Chris Abraham » evils

Thank You Fresh Air Fund Holiday Bloggers!

Chris Abraham — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:46:30 +0000

In December, we at Abraham Harrison helped the Fresh Air Fund reach out to bloggers and folks online in order to remind the online Fresh Air Fund friends and family that they both need donations during this time of year as well as needing families to host children for the summer. Since the holidays, over ninety bloggers have responded to Fresh Air Fund’s call to action with the placement of banners, with tweets, and with blog posts. We are much obliged to you, Fresh Air Fund bloggers! (via Marketing Conversation)

Menehune and the Nightmarchers

Chris Abraham — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 11:30:07 +0000

This morning I was listening to Tapestry from the CBC and they were talking about the Netherworlds, including stuff about Anne Rice. What interested me was a segment on elves and faeries. The segment focused on how folks from Iceland and Newfoundland truly believe in elves and faeries. It made me think about growing up in Hawaii and how everybody I knew believed in both the menehunes and the nightmarchers.

In fact, we really believed in menehunes and many of us residents saw examples of the sort of endless, ancient, black lava rock walls that cut the verdant countryside. The fish ponds of almost super-human proportions. Even viaducts that carry water And, even more, we were always wary about running around in the wilderness at night. The menehune were pranksters. They are sometimes called “little people” — the same word they use in Ireland — because they’re supposed to be small, strong, mischievous, and only come out at night. They, too, are supposed to by mystical, minor deities, and also capable of reproducing with people, resulting in very blessed children.

The nightmarchers are different. There is no doubt that these are ghosts who don’t really know they’re dead, per se. They’re still making marches through the forest, and heaven forbid if you build your new home in the path of their marches. Many people have head them and some have seen their flaming torches.

In fact, my dad, Bob Abraham, who spent many years digging deep into Hawaiian culture as a photographer, told me that he heard the nightmarchers one night. In fact, my dad had stories of many experiences with ghosts and spirits in Hawaii Nei.

Here are two good resources I have discovered about them both:

Hawaiian Legends – Nightmarchers, Menehune, and the Tiki Gods

By: Celeste “Sally” Cheeseman, Century 21 Liberty Homes, Mililani, HI 96789 (Localism.com Featured Article)
HAWAIIAN Spirits and Superstitions covered only a sliver of our Spirits and Superstions in Hawaii. Remember I mentioned that we had our home blessed because our home was in the path of the warriors marching? We will now embark on one Hawaiian legend, ….The Nightmarchers.
The Nightmarchers are the ghosts of ancient Hawaiian high ranking warriors. They say that they come forth during the night from their burial sites to march where they battled or march on to other sacred areas. It is said that if you live near their path of marching you will see their torches or hear the chanting, the marching and/or the drums beating faintly. Place ti plants or leaves around your house to keep away evil spirits and the “nightmarchers” to avoid the area as well. The most famous of these “marching” paths of the Nightmarcher’s is along the Pali where Kamehameha fought the last battle.
In Hawaii, the Menehune, are “little people” that stand two feet high. Similar to pixi’s or trolls the Menehune roam the deep forests at night. They are very strong and are master builders and said to accomplish many projects over night! There are many stories how they came to be in Hawaii. One version is that they were the first settlers in Hawaii that came from the descendants of the Marquesas Islanders and resided here between the years of 0-350 A.D. Supposedly, the “bigger people” from Tahiti came and the Menehune ran off into the caves in mountains and only came out at night for food.
My mother was born and raised on Kauai with her 7 sisters and 1 brother. Later on, one of my Auntie’s married and moved to Waimea Kauai. When my cousin and I were 10 and 11 our mom’s would let us go to Kauai to visit my Aunt and Uncle for the summer. She lived right on Menehune Road and at the end of the road was the “Menehune Ditch”. The high chief of Waimea, “Ola” received aid from the Menehune to divert water from the Waimea River to their taro patches and supposedly made this ancient acqueduct overnight!
Anyway, my cousin claimed she must be a Menehune as well because she was very short and tried to go in the passageway in the Menehune Ditch in the mountain……I ran away afraid that something might happen! (The opening is in the picture to the right)

Menehune by Hugh D. Mailly on Encyclopedia Mythica

The folklore of many nations around the world include stories of magical little people. The most famous of course, are the leprechauns of Ireland. In Hawaii, it is the mischievous Menehune who are said to haunt the deep forests or the mountains of Pu’ukapele (“Hills of Pele”). They come out mostly at night to play tricks on people, or to serve them if they feel that way inclined.
The mythology of the Menehune is as old as the beginnings of Polynesian history. Some say that the great god Maui himself, was one of the tiny creatures. When the first Polynesians arrived in Hawaii, they found dams, fish-ponds, and even Heiaus (temples), all presumably built by the Menehune who were already there, living in caves.
The creatures are said to be about two feet high, although some have been seen as small as six inches, capable of fitting in the palm of someone’s hand. They are always naked, but the long straight hair that falls to their knees keeps them warm and discreet. Apparently no two of them are the same, and they can be so moody as to be malicious and dangerous one day, and simply harmless the next. But they are always tricky, and therefore should be avoided, unless a special favor is absolutely needed of them.
In the old times, some Hawaiians married Menehune girls, who were said to be quite fair, but needed to be shown how to make a fire and eat cooked food, because their own diet consisted only of starchy raw vegetables. The services of Menehune expert builders and craftsmen can be requested. This is especially so, if you can trace your family tree back to one of them. They then act like benevolent godparents. Many a major project, such as the preparation of a wedding feast, has been completed in a single night by the super strong little gods, while all humans slept.
Menehune are afraid of owls. On the island of Kauai, the Menehune sometimes sneak in among the people there and pull too many tricks. That is when the owl god of Paupueo (owl hill) summons all the owls of Kauai to chase the Menehune back into the forest.
The little ones are fond of dancing, and singing, and of sports, such as shooting arrows. Sometimes they use magic arrows, to pierce the heart of angry persons, and make them feel love instead. They also truly enjoy diving off cliffs into the surf. If you hear splashes in the night at Kaanapali, it is possibly a Menehune diving off Black Rock! But you would have to move impossibly quick to ever see one.

Earned Media for SEO and Profit

Chris Abraham — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:27:43 +0000

I just received this newsletter from the gang over at WebProNews AU, Blogging To Better SEO, that puts into words a lot of what we do for our clients every day as part of our Social Media consultancy and even what we do incidentally for our Public Relations clients.

With all of our social media outreach, we at Abraham Harrison LLC work on providing earned media for our clients. As I wrote in The current crop of advertisement methods is too ephemeral, it is important to decide where you want to spend your limited resources. Do you want to spend it on contextual ads? Contextual ads can drive a lot of traffic immediately to your target, to be sure, but when you stop paying for your key words, everything comes to a halt. All that traffic goes away… and, even while you’re paying for the ads, the conversion might not be there — it might just be a waste of money, a budget burn.

