There are no Celebrities in Angola

on a serious note, yesterday's new york times front page offered a sobering look at the cholera epidemic in Angola...a Southwestern coastal African nation.

Cholera, as you probably know, is a bacterial illness contracted through contact with feces. In its worst form, the disease causes watery diarrhea, vomiting, and leg cramps--followed by rapid loss of body fluids, dehydration and shock. Without treatment, people infected with Cholera can die within hours. Says the Times:

Only one in six Luandan households is lucky enough to have running water, and for many of them, it comes from a community standpipe, according to Development Workshop, a nonprofit group in Angola.

These community standpipes are usually linked directly into the Bengo River, the primary water source in the country. The river is highly polluted--its banks strewn with garbage and human waste. Water distributors pick up millions of gallons of polluted water from this river, claim to have it "sanitized" and sell it at 12 cents a gallon--a small fortune to people in the slums of the country. Of course, in some situations...it's not sanitized...and the epidemic spreads.

Children stripped to their underwear dance through sewage-clogged creeks and slide down garbage dumps on sleds made of sheet metal into excrement-fouled puddles.

Much of the city has no drainage system; in heavy rains, the filthy water rises hip-high in some of the poorest dwellings.

According to the WHO, As of 6 June 2006, Angola has reported a total of 43 076 cases and 1642 deaths (overall case-fatality rate (CFR) 3.8%). In the last 24 hours, 280 new cases including 8 deaths have been reported. Fourteen out of 18 provinces are affected.

Doctors Without Borders officials say the government response to the outbreak has been woefully slow and underfinanced. A crisis committee began work only two and a half months after the epidemic began, and the government has set aside a mere $5 million in emergency money to fight the disease.

Here's the thing, though. Angola is not the poverty-stricken African country we all think of when we think of those obscure land masses "somewhere in Africa." According to the Times:

Angola is in the midst of a gusher in oil revenue, its hotels crammed with oil executives and its harbor filled with tankers carrying away the 1.4 million barrels of crude pumped here each day. The economy grew by 18 percent last year. The government racked up a budget surplus of more than $2 billion.

This year it is expected to take in $16.8 billion in revenue, well over twice the $7.5 billion it received in 2004. Next year, revenue is expected to rise by a third again, almost all because of oil.

Economists say the government simply has more money than it can spend.

I have an idea of how they can spend it...The cost of a single dose of cholera vaccine? 31 cents. With 16.8 billion dollars in revenue, they could purchase 51,612,903 doses of vaccine...enough to vaccinate the entire population of Angola 5 times over.

Unfortunately, in spite of all this, Angola suffers the same fate of most of Africa--no Brangelina babies (Namibia) or George Clooney led rallies (Sudan). Instead, these millions of impoverished people suffer disease quietly, forgotten by the rest of the world. Take a moment, and consider how you might be able to make a difference.

Fix your jones for not letting the world ignore injustice @ doctors without borders ...or simply pass this story on.

Posted by sarah t. at 9:40 AM 1 comments

2 hours of my life i want back

I confess...i fell victim to the ridiculous gossipy hype about The Break Up...the Aniston/Vaughn movie depicting, as the title would suggest, a break up. I like Vince Vaughn a lot and, despite being squarely on Team Jolie, I was willing to give the former "friend" the old college try.

Oh, Jones...when will you learn?

If it weren't enough that the script was mediocre at best (Sorry, Vince...leave the heavy writing in your world to Owen Wilson and Jon Favreau), and that the acting was fairly awful (with the exception of Jason Bateman, Favreau, John Michael Higgins, and Judy Davis (who played Aniston's fantastic egomaniacle boss)), it didn't help that Vaughn and Aniston...supposedly hollywood's next hot couple...had little to no chemistry (i feel bad for their doomed relationship already).

Unlike many reviews that I've read that included all of the above as legitimate criticisms, there was a cake-topper for me. I remind you that Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston are, currently, the A-List of the A-List. So why did they sell out and phone in a ridiculously unbelievable potentially happy ending to a movie that (despite all of the above) was at least gutsy enough to not pretend to believe in happily-ever-after? I'd expect it from Aniston, with the trash she's been making recently, but from Vaughn? Coming off of Wedding Crashers? I had hoped for more.

Ugh. The long and the short? Two hours of my life i'd like back. This week's issue of People Magazine is more interesting. And yes. I went there.

Fix your jones for a good vince vaughn movie @ wedding crashers or swingers. As for Aniston? TiVo Friends...it's the best I can suggest.

Posted by sarah t. at 1:32 PM 1 comments

Attention Internet: Reply to the Library of Congress!

I've always had a little bit of a thing for the Library of Congress--I mean, who isn't curious about the group of people who assign ISBN numbers, catalog books, and keep a copy of every single publication America has or will produce until the end of time?

