Zorral

https://www.si.com/soccer/2023/11/10/carli-lloyd-confirms-uswnt-once-lost-team-15-year-old-boys BTW the loss was 5-2.

O yes. TX, you always win.

But reports such as the latest bombing in Rafah, in which over 30 people were killed -- most of them children -- will also heighten the activist protest movement.

These protests and demos are spreading to many campuses across the US. That seems to be in provoked at least in part to the cops and shut downs and calls by the fascist ilks in congress etc. that the National Guard, the cops, somebody come in beat their asses and arrest them -- or as the stinkin' pile demand, I think it was him, be shot and hung. Shades of 1967!

Hmmm. I missed that all together. But then, as commented, this series did not engage my emotions or curiosity beyond seeing what they did with this once-upon-a-time phenomenon of publishing, and then made-for-tv movie mini-series (1980). Or else I was making dinner -- and/or jetlagged when that rolled by. In any case this son plays absolutely no role in the series.

All we need to understand is, since behind every great family and their great fortune is a great crime, for a great family to continue with its great fortune is to commit more great crimes. Which entertains those over whom they maintain their exploitation and dominance via their great fortunes which provides their great power.

That's what I said. But she's already dead, when he does this. She has no daughters. I didn't know she had a son, so thank you for that information. But, we never saw him. What is he doing? Torananga doesn't seem to know either, or give a damn. He has many sons though, which is mentioned by more figures than himself.

Further, it seemed to this viewer the scene in which Toranaga sets sets free his falcon is a paradigm that setting Mariko to do what the army cannot, which she did, at the cost of her own life. He earlier in the series called her his falcon at one point while Blackthorne and Yabu are goshawks. However, Toranaga says, as the falcon flies, "Bear many daughters." Mariko has no daughters, no children, and never shall. So, what are we to think of this?

Amid arrests and dark warnings about Jewish students’ safety, an editorial at the campus newspaper offered a far different view of the crisis. https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/04/columbia-university-protests-presidents-jewish-students-encampment.html Columbia has a radio station, WKCR, "The Home of Technical Difficulty" which is broadcasting continuously what is happening on the campus concerning the protests and demonstrations. It is online, but regard its self-given subtitle. There are no funds for anything for the radio station. It's entirely volunteer, including the equipment.

There was one bit this viewer's pov appreciated. That was at the end, in, as we have already been informed, Blackthorne's first to fail endeavor to rebuild a ship for seafaring. Buntaro's appearance to throw himself into this failed endeavor along with Blackthorne. Both of them came back from the dead. Both of them failed to keep Mariko from what she wanted, she escaped both of their versions of what they thought was what she should do, leaving them to fail together in this too. Both Ha! However, I really missed Blackthorne's decision, and then mental preparation to commit Seppuku, and the aftermath of being stopped right at the moment, for several days afterword, and then in one way or another for what would be the rest of his life. This, more than anything else in the novel -- and particularly missing in this television adaptation -- allowed Blackthorne to enter "Japaneseness.' That was the powerful bit of Clavell's fiction, that never left my recollection of the readings.

There is so much more involved in the lives of trans people like all of us, than sports, yanno? For many, perhaps even most, sports isn't even on the radar. Sports is not the point or the reason or anything at all. A Breakout Spanish Novel About Class and Trans Identity Comes to the U.S. Alana S. Portero’s debut, “Bad Habit,” follows one woman’s coming-of-age in a blue-collar Madrid neighborhood. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/books/review/bad-habit-alana-s-portero.html

LIstening over and over to a cover of Tina Turner's version of "Proud Mary" -- everything exactly the same except the woman singing is singing the words in Chinese. Covers are covers -- how many versions over the years have we heard just of "Proud Mary"? What makes this one stand out so?

THE SCHOMBURG CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN BLACK CULTURE The 12th Annual Black Comic Book Festival Friday, April 26 - Saturday, April 27 https://www.schomcom.org/ https://www.schomcom.org/schedule

Why in hell is Mike Johnson coming to Columbia U today? To visit Jewish students ... will he be visiting the Jewish students who are part and parcel of the protesting?

O yes, here we go again with that tired old canard. Stupid lazy ignorant dumb corrupt mayor all in with real estate, finance and cops insists its all outside agitators on the city's campuses. There is no way these students could actually care about, in their hearts, about the issues about which they are protesting the schools which are profiting directly from them in the millions and millions of dollars.

Ya, that what the reviewers say.* But for me, even if that was what it was supposed to be, it was a hard fail, which is not how they would have wanted to their viewers to see it. *

Of course the author knows. She was making a different point -- that despite all of the praised, including by yrs truly, the centering of Japanese figures not European ones, this show is still centering a European fantasy Japan, particularly of that period.

The stinkin' pile is now whining outrage at the amount of security around 100 Centre Street -- insisting THIS is why there aren't millions of his supporters there to demand his freedom of speech and movement, but instead, only about 5 people standing around chatting and enjoying the sunshine. Another political persecution of martyr to freedum him.

I don't get my news from such venues. But I feel I'm just about the only one who waits until more consistently fact checking and reporting venues go up with 'information' instead of just rushing hither thither to tell and believe whatever the xtit etc. say and pass it on. That doesn't mean blindly believing what those venues say either -- re NYT and Yellow Cake, for a single instance, not to mention some of ridiculous stuff its put up more lately. More and more, in fact, lately. Of course they do try to cover it by pretending it's opinion in very small fonts.

Before the students got busted up by cops, they'd held a seder, last night. At the moment, Washington Square Park is packed with protesters of the bombing of Gaza and NYU's participation in the military and other industries of aid and assistance to that war. It's almost like a time capsule, as this afternoon's WNYC's 1A program featured the 60's, particularly the music and its connections with political protests and other movements of the time, particularly focusing on ... The Jefferson Airplane. Ha! One quite thinks that very people in any capacity at NYU right now were even born in 1967. https://the1a.org/segments/the-sounds-of-america-surrealistic-pillow/

A perspective, some of which shares what I commented on the show in the Watch thread. Shōgun Has a Japanese-Superiority Complex By Ryu Spaeth, a features editor at New York https://www.vulture.com/article/shgun-what-the-hit-series-gets-wrong-about-japan.html?

FYI -- The research deskers are listening to the call-in section of the NPR affiliated public radio program right now about the topic of NYU and Columbia protests in particular and the push back from the vast majority of the callers at the idea that Jewish students on the campuses are in danger and that the campuses are antisemitic is exceedingly coherent and cogent. Many of the callers are not only Jewish residents of the city, but were part of the protests in the Vietnam era, who lay out the culpability of the universities in the programs to develop weapons to more accurately target Vietnamese villages, toxic chemicals to deforest Vietnam and so on. The protests were pointed at the universities to stop that, and divest -- just as the protests are targeting presently. Very interesting!

Liked this take on another current event taking place in my general neighborhood right now: On trial, Trump is a shadow of the superhero his supporters crave Sidney Blumenthal He wants his devotees to see the court case as trial by combat, with him as warrior. But the truth is more pathetic https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/23/trump-trial-superhero-shadow

Meaning of course the opposite.