When you put your time and budget into blogger outreach, social media outreach, and blogging, your results may be less immediate than they are with ads, but whatever coverage you get, whatever earned media — and it can be an astounding amount of coverage, too — never goes away. Never! It becomes permanent record on the Interwebs, stashed and findable on Google until the Internet collapses through some sort of evil DNS hack.

Blogging To Better SEO by Manoj Jasra
[...]
[Manoj]: Why kinds of benefits can an organization expect with the implementation of a blog (and some of the natural SEO benefits that come with a blog)
[Lee Odden]: When a blog publishes AND promotes useful content, the benefits include:
More content to be spidered by search engines and an increased footprint of the brand via search
More links from other sites to the blog and improved search engine visibility
Non-search engine traffic from social media sites and direct links from other blogs
Direct communication with customers and prospects via RSS
Depending on the blog structure and content, increased contacts by journalists that want to use blog content or authors as subject matter experts
Increased leads or sales as a result of blog content – direct or indirect
[...]

Yahoo Founder, CEO, Jerry Yang Steps Down

Chris Abraham — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:35:05 +0000

This news is from the hasn’t this already happened before department? Also, from the I can’t believe it took this long department. Via the Washington Post.

Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang will step down, the company announced last night, as the once-highflying Internet portal struggles to steady itself in the turbulent environment for Web media.

Yahoo! should be one of the coolest brands on the block. With Flickr and del.icio.us, Yahoo really should be #2 — and it could be #1 if it would stop with the self-loathing — and it is not. Why? Because Yahoo isn’t nearly shameless enough to survive in the 2008 Internet. It is no longer the world of wizened Unix gurus who would easily define what is and isn’t couth on the Internet. Yahoo! is stuck in the days when it was uncool to splash your own brand on the brands you own (so is AOL); Yahoo! is stuck in the Internet of the 90s, an Internet wherein being good enough was good enough.

If Yahoo! was trying not to become gauche or become an ugly American in the Europe of the Internet, then it was successful! Yahoo! has become irrelevant. At least people hate Microsoft & AOL. Hell, I have nothing at all to say about Yahoo! except I adore del.icio.us and Flickr. How could the owner of two of the Internet’s coolest properties never be able to harnest the gravity of these two major celestial bodies and slingshot themselves into #1?

Maybe there is too much modesty, not enough braggadocio, in the halls of Yahoo! Maybe if you look closely, Yahoo! is the company that does no harm and does no evil. Maybe the company who’s motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” is actually pretty shameless and far from modest. Maybe on the modern Internet (and in modern business) it is more important to say you’re doing good, being good, and being modest than it is to actually be modest.

Yahoo!, Yahoo!, Yahoo! please try your darnedest to spend more time sharing yourself with the world and less time being the best of the good citizens. Google is absolutely shameless when it comes to all the good work they’re doing. They are not keeping their religion to themselves, they’re not praying quietly to themselves in a bare cell, away from prying eyes! Google is on the soapbox! Google is bragging! Google is sharing the Holy Spirit with the world!

If you keep on slipping those alms into the alms box of Internet Good Works by dark of night you will actually become irrelevant. Nobody is against you but nobody is for you, either. Nobody cares.

What’s worse, I don’t think enough people even really think much about Flickr and del.icio.us being Yahoo! properties.

Yes, you make folks become Yahoo! members, but that’s not enough. In DC and Virginia, everyone has a Safeway card but nobody like to shop at Safeway — it’s only because Safeway makes it super-easy to become a member. There is no brand loyalty, there is no passion behind the brand (OK, OK, Safeway Select pasta sauce is awesome — it is like Safeway’s Flickr), even if everyone has a Safeway scan card on their key ring.

Anyway, Yahoo!, I am so sorry for the rant. Oh, also, why is it that all of my geeky friends in the Zope and Python world all want to work for Google and not for Yahoo!? How come all of my PHP and MySQL friends ache to work for Google and not for Yahoo! How pissed you must be to suffer that Google drank your milkshake. They took you toys! You, Yahoo!, where supposed to be that success story! I mean, you were the first search engine, after all! You were the first directory, right?

Well, it is time to get off your pity pot, kick Jerry to the curb, and again become the Yahoo! I have known you since 1994 and have loved you (although I have not used your email address since Gmail came out, sorry) and I really want you to get you some smarts. Give me a call at +1 (202) 352-5051 or +49 (0)151 52579077 — I would be more than happy to try to help you turn this ship around!

Viel Glück

Pithy Philosophical Quotes on Democracy

Chris Abraham — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:37:30 +0000

“Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.” Friedrich Nietzsche #
“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonl … #
“Only the educated are free.” Epictetus #
“When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.” Eug … #
“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy; the best weapon of a democracy is openness.” Edvard Teller #
“A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.” Napoleon Bonaparte #
“Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.” Napoleon Bonaparte #
“Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even f … #
“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” Thomas Jefferson #
”You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.” James Thurber #
“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, … #
“If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the s … #
”Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health, no pleasure can be tasted by man; without l … #
“History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure … #
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Mar … #
“Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant.” John Simon #
“Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first-class management.” Sen … #
“Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.” George Bernard … #
“In democracy everyone has the right to be represented, even the jerks.” Chris Patten #
“When the government fears the people, that is LIBERTY. When people fear the government, that is TYRANNY.” Author Unknown #
“It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the bad to suspect good.” Marcus Tullius Cicero #
“Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it, anything but live for it.” Charles Caleb Cotton #
“Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” African proverb #
“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” Ma … #
“Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.” John Stuart Mill #
“Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.” Laurens van der Post #
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Alice Walker #
“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” Saul Bellow #
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Aristotle #
“Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress.” Thomas A. Edison #
“Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as ‘sentimental’, ‘impractical’, or ‘womanish’, etc., by those whose fun, profit or … #
“To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not respect them is to treat them a … #
“Democracies don’t prepare well for things that have never happened before.” Richard A. Clarke, former White House counter- terrorism chief. #
“Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and … #
“Good government could never be a substitute for government by the people themselves.” Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, British Prime Minister #
“A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.” Bill Vaughan #
“Only the educated are free.” Epictetus #
“I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. #
“It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.” John Mayard Keynes #
“Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.” Clement Atlee #

Sarah Palin is New Feminism According to Camille Paglia

Chris Abraham — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 01:01:32 +0000

I would have never guessed that Camille Paglia would be in awe of Sara Palin or perceive her as follows, “Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.” Whoa. (Via Salon.com)

