Beirut

whoops apocalypse (part 3)

I hope that if there winds up being only three people left on Earth they start a band.

BBC doc on the "alchemists of sound"

WOW! From 2003. I am only posting the first segment here but I can't wait to watch all of them...

New Realities

I am not going to pretend that I was able to digest all of this upon my first viewing but I am going to give it another try. My Father sent this to me the other day. It brings together some of my favorite topics: ancient history, linguistics, extra terrestrial life, and metaphysics.

R.D. Laing-The Lighter Side

"Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible.
From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful."

Shatner does Esperanto

The 1961 sci-fi film "Incubus" is the only movie I know of to be shot entirely in Esperanto. At the very least, it is the only Esperanto language flick that William Shatner ever did.

Lingua Ignota

On tour, I just had the privilege of some much needed reading time and I was able to breeze through Arika Okrent's highly entertaining "In the Land of Invented Languages". She spends long chapters on the curiously durable Esperanto, the bizarre but beautiful Blissymbolics, and the befuddling Loglan.
The first "invented" language though, was the work of Hildegard of Bingen, the noted Medieval Christian mystic. Meaning "Unknown Language" in Latin, Hildegard devised a vocabulary of about 1000 words, and a corresponding unique orthography of her own invention. With terms like "phazur" (grandfather) and "scirizin" (son), the language almost appears to be a mixture of Latin and German with a bit of Basque.
There has been speculation as to the possibility that Hildegard had designed the language for Utopian purposes, much as 19th century language inventors such as Esperanto's Zamenhof. But the stronger likelihood is that she intended it to be a sort of secret language, perhaps for divine communication.