22 July 2010

formatting html

What ideas come to mind when confronted with a table in the middle of text?
     Generally, design concepts are not given much thought by most viewers... they just look at "stuff" and if it makes sense visually nothing gets said or thought about.
     Making tables can be handy to present specific information to the reader in a way that helps clarify how data is relevant to the subject matter in the article.
 WIDGETSSPROCKETSTotal
 181129
 350944
     Of course, what you have here isn't connected to anything. It's just trying to see if I can add tables within the blogger posting format.
IMAGE CREDIT: From a now defunct Russian clip art site

18 July 2010

original work - Tribute to Hockney

propaganda - screeds

 • Ethan Persoff's Collections. "Political ephemera, drug hysteria, vintage sex & health items ...other miscellany; Delivered to you in a timely, inappropriate manner since 2001"
     Where else can you find Paul Krassner's Realist Archives, M. Philip Copp's 1957 classic The Atomic Revolution, Sarah Palin's Lipstick Collection, The U.S. Army Training Guide on the Don't Ask Don't Tell homosexual policy, and How to Treat your M-16 Like a Lady all in one place? That's right! Nowhere else.

     Mr. Persoff's collecting efforts have been entertaining me for almost a decade; though I often neglect paying proper attention. I think it has as much to do with how much time I spend once on his site. My loss, and a far more productive use of time than messing about with Facebook's FarmVille.

 • Chick Cartoon Tracts "Publishing cartoon gospel tracts and equipping Christians for evangelism for over 40 years."
     When I was a teenager, I became enthralled with the likes of Jack Chick's Comics. Mind you, I was never converted to the somewhat rabid anti-Catholic evangelicism promoted by Mr. Chicks' bible tracts, I was more intrigued by his style, and, in part, by some [though not all] of the content.
     And when I combined Chick's fire-and-brimstone moralism with the lessons learned from an odd assortment of conventional horror comic books, the thing I learned was that greed and vanity never really pays off.
     It is from these lessons lessons that I sometimes receive vicarious consolation when confronted with the dark cabal that runs the world these days.
     The lesson learned was that if you sell your soul for fame, riches and power in this life, eventually, the payoff is that old sulfur-breath comes back to claim what is his.
     And the sign-in-blood contractee gets whisked abruptly to a sentence of eternal damnation and horror.
     But while Dante, when viewing the Inferno, may have been able to peek at the outcomes, the rest of us just have these comic books to prove it.

 • As if Jack Chick's pamphleteering was not enough, Pleated-Jeans has posted 15 awful examples of Christian propaganda. That is one of them to your left. My favorites on the list include "environmentalists", "sophisticated swine" and "loud-mouth women". Wonder where each of these are mentioned in the Bible.

 • Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages, which is moving to: Chinese Poster [dot] net

 • Propaganda Poster Collections Online

mental health - Toronto "community" to replace old Asylum

 • A Canadian architect, Frank Lewinberg, and a psychiatrist, Paul Garfinkel, have teamed up and planned for a nice new neighborhood for "the mentally ill".
     They acknowledge the limits of their vision, writing that “the history of urban planning is littered with idealistic projects that withered in the harsh light of everyday living.”
     A recent article in Canadian Architect quotes Garfinkel:
"People need to be treated in a respectful, dignified, holistic manner that sometimes requires them to be confined in a hospital voluntarily or involuntarily. The more we normalize the hospital stay, in keeping with safety and security, the better it is for the person's recovery, and ultimate reintegration. Normalizing starts with an urban village, like the rest of the city, but it gets into the nature of public space, treatment space, what our hospital rooms look like. We want to make [the hospital] a more homelike setting, just as you would want in a normal community."
     Dr. Garfinkel claims to be especially critical of the "biological reductivism" fashionable in psychiatry for the last 30 years, a theory that lays great emphasis on medication--often, he believes, at the expense of the patient as a whole person, and at the expense of the settings of his treatment.

