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[Update 3:57 p.m.] U.S. House Speaker John Boehner has assured lawmakers that the House will vote on $60 billion in aid related to Superstorm Sandy by January 15, a group of lawmakers from New York and New Jersey told reporters Wednesday afternoon.
[Initial post, 2:22 p.m.] New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he doesn't know why House Speaker John Boehner didn't allow a vote on a $60 billion aid package to help Superstorm Sandy victims Tuesday or Wednesday, but he's steamed about it.
"There's only one group to blame for the continued suffering" of Sandy victims, and that's Boehner and the House Republican leadership, Christie told reporters Wednesday afternoon.
"Shame on you. Shame on Congress," Christie, a Republican, said.
Christie is just one of many New Jersey and New York politicians upset that the House did not consider the aid proposal on the final two full days of the 112th Congress. A new Congress will be sworn in on Thursday. The Senate had passed a bill that would have provided billions of dollars in aid to victims, but the process will begin anew with the new Congress.
Sandy killed at least 113 people in the U.S. and left millions of people without power after running up the East Coast in late October. The storm hit hardest in New York and New Jersey.
Christie said he was given assurances that the House would consider the package after it dealt with the fiscal cliff deal that it passed Tuesday night. But late Tuesday, he said, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told him that the "authority for the (Sandy) vote was pulled by the speaker."
Christie said he then "called the speaker four times last night, and he didn't take my calls."
"Every day that we don't begin to get this aid are days that we can't get people back in their homes, get businesses reopened. ... It's absolutely disgraceful," Christie said.
Getting the fiscal cliff deal passed in the House undoubtedly held up the relief measure, and many conservative House Republicans opposed the size of the Senate bill. Some said there were many unrelated provisions in it for items that were not emergency needs.
House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Kentucky, told reporters off the House floor late Tuesday that "leadership was all-consumed with the cliff procedure ... and they really have not had the time to devote to this because of that."
Up until Tuesday night, GOP leaders were working toward a plan of splitting up the vote into two measures: one providing $27 billion for immediate needs and another amendment offering $33 billion for longer-term recovery efforts.
Rogers said he was ready to move his scaled-back bill but did not give a timetable for the vote in the next Congress.
"FEMA has plenty of money, there's no immediate needs," he said, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
U.S. Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican who also is upset that the House didn't vote on the package, told CNN Wednesday that Rogers "doesn't know what he's talking about."
"The FEMA money is not going to rebuild businesses, that's not going to provide food and shelter, and it's not going to reimburse the local governments," he said.
The bill included grant funding for owners of homes and businesses, as well as funding for public improvement projects on the electric grid, hospitals and transit systems to prevent damage from future storms.
King called the House leadership's move a "knife in the back." Boehner did not immediately respond publicly to King's assertions.
Michael Steel, Boehner's spokesman, said the speaker is "committed to getting this bill passed this month."
If this was happening to the victims of Katrina under a Bush administration...OMG!!!!!
Christie is a crybaby ps with an o in the middle.
"King called the House leadership's move a "knife in the back." He's a Republican, did you expect anything different? These are "common people" we are talking about that need help, so it is no big surprise that Republicans did not run to the rescue. Had it been Rich people it would have happened so fast it would make your head dizzy!
Is it possible the Republicans are doing this to punish Gov Christie for complimenting Pres Obama on his handling of Sandy ?
I considered EXACTLY the same thing..the GOP is capable of that...
No doubt, and I have a feeling they are going to revoke his republican card. The party is slowly self-destructing.
This is what I was thinking. The republican party will turn on you if you do no comply with their every wish!
On behalf of the Democratic Party, I would like to invite Gov. Christie to follow former Florida Governor Charlie Crist's lead and switch parties. We Democrats actually care about people and work to get things done for all Americans, not just the 1% crowd.
Christ and Christie! It's a sign! lol
I like that combination.
It behooves me how these "self-serving-holier-than-thou-I've-got-the-power-I'm-in-charge" congressional buffoons hold groups (middle class, New Jersey, etc.) hostage as if they are God! These fools are worried about their 2014 re-election already instead of doing their jobs now. The voters in their respective states need to wake up, smell the coffee and vote them out of office; we did in my state!!!
I do not think that word means what you think it means. Please look up the meaning of "behooves".
Move off of the beaches.
Fool who doesn't know that it didn't just impact those by the beach....
Fail for those that think the storm just impacted Seaside and Point Pleasant.....
we first have to get the trailers out of tornado alley there ALWAYS seems to be money for those "acts of God"
Its not about getting a free lunch .... its about helping your neighbor up.
I agree that building on a barrier island is stupid, but this money is not for the vacation homes. It's for the infrastructure that was damaged. It's to help get businesses up and running. It's to help repair schools. Much of the damage was far inland, in some cases miles from the shore.
This is a payback for all the great things he said about Obama and probably voting for him. They did throw you under the bus and it is not too late to switch parties for the 2016 election.
The strongest GOP candidate for president in 2016 (Christie)
Hates the GOP. Yep... this party has a solid future.
Keep it up Tea Party. Don't change a thing.
$60 billion??? That seems like a lot. I mean, it's not like its well spent money saving Iraq from evilness or anything.
Best solution I've heard yet.... republican cannibals.
Boehner doesn't care about anybody except his party. He flew home last night on his private jet.
Really? what about your home/auto/property insurance? follow up with them. Oh? what? you DIDN'T have coverage? how irresponsible. Now it is your problem. Suck it up cupcake – WORK you way thru it instead of leading with your hand out for $$!
This money is the fund the Federal flood insurance program that only the Fed provides which these people have and already had been paying premiums on. Regular insurance only pays for wind damage .They are not looking for a free hand out this is for insurance claims that they have been promised when they payed their premiums.
Well, Mr. Christie, now you know how the rest of the US feels. We've all be screwed over by the bigwigs in Washington. Our fearless leader at the tune of $300K each time has gone back to Hawaii to finish his holiday. How many times back & forth was that just over Christmas. Federal employees wages frozen but not the house & senate. Are they NOT federal employees. Everyone of them should ashamed of themselves. Not one of those idiots speaks for me or for most citizens of this country. If you don't make over $500K you're nothing to them.
I really do not like Christie's ideology, but when push came to shove, he set politics aside and stood up for his state. Boehner and Cantor simply do not care about the impact their actions have on real people.


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Photos we are missing.
The Emperor Goose has a current classification rating of Near Threatened. While the population of the Emperor Goose has witnessed some increase in the last few years, historically there have been significant decreases, particularly during the mid-20th century. The breeding range of this bird is restricted and the Emperor Goose can only be found in the Bering Sea. The primary threats to this bird are believed to be coastal oil pollution and climate change in its range. This bird is native to the United States and Russia. It has been occasionally seen in Japan and Canada.
Emperor Goose: This small goose has slate-gray plumage that is subtly barred in white and black. It has a white head and hindneck, a dark foreneck, a short pink bill, and a white tail with black under tail coverts. The legs are bright yellow-orange. It feeds on plants, crustaceans and mollusks. It has a direct flight with rapid wing beats. The sexes are similar, with the female slightly smaller.
Emperor Goose: This species breeds on islands in the Bering Sea and marshy coasts of western Alaska and winters mainly in the Aleutian Islands east to Kodiak Island. Also breeds in Kamchatka, Russia. In winter, this bird may wander as far south as Oregon. Preferred habitats include coasts, mudflats, and coastal tundra.
Emperor Goose A1
Calls from a pair.
Emperor Goose A2
Wing noise and "kla-ha" calls from a pair.
"Kla-ga-kla-ga-kla-ga", "u-lugh-u-lugh"
Ducks, Geese and Swans (Anatidae)
The ANSERIFORMES (pronounced an-ser-ih-FOR-meez), one of the oldest avian orders, is composed of three families and includes the bizarre and noisy screamers of South America, the odd Magpie Goose of Australia, and the globally distributed swans, geese and ducks.
The swans, geese and ducks are grouped in the Anatidae (pronounced ah-NAH-tih-dee); a bird family with one hundred sixty-four species in forty-eight genera, various members of which can be found on all continents.
The Anatidae are represented in North America by sixty-nine species in twenty-three genera (including the extinct Labrador Duck). Members of this well known bird family include the graceful, long-necked swans, familiar geese of farm fields and golf courses, and the many species of ducks.
While all species are known for their association with aquatic habitats, Canada Geese are also known for their aggressive behavior when guarding their nests and young. After the breeding season, Canada Geese become better known for the "V" shaped flocks they form during migration.
