The Farallone Islands

US Observes Memorial Day

Photo: Michael Kamber for The New York Times
NYTimes: "Sergeant Kevin O’Flarity [at] an Iraqi Army checkpoint during a night patrol. He said he believes that many Iraqi Army soldiers are actually insurgents."

Netherlands

Foto: Neutelings Riedijk Architects
The Institute for Sound and Vision

Willem Jan Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk

NYTimes:

Photo: Neutelings Riedijk Architects

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision was conceived as a perfect cube, half of it buried underground. It houses broadcasting archives, offices and a museum, making it a cultural focal point for the city of Hilversum.

Grand Central Station, New York City, 1959

Photo: Turner Classic Movies

Cary Grant, center, glancing at Alfred Hitchcock, between lights, during filming of a scene in Grand Central Terminal for "North by Northwest" (1959).

From:
“Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies,” an exhibition of background paintings, film clips, production stills and archival photographs, will be on view through June 22 in Grand Central Terminal, Vanderbilt Hall; grandcentralterminal.com. In addition, films with New York City settings will be shown Saturdays at noon and 2 p.m. through June 30 on Turner Classic Movies.

Opposition to Iraq War at All Time High

Americans now view the war in Iraq more negatively than at any time since the war began, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Six in 10 Americans surveyed say the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, and more than three in four say that things are going badly there — including nearly half who say things are going very badly, the poll found.

Jorge Yarur Bascuñán

Foto: Lorenzo Moscia/archivolatino/Redux

Bascuñán in front of his new clothing museum in Chile.

Arms and the Boy

Photo: James Estrin/The New York Times

[The 1,000-plus cadets graduating on Saturday were the first to enter West Point after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Most arrived on campus in June of that year.]

Arms and the Boy
Wilfred Owen (1893 -- 1918)

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

The Second Coming

Anthony Soprano, Jr (Robert Iler) attempts suicide.

The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Diego Luna

Glenn Greenwald

Topanga Canyon: May

300 Feet Below Meyrin, Switzerland

via New York Times
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: May 15, 2007

Starting sometime next summer if all goes to plan, subatomic particles will begin shooting around a 17-mile underground ring stretching from the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, near Geneva, into France and back again — luckily without having to submit to customs inspections.

Crashing together in the bowels of Atlas and similar contraptions spaced around the ring, the particles will produce tiny fireballs of primordial energy, recreating conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.

Whatever forms of matter and whatever laws and forces held sway Back Then — relics not seen in this part of space since the universe cooled 14 billion years ago — will spring fleetingly to life, over and over again in all their possible variations, as if the universe were enacting its own version of the “Groundhog Day” movie. If all goes well, they will leave their footprints in mountains of hardware and computer memory.

www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15...15cern.html

Gaza City

Photo: Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

A Palestinian youth stands in front of a burning vehicle today during clashes between political rivals Fatah and Hamas in Gaza City.

Zachary G.

An Early Summer

Tsé + Tsé

Photo: Jens Mortensen/NYTimes
Chalice: Porcelain dipped in platinum: $135 for two. At MC & Company. (718) 388-3551.

1956 Mercedes Benz