World's Smallest Cars

Of course, I prefer no cars at all, but failing that, and all other things being equal, smaller is better.

Here are many teeny weeny itsy bitsy street legal cars.

Uganda: Women Start Own Bank, Building on their Savings Group

I first read about these savings groups in a very cool book: Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. Sometimes known as a merry-go-rounds or savings circles, these grassroots groups build on both the self-help and cooperative models.

Here's an example of how they can work: a group of neighbourhood women get together and they each contribute a small amount on a regular basis (say, a dollar a week) to the pot. Then at a predetermined period of time, say, each week, one woman gets the entire pot. She can use this money to pay for her kids' school, to improve her (usually self-built) home, pay off debts, to purchase materials for a small business, or whatever else she may need. The next week, the next woman in line gets the pot. And it keeps going around and around, meaning each woman can rely on a tidy sum of money a couple of times a year.

Recently, in Uganda, one of these groups, grown too large to handle the savings circle model, expanded to something resembling a community bank.

It started five years ago as Nigiina, a village group where women meet, discuss development issues, party and exchange gifts on a merry-go-round basis.

Bukesa Women Kwagalana Group has since graduated into something more serious - a village bank with 320 'shareholders'. <AllAfrica.com>

More:

A 320-member women’s merry-go round group, (Nigiina), is in the process of transforming itself into a Savings & Credit Cooperative (SACCO).

The group started five years ago as a gift-giving group.

Every week, they would come together, deposit money or gifts in a pool and give it to a member. But as the group grew, the members had the good sense to realise their business model had limitations.

For starters, the bigger the group grew, the longer the intervals between gifting for a member. Secondly, it was only a matter of time before differences of opinion about how to employ the monies tore the group apart.

In a SACCO, there are well laid out rules and procedures for how surpluses are created and spent. <New Vision>

Yep, good thing they have us, those helpless women, those Africans, those Third-Worlders.

ID/ Creationist Bingo

First, print this card:

Then:

...check off a square every time the relevant dopey argument is presented. You win when you have a straight line of five - horizontally, vertically or diagonally. The "JOKER" square can either be a free square, or you can reserve it for any new ludicrous argument presented (as long as it is presented with total sincerity), or any argument [you've] missed.

From Skeptico via Friendly Athiest

What do you think? Can we play it with John Tory? Ooh, or turn it into a drinking game?

Madeleine L’Engle, Writer of Children’s Classics, Is Dead at 88

As a confirmed bookworm and serious child-nerd, who frequently found herself in the quandary of no-new-books-to-read, I re-read my favourite books over and over... and over and over. Several of Madeleine L'Engle's books fell into this group of well-loved stories, including of course the famous Wrinkle in Time. Filled with science, magic, space and time, and children coming of age, her books spoke both to my natural curiosity and to my growing emotional complexity.

Madeleine L'Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.
[...]
Her works - poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer - were deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children's characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.
[...]
The "St. James Guide to Children's Writers" called Ms. L'Engle "one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades." Such accolades did not come from pulling punches: "Wrinkle" is one of the most banned books because of its treatment of the deity.
[...]
The book used concepts that Ms. L'Engle said she had plucked from Einstein's theory of relativity and Planck's quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children's literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand. She also characterized the book as her refutation of ideas of German theologians.
<The New York Times>

The American Ruling Class

If you haven't read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, get thee to the library or bookstore, posthaste!

Or, you can watch the soon to be released film The American Ruling Class, a "dramatic-documentary-musical" (starring Harper's Magazine's Lewis Lapham).

The film's best moment comes with a Barbara Ehreneich interview. In the late 90s Ehrenreich went undercover to take on various low-wage jobs (waitress, hotel chambermaid among them) and then report on how difficult it was to live on those earnings. She discusses her findings here, which culminate in a full-blown musical number, in which employees sing about being nickel-and-dimed. The scene is divine madness. <Mathew Hays, Montreal Mirror>

Check out the clip:


And it includes a modified version of this passage from the book (as previously quoted here):

The ‘working poor’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.

Silly Monkeys!

Oops, our face is sure red!

An Air Force B-52 bomber flew over the heartland last week with six nuclear-armed cruise missiles attached to its wings. The pilots and crew evidently had no clue what they were carrying. Nor did the munitions crew that accidentally loaded the missiles. No one noticed that six nuclear warheads were missing for more than 12 hours. And of course the American public didn't know what was happening until now.

You know, they'd have a lot better chance of convincing us that Iran is the danger if they were more careful with their toys.

... just sayin'.

Mud Pies: Haitian Staple Food

This is dinner in Cité Soleil, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Do you remember playing in the mud as a child, making scrumptious mud pies? All that playing would make you hungry, so you'd go inside for lunch. Well, in Haiti, the mud pies are lunch.

People eat the mud pies, known as teh, to help quiet their excrutiating hunger pangs. You can watch a one-minute video of the mud pies being made here, although there seems to be some misinterpretation - the commentator opines it is a craving for something in the mud, not hunger, that drives people to eat it. But John Carrol, a doctor working in Haiti, says starvation is the main cause, although Pica, which occurs sometimes with iron deficiency anemia, may also be present.

You can read more about the mud pies on John Carrol's blog, Dying in Haiti or listen to this podcast (around 12 minutes), where Darren Ell interviews him about health in Haiti.

Something else that is very disturbing is the high rate of maternal mortality - 523 women die for every 100,000 who give birth. Most women give birth without a doctor or midwife, many completely alone.



Haiti's history is terribly sad. Christopher Columbus "discovered" it in 1492, and soon after, Europeans completely killed the indigenous population, in one of the worst genocides ever. Then it was repopulated, primarily by African slaves. Most Haitians are descendants of those slaves, who overthrew their French masters in the Haitian Revolution in 1804. Unfortunately this did not end colonial intervention. I recommend A People's History of the United States for more background.

The election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide offered a ray of hope for the poorest in Haiti, that sadly did not last, due to the US-backed coup and kidnapping of Aristide. Canada, too, was and is involved. Haiti continues to experience extreme poverty and repression. You can read about Canada's role here, or check out Znet's Haiti Watch.

Reloaded: Older Posts Worth Reading

Spent the last true day of summer over on Toronto Island. Now I'm sitting here, slightly sunburned, drinking a glass of raspberry wine (yum) and catching up on my reading. Definitely to check out... Reloaded: a carnival of older posts collected over at One Tenacious Baby Mama. I always like to find new bloggers to read, so this was a real treat.

Reloaded
Sunday 2, 2007

In addition to my post "The Good Life and The Economy" check out:

Mommy On The Floor's "The City On The Hill"

Second Waver's "The Male Gaze, postscript"

Universal Plume's "It's Blog For Loving Yourself Day"

Seminalson's "I'm A Fragile Being: Touch In My Men's Group"

Risa's "You Want Cream In That?"

All About My Vagina's "Please call it 'Sex Safety'"

Darkdaughta's "Race, Class and Everyday Shite", "Western Civilization...A History of Emotional Dysfunction", "My Daughter Wants A Barbie", "Mission Not Accomplished...Sort of"and "Does He Wipe His Track Makin' Ass With Moist Towelettes?"
Reloaded will be happening every Sunday and if you have an old post you'd like to see recirculated, contact Dark Daughta.