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[theatokos]

Last weekend I attended the western regional conference for the American Academy of Religion here in Berkeley. It was great: collegial, interesting, heavy on the women and religion end of things, and I totally got my geek on. It made coming back to work this week painful. My job has become especially dull and uninteresting to me and I'm having a hard time getting out of bed in the mornings. It's sapping the energy from my days. But there it is.

However, my blog reading has been getting a boost these days. My favorite weekly is The Stranger out of Seattle. I adore David Schmader's weekly recap of random news events. This week the first two events pop right out: yet another replay of the JDHS "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" Supreme Court case and a tale of why sisters need to have each other's backs. Two bartenders in San Francisco saved a girl from getting drugged on her date, eventually leading to the guy's conviction. Three cheers for ladies that watch out for one another! (And for the guys that would do the same.)

Lastly, thanks to hrafntinna, I am now obsessed with the Eurovision song contest. You can check out all the entries here. I haven't seen all of them yet, but my top three faves are Germany (jazzy! If only any of the guys in American Idol were as good as this guy.), Bulgaria (goth pop done right, plus Bulgarian folk singing technique and interesting rhythms!) and Israel (using klezmer to convince us not to blow them up). Most that I've seen so far are awful. The lead singer from Sweden thinks he's Hedwig, but he's missing an angry inch or more. But, seriously, for a good way to pass the time at work, Eurovision is where it's at.

Comments

Update

[ewigweibliche.livejournal.com]

I've now seen all of the candidates except Andorra, which for some reason I wasn't allowed to view. Some is jsut awful: Switzerland singing "I am a vampire" is laughable, Latvia and Slovenia went rather operatic and it didn't work in their favor, and Portugal is out of tune. However, there are some gems, such as the strange Serbian singer Marija Serifovic who has an amazing voice and looks and sounds gender neutral and there is something Bjork-like about Georgia's singer, reminding me that it's a good idea to branch out musically. The rest of world has something to offer in pop music.

Lastly, no one should miss Belarus's video. It's like, WHOA.

[seagull42.livejournal.com]

The Academy of Religion conference looked interesting, but just too many things going on of late. Anything you found particularly interesting?

The Stranger - I'd forgotten about that (and had only seen it in print form before). Didn't know they had a blog. Thanks for the pointer.

Risking political incorrectness - I like the Barbarella icon. :-) A friend recently loaned me a copy of some of the collected comics, and I've always been a sucker for good bad movies (particularly SF movies).

[ewigweibliche.livejournal.com]

I didn't even know Barbarella was a comic book! Cool.

The highlight of the American Academy of Religion was listening to one of the translators of the Gospel of Judas talk about the process - not the linguistics behind it, but the process with National Geographic and the ethics behind being a scholar for private organizations and documentaries, etc. So good. There was also a whole slew of feminist and goddess related stuff. I got my nerd ON.