Harper's and Werner Herzog

I subscribe to Harper's Magazine, which comes monthly and is always a good read. Wikipedia describes it as

a monthly general-interest magazine covering literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts from a progressive, moderate left perspective in a fashion often not found in the ordinary news-media. It is the second oldest continuously-published monthly magazine (the oldest magazine being Scientific American) in the United States…

In the December 2006 issue, there's an interesting piece on thousands of scavengers living on an enormous garbage dump in Manilla, the Philippines. The phrase "economic Darwinism" is used, and the whole thing strikes me as another realization of William Gibson's dystopian, cyberpunk near-future.

There's also a review/interview on Werner Herzog, who's a maker of not-so-normal films:

Although his films take place everywhere (Germany, the United States, South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia, the Middle East) and are about everything (adventure, courage, madness, failure, death, time, space travel, nature's indifference) his imagistic obsessions (auctioneers, flight, monkeys, chickens², ski jumpers, dwarves, bears, boats, wind, roosters³, midgets, mountains, wind-mills, hens) reappear again and again

On "chickens" there is a footnote:

1. Chickens (and roosters and hens) are Herzog's objective correlative and play some role in dozens of his films. A film as early as Even Dwarves Start Small contains a disquieting sequence in which a chicken eats a dead mouse. "Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity," Herzog has said. "It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world."

I think anyone who's played Zelda can appreciate this. On "roosters", another footnote:

1. Herzog: "Years ago I was searching for the biggest rooster I could find and heard about a guy in Petaluma, California… I went out there and found Ralph… who weighed an amazing thirty-two pounds! Then I found Frank, a special breed of horse that stood less than two feet high. I told Frank's owner I wanted to film Ralph chasing Frank—with a midget riding him—around the biggest sequoia tree in the world… But unfortunately, Frank's owner refused. He said it would make Frank, the horse, look stupid.

I agree this was unfortunate, as I, for one, would have found it highly entertaining.

I have no particular point; this is just some plagiarism and an exhortation to subscribe to the freakin' magazine already.