flickering pictures

One year ago today, the very first post went live here at Flickering Pictures, and I leapt headfirst into the great unknown of the blogosphere. I’d wanted to do this for a long time, but kept putting it off, like I’d put off a lot of things I wanted to do. Since then, I’ve been [...]

[Read more →]

Unless you haven’t turned on a television lately, you know that ten days ago the Israeli army launched a full-scale attack on Hamas forces in Gaza, with the stated aim of halting the barrage of homemade rockets that have been launched into Israeli towns since 2000. As I write this, the fight has left more [...]

[Read more →]

Surely it had nothing to do with the title of G&R’s new record. And since when do Chinese foreign affairs officials moonlight as music critics? The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reports: In a rare comment on rock’n’roll, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang dismissed the creative output of US rock band Guns N’ Roses [...]

[Read more →]

Why shallots? Why not shallots? From the Times of India: India would make Pakistan a barren land in the next six years by blocking its water through construction of dams in violation of the Indus Water Treaty, Pakistan Indus Water Commissioner Jamaat Ali Shah said on Monday. [...] Dismissing India’s claim that it had stopped [...]

[Read more →]

Not that it’s any of my business, since I’m not American, but on behalf of the rest of the world, congratulations on choosing the best person for the job. We — and 52% of America — could be wrong about him, and we’ll have four years to find out, but in terms at least of [...]

[Read more →]

Peter Hitchens, an excellent — if fiercely conservative — writer and columnist at Britain’s right-leaning Daily Mail, is covering America’s pre-election mood from Moscow, Idaho, which is incidentally named after a town in Pennsylvania, not Russia. Though I don’t agree with his politics, his latest editorial piece is a thing of beauty — as much [...]

[Read more →]

CNN reports: Exxon Mobil, the leading U.S. oil company, said its third-quarter net profit was $14.83 billion, [or] $1,865.69 per second, nearly $400 a second more than the prior mark. No U.S. company has ever earned more profit in a single quarter. To put things into perspective, $14.83 billion is enough to wipe out the [...]

[Read more →]

They’re not good at all. I’m not terribly good at math, but I really like numbers. I like their finality, and although they’re often misused, it’s not their fault — numbers don’t mislead people; people mislead people. If the town of Boulder, Colorado has 91,685 residents, then you can say what you like, but that’s [...]

[Read more →]

Not to be a jerk or anything, but it kind of seems like a stupid question: should we find new ways to feed and maintain our addiction to oil, or decrease our reliance on the fossil fuels that are empoverishing our people and altering our fragile climate? These folks think they have the answer: I [...]

[Read more →]

In a powerful op-ed piece for the New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof points out something we already know but try not to think about: rape has moved from a by-product of war to a weapon of war, used coldly and calculatingly to inflict maximum pain and intimidation on an entire population. It’s not a [...]

[Read more →]