Mick Hartley

Bottle

A short film from Kirsten Lepore:

[Via]

Boxing Day Brick Lane

Further to the Hoxton door figures, here we are just off Brick Lane, in the heart of Bengali London:

 

 A crowd on Bethnal Green Road:

 

Swinging for Christmas

In search of a Christmas soundtrack which isn't carols or Slade? Expecting Rain have Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Christmas show from 2006 as a zip download (top item for today). Track listing here.

In the right direction

The Washington Post - hardly a cheerleader for ex-President Bush or for the Iraq war, as I recall - has an interesting and surprising editorial: A good year in Iraq:

At the beginning of this year, Iraq's fragile new political order faced a momentous challenge. The country needed to hold credible democratic elections at a time when its army was still battling al-Qaeda and other domestic insurgents. The winners had to form a government in spite of deep rifts among leaders and sects, who just three years ago were fighting a civil war. And all this had to happen even as the United States reduced its troops from 150,000 to 50,000 and ended combat operations for those who remained.

The result was a long, painful, contentious, confusing and sometimes bloody year. But when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki presented his new government to parliament on Tuesday, Iraq could fairly be said to have passed a major test. It is not yet the peaceful Arab democracy and force for good in the Middle East that President George W. Bush imagined when he decided on invasion eight years ago. But in the past 12 months it has taken some big steps in the right direction.  [...]

It's still too early to draw conclusions about Iraq, though many opponents of the war did so long ago. Mr. Maliki's government could easily go wrong; the coming year, which could end with the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. troops, will likely be just as challenging as this one. But the country's political class has repeatedly chosen democracy over dictatorship and accommodation over violence. If that keeps up, a rough version of Mr. Bush's dream may yet come true.

 

He's so lazy, lazy, lazy...

With the kitchen featuring prominently over the next few days, here's a tip for the guys: it's OK to let the woman do all the work while you sit around, provided you manage the occasional lazy dance across the kitchen floor. She'll love you for it! Here's how it works:

From Harlem's Apollo Theatre, 1955. Pearl Wood, with unknown but impressive support.

Added bonus, this being Christmas and all, here's June Richmond from 1945: an earlier generation, before r'n'b, but it's another cool dude - Mr. Jackson from Jacksonville:

The dancing's more energetic this time.

The stillness of the dead world's winter dawn...

An icy Alfred Lord Tennyson outside Lincoln Cathedral:

[Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images]

From The Big Picture.

[Title from Idylls of the King]

Meet the Denisovans

They're a kind of Eastern Neanderthal; all that survives of them are a tooth and a finger bone from a cave in Siberia; and they interbred with us sometime around 50,000 years ago. The history of proto-human species outside of Africa just got a whole lot more complicated:

An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of New Guinea.

 All the Denisovans have left behind are a broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA, published on Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA.

An earlier, incomplete analysis of Denisovan DNA had placed the group as more distant from both Neanderthals and humans. On the basis of the new findings, the scientists propose that the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans emerged from Africa half a million years ago. The Neanderthals spread westward, settling in the Near East and Europe. The Denisovans headed east. Some 50,000 years ago, they interbred with humans expanding from Africa along the coast of South Asia, bequeathing some of their DNA to them....

The research was led by Svante Paabo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Liepzig, Germany. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues have pioneered methods for rescuing fragments of ancient DNA from fossils and stitching them together.

First Linda Vigilant; now Svante Paabo. This Max Planck Institute sounds quite a place.

From the BBC:

According to the researchers, this provides confirmation there were at least four distinct types of human in existence when anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) first left their African homeland.

Along with modern humans, scientists knew about the Neanderthals and a dwarf human species found on the Indonesian island of Flores nicknamed The Hobbit. To this list, experts must now add the Denisovans.

The implications of the finding have been described by Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London as "nothing short of sensational".

Stockholm Syndrome

Swedish author Henning Mankell writes in the Guardian: "In the wake of the Stockholm bomber, all of us Swedes must unite against...."

Can you guess what Swedes must unite against?

Islamofascism?

Terrorist suicide bombers?

An ideology that thrives on grievances - in this case the supposed blasphemy of Swedish artist Lars Vilks, and the presence of a few Swedish troops in Afghanistan - and seeks to kill as many innocent bystanders as possible?

No, no, no. Swedes must unite against.....Islamophobia.

Suicide bombings? - understandable. Afghanistan? - a US war that Sweden should never have got involved in. The West? - guilty, guilty, guilty. Muslim grievances? - all justified. Islamophobia? - yes, a very real problem:

Muslim organisations need to put together a plan of action for how to work in schools and in study circles to be able to deal with the growing Islamophobia that we face in Sweden and many other western countries. And for this they should have the full support of the Swedish government.

At least the comments are good.

Snatched Shots

Another set of photos from inside North Korea, from Life magazine:

A policewoman in North Korea. (Gary Knight/ VII Photo)

Photographer Gary Knight:

I had a driver and two minders all to myself in a Mercedes traveling at incredible speeds, so that I couldn't see anything, basically. What was most interesting traveling with those guys, though, is they would sleep outside my room at night. I once unscrewed an opaque window in a hotel bathroom, so I could see outside onto the street, look around, and maybe take a couple of pictures. Somebody obviously reported me, because when I returned to the room later, the window had been screwed back on -- from the outside. Nothing was ever said. They were far too polite to chastise me for that.

Brickwork Snow

Parkland Walk, towards Crouch End: