Hasta La Gadget!

With the September 28 launch of Parts Unknown series four on CNN, TV personality and chef Anthony Bourdain takes time out to talk to us about his unforgettable experience of filming in Tanzania and Zanzibar.

What drew you to film an episode of Parts Unknown in Tanzania and Zanzibar?

We’ve made shows in a lot of parts in Africa but we’d never really done the traditional safari, looking for those aspects of African landscape that’s about large vistas and wildlife. We hadn’t done that before.

What was your impression of the local food in each place?

The food in Zanzibar is very different to that of mainland Tanzania. Zanzibar has a lot of Arab, Persian and Indian influence, which makes the food spicy and quite interesting. It’s coastal, as an island, and a former trade hub for spices. It has that mix of flavors and influences that’s often really good for food. The mainland [Tanzania] is a little less varied, particularly the Maasai who we were hanging out with. They have a lot of raw meat, blood, yoghurt and not much else; they’re pretty much on a 100 percent protein diet. The chief of the Maasai group hosted a meal in which we ripped a lamb open, drank its blood and ate its kidneys.

Have you ever struggled to eat anything you’ve been offered?

I always eat what’s offered, as I think that’s an essential part of what I do. You’re not going to make any friends around the world by saying no to an offer of food, so I will always try what’s offered. There are times when you just have to take one for the team.

While you were in Tanzania you stayed at Ngorongoro Crater Lodge. How was it?

It was very luxurious. The lodge is sort of the colonial dream of Africa; a real throwback to colonial times. You can go out in the Serengeti all day, looking at animals and bouncing around in a four-wheel-drive, and arrive back at the lodge to a hot bubble bath and a sherry in a nice glass. It’s an experience you don’t see much of elsewhere, and they have very good food there.

What’s your most memorable moment from your time in that part of Africa?

The Maasai are pretty incredible and the meal we shared with them was very moving. I think people are going to be upset when they see it, let’s put it that way.

You’ve met a lot of incredible people on your travels – who have you met that’s made an especially lasting impression?

I’ve bumped into some pretty amazing people like Paul Bocuse, Bill Murray and Alice Cooper, and from this season Afrika Bambaataa and Kool Herc; the people who essentially invented hip-hop as we know it.

And where have the local people made a big impression on you?

We were filming in Libya not too long after Gaddafi was toppled and we were hanging out with a lot of young people who’d joined militias there and fought against Gaddafi. These were people with no military experience who’d fought a mechanized modern army with basically slingshots and improvised weapons. Many of them had been studying abroad when the war started and returned to Libya to fight. They were very kind to us. They kept us safe, fed us and looked after us. Their struggle and heroism made a real impression.

Where do you plan to go next in Africa?

I hope to go to Ethiopia this year. I’m interested in its culture and cuisine and I have a very good friend who’s Ethiopian. It’s always good to have a friend with a close association and personal history in a country, so we’re going to take a very personal look at that place.

Being pregnant on Halloween has its perks (like having an excuse to eat a boatload of candy). But it can also pose some challenges when it comes to picking out a costume. If you’re feeling limited in your options, worry no more!

Here are 31 creative costumes for expectant mothers:

See more Halloween costumes ideas for families, couples, women, and more. Have a costume you want to share? Send a photo to HPPHalloween@huffingtonpost.com.

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When I was born in an Indigenous Limbu village of Eastern Nepal, no one had heard of climate change. Our communities struggled to make their living from land amidst armed conflict, feudal hierarchies, strangling debt and disasters that were slowly increasing. It was impossible, then, for anyone in the village to imagine that I might one day speak at the United Nations during a Climate Summit that will bring world leaders together to address the world’s biggest problem.

I am the first person from my village to obtain a university degree. With this enormous privilege I decided to focus on the rights and development of Indigenous peoples and quickly realized two things. First, threats to our lands threaten our livelihoods, our culture, and our very existence. Second, Indigenous women across the world, particularly in least developed countries like Nepal, are the least audible, most excluded and seemingly the most expendable when the world is focused on maximizing profits and consumption.

I’m now working as a community researcher in remote, mountainous areas of Nepal. Together with women in the community we are documenting the impacts of climate change and the actions that women need to take to survive. Isolated geographically (they have to walk two days just to get to a road), linguistically, culturally and religiously, these Mugal women have not been part of climate negotiations locally or internationally.

Landslides resulting from melting glaciers and changing monsoonal rains, for example, have destroyed crops in the Mangri village prior to harvest for the past five years. These landslides were not even reported due to their isolation and lack of services. When Indigenous people lose their crops and land they have few survival options. Women, already working 14 hour days, now have to climb further up the mountain to collect local medicinal herbs for sale. Increasing temperatures, unpredictable rain patterns and increased competition have made the herbs rarer. Often the only options for survival are debt and migration. Nepalese who are forced to migrate often end up in exploitative, dangerous work, such as domestic work or trafficked into sex industries, forced labor and surrogacy, often under the guise of marriage.

My work is part of a regional project to empower the most marginalized women to determine their own solutions to climate change. Through the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD), I have met women from the Carteret Islands who are amongst the first climate refugees, women working with the survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and women from Bangladesh working with the Munda Indigenous community who are losing their lands to salinity and flooding in a country that anticipates at least 20 million displaced people by 2050.

