Blog - Recent
The less serious side to Heason Events...
Jump to: Read This Book , More River Antics , An Appeal , Watched Another Film ,
Mon 16th Aug 10 Read This Book
For some reason I'd ignored this particular book my folks had recommended for some time. I can't tell you why. Perhaps it was the cover which isn't inspiring. Perhaps its the main title which does a good job of masking the subtitle and what the book is really about. I finally picked it up a couple of weeks ago and finished it on the train back home today.
Three Cups Of Tea is a book about an American mountaineer called Greg Mortenson. His name was familiar to me from the days I used to write the news for planetFear. I even received an email from somebody else who read the book and contacted me to see about organising a lecture tour for Greg over here in the UK. He was obviously moved by the book in a similar manner to me. Frustratingly I can't find the email to follow up on, but I will certainly be contacting Greg at some point to discuss doing some lectures here in the UK. Anyway, Greg was coming down off K2 after a failed attempt to climb the second highest mountain in the world when he ended up, quite by accident, in a very remote village way off the beaten track (he was lost). He fell in love with the place and pledged to go back to the States and raise $12,000 which was how much money he and the village elders had decided would be necessary to build a school there. Through sheer dedication, hard work, and doggedness he set up the Central Asian Institute (a strange name really given it's similarity to the CIA, a very distrusted agency in the very part of the world that it seeks to do good!) and has arguably done more for fighting the war on terror than the trillions of dollars the US and other countries have spent on their military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. How? By building schools and concentrating on educating young girls in Pakistan and, more recently, Afghanistan.
A mind-blowing book about a truly inspirational man. I'd be interested to know how many of us Brits have heard of him and what he is doing. Read the book and make up your own mind.
Here's a recent BBC radio interview with Greg.
Fri 6th Aug 10 More River Antics
It seems that wild swimming is all the rage at present. First there was Daniel Starks's book 'Wild Swimming' which I reviewed here a while back. Then he produced a coastal version of the same book which is arguable even better than the original (still waiting for my review copy). Two nights ago TV presenter Alice Roberts took to the water following in the footsteps of the late Roger Deakin, celebrated environmentalist and wild swimming officionado responsible for Waterlog.
And then just a few weeks ago a bunch of us took to the river in inflatables and braved the monsoon summer rains (see the brown colour of the river - it looks like the Yangtze!) for the unofficial annual river race. Pics here and video here:
Thu 3rd Jun 10 An Appeal
A few years ago we visited JoSiTo in Antalya, Turkey and had a wonderful time climbing there. Took our 1 year old with us so this is very pertinent. I just received a message from JoSiTo as follows:
Hallo climbing comunity,
At Geyikbayiri, a tragic accident happened to a 5 year old girl. She is very seriously injured , in intensive care. As she has no more ensurance for costs of hospitalization and transport to russia she needs all our help.
For more informatiom please read the article below from journalist Anna Piunova (mountain.ru). We ask you for help, even if it's only with a little money.
Thank you for your heart and care,
the JoSiTo-Team.
Appeal by Anna Piunova (mountain.ru):
...A dreadful accident happened in Turkey with Zalia, a daughter of Salavat Rakhmetov, famous boulderingist, he won World Championship 2005 in Munich at the age of 38.Sure, you've heard about him. Salavat lead the pitch, his wife belayed, when huge block of rock fell down directly to their 5 y.o. daughter, she's still unconsciousness, in intensive care in a Turkish hospital, she has pulled through four surgeries (amputation of a hand, sewed big toe on a leg, stuck in the spokes of a broken arm and a leg).
But she needs one more heavy operation - damaged crashed skull fragments fell into the brain.
Doctors are waiting for swelling of the brain reduces to allow the operation for removing these fragments.
The problem is that her medical insurance expires tomorrow, and she’s still not transportable because of the injuries.
Hospitalization can last from two weeks to a month. And the cost (w/o surgeries) will be approximately in total about $120,000.
So let's try to co-ordinate and to find money for Zalia. It is not so easy.
But all our children grow up near the cliffs.....
We propose this for all internatinal donations, because it's the best working and by far cheepest option for those. You can donate, to a PayPal account that was also established to help with foreign donations.
For more information and donation, this way visit the site: http://sharmenhope.com/zaliya/
Tue 1st Jun 10 Watched Another Film
When it came out I thought that Age of Stupid sounded a bit gimmicky. Not so it seems.
The premise is straight-forward. Pete Poselthwaite is the sole survivor of the human race and resides in a huge international archive edifice.Not much attention is paid to him as a character, his life-situation, or indeed whether anybody else has survived. Instead we see him swiping and clicking his way across a large touch-screen monitor (from the inside) recalling what happened to the planet in order to get to the situation it is in. The year is 2055 and the cause of Armageddon is Climate Change. The film is a very slick and clever documentary comprised itself of numerous clips from other documentaries and interviews which have already graced our screens. The message is loud and clear, we're messing up the planet and it's almost too late to do anything about it. Watch it for yourself and draw your own conclusion. We sat in silence for five minutes or so when it finished and then spent half an hour discussing what we could do to make a difference. Sure, us making a difference won't in itself alter the course of history, but it became clear after just a few minutes discussion that at least we'd be doing something. Perhaps the biggest thing that we figured we could do was to use some of the events that I organise in some way. The day after the film I contacted a friend at Sheffield Hallam University to ask whether they have a student or three who might be interested in running an environmental audit on Cliffhanger which is coming up in July. Not with a view to doing much this year, we've only got a month left, but with a view to producing some thoughts for the future of the event. It's a start. I won't bother preaching about what else we're doing, suffice to say that it's more than we were before watching the film. I would preach at you to watch it and make up your own minds. Even if it's entirely wrong, and I sincerely hope that it is, it's givvn food for thought and some genuine well intentioned action to boot.
Thu 8th Apr 10
Barack Obama won his historic presidential victory largely because young people in the US took responsibility and turned out to vote.
57% - that's more than half - of eligible 18-24 year olds in the UK are not even registered to vote.
If you, or anyone you know, falls into this category, you or they can easily register online so long as you do so before 20 April.
Enter your postcode at this website: http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/ and enter your postcode.
Follow the instructions, then print and sign the form before sending it to your local electoral registration office.
It's that easy.
Location: Vote!
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