Found some awesome instructions for origami lotuses, which I think will look awesome on a holiday tree with a Buddhist slant. Will post the results soon!

Rae630 Paper Lotus

Dear South African leaders:

WTF?

Sounds like you guys are on your knees in front of your Chinese masters. Losers. Grow some ‘nads and host a real peace conference. Then maybe you’ll be able to admit the real reason you’re not letting HH the Dalai Lama attend, instead of saying that you don’t want the attention taken from an event that’s about a year away.

You guys have totally failed.

Your pal,
Woody

PS: Say hi to my SA friends for me. They’re a lot smarter than you.

Read More…

One of the things I’m really excited about is Leopard’s improved support for Tibetan. I didn’t realize that it would have much nicer fonts, so I purchased XenoType’s Tibetan language kit before Leopard arrived at home. The XenoType font displays beautifully, and I’m happy to say that Leopard’s new native fonts are almost as nice.

The old Tiger fonts with encoded Tibetan characters had major stacking problems. It seems that the Tibetan glyphs in those fonts have been removed, with the new fonts Kailasa and Kokonor replacing them. In these new fonts glyph modification is also in place so stacked characters properly ligate (change shape) based on the other characters in the stack. (For those keeping score, the old non-working Unicode fonts with Tibetan glyphs were Lucida Sans Unicode, STFangsong, STHeiti and STSong if I remember correctly.)

It’s important to remember that OS X itself doesn’t correct other fonts fully. Publicly available fonts like Christopher Fynn’s Jomolhari, THDL Tibetan Machine Unicode and Gregory Mokhin’s Tibetan Unicode now stack properly, but it seems that they don’t ligate. Update: This is because OS X still doesn’t fully support all the features in these OpenType fonts.

Here’s a sample of the new fonts, along with some of the public fonts:

Click to enlarge 

I’ve yet to really play with the fonts other than in TextEdit, but from my experience with XenoType Tibetan, they should work fine in other applications like Pages (but not applications from Adobe or Microsoft that don’t use Apple’s type rendering technology). You’ll also note in the screen shot that filenames with Tibetan characters also stack properly, which they didn’t before.

Overall, this is a wonderful improvement for people using Macs who need to produce texts in Tibetan. Hopefully some talented shareware authors will come forward to produce Mac software like PechaMaker.

Tibetan in OS X 10.5 Leopard

• New properly stacking and ligating Tibetan fonts: Kailasa and Kokonor
• Old non-stacking Tibetan glyphs cleard out from : Lucida Sans Unicode, STFangsong, STHeiti, and STSong
• Proper stacking in other Unicode fonts, but correct ligating only in fonts that are AAT fonts., like XenoType Tibetan New

[Updated 2007-10-29 to correct screen shot and other minor errors.][Updated 2008-04-03 to clarify that problem with public fonts is due to still-incomplete Mac OS X OpenType support.

No, they didn’t appear together (or even met that I know of), but they were both in Atlanta this past weekend. My wonderful, loving, handsome, and most-awesomest-ever partner got us tickets to see Eartha Kitt and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on Saturday evening, and His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama at the First Emory Summit on Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding on Sunday afternoon.

I’ll blog about each of these amazing events separately, because I don’t think it would do either justice to blog them together. Each in its own way was a stunning moment for me, and I’m sure that with a little thought I can find some commonality. I feel like it was karma that allowed me to see both these events this weekend, and I’m wondering if there might be something that both might be working together to teach.

Watch this space for the articles on both. It was an amazing weekend I want to share.

CNN reports:

“We solemnly demand that the U.S. cancel the extremely wrong arrangements,” said Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi. “It seriously violates the norm of international relations and seriously wounded the feelings of the Chinese people and interfered with China’s internal affairs.”

Yeah, that’s gonna happen.

What’s up with these demands? China got Mattel to bend over and grab their ankles, when the problems were with Chinese factories using lead paint when they shouldn’t have. (Sure the magnets on that one doll was Mattel’s error, but not the lead paint.) China seems to be acting like either bullies or insolent brats — maybe that’s the same thing.

Speaking of violating norms of international relations, wasn’t China’s invasion of Tibet just such a violation?

The near-silence is deafening. What is happening in Burma now that the military regime has cut off most telecommunication in the country? Internet’s down, cell phone system’s disrupted.

Some of the news leaking out is that the junta’s generals are disagreeing with each other about the crackdown on the peaceful protests lead by monks, and there are even reports that some army members are breaking rank (reportedly an entire infantry division) and turning their guns on other soldiers to protect the monks. But the news seems to be coming much slower as the regime restricts communication out of and within the country.

Let us pray, in whatever fashion you choose, for the safety and success of our freedom-loving brothers and sisters in Burma.

CNN says that the government of Myanmar (Burma) is cracking down violently on the peaceful protests lead by Buddhist monks.

Oh no.

The reports I’ve been hearing this morning have varied quite a bit. On the way to work, I heard a report from NPR that only said monks had been beaten and arrested, and that there was only one protester killed. CNN’s report says that people in Myanmar are reporting that five monks are dead. This is something I’ll be watching.

No matter who was killed, or how many, it simply illustrates that the Myanmar government has no desire to allow its citizens to gather peacefully to demand democratic reform.

(CNN has a link to a source of news from Burma in Thailand, but the link is bad. I think the correct link is www.irrawady.org.)