Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Sports: USA Baseball: St Louis' Cardinals win World Series 4-2 over Detroit Tigers

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The Cardinals did win, but the Tigers felt like winners too. Detroit's Tigers and their fans were celebrating from Day 1 of the recent Baseball World Series competition against the St Louis Cardinals. Of course, by now we know who came out on top, but for the Tigers and their fans, just the fact that after 12 consecutive years Detroit was back in the great American game, made the gain of second place compared to all the other contenders in the two leagues, well, that was euphoria producing enuff to last them all ... till next year.

Sports, by Sportikos

The credit seems universally to be given to Jim Leyland, Detroit's manager.

The Tigers manager is rated a genius for taking the team to Major League Baseball's championship after 12 consecutive losing seasons.
"It's a great boost for people's psyches for the World Series to be in Detroit this year," says Detroiter Jeff Case, who returned to work as a truck driver in July after a four-month layoff. "It makes you forget the hard times."
As to the Cardinals, "David Eckstein drove in the go-ahead run and Jeff Weaver tossed eight brilliant innings as the Cardinals beat the Tigers, 4-2, in Game 5 to clinch the World Series. Eckstein was named the Series' Most Valuable Player." You can catch them in a victory-mashup photo and read the whole winner's-point-of-view story on MLB.com.

More Info:

Cardinals shortstop David Eckstein, MVP
Cardinals Win World Series; Weaver Dominant...[Blogging Baseball]

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Technics: Portable Digital Format: Adobe's PDF becomes super-flexible, fluent and rises in value as a digital medium of its own

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A specialist email newsletter, PDFzone< offers a link to PDF Conversion Central. The page will further live-link you to

PDFzone Special Report: PDF Conversion Central
1.) Could Unipage Topple PDF?


2.) Engineers Weigh In on Acrobat 3D

3.) Convert a Complex Word file to PDF

4.) Convert PDF to MicroSoft Word

5.) Convert Word Documents with Embedded Files to PDF

6.) Convert Word Bookmarks to PDF
Technotes, by Owlie Scowlie
7.) Convert AutoCAD to PDF

8.) Convert RSS to PDF

9.) Convert PDF to Audio Formats

10.) Convert to PDF Online Using Your Printer

11.) Convert Java help sets from HTML to PDF

12.) Convert Crystal Reports 8.5 to PDF

13.) Convert TIFF-6 Files to PDF

14.) Convert PDF to XML

15.) Convert XML to PDF
If you want to make your use Portable Digital Format more flexibly and with greater fluency, the fifteen items on this list can link you to separate page on each.

More Info:

Definitions to be found on the Web, regarding PDF [compilation > Google]
Definitions to be found on the Web, regarding PDF [compilation > Google]
Definition and About for PDFs

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Aesthetics: Arts: Nobel Prize for Lit 2006 goes to Turkey's novelist Orhan Pamuk, himself under dispute

The Nobels have been good to Muslims this year. Muhammad Yunus greatly deserved recognition in Economics (altho he got the Peace Prize, wihle an American PhD got the Economics award, again: and the peace-force that deserved the Peace prize but didn't get it, as all the world realizes to the gathering distrust of the Nobels, was the formerly hardline separatist area Aceh (a strict Muslim soceity and regime) which finally settled up post-tsunami with Indonesia (also a Muslime regime). But, there was yet another Muslim, Orhan Pamuk, of Turkey who did get the Prize for Literature, in a somewhat beclouded circumstance outlined by Sarah Rainsford in "Pride and suspicion over Pamuk prize" (Oct14,2k6)BBC. She writes from Instanbul:

Pamuk is one of the youngest writers to have won the prize. [His] novels ... are now piled high in the windows of Istanbul bookshops. His smiling face beams from the front page of every newspaper.

"Our Pride," is the headline in Radikal. "Thank you Orhan!" blazes BirGun.

"It's very important, I congratulate him," says bookseller Mehmet, who moved all his Pamuk stock to the front of the store as soon as he heard that the first ever Turk had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

"It's not only Orhan Pamuk who's won here. This prize will be a chance for all the world to get to know Turkish literature."

Even before the Nobel announcement, Orhan Pamuk was Turkey's best-selling novelist by far.

Each of his books had sold more than 115,000 copies here at home. He has been translated into dozens of foreign languages - and demand is now soaring.

In the first four hours after the news from Sweden, Pamuk's publishers in Istanbul received another 6,000 orders. They have had to allocate extra printing presses to keep up.

