March 8, 2011
A shebeen [shuh-been] was originally an illicit bar or club where alcoholic beverages were sold without a licence. The term has spread far from its origins in Ireland, to Scotland, Canada, the US, England, Zimbabwe, the Caribbean, Namibia, and South Africa. In South Africa and Zimbabwe, shebeens are most often located in black townships as an alternative to pubs and bars, where under apartheid and the Rhodesian era, black Africans could not enter a pub or bar reserved for whites. Originally, shebeens were operated illegally, selling homebrewed and home-distilled alcohol and providing patrons with a place to meet and discuss political and social issues.
Often, patrons and owners were arrested by the police, though the shebeens were frequently reopened because of their importance in unifying the community and providing a safe place for discussion. During the apartheid era shebeens became a crucial place for activists to meet. They also provided music and dancing, allowing patrons to express themselves culturally, giving rise to the musical genre kwaito. Currently, shebeens are legal in South Africa and have become an integral part of urban culture, serving commercial beers as well as umqombothi, a traditional African beer made from maize and sorghum
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March 8, 2011
Jerk is a style of cooking native to Jamaica in which meat is dry-rubbed or wet marinated with a very hot spice mixture called Jamaican jerk spice. Jerk seasoning is traditionally applied to pork and chicken. Modern recipes also apply jerk spice mixes to fish, shrimp, shellfish, beef, sausage, lamb, and tofu. Jerk seasoning principally relies upon two items: allspice (called ‘pimento’ in Jamaica) and Scotch bonnet peppers (similar in heat to the habanero pepper). Other ingredients include cloves, cinnamon, scallions, nutmeg, thyme, garlic, and salt.
The term jerk is said to come from the word ‘charqui,’ a Spanish term of Quechua origin for jerked or dried meat, which eventually became jerky in English. The term jerk spice (also often commonly known as Jamaican jerk spice) refers to a spice rub. The word jerk refers to both the spice rub and to the particular cooking technique.
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March 7, 2011
Hungry ghost is a Western translation of an Eastern phrase representing beings who are driven by intense emotional needs in an animalistic way. In Buddhism, they are ghosts only in the sense of not being fully alive; not fully capable of living and appreciating what the moment has to offer. They are phantomlike creatures with withered limbs, grossly bloated bellies, and long thin necks.
They represent a fusion of rage and desire. Tormented by unfulfilled cravings and insatiably demanding of impossible satisfactions, the Hungry Ghosts are searching for gratification for old unfulfilled needs whose time has passed. They are beings who have uncovered a terrible emptiness within themselves, who cannot see the impossibility of correcting something that has already happened. Their ghostlike state represents their attachment to the past.
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March 4, 2011
Mass games or mass gymnastics are a form of performing arts in which large numbers of performers take part in a highly regimented performance that emphasizes group dynamics rather than individual prowess. The effect of displaying huge images is achieved by a having large number of individuals each being dressed in a particular color or holding a colored hard paper above their heads.
Because of the vast scale of the performance, with often tens of thousands of performers, mass games are performed in stadiums, often accompanied by a background of card-turners occupying the seats on the opposite side from the viewers. The rapid change of images was achieved by changing a card with another in swift and synchronized movement. The synchronization is achieved after several hours-long rehearsals and employs much choreography.
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March 3, 2011
C. Allan Gilbert (1873 – 1929) was a prominent American illustrator. He is especially remembered for a widely published drawing (a memento mori) titled ‘All Is Vanity.’ The drawing employs a double image (or visual pun) in which the scene of a woman admiring herself in a mirror, when viewed from a distance, appears to be a human skull.
It is less widely known that Gilbert was an early contributor to animation, and a camouflage artist (or camoufleur) for the U.S. Shipping Board during World War I.
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March 2, 2011
Adoniran Barbosa (1910 – 1982) was a famous Brazilian traditional samba singer and composer. The themes of his songs are drawn from the life of low-wage urban workers, the unemployed and the vagabonds. His first big hit was Saudosa Maloca (‘Shanty of Fond Memories,’ 1951), where three homeless friends recall with nostalgia their improvised shanty, which was torn down by the landowner to make room for a building. His next hit ‘Joga a Chave’ (‘Throw me the Doorkey,’ 1952) was inspired by his own frequent experiences of arriving late at home and finding the door locked by his wife, Matilde.
