Dream of the Dragon

Category: rising above

May 10, 2010

The heart of it.

by Justin

News of Elena Kagan’s nomination to replace that magnificent dissenter John Paul Stevens just isn’t as thrilling as I may have hoped. The tedium of the news flow – the mounting disaster in the Gulf, car bomb incompetence, and the labyrinth of British elections – while interesting and important, isn’t moving me to write. The benefit of a blog is that I can be as indulgent as I like and don’t for the moment need to cover Ms. Kagan, though Supreme Court Justices are in many ways more important than presidents. So I’m going to wax a little poetic and remind myself what I want to do and why I believe in journalism. This one’s more personal than the usual scathing account of Ahmadinejad’s antics or excitement about the latest NASA future science. Read the rest of this entry »

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May 7, 2010

A Tree Killing a Whale

by Justin

A bit of Friday lightness. The British Kew Gardens joined with an organization called Velvet to launch an excellent children’s competition with the following prompt:

Imagine your dream tree! What does it look like? What grows on it? What kinds of insects, animals and birds live there? Let your imagination run wild and then draw a picture of this amazing tree.

Every entry is rewarded with a new tree planted and a special certificate honoring that contribution to ‘Trees for Cities.’ And then special prizes are available to the winners selected in the competition. The Guardian covered it in an online gallery showcasing a good range of artistic skill and childlike insanity. Read the rest of this entry »

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May 1, 2010

Silver Lining

by Justin

New tradition. The onslaught of terrible news, certainly not a new trend but one into which I’m newly tuned, started to murder my morale. So Saturday will feature a unique weekend-review mission: to identify the bright side of the darker stories of the week. These are specific headliners that dragged me down with their revelations of dishonesty and general badness. The weather’s doing its summer dance, people are generally happier, and why should the news do its best to battle that? Answer: because the world is full of reckless, ignorant, and greedy people. But I’ll do what I can to tread the air above the din for at least one day of the week. Here we go.

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