Not really…I support this web site entirely on my own dime. But you had to see this coming… Yes…I’m posting a Mercedes ad here. But it’s so darn cute…I just had to.
I need to find someone to translate that verbiage at the end for me. I can decipher “The E Class” and that’s about it. But notice…it’s a German ad, and yet the song is sung in English.
200 proof snark, in the Financial Times. Gideon starts out by noting that "diplomat" Bolton rejects pacta sunt servanda, and goes on from there. The high point is Gideon’s noting that Bolton calls his book Surrender Is Not an Option, and observes that "When it came to Vietnam, surrender was not an option for Bolton because he never got close enough to the enemy to make it feasible…"
I keep looking for something in the little stack of envelops that greats me at the door when I get home from work. A pleasant little surprise from warmer climes, like the one I got last December that put a smile on my face that lasted well into the New Year. I got three Christmas cards in the mail today. One of them was for the previous occupants of this house. I’ve owned Casa del Garrett for just over seven years now and I occasionally still get mail for them. But this card was from an address I’d never seen before in their mail, so I’m guessing it’s from someone they haven’t heard from in a while. Maybe someone who lost touch and, after searching around online, found an old address they decided to give a try. I’ll put it back in the mail stream tomorrow with a note about the old owners new address, and hopefully the little card will find its way to the hands it seeks to open it.
Petra’s year-and-a-half love affair with a plastic pedal boat made headlines around the world. Now, though, the black swan from Münster has found herself a real swan to snuggle with, leaving the boat in the lurch.
Swans, Wikipedia tells us, usually mate for life. Divorce, though, the entry goes on, "does sometimes occur, particularly following nesting failure." Which perhaps explains why Petra, the famous black swan from the German town of Münster, has ditched her boyfriend for a new beau. It is, after all, difficult to nest with a giant, plastic pedal boat.
Life is too short to stay hung up on indifferent lovers. On the other hand…never underestimate the power of love…
Just a few days after having moved into her winter quarters with the pedal boat she fell in love with over a year and a half ago, Petra began making eyes with a newcomer. The male swan is just as white as her previous true love, but he is made of feathers and blood instead of plastic. "She seems to accept him and allows him to eat out of her food dish," a spokeswoman from the Münster zoo, where Petra spends her winters, told the local paper. Nobody, though, seems to know where the new swan came from. "He just showed up…"
Okay…it’s the hopeless romantic in me…but there’s a story somewhere here to be written about a little swan who fell in love with a lifeless hunk of plastic and wood that cold and indifferent fate had cruelly made to resemble her soulmate…and how she nonetheless loved it so wholeheartedly that a spirit began to take root and grow within that drifting lifeless hunk of plastic and wood…until one day it awakened…and embodied as a real swan. Of course that’s where the new swan came from…
Still, a love affair with Paul would certainly be a step up from an infatuation with a swan-shaped pedal boat. And there is so far no indication that Petra is treating Paul merely as a rebound relationship. They spend much of their time swimming side-by-side. And Petra, it should be noted, isn’t known for her philandering. A number of male swans have attempted to make her acquaintance over the last two year — but Petra has rejected them all.
Photo Gallery Number Four, Road Trip, now available for your viewing pleasure in the Photo Gallery. Also Gallery One, Philadelphia 2004 and Two, Rehoboth Beach 2007 are back up, and Three, The Shadows and Light Sessions, is still there. I have enough space on the web now that I think I can just keep these galleries online as I keep putting them up, so that people can keep wandering through.
When I get back from my own little holiday road trip later this month, I’m going to start making a push to try and sell some artwork to help raise funds for Morgan Jon Fox’s documentary, This Is What Love In Action Looks Like. I’ll likely also be offering to sell high resolution signed 11 x 17 prints from any of my photo galleries. 100 percent of the proceeds will go to Morgan to help him finish his documentary. More on that next month…
Somewhere in this little fragment of a conversation I had last night, is the central difficulty in my life, staring back at me…
Me: …I was never competitive enough so I dropped it after high school. I wonder sometimes how different my life might have been. I wanted to be a photographer…
Evangelical pastors are helping to create a terrible new campaign of violence against young Nigerians. Children and babies branded as evil are being abused, abandoned and even murdered while the preachers make money out of the fear of their parents and their communities.
The rainy season is over and the Niger Delta is lush and humid. This southern edge of West Africa, where Nigeria’s wealth pumps out of oil and gas fields to bypass millions of its poorest people, is a restless place. In the small delta state of Akwa Ibom, the tension and the poverty has delivered an opportunity for a new and terrible phenomenon that is leading to the abuse and the murder of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children. And it is being done in the name of Christianity.