But Orhan Pamuk is a difficult hero for some in Turkey.

'Western plot'

Earlier this year nationalist groups labelled the author a traitor when he spoke out on two of Turkey's most sensitive issues - claims that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against the Armenians nine decades ago, and the plight of ethnic Kurds in modern-day Turkey.

His comments earned him death threats - and criminal charges.

Pamuk was put on trial for insulting Turkishness, sparking a wave of pressure from the EU which accused Turkey of limiting free speech.

"For his words, or his pen?" demands the headline in Vatan newspaper. Inside a columnist argues that the Nobel Prize decision is part of a dark Western plot against Turkey.

"I'm not proud Pamuk won. This is all political," Gokhan protests outside another Istanbul bookshop sporting a brand-new window display devoted to the writer.

"He didn't get this award for his literature, they gave it to make a point to us here in Turkey."

"The nationalists will see Pamuk's win as their loss. It's as if they let in a goal in a football match," Ragip Zarokolu explains.

The dissident publisher is on trial himself here for publishing books on the fate of the Ottoman Armenians.

He believes Pamuk fully deserves his Nobel Prize, for his literature.

"But I feel those of us who dare to speak about our history and face our taboos have won a moral victory with this award too," Ragip Zarokolu adds.

"It's an award for the right not to be silent, for freedom of expression."
The conern about honouring Pamuk this year is that the effort of Turkey to enter the European Union and the effort of many in the Union to keep Turkey out has reached a new h+-water mark, or should one say, a new boiling point, both within Turkey and without.

refWrite will have more to say in future about the issue of the Armenian Genocide (which we had previously, already explored). Regarding the Nobels, our frontpage has a new blog-entry on the prizes in Peace and Economics.

-- Anaximaximum

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Obituary: Nobel winner in lit: Naguib Mahfouz, Arabic language's greatest novelist

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The great novelist of the Arabic language and of daily life in his native Egypt, Naguib Mahfouz, has died at the ripe old age of 94. He departed on August 31, this year. Writing in the online journal, openDemocracy, Trevor Le Gassick in "Naguib Mahfouz: a farewell tribute" (Sep1,2k6) recounts some of the fascinating factoids of the man whose impact is worldwide. Le Gassick is Professor of Arabic Literature at the IUniversity of Michigan, and one of Mahfouz's traslators into English. He gives us a thumbnail portrait:

Mahfouz ... will be remembered as a man of great intellectual ambition, courage, and dedication; he openly supported the concept of a shared heritage with the peoples of the Mediterranean basin due to which Jews and Arabs could, in his view, live in conciliation and mutual respect once the Palestinians were granted a just settlement.

A family man with a devoted wife and two talented, well-educated daughters, Naguib Mahfouz embodied rational and liberal values which he maintained consistently, even into our current age of polarisation and intercommunal violence. Gregarious and open-minded, a man who inspired affection as well as admiration, he will be sorely missed from the Egyptian and world stages.
One of his works came under the purview of censors, yet Mahfouz had a day job in the civil service of Egypt, which at one time made him chief censor of film in the country. He had an enormous sense of humour which sustainted thru all the pereginations of his existence.

Another of his translators, Roger Allen, "Naguib Mahfouz: from Cairo to the world" (Aug31,2k6). Also a Mahfouz translator, Allen met the author personally first in 1967, and is Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. In kernel: "Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) founded the modern Arabic novel and forced the world to take notice."

More broadly, Allen surveys the impact of Mahfouz upon the entirety of Arabic literary writing in the modern era. A literary writing quite often with political and religious consequences, however indirect.
Mahfouz was the one Arab writer who succeeded in bringing the genre of the novel to its full maturity; from that perspective, he is the founder of the contemporary tradition of the Arabic novel in all its wonderful variety. Today's generation of Arab novelists stands on his shoulders. ...

The novel(s) by which he has become most famous in the west are the three works that make up Al-thulathiyya (The Cairo Trilogy). These were written before the Egyptian revolution in 1952 that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, but were only published in 1956-57. The trilogy represents a breakthrough in modern Arabic fiction, in two ways: it shows an entirely new level of maturity in the writing of novels in Arabic, and it records in vivid detail the struggles of the middle class of Cairo in the pre-revolutionary period.

The Arab world of the 1950s, much of it savouring a post-independence era, could look back and see what it was it had lived through and what it had sought to escape. The Cairo Trilogy made Mahfouz into an Arab-world figure of considerable importance.

