Eideard

Poems about the Japanese tsunami were among the winners at the country’s annual Imperial Palace poetry contest. Emperor Akihito and his family attended a ceremony in Tokyo, where the 10 winning poems were read aloud.

One winner, a 72-year-old tailor, wrote of his relief upon learning his son was safe after three days of uncertainty when an earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan last March.

The theme for this year’s traditional five-line tanka contest was “shore”.

A tanka is an older form of poetry than the more well-known haiku, and follows a syllable pattern of 5-7-5-7-7…

Never able to
Turn it back,
This reality
Feels so heavy on my shoulders,
Along this coastal path.

By Yueko Sawabe

The imperial family also offered their poems for the event. One of Emperor Akihito’s verses expressed his sorrow and horror in watching the dark waves of the rolling tsunami on TV news footage.

Next year’s theme has been announced as “stand up”, which could inspire poems of hope in a recovering Japan.

Bravo. I could see Obama sponsoring a poetry contest.

The next Republican in the White House – hopefully not in my remaining years – will probably have a contest for badges required for dissenters to wear in public. As part of the Patriot [sic] Act.

 
Several Apple employees have appeared in a video for the It Gets Better project, which is part of The Trevor Project, an organization out to prevent suicides in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered youths.

 
‘In the old days all the movie songs were recorded right there on set,” remembers Asha Bhosle, the quintessential Bollywood singer. Now 77, Bhosle was just 11 when she performed her first song on a movie soundtrack, Chala Chala Nav Bala from Majha Bal in 1943. In the 68 years since, she has provided the on-screen singing voice for generations of actresses unable to capture and deliver a song as brilliantly as she could, singing around 20,000 tunes in 14 languages, as well as recording with Robbie Williams, Michael Stipe and the Kronos Quartet, and lending her name to Cornershop’s Brimful of Asha, one of the landmark No 1 hits of the 1990s.

“My son Anand first heard that song in San Francisco and told me all about it,” she says, via a friend and translator, from Australia where she is appearing in concert. “I was at the immigration counter at Heathrow Airport once and the young officer read the profession listed in my passport as ‘singer’. He was intrigued, so I told him I was the Asha from Brimful of Asha, and he was so excited he left his post and called his friends over to meet me. So I guess, at the very least, that song helped me clear UK immigration faster than usual.”

When Bhosle thinks back to the start of her career she remembers dusty movie sets, people running around, lights and cameras. “And there was little me,” she says, “falling asleep and being woken up to sing my part. I think of that time fondly – it was pre-independence India. Only my sister Lata [Mangeshkar, a hugely popular singer in her own right], Manna Dey [the 91-year old Bengali singer] and I are left from those who began their careers in what was British India…”

Bhosle became particularly well known for her ability to change her voice for each role and a huge amount of film work, alongside established male singing stars such as Dey, Kishore Kumar and Mohammad Rafi, followed…

“Rahul Dev’s music was way ahead of its time,” she says. “He had so many different styles and rhythms in his music. You can hear jazz, Latin, that John Barry, super-spy sound, some blues, calypso and pop in there; 17 years after he died, he’s more popular than ever.”

RTFA. Learn to love some of the best pop music ever to reach out to the whole world.

Joumana Haddad, the editor of an erotic Arabic-language magazine and author of a new book that challenges sexual taboos in the Arab world, is drawing praise and death threats alike.

The Lebanese writer and poet publishes Jasad – Arabic for body – a glossy quarterly that deals with eroticism and body-culture. Published since December 2008, Jasad’s articles range from violence in relationships to voyeurism and masturbation.

Her works have been opposed by Muslims and Christian groups alike, but Ms Haddad says she will not be silenced.

“When I started doing Jasad, I started receiving a lot of hate mail and threats,” she told the BBC World Service in a recent interview.