Swans, geese, and ducks are large birds with long necks (longest in swans, shortest in ducks) and short tails. All species have webbed feet suited to their aquatic environments and distinctive flat bills - except for the mergansers with their thin, serrated bills ideally suited for catching fish.
Although swans and geese are mostly white, brown, and black, many ducks showcase several shades of grays, browns, and blacks combined with fine barring and streaking to result in a variety of beautifully patterned plumages for which females of the species are well known. Males in breeding plumage are more boldly patterned and often have iridescent blue or green on the head. Both sexes usually show a spot of color in the wing known as a "speculum".
Swans, geese, and ducks occur throughout North America wherever aquatic habitats are found. While geese and some ducks are often found along the shoreline, species that feed on underwater vegetation such as swans and dabbling ducks prefer calm water with depths suited to the length of their necks. In deeper waters, the mergansers, scoters, and diving ducks occur. Boldly-patterned Harlequin Ducks swim in the swift rivers and turbulent seashores of the Pacific Northwest and some areas of the northeastern U.S. and Canada.
A highly migratory family, most species migrate to open, ice-free water in sheltered bays and marshes of the southern United States with some reaching Mexico and Central America.
Members of the Anatidae flock together after breeding in large, multi-species groups at sites with good, safe foraging. At such sites, scoters, Canvasbacks, and other diving ducks dive for mussels in the deep sections while dabblers such as Gadwall and Northern Shovelers forage on the surface and in the shallows. On the shore, grazers such as geese and the American Widgeon forage on grass.
Populations of two Alaskan diving ducks, the Steller's and Spectacled Eiders, are threatened for reasons unknown; possible causes include changes in their habitats, nest predation by ravens and gulls, hunting, and the on-going effects of lead poisoning. The reasons why the Hawaiian Goose, and the Laysan and Hawaiian Ducks are endangered are much better understood; however after nearly going extinct, populations have stabilized but unfortunately don't have much room for growth in the limited amount of available habitat.
The white plumage of Snow Geese and Tundra Swans sometimes takes on a dirty, rusty-brown appearance. The birds aren't actually dirty but do show rust-colored highlights from foraging in the iron rich environments of the far north. Regarding the well-known description of the sound made by a duck as a "quack," duck species in North America also variously whistle, squeak, click, and grunt.
Yury Lisyak

subset: commoncrawl


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Jean Marie Massaud
Born in Toulouse in 1966, Jean Marie Massaud was a child fascinated by science, who dreamt of becoming an inventor. He graduated from ENSCI in Paris in 1990, and started to collaborate with Marc Berthier. While working on urbanism issues, Jean-Marie Massaud discovered the intimate link between design and architecture, relating to similar implications in the creation of our environment and of our life experience. Convinced more than ever that it is both urgent and necessary for man to reinvent himself, beyond a formal and strictly hedonistic exercise, Jean Marie Massaud sees his role as a designer in a committed and decidedly political way.
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Barbarians at the gate
Contrary to expectations, this week's elections could be the making of the European Parliament
NIGEL GARDNER, a British candidate in this week's elections to the European Parliament, was recently confronted with an unusually direct expression of the difficulty facing the institution he aspires to join. Mr Gardner was out campaigning for the Labour Party in Hemel Hempstead, a medium-sized English town, and approached a female shopper with the usual candidates' patter—"Madam, may I take a few moments of your time to talk about the European elections." The woman looked at him with distaste and incredulity, then moved her face to within a couple of centimetres of Mr Gardner's before yelling at the top of her voice: "Boring".
That, in a nutshell, is the big problem facing the European Parliament. Voting will take place over four days between June 10th and 13th, in all 25 European Union member countries. In most normal elections attention would focus on winners and losers, but in these ones the figure that matters will be the turnout. In the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979, 63% of the electorate voted. By 1994 this had fallen to 56.8%. At the most recent elections, in 1999, participation was down to 49.4%.
The sense that ordinary Europeans are disengaging from the parliament is debilitating for an institution that already stands accused of corruption and irrelevance. And it is a worry not just for the parliament, but for the EU as a whole. Even Europhiles acknowledge that the Union has an image problem, with most ordinary Europeans seeing it as remote, incomprehensible and run by unaccountable bureaucrats. The parliament is supposed to be the main answer to this so-called "democratic deficit". Successive treaties have given it ever more power over European legislation, which in turn accounts for about 50% of all new laws in EU member countries. Yet, as a senior official at the parliament puts it, "we face this incredible paradox: the more power the parliament gets, the less people vote."
Not everybody is convinced that this is a real problem. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the Greens in the parliament, points out that turnout in American presidential elections has usually hovered around the 50% mark, but "nobody says that the United States is not a democracy." It is a good answer, but not a complete one. The European Parliament, unlike the American presidency, is a young institution struggling to establish its legitimacy. And in European terms, its ability to inspire people to vote is pretty feeble. Professor Richard Rose of International IDEA, a think-tank, has monitored what he calls the "Euro-gap", which measures the different turnout in national and European elections. This shows, for example, that only 40% of Portuguese voted in the European elections of 1999, whereas 61% voted in elections to the national parliament at around the same time. The biggest Euro-gap was in the Netherlands, where 80% voted in last year's national elections and just 30% in the 1999 European elections. Across the European Union, according to Professor Rose, the Euro-gap was around 22 percentage points.
And now the good news
Another expected outcome of the elections is a surge in votes for populist parties opposed to the European Union. In Poland, Samoobrona (Selfdefence), a party led by Andrzej Lepper, a pugilistic peasant who rants against the EU, is likely to win a big block of seats. In Britain, the UK Independence Party, which advocates withdrawal from the EU, could win as much as 15% of the vote. Other Eurosceptic parties expected to do well include the Civic Democrats in the Czech Republic, Denmark's June Movement and Sweden's JuneList.
The rise of Eurosceptic and populist parties may be bad news for the EU, because of the disillusion with the whole project that it reflects. But for the European Parliament as an institution, it could actually be quite positive. For it would place the parliament in a unique—and so potentially powerful—position within the EU. One of the oddities of the club is the extent to which most of its leading institutions have managed to insulate themselves from public opinion. National ministers and diplomats haggling in the Council of Ministers often seem to regard their job as "delivering" their publics, as much as representing them. The European Commission, which is unelected, unabashedly sees itself as the keeper of the European flame. And the European Parliament has traditionally been the most federalist of all the EU institutions. The three biggest political groupings—the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), the Socialists and the Liberals—have long been dominated by true believers in "ever closer union".
This situation will not be transformed by this week's elections, but it could change significantly. Already the EPP, which is likely to remain the parliament's biggest political group, has rewritten its statutes so as to accommodate the British Tories, who explicitly reject the group's traditional federalism. The two avowedly Eurosceptic political groups—one broadly on the left, one on the right—are both likely to gain members. There could be a new alliance of far-right parties that might include France's National Front. Nobody knows which group the Polish potato-throwers will join. But parties that are broadly Eurosceptic could see their representation rise from around 10% in today's parliament to as much as 20%.
Many centrists will doubtless react with horror to this. But the arrival of anti-European populists, along with a sprinkling of cranks, celebrities and single-issue fanatics, among the 732 MEPs reporting for duty after the election might at long last excite some public interest in the parliament. Debate may become less genteel and the work of all those worthy committees on fish quotas and chemical regulations could be disrupted. But by making the parliament more reflective of the true breadth of European opinion, in all its diversity, this week's elections could yet raise its standing in Europe.
This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "Barbarians at the gate"
From the June 12th 2004 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contentsExplore the edition
More from Europe
A crushing victory for Italy's nationalist right
Giorgia Meloni of the Brothers of Italy is set to be the country's first female prime minister
Voting begins in four sham referendums in Ukraine
The results are not in doubt
Fresh evidence shows how grim life is under Russian occupation in Ukraine
Military police reports from Izyum describe everyday acts of brutality


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Despite the overall lack of top-line growth during the economic downturn, many companies have stayed afloat by downsizing staff and eking out supply-chain efficiencies. In the face of continuing unemployment and the attendant lag in consumer demand, however, how long can companies maintain respectable margins merely by growing leaner?
Maybe longer than you might think. Opportunities still abound for doing more with less, according to a new study of the 1,000 largest U.S. companies (in terms of sales) by REL, a division of The Hackett Group. Indeed, the study concludes that those companies could wring a total of as much as $709 billion in excess cash flow from their supply chains by adjusting their inventory levels, getting their customers to pay their bills on time, and managing their accounts payable carefully, according to research on working capital for the third quarter of 2009. (Sizable as that number is, it's considerably smaller than a year ago, when the same group of companies had an opportunity to take $854 billion out of their working capital.)
