improbable_blog

http://improbable.com/2008/07/06/the-face-of-memory/

http://improbable.com/?p=4253

Memory consists, among other things, of verbal information and of mental images. To illustrate this difference, I will often start a lecture on cognition by asking students to think of their home address. Then I ask them to think of how many windows are in their living room. Ostensibly, I do this to illustrate the different processes of recall and imagery. Really, though, it’s just entertaining to watch 35 faces simultaneously go slack and 35 pairs of eyes roll back in their heads as they count the windows.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Socially Scientific (Notes on the intriguing behavior of human beings,)” by Robin Abrahams, published in AIR 11:1.)

spacing

http://spacing.ca/wire/2008/07/05/street-stories-the-what-street-am-i-contest/

Think you know Toronto’s streets? Try your hand at our Street Stories “What street am I?” contest — you could win a one-year Spacing subscription (or subscription extension, if you’re already a subscriber).

To enter, email your answers to the five questions below to toddharrison@spacing.ca, and write “Street Stories contest” in the subject line. We’ll randomly select a winner from all correct entries submitted on or before Sunday, July 6. Good luck! We’ll post the answers on Monday morning.

1.
This street was designed as a military road, cut by the Queen’s Rangers, and named by John Graves Simcoe in honour of his friend — who, as British Secretary of War, was responsible for assigning the Queen’s Rangers to protect Canada.

2.
The first parliament buildings in York were built at the intersection of Front Street and this street in 1797. As a result, it was originally titled Parliament Street. Its current moniker derives from the name of a house that belonged to Major John Small, famous for a duel he fought and won in 1800 against Attorney General John White. Small called his house after his hometown in Gloucestershire, England.

3.
Major John Small’s son was a Supreme Court clerk who maintained a tannery, sawmills, and a cattle farm on a piece of land his family owned east of his father’s famous estate (see question 2). This street was named after him.

4.
Colonel Walter O’Hara, one of Parkdale’s first residents, fought against Napoleon during the Peninsular War in northern Spain. O’Hara owned more than 500 acres west of Dufferin and north of Queen, and he named this street after one of the Spanish villages he encountered during the war. The same village is also reputed to be the site where Roland, knight in the court of Charlemagne, was killed in 778.

5.
This street is named after an inn, which was in turn named after the man who bought it in 1856. It was a wise purchase; the hotel was an ideal resting place for people traveling north from York to Richmond Hill, Thornhill, and Newmarket.

Street Stories is a new regular feature on Spacing Toronto. If you have an idea for a street we should feature in an upcoming installment, email toddharrison@spacing.ca.

justinelarbales

http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/?p=1245

Atlanta Dream: 91; Chicago Sky: 84

The first win for the Atlanta Dream has made me very happy I can’t imagine how thrilled the Dream fans are. They have had the longest losing streak (0-17) in WNBA history without actually being a bad team. Quite a few of those losses were thrillers. I know. I watched the game where the New York Liberty barely beat them.

I think it’s astonishing and wonderful that more than 8,000 people have shown up for every one of those games even when they’d lost ten, fifteen, seventeen in a row. And now they have their first win. Woo hoo!! And w00t! It’s good for Atlanta and it’s good for the whole league. May it be the first of many many more.

pam_noles_blog

http://andweshallmarch.typepad.com/and_we_shall_march/2008/07/harlemgentholding.html

The drummers in the park are African-American and from Africa and the Caribbean. They form a circle and have played in the park, in one form or another, since 1969, when the neighborhood was a more dangerous place. The musicians, who play until 10 p.m. every summer Saturday, are widely credited with helping to make the park safer over the years.

Their supporters, who acknowledge that the drumbeats can pierce walls and windows, regard the musicians as part of the city’s vibrant and often noisy cultural mix. But some in the building at 2002 Fifth Avenue, most of them young white professionals, have a different perspective: When the drummers occupy a spot nearby, residents say, they are unable to sleep, hear their television sets, speak on the telephone, or even have conversations with their spouses without shouting. Some say they cannot even think straight.

