Notes from a pad in Oslo
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| The Padacia Notes from a pad in Oslo |
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20040224  Vintage Soviet posters from the Bolshevik Revolution to 80s' Perestroika. 
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 20040219 The Adjective -- So Ludic, So Minatory, So Twee by Ben Yagoda, The Chronicle Review As far as not getting respect goes, adjectives leave Rodney Dangerfield in the dust. They rank right up there with Osama bin Laden, Geraldo Rivera, and the customer-service policies of cable-TV companies. That it is good to avoid them is one of the few points on which the sages of writing agree. Thus Voltaire: "The adjective is the enemy of the noun, though it agrees with it in number and gender." Thus Twain: "When you catch an adjective, kill it." And thus William Zinsser: "Most adjectives are... unnecessary. Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don't stop to think that the concept is already in the noun." As the French might put it, those quotes have reason. Writers frequently pull out the adjectives when they either haven't, or are afraid they haven't, provided sufficient data -- specific nouns and active verbs -- to get their ideas across. So if you point out that the jaw of every male in the room dropped when a woman walked in, it's neither necessary nor helpful to describe her as "beautiful." And establishing that someone kicked his opponent when down, stole $17 from a Salvation Army collection kettle, and lied to partners about having sexually transmitted diseases precludes the need to call him terrible, awful, horrible, deplorable, despicable, or vile. Beginning or inept writers are inclined to stack up adjectives in front of a noun (especially when attempting to do justice to nature). The words give you the feel of a bunch of football players piling on, long after the play has been whistled dead... [ the whole article ]
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20040213  Jean-Marc Bouju of The Associated Press. The picture shows a detained Iraqi man comforting his 4-year-old-son at a regroupment center for POWs near Najaf, Iraq. The picture was taken on 31 March 2003.
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20040203  is a growing collection of images on the web. It contains thousands of images from the library's existing collection of transparencies and also new material from manuscripts, maps, music, philately and the Asia, Pacific and Africa collections.
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20040202 Trapped in Someone Else's Dream Statement and photos by Asim Rafiqui  There is a brutal military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and it is being used to systematically expropriate land from the Palestinians and lock them into ghettos. This is a lived reality for the millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. However, these facts are carefully avoided in the official language of peace. The latest 'road map' does not even mention the occupation, nor that Palestinians' lands are being taken from them at gunpoint. Instead, it shamelessly places all the responsibility for the violence on the shoulders of an essentially unarmed and outgunned people. Rafah is perhaps one of the first Palestinian ghettos. A town of about 100,000 it is surrounded by steel walls, electric fences, checkpoints and gun towers. Pilotless drones patrol the skies at night and curfews control the movement of people. It is from such a hell that the Palestinians are expected to extend a 'hand towards peace', and to 'give up their violent ways'. Meanwhile, the occupation continues, and so does the theft of land.
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