In "Curious, George: Cultural misconceptions"

un- wrote: I googled for "touch a child's head" and found that it is taboo variously in: SE Asia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, but mostly, Thailand ... Allegedly, it stems from Buddhist beliefs or something. In many Asian cultures, the head is the 'highest' part of the body (in a spiritual sense) and the feet are the lowest. This has lots of consequences, such as the fact that touching someone's head or face is offensive (adults as well as children) and stepping on a sacred object is deeply taboo. Even sitting in such a way that your feet point towards a holy object or person such as a Buddha image or a monk is bad. Women, incidentally, may not touch monks (certainly in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos and probably elsewhere as well). A woman who wants to hand something to a monk will place it where he can reach it, or give it to a man to hand over. I guess the worst possible thing would be a woman touching a monk's head with her foot: that one really doesn't bear thinking about. In Arab and Islamic countries, use your right hand for shaking hands, taking or giving things, and waving to someone. The left hand is reserved for cleaning your ass and using it for anything else may be seen as disgusting and insulting.

In "Curious George: Boycotting"

Who you want to boycott depends on what your politics are: you may see Walmart as a union-busting, worker-exploiting, neighborhood-destroying monster, or you may admire the way they make it possible for even the poorest Americans to live the American consumer dream of owning more stuff than we need.

The real trouble comes when you dislike a company for one thing, but admire it for another. I avoid Kraft Foods because their subsidiary Gevalia has been spamming me - but I like the fact that when the American Family Association tried to blackmail them, they told the AFA where to go. And everyone knows how greedy and evil Microsoft is, but the Gates Foundation does excellent charitable work, giving large sums of money to some intelligently-chosen causes.

By the way, just to make you really pessimistic about the chances of changing anything, consider this encouraging line from a novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray: "Any man with ten pounds in a savings account has unwittingly invested half of it in practices that would disgust him if he only knew." The sad fact is that he's probably right: almost every commercial venture is ethically compromised to some degree.

In "Curious George"

"Always take your camera with you" is great advice: a friend once told me that the news photographer's maxim is "f8, and be there." The fanciest gear in the world won't do you any good if it's home in a drawer. Nonbinary's advice about putting the camera back to default settings is also golden; I've lost a lot of good pics by forgetting to put things back to normal (800ASA equivalent and 1/60th of a second works for bars and clubs, but it sucks the next day in bright sunlight). Some hard-learned random lessons: Trying to get a picture in a crowd by holding the camera over your head is hard. Practice until you have some feel for how much to tilt the camera, otherwise all you'll get are feet or blue sky. Use a wide angle; you can crop later. If you're taking sports or events - car wrecks, assassinations, street theatre - get to the front. You'll get better pictures that way. Don't be afraid to go inside the roped-off area (unless it's dangerous to do so, or you'd get in the way of emergency personnel). Act like you have a right to be there. Light is key. Dull daylight makes for bad pictures, bright sunlight is tough too: what looks like a soft shadow to your human eyes is hard black to your camera. Watch out for this when you compose your pictures. Take as many pictures as you can (get another couple of 2GB cards while you're at it) and throw away the bad ones. You can't go back and recreate the scene later when you find that your one 'perfect' shot wasn't. Study all the pictures you take and figure out what you did wrong or right in each one. Shoot RAW. You'll be amazed what you can do to improve the picture later with the software that comes with your camera. Shoot wide. You can crop later. Remember to experiment with unusual aspect ratios. And here are three good links that I found just recently. The first two are required viewing: http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path=317 http://memap.org/?p=34 http://www.radiantvista.com/

In "How many of these have you read?"

A reader's list of the 100 worst novels would be interesting too, if only to see how much overlap there was with the 100 best.

38 on the official list, 45 on the reader's choice. I presume that the reader's choice list was the result of an online survey? The heavy presence of science-fiction and cultish pseudo-philosophy (Rand, Hubbard) on that list suggests an Internet audience. And the fact that fantasy writer Charles de Lint (who I'd never heard of before this moment) has 9 entries out of 100 on the reader's list suggests that the vote may have been, uh, influenced. That's more even than Heinlein, a man who has his own cultish followers, yet who only got seven titles on the list (including, I'm pleased to see, "Citizen of the Galaxy", which was always my favorite). On the other hand, I wonder how many of those who voted to include "Finnegan's Wake" in the official list actually managed to finish it. "Ulysses" is tough enough going for most readers. Out of the titles on the official list that I have read, the ones I'd most want to re-read would be "The Magus", "As I Lay Dying", "Heart of Darkness" and "Under the Volcano", plus perhaps "Nostromo" and "I, Claudius". "Of Human Bondage" and "A House for Mr Biswas" are also excellent. And I want to read or re-read all the Faulkner and Steinbeck on that list. The one book I really didn't like on that list is "A High Wind in Jamaica", which I read as a child and which depressed the hell out of me. Is it worth commenting that close to 90% of the books on the official list are by (mostly Dead) White Males? Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul and James Baldwin look like the only non-white writers, and women are also little represented.

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