In his ‘Trem das Onze’ (‘The 11 PM Train,’ 1964), the protagonist explains to his lover that he cannot stay any longer because he has to catch the last train to the Jaçanã suburb, and besides his mother will not sleep before he arrives. Unlike the samba songs of the previous decades, which generally used the formal Portuguese of the educated class, Adoniran’s lyrics are a realistic record of the informal speech of São Paulo’s lower classes. He once said ‘I only write samba for the common people. That is why I write lyrics in ‘wrong’ Portuguese, because that is how the common people speak.’
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March 2, 2011
The Magic Roundabout in Swindon, England was constructed in 1972 and consists of five mini-roundabouts arranged in a circle. Its name comes from the popular children’s television series The Magic Roundabout (a children’s television program created in France in 1963). Traffic flow around the smaller, inner roundabout is anti-clockwise, and traffic flows in the usual clockwise manner around the five mini-roundabouts and the outer loop. Local and regular users are proficient at traversing the complex junction, which offers multiple paths between feeder roads. Virtually the same overall configuration has been in place for over 30 years.
In 2005, it was voted the worst roundabout in a survey by a UK insurance company. However the roundabout provides a better throughput of traffic than other designs and has an excellent safety record, since traffic moves too slowly to do serious damage in the event of a collision.
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March 2, 2011
Piet [peet] Mondrian [mawn-dree-ahn] (1872 – 1944), was a Dutch painter, and an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement (Dutch for ‘The Style,’ which advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and color; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white).
He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of white ground, upon which was painted a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the three primary colors.
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March 1, 2011
Ubuntu [ooh-boon-too] is an ethic or humanist philosophy focusing on people’s allegiances and relations with each other. The word has its origin in the Bantu languages of southern Africa. Ubuntu is seen as a classical African concept. Ubuntu translates to, ‘I am what I am because of who we all are.’
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March 1, 2011
Muammar Gaddafi [guh-dah-fee] (1942 – 2011) was the leader of Libya since a coup in 1969 until he was killed in a popular uprising in 2011. His regime was associated with numerous acts of state-sponsored terrorism in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s.
With the death of Omar Bongo of Gabon in 2009, he became the longest serving of all current non-royal national leaders and he was one of the longest serving rulers in history. Gaddafi is alleged to have amassed a multi-billion fortune for himself and his family.
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February 28, 2011
The Giant’s Causeway is an area of about 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, the result of an ancient volcanic eruption. It is located on the northeast coast of Northern Ireland. The tops of the columns form stepping stones that lead from the cliff foot and disappear under the sea. Most of the columns are hexagonal, although there are also some with four, five, seven and eight sides. The tallest are about 12 metres (36 ft) high, and the solidified lava in the cliffs is 28 metres thick in places.
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February 27, 2011
The Pascha is a 12 story brothel in Cologne, Germany. With about 120 prostitutes, over 80 employees and up to 1000 customers per day, it is the largest brothel in Europe. The brothel was opened in January 1972 in the Hornstraße, under the name ‘Eros Center.’ It was Europe’s first high rise brothel. The city of Cologne wanted to eliminate the red light district ‘Kleine Brinkgasse’ in the city center and issued a license to build the new brothel on land owned by the city in the outskirts of town. The house rents 126 rooms on 7 floors to prostitutes for a fee of 180 Euros per day, which includes meals, medical care, and the 20 Euros of tax that authorities collect per prostitute per day.
The women come from many countries; about 30% of them are German. They typically sit outside of their rooms and negotiate with customers who wander the hallways. Some of the women live in their rooms, others rent a second room to stay in, while still others stay in their own apartments in Cologne. The house is open 24 hours a day; customers of the prostitutes pay an entrance fee of 5 Euros and then negotiate directly with the women, who work independently and keep all of the money. One floor is reserved for low-cost service, and another one for transsexual prostitutes. The house also contains a regular hotel, a table dance nightclub with separate entrance, several bars, and a separate club-style brothel on the top floor.
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