Fade Out

Ohio Update

Well this should be my final Ohio update. So Andy, if you are disappointed in the lack of updates as of late, just wait till I get out of the states... :) Everything seems to be in order. Philly on Sunday and Africa on Wednesday. Hope to update soon.

Pictures of Lesotho

Found this website with some pictures of Lesotho. This guy has some pictures as well.

BBoys Cd Forthcoming

Beastie Boys new album, To the 5 Boroughs, coming June 15th. Maggie will be buying this and sending it to me. Hopefully I will have it before the end of July:)

Thank you everbody.

I'd like to thank everyone who came to Maggie's over the weekend for the going away party. I had a great time and hope that everyone else did. Got some pictures up from Saturday. Though there is a lot of smoke and blurriness involved with much of it.

Spinning thing...

Go here. It will make your keyboard look all funny.

Hasta luego party at Maggie's house: Saturday. Tomorrow. No rain?

MT 3.0

Well the outcry against Movable Type 3.0 seems to be pretty unanimous and, as I see it, fairly understandable. That being said I have one blog and am the sole author; therefore this does not effect me, as I still fall under the free version limitations. I looked into Drupal, but with only two weeks left I really don’t want to bother with it. Besides, Fade Out is pretty bare so even MT is overkill.

Rumblings

Sasser is a silly virus. Silly in this case is a very derogatory term. This is compounded by the inherent evil/sadness that is/are all things Microsoft. XP’s system restore feature should be renamed system virus depository.

Also I’ve downloaded quite a few drivers from HP’s site and every time I go to the support page, I am greeted with the picture at left. And every time I swear that it is Ben Folds…

Don't Panic--> H2G movie forthcoming

Faculty Club Gathering

Last night I attended a Peace Corps get together at the Faculty Club at OSU. I picked up some really good info and met some RPCVs, invitees, nominees, and lots of parents of current volunteers.
It also seems that I will inevitably have a cellular phone in Lesotho... So we'll see how that goes. 17 days.

The Millennium Challenge Account

Article about how Lesotho is one of 16 countries throughout the world which will receive money through the Millennium Challenge Account.

Excerpts from this article:
Congress has approved US$1bn for the MCA this fiscal year. President Bush is asking for US$2.5bn for FY2005 and has pledged to request US$5bn in FY2006, which would nearly double current U.S. assistance to developing nations.

Apparently the qualifications for this money are quite strict:
A total of 16 indicators was used to select the 16 countries invited to apply for assistance. The indicators are grouped in three categories - 'ruling justly', 'investing in people' and 'economic freedom'. In addition, to receive MCA assistance this year, countries must have less than US$1,415 in average per capita income, which eliminates several countries on the continent, including Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.

According to this article Kenya and Malawi were excluded based on corruption. It seems that my staging in Philly will also include a group that is headed to Malawi, so hopefully I'll be able to pick up a thing or two on that front.

The offical site is http://www.mcc.gov/ which, according to that site, will soon be updated with country specfic information.

I have a Liberal Bias

I have a liberal bias. I'm like the media... No. But don't take my word, which is of the sad minority, for it. Levar Burton is nowhere to be found in the forthcoming excerpt, sorry. Instead I shall provide this excerpt from a Salon.com article, of course, written by David Brock.

Ironically, though not coincidentally, this radical transformation of the media has been obscured by conservative charges of "liberal media bias" that are believed by the vast majority of the public, including about half of Democrats. I'm all too familiar with the claim. From my very first days at the Washington Times, I was schooled to invoke "liberal bias" to deflect attention from my own biases and journalistic lapses and as a rationale to justify my presence in the mainstream media conversation in the name of providing "balance" or "the other side." We sold a lot of books and magazines and commanded lavish attention for our propaganda outside the right wing by using this cover story. Whole article here Remember the whole free day pass thing.

Anyway in this article, and I assume in his book, Brock, a former right-wing slanderer himself, exposes the sadness that is the right. Good read. Though I'm sure you won't believe it and will denounce this as "liberal" trash. What can I say? I'm biased. And leaving.
But what concerns me most about the whole "thing," if it may be referred to as such, is that it has ceased to become political, as it pertains to a literal sense of the first definition entry. Instead it has become a factional championing of definitive answers, solutions and feelings. I don't see things changing anytime soon either, especially in light of the relational difficulties between sides even through/after 9/11. Big sigh.

Lincoln says:

I realize this has nothing to do with Lesotho, but this blog is mine and therefore cannot be entirely focused. Anyway I read an article about a speech given by Kurt Vonnegut at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. In it he quotes Abraham Lincoln as follows:

"Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood �that serpent�s eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war.�

Lincoln was saying this towards James Polk, who was President at the time, in regards to the Mexican War. So it goes. My my how things have changed.

Name comes up

It is interesting how once you know something you see it all over the place. Well perhaps not interesting but perhaps it just makes sense. Anyway, Lesotho gets a nod, albeit a bad one, in the April edition of Harper's Index.

New Date

New date for staging: May 30th. I take off for Philly on the 30th and Lesotho on June 1st. Now to make some travel arrangements.