REL arrives at the $709 billion figure by calculating what would happen if all of the 1,000 companies could attain the working-capital performance of the top 25%. The biggest opportunity for improvement lies in the area of inventory, where REL reckons about $286 billion could be cut. The companies could also pick up $241 billion by doing a better job of collecting from their accounts receivable and $182 billion by managing their accounts payable more prudently.
Cutting down on the amount of cash tied up in working capital (current assets minus current liabilities) is a good thing because it increases the amount of cash available for a company to invest in itself or return to its shareholders. During the downturn, companies have placed more emphasis on getting more usable cash this way because the ability to do so by producing more revenue has diminished.
At the same time, the opportunity to trim working capital has dropped because of the sales slump. Between the third quarter of 2008 and the same period of 2009, revenues for the group fell from $2.6 trillion to $2.2 trillion, providing a smaller pie from which to cut. Says Mark Tennant, president of REL: "If the overall magnitude of business decreases, you'd expect working capital to decrease, but by how much? If it's decreasing proportionally, that's fine. But if it's decreasing at a slower rate [than revenues], that indicates issues within the business."
By that measure, companies are cutting fast enough to keep up with revenue declines. In the third quarter of 2009, net working capital as a percentage of revenue rose by only 1% from the same period in 2008, from 8% to 9%. Further, working-capital performance, defined as inventory plus accounts receivable minus accounts payable, improved to $775 billion in the third quarter of 2009. That's a productive decrease from the $784 billion recorded in the second quarter and the $864 billion recorded in the third quarter of 2008.
Nevertheless, Tennant believes that many companies have "muscled down" their working capital by taking short-term actions and setting tougher goals for accounts payable and receivable and for keeping inventory low. While such actions as delaying payments to suppliers and stopping production may have made sense at the time, they won't improve companies' ability to adjust to revenue opportunities just around the corner. To be nimble enough to adjust to sudden shifts in customer behavior, companies need to zero in on demand planning and forecasting and build more flexibility into their supply chains, according to Tennant.
Unless they move to more "sustainable" working-capital management, companies run a risk if their response to economic recovery is overly euphoric, Tennant contends. "The immediate risk would be if we start to take off the controls in terms of buying and producing, and we blow our inventories at a rate faster than we increase the absolute business," he says. And that could happen, he notes, by companies "not producing according to true demand, but rather just producing."


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We are posting articles from The Independent and Barnabasfund which describe a massacres in Syria by Wahhabi/Salafi/Deobandi extremists. This confirms the fears expressed by British MP Nick Griffin and other upright politicians that the Western countries and Britain in particular is strengthening terrorists of the same evil ideology that brutally beheaded the British soldier Lee Rigby.
It would be a mistake by Western Powers to think strengthening evil with benefit anyone in the long run. It is time to learn from the mistakes of the past, strengthening Taliban in Afghanistan (against Soviet Russia) at least in part produced more wars, massacres, 9/11 and other terror attacks. Why is another blood thirsty Al Queda style islamofacist insurgency being supported by the West to replace a repressive but largely secular government?
Up to sixty Shia Muslims have been killed in an attack by opposition fighters in the eastern Syrian town of Hatla. A video posted online on Tuesday, entitled "The storming and cleansing of Hatla", showed fighters waving the black Salafi flag and celebrating.
"We have raised the banner 'There is no God but God' above the houses of the apostate rejectionists, the Shia," the voice of the cameraman says.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that thousands of rebels participated in the killings, although the footage of the attacks pictured just a handful of fighters. The death toll could not be independently verified.
Activists denied that the killings were sectarian in nature, claiming instead that they were a response to an attack on a Free Syrian Army checkpoint by 30 armed villagers from Hatla. The activists claim the opposition fighters were incited by the Assad regime's decision to arm the population of Hatla, one of the only Shia villages in an area that has been firmly under rebel control for more than a year.
[youtube id="W_PLctjCXHY" width="600″ height="340″ position="left"]
However, the language used in the videos is explicitly sectarian. "This is the Shia, this is the Shia carcass, this is their end," the cameraman says as a blanket is lifted from one of the victims. That video, posted by a pro-Assad group, indicates those responsible were non-Syrians, possibly from Kuwait. A Syrian government official spoke of a "massacre against villagers in which older people and children were killed".
Massacre of Christian village in Syria; almost 40 people killed
Country/Region: Middle East and North Africa, Syria
A Christian village in Syria was savagely attacked and almost 40 of its residents, including women and children, killed by opposition fighters, as UN investigators warned of increasing radicalisation among the rebels.
UN: "Very complicated distinction between the bad and the good rebels"
CC BY 2.0 / Freedom House
The village of Dweir on the outskirts of Homs, near the border with Lebanon, was invaded on 27 May.
One of our Syrian partners told us that two of his relatives in Dweir were severely tortured by the rebels, who broke some of their bones and started to burn their bodies before shooting them in the head.
The villagers who managed to escape the onslaught fled to Raman district, where Barnabas Aid is providing them with aid.
Following the massacre, the Syrian army entered the village and heavy clashes with the rebel fighters ensued.
The following day, independent United Nations investigators warned that the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad is becoming increasingly radicalised and that the civil war is producing ever worse atrocities.
Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-60-shia-muslims-massacred-in-rebel-cleansing-of-hatla-8656301.html


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Entrepreneurship student Ansh grew up in India and has now set up his own streetwear brand in Australia called Zeak Brown. "My passions were theatre and basketball," he says. "I won Mr Teen India in 2016, but my parents wanted me to focus on studies rather than pursue basketball or a Bollywood career."
Ansh began studying accounting at university, but it didn't feel right. "I was a bit of a lost traveller and was looking for something, but I wasn't sure what," he says. "Something that could test my limits, stretch my creativity and build my skills. Not a bookish approach to learning. As soon as I found Macleay College and business entrepreneurship, I thought this is it. I never knew this kind of college existed."
Ansh immediately noticed the difference between his university studies and what Macleay offered him. "Macleay gives you real opportunities and real-world issues, which has been so good for me. I've learnt real-world skills, like how to write a resumé and create a company. And I hit it off straight away with a group of people in class."
Ansh's experience in the limelight means he's no stranger to brand and influencer collaboration. After winning Mr Teen India, "I started getting collaborations with Superdry and a bunch of other brands," he say.
Ansh used these lessons on how to stand out for his unique t-shirt designs. "If you want to be an influencer, you need to be different to others to get people's attention."
The skills Ansh has learnt in his course have helped him put his brand into production. He explains his passion for entrepreneurship. "The biggest misconception people have about entrepreneurs is that they just make a lot of money. But it's not about that. An entrepreneur is a person who solves a problem in our society, whether it's by creating a fidget spinner or Airtasker. Being the one to solve a problem by following my passion is exciting."
Ansh reflects on the ease of the Macleay enrolments process. "Personal Education Consultant Shibani has been really good to me. Having an international student advisor is helpful for all the international students. Everybody at Macleay College has been so helpful."Find out more about Macleay's Bachelor of Business, specialising in Entrepreneurship.


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by Cathy Resmer
Thomas Naylor, founder of the secessionist Second Vermont Republic, died this week after suffering a stroke on Sunday. He was 76. Naylor's friend and ally Rob Williams delivered the news via email on Friday afternoon.
Naylor, a Charlotte resident, founded SVR in 2003. In his Vermont Manifesto, which he self-published the same year, he declared that, "Our nation has truly lost its way. America is no longer a sustainable nation-state economically, politically, socially, militarily or environmentally."
His solution? Secede from the union and create a second Vermont Republic; the first existed from 1777-1791, before Vermont joined the Union.
Secession sounded nuts — until George W. Bush won a second term in 2004. Suddenly, Naylor's quixotic quest began making headlines, and disgruntled liberals started slapping SVR bumper stickers on their cars.
Some of those supporters abandoned the group, however, after an anonymous blogger raised questions about SVR's ties to secessionist groups such as the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed a racist hate group. Williams, who founded Vermont Commons, a journal devoted to Vermont independence, was one of them. For his part, Naylor disputed the suggestion that SVR was in any way racist.
But though the public perception of the Second Vermont Republic changed over the years, Naylor's devotion to the cause never did. The author and retired Duke economics professor was a tireless advocate for secession. He diligently mailed frequent missives to a long list of contacts, addressing each by hand using his signature green felt-tipped pen.
Naylor was always eager to provide an entertaining bit of street theater, or an over-the-top condemnation of the status quo. He staged an elaborate funeral for the State of Vermont in front of the Statehouse in 2005, for example, and once referred to Sen. Patrick Leahy as a "world-class prostitute." He was critical of Bernie Sanders, too, though the two white-hair, bespectacled gents shared a certain resemblance.