Fresh blood for the vampire
Rip tide! Is the Obama campaign shooting out to sea like a paper boat?
It’s heavy weather for Obama fans, as momentum has suddenly shifted to John McCain — that hoary, barnacle-encrusted tub that many Democrats like me had thought was full of holes and swirling to its doom in the inky depths of Republican incoherence and fratricide. Gee whilikers, the McCain vampire just won’t die! Hit him with a hammer, and he explodes like a jellyfish into a hundred hungry pieces.
Oh, the sadomasochistic tedium of McCain’s imprisonment in Hanoi being told over and over and over again at the Republican convention. Do McCain’s credentials for the White House really consist only of that horrific ordeal? Americans owe every heroic, wounded veteran an incalculable debt of gratitude, but how do McCain’s sufferings in a tiny, squalid cell 40 years ago logically translate into presidential aptitude in the 21st century? Cast him a statue or slap his name on a ship, and let’s turn the damned page.We need a new generation of leadership with fresh ideas and an expansive, cosmopolitan vision — which is why I support Barack Obama and have contributed to his campaign. My baby-boom generation — typified by the narcissistic Clintons — peaked in the 1960s and is seriously past it. But McCain, born before Pearl Harbor, is even older than we are! Why would anyone believe that he holds the key to the future? And why would anyone swallow that preening passel of high-flown rhetoric about “country above all” coming from a seething, short-fused character whose rampant egotism, zigzagging principles, and currying of the gullible press were the distinguishing marks of his senatorial career?
Having said that, I must admit that McCain is currently eating Obama’s lunch. McCain’s weirdly disconnected persona (beady glowers flashing to frozen grins and back again) has started to look more testosterone-rich than Obama’s easy, lanky, reflective candor. What in the world possessed the Obama campaign to let their guy wander like a dazed lamb into a snake pit of religious inquisition like Rick Warren’s public forum last month at his Saddleback Church in California? That shambles of a performance — where a surprisingly unprepared Obama met the inevitable question about abortion with shockingly curt glibness — began his alarming slide.
As I said in my last column, I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama’s efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development and which are painfully wrong for the target audience of rural working-class whites that he has been trying to reach. Obama on the road and even in major interviews has been droppin’ his g’s like there’s no tomorrow. It’s analogous to the way stodgy, portly Al Gore (evidently misadvised by the women in his family and their feminist pals) tried to zap himself up on the campaign trail into the happening buff dude that he was not. Both Gore and Obama would have been better advised to pursue a calm, steady, authoritative persona. Forget the jokes — be boring! That, alas, is what reads as masculine in the U.S.
The over-the-top publicity stunt of a mega-stadium for Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention two weeks ago was a huge risk that worried me sick — there were too many things that could go wrong, from bad weather to crowd control to technical glitches on the overblown set. But everything went swimmingly. Obama delivered the speech nearly flawlessly — though I was shocked and disappointed by how little there was about foreign policy, a major area where wavering voters have grave doubts about him. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary event with an overlong but strangely contemplative and spiritually uplifting finale. The music, amid the needlessly extravagant fireworks, morphed into “Star Wars” — a New Age hymn to cosmic reconciliation and peace.
After that extravaganza, marking the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s epochal civil rights speech on the Washington Mall, I felt calmly confident that the Obama campaign was going to roll like a gorgeous juggernaut right over the puny, fossilized McCain. The next morning, it was as if the election were already over. No need to fret about American politics anymore this year. I had already turned with relief to other matters.
Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy — one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama’s triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football — or one of the great light-saber duels in “Star Wars.” (Here are the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, going at it with Darth Maul in “The Phantom Menace.”) This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.
In the U.S., the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women by the unique peculiarity that our president must also serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. Women have risen to the top in other countries by securing the leadership of their parties and then being routinely promoted to prime minister when that party won at the polls. But a woman candidate for president of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. Our president also symbolically represents the entire history of the nation — a half-mystical role often filled elsewhere by a revered if politically powerless monarch.
As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women’s studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances. I have repeatedly said that the politician who came closest in my view to the persona of the first woman president was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton, with her schizophrenic alteration of personae, has never seemed presidential to me — and certainly not in her bland and overpraised farewell speech at the Democratic convention (which skittered from slow, pompous condescension to trademark stridency to unseemly haste).
Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. The gun-toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did — which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.
Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics — which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama’s campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don’t see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.
One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil). Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington occupy their own mental zones — nice to visit but not a place to stay if you value independent thought these days. Ambitious professionals in those cities, if they want to preserve their social networks, are very vulnerable to received opinion. At receptions and parties (which I hate), they’re sitting ducks. They have to go along to get along — poor dears!
It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin’s boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn’t worth a warm bucket of spit.
Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was an all-American version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother’s generation — agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.
Here’s one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, “Stop her!” as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, “Men!”
Now that’s the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism — a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.
Here’s another example of the physical fortitude and indomitable spirit that Palin as an Alaskan sportswoman seems to represent right now. Last year, Toronto’s Globe and Mail reprinted this remarkable obituary from 1905:
Abigail Becker Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830
A tall, handsome woman “who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all,” she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper’s cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont.
Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today’s pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.
But what of Palin’s pro-life stand? Creationism taught in schools? Book banning? Gay conversions? The Iraq war as God’s plan? Zionism as a prelude to the apocalypse? We’ll see how these big issues shake out. Right now, I don’t believe much of what I read or hear about Palin in the media. To automatically assume that she is a religious fanatic who has embraced the most extreme ideas of her local church is exactly the kind of careless reasoning that has been unjustly applied to Barack Obama, whom the right wing is still trying to tar with the fulminating anti-American sermons of his longtime preacher, Jeremiah Wright.
The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.
Let’s take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women’s movement — leading to feminists’ McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas (admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton’s support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women — an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.
But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, “Sexual Personae,”) has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.
On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?
What I am getting at here is that not until the Democratic Party stringently reexamines its own implicit assumptions and rhetorical formulas will it be able to deal effectively with the enduring and now escalating challenge from the pro-life right wing. Because pro-choice Democrats have been arguing from cold expedience, they have thus far been unable to make an effective ethical case for the right to abortion.
The gigantic, instantaneous coast-to-coast rage directed at Sarah Palin when she was identified as pro-life was, I submit, a psychological response by loyal liberals who on some level do not want to open themselves to deep questioning about abortion and its human consequences. I have written about the eerie silence that fell over campus audiences in the early 1990s when I raised this issue on my book tours. At such moments, everyone in the hall seemed to feel the uneasy conscience of feminism. Naomi Wolf later bravely tried to address this same subject but seems to have given up in the face of the resistance she encountered.
If Sarah Palin tries to intrude her conservative Christian values into secular government, then she must be opposed and stopped. But she has every right to express her views and to argue for society’s acceptance of the high principle of the sanctity of human life. If McCain wins the White House and then drops dead, a President Palin would have the power to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court, but she could not control their rulings.
It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism — one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.
But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.
Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

Cook the Whale Eat the Whale

Chris Abraham — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:59:38 +0000

Well, I give up. So many people think I am an evil whale-killer that I will stop fighting. What do you think I am after you read Don’t Save the Whales? Should I be “harpooned and flayed alive?” Well, for those of you who think I kill whales, here are my favorite whale recipes:

Whale Recipe One:

3/4 to 1 kilo whale meat (or beef/horse)
50 g butter, tallow or lard
2-3 onions
Salt and pepper
Laurel leaf (optional)
600-700 ml water
Sauce colouring (caramel)
50 g flour
200 ml milk
Clean the meat: some say it’s enough to slice off about a centimetre off each side of the piece, others recommend soaking in milk overnight. This is only to ensure there will be no oily taste to the meat, but if it has been properly handled in the first place, it will not taste oily. Cut into steaks and beat with a meat mallet.
Slice the onions. Heat the cooking fat in a frying pan, brown the meat on all sides and put in a cooking pot, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Brown the onions in a frying pan and add half to the pot with the meat, along with the laurel leaf, if using. Set half the onions aside. Pour water into the frying pan and deglaze. Pour over the meat and cook for 15 to 30 minutes or until the meat is tender. Arrange the steaks on a serving dish and arrange the browned onions that were set aside on top.
Make a paste with the milk and flour and use it to thicken the cooking liquid left in the pot. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Serve with cooked potatoes and vegetables arranged around the meat and sprinkle parsley or cress over the dish. Serve gravy on the side.

