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July 27, 2006

Cindy Sheehan buys land in Crawford, Tx.; Sunflower in your face; Dylan, Newport, 1965; Ode to YouTube

10:56 a.m.
Sheehan buys plot in Crawford with son's insurance money, the Fort Worth Star Telegram reports:

...The Gold Star Families for Peace says on its Web site that its members will again flock to Crawford in August to protest Bush's wartime decisions. Leader Cindy Sheehan is again demanding to meet with the president -- a replay of a year ago -- garnering worldwide attention and making Sheehan, the mother of a fallen soldier, the most familiar face of anti-war protesters.

But Sheehan and Mark Mattlage, owner of the 1-acre property where protesters have been allowed to gather, have had a falling out over scheduling and increased costs for liability insurance.

So, Sheehan has purchased a 5-acre plot in Crawford, saying she did so with some of the insurance money she received after her son, Casey Sheehan, was killed in Iraq....

Paul Bourgeois, one of the paper's bloggers (Startle Grams), reacts to the news of her purchase of five acres in President Bush's vacation spot (There goes the neighborhood):

...It intrigues how and why she was transformed from a grieving mama to an anti-war icon. I suspect she's become the tool of a movement.

And to think, all this could have been avoided had George, rather than shunning her, offered a hug and a sympathetic ear to a mother who just lost her boy...

Who's tooling whom?

5:03 a.m.

My own Fibonacci sunflower. Check out the spirals:

For some, mathematics is a language; they're fluent, can converse in it. While equations don't speak to me, the sunflower shows me the math in the structure of nature. My right brain gets it.

Related: Guggenheim Study Suggests Arts Education Benefits Literacy Skills.

Electric chords: As the Newport Folk Festival looms again (Aug. 4-6), I overhead yet another conversation yesterday about What Dylan Did in 1965. I was there, standing on a chair, dancing to Maggie's Farm.

You can see more of this night here on YouTube.

The YouTube Devolution: Tom Scocca in the New York Observer. The old TV shows didn't die, they hung on waiting for the Web.

Video had always been more elusive. It defeated secondhand reports; a critic might describe a scene, but the moving image was unquotable. There was no way to share that passing experience. All you could do was write about it or talk about it. The original moment was transformed by the telling into something else—probably something funnier or more original or more shocking. But now the moments—all the moments, even the ones thought lost—have begun looping back around for public inspection.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:56 AM | Permalink