That said, it is my view that Mahfouz's best works are those he wrote during the 1960s, and especially Al-Liss wa'l kilab (The Thief and the Dogs, 1961), with Tharthara fawq al-nil (Adrift on the Nile, 1966) close behind.
In an exceptional wealth of detail, Allen moves beyond the best known works, to the inner sanctum of works that suffered the glare of official religion and state censorship.
Between the publication dates of The Cairo Trilogy and these novels there lies Mahfouz's most controversial excursion into fiction, Awlad haratina (Children of Gebelawi, 1959 – there is also another translation of the incomplete Beirut edition, entitled Children of the Alley). In this work, Mahfouz explores the human community's proclivity to violence through an examination of the role of five "leaders" attempting to control these baser instincts; an overseer, Gebelawi, living outside the walls of the community, watches on in dismay.
MidEast > Egypt [Arabic lit]:
Those five "leaders" were soon recognised by readers as being portraits of Adam, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, and – most controversially, "Science", the last of whom goes to the overseer's house and kills him.
Upon reading this account I couldn't help but think of a recent bitingly satirical cartoon I analyzed in my column "Semiote Analytics in refWrite Backpage Jun20,2k6, Cox & Forkum and the semiotics of the atheist critique of religions. I wonder if the Mahfouz stories influenced the cartoonists. ... Returning to Roger Allen:

The book was serialised in al-Ahram (Cairo's main newspaper) against protests from the al-Azhar mosque-university in Cairo, then banned from publication in book form in Egypt, before being published in Lebanon in 1967 (with some excisions from the text). It was this work that aroused the fury of the religious establishment in Egypt and led (after Mahfouz's Nobel prize in 1988) to a fatwa from Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian popular preacher, condemning Mahfouz to death (a la Salman Rushdie and [the fatwa issued against him by Iran's] Ayatollah Khomeini). That threat was almost made a reality in October 1994 when Mahfouz was stabbed outside his apartment in Agouza.
The fatwa's author, Omar Abdel Rahman, Daniel Pipes informs us, is familiar to many Americans for another reason:
Although a Muslim himself, Mahfouz deeply mistrusts fundamentalist Muslims. Already in 1959, he wrote an allegorical tale, Sons of Our Quarter, that much perturbed them. And it still does: in 1989, shortly after the Ayatollah Khomeini's edict against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, one Egyptian fundamentalist declared, "If only we had behaved in the proper Islamic manner with Naguib Mahfouz, we would not have been assailed by the appearance of Salman Rushdie. Had we killed Naguib Mahfouz, Salman Rushdie would not have appeared." Not to be outdone, Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian sheikh now resident in Leavenworth, Kansas (serving many life sentences for his role inspiring terrorism in New York City), condemned Mahfouz to death. In October 1994 a young fundamentalist Muslim stabbed the then 83-year-old Mahfouz in the neck, an act of vengeance for his anti-fundamentalist attitudes.
While Pipes is not an enthusiast for Mahfouz's writing, his remark is embedded in a book review of a volume about the Nobel laureate (albeit with a different spelling of the Egyptian's name), Najib Mahfuz: The Novelist-Philosopher of Cairo by Menahem Milson (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. 336 pp. $49.95).

I conclude by quoting Roger Allen. "Requiescat in pace, may he rest in peace. Rahima-hu Allah."

-- Anaximaximum

More on MahfouzRoger Allen interviewed on translating Mahfouz

Mahfouz, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1988
Leading Arab-language poet, playwrite & satirist, Mohammed al-Maghout, dies at 72 [Syria]

Satire: religious mockery: HumorFeed indulges in purposeful offense of religion of others

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The service to which refWrite subscribes to round out its arts coverage, one of the best online and, as you can plainly see be scrolling down the Sidebar is called HumorFeed. Recent HumorFeed offerings contain some religiously offensive matter that outrages our faith-sensiblities by scatological reference to Jesus, Lord of Creation and Saviour of the world. Too bad that -- to retain a good supply of irony, satire, and humour -- we can't find something better, so we have to take the good with the very offensive currently being dished out. Or chuck HumorFeed entirely. We'd rather excoriate the violation than kick form our pages the steady supply of satire. Now that we've taken on an experiment of running some ads from Google Adsense, another item in the P-class possibly could jeopardize that initiative too. We shall have to monitor HumourFeed more closely, and meditate these matters at greater length.

-- Albert Gedraitis, publisher
-- Owlb, editor
-- Sardonicus, Ire & Satire columnist

Exhibit A

Tags: HumourFeed religiously offensive