     I have worked with, and on behalf of, people with psychiatric disabilities for over 20 years. I remain skeptical about the plan. This isn't a plan for a new neighborhood, it is adding more office rental space while tossing a few bones to the clients and community.
     Not only because the rationale behind building the great Victorian-Era behemoths that housed "the Insane" was based on providing mad people with sylvan settings; but also due to the fact that the plans ~ as extensively described ~ show more effort going into office space for clinicians than to actual housing. That housing seems to be limited to three ""alternative milieu" dwellings: 72 motel-like rooms, with private washrooms and lockable doors, for patients who still need hospital care, but who have progressed beyond the acute stage of their illnesses."
  •  "Housing" people in "motel style" accommodations does little to restore a sense of normalcy to one's life, yet that seems to be the only client housing being given serious consideration in the multi-blocked endeavor.
     Moreover, if are planning a community, why is there only circumstantial mention of cultural amenities? Instead "...the exact nature and placement of the non-hospital uses have yet to be determined, a grocery store and health club, scientific institutes and laboratories, cafés and private residences have been mentioned."
     During the reconstruction phase, The Workman Theatre, a popular visual and performing arts gathering place, "...a space much loved by local residents and others throughout the city...," operated and managed by people with psychiatric disabilities, [and funded, in part by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Canada's largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital and the agency that stands to benefit from reconstruction] will be demolished.
  •  To destroy the Workman Theatre without having prioritized a replacement structure ~ is patently absurd! It is a popular gathering place, run by clients and former clients of mental health services. Across the continent theatre groups run by ex-patients have shown themselves to helps bolster self-esteem, foster independence and self-determination. Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) partially funds the theatre group; it is a bafflement that CAMH management would even consider razing a structure so integral to helping mental health service clients in recovering.
  •  That single action alone speaks volumes about the arrogance of clinicians towards the clients the agency supposedly serves, and makes a lie of any claims that CAMH may make about "...advocating for public policies [and practices] that are responsive to the needs of people with addiction and mental health problems." Why eliminate the Workman Theatre, a truly integrated service, that actually provides supportive services that CAMH claims they want to offer?
     If Lewinberg and Garfinkel really wanted to help developing a community that helps "normalize" life for people with psychiatric diagnoses, and help folks integrate into the larger society, why then act like just a real estate developer hawking densely packed office buildings? How about affordable housing and street level spaces for small businesses. So much for an clinical commitment to the Recovery Model. And practically nothing to promoting "Community."
IMAGE CREDIT: Rendering of one of the new buildings by Montgomery Sisam Architects

fitful wanderings from the web

 •  A Founding Father [the one that the Texas Republican Party has eliminated] on the Banking System and on Religious Demagoguery Quote:
If Americans ever allow banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless..”
~ Thomas Jefferson
 • Political news junkies should save this bookmark. The "Truth-O-Meter" hits politicians. Politifact looks at the accuracy of all; whether from pundits Sarah Palin and Keith Olbermann or politicians from President Obama to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. Question: Is fact-checking FOX NEWS next?

 • The Regressive Antidote talks of shoe-horning 21st Century governance into 17th Century ideas. Surprise! It doesn't work. From David Michael Green's essay:
"The world in our time faces a series of enormous global problems that demand global solutions. Unfortunately, we’re a lot more skilled at producing the former than the latter. And even more unfortunately, no one is better at creating these problems and blocking their solutions than the good ol’ US of A. Just such behavior was vividly on display last month, when the US went to a conference of the International Criminal Court (which we are not only not a member of, but have actively tried to undermine) and there attempted to block a resolution making aggression a crime under the ICC’s jurisdiction. But that’s only the latest example of a much broader and very dangerous 21st century tendency to avoid changing political institutions designed to work well for the world of the 17th century." Read the rest
 • Another example of discontinuities with laws across the planet comes from Marie Claire, a hair care and fashion mag, with nary a mention in the media a dishonorable "Honor Killing" takes place in Arizona. a gruesome tale of a father's failure to assimilate and of the "punishment" meted out on his daughter for doing just that. Abigail Pesta, author of the article, is the editor-at-large of Marie Claire. I'm impressed at Marie Claire for their effort!
     At school, she was known as a fun-loving student who made friends easily.
     But at home, Noor inhabited a darker world. She lived a life of subservience, often left to care for her six younger siblings. Noor's father, 49-year-old Faleh Almaleki, was strict and domineering, deeming it inappropriate for her to socialize with guys, wear jeans, or post snapshots of herself on MySpace. Her responsibility was to follow orders, or to risk a beating.
     When she finally decided she had to move out on her own Dad thought the only acceptable thing to do was to repeatedly drive over her with his Jeep. Read the rest of the story!

IMAGE CREDIT: Thomas Jefferson - image widely available on the internet. I happened to find it at America First Books; 2- A photo of Noor Almaleki taken by a friend

music - Tina Turner

music - Robert Palmer