In November of 2008, while most Vermonters were celebrating Barack Obama's imminent occupation of the White House, Naylor staged a Vermont Independence Convention in the chamber of the Vermont House of Representatives. Naylor reveled in the irony. He didn't care if Obama was president — he still wanted out of the union.
In a phone interview Friday, Williams described Naylor as both indefatigable and irascible. "If you haven't been blacklisted by Thomas at some point, it means he doesn't like you," he quipped.
Though Williams left the Second Vermont Republic, he stayed in touch with Naylor; the two were planning a conference on the self-determination of small nations. "The last conversation I had with him was a week ago," he said. "We were having a very interesting conversation with the prince of Lichtenstein, of all places.
He added: "The thing I most admired about Thomas is that he woke up every morning, brushed his teeth, and got to work on Vermont independence."
Williams noted that Naylor's dedication to Vermont independence sparked a number of other efforts, including Vermont Commons, the Middlebury Institute and Radio Free Vermont. This spring, Chelsea Green Publishing will release Most Likely to Secede, a collection of pieces first published in Vermont Commons. Said Williams: "He inspired a lot of people with his passion."
by Jordan Adams
September 20, 2017
by Kevin J. Kelley
January 11, 2017
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Barre native created magic for herself and those she loved
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TThe Kids had a blast with the egg hunting game.
The New Look of our Christmas Tree
Birthday Parties:)
We attended lots of birthday parties this past few weeks, from Matt's birthday party in the newly built McDonald's in Ras Abu-Aboud then the 1st birthday party of Jairus in Chinese Restaurant in City Center last Wednesday then the following day we also attended the Tinkerbell themed 1st birthday party of Anica Ysabelle in Junglezone, Hyatt Plaza and just today we came from MJ's birthday party in McDonalds Al Sadd. Whew! It was like a birthday party marathon.
During Matt's birthday party, my kids enjoyed almost all the games as usual Andrea is still  scared with the mascot, Hamburglar.  She was happily enjoying the musical game, just the 4 them, two older boys and Xianne and her and suddenly she quickly ran toward her daddy. She saw Hamburglar inside the party room. So there, still she's scared with mascots. We don't know how to keep her from being frightened with mascots. It's only in her 1st birthday party that we allowed a mascot then after that we always request that mascots should not appear as opposite as to what parents would usually arrange for.
When we attended Jairus birthday party Ate Andrea was asking where the party was since mostly of the guests were adults and they were only 4 kids and 2 babies there. Anyway, they enjoyed the food especially the fried chicken and as well as the ube cake and the frostings on the cake. They played with the huge blue balloons and Sean found a new friend. Only that the balloons kept on exploding that every time it would explode it was like a bomb explosion because of the big sound.
Anya's Tinkerbelle themed birthday party was one of the best, Mom Wen really worked her butt on it that she even had one week leave just to prepare for the big celebration of her princess. She ordered online from birthdayinabox.com some of her party supplies and she hired someone to decorate the place and turned it into a Tinkerbelle's den. Andrea came to the party as a fairy (and specifically Elina as she would insist on it) and Sean as Superman but he was in deep slumber so he got no chance in wearing his costume since he woke up on the middle of the magic show.The kids had fun watching the magic show of the Junglezone staff, then the Pinata and lots of stuffs in the lovely purple loot bags which my kids can't keep themselves from eating almost all the candies and chips and Andrea giggled upon seeing a Tinkerbelle pad with images to color in some pages and lots of stickers. A VCD movie of Peter Pan served as the give away and my kids enjoyed in re-watching it the following day as if they never have watched it before and still they are afraid of Captain Hook. And of course, the rides in Junglezone but it was only ate Andrea who had the chance to play since I had lots of things with me so we (me and Sean) preferred to go to Homes 'R Us instead. And we love the Milk Fish and the Carbonara, as catered by La Rochelle (Restaurant is located in Al Sadd). For you Tita Wen Congrats! I know you combed all the stores in Doha just to find the things you need and you are one cool momma for that.
Kuya MJ's birthday party in McDo I guess was also fun, as  can be seen from ate Andrea's face when we arrived there (we were late) since me and Sean had to do our grocery and do some window shopping while dad N was watching Formula 1. We were so happy to be reunited with old good friends and it seems like these never-ending parties after all will have no end since after this comes Ate Shey's big birthday party bash as she turns 7 next week then Faith will turn two on the 14th and my brother's big day and then our own princess 4th birthday party.
And in between those kiddie parties were also birthdays of my dear friends: Neth, Jinky, Ninay Rachelle, Manay Daryl and soon Ninay Obin.
Andrea's First Day in School
Last week, our daughter Ate Andrea started her school in DMBS as KG 4. We woke up early at 6 am on Sept. 4 even we knew that we can go there in between 8 am to 9 am since the school Principal, Ms. Sandra Williams will give us instructions as to where our daughter's room will be. We headed straight to the administration office and Ms. Sandra asked us which class our daughter we'll be attending and I told her that she's in KG 3. As she flipped through her records Andrea's name can't be found (silly us we didn't check her name on the information board near the gate as we already know that she'll be in KG 3) so she asked us again the family name then only to find out that she's already in KG 4.
We were led to the KG4-Yellow classroom by one of the school staff and Andrea happily told her teacher her name when she was asked then quickly ran to the group of other kids in the front who are already singing with the assistant teacher. But I found out that in their record she has only Andrea as her name without the second name Lizette, so I informed them that it should be Andrea Lizette.
Her dad was also excited and very supportive that he applied for a leave of absence for one day just to make sure that everything will be okay. The only problem was that we don't have transport since the school has no school bus. Luckily our friend Mavis was able to find one with an Indian driver but the problem is he'll not be available on time with the 12:15 dismissal of classes and we don't want to pay another 600 riyals just to let them stay in the classroom until 1:15 so another option is to find another driver who would transport us. We met some Filipino moms too there and they were kind enough to tell us that maybe our daughter can go with their transport but after a long discussion the Filipino driver can't accommodate us since he'll be short of his time if he's going to fetch me first before going to the school. And he can't accommodate also Xianne (Princess BFF) since their house is in Old Airport, so we have to find another one. As school policy kids in KGs and Reception should be fetched by a parent or a guardian, so that mean me and Sean should fetch her and still she's too young to manage to walk from her classroom to the parking area.
Andrea's first day was a colorful one. She was bubbly and she came home with two flowers (instead of stars) on both hands as a sign that she did great in her first day at school. Even her teacher was happy to tell her dad that she was a good girl. She's attentive to the instructions and she follows what the teacher told her to do.She missed her little brother very much that she hugged him tightly and kissed him on the car and she showed to Sean at once her 2 flowers on her hand. She told us their activities on the first day of school. And I know that she'll be okay now, her mind was set in going to school and she'll be fine. We told her how much we love her and we are happy for her.Â
Some of her pictures during her first day in school:
Kabayan Daw!
Last weekend nagpunta kami ng Villagio Mall para maggrocery at kumain na rin ng lunch. As usual si Ate P chicken lang sa KFC ang gusto at kami naman ni Str ang all time peyborit na Mushroom 'N Swiss sa Hardees. Tulog si Sean kaya ako ang nag-order. Ang haba-haba ng pila sa KFC kaya inuna ko munang mag-order sa Hardees at ibinilin ko muna sa Pinay na staff ng hardees  na babalikan ko nalang. Pumila na naman ako sa KFC at ng malapit na ako sa counter umusog lang ako ng kunti to my right para si Ate P hindi maipit ng ibang nakapila ng biglang may kabayan na nagsalita ng "kabayan saan ba ang pila? Yong taong yon wala pa sya doon sa pila ng kami ay pumila. Sa tono nya para syang nang-aasar na alam naman nya kung saan ang pila. Hindi ko kailangan sa kanya mag-explain kasi alam naman nya.
At isa pa mas nauna ako sa kanya pwede namang lumihis ng konti ano buti kung mag-isa lang ako na pwede akong makipagsiksikan. Pero hinayaan ko sya at sinabi ko sa kanya na nauna ako sa kanya sa pila. Nasa linya pa naman ang anak ko di ba?
 Hindi rin sya bastos ano? Ng kinukuha na ang aking order sabay ang hirit nya ng kanyang order, sinasabayan nya ako ng salita kaya tiningnan ko sya at tumigil sya. Tapos sabay lingon sa kasama nyang babae at nagsalita sila ng Bisaya. Tinanong ulit sa akin ni Berwin ang aking order at nakikipagsabayan talaga ang bastos an lalaki sa likod ko panay ang salita sabi nya "kabayan, dalawang twister din sa akin!". Dalawang beses nya sinabi ang linyang yon. Alam naman nya na hindi nya order yong kinukuha dapat mag-antay muna sya saka magsabi ng paulit-ulit ng kanyang order.