But last month...the Library of Congress got that little bit cooler. First, some history

In 2000, the good people there realized that:

The Library's traditional functions of acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving materials of historical importance to the Congress and the American people to foster education and scholarship extend to digital materials, including Web sites.

The LOC established a pilot project designed to preserve these primary source materials.
A multidisciplinary team of Library staff studied methods to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve unique web content reporting on a variety of topics for future generations of researchers.

In July 2003, the Library and the national libraries of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the British Library (UK), and the Internet Archive (USA) acknowledged the importance of international collaboration for preserving Internet content for future generations and formed the International
Internet Preservation Consortium.

Recognizing the importance of preserving web-based content and coverage of some of the era's most important events, LOC finally and officially instituted an official Web Capture Team, "to support the goal of managing and sustaining at-risk digital content." The team launched the Web Capture site at the Library of Congress homepage in May, taking visitors inside LOC's Internet preservation program. So far there are materials on the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and the upcoming Election 2006, to name just a few of the subjects covered.

Web capture culls content from thousands of Web sites within a single theme, adding up to about a terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of collected material per month. The collection already boasts more than 45 terabytes of storage. Websites captured are almost always noncommercial in nature--including newsletters, campaign, public advocacy sites, and sites primarily centered on political and public policy issues.

incredible, right? right. but...

Because of copyright restrictions, the Library can only collect and display materials—or make them available for online searches—after it has secured permission from the resource's owner or author. Unfortunately, LOC only gets a 25 to 50 percent response rate when contacting those in charge. As a result, only a few collections, including the one on Hurricane Katrina and another on September 11th, are retrievable over the Internet.

So, you don't have to answer my email, kids...but when you get email from the Library of Congress...answer it. For history's sake.

fix your jones for the Library of Congress in the 21st Century @ web capture

Posted by sarah t. at 12:53 PM 0 comments

beer for bags

today's fantastic idea...the beer for bags trade at Crumpler Bags in New York City. From Saturday, June 3 through Sunday, June 11, shoppers can trade beer for one of six of Crumpler's accessories--ranging from Cellphone cases to messenger bags. Groovy!

when asked what they're going to do with the beer...the australian owners of the store answered "we're going to drink it!" which explains why they're so picky. a case of bud is not going to cut it--they're serious about what they're willing to trade their swanky messenger bags for. For example:

1 case of pacifico and 1 bag of limes gets you a bean bag chair
4 cans of boddingtons gets you an ipod case

it's a great deal...and you can dine out on the story for years.

fix your jones for those crazy aussie deals @ crumplerbags.com

Posted by sarah t. at 5:11 PM 0 comments

Anderson Cooper reminds why I love Vanity Fair

In the past decade, I have had a secret, on-again, off-again love affair with Vanity Fair. Here's how it usually goes: I stumble upon a copy of it during my daily routine, and leaf through it to find the latest and greatest Annie Leibovitz or Herb Ritts (RIP) photograph of the most intriguing celebrity, politician, or "other" of the hour. At that moment, usually the gene that makes me a rabid US Magazine reader kicks in...and I read the article associated with the person of the hour. I'm always intrigued. almost always impressed.

but then i get sucked in.

i read the article before...the article after....graydon carter's editorial note...and the vanities...oh the vanities!!! and the...the piece de resistance...which i always save for the end...the proust questionnaire (not to be confused with the pivot questionnaire--possibly the best reason to watch Inside the Actors' Studio as well).

then, in a stupor of journalistic, gossipy, dramatic excellence...I subscribe.

my subscription lapses 12 months later.

rinse and repeat.

This month...it was Anderson Cooper. The juiciest of the juicy...the dreamiest of the dreamy...the most heroic of the heroes. The cover story is less journalism, more memoir excerpt. Tells the story of the poor little rich boy Anderson--son of, not only a Vanderbilt, but a Vanderbilt who made waves in the perfume, makeup, decor, and denim worlds, brother to a tragic, brooding young Vanderbilt Cooper...who threw himself off a balcony in 1988. More importantly, it tells the story of Anderson Cooper--cold, barricaded Anderson Cooper--who, like the rest of us, lived the images of a Hurricane ravaged Gulf Coast and saw, in the heart of humanity, tragedy and beauty to mirror his own.

In disasters, in war, it isn't governments that help people, at least not early on. It's individuals: policemen, doctors, strangers, people who stand up when others sit down. There were so many heroes in this storm, men and women who grabbed a bandage, an axe, a gun, and did what needed to be done.

Need I explain why, this afternoon, I subscribed to Vanity Fair?

Oh...and, in case you're wondering....Ron Howard's motto is "Panic is not our friend."

Fix your jones for a tempting and satisfying reading material @ vanityfair.com...or buy dispatches from the edge

Posted by sarah t. at 11:50 AM 5 comments