Monthly Archives: May 2009

Where Do Fairy Tales Come From?

by Editor | 8 Comments

The traditional notion of where fairy tales come from suggests that people like the Brothers Grimm listened to oral folktales handed down through the generations and wrote them down with little embellishments.  But now, in a book called Fairy Tales: A New History, Ruth B. Bottigheimer argues that fairy tales have a much more literary genesis than has been commonly thought.  The Chronical Review has an interesting article about the different theories on the origin of some of the world’s most retold stories.  The article points out how confusing and complex the history of fairy tales becomes when you consider that many of the most familiar tales are shared across different cultures.  Jack Zipes, a leading translator and adapter of fairy tales says that “It’s absurd to create a dichotomy. The literary and the oral thrive off one another.”

Purchase Fairy Tales: A New History (Excelsior Editions)

Film: I Dreamt of Flying

by Editor

Filmmaker Alex Bland made this animated/live action film about RAF bomber squadrons during World War II.  He mixes hand-drawn illustration and archive footage from the war.  The soundtrack is excellent.  I really like how the film explodes into abstraction as the planes fly through the spotlights during an attack.  Mr. Bland also made an excellent animation called Unforgettable Evil From Mars.

French Navy: Video from Camera Obscura

by Editor

This video is from the album My Maudlin Career, by Camera Obscura.  The song is good and bears repeated listens.  The video is sort of an homage to films about love, or about couples anyway.  There’s a little French New Wave in it.  A little Fellini too.  It works.  We should all dance down the sidewalks and jump over things and climb lampposts when we’re out on dates, shouldn’t we?

President Obama Moves Toward Fascist Ideas

by Editor | 1 Comment

Watch liberal MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow in this video.  Watch the whole thing.  She’s leading us through what may amount to the most terrifying fascist speech ever delivered to the people of the United States.  The sitting president is moving toward setting up a legal structure that will place people in ‘prolonged detention’ BEFORE they have committed any crime or have even been charged with a crime if they are determined to be a possible danger to the United States.  Maddow points out how this is the exact premise of the science fiction film Minority Report which was based upon a Philip K. Dick story.  This is a well-known liberal commentator who says at the end of the video that this Obama speech is ‘one of the most radical proposals for defying the Constitution that we have ever heard made to the American people.’

The American Civil Liberties Union has responded with short statement.

The bottom line is that this president is shocking human rights and civil liberties organizations all over the world with his rapid move toward fascism.  These are largely liberal organizations that once looked upon Mr. Obama as a welcome change from eight years of assaults on civil liberties.  They and many liberal voters in the United States are profoundly disappointed and legitimately horrified at what they are hearing from this president.

So, if you write or say something that makes someone somewhere in the Obama administration decide that you might be some sort of danger in the future, you could be arrested and held in a new separate legal structure that could keep you imprisoned indefinitely – forever.

That is a profoundly un-American and illegal idea.

Amazing Pictures of Space Mission to Hubble

by Editor

These are incredible, huge, and crystal clear photographs of the May 2009 shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.  The telescope is the greatest astronomical instrument ever devised and this is its last repair.  The mission was very dangerous because the Hubble orbits in an area with a high density of space junk.  A rescue mission was actually waiting on the ground with another shuttle in case the main mission ran into trouble.  These pictures are fantastic.