Sharon Jones breaks it down

We missed the Rock the Garden concert this year, but The Current put up some video clips. I love this one of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings.

Lionel Messi

Why people think Argentina's Lionel Messi is currently "The Best Player in the World, described beautifully by sportswriter and blogger Joe Posnanski (via kottke).

updated to add: Messi plays for Barcelona, so he's buddies with most of Spain's national team. From the shallow end of the pool, here's an Argentina victory thread with lots of Messi pics/captions, and a Spain post-victory thread both from the from LJ ONTD_football where real fans also indulge in pics of shirtless players, jokes and all-around silliness.

World Cup highlights of yore

Tomorrow Portugal plays Brazil. Will the match be as epic as Germany Vs. Greece in Philosophy Football?

World Cup Fever at Bette's Ocean View Diner, Berkeley

A trip to the Bay Area almost always includes a stop at Bette's Ocean View Diner in Berkeley. This year the place was decked out for the World Cup!



Our table was right next to the board where they are tracking the play-offs.

Blogging will be sparse for a while

I'm in San Francisco now, with my mother, and don't have easy access to internet for a little while. I'll be updating my Twitter feed over there on the sidebar because it's easier to do from my phone. If I had an iPhone, I could browse, post, etc, much more easily, but it's just as well that my Blackberry makes those activities to slow and frustrating. Backing off from the internet for a week feels good, and I've finished a novel (Thinks by David Lodge) and I'm halfway through another (Solar by Ian McEwan)(SPOILERS IN THE REVIEWS I"VE LINKED). Both happen to be about extremely disagreeable male protagonists whose lechery, vanity, and solipsistic selfishness are corollaries to our society's pig-headedness with regard to the urgent need for change. Neither novelist is apologizing per se, but both of them take pains to mock those intellectuals whose critiques of that worldview are easily caricatured rather than addressed seriously. On the other hand, both of them are dead accurate about the failings of their scientist protagonists and the academic worlds in which they move. Sigh. And they are both very funny.

MR

I wondered how you were, and now I know you are gone. Tomorrow would have been your 52nd birthday. I hope you found peace.

South Africa

I wrote part of my dissertation on a writer from South Africa.


From the YouTube post, I repost the following information:

NKosi Sikeleli Africa (African National Anthem)- With Miriam Makeba, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Paul Simon, Hugh Masekela, etc

Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika ("God Bless Africa" in Xhosa language), is unofficially called the African National Anthem, anthem of the African National Congress (ANC), and has historically been the unofficial national anthem of South Africa during its apartheid era, representing the suffering of the oppressed.

During the global anti-Apartheid movement of the 1970s and 1980s, it was regularly sung at meetings and other events, including African National Congress (ANC) events.

Part of the song has now been included in the new official national anthem of South Africa, after the apartheid era ended. The new national anthem of South Africa is a combination of "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika" and the former anthem in the apartheid era "Die Stem van Suid-Afrika or The Call of South Africa."

Nkosi Sikelel Afrika was originally composed as a hymn in 1897 by Enoch Sontonga, a teacher at a Methodist mission school in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1994 after the fall of apartheid, the new State President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela declared that both Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika and the previous national anthem, Die Stem (The Call of South Africa) would be national anthems. In 1996, a shortened, combined version of the two anthems was released as the new South African National Anthem under the constitution of South Africa.

The hymn is also the national anthem of both Tanzania and Zambia, and was formerly the anthem of Zimbabwe and Namibia. The words of the first stanza were originally written in Xhosa as a hymn.

In 1927 seven additional Xhosa stanzas were added by the poet Samuel Mqhayi. Solomon Plaatje, one of South Africa's greatest writers and a founding member of the ANC, was the first to have the song recorded. This was in London in 1923.

A Sotho version was published in 1942 by Moses Mphahlele. Rev. John L. Dube's Ohlange Zulu Choir popularised the hymn at concerts in Johannesburg, and it became a popular church hymn that was also adopted as the anthem at political meetings. It has also been recorded by Paul Simon and Miriam Makeba, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Boom Shaka, Oliver Mtukudzi (the Shona version that was once the anthem of Zimbabwe) and the Mahotella Queens.

NKOSI SIKELELI AFRICA LYRICS
(AFRICAN NATIONAL ANTHEM LYRICS)

Nkosi Sikeleli Africa
Malup hakanyiswu phando lwayo
Yiswa imithanda zo yethu
Nkosi Sikelela
Thina lusapo lwayo

Nkosi Sikeleli Africa
Malup hakanyiswu phando lwayo
Yiswa imithanda zo yethu
Nkosi Sikelela
Thina lusapo lwayo

Yiza Moya (Yiza, Yiza)
Yiza Moya (Yiza, Yiza)

Yiza Moya oyingcwele
Nkosi Sikelela
Thina lusapo lwayo

Morena boloka sechaba sa heso (sa heso)
O fedise dintwa le matswenyeho
Morena boloka sechaba sa heso
O fedise dintwa le matswenyeho
O seboloke (O se boloke)
O seboloke morena
O seboloke sechaba
Sechaba sa Heso
Sechaba sa Africa

O seboloke morena
O seboloke sechaba
Sechaba sa Heso
Sechaba sa Africa

Jimmy Fallon's house band is The Roots, who are superstars!

Librarians Do Gaga

Leo

It's so hard to take good pictures of my cat! He avoids the camera.


He doesn't like the flash.


I like to sneak up on him when he's sleeping.

Personal Trainer for "porky kookaburra"

From the comments to my post about fitness:

Poor baby! fed so many sausages she got overweight and unable to fly away from the dogs.

And here is what they sound like!

NPRness, or "Autotuned Things Considered" and "WaitWait Chatroulette"