And so in this corner of Harlem, which is known as Mount Morris Park, two sides have formed, each with complaints that many agree are legitimate. The stalemate has bubbled over into a dispute about class, race and culture and has become a flash point in the debate over gentrification.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/nyregion/06drummers.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

pepysdiary

http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1665/07/05/

Up, and advised about sending of my wife's bedding and things to Woolwich, in order to her removal thither. So to the office, where all the morning till noon, and so to the 'Change, and thence home to dinner. In the afternoon I abroad to St. James's, and there with Mr. Coventry a good while, and understand how matters are ordered in the fleete: that is, my Lord Sandwich goes Admiral; under him Sir G. Ascue, and Sir T. Teddiman; Vice-Admiral, Sir W. Pen; and under him Sir W. Barkeley, and Sir Jos. Jordan: Reere-Admiral, Sir Thomas Allen; and under him Sir Christopher Mings, and Captain Harman. We talked in general of business of the Navy, among others how he had lately spoken to Sir G. Carteret, and professed great resolution of friendship with him and reconciliation, and resolves to make it good as well as he can, though it troubles him, he tells me, that something will come before him wherein he must give him offence, but I do find upon the whole that Mr. Coventry do not listen to these complaints of money with the readiness and resolvedness to remedy that he used to do, and I think if he begins to draw in it is high time for me to do so too. From thence walked round to White Hall, the Parke being quite locked up; and I observed a house shut up this day in the Pell Mell, where heretofore in Cromwell's time we young men used to keep our weekly clubs. And so to White Hall to Sir G. Carteret, who is come this day from Chatham, and mighty glad he is to see me, and begun to talk of our great business of the match, which goes on as fast as possible, but for convenience we took water and over to his coach to Lambeth, by which we went to Deptford, all the way talking, first, how matters are quite concluded with all possible content between my Lord and him and signed and sealed, so that my Lady Sandwich is to come thither to-morrow or next day, and the young lady is sent for, and all likely to be ended between them in a very little while, with mighty joy on both sides, and the King, Duke, Lord Chancellor, and all mightily pleased. Thence to newes, wherein I find that Sir G. Carteret do now take all my Lord Sandwich's business to heart, and makes it the same with his owne. He tells me how at Chatham it was proposed to my Lord Sandwich to be joined with the Prince in the command of the fleete, which he was most willing to; but when it come to the Prince, he was quite against it; saying, there could be no government, but that it would be better to have two fleetes, and neither under the command of the other, which he would not agree to. So the King was not pleased; but, without any unkindnesse, did order the fleete to be ordered as above, as to the Admirals and commands: so the Prince is come up; and Sir G. Carteret, I remember, had this word thence, that, says he, by this means, though the King told him that it would be but for this expedition, yet I believe we shall keepe him out for altogether. He tells me how my Lord was much troubled at Sir W. Pen's being ordered forth (as it seems he is, to go to Solebay, and with the best fleete he can, to go forth), and no notice taken of my Lord Sandwich going after him, and having the command over him. But after some discourse Mr. Coventry did satisfy, as he says, my Lord, so as they parted friends both in that point and upon the other wherein I know my Lord was troubled, and which Mr. Coventry did speak to him of first thinking that my Lord might justly take offence at, his not being mentioned in the relation of the fight in the news book, and did clear all to my Lord how little he was concerned in it, and therewith my Lord also satisfied, which I am mightily glad of, because I should take it a very great misfortune to me to have them two to differ above all the persons in the world. Being come to Deptford, my Lady not being within, we parted, and I by water to Woolwich, where I found my wife come, and her two mayds, and very prettily accommodated they will be; and I left them going to supper, grieved in my heart to part with my wife, being worse by much without her, though some trouble there is in having the care of a family at home in this plague time, and so took leave, and I in one boat and W. Hewer in another home very late, first against tide, we having walked in the dark to Greenwich. Late home and to bed, very lonely.

jmhm

The National Black Republican Association has paid for billboards showing an image of the civil rights leader and the words "Martin Luther King Jr. was REPUBLICAN." ...

Seven billboards have gone up in six Florida counties, and another in Orangeburg, S.C., said Frances Rice, the Republican group's chairwoman.

Woman 1: Dr. King was a real man

Yes he was. As the FBI can prove

Woman 2: You know he was a Republican

Republicans bring this up, but don't mention that most black middle class voters were Republicans. However, since blacks couldn't vote in Georgia, they forget to mention that as well,

Woman 1: Dr. King a Republican? Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan. White hoods and sheets. Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860’s to the 1960’s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks. And the Dixiecrats remained Democrats and vowed to vote for a yellow dog before a Republican.