Whale Recipe Two:

3/4 kg whale meat, beef or horse
250 g onions
75 g margarine or butter
2 tbs tomato purée
200 ml water
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp paprika
Melt the margarine in a frying pan, slice the onion and brown it. Remove from pan and set aside. Cut the meat into slices, brown in the pan and put in a cooking pot or stew pan with the onions. Boil the water, stir in the tomato purée, salt and paprika and pour over the meat. Cook slowly for 14 to 30 minutes, or until the meat is tender. Serve with potatoes.

Whale Recipe Three:

3/4 kilo whale, beef or horse
50 g margarine
3-4 onions
2-3 tbs water
Salt, pepper, garlic powder
Cut the meat into very thin slices (1/2 cm thick or so). Brown quickly in a dry pan (no oil). Remove meat and melt the margarine and brown the sliced onions in it. Remove from the pan, add the water and cook the meat slices in the water for 2-3 minutes. Flavour with salt and spices. Serve with potatoes and a salad.

Sour Pickled Whale Blubber – Súr Hvalrengi

Chunks of whale blubber are washed under cold running water and cooked until firm, then removed from the cooking liquid, cooled and kept in cold water for 1-2 days, cut into smaller pieces and dropped into strong whey. Ready for eating in 4-6 weeks.

Whale Steak:

4 slices of whalemeat @ 150 – 180 g
Salt and pepper, preferably freshly ground
4 onion rings
2 dessert spoonfulls of finely diced green or red peppers
1 dessert spoonful of finely diced parsley
1 dessert spoonful of finely diced gherkins
Carve the meat into slices of about 1.5 to 2 cm thick, beat them with your hands and press them into shape. Preheat the frying pan and melt some butter in it. Brown the butter before adding the meat. Fry the steaks on both sides. Whale meat should be fried for about 4-5 minutes on each side. The steaks taste best when they are medium rare, but they should be warmed right through and not eaten raw. Serve the steaks on a plate, place an onion ring on each of them and fill it with peppers, parsley and gherkins. Potato scollops taste good together with the steaks. Serve with a bowl of good, crisp lettuce and salad.

Joint of Whale Meat Steeped in Red Wine Marinade:

1 1/4 kilos of whale meat
3 dl red wine
1 dl vegetable oil
3 ground cloves
1/2 teaspoonful of coarsly ground pepper
2 teaspoonfuls of salt
The Marinade – 3/4 litres of juices from the meat Thickening (milk and flour) 4 dessert spoonfuls of sour cream (20% rømme) Sugar colouring Salt
It may be a good idea to bind the joint to help it keep in good shape. Place it in a small oven dish and pour the marinade over. Leave the joint there until the next day, turning it at regular intervals. Remove the joint from the dish, dry it well and rub it with salt. Cook the joint until it turns a pleasant brown colour all over, turn down the heat and add water to reach 2-3 cm up the side of the joint, approx. 3/4 litre. Let the joint simmer for about 20 minutes, turn it over and leave it for another 20 minutes. Measure enough of the juices to make enough marinade, about 3/4 litre. Add the thickening to the marinade, and then the sour cream to taste. Serve with boiled beans or other vegetables, and potatoes – boiled or fried in the pan.

How to Cook a Whale Found Dead

An old Kwakuitl recipe, as narrated in the Kwakuitl language by Elie Hunt and translated into English by her husband, George Hunt, circa 1908.
Courtesy of http://www.hallman.org/~bruce/
Most importantly, you cannot eat it all by yourself! So the first step is to call for a party and invite all your friends, relatives, and local dignitaries.
A special occasion, like the finding of a whale, calls for the use of ceremonial names. Though a hunter, a man, has found the whale, preparing food is women’s work, and therefore the daughter of the hunter has the rights to prepare the whale. She is given the ceremonial name, Place-of-cutting-Blubber. Note that it is the daughter who has the rights, not the wife(s), due to the family rights in a matrilineal society.
Once everybody is ready, you bring tools, and the hunter who found the whale leads everybody in their canoes to the spot where he found it. The father of the hunter has the honor of speaking for the daughter of the hunter to “make a toast” for the occasion. It is customary to first declare how wonderful the whale is, being full of delicious blubber, etc.. Then you should give the choicest piece (the dorsal fin) to the ranking dignitary, who is typically the chief of the village.
Everybody else gets an equal size piece of the whale according to the order of their rank. The first piece starts at the whale neck, and they work from the top down and from the head to the tail. Generally the pieces are cut about a fathom (6 feet) in width. After the ceremonial pieces are given out, the women go to work to gather the remaining fat from the whale. The last step is cut off a piece of the tale of the whale.
When this is done, the pieces are loaded in the canoes, and everybody goes home to do the remainder of the preparation. The hunks of blubber are split into strips four fingers thick (two inches). These pieces are then cut into half inch strips.
A kettle of water is set to boil on the beach, and the strips are boiled to render the oil. The oil is ladled off and stored in watertight storage boxes. Whale oil is best stored in the corner of your house.
Then, you take cedar bark, and split it into long strips. Poke holes in the middle of the boiled pieces of whale blubber, and thread them onto the long strips of bark. When finish these strings of blubber are now called “tied-in-the-middle”.
Dry these strips in the smoky rafters of your house for at least a month. When you want to eat some “tied-in-the-middle” take it down from the rafters, and boil it in a kettle until tender. This takes a lot of boiling. Be sure to eat it hot, because when it is cold, it is really tough. If you boil more than you can eat, you can dry it again, and reheat it later. This dish is called “eating boiled blubber tied in the middle”, a real treat!

