truthiness

Whoa - I think this year marks the first time I've ever sat through the ENTIRE Oscars ceremony. I was sucked into the red carpet gushing, the Hugh Jackmania, and even the commercial blitzes. And I loved it. Oops. I'm reading The Reader now, and enjoying an excuse to see the movie later. And dang those Slumdog kids were great. Steve Martin and Tina Fey should make a family of comedic babies. Or at least a movie.

Things are hectic and awesome at work, and I'm really looking forward to a weekend of Miss Andrea and her Southern beau.

This article on the Iraq Museum makes me so sad - I hope in the next few years souls braver than myself will turn it around, and make it an international center of peace and learning that shames art thieves into returning their stolen "loot." Assyrian and Babylonian cultures - and the entire Mesopotamian belt - are incredibly under-represented in ancient Art History. Not everyone had a wonderful history teacher to tell them that Subbiluliuma was the greatest Hittite king. You can't Google that kind of thing.

Of course, it's largely due to Western arrogance and the continued assertions that Rome was the cradle of Civilization as we like to define it (and inexplicably Caucasoid). But the fact that many of these artifacts and pieces of art have been consistently looted, spirited away to palaces, obscured behind barbed wire, or buried in the rubble of bombs and tanks doesn't help our understanding. The media rarely talks about history as a casualty of today's wars. But entire cultures are falling further into obscurity. Soldiers - whether through malevolence or just ignorance - are too often to blame. This program seemed to help, I wonder what happened to it.

I'd love to imagine that in my lifetime I could visit the Iraq Museum as casually as I might visit the Prado or the Uffizi.