 Si Berwin naman (binasa ko at tinandaan ang nameplate nya) yong cashier sa KFC isa ring lito. Ang sabi ko sa kanya 3 chicken wings at sabay sabi nya ng hindi sila nagbebenta ng chicken na pa-isa-isa at pumunta daw ako sa McDo at doon meron. Sinong niloloko nya ako ba? o di kaya hindi nya alam kung ano ang tinitinda nila? Kelan pa hindi na nagbebenta ng chicken ang Kentucky Fried Chicken? At walang chicken wings sa McDo. Kaya sabi ko sa kanya okay hindi na pala kayo nagtinda ng chicken by piece (pero 4 pcs. nga ang ino-order ko). Sabi nya pwedeng snack box nalang at may chicken na yon. Kaya ako naman sumige nalang kasi nabebwesit na nga ako sa lalaing nasa likod ko at panay ang salita. At sinabi ko pa rin kay berwin na isa pang cheese cake at sabay abot ng 16 riyals. Hanggat maaari gusto ko na sanang umalis doon kasi ayokong makipagsagutan sa lalaking bastos na nasa likod ko. Sabi nya 10 minutes pa daw kaya nag-antay -antay ako. Pero nakaka-inis talaga yong lalaki sa likod ko kaya sinabihan ko si Berwin ng KFC na babalikan ko nalang sabay punta sa Hardees at kinuha ko yong inorder ko doon.
 Balik ako sa KFC after 10 minutes sabi ni Berwin 5 minutes pa daw kaya sinabihan ko sya na kung pwede asawa ko nalang ang babalik para kunin ang order ko.
 After 5 minutes bumalik si Str, hindi kasi mapigilan ng asawa ko na hindi magcomplain kaya sinabihan nya si Berwin na bakit hindi na ba sila nagbebenta ng chicken. Bigla yata naalala ni Berwin na nagtitinda sila ng ganun kaya sabay sabi na meron naman daw. Sinuklian pa nya ng 2 riyals si Str. Binalik ni Str ang 2 riyals kasi alam nya na tig -apat na riyal ang bawat piraso ng chicken sa KFC. At mukhang hindi alam yon ni kabayan na 4 na chicken ay 16 riyals.
Minsan din sa mga mall may mga sales staff na mga masusungit. Sa akin lang naman kabayan ngumiti ka naman. Lalo na kung mamahalin yong mga paninda nila para bang ang tingin at ang tono ng sagot nila minsan ay "hello, kabayan mahal to at hindi mo afford no!"
Sa katulad ni Berwin ng KFC sa VIllagio Mall, huwag kang maging tuliro. Alamin mo ang inyong mga paninda at presyo para hindi ka magshort sa kaha mo. Huwag kang masyadong mag-apura na sasabihin mo na wala sa customer kahit meron para lang matapos kaagad ang ginagawa mo. Kung hindi lang ako nagpigil kakausapin ko sana ang manager mo para maleksyonan ka, kaso nga kawawa ka naman at kabayan ka kaya may konsiderasyon.
Sa'yo naman lalaking Bisdak, wait fot your turn, huwag kang ganyan kasi buti nga wala kang dalang anak na mapipipi sa linya di ba? Asawa mo ba talaga yong kasama mo o alam mo na ? Uso naman yan dito di ba? Kasi mukhang hindi eh! Pasalamat ka hindi ko dala camera ko kasi pagnagkataon makikilala ka ng lahat.
Hindi ko naman sinasabing maging friendly tayo palagi sa mga kabayan kung ayaw mo pero di ba mas nakakagaan ng pakiramdam kung maayos ang pakikitungo natin sa ating kapwa lalo na pag kabayan. Nasa Pinas man tayo o wala maging maayos naman tayo sa kapwa natin. Kilala nga tayong mga Pinoy sa pagiging warm at friendly natin at higit sa lahat kilala din tayo bilang effective and efficient workers kaya huwag mo naman ipahiya ang lahi natin mga tsong:)
R.S.V.P. Us Please:)
I made an invitation card for my daughter's 4th birthday party very much early, more than a month in advance and after making it I sent it at once to our friends with the emphasis on the R.SV.P.
Some friends replied at once to my invitation, stating their presence for the said party but they are only few, maybe the others have not yet opened my e-mail that's why I did not receive a reply. If I receive an invitation to a party with RSVP then I would at once reply to the host, it's like paying attention to the question if you're going or not. Your firm indication would mean a lot to the party host. If RSVP is written on the invitation then the invited guests should tell the host wether or not they plan to come.
The reason behind why I had to send invites a month ahead is for me to have the fixed head count of who are going to come so that I can tell the restaurant the exact number of guests who are coming. This will keep me from overpaying foods for those guests who will not appear in the party. I need to know the quantity of the food that I'm going to order. I have to come up with the exact number of loot bags to prepare for the kids; how many for boys and how many for the girls. I need to know how many give aways should i buy. And that's what RSVP is for. The term RSVP is from a french expression: " respondez s'il vous plait", meaning "please respond!" RSVP stands also for "Response Solicited for your Valuable Presence."
Maybe their silence means a "yes", they will come but then again it could mean "no", they won't come. Either of the two but I need an answer. Hope I could receive more replies and feedbacks if they're coming or not.
Big School Here I Come!
Two more weeks and our daughter, Andrea Lizette will start here formal education in Doha Montessori and British School (DMBS) as KG1. Last Monday, Aug 20 together with her BFF Xianne and family we went to their school to inquire about the school uniform and some other important informations. We were given a info guide with all the rules and class schedules for the autumn, spring and summer terms and as well as the dos' and don'ts in the school.
Then we were directed to the store in Salwa Road in front of Mercedes Benz showroom, to the Zaks store, from where we can buy  the uniforms and they are also selling other uniforms for schools like American School, Park House, Doha College and many others. The uniforms are quite costly, I bought 3 pieces of  size 4 dress uniform at Qr. 95 each, a P.E. shirt for Qr.50 and a trouser for Qr. 60. And we have to come back for the cricket hat and jacket with school logo. They are also selling book bags, shoes and school bags.
As of today she woke up earlier (5 am) Â than the other days, as we prepare her biological clock with an earlier schedule of sleeping and waking so as not to shock her system when her school starts.
She's looking forward to starting her new school. She's so excited that she would always ask us how many days more before the school starts. She's always telling stories of how it would be in her new school. I guess she's more matured now unlike when she went to Mulberry Bush for her play school that longer time was spent in waking her up and she did lots of antics so that she'll not go there. We are as well as happy as she is and I guess this is it. Her mind is set into something she like to do. And that's a good start!
There are lots of moments that she tested our patience. There are lots of funny stories, some are horrifying just to let her stay in the house and not go to the nursery. She was not out of excuses and alibis and she was so quick on plans just to spare her in going to the play school. That was how it went when she started going there but gradually she accepted it.There was a time that I thought her dad send her already to the nursery but they ended up touring the city of Doha because she kept on crying. That time her dad was having his vacation so she just wanted to stay in the house and play with her dad and her brother. The puking antics came and the scared dad did not let her go to school even that they were already indide the gate instead he let her see what happens to kids who don't go to school. He told her and showed her what would she'll become if she'll not go to school. They parked near a construction site ( as if my daughter is a boy that she'll end up as a construction laborer if she'll not go to school) to let her see how hard to have a job as a laborer. They went to a police station. They went to a maid agency. It was funny and at the same time annoying. But still you ended up in the nursery coz I  brought you there even if I had to trick you in getting inside the gate until we reached the office of the admin then to the classroom.
Things like these, stories of your childhood, of how you evolve on maturities in some aspects taught us lessons; it's not only you my dear who learned a lesson but also us your loving parents.
We love you that's why we have to mold you, to educate you and to discipline you.
The Nuisance
Have you ever had a nuisance caller? We have this caller who calls 4 times a day and he sounded like a man who has nothing to do for a day from a construction site or a place with a very annoying sound. He's quite irritating just imagine myself putting my kids to a nap then the phone would ring or sometimes he would call as early as 7 in the morning; it's like our landline number is part of his to call activity for 5 consecutive days.
So how on earth did that human being got our number? Maybe he randomly made a 7 digit number and dialled our number.