Almost everyone goes to church here. Driving through the town of Esit Eket, the rust-streaked signs, tarpaulins hung between trees and posters on boulders, advertise a church for every third or fourth house along the road. Such names as New Testament Assembly, Church of God Mission, Mount Zion Gospel, Glory of God, Brotherhood of the Cross, Redeemed, Apostalistic. Behind the smartly painted doors pastors make a living by ‘deliverances’ – exorcisms – for people beset by witchcraft, something seen to cause anything from divorce, disease, accidents or job losses. With so many churches it’s a competitive market, but by local standards a lucrative one.
But an exploitative situation has now grown into something much more sinister as preachers are turning their attentions to children – naming them as witches. In a maddened state of terror, parents and whole villages turn on the child. They are burnt, poisoned, slashed, chained to trees, buried alive or simply beaten and chased off into the bush.
Some parents scrape together sums needed to pay for a deliverance – sometimes as much as three or four months’ salary for the average working man – although the pastor will explain that the witch might return and a second deliverance will be needed. Even if the parent wants to keep the child, their neighbours may attack it in the street.
This is not just a few cases. This is becoming commonplace. In Esit Eket, up a nameless, puddled-and-potholed path is a concrete shack stuffed to its fetid rafters with roughly made bunk beds. Here, three to a bed like battery chickens, sleep victims of the besuited Christian pastors and their hours-long, late-night services. Ostracised and abandoned, these are the children a whole community believes fervently are witches.
Sam Ikpe-Itauma is one of the few people in this area who does not believe what the evangelical ‘prophets’ are preaching. He opened his house to a few homeless waifs he came across, and now he tries his best to look after 131.
‘The neighbours were not happy with me and tell me "you are supporting witches". This project was an accident, I saw children being abandoned and it was very worrying. I started with three children, then every day it increased up to 15, so we had to open this new place,’ he says. ‘For every maybe five children we see on the streets, we believe one has been killed, although it could be more as neighbours turn a blind eye when a witch child disappears.
This is the country that’s posturing to the world about being more godly and righteous then those liberal American Episcopalians who are rewriting the bible to excuse sexual deviancy. This is what the "conservative" American Episcopalian churches that are aligning themselves with Akinola are buying into so they don’t have to treat their homosexual neighbors as anything other then human garbage. Without a doubt it’s what the billionaire Ahmanson wants the Anglican Church he’s paying for to look like. Ahmanson you may recall, is the billionaire "former" Christian Reconstuctionist who once said that stoning homosexuals to death was all part of God’s plan.
When you start inciting mob religious passions against your neighbors you are walking down a path that leads right into the Pit and what you need to understand about that is that the fall has no speed limit, and there is no bottom to stop you. It just gets worse and worse and worse until every last shred of human nobility and decency is gone and all that is left is the jungle and screams in the night.
Mary Sudnad, 10, grimaces as her hair is pulled into corn rows by Agnes, 11, but the scalp just above her forehead is bald and blistered. Mary tells her story fast, in staccato, staring fixedly at the ground.
‘My youngest brother died. The pastor told my mother it was because I was a witch. Three men came to my house. I didn’t know these men. My mother left the house. Left these men. They beat me.’ She pushes her fists under her chin to show how her father lay, stretched out on his stomach on the floor of their hut, watching. After the beating there was a trip to the church for ‘a deliverance’.
A day later there was a walk in the bush with her mother. They picked poisonous ‘asiri’ berries that were made into a draught and forced down Mary’s throat. If that didn’t kill her, her mother warned her, then it would be a barbed-wire hanging. Finally her mother threw boiling water and caustic soda over her head and body, and her father dumped his screaming daughter in a field. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she stayed near the house for a long time before finally slinking off into the bush. Mary was seven. She says she still doesn’t feel safe. She says: ‘My mother doesn’t love me.’ And, finally, a tear streaks down her beautiful face
The righteous men of god in Nigeria are killing children now as witches. If you thought all that would stop with the sinful wicked devil possessed homosexuals you have never opened a book of human history. There’s a reason why Jesus said the most important thing after loving God, is loving your neighbor.
So one of my chain smoking friends is quitting now…and I’m back to my cigars all of a sudden. Ah well… Seasonal stress is coming early.
