Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings
Tax the Rich
Website Wednesday
Before I get to my picks, there's a question which has been bugging me ever since I saw The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and recent events brought it to the front of my brain again.
The recent events: There's anti-American havoc in Libya and Egypt because an Israeli/American has produced an anti-Islam film which got translated into Arabic and then went viral on YouTube. The guy acts likes an agent-provocateur in that's he's quoted as standing behind his anti-Islam propaganda and his type of hate is not unusual to me since every once and a while some of my neighbors will e-mail me anti-Islam screeds full of vitriol and nonsense. (Why do people think just because you're liberal you're also a hater?)
When I awakened this a.m. and read about the US. embassy staffer being killed during this mayhem, I remembered the question I had after seeing TGWTDT. The scene is when the reporter links the killings to verses from Leviticus. Harriet's voice-over quotes a passage similar to 20:16: "If a woman presents
herself to a male animal to have intercourse with it, she and the animal
must both be put to death. You must kill both, for they are guilty of a
capital offense."
I know that Leviticus is known for its wacky "Shall Nots", but did people really have sex with animals back then? Laws don't usually get written unless people are doing something that the lawmakers want stopped. And to reach the level of such a draconian punishment, I'm assuming enough people did this to hit the "radar." Spooky! I've also decided on a new saying: Religions are just cults with bigger budgets.
OK, I'll start with this website today:
These are American slave narratives which are preserved due to a Works Progress Administration project from 1936 to 1938. Now the WPA was a government program set up by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), during the 1930's depression in the US. (You can google WPA to read about this program.) It not only gave Americans jobs and dignity, it created this treasure trove of insight into lives of slaves in the US south before the US Civil War. The former slaves just talk about their lives with much more resignation than I think I could have felt. (But they were very old at the time of the project.) It's not an easy read because their dialect is written down as they spoke it but the cadence and understanding kicks in as you read along. Want to know what it's like when you're an object to be bought and sold? Want to have some talking points when a yahoo tells you "slavery wasn't that bad for those people?": Read this.
And now for something completely different:
The site is called 5 Second Films, but the film linked to above, Naked Came The Gorlac, comes from one of the site's long films. (Link in top bar.) Naked Came the Gorlac takes place at a wedding reception and hopefully a reception you'll never attend unless, of course, you're dating Gorlac. Amateur perhaps, but cleverly entertaining.
To get to the 5 second films, click on "Random Film." There seems to be a blurb about each film to the right of the screen but you had better be able to read fast because 5 seconds is really, really short.
Their About says: 5-Second Films was created by Brian “Boss Man” Firenzi in the Spring of
2005, after being disappointed by so many 5,400-second films. The rules
are simple: 2 seconds of beginning titles, 5 seconds of film, 1 second
of end titles. If you take umbrage with these 5sfs running at an actual
length of 8 seconds, we can only assume you’re no fun at dinner parties.
A really fun, quirky site, probably not kid nor work friendly, but where can you get 12 films with plots and themes in 60 seconds? Enjoy. See you next Wednesday.
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