Monday, November 27, 2017

What's Scarier Than A Nuclear Bomb: A Woman's Period!

The fear men have of menstruating women has not yet abated in the souls and imaginations of those who do truly fear it. We are well past the border of tolerance.

When the Taliban fled to their remote caves in Afghanistan, I was trying to think of what I might do to keep them there. We don't need to travel long distance any more. We have those who fear menstruating women in our midst, from the tippy top of the federal government to our next-door neighbors.

I propose to bomb and surround them with used "feminine" menstrual padding ... pretty simple.

They will not cross the line. Free. Harms no one. Caters to their deepest fears (yay!) and is a renewable commodity.

Lord knows! Any "Lord". Every "Lord". Even the little "lords".

I know you have questions about reloading. Here are some actual answers.

Are (ahem) feminine products available [at Disneyland] restrooms?
It says in the restrooms that things are available at City Hall but I have no idea what they have.
You could also go to the little Casino supermarket which is to the left of the train station, just before the entrance to the park, they would probably have things there and maybe a wider choice.

Here's another tip if you're bound for the Magic Mousedom.

Good way to get rid of those toxin-carrying "hygiene" necessities!

I've read that "tampons" are out among young women these days. What's a defense contractor to do with stores of them for the newly-entered fighting force of women combatants?  There's a consumer war going on ... welcome to the new battlefield!

I'm just reporting.

Nothing Lost ... Somethings Gained: Found in Translation - Design in California and Mexico 1915 - 1985






Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico 1915 - 1965 is one of LACMA's offerings in the Getty-sponsored festival of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.
PST LA/LA... (hey, pssssssssssssssssst! over here! 
 Never say la-la, as in tra- ...!

This exhibition does much more than clear up the ruse of Olivera Street (set up as a tourist attraction like Chinatown LA). It honors, not just disparages, the mutual admiration society between CA and ME!

Being a child of the post-WWII era, an early consumer of television and having emigrate from the Mid-Atlantic region in the late 1970s to CA, the show strikes a familiar chord of cultural sensibility, but now I can see the back-story of what was projected as the "goldene medina" of my mediated youth. I will now admit to having drawn a serape-d/sombrero-d "Mexican" propped up against a saguaro sleeping in the noonday sun in a mural in middle school. 

What did I know? I was brought up in Philadelphia area in the age of TV!
California was once part of Mexico and which was a Spanish colony. The very soil, the ocean, the forests and mountains, the weather and the sun ... above all, the sun! The indigenous people were not waiting to be discovered! They were also not consulted when design images were attribute to them. It is still hard for me to eat lettuce and grapes, given what I learned about the Chicano Movements ... Woody Guthrie was right. California was and remains the "Garden of Eden", and we sill need, more than even, the Do-Rey-Mi!

It's a full range of design and architecture dialogues between California and Mexico from 1915 - 1965. The more I visit this exhibition (and tour school kids to show the Portrait of John Dunbar, by Diego Rivera), the more I learn, such as the fact that Ruth Asawa, a participant in the Black Mountain College art/community experiment, learned how to weave wire into sculptures in Mexico! I was already familiar with Peter Shire's work, and love the inclusion of his "Mexican Bauhaus Tea Pot".


The Mexico / USA California split in 1804 never left either wish a sore spot in term of design sensibilities. There has been a natural trickle up and down effect for a long time despite efforts to appropriate imagery and disseminate stereotypical impressions via the then "new" media as photography, wire audio recorders and movies and later TV. There was and continues to be a "mutual admiration society" among the colonialists. There are a few indigenous pieces, but mostly this is a celebration of conquest.

The triptych (right) includes (l-r) LACMA's Standing Male Figure with Club" a (200 BCE - 400 CE) slip painted earthenware acquired in 1986 and Dora De Larios (b1933, active Los Angeles) "Warrior (mid-1960s) and "Blue Dog" (1979). I couldn't help but chuckle, as they reminded me of 2 pieces in the permanent collection on the top floor of the Pavilion for Japanese Art. (l-r) "Seated Figure" and "Horse", both Haniwa (tomb figures) from the Late Tumulus Period (4th and 5th Centuries, CE). 







#FoundinTranslation @ #LACMA has opened as one of the PST/LALA offerings around town thanks to the #Getty. It's a full range of design and architecture dialogues between California and Mexico from 1915 - 1965.

Klingon: The Art of Inventing a Language

The Final Frontier Forever"
(originally published 2013)
 
Since the beginning of time: 2161, or at minimum, over 40 Earth years ago when Gene Roddenberry launched the Star Trek enterprise, the crafty creators of races and galaxies, technologies and tools have been hard at work to transform everyday Earthlings into a Trekkies worthy of citizenship in the United Federation of Planets.
 
The Star Trek franchise builders have not been content to merely dabble in pop culture and fantasy storytelling. Now over 40 million human fans world-wide have access to powerful tools to cross the media threshold and interact with other weekend wanna-be warriors by learning to speak and read the Klingon language.

The master-mind (and mouth) of the Klingon language is linguist Dr. Marc Okrand, author of Conversational Klingon, the definitive audio book, the Klingon Dictionary, among others. A specialist in an extinct language of a people of Northern California, Okrand was making a living over-dubbing and subtitling for the film industry when he was brought into the Star Trek picture, literally. His first task was to create just four lines of otherwise non-extant Vulcan in post-production of Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan to match the actor’s English language lip movements as an over-dub.

Brought back to work on Star Trek III The Search for Spock, this time in the scriptwriting phase, he decided to formally create an entire new language from scratch, complete with grammar and vocabulary as well as an inventory of sounds, Klingon at once needed to reference the history and current world view of the inhabitants of that distant galaxy. No detail was overlooked.

Since then, new stories and new characters have been blending into those earlier “realities”, necessitating the development of Klingon’s greater linguistic complexity. Klingon further morphed as fans began try to speak and write it in their ordinary, 21st Century Earth-bound lives. There are also lexicons and grammars created by fans, such as the online program “battle tested” at the Klingon Language Institute that has attracted many adherents and many efforts to compile English – Klingon dictionaries.

While Microsoft’s Bing search engine identifies 1,060,000 entries for “translate Klingon”, now, in cooperation with Paramount and the Klingon Language Institute, Bing offers written translation from many languages into both the “original” Klingon script as well as Roman and Hindu-Arabic characters. It seems that Bill Gates’ team has been considering how to do this for a long time, and released it in time for the premiere of Star Trek Into Darkness. There are no coincidences!

While we at Acclaro have yet to receive a request for translation into Klingon, we salute the Trekkies who have delved into learning the language for themselves. To you, we say majQa’…well done!