“I didn’t want to be intimidated and compelled to stop doing what I was convinced I needed to do,” she says. “I just kept on doing it…”

Ms Haddad, who grew up in a conservative Christian family in Lebanon, says the main image of an Arab woman in the West is the one of the victim, “the one who doesn’t have any decision over her body, her life.”

But that should not be the only image of an Arab woman in the world, she argues. “Even though that image does exist,” she says, there is also another Arab woman who is liberated and emancipated, “and she represents the hope for the first one…”

Her work has received almost the same number of complaints from various Christian churches as it has from Shia and Sunni Muslim groups, she says.

“I think we underestimate the power of the Church. There is a lot of discrimination in the Church and I talk about it in the book,” she tells the BBC.

“Christianity, as far as I am concerned, is not that different from Islam…I’m convinced that religion in general is one of the worst enemies of women’s emancipation,” she adds.

RTFA. Much detail, many avenues of discussion left out of my brief precis.

Haddad’s work is groundbreaking in many ways. With the regionwide interest and acceptance by folks with the intellectual honesty to read Jasad and step beyond accepted cultural boundaries, she’s out in front of what would be a courageous march in most nations.

An elderly Japanese woman attacked a student and broke his nose after he refused to give her his seat on a bus.

Tamiko Masuta, 66, the manager of an apartment complex, was arrested after assaulting the teenager on a bus with her umbrella.

According to witnesses, she flew into a rage when the student did not stand up and offer her his place, designated as a “silver seat” for elderly passengers.

As well as striking him with an umbrella, the pensioner kicked the 18-year-old student and inflicted bruising as well as the broken nose…

The incident in Nagasaki is symptomatic of the widening chasm between the generations in Japan, with older people continuing to expect young people to show the respect that is traditional in Japanese society for the elderly. Young people often have a very different understanding of what constitutes manners in Japan.

That’s one way to put it. I see little difference from harassing the dolts who park in spaces reserved for handicapped drivers.

Smack him upside the head, lady. I’ll donate to the defense fund.

Most of these are reasonable suggestions. Mostly, they make sense and you will read them and say to yourself, “yes, that’s something that makes me happy”. And you should follow on by doing whichever will help your day – or forget about it and do whatever you really feel like doing.

Here are a couple I can agree with:

Aren’t you ready, yet?

1. Play that song you love so much. Repeat. As any preschooler can tell you, repetition nurtures pleasure. When you experience something more than once, you notice more details about it each time, thereby increasing your enjoyment. That’s why you love revisiting that jazz standard, favorite roast chicken recipe, and beloved old Woody Allen movie.

6. Look outside. Our species has spent almost all of its existence on the African savanna, surrounded by trees, water, and sky. The world in which most of us spend our time nowadays is unnatural and can corrode the spirit. Even a small dose of nature elevates our mood. But accept no substitutes..!

7. Pet a dog (any dog). You may have heard this before, but it bears repeating: Physical contact with animals works wonders. It increases the brain chemicals associated with pleasure and decreases those associated with stress. Even people without pets can get some of the effect by hanging out for a few minutes at a dog run.

Start your Monday in tolerable fashion.

I’m going for a walk with my dog.

A Lord Mayor has banned the traditional Christian prayers at the start of council meetings, calling the practice “outdated, unnecessary and intrusive“.

Colin Hall, who has just taken over the mayorship in Leicester, said the “majority” of councillors and city council staff were not practising Christians therefore there was little point in having the prayers…

“I am delighted to confirm that I will be exercising my discretion as Lord Mayor to abolish the outdated, unnecessary and intrusive practice.

“I personally consider that religion, in whatever shape or form, has no role to play at all in the conduct of council business. This particularly applies in Leicester where the majority of council members, myself included, do not regularly attend any particular faith service.”

Mr Hall said he was sure his position would be “positively received” by both council colleagues and the public, but last night he faced criticism from the Leicester Christian Fellowship…

There’s a fracking surprise. Few can whine as frequently or as loud as Christians – from a position of establishment and government support.

