Andymatic

Month: April 2007

  • Women Break Through Glass Ceiling in Drug Cartels

    You’ve come a long way baby: Challenging the stereotype of macho Mexico, women are moving into positions of power in male-dominated drug cartels but in the process suffering gruesome deaths in turf wars among traffickers. Corrupt female police officers have proved adept at recruiting teams of attractive, well-dressed women to smuggle drugs past border guards […]

  • Controlling the Language of Abortion

    From Alternet: [T]he travesty of language around abortion is so pervasive that even Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the court’s majority, in addition to using the inaccurate term “partial birth abortion,” also referred to the “abortion doctor” repeatedly in the ruling. Why did he not simply refer to doctors as “doctors,” or “ob/gyns”? […]

  • Funeral Rites in the Phillippines

    Wow. This totally out does our family funeral habits: (granted, this is the reporting of one inteviewee) Rosary sessions are held each night for thirty days to aid the deceased in getting to heaven. … For up to a year and often beyond, men will wear a black ribbon and women will dress in black […]

  • Filipinos, Tagalog and Anger

    A little Googling: (this is a meta-study of other studies and probably applies mostly to direct immigrants and/or first generation) Filipinos put a premium on peace. They avoid conflict whenever possible and when it exists they try to settle it in a non­confrontational way. … The American rates ‘integrity’ (defined as ‘let your speech express […]

  • Natural semantic metalanguage

    Geekyness from Wikipedia: The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is an approach to semantic analysis based on reductive paraphrase (that is, breaking concepts/words down into combinations of simpler concepts/words, see Oligosynthetic language) using a small collection of semantic primes. The semantic primes (below) are believed to be atomic, primitive meanings present in all human languages.

  • Catholic Church Closes Down Limbo

    I like events like this – when doctrine is revealed to be fluid and human (even if it is centuries behind): “The conclusion of this study is that there are theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness even if there is not […]

  • George Bush and 50 Cent: Hip Hop Reflects Culture

    Poet Saul Williams writes an open letter to Oprah: Hip Hop is simply a reflection of the society that birthed it. Our love affair with gangsterism and the denigration of women is not rooted in Hip Hop; rather it is rooted in the very core of our personal faith and religions. The gangsters that rule […]

  • Friday, Love, Ink, Art, Murder

    And it is Friday. I’m typing my journal this morning since I filled up my last notebook. Remember that scene in Seven where they find those thousands of notebooks of a psychotic? That’s a shelf in my closet. Ron is out for three days. Kitty is climbing the obelisk of boxes I’ve packed up for […]

  • Women Don't Talk More Than Men

    Eat it Chatty Kathy: “No reputable study has ever measured the widely repeated numerical comparisons that show women talking two or three times as much as men.”

  • Palast, Goodman, Hightower, Economic Hit Man and More!

    Heads up pinko-commies: The Green Festival hits Chicago this weekend. I’m very excited now that I’ve seen the lineup and will at least go to hear Goodman and Palast.