So I went to see this documentary about Gypsy/Roma music last night. To my complete delight, it featured at least two musical artists featured on the amazing Borat soundtrack! The movie itself was okay, but if you like Roma music, I highly recommend it (or at least the soundtrack).

After seeing Borat, I was reminded of Long Way Round, The muti-part documentary in which Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman ride motorcycles around the world. There’s a long section of that series in which the cyclists pass through Kazakhstan, which seems to have much in common with Mongolia. The inhabitants appear ethnically Asian, and the whole “feel” of the place was not Slavic or eastern European, as depicted in Borat. Obviously that film is a crude joke, especially the “Kazakh” sequences. But I couldn’t place the precise reference, until now. Gypsy Caravan shows many Gypsy settlements, including one in Romania. Bingo! From the donkey-pulled cart of tuba-bearings youths, to the 13-year old bride, this is clearly Borat’s inspiration. A quick Google search revealed that Borat was filmed in Glod, a Romanian village (roughly 2000 miles from central Kazakhstan). Not to sound holier-than-though, but exploiting these poor people was a horrendous, inhuman act. Villagers were paid about $6 each- the film made $54 million. I wasn’t going to go this way with the post, but it’s infuriating to me. Ahh well, enjoy the music.

The newest trend in dining is not directly gastronomic, though it may intensify flavors and other sensations… except the visual ones. Pitch-black restaurants are popping up all over the world, and the dining is truly sightless. Mobile devices, watches and other potentially flashy things are confiscated. Patrons normally select their meals from a board in a waiting area, and are then led to their seats by waitstaff who place a guiding hand on their shoulder. The staff wear bells on their shoes, and are usually blind.
In fact, raising awareness about disabilities while employing the blind is the purported raison d’etre for these establishments. A review of one restaurant, Dans Le Noir in Farringdon UK, can be found here.

If you haven’t noticed, I’m using a little widgety device to include my blog on MySpace. The thing is called a blidget from Widgetbox (I’m not making this up), and it was braindead easy to set up. And it’s a powerful way to distribute content- it effectively creates an embeddable object from an RSS feed. And it makes it beautiful. User-friendly is usually synonymous with aggravating in my book, but this is truly the best of both worlds. And after wrestling with other dead-end ideas (thanks, MySpace) I couldn’t care less about one little link. Heck, here’s another: www.widgetbox.com. Check it out.

So Jill is a roller girl. Time to check that one off th’ list! She’s a rookie in the CTRG flat-track league. If you’ve talked to me since April, you know all about it, and if you haven’t, now you know why!
An amazing thing: think of a clever roller derby name, and it will magically appear on this database. Isn’t that a cool trick? Well, not really, after you and your friends have all contributed several excellent names. (Hannah Barbaric, c’mon!) However, a group effort yielded a perfect -and original- name for Jill. I won’t reveal it here until I get proper clearance from the lady in charge. But rest assured, it’s a good fit.So be sure to check out the International Rollergirls’ Master Roster. And who’s it managed by, you ask? Page Burner.

Vocab lesson of the day: Apparently the Maes-Garrreau point is the term given to a wondrous future, predicted to appear just before the visionary’s expected date of death.
The term, coined by Kevin Kelly, is named for MIT’s Pattie Maes and jounalist Joel Garreau, who both noticed the phenomenon. Maes apparently found that several of her colleagues were optimistic that one day we’ll all be able to upload our minds into computers, ensuring a kind of immortality. Interestingly, Maes discovered that when she asked her colleagues when this would all happen, they all tended to give a date that just happened to be right before they could be expected to die of old age. Journalist Joel Garreau has noticed this type of thing happening with other predictions of cool, wonderful, transformative advances that will make all of our lives wonderful… the person making the prediction tends to think that the advance will happen right before they die.

Thanks to
SpugeonBlog and Technium.

Check this out: http://www.pinktentacle.com/2007/07/pimp-my-rice-paddy/