It’s rare that you hear public radio talk about Middle Eastern countries that exist only in the world of DC Comics, but that’s what was in one of PRI’s The World’s GeoQuizzes earlier this month.
For today’s Geo Quiz we’re looking for a country – with a twist. The country we’re looking for belongs in a list that includes these other states.
Tropidor is a country in Central America – it was the subject of illegal U.S. Government arms trading many years ago.
Kooey Kooey Kooey is an island in the South Pacific, in case you didn’t know.
Ah, yes, Pokolistan. Pokolistan is a former Soviet republic. It used to be a military dictatorship ruled by General Zod. And General Zod, you might recall, was killed by… Superman.
It goes on to talk about home-grown Middle Eastern superhero comics:
Of all the places in the world that needs a hero, Lebanon is probably high atop the list. After an Israeli invasion in 2006, and a 15 year civil war before that, much of the country has been wracked by war. So in many ways, just as the United States had Superman and Captain America in the 1950s, Lebanon now has Malaak.
“Malaak is basically the Lebanese superhero, super heroine I should say, as we never had one in Lebanon.�
28-year-old Lebanese artist Joumana Medlej created Malaak — a new online and printed action comic.
“Actually we’ve never had an action comic in Lebanon. She was born of the situation where everybody was starting to wish we had some kind of superhero to come and fix things once and for all.â€?
Medlej says Malaak — whose name means angel in Arabic — fights against supernatural and evil beings — known as “jinn” — that are creating a war in this fictitious representation of Lebanon.
“She definitely has powers, but she’s discovering them as the story goes. So we don’t know the extent of them. But so far she can generate some kind of energy that destroys the jinn that are responsible for the war.â€?
While Malaak is clearly drawing from elements of Lebanon’s recent past, another comic has a much newer take on a significantly older story — Islam. “The 99” is a comic with wide distribution throughout the Muslim world. It’s almost like a religious version of the Justice League. Naif Al-Mutawa is the CEO of the Teshkeel Media Group in Kuwait, which publishes “The 99”. He explains that the name refers to the 99 attributes that Muslims believe come together in Allah — and which in turn give Allah power.
“Things like generosity and strength and wisdom and foresight and mercy. And dozens of others that unfortunately are not used today to describe Islam in the media. So, the idea, very simply is a series of heros, each of which embodies one of these traits. And they need to work in a team of three to solve a problem.�
Al-Mutawa says part of the reason comics haven’t taken off in the Middle East before is government censorship, which restricted what could and couldn’t be published.
Joumana Medlej’s a pretty good artist, if the sample shown is any indication. I could definitely see a stateside publisher taking a chance on Malaak. I’d certainly want to try an issue.
I guess I’m a serious word nerd, but I find myself in agreement with a New York Times article cheering an unexpected appearance of the semicolon on the New York City subway system:
It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.
“Please put it in a trash can,� riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.�
Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.
Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.
“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,� Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.�
In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.� In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.
Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr. Neches, the 55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager, learned them, before graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later received a master’s degree in creative writing.
But, whatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use them because they never learned how.
In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.
“I thought at first somebody was complaining,� he said.
A surprisingly fun and funny article, even if you don’t care about the semicolon. (Although you should.)
Once upon a time, bigger newspapers routinely had reporters write up the obits or, at least, flesh out the ones of general news interest. In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, James Healy gets just such an obit.
A brief excerpt:
When he wasn’t defusing roadside bombs, Army Sgt. James K. Healy often could be found drawing, taking out the stress of each day by creating cartoon characters of family members and friends.
“Any time he would sit down in the evenings, he would have a sketchbook with him. He was always drawing something,” said his wife, Shannon, 23. “I have books and books full of his drawings.”
Family members said Healy, 25, an avid “Star Wars” enthusiast from Hesperia, was the unofficial artist for the Ft. Knox, Ky.-based 703rd Explosive Ordnance Detachment while it was fighting in Afghanistan. He designed a logo for his company and made signs that some of the soldiers hung on their doors.
At home with his wife and 15-month-old son Wyatt, he “would draw Wyatt and I as comic characters and himself as well,” his wife said. “He would do little comic strips of the three of us . . . as he did one of us when Wyatt was first born.”
Healy was killed Jan. 7 on his second tour of duty when his vehicle struck a roadside bomb in Laghar Juy, Afghanistan, southeast of Kabul and in a mountainous region on the eastern border with Pakistan. Also killed in the attack was Army Maj. Michael L. Green, 36, of Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
Well worth the full read.
Mom sent me this story from NPR: Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills
On October 3, 1955, the Mickey Mouse Club debuted on television. As we all now know, the show quickly became a cultural icon, one of those phenomena that helped define an era.
What is less remembered but equally, if not more, important, is that another transformative cultural event happened that day: The Mattel toy company began advertising a gun called the “Thunder Burp.”
I know — who’s ever heard of the Thunder Burp?
Well, no one.
The reason the advertisement is significant is because it marked the first time that any toy company had attempted to peddle merchandise on television outside of the Christmas season. Until 1955, ad budgets at toy companies were minuscule, so the only time they could afford to hawk their wares on TV was during Christmas. But then came Mattel and the Thunder Burp, which, according to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, was a kind of historical watershed. Almost overnight, children’s play became focused, as never before, on things — the toys themselves.
“It’s interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys,” says Chudacoff. “Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activity rather than an object.”
Chudacoff’s recently published history of child’s play argues that for most of human history what children did when they played was roam in packs large or small, more or less unsupervised, and engage in freewheeling imaginative play. They were pirates and princesses, aristocrats and action heroes. Basically, says Chudacoff, they spent most of their time doing what looked like nothing much at all.
“They improvised play, whether it was in the outdoors… or whether it was on a street corner or somebody’s back yard,” Chudacoff says. “They improvised their own play; they regulated their play; they made up their own rules.”
But during the second half of the 20th century, Chudacoff argues, play changed radically. Instead of spending their time in autonomous shifting make-believe, children were supplied with ever more specific toys for play and predetermined scripts. Essentially, instead of playing pirate with a tree branch they played Star Wars with a toy light saber. Chudacoff calls this the commercialization and co-optation of child’s play — a trend which begins to shrink the size of children’s imaginative space.
Clearly the way that children spend their time has changed. Here’s the issue: A growing number of psychologists believe that these changes in what children do has also changed kids’ cognitive and emotional development.
It turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.
We know that children’s capacity for self-regulation has diminished. A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked kids ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn’t stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the researchers asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at the National Institute for Early Education Research says, the results were very different.
“Today’s 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today’s 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago,” Bodrova explains. “So the results were very sad.”
Sad because self-regulation is incredibly important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child’s IQ. Children who are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are better able to learn. As executive function researcher Laura Berk explains, “Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain.”
This is the kind of study I’m inclined to like, because it feels right to me (and yes, that’s obviously irrational and a bad basis for evaluating studies): When I was a kid, I shot my brother Joel with sticks with a small branch sticking out as a trigger. We bombed our Hot Wheels cars by throwing rocks and sticks and firewood at them. We created war games for our Star Wars figures with the furnishings of our bedrooms and a ruler to solve any arguments about which Stormtrooper was able to shoot which Micronaut.
Today, all that play would involve hundreds of dollars of specialized toys. If this study is right, not only did my parents save a whole lot of money compared to today’s parents, they also helped make us better prepared for school and for life.
Plus, there’s something deeply satisfying about dropping a piece of firewood onto a Matchbox car from above your head. (Good thing Matchbox cars are close to indestructible.)
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