Whale Pie

20    oz    Whale meat
One bay leaf
1         Stalk celery
6         Peppercorns
1    tb    Salt
1/2    c    Butter
1/2    c    Flour
1    c    Light cream
1/8    ts    Pepper
1/4    ts    Salt
One 1 pound can pearl onions
1         4 ounce can sliced mushrooms
1    pk    Frozen peas
2    cn    Pimentos, sliced 1
Box pastry mix
Whale meat (minke whale) is unfortunately no longer easy available, but it can still be obtained in some countries.
Whale meat is a very strong tasting, but marinades may be used to help tenderise and add flavour, such as red wine, oil, juniper berries, port, spices, bay leaf and peppercorns.
Normally I use whale meat for steaks or for barbecue, but this is a new recipes, which turned up to be a great success:
Cut the wale meat up, and place in a large kettle and cover with water ( or use crock pot). Add bay leaf, celery, peppercorns and 1 tablespoon salt. Bring to boil, cover and cook over low heat for 2 hours or until the meat is tender.
Melt the butter in a saucepan, add flour and stir until blended. Add light cream, pepper and salt. Cook stirring, until thickened.
Arrange whale meat pieces, onions, mushrooms, peas and pimentos in 2 quart casserole. Add sauce to within 1 inch of top.
Prepare the pastry mix. Cut pastry circle 1/2 inch larger than casserole and place over the whale-mixture, turning edge of pastry under and pressing to casserole with fork or spoon.
Bake in preheated 450 degree oven 15 min. or until crust is golden brown.
Serves 4 to 6.

Whale-Qaeda

Chris Abraham — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 02:39:31 +0000

I wrote an article called Don’t Save the Whales and the results have been unanimously negative, hostile — even murderous. I call these 14-year-olds who consider me worthy of being harpooned, flayed, and killed, the Whale-Qaeda! Don’t you love that?

Sydney wrote:
KILL THE CHRIS!! KILL THE CHRIS!! cMON EVERYBODY, DONT SAVE THE CHRIS ABRAHAMS!!! considering he doesnt care about anything but himself. hes gonna ruin the world!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU SUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!
Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 1:42 pm #
jenn wrote:
i think you are a fucked up person considering you dont care about anything but your self i hope a whale beaches it self on you
Thursday, January 3, 2008 at 6:46 pm #
Tony wrote:
I hope you burn in hell Whales r Awsome, they rule. Fuck u
Sunday, March 2, 2008 at 7:55 am #
angie wrote:
What the fuck is wrong with you, you selfish asshole!!! if you where getting harpooned to the point of near extinction-i think you would want to be saved…then again what whould the Japs need 2 do ‘research’ on a self centred-ass like yourself. whales have done NOTHING to this world besides making it alittle bit more beautiful. Dude, what have they done too you…do you feel unapriciated? being a member of a race of fucking BILLIONS!! Get a life you sick, redarded cocksucker!!! hope you randomaly get harpooned one day and dragged aboard a big fucking ship-whilst your skin is being riped off…hope you like hate-mail, motherfucker!! your gonna get lots. WHALES RULE. PEACE OUT xxx
Sunday, March 2, 2008 at 7:51 am #
Jordan wrote:
You truley are the most selfish uneducated vile and pathetic little man ive ever seen in my whole life. You know that 90 percent of these people that are standing up for whales and such, do not have children, or any sort of obligation at home, and do you not think that your family would be happy for you, that you’re doing something that you love? Well you truley are a fool. You say we should spend less time fighting for the whales… You are spending an equal ammount of time trying to stop us.. So take some of your own advise… Shut up, go back to school and stay in your dark cave with your beloved children… who I assume will grow up to be as little hearted, foolish, evil, vile and cruel. If you didn’t catch that you might want to get a dictonary… Do you know what a library is? Most likely not. Bloody idiot. Have fun loosing this war.
Saturday, March 1, 2008 at 7:21 am #
Victoria wrote:
SHUT THE HECK UP! DON’T BE SUCH AN IDIOT! WHALES ARE ALMOST GONE! EXTINCTED! NADA! AND ALL YOU CAN DO TO HELP IS TO CONVINCE PEOPLE TO KILL WHALES!? HAVE YOU GOT NO HEART!? IF YOU DO YOUR SO COLD HEARTED! WHAT THE HECK IS YOUR PROBLEM!!!!!!!!!!
Y’KNOW I MAY ONLY BE A PRE-TEEN, BUT EVERYONE CAN MAKE A CHANGE IN THE WORLD! EVEN KIDS TOO. SO SHUT UP COLD HEART!
Monday, February 25, 2008 at 10:30 pm #
bambam2cute4you@yaho wrote:
Dude you really need to get a real hobby other than dissin’ the whales they are apart of the ecosystem and what goes around comes around so i hope that you get stolen by some japenese whalers that will take your guts and feed them to their hungery offspring!!! Plus I think that you dont even know how many ways us humans hurt animals every day so some of us are trying to help them!
Monday, February 11, 2008 at 7:18 pm #
sea_angel27 wrote:
i think u should think again about not saving these amazing creatures they have lived here way before we did, that does NOT mean kill them. whales and dolphins, especially orcas are said to be as smart as humans maybe smarter, think of how they feel if one of their family members got killed!ur probably just a sick old man that sits all day thinking of these things. so… save the whales and all of gods creatures their not doing any harm to us! SELFISH PEOPLE LIKE U ARE!!!!!
Friday, February 8, 2008 at 1:22 pm #
Evelyn wrote:
hope u die!
fuck u
Monday, February 4, 2008 at 4:23 pm #
Tyler Boller Whale wrote:
U are so selfish yes whales are important at the moment cause Japan is kkilling the for supposably reacher but how do u reacher a dead whale or any other animal in their natural habitat i agree with the other viewers on this web cause u are a heartless besterd and diserv to die .Other indanger animals need help too yes and we should help them but right now the whales need more help we are starting a club to save the whale we are collecting 5000 pennies to see how many whales will die for japan cause they said that is how many they are going to kill and the money we make is going to LOta a whale in Florida with the worlds smallest tank so they can make her a bigger tank.So u need to shut up and i hope ur family lives and u die y faggot. SAVE THE WORLD AND ITS LIVING CREATURE cuase we need living creatures to serive so we can live on cause they help our plants when they die and when they use the bathroom and we need them to eat vbut only certain ones .SAVE A COW EAT MORE CHICKEN> and u need to help us save the whales and i bet u are a bitter old man all alone trying to get attion because u are lonly and missible but that doesn’t mean that u should try to stop us cause we the children of the world are ur future one day we may find away to save the world
Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 3:39 pm #
chelsiea lhamon wrote:
i think you should research whales while they are alive and whale shouldn’t be dead they should live how would you like it if you was alive and some one killed you and ate you ?
thats my point i dont think you do.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 3:26 pm #
VivyRome wrote:
You Rude Obnoxious idiot! How dare you put your CRUDE opinoins out there like that? I’m from D.C too and you’re lying my mother worked on the whale project with Green Peace and I’m fine.As is my wonderful family.Prejudice is wrong, you are discriminating against people who are trying to keep our economy and WORLD alive and intact. If you want to see it go up in flames, be my FUGLY (Fucking ugly)guest It’s a flippin’ free country you moron. Let it live. We need to save the world, and not exclude any creature. Yes children and are important, but SO ARE ALL ANIMALS! And, also, I agree with Amy: YOU, you heartless prat, deserve to be hunted by whale hunters!
Sunday, January 6, 2008 at 4:39 am #
nema wrote:
hello? is there a heart in your body? there are millons of humans on the earth, yes care about them but don’t not care about the animals and whales!! your website is sick and twisted, i’de rather see a kid die than a orca or a bottle nose dolphin!
Friday, January 4, 2008 at 12:53 am #

Zardoz is the Most Interesting Movie You’ve Never Heard Of

Chris Abraham — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 10:06:03 +0000

Before I start, check out Sean Connery’s costume (left). Zardoz is the most important movie nobody (I know) has seen. Forget that there is a lot of nakedness and topless women; or, that you get to see a super-buff, 1974-era, Sean Connery running around for more than two hours in a pair of underwear; this is an important movie or utopia gone terribly distopian.