Wishing will make it so
just keep on wishing and care will go
Dreamers tell us dreams come true
It’s no mistake
Wishing are the dreams we dream when we’re awake
The curtain of night will pass
If you are certain within your heart
So if you wish long enough wish strong enough
You will come to know
Wishing will make it so
Weather Report, For My Family In California Where They Don’t Have “Weather”
Yes, yes…it looks like New England is getting clobbered right now. Yesterday NOAA was calling for freezing rain this morning here in Baltimore, but the freeze line had apparently moved north by late last night and right now we’re only getting our usual miserable cold wet drizzle. Good thing it’s not cold enough for snow though, or we’d be getting socked in too.
P.S.: I hear you had a very severe cold snap out there recently. Temperatures plummeted all the way down to…thirty-eight, was it? It must have been awful having to…you know…put on a jacket or something…
Somedays, it is my profoundest wish that the one true god turns out to be some refrigerator that washed ashore on some remote island in the pacific. And that nobody but the natives there, and there alone, worship.
Visualizing this made me smile. It gave me the warm fuzzies somehow. The creator of All That Is embodies one day as a refrigerator and washes ashore on some lost and out of the way island, where it’s venerated by the natives there…and by them alone. What a completely goofy…and yet evocative image that is…
ARCHBISHOP Desmond Tutu has accused the United States and Britain of pursuing policies like those of South Africa’s apartheid-era government by detaining terrorism suspects without trial.
At an event to commemorate the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDR) today, the Nobel laureate said the detention of suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a "huge blot on a democracy".
"Whoever imagined that you would hear from the United States and from Britain the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government," Archbishop Tutu said.
I take it you haven’t noticed yet that the Bush base here in America are the same folks who wholeheartedly supported Apartheid. And not just abroad…
Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog: So, people ask why, in The Conscience of a Liberal, I downplay the role of issues other than race in swinging the political balance in favor of the GOP. The answer, basically, is the math: once you take the great southern switch into account, there isn’t much left to explain.
In some correspondence with Larry Bartels, whose “What’s the matter with “What’s the matter with Kansas?”" is must reading for anyone trying to understand modern American political, economy, the issue of how the Democrats lost white males came up. Larry points out that you really need to separate out the South. Here’s what he had to say:
Unless you have a peculiar nostalgia for the racially coercive Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era, it makes sense to focus on the rest of the country. There, the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote among white men was 40% in 1952 and 39% in 2004.
White men didn’t turn against the Democrats; Southern white men turned against the Democrats. End of story.
Who would have imagined the the United States of America would one day piss on the Geneva conventions and laugh? The republican base…that’s who. The American gutter that came charging into politics after the hated Warren court told them to desegregate their schools, and allow their negros to vote. They’ve dreamed of it for decades. Reagan delivered that gutter into power. Bush told them they didn’t have to give a shit.
Well I reckon Disney World’s out. Thanks for the warning about the crowds during Christmas week guy. And here I was wondering if they were even open then…
Bush and Cheney have broken the law consistently throughout their reign, often openly, and to the great detriment of our own country and others; when they obey it, they do so more as a matter of convenience than from any fealty to it or any fear of retribution. They’re pleased to use the legislature to achieve their ends when they can – as when Congress obligingly immunized administration personnel from prosecution under the War Crimes Act – and to ignore it when they can’t. Former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith explains the dynamic as described to him by Dick Cheney’s current number two, torture maven David Addington: "We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop." They have, and that larger force has not materialized – and the administration have been at pains to ensure that the force, if it ever arrives, won’t do so in the person of the courts – and the result is a constitutional republic with its framework intact and its guts eviscerated. There is only one remedy, and that’s impeachment.
(Emphasis mine)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
-George Washington
Washington was probably thinking about the democrats when he said that…
See…This is why I wish you’d let me email you…I could just bop these little questions back to you and maybe get a quick answer, instead of putting them into the Christmas card I’m sending.
My friends up here are just a tad too disorganized this year to count on them doing anything all together this New Years, alas. I’ve pinged them and pinged them and it looks like it’s just going to be catch as catch can and I tend to slip right between the cracks when it’s like that. I have a week off between Christmas and New Year and I don’t want to spend it moping around the house alone. Be nice to take a drive in my new car somewhere…particularly somewhere it’s warm. Somewhere I’ve never seen before.
So…basically…will Disneyworld be open during the week between Christmas and New Year…?
And…
What part of the complex, in your experienced opinion, would most appeal to a single adult? I’m not interested in the kiddy stuff, or the thrill rides so much (Unless I had a companion to thrill along with). I’ll probably just be wandering around all by myself. So maybe something to engage my mind and my curiosity? If such as that even exists at Disney? Epcot Center maybe? Or is there something else you think would be better?
And where would you suggest I get a room for a few days. Something basic, and not horribly expensive.
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