Mr Hall declined to comment but the Deputy Lord Mayor, Robert Wann, said he was supportive, adding: “We have many faiths within Leicester and we respect all faiths accordingly.

“Equally we respect people with no faith and on this occasion the Lord Mayor has decided not to have prayers and we will abide by that…”

Can you imagine even suggesting this in Congress? Or East Jeebus, Texas? You’d be lynched.

Rock on, Colin!

Colin L. Powell challenged Dick Cheney on the legacy of the Bush administration and the future of the Republican Party on Sunday, declaring that Republicans should not bow to “diktats that come from the right wing.”

The remarks by Mr. Powell, a former secretary of state, amounted to a public rebuttal of Mr. Cheney, the former vice president, and Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio commentator, who have questioned Mr. Powell’s Republican credentials and suggested that he should leave the party.

“Rush will not get his wish,” Mr. Powell said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “And Mr. Cheney was misinformed. I am still a Republican.”

Mr. Powell’s appearance underlined an extraordinary public struggle among Republicans over the future of the party and the legacy of the Bush administration, particularly on national security. Mr. Powell broke with Mr. Cheney on the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, saying that he agreed with President Obama that it should be closed and that Mr. Cheney disagreed as much with his former boss as with Mr. Obama.

“Mr. Cheney is not only disagreeing with President Obama’s policy,” Mr. Powell said. “He’s disagreeing with President Bush’s policy. President Bush stated repeatedly to international audiences and to the country that he wanted to close Guantánamo. The problem he had was he couldn’t get all the pieces together…”

Mr. Powell infuriated many in his party last fall when he endorsed Mr. Obama for president. His appearance on “Face the Nation” comes two weeks after Mr. Cheney, appearing on the same program, said he believed that Mr. Powell “had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican…”

He made clear that he thought a major threat to the party were suggestions by Republicans like Mr. Cheney and Mr. Limbaugh that there was no room for Republicans like Mr. Powell…

Though I respect the views of traditional American conservatism – goodness knows there are enough of them in my extended family – I’m glad to see the nutball Right battling to stay in charge of the party. I’m just as pleased to see proto-fascists narrow their base, affront that portion of the American populace who respect democracy and collective political freedoms.

Let them paint themselves into the corner where racists and bigots, war-lovers and chickenhawks alike, the professional haters jostle each other into uselessness. The party of “NO’ indeed.

The title is not misleading. “Dancing” shows a guy dancing: a big, doughy-looking fellow in shorts and hiking boots performing an arm-swinging, knee-pumping step that could charitably be called goofy. It’s the kind of semi-ironic dance that boys do by themselves at junior high mixers when they’re too embarrassed to partner with actual girls.

The dancer is Matt Harding, the 31-year-old creator of the video, and with some New Agey-sounding music playing in the background, he turns up, grinning and bouncing, in 69 different locations, including India, Kuwait, Bhutan, Tonga, Timbuktu and the Nellis Airspace in Nevada, where he performs the dance in zero gravity…

However you interpret it, you can’t watch “Dancing” for very long without feeling a little happier. The music (by Gary Schyman, a friend of Harding’s, and set to a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old native of Bangladesh now living in Minneapolis) is both catchy and haunting. The backgrounds are often quite beautiful. And there is something sweetly touching and uplifting about the spectacle of all these different nationalities, people of almost every age and color, dancing along with an uninhibited doofus…

Matt isn’t inclined to leap into the Hollywood/media/showbiz hustle of producing “Dancing 2″. Let this live as a video unto itself.

Folks who come up with talented ideas like this generally have more than one gem inside their noggin.

Slide Show: a photographer’s view of a city in transition.

It can’t be said often enough that we, the United States and our EU allies have treated the nation of Afghanistan as shamefully, again, as we did after the Afghan-Soviet War.

We jumped in. Pulled a smash-and-grab. Stuffed a few unfortunate locals in at the top and said, “Go ahead and govern, boys!” While we took our dollars and troops off to steal some oil down the road.