“Secular” India and “Islamic” Pakistan try to suppress prostitution but ignore the plight of thousands of people involved in this highly risky but widely practised profession. Some NGOs have done commendable work, such as a recent drive in Karachi to promote health awareness among sex workers. Lahore, Karachi, Calcutta, Bombay and Lucknow were among the traditional urban centers in undivided...

My cultural intake the past couple of weeks has provided me with a strong dose of polygamy. Courtesy of Netflix, I am about to finish season two of Big Love, the HBO drama about a forward-thinking polygamist family in Utah. On the literary side of the house, I just finished A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, which recounts the story of two Afghan women who find themselves married to the same brutal...

Forty years ago today, July 20th, 1969 and for a instant in time we were united in celebration. I was still a baby when this happened but I have spoken to family members who talk about how everyone was watching and holding their breath. Children watched their fathers cry as they watched a human being step foot on the surface of the moon. Indeed I don’t know that any of us who were not alive that day can...

And the video below is our lesson for Monday:

The author of Angela’s Ashes was 78. He had skin cancer. I will probably write more at another time. Right now, I am in a state of shock.

I have been trying to teach myself graphic design out of a book. It is slow going. Learning things that have many parts combined with abstract ideas take me much reading, re-reading and re-re-reading. I can learn more easily it seems if there are applicable pictures of whatever the learning is… and living poeple actually moving their eyes and hands to make the expert motions so I can see how the body...

America’s legendary broadcaster Walter Cronkite, who passed away at age 92, would be long remembered among the journalist fraternity in the world for the basic things he upheld/promoted as a professional all his life: Excellence, Integrity, Accuracy, Fairness, Objectivity. Really, the world would be a better place if journalists left aside the frills and returned to these basic values in journalism....

Many of us were not lucky enough to experience it the first time around but I urge everybody to keep their eyes for the many events covering the 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon. The net has tons of coverage including a minute by minute reenactment at We Chose The Moon CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc all plan to have extensive coverage over the weekend. 40 years ago tonight, the world held its breath as a countdown...

Gary McCoy, Cagle Cartoons This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Flooding, lake rising every day… my heart shakes, water breaks over its banks… My lifetime of books, my art, my everything is stored on ground lower than the lake. It has slash-rained here in the Rockies every day for last thirty… another 11 we’ll outdo Noah… Rains in the mountains afternoons- usual. But not like this, thunder, sheet lightning, fork lightning, lamp glowing yellow...

The tone between the Democrats and Republicans in Washington has increasingly come to resemble the attitude in this song: Of course, I’m not the only one who saw the connection between this song and our political “debate.” Snide TV.com saw it in the Clinton/Obama 2008 Presidential primary battle and offered this:

#6 – Michael Jackson. drugs. Palin. What’s that? A 24-year-old Brooklyn musician named Michael Gregory has combined a number of evening news broadcast clips and turned them into a vaguely acceptable faux R&B series called Auto-Tune the News…. For those unaware, Auto-Tune is a software program that alters singers’ voices to achieve perfect pitch. Used too much — or when they’re...

This just in! Just watch this You Tube:

Can you guess what it is? Read Phil Bronstein HERE.

I’m sick of all the attention the media is giving Michael Jackson, too, but I promise you this is absolutely brilliant: Studio Brussel, a publicly funded radio station in Belgium also known at StuBru, has created a very unique website as a tribute to Michael Jackson. The site is called Eternal Moonwalk and is a video slideshow of people, animals and inanimate objects doing Michael Jackson’s signature...

Cam Cardow, The Ottawa Citizen This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to appear on TMV. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Or just at Fox? I know there’s a lot of competition for that title there, but this truly is a stand-out entry:

A new report raises questions about one of soon-to-be-former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s stated reasons for her stunning announcement that she plans to resign before completing her first term — but a new poll shows that the bulk of Republicans love her, resignation or no resignation. Which raises a tantalizing question: if the reading on this new poll and previous polls hold up, it means Palin...

Sri Lankan journalist Nalaka Gunawardene notes in his blog how the twin technologies of satellite television and the Internet transformed far-away Michael Jackson into a local icon across Asia. He also mentions about a 2001 documentary named Michael Jackson Comes to Manikganj that probed how far and wide satellite television was influencing and impacting culture, society and even politics of South Asia. See...

John Cole, The Scranton Times-Tribune This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Let’s deep six dwelling on stars of the past. And who needs American Idol? Here’s a REAL kid musical star of the future via You Tube (the cell phone ring you’ll hear isn’t yours but is on the video):

With the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing coming up in a couple weeks I thought I’d start posting some relevant videos. The first  is purely for sentiment, and to give us all a post we can agree on.

Strip away all of the controversy over his life, all of the overblown language and controversy raging about whether he was or wasn’t the “greatest entertainer in all of history,” or bigger and better than Elvis Presley, and there is one fact about Michael Jackson’s death: He’s leaving his children behind — and like most young kids who lose a parent, they are in a world of...

Aislin, The Montreal Gazette This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to appear on TMV. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

It’s an American product that most people consider as pure as rain and as wholesome as apple pie. Is it possible to criticize Disneyland as a ‘gigantic world encompassing brain-washing facility’? After attacking the insidious way that Disney stories have soft-peddled destructive Western man to the globe’s children, this article from Mexico’s La Jornada criticizes a new Mexican...