As if I needed another reason to recoil at having to touch elevator buttons: radioactive scrap from India was used to make buttons for Otis elevators in France. It makes me worry where we are getting our scrap from, considering we are in that part of the world where people like Larry Summers think dirty industries should be transferred.
See his old notorious creepy memo.
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Yemen is flooded by a tropical storm..Dozens dead and tens of thousands displaced.
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Jordan arrests a poet for using quotes from the Quran in his love poems... Though, it seems that we don't get enough arrests when people use quotes from the Quran to add flourish to hatred.
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The Guardian has compiled 1000 artworks you should see before you leave the world.
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A McCain worker's hoax might spell doom for him... But then again, scary movie characters always get back up when you think they're finished. Here is some more on the hoax including video.
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Have a listen to some music that astronomers have recorded from stars... The beat of their pulse helps tell us their age and size and what they are made of... and it's pretty haunting.

I leave you to keep picking up all the pieces I have to put back together...
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"Green eyes
Blue bedroom
bright machinegun sun"
love is a dog from hell

Since misery loves company, the planet and the economy in meltdown should offer some sort of comfort to my dwindling sanity... but planet you are gonna have to come up with a lot more crazy to make me feel matched.

Where do we start...oh where do we start?

The IMF said the "global financial system was on the brink of meltdown" which is triggering descriptions like "utter carnage" and "a titanic battle between greed and fear"... Last week was apparently the worst week ever... indeed.

And today the little green market arrows are pointing up... who feels reassured?

HuffPo has a list of economists who told you so (one of whom just won the Nobel Prize) and another list of those who got the economy to its dark depths...

Entire countries are feeling the strain, the beautiful Iceland is "on the brink of collapse" according to an interesting and worrying article in the Guardian.
And:

"Iceland is bankrupt," said Arsaell Valfells, a University of Iceland professor. "The Icelandic krona is history. The IMF has to rescue us." Link

And if you were quaking in your boots about the financial crisis where the hell were you when Earth got pushed against a wall and stripped of every last bit of its dignity?

A study by a Deutsche Bank economist says deforestation alone leads to financial losses that make the financial crisis look like piggy-bank pennies... The UN suggests a Green New Deal to save the economy.

Speaking of New Deals, the great Sarah Vowell has been turning to Roosevelt's Fireside Chats to deal with the panic of the economic crisis... I have been turning to the classic film channel for all sorts of other panic.

I leave you with one of my favourite quotes which has never been more stuck in my brain...

"Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead"
King Lear

Yeah.. I am in a video mood these days