Zardoz is written and played out like a Broadway musical, with lithe dancer-actors, it is presented like a play. This is not a sophisticated movie but it will surely make you think. I would say that Zardoz is both brilliant and campy; insightful and kitchy, and brutal and actually very good at dealing with the concept of balance: in order to grow as men and as a society, one cannot — must not — merely separate physically from poverty, ignorance, sickness, and death; but, rather, integrate, integrate, integrate — or perish. Bravo! See it.

The quote that is most popular from the movie comes from the first scene. God Zardoz says,

“The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth… and kill!”

“In this cult favorite from John Boorman (Beyond Rangoon), 23rd century society is split into two castes — the overly civilized Eternals and the barely civilized Brutals — one of which is constantly controlling the other. The Brutals worship a huge stone figure known as Zardoz. When Zed (Sean Connery) begins to question the authenticity of this god, the film is able to offer some pointed commentary on class structure and religion.” Via Zardoz/60020833?trkid=14″>Netflix

“Zardoz BY ROGER EBERT / January 1, 1974

John Boorman’s ZARDOZ is a genuinely quirky movie, a trip into a future that seems ruled by perpetually stoned set decorators. It’s set in an Ireland of 2293 that looks exactly like the Ireland of today, until you get inside the Vortex. And then suddenly everything is shimmering gowns and futuristic throne rooms and beautiful young people who glide around at an endless debutante ball.

These are the Immortals. They will never die. They cannot. Every time they try to, their bodies are relentlessly restored by the all-knowing mystical computer mind that runs the Vortex. There’s a catch, though: They can’t die but they can grow old, and for infractions, they’re sentenced to age a few years. If they don’t watch themselves, they might wind up as Immortal Seniles.

Outside the Vortex, a barbaric civilization survives. Slaves till the land and gather the crops, ruled over by sadistic masters who sometimes gallop around killing off the surplus population. One of the barbarians is Zed, played by Sean Connery as a cross between Tarzan and Prince Valiant. But one day, Zed (like Lord Greystoke, come to think of it) finds a child’s alphabet book. He teaches himself to read and then fanatically devours the contents of whole libraries (like Thomas Wolfe, come to think of it). Eventually he comes upon The Wizard of Oz and, in a moment of blinding insight, sees through the whole joke of his world’s social structure.
Zed has himself smuggled aboard the giant floating head of Zardoz, which rules hinterlands, and finds himself inside the Vortex. Here he is an object of great interest, because the Immortals, you see, having lost the ability to die have also lost the drive to procreate and are doomed to an eternity of detumescence. Zed labors with no such difficulty.

The movie is an exercise in self-indulgence (if often an interesting one) by Boorman, who more or less had carte blanche to do a personal project after his immensely successful DELIVERANCE. Boorman seems fascinated by stories which are disconnected from the ordinary realist assumptions of most movies; his LEO THE LAST (1970) gave us Marcello Mastroianni as the last of the big-time decadents, living in a mansion at the end of a deserted street in an eerie London.

Boorman puts a lot of heavy concepts into ZARDOZ, but seems uncertain whether he takes them seriously himself. There are sight gags (the attempt to turn on Connery with futuristic pornography provides the best) , there are group seances that seem lifted bodily from pajama parties, there is no end of special visual effects (every optical printer in England must have been busy for weeks), and at the end there’s a combination shoot-out and mercy-killing spree that is at once ridiculous, depraved and low camp.

Sean Connery wanders through all of this with a slightly bemused expression on his face. He begins as a barbarian given to distrust and childish impulses, but after he gathers all knowledge to himself (the movie is full of phrases like “gathers all knowledge to himself”), he turns into a sort of body-building Einstein who sees into the center of the Vortex, deciphers the wisdom of the crystal, stimulates the Apathetics (that’s another social class I forgot to mention), makes love with a good-looking Immortal dame (she regains the knack) and finally turns into a fossil while the sound track milks Beethoven’s 7th for all it’s worth.

I remember standing in the rain once outside a theater that was playing LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. Now there was a movie so complex and personal no one claimed to be able to understand itÑno, not even Time magazine. The people coming out from the previous show were shaking their heads and admitting that they, too, didn’t have a clue. And then it was our turn to go in and be mystified.

Every once in a while, a movie like that comes along; a movie you’ve got to see so that you, too, can be in the dark about it. In the movie’s own terms, this much can be said for sure: It may not make you an Apathetic, but it will certainly age you by two hours.”

“Zardoz Review by Scott Weinberg

If your idea of perfect science fiction consists of space battles and droids, you’re probably best advised to steer clear of John Boorman’s ultra-trippy cult classic Zardoz. If, however, you can enjoy an ironic and entertaining fantasy mind-bender, then this one might be right up your alley. While overlooked by general audiences, Zardoz is one of the most feverishly adored cult movies ever. And while the movie certainly looks outdated and even silly at times, the deeply intelligent and thought-provoking issues under the surface challenge and entertain audiences.

The year is 2293 and most of humanity has devolved into mindless ‘Brutals.’ Their god Zardoz visits these savages periodically, instructing them to hunt down and kill any human ‘Breeders’ they come across. This is because “the penis is evil,” and humanity deserves to be wiped out. Zardoz appears to his violent followers as a giant flying stone head that spits out rifles and ammo, along with his murderous decrees. Zed (Sean Connery), one of the Brutals, stows away aboard the massive stone head, which takes him to ‘the Vortex.’ The denizens of the Vortex are a race of genetically superior, immortal beings that treat one another pretty rotten and long for death. When Zed climbs out of that giant head and starts poking around, things get really screwy.

Zardoz is packed to the gills with high-minded concepts. Take the ‘apathetics.’ These are immortals who have become so bored and disassociated during their eternal lives, that they are breathing, blank zombies. Another faction of the immortals is the ‘Renegades,’ who have become irretrievably insane. These elderly creatures are dumped off in an out-of-the-way building and forgotten. Zardoz is a movie with a lot to say about the ills of society.

Since it was made in 1973, it’s no surprise that Zardoz looks dated and even downright absurd. There are more than a few costumes and set designs that may have you rolling your eyes in disbelief, but it’s important to watch a movie like this with a sense of maturity. It may be difficult to take seriously dialogue like “The penis is evil,” but a willing (and preferably enthusiastic) suspension of disbelief is essential. Yes, that’s Connery as Zed, running around in what looks like a giant red diaper… and yes, there is a scene in which Zed is forced to achieve an erection while dozens of fascinated immortals stare on. But with the plethora of challenging and satisfying ideas being tossed around in Zardoz, it’s a tough movie to dislike.