On his first call I told him "wrong number". And then after a minute he called back again with urgency in his voice he's telling something I can't understand since he can't speak straight English language and again I told him that I can't understand what's he's saying and he's calling again a wrong number that's the first day he called us.
The following day he called again twice then I called my hubby in his office to call this man so he'll stop bothering us. By the way, this is his number 6619779, I memorized this number since the combination is easy to put in the head and heaven forbid me I want to wring his neck for not forgetting to call our number.
My hubby contacted this person thru that number and he denied that he placed a call to our landline number. Str told him that we have a caller ID in the house so we know who's calling us but still he said that he did not call our number. My hubby got also pissed off that he called again this person and told him that we'll report him to the police just to make him stop.
The 3rd day he called again. I did not answer the phone when his number registed as the caller then the 4th day and then the last day is the 5th day, he called only once then thanks God he stopped! I guess for now since he did not call our number again.
A very Long Happy Weekend!
Our weekend started with the 1st birthday party of my inaanak Angela in their house then followed by a late night booze with the QAFAC family group in Ninong Yam's house. All the dads were in a mood for a drink and singing galore. This time nobody got tipsy and the party ended at 2 in the morning but the problem was we can't go home, our car was sandwiched with two other cars. Thanks to the rude owners of the other cars who purposedly parked close to the rear and nose of our car. It's wee hours so we had no choice but to leave our car there and let Dad Yam drive us to our house.
We woke up very late the following day and went only to Lander's place with Ninay Jinky for ate Andre's Cinderella gown. I did not buy the C gown in Marks and Spencer. I was not satisfied it seems that there's something lacking with it so I decided to just find somebody to make it. And the timing is perfect Ate Shey will be having her 7th birthday and they know the perfect guy who makes best gowns in weddings and other celebrations.
Ate Andrea and Ate Shey insisted of going to KFC and we ended up there. They played for awhile including Sean.
And our Saturday was very exciting yet tiring. We started our day at 5:30 am we woke up very early because we had a schedule, it was a swimming day in Intercon Hotel. Ate Princess was very happy as well as Sean. They met a 19 months old Aussy boy in the kiddie pool. They played a lot. The smile in Sean's face, the happiness of Ate Andrea are so overwhelming. They kept on thanking Mom May for inviting us there. And thanks to Bima too. Our names are still in the system and we still have 35% discount on membership fee, so we'll think about joining the health club there again.
Lunchtime was spent in another friend's house. Kuya Edgar asked STR to fix two old computers so there. Together with Mom May and Dad Yam we went to Kuya Edgar's house. Kuya Edgar cooked sinigang na hipon, it's so yummy with some kangkong vegies and the fried hammour (lapu-lapu), the sweet watermelon and they have cake. STR finished fixing the computers nearly 5 pm so three families proceeded to Villagio Mall for our groceries and some window shopping. And we were home at 8 in the evening. Everybody went straight to bed after changing clothes and I woke up and remembered that I still have to call my bosom friend who happens to be back here in Doha from a long vacation.Â
Wedding Dinner Party
Last Sunday night we went to Rachell and Clint's wedding dinner party in Great Wall of China Restaurant. Ninay Rachell is the godmother of Sean Linus and a sweet and thoughtful friend. We met Rachell when I was pregnant with Sean and she's the ultrasound technologist in QP Clinic.
 She was so accommodating that I opted to make an appointment for the ultrasound parallel to her schedule so that she's the one who'll do it and not the other guy who happens to be of another nationality. Its not that I don't want other nationalities (I have nothing against them) but I have this feeling of being taken cared of, the TLC of a kabayan rather than other nationalities in QP Clinic who doesn't care if they are hurting you already or just that they are like that, callous and unmindful of other's emotions. And it goes the same way regarding the health of my kids if they get sick we prefer a kabayan doctor and have a second opinion from my hubby's brother and sis in law.
So that's how our friendship started and I can still hear Rachell's words…â€Ay! Lalaki ang baby nyo! Ang haba ng legs nya at my lawit!â€Â And from there on we definitely knew that our second baby is a boy. Our friendship flourished and we asked her together with my hubby who happen to be there with me during my 2nd ultrasound to be a godmother of our baby boy. She's so sweet as a ninang that she always asks how her inaanak is doing.
Best wishes to you Ninay Rachell and Ninong Clint!!!
The best part of having a dinner in Great Wall of China Restaurant is the yummy buchi. That's what I always look forward to in dining in this resto.


text:
How not to cut 12,500 jobs: send your staff a windy 1,100-word memo that starts "hello there", proceeds to torture its readers with phrases like "appropriate financial envelope" and then finally mentions job cuts about two-thirds of the way through.
Did Stephen Elop, formerly boss of Nokia but now Microsoft's executive vice-president of devices and services, ask anybody to read this stuff before he pressed "send"? One assumes not because a well-intentioned colleague would have told him to cull at least one of the two uses of the phrase "the finest of Microsoft's digital work and digital life experiences" in the first three paragraphs.
The worst of it, of course, is the time it takes Elop to get to the job cuts. When he does, he devotes just two sentences to the subject – 12,500 posts at Nokia will go as the Microsoft takeover is completed and there will be severance benefits. Then he's back to banging on about "iconic" tablets and "new interaction models".
At Nokia, Elop became famous for writing a memo that compared the company's position to that of a man on a burning oil platform. His bosses didn't like it but at least it caught the reader's attention.
This latest dispatch is jargon-heavy management bluster. Apple and Samsung have nothing to fear.


text:
Montana — Molly B, a lucky Montana cow that was spared after jumping over a slaughterhouse gate and swimming across the Mississippi River, is being given a new home.
The cow, Molly B, was among an estimated 1,200 animals removed from the Montana Large Animal Sanctuary and Rescue in recent weeks as part of a massive effort to bail out its overwhelmed owners.
Animal rights groups said they were forced to euthanize dozens of starving and ill cattle, horses and llamas found on the 400-acre sanctuary in rural Sanders County.
The bovine celebrity herself – an overweight black Angus breed said to be sore in the hoof but otherwise relatively healthy – was removed to a nearby ranch and is headed this week to a smaller farm sanctuary.
Read more at Associated Press.com


text:
Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren (D) raised a whopping $5.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, her campaign announced today.
Sen. Scott Brown (R) raised $3.2 million for the race against Warren in the past three months — a respectable total for a Senate candidate but one that pales in comparison to Warren's haul.
"From all across our commonwealth, people are supporting our campaign and the fight to level the playing field for middle class families," Warren said in a statement.
Warren, a former administration official, announced her campaign in September. She quickly tapped into a network of progressive activists who supported her creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
She outraised Brown in the previous quarter as well, $3.15 million to $1.55 million.
"Elizabeth Warren is being financed by extreme liberal special interests from outside Massachusetts," said Massachusetts Republican Party spokeswoman Alleigh Marré in a statement.
But Brown still has far more cash on hand than his rival — $12.8 million to Warren's $6 million, according to the Boston Globe.
Brown and Warren are two of the top fundraisers of the 2012 cycle, gearing up for what is sure to be a very expensive, very competitive race. The most recent polling has Warren leading by 7 points.


text:
(Archived on Saturday - March - 27/03/2021 )
With all the recent beautiful spring sunshine and fine weather, the following prayer is appropriate as we move into the last few days of March.
A March prayer
Lord of the wind and the waves, calm the storms of our life when we are afraid.
Lord of the loaves and fishes, be our food when we are hungry.
Lord of spring, growth and new life, be our source of new beginnings.
Lord of the lambs and the flocks, seek us out when we are lost.
Lord of signs and wonders, show yourself when we have doubts.
Lord of the blind and lame, take our hand when we falter.
Lord of the fields and flowers, care for us when others seem far away.
Lord of all that lives, be a source of life when we're struggling to be alive and active in our daily activities.
Lord of simplicity, help us to recognise your gentle presence in everything we do each day. Amen


text:
Mark Kermode: Just to start things rolling, and this is not specifically connected to Inland Empire which we've just seen, but transcendental meditation is a really big thing in your life. The last time we talked, it was entirely about how TM had changed and affected your life. In as much as it is possible to explain this complex subject in a pitifully small amount of time, please explain to us what TM has done for your consciousness and what you believe it's capable of doing for the greater good?
David Lynch: How many people have heard of TM? Quite a few. Good. TM is a mental technique. It's an ancient form of meditation that allows any human being to dive within and transcend and experience the unbounded, infinite ocean of pure consciousness. Pure vibrant consciousness, bliss, intelligence, creativity, love, power, energy - all there within. At the base of mind, the base of matter, is this field. And it's there. Modern science has just discovered the unified field by going deeper and deeper and deeper into matter. And there it was: a field of oneness, unity. They can't go in there with their instruments and everything, but any human being can go dive within through subtle levels of mind and intellect, transcend and experience this field. When you experience this deepest field, it's a beautiful experience, and experiencing it enlivens it and you grow in consciousness.