Reading UN climate reports that reveal our future is truly terrifying. If we continue extracting, consuming and emitting as we are, the temperature is likely to rise by 4 degrees Celsius or more. That would be disastrous for humanity. But it will be the most disastrous for those who live the most sustainable lives — Indigenous, rural and poor women and their communities in the least developed countries. With none of the benefits of ‘development’ or globalization and none of the responsibility for climate change, Indigenous women have every right to question the shocking selfishness of the international community.

For us, the answers to climate change are simple and were promised decades ago. The answers are not the creation of markets for carbon — markets that cause women in Indonesia for example to lose their access to forests. The answers are not to create more dangerous nuclear power in India or more hydro that displaces poor women yet fails to give them power in Nepal, India and Vietnam.

The answers lie in human rights and equality. The gargantuan threat of climate change should force us to re-think global systems that are disastrous for the planet and deeply inequitable. These systems mean 85 people in the world have more wealth and consume more than 3.5 billion people — half the world’s population. Our survival is dependent on governments making binding and drastic commitments to reduce emissions. But it is also dependent on a commitment to finally deliver on human rights promises and provide Development Justice to all.

As governments continue to negotiate our climate future I will be asking them to look Indigenous women in the eyes and answer us: whose lands will be traded away? Which cultures will be lost? And whose lives will be discarded in these negotiations?

This post is part of a month-long series produced by The Huffington Post in conjunction with a variety of events being held in September recognizing the threats posed by climate change. Those events include the UN’s Climate Summit 2014 (that was held Sept. 23, 2014, at UN headquarters in New York) and Climate Week NYC (Sept. 22-28, 2014, throughout New York City). To see all the posts in the series, read here.

Fighting Mideast terror with another American intervention is like fighting fire with gasoline.

In 2000, after a deranged man shot several people in a gay bar in Roanoke, Virginia, some suggested that everyone would have been safer had they all been carrying firearms. Jonathan Rauch made the case six months before the Roanoke incident in his article “Pink Pistols” in Salon. Similar suggestions have been made after mass shootings in movie theaters and elementary schools. As I write this, the D.C. Council is about to pass a concealed carry bill in response to court rulings against the District’s gun control law.

The fact that America leads the developed world in guns and gun-related deaths doesn’t faze gun advocates. Like tax cuts, guns are considered a cure-all. Unfortunately, the same appears true of munitions in American foreign policy.

The speed with which we are being goaded into war is not a sign of strength. It is easy to mock Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and his overcompensating sidekick Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for their endless saber rattling, or Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) for his claim that ISIS members are sneaking across the Mexican border to cut our throats. But already our fears have been successfully exploited to justify yet another Mideast war effort.

Americans are much likelier to die from something we do to ourselves, whether with guns or alcohol or texting while driving. You would be well advised to worry less about whether ISIS will make it to Baghdad and more about whether you’ll make it over the crumbling bridge you take to work. McCain says that we need to fight the terrorists over there so we won’t have to fight them here. The last time he said that, we launched a war in Iraq that destabilized the region. Yet here he comes again to quell terrorist fires with hoses of gasoline. And once again we spend money we say we don’t have to save other people’s houses while neglecting our own.

I seldom agree with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), but he was right last week: “Before we arm the so-called moderate Muslims of Syria, remember what I said a year ago: ‘The irony you will not be able to overcome is that these arms will someday be used against America.'” It is small comfort that the Northern Storm Brigade, with which McCain met in May 2013, is now opposed to ISIS.

How often do we have to respond to distant problems by charging in and making things worse before we bloody well stop doing it? However bad the situation, any action we take should at least have a reasonable shot at improving things. At this point, the only thing we have improved by our ruinous investment of blood and treasure in the Levant is the profits of Halliburton and other defense contractors.

Aside from idly wondering why Dick Cheney and other war criminals are not in prison, we would do well to tend our own garden by facing the threat posed by America’s own religious fanatics. They may not be cutting off heads or flying planes into office towers, but the misogynistic and homophobic policies they seek to impose on their fellow citizens bear more than a passing resemblance to those of the foreign extremists we fight. The main difference is that diversity here has taken firmer hold, notwithstanding the fact that American policing, both foreign and domestic, disproportionately targets people of color.

A better use of our military resources is the humanitarian mission announced by President Obama on September 16, in which American forces will set up field hospitals and train local health workers in West Africa to help the fight against Ebola.

Three years ago on Sep. 20, the military gay ban officially ended. I remember the great satisfaction of World War II combat veteran Frank Kameny, who had devoted much of his life to helping reach that moment. He died three weeks later. It does no dishonor to him or other LGBT service members (and we’re still working on the T) to insist that deadly force, whether at home or abroad, should be used as a last resort and not by habit.

This piece originally appeared in Bay Windows and Washington Blade.

Copyright © 2014 by Richard J. Rosendall. All rights reserved.

When Justin Stuart of prankster YouTube channel JStuStudios goes to the library, he doesn’t read.

He eats loudly. Very loudly.

Watch what happens when Stuart munches on a bag of chips, a carrot and even some watermelon, chowing down way too close to people who are clearly trying to work or read quietly.

A range of hilarious reactions ensues — but if nothing else, the poor library-goers could probably agree it made studying a little more interesting.

Via Reddit