then to hospitals treating burn victims. Steve is being courted by the Republican Party of South Dakota to run for Senate. He does seem to have the traditional Republican set of values.

orange transitions wallpaper 

i’m somewhat illustrator disabled especially once adobe went to CS2 and CS3 so i made the above by placing the eps file in photoshop and playing around with it there. These folks at The Mixed Media group at flickr are decidedly not disabled in their creative endeavors using bits of vectors, photos and whatever in the mix.

abercrombie & fitch – the good, bad and ugly, cape may wallpaper

The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch

…Mike Jeffries, the 61-year-old CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, says “dude” a lot. He’ll say, “What a cool idea, dude,”

…If looks could kill, everyone here would be dead. Jeffries’ employees are young, painfully attractive, and exceedingly eager, and they travel around the campus on playground scooters

…Valued at $5 billion, the company now has revenues approaching $2 billion a year rolling in from more than 800 stores and four successful brands.

…Those who have worked with him tend to use the same words to describe him: driven, demanding, smart, intense, obsessive-compulsive, eccentric, flamboyant and, depending on whom you talk to, either slightly or very odd. “He’s weird and probably insane, but he’s also unbelievably driven and brilliant,”

…Later I brought up the brouhaha surrounding the A&F Quarterly, which, until it was discontinued in 2003, boasted articles about the history of orgies and pictures of chiseled, mostly white, all-American boys and girls (but mostly boys) cavorting naked on horses, beaches, pianos, surfboards, statues and phallically suggestive tree trunks. The magalog so outraged the American Decency Association that it called for a boycott and started selling anti-Abercrombie T-shirts: “Ditch Fitch: Abercrombie Peddles Porn and Exploits Children.” Meanwhile, gay men across America were eagerly collecting the magazines, lured by photographer Bruce Weber’s taste for beautiful, masculine boys playfully pulling off each other’s boxers.

Cons: Jeffries does seem to try too hard to appear hip. It is one thing to be high on your product or service another to cross the line into evangelical purity about what your employees and others should wear. I wear some AF stuff, but it always mixed with stuff from other brands – that I would show up for work wearing Gap jeans and an AF shirt and be harassed by by boss for lack of brand purity is disturbing in an employer, especially someone that sells the celebration of personal freedom as part of their public image. His vision of what constitutes attractive is too rigid; on a personal level that’s his business, but culturally is a soft form of xenophobia. He states at one point in the interview, “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” Looks bias strange actually, but within his rights on a personal level and not a phenomenon that he created as much as exploits.

Pros: The AF workplace is described as campus like with plenty of time for employees to hang out, they’re not chained to their cubicles like most of corporate America. Much of the sometimes visceral reaction to the catalog and Bruce Weber’s photo compositions are off base. What people see has been is to a large degree a projection of their own purient thoughts about sexuality, Jeffries, ” “I think that what we represent sexually is healthy. It’s playful. It’s not dark. It’s not degrading! And it’s not gay, and it’s not straight, and it’s not black, and it’s not white. It’s not about any labels. That would be cynical, and we’re not cynical! It’s all depicting this wonderful camaraderie, friendship, and playfulness that exist in this generation and, candidly, does not exist in the older generation.” Without some kind of psychic sub conscience mind reading device one assumes that he believes that and his emphasis on traditional beauty aside I tend to believe that “healthy sexuality” and the celebration of youth was his and Weber’s intention. Jeffries has a vision, is driven and obsessive – not bad things if directed in a positive direction. When he took a public relations beating on the lack of diversity at AF he made changes – how many people do we know that respond to criticisms by just become more entrenched in their attitudes.

Photographer Bruce Weber has a decent, but not great Wikipedia entry here and has his own exceptional web site. Looking back over Weber’s work gives one a better idea of at least his aesthetic sensibilities when interpreting the AF cataloges.

cape may wallpaper

weekend bunnies, arrested for flirting, bring back the HOLC

weekend bunnies 

Saudi Arabia Arrests 57 Men For Flirting, Dancing At Mall

Saudi Arabia began interrogating 57 men Saturday who were arrested for flirting with women in front of a shopping mall in the holy city of Mecca, a local newspaper reported.

I told them to do it like we do in America. Stay in the car, whistle and make cat calls, but no they had to do it their way. And I still want to know who brought the tape of Frank Sinatra singing I Did My Way.

ballinskelligs bay ireland 

“From the New Deal, a Way Out of a Mess”

The HOLC was established in June 1933 to help distressed families avert foreclosures by replacing mortgages that were in or near default with new ones that homeowners could afford. It did so by buying old mortgages from banks … and then issuing new loans to homeowners. The HOLC financed itself by borrowing from capital markets and the Treasury.

Like many of the FDR era programs HOLC was remarkably successful. They helped the people whose mortgages they bought with debt counseling and even with some defaults the program closed down in 1951 having made a profit. One commenter on this story says to wait, housing prices will adjust downward – the usual let the market decide BS. One wonders if that commenter has enough room at his house, while we wait for the market to decide for all the families that are losing their homes.

air powered cars to hit u.s., autumn raindrops, the world of war profiteers

Air-Powered Car Coming to U.S. in 2009 to 2010 at Sub-$18,000, Could Hit 1000-Mile Range

Zero Pollution Motors (ZPM) confirmed to PopularMechanics.com on Thursday that it expects to introduce the world’s first air-powered car for the United States by late 2009 or early 2010.

The next generation of air cars might have a 1000 mile range estimate, but not be completely air powered. You’ll need a whopping 8 gallons of regular gas, ethanol or other biofuel to get that far. That is roughly 125 miles per gallon. There are some good illustrations at the link; you won’t have to sacrifice style for going green.

autumn rain drop

The darn gov’mint can’t do nut’in right so let’s privatize everything and give gov’mint contracts to our buddies. That’s the ticket, Inside the world of war profiteers – From prostitutes to Super bowl tickets, a federal probe reveals how contractors in Iraq cheated the U.S.

Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how kickbacks shaped the war’s largest troop support contract months before the first wave of U.S. soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.

The graft continued well beyond the 2004 congressional hearings that first called attention to it. And the massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it lined contractors’ pockets, records show.

Federal prosecutors in Rock Island have indicted four former supervisors from KBR, the giant defense firm that holds the contract, along with a decorated Army officer and five executives from KBR subcontractors based in the U.S. or the Middle East.

KBR is part of Dick Cheney’s old employer Halliburton.

Audrey Hepburn’s screen test for Roman Holiday at YouTube.