You grow in creativity and intelligence. And the side effect is that negativity starts to recede. Things like hate, anger and depression, sorrow, anxieties - these things start to recede and you live life in more freedom, more flow of ideas, more appreciation and understanding of everything.
It's so beautiful for working on projects. It's a field of knowingness - you enliven that and you get this kind of intuitive thing going. It's so beautiful for the arts, for any walk of life. In Vedic science, this field is called Atma, the self and there's a line, "Know thyself." In the Bible they say, "First seek the kingdom of heaven which lies within and all else will be added unto you." You dive within, you experience this, you unfold it and you're unfolding totality. The human has this potential and they have names for this potential: enlightenment, liberation, salvation, fulfilment - huge potential for the human being. And we don't need to suffer. You enliven this thing and you realise that bliss is our nature. We're like happy campers, flowing with ideas. We're like little dogs with tails wagging. It's not a goofball thing, it's a beautiful full thing, really, really great.
MK: I'm right in thinking that your relationship with that has mirrored your film-making career - you started TM around the same time that you were making Eraserhead, is that right?
DL: That's correct.
MK: And it's something that you've done throughout your career?
DL: Yes.
MK: So the question that's always asked is, if TM creates positiveness and all the things you've talked about - and I can see that it genuinely does - some people might ask what about all the darkness that's in your films?
DL: Exactly. We are all different at the surface and one at the core, unity. We are one world family. On the surface, different - I like this, you don't like this. And we catch ideas. Sometimes, we catch an idea that we fall in love with. And if it's a cinema idea, we see what cinema could do to that idea and we're rolling. Stories hold conflict and contrast, highs and lows, life and death, and the human struggle and all kinds of things. But the artist doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You gotta understand it. You don't have to die to do a death scene. You just have to understand it in your own way, but understanding is the thing, understand this suffering, this anger, this character. And you go like that.
I thought when I started meditation that I was going to get real calm and peaceful and it's going to be over. It's not that way, it's so energetic. That's where all the energy and creativity is. Everything that is a thing has emerged out of this field. So it's tremendous creativity. And you don't lose your edge, you get more, stronger feeling for something and it can be magnified. And you don't get sleepy and laidback in this kind of flat-line peace. It's a dynamic peace. It's very powerful, it's where all the power is. So the thing is you can make all these stories but you're separate from it. And that's the key.
MK: I'd like to show a clip from Eraserhead, but before I do, one specific question. One of the recurrent images in your films is of electricity arcing, light-bulbs crackling, two points and something arcing between them. And it seems to me that this somehow relates to what you think about the synaptic arcs in our brains, about making connections. I know you hate saying what things mean in your films, but am I right in thinking that that's at least in the right area?
DL: [pause] No. [audience laughs] Mark is a beautiful guy. It's like that, but I didn't think of it that way. I just love electricity. I like smoke and fire and electricity, these things are mesmerising. You could watch a thing sparking and arcing for hours, and it makes such a beautiful sound. And it's also a disturbance. There's something about electricity that does kind of what you say, but it's not necessarily the reason that it's there.
MK: This is a clip from Eraserhead. Usually in these circumstances I set up for you in narrative terms what's happened up to this point, but there's really no point in explaining. So here's a clip that I quite like.
[runs clip]
MK: One reason why I wanted to show that sequence is that it's a musical sequence. So much of what you do is related to music or harmony, the suspended chords and the way the narratives work. The other reason is that in the case of Inland Empire, it's the first time since Eraserhead that you've made something without any outside interference at all. It's taken years to put together, it grew and seemed to form organically, and the end film is entirely your own project. And that was sort of similar to Eraserhead. You've said that you don't have to actually suffer when you're making art, but people did always talk about Eraserhead as an extremely personal project, as is Inland Empire. Do you see those two things as connected? Please don't say no again.
DL: I won't say yes. There's only been Dune where I didn't have final cut. You know, I came to film-making through painting. Nobody fiddles with a painter and his painter. It should be that way in film, and we should have total control. That way the thing has a chance of holding together as a whole. So all the films were that way. Although I understand what you're talking about. Eraserhead took about six years from start to finish - I kept running out of money, so that's why it took so long. Inland Empire, it started as scene by scene, and there were long times before the next scene came. Finally it started unfolding more rapidly. So when it goes like that it's very frustrating, but it also gives you a chance to go slow and sink into a world and live in that world. The world of Eraserhead, I lived in that world for years, and it was a beautiful experience.
MK: In the case of Inland Empire, just at nuts and bolts level, I've read various versions of where the story came from. One of them is that Laura Dern told you about a neighbour coming to see her and that she suggested the title. Another is that it came out of work that you were doing for the website [davidlynch.com]. As far as you can tell, where did the genesis of the story come from?
DL: It is true that Laura Dern came along and started this. She was walking down the sidewalk in front of my house and smiling as she approached. I hadn't seen her in a long time. She came and announced that she was my new neighbour. And this made us both very happy. And then she said, "David, we gotta do something again some time." And it struck me and I said, "Yes, we do. Maybe I'll write something." And that meeting there triggered a thing, a desire to write something. And desire is like a bait, it can bring things in. And lo and behold, it started bringing things in.
Where the title came from is another story. Later, in the middle of shooting, about a third through, she was telling me that her husband was from the Inland Empire, which is an area east of LA that encompasses many towns. She went on talking but my mind stuck on those words. I'd heard them before but now they had a new meaning and I stopped her and I said, "That's the title of this film." Then, at the same time almost, my brother who was up in Montana, cleaning the basement of my parents' log cabin, discovered this old scrapbook that had fallen behind a chest of drawers. He dusted it off and found that it was my scrapbook from when I lived in Spokane, Washington, aged five. He sent it to me. I get this, I open it up and the first picture is an aerial view of Spokane and underneath it says, "Inland Empire." So I had the most beautiful feeling of a correct title.
MK: And is it correct that there are certain elements, like for instance the rabbit sitcom, that have their genesis on your website?
DL: Yes, it ran on the site and was called Rabbits. Sometimes we start something and we think it is that. And later, it finds a new home. It was like going towards that, or later, it sprouts and becomes a bigger thing. You don't ever know. It's important that when you get an idea, write it down so you won't forget it. And then, when you're doing it, so many things can flow from that doing.
MK: Next clip that I want to show is from Blue Velvet. You've been talking about Laura Dern and this is a key Laura Dern scene. This has been written about often as ironic, and this has always made me quite cross because there never seemed to be anything ironic about it at all. This is when Laura Dern describes her dream of love. I always thought it was meant to be completely sincere and not ironic at all. You have said in the past that it's not meant to be ironic, so I hope that's still the case. Here's that lovely scene from Blue Velvet.
[runs clip]
MK: The thing I absolutely love about that clip is I think that when Laura Dern describes that dream, it's like you were saying earlier, it's not in a goofy way but in a real way. And you do really mean that, don't you?
DL: Yes. The phenomenon of a shared experience in a theatre is very different than seeing a film on your own. And in a theatre, we all have this thing where we want to be very cool and when you see something like this, really kind of embarrassing, the tendency is to laugh so that you are saying out loud that this is embarrassing and not cool and you're hip to the scene. So this kind of thing happens. But we also always know that when we're alone with this person that we're falling in love with, we do say goofy things, but we don't have a problem with it, it's so beautiful. And the other person's so forgiving of these beautiful, loving, goofy things. So there's a lot of this swimming in this scene. At the same time, there's something to that scene, a truth to it, in my book.
MK: There's also, in the background of it, Angelo Badalamenti, the master of the suspended chord, the person whose music kind of embodies that sense that you get in your films of two worlds vibrating against each other. And it's the thing in between that's important. He is the great suspended chord writer of his generation.
DL: He is. He can tear your heart out.
MK: The last thing I want to show is a scene from Fire Walk With Me. The reason I want to show this is, when it opened, it got very poor reviews in some places. And I remember watching it, and I think it's still my favourite of your films; I really, really loved it. It seemed that when the press turned on Fire Walk With Me, they didn't just dislike it, they were actively hostile towards it. Years later, I spoke to Angelo Badalamenti about it, and I said it must have been heartbreaking when that happened. And he said, "For David, it was like somebody had taken away his kid and was murdering the child." How bad did it feel when Fire Walk With Me was that badly received? And do you now feel vindicated, now that people feel it's actually a masterpiece?