It’s a testament to writer/director John Boorman that this movie ever saw the light of day. Zardoz was obviously a labour of love for him, and to this day Connery still lists this movie as one of his favourites. If you’re a fan of science fiction in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Blade Runner, I would recommend Zardoz. While not as ‘polished’ as those other films, it deserves a place in anyone’s sci-fi collection.”

Plot Summary

* Genres: Fantasy, Sci-Fi
* Tagline: Beyond 1984, Beyond 2001, Beyond Love, Beyond Death
* Plot Outline In the far future, a savage trained only to kill finds a way into the community of bored immortals that alone preserves humanity’s achievements.
* Plot Synopsis: In the distant future Earth is divided into two camps, the barely civilized group and the overly civilized one with mental powers. A plague is attacking the second group after which it’s members cease to have any interest in life and become nearly catatonic. When Sean Connery one of the barbarians, crosses over, the tenuous balance in their world is threatened.
* Plot Keywords: Blindness, Bizarre, Book, Mutant Human, Crystal Ball, Head, Harvest, Mutation, Flying Head, Ring, Reverse Footage, Horseback Riding

- Actors: Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman, John Alderton, Sally Anne Newton, See more
- Directors: John Boorman
- Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
- Language: English, French
- Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
- Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
- Number of discs: 1
- Rating R
- Studio: 20th Century Fox
- DVD Release Date: March 27, 2001
- Run Time: 106 minutes
- Average Customer Review: based on 113 reviews. (Write a review.)
- DVD Features:

* Available Subtitles: English, Spanish
* Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 3.0), English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
* Commentary by director John Boorman
* Still photo gallery
* Concept Art and Pressbook Galleries

- From IMDb: Quotes & Trivia
- ASIN: B000059HAE
- Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,570 in DVD (See Top Sellers in DVD)

Nominations

* BAFTA Awards: BAFTA Film Award for Best Cinematography
* Hugo Awards: Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation

Trivia

* The scene where Zed (
* DIRCAMEO:(
* To help keep the movie cost down,
* Zed’s revolver is a Webley in 455 caliber.
* The exterior shots at the very opening of the movie were taken right next to director
* To make the shots of the stone head move into the mouth accurately, the camera was placed at the mouth and tracked backwards, and the film reversed in the lab.
*
* The government initially refused to allow the production team to import the guns for the movie into Ireland because of terrorist attacks occurring at the time.
* Radio spots (available on the DVD) were narrated by
* According to John Boorman, Sean Connery found it incredibly difficult to get work when he abandoned the James Bond role a second time after Diamonds are Forever. Thus, Boorman was able to hire Connery very cheaply for this project.

Goofs

* When mortality comes to the vortex, several “dead” characters can be seen moving.
* When the exterminators on horseback are killing the brutals, tire tracks can be seen on the wet beach sand.
* Early in the film, when the weapons are spewed out of the floating head’s mouth, a crewmember’s arm can be seen throwing them.
* About three minutes into the movie, when the floating head is in the clouds, part of a car can be seen in the top right corner of the screen.
* In the scene where Zed discovers the floating book, you can clearly see the strings suspending it in midair.

Movie Connections

* Remade as: Planet B: Mask Under Mask
* References: Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey
* Referenced in: Excalibur, Dark City, The Big Tease, Wonder Boys, Empire of Dreams: The Story of the ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy
* Featured in: To the Galaxy and Beyond with Mark Hamill, The Fly Papers: The Buzz on Hollywood’s Scariest Insect

Quotes

* Arthur: It was I! I bred you! I led you!
Zed: And I have looked into the face of the force which put the idea in your head. You are bred and led yourself.
* Friend: We’ve all been used…
Arthur Frayn: …and reused…
Friend: …and abused…
Arthur Frayn: …and amused!
* Zardoz: The gun is good.
Exterminators: The gun is good.
Zardoz: The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill!
* Zed: Stay behind my aura!
* Consuella: The brutal is now in fourth hour of unconscious sleep. It’s astonishing that Homo Sapiens spends so much time in this vulnerable condition, at the mercy of its enemies.
* Zed: I want the truth.
May: You must give the truth, if you wish to receive it.
Zed: I’m ready.
May: It’ll burn you!
Zed: Then burn me.
* The Tabernacle: Caution: You are approaching the periphery shield of Vortex Four. Caution: You are approaching the periphery shield of Vortex Four.
* Zardoz: Zardoz is pleased.
* The Tabernacle: Vote, please. Vote, please.
* The Tabernacle: I cannot give information which may threaten my own security.
* [watching his memory-scan video of hunting down Brutals] Zed: I love to see them running. I love the moments of their deaths – when I am one with Zardoz.
* [first lines]
Arthur Frayn: I am Arthur Frayn, and I am Zardoz. I have lived 300 years, and long to die. But death is no longer possible, I am immortal. I present now my story – full of mystery and intrigue. Rich in irony, and most satirical. It is set deep within a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred. But they may! Be warned, lest you end as I. In this tale I am a fake god by occupation, and a magician by inclination. Merlin is my hero! I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I am invented too for your entertainment and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in showbusiness too?
* [to Zed] Consuella: I have hunted you so long, I have become you.
* George Saden: I think what I think. I hate you all. I hate you all. I hate you all. Including me…
* [about to Liberate Consuela] Zed: All that I am is gone.
* [Zed breaks the heart of the crystal] The Tabernacle: You have destroyed us. You are alone.
* Consuella: Penile erection was one of the many unsolved evolutionary mysteries surrounding sexuality. Every society had an elaborate subculture devoted to erotic stimulation. But nobody could quite determine how this…
[Consuella points to a diagram of a male penis and scrotum]
Consuella: becomes this.
[Consuella points to a diagram of an erect penis and scrotum]
Consuella: Of course, we all know the physical process involved, but not the link between stimulus and response. There seems to be a correlation with violence, with fear. Many hanged men died with an erection. You are all more or less aware of our intensive researches into this subject. Sexuality declined probably because we no longer needed to procreate. Eternals soon discovered that erection was impossible to achieve. And we are no longer victims of this violent, convulsive act which so debased women and betrayed men. This brutal
[Sean Connery]
Consuella: , like other primates living unselfconscious lives, is capable of spontaneous and reflexive erection. As part of May’s studies of this creature, we’re trying to find, once again, the link between erotic stimulation and erection. This experiment will measure autoerotic stimulation of the cortex, leading to erection.
* The Tabernacle: Sleep was necessary for man when his waking and unconscious lives were separated. As Eternals achieved total consciousness, sleep became obsolete and Second Level meditation took its place.
* Zed: What is it you want?
Friend: Sweet death. Oblivion.
Zed: For yourself, or for the whole Vortex?
Friend: For Everybody. An end to the human race. It has plagued this pretty planet for far too long.
Zed: You stink of despair. Fight back! Fight for death, if that’s what you want.
Friend: I thought at first you were the one to help. But it’s hopeless. All my powers have gone.
* May: Friend, I cannot sanction this violence and destruction.
Friend: It’s too late, May. There’s no going back.
May: Don’t destroy the Vortex! Let us renew it. A better breed could prosper here. Given time…
Friend: Time? Wasn’t eternity enough?
Zed: This place is against life. It must die.
May: I have my followers. Inseminate us all, and we’ll teach you all we know. Give you all we have. Perhaps you can break the Tabernacle. Or be broken.
Friend: An end to eternity.
May: A higher form.
Zed: Revenge.
* [to Consuela] Zed: Can you unknow what you know of me?”