Until 1968 and the "Southern Strategy", which courted white voters as they were driven out of the Democratic Party. Black Republicans have to recall the past because they don't have any means to explain the present. The Democrats kicked them out, and the GOP took them.

Republicans freed us from slavery and put our right to vote in the Constitution. Republicans founded the NAACP, affirmative action, and the HBCU’s.

No, 179,000 black soldiers freed us. Radical Republicans were very different than modern day Dixiecans. They supported black rights.

Woman 2: Sounds like Democrats have bamboozled blacks.

No, it sounds like you people are lying fucks abusing history for your masters

Fifty years ago today, on August 29, 1957, Sen. Strom Thurmond [D-SC], the South’s champion of states’ rights and white supremacy, secured a place in the annals of congressional history when he finally yielded the floor after speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes straight [against the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act]. His speech set the record for a Senate filibuster.

Thurmond’s filibuster made for good political theater, but it never stood a chance of derailing the bill. …But outside the nation’s capital, many Southerners loved Thurmond’s performance. Georgia’s governor, Marvin Griffin, defiantly promised, “We’re not going to let a Federal judge tell us who can vote,” while South Carolina’s governor, George Bell Timmerman, Jr., proudly announced, “I don’t have any intention of cooperating.” Thurmond’s grandstand may have been legislatively ineffectual, but it almost certainly encouraged white Southerners in resisting federal law, as they had begun doing three years earlier after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

In its immediate goal, Thurmond’s stand proved unnecessary. Stripped of its teeth, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 proved an ineffective safeguard of black voting rights. It would take a much stronger measure, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to get the job done. It’s hard to say who won in the long run. In 1964 Thurmond, a Democrat, switched political affiliation again, this time for good, leading a massive exodus of white Southerners to the Republican party.

makinglight

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010410.html

5 cold cooked beef tenderloins, about 0.75" thick
1 entire package of mixed yuppie salad greens
a nearly equal quantity of small fresh spinach leaves
a good handful of fresh basil leaves
7 medium tomatoes
6 fat stalks of green onion, chopped
8-9 of those mutant dwarf sweet bell peppers
2/3 C. sun-dried tomatoes snipped into little bits
4 small salty French preserved lemons
olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper

Slice tenderloins in half along their horizontal axis, then cube the resulting half-thickness pieces. Put them in a bowl. Seed your lemons and chop them fine. Chop or snip your sun-dried tomatoes into bits. Snip the fresh basil into thin bits. Put the chopped lemon, sun-dried tomatoes, and basil bits in with the beef, and toss gently. Stet.

Wash your greens, get the excess water off via your preferred method, and put them into a very large bowl. Chop the green onions. Cube the tomatoes. Cut up the mutant dwarf bell peppers. Toss them in with the greens. Snip some more basil leaves and toss those in too, if you feel like it.

Add the beef mixture to the main bowl and toss everything together gently. Dress it with a good olive oil (the cloudy greenish sorts work well with this) and some balsamic vinegar. Salt and pepper to taste. Eat happily.

Before I go any further: no, I have not become a spendthrift! The Fairway in Red Hook sells cut-price whole beef tenderloins. I de-sinew them (that's the trickiest bit), slice them into individual servings, and wrap and freeze them myself. If they're not the cheapest meat on the market, they're also far from the most expensive.

The preserved lemons are from Fairway as well. They import them from France under their own "Campagne St Eugene" label. They're small, salty, and intensely flavorful. The complete ingredients list is "lemons, water, salt, anti-oxidant F300, citric acid." If you can't get French lemons, use Moroccan preserved lemons instead.

I'm recording this one because it turns out there's something alchemical about the combination of cold beef, preserved lemons, and fresh basil. It's possible the alchemical effect depends on some of the other ingredients as well, but it's the beef, lemon, and basil that rise up singing.

makinglight

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010409.html

• John Roberts, age 55
  
• John Paul Stevens, age 88
  
• Antonin Scalia, age 72
  
• Anthony Kennedy, age 71
  
• David Souter, age 68
  
• Clarence Thomas, age 60
  
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg, age 75
  
• Stephen Breyer, age 69
  
• Samuel Alito, age 58