Delicious LiveJournal Links for 3-4-2011

Seemingly oblivious to the democratic fervour sweeping across the Middle East and the Maghreb, the European Union has moved to prop up another autocratic and corrupt regime to the south of the Mediterranean – that of King Mohammed VI of Morocco.

Manchester the rudest city in the (English-speaking) world; El Paso a close second, others (Pittsburgh, Bloomington) way behind.

Wow.

"...the Monkees had a rather good excuse – they weren’t, at least to start with, a band. Rather they were performers in a TV show *about* a band. As they often say themselves, “no-one complains that William Shatner never really captained a Starship”"

Dune reimagined as a children's book

As the ‘post-Cold War era’ turned into the ‘multipolar world’ era, the notion of Western democracy promotion underwent similarly dramatic changes. The West became too weak to pursue democracy-promotion head-on and was seen as being forced to fall back on old-school realist approaches to democracy. But just when this realist approach to democracy-promotion seemed to almost finally become dominant, the popular wave of protests in EU’s southern neighbourhod changed everything again. Now the question is what will come next.

The official video. Wouldn't it be <s>great</s> awful if life was really like that?

Boom.

"By what seems more than coincidence, I appeared at The Kilns that very day and learned that unless I carried the papers away with me that afternoon they would indeed be destroyed," Hopper wrote. "There were so many that it took all my strength and energy to carry them back to Keble College." For the past 46 years, Hopper has spent his time sifting through the saved material before it is transported to Oxford's Bodleian Library. Four years ago, he realised that fragments of the famous Aeneid translation, referred to by Tolkien in his own letters, had escaped his attention. Since then he has worked with Reyes to piece together the translation, which exists in fragments spread across several notebooks.