Zardoz from Wikipedia

Zardoz is a 1974 science fiction film directed by John Boorman and starring Sean Connery in one of his first post-James Bond roles. The film contains a mix of mythology, a bizarre, sprawling plot filled with twists and incongruities, and wide-ranging satirical and allegorical stabs. Filmed on a small budget of US$1 million, Zardoz‘s mixture of cerebral, philosophical sci-fi was in complete contrast to Boorman’s previous film, the brutal thriller Deliverance. The film was shot by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth. An attempt to market the film to the post-2001: A Space Odyssey audience was unsuccessful, although the film has since developed a cult following.

Plot

In a future post-apocalypse Earth (2293), the human population is divided into the immortal “Eternals” and mortal “Brutals”. The Brutals live in a dark-ages wasteland. The Eternals, who live apart in various “Vortices” (singular “Vortex”), hidden bastions of civilization, lead a luxurious but aimless existence. The contrast between the two groups is stark. In general, calamity after calamity has reduced life on much of the Earth to dire subsistence levels. The distant Eternals are unknown to most people. The only contact between the groups is through a religious warrior class called the “Exterminators”, who kill and terrorize other Brutals at the orders of a huge flying stone head called Zardoz. The stone head supplies them with weapons and ideology in exchange for the food they collect.

Zed (Connery), an Exterminator, hides aboard Zardoz during one trip, “killing” its Eternal operator-creator, Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy). Arriving in the Vortex as a stowaway, Zed meets two Eternals — Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) and May (Sara Kestelman). They possess psychic powers, and make Zed a prisoner of the community of decadent effetes in order to study him. Zed is put to work as a physical laborer under the direction of subversive troublemaker called Friend (John Alderton).

Over time Zed learns the nature of the Vortex. The Eternals are overseen and protected from death by an AI called the Tabernacle. Through their vastly extended lifespan the Eternals have grown bored, corrupt, and impotent. They spend days stewarding the vast knowledge of humanity while doing little themselves besides participating in bizarre rituals and mass meditations navel gazing. As they never die and the passage of time is largely meaningless as a result, violating the complex set of social rules, and thereby going “Renegade”, results in artificial aging. An Eternal thus aged will remain as the feeble elderly for the rest of time. More recently some have fallen into catatonia through an odd mental illness, forming a new social strata the Eternals call the “Apathetics”.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Zed is not quite the “brutal” the Eternals believe him to be. He very quickly divines the nature of the Vortex and its problems, and starts to play an increasingly proactive role among the Eternals. The backstory develops to reveal that Zed was aware of the true nature of Zardoz, having been led to an old book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; the origin of the name Zardoz (Wizard of Oz). After revealing that Frayn had led him to the book and taught him to read, the story is completed; Zed is the ultimate creation of Frayn’s long-running experiment in creative eugenics, using the Exterminator class to control the Brutals with the aim of breeding a superman to save humanity from its dead-end status quo. He had led Zed to understand the nature of Zardoz, hoping he would use it to infiltrate the Vortex.

The Eternals discover the deceit and “age” Friend, while attempting to control Zed. But Zed is actually superior in intelligence to the eternals, and is eventually able to withstand their psychic powers. He destroys the Tabernacle, after which the Vortex is invaded by other Exterminators who bring death to the majority of Eternals, typically with their blessing, given the novelty of the events. A few Eternals escape to make a new life outside the Vortex among the Brutals, carrying the knowledge of civilization. The allegorical ending shows Zed and Consuella producing a child, growing old and dying naturally, whilst the sound of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony swells in the soundtrack.
Spoilers end here.

History

Zardoz is is notable for being the first time a search engine (or a precursor) is shown in a film, retrieving visual images from a database, years before the personal computer was invented. Arthur Frayne is shown instructing the computer to search for specific images of Cars in the way that we associate with search engines, except with voice recognition software .

Production

In the DVD commentary Boorman repeatedly complains about the low budget of the film. Nevertheless he attempted to fill it with a sort of concept art. The Exterminators hunt down the Brutals while wearing large red paper mache facemasks, loincloths and matching bandoliers. The Brutals are instead dressed almost universally in sport coats and jeans, except for young women, who are dressed in “caveman” garb. If this were not enough, in one scene Zed escapes from the Eternals by dressing in a wedding gown. The head of Zardoz, arguably the most important set in terms of plot development, is clearly made of painted paper mache. Most of the sets in the Vortex are equally low quality, variously consisting of large inflated plastic sheets, “olde English” villages, or pastel decorated sets – the Tabernacle is simply a room filled with mirrors.

Reception

In 2004 the magazine Total Film described Connery’s costume (consisting of a ponytail wig, leather knee boots, and a loincloth which bears a strong resemblance to a giant orange nappy or diaper) as the number 1 “dumbest decision in movie history”.

References in popular culture

This article contains a trivia section.
Content in this section should be integrated into other appropriate areas of the article or removed, and the trivia section removed.

* The DC Comics character Vartox is a near-carbon copy of Zed. He has an exact replica of Zed’s clothing, brown hair, and receding hairline. The character’s name is even close to sounding like the “Vortex” of the film.
* The video game Time Bandit, which has several science fiction references, mentions the “spirits of Zardoz“.[citation needed]
* The video for “Dreams” by the rock band TV on the Radio features a huge stone head like the one in “Zardoz” that disintegrates at the video’s end.
* The webcomic Questionable Content referred to Zardoz multiple times in comic number 830].
* Saul was dressed as Zed in an episode of Saul of the Mole Men, “Fun King Johnny”, when he was on trial by combat.

Quotes

If the content can be changed to be more encyclopedic rather than just a list of quotes, please do so and remove this message. Otherwise, you can help by formatting it per the Wikiquote guidelines in preparation for the duplication.

* Zardoz: The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth… and kill! [Zardoz proceeds to vomit a torrent of rifles and ammunition for his followers to use.]

Listen to Your Own Declaration of Independence

Chris Abraham — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 14:07:22 +0000

Listen to the entire Declaration of Independence read by all the stars of NPR this AM. Via NPR.

The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:

Column 1
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton

Column 2
North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton

Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton

Column 4
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean

Column 5
New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark

Column 6
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton