The Second Wave. Camp Followers and Tourists in Iraq
Thursday, May 29th, 2008 Posted in Second Wave, Iraq | No Comments »The successful American military blitzkrieg invasion of Iraq was accompanied and followed by a second wave. Some journalists and photographers were accredited and contained within select military units. But an unanticipated and unregulated group of free lance journalists ...
Love in Space
Thursday, May 29th, 2008 Posted in Family Forms, Space and Time | No Comments »Every road leads, if you continue on far enough, to anomaly, to contradiction, mystery. A satisfaction of sorts at the start of a journey, to know where you are going for a while. I can hardly believe that at the beginning, ...
On Space and Time
Monday, May 26th, 2008 Posted in Family Forms, Space and Time | No Comments »(By way of explanation of what we are about: "Love in Space" and "On Space and Time" are matched, the one leading to the other, but can be read separately. The first is the more technical and longer. ...
The Mob in South Africa
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 Posted in Violence | No Comments »Trouble has followed the Zimbabwe migrants to South Africa. In the last week there have been attacks on Zimbabweans and assorted other strangers by local gangs of roughnecks parading as warriors in and around Johannesburg but otherwise not clearly ...
Zimbabwe. Life Below the Headlines
Thursday, May 15th, 2008 Posted in Ethnicity, Culture | No Comments »Mr. Mugabe, the aspiring president of Zimbabwe for life, has paid his dues--ten years in prison for his liberation work. The people of the country owe him some slack. But (1) the titanic hyperinflation of the value of the currency, ...
How Long is Too Long? Persistence in Office in Zimbabwe.
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 Posted in Culture, Politics | No Comments »Consider: Robert Mugabe in his actions is saying that he has ascended to the office of president for life. The anomaly, the unexpected moment, is the fact that he had presented himself before the people of Zimbabwe again and ...
Buddy Wins
Sunday, May 11th, 2008 Posted in Cadre, Cadre Functions, Culture | No Comments »Early on we discovered a board game called Trouble that we all loved. Billy was 8 and Buddy was 4 then. My wife and I and the kids would sit on the floor around the decorated cardboard with three ...
A New Rule for Baseball
Thursday, May 8th, 2008 Posted in Invention, Sports | No Comments »I propose a change in the rules of baseball, namely the elimination of the automatic home run. The outfield fence over which the home run is hit is an artifact of the enclosed baseball field that was invented ...
If I Forget, Remind Me.
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 Posted in Culture | No Comments »Suppose you discover a film actor late in her career or even after her death. You view her work as it becomes available to you without regard to the order of time. So the images of the person you see ...
Some of the Concrete is Under Deep Water. Notes on the Iraq War.
Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 Posted in Concrete incident or process, Conflict | No Comments »War, and specifically the ongoing war in Iraq, is an interaction sequence whose parties attempt to impose contradictory social orders on each other using forceful and fraudulent means. The key for the sociologist is in the interaction. The ...