DL: No, I didn't feel bad.
MK: No? He lied!
DL: Angelo lied. When you do something and you have final cut, you have control over it, and you've done the best that you can do and not walked away until all the elements feel correct and you really feel that, then you can take that heavy negative reaction. It was on Dune, where I knew I was selling out, and then still you get a bad review, that's dying two times. And so, I just died a little bit on Fire Walk With Me. But it's true, and the reaction was understandable at the time. It wasn't in the same spirit as the series, that's what people got upset about. And the series was tapering anyway. And there was a dark cloud over things for me right around that time. It was just destined to happen that way. But over time, since then, its reputation has come up.
MK: The key line is, "We live inside a dream." Do we?
DL: Very much, we do.
MK: So we're going to show this clip. Again you'll recognise the setting and the characters. I think this is a great redemptive moment, but then you said maybe it's dark.
DL: We'll talk about it.
[runs clip]
MK: It isn't redemptive?
DL: You know, he wants his garmonbozia.
MK: Which is corn?
DL: Which is pain and sorrow.
MK: In what language?
DL: It's in the subtitle in there.
MK: But where does the word come from?
DL: I don't know. It just came.
MK: So, in your language.
DL: It's their language. So in a way, they sort of liked feeding off that. The creamed corn.
MK: When you were making Fire Walk With Me, you said that one of the reasons you wanted to do it was that you wanted to get back to Twin Peaks. You had fallen in love with the place, and I think there's an entire generation of people who did fall in love with the place of Twin Peaks, with the atmosphere of that series. I know that things, as you say, petered, but there was a moment when it was like, that was the place that we all wanted to be.
DL: It's strange. Twin Peaks exists in a part of the north-west, a fictitious part, but it's there. It's a small town, and yet the story travelled around the world. Go figure, what it was that caught all different cultures and places. It was a strange, beautiful surprise.
MK: And was it as a result of Twin Peaks that, you have a line of coffee, don't you?
DL: Yes, but not as a result of Twin Peaks.
MK: I know you like coffee.
DL: I love coffee, but many human beings love coffee. And I think this David Lynch signature cup coffee will please those coffee-lovers.
MK: For those who don't know, it has the most fantastic advert, which is a picture of you and it says, "It's all in the beans, and I'm just full of beans."
DL: Yes. [laughs]
MK: Are you happy to take questions? Okay, let's start there.
Q1: I've grown up watching your films and I think there aren't many film-makers out there who depict the human condition, and human affliction, as you do. What's your take on that and how does it relate to your transcendental meditation?
DL: The affliction that you're talking about is suffering, and there's a thing when our desires are blocked, there's this huge frustration, and that frustration can turn into anger, and it can turn into what they call unproductive thinking and actions. So the character of say, Frank Booth - I didn't think about this, Frank Booth just literally came walking along as an idea, but at the same time you can see there's some very tender thing to Frank, but there's so much torment and tension and suffering in the guy that he's just bound by that. Bill Pullman in The Lost Highway, the same thing. It just builds up and builds up and builds up. Now, if that same person could transcend and experience this deepest level, the lid would come off this pressure - beautiful, beautiful. It's like in darkness, the light would come on and the darkness would just start going. And then Frank would be, maybe not as interesting as in the film, but Frank himself would be a much, much happier cowboy.
Q2: Thank you for such an astonishing new piece of work. Inland Empire has an unconventional distribution method. Is that because the major studios and distributors don't want to take it up? And if that's the case, do you believe that the mainstream cinema audience has lost the capacity to think or that the studios are afraid that they have?
DL: There's a whole bunch of things. One, Inland Empire is three hours long and two, people have trouble understanding it. It's the kiss of death; for a distributor looking at this, it's a horror to them. On my website, I started distribution of Eraserhead and the short films and other things, and we made contacts and friends, and a conduit got developed to stores. And we thought, wait a minute, maybe we could do this with Inland Empire. That was before there was even any wondering about distributors and what they would think. Then, the advances that distributors give - just like in the music business, these advances used to be huge. And they just went down and down and down. So people get asked to do an album for nothing now. And the same thing has happened in the film business. So, then you find, at least in the States, I never got a nickel, no matter how much a film made, more than that advance. Not a nickel. All kinds of creative accounting.
So we thought, why not go out and try, and the trying is so beautiful because we go to different cities and meet people like tonight and get a feel for how things are going. And the feel I got from the United States was... I always thought the real film-lovers were in Europe. But there's a huge, huge bunch in the States, who are just longing for an alternative to what comes out of Hollywood, more and more and more. So that's a very uplifting feeling. Meeting the theatre owners and having a relationship with them, which is the last stop for a film, in that theatre, in that dark room and the big picture and the right sound, it's all a good thing. It might not be the future for all film-makers, but it's a future for more.
MK: What's the truth or otherwise of this story that you went on the road campaigning for Laura Dern with a cow that said, "If it wasn't for cheese, there wouldn't be an Inland Empire"?
DL: This is true. I didn't have a lot of money to support Laura in the traditional way, which is to buy a lot of these ads in the trades. Theoretically, people in the Academy read these trades and they see a picture that cost so much money, and they change their minds on who they vote for based on this picture. It's absurd. So lots and lots of money spent, I don't think it does any good, but they call them vanity pictures and lots of actors, they like to see the picture and they like to know they're supported by the studio like this. It makes sense, but I didn't have that money. So I got this idea to go out with a cow and a big placard for Laura, and sat on the corner of Hollywood and La Brea and, within an hour, these television news people came, and a crowd gathered. And it was mainly, I think, for the cow. But Laura appreciated that so much, and people appreciated it, but she still didn't get a nomination.
Q3: In a lot of your films, you're very much concerned with stage performances, like we saw in that clip from Eraserhead. And in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, you have actresses playing actresses who are in turn playing another part and they play another part in that film. I was wondering why you're so focused on this idea of performance in your films?
DL: I don't know. I always say it comes with the idea. But then you get lots of ideas, but you fall in love with certain ideas. And I have a thing for curtains and the stage. But then, I think everybody does because a curtain hides something and we want to know what's behind this curtain. And in the cinema, when the curtain opens and the lights go down, it's so beautiful and magical, there's something to it. So it thrills me. If an idea comes and it holds that kind of thing, I fall in love.
Q4: I wanted to ask about the idea of the stock company. In Hollywood, you've had John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, even Clint had stock-company actors. You've surrounded yourself with people like the great Jack Nance, Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, the cast from Twin Peaks and the great, underrated On the Air. What is it about those people particularly that you feel drawn to?
DL: I think what happens is, the rule is, get the right person for the role. If there're two people who are basically both right, and you've worked with one of them before, and you have a shorthand to working and have a good relationship with them, you're going to pick that person. It goes like that.
Q5: Do you watch current movies? If so, are there any current directors that you like?
DL: I haven't watched any for some time. I like to work but I'm not really a film buff. But I was asked this question just today - I liked Aki Kaurismäki's film, The Man Without a Past.
Q6: Which painters or creators influenced your work or your vision of art?
DL: I always say Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is my biggest influence. But for painters, I like many, many painters but I love Francis Bacon the most, and Edward Hopper. Both really different, but Edward Hopper makes us all dream, take off from a painting. Magical stuff. And Bacon for a whole bunch of reasons, but those two are big, big, big inspirations.
MK: Am I right in thinking that there's a major exhibition of your paintings happening, is it in Paris?
DL: It's in Paris, opens in March. It's paintings and drawings and photos and things.
MK: Should we go?
DL: Well, that's up to you. But I think you'd enjoy the show.
Q7: wanted to know how you got to using DV, and in doing that, do you think you would go back to some of those projects that haven't come around, for instance, Ronnie Rocket or One Saliva Bubble?
DL: I started getting into DV through the website, doing short things with a Sony PD150. Started kind of falling in love with this camera, the way there's so much freedom connected to it. Then I started, in the early days of Inland Empire, getting an idea for a scene, writing it and shooting it, with just the Sony PD150. When more came, and I see it's a feature, I stuck with that camera. I did tests up-resing it and the up-res to film, I loved the look of it. It's not the same quality as film, but it has its own feel that I fell in love with. And more than that, this small camera, with 40-minute takes, automatic focus, seeing exactly what you're going to get, it is... I'm deeply in love with this now, it's so good for the scenes and the actors. Magic things can be caught which maybe couldn't be caught with film because you're always stopping - the longest you can go after a slate is about nine minutes. It's always broken and it always moves so slow, everything's so heavy. It's a horror compared with DV.
MK: Are you working as your own operator with that camera?
DL: Yes, you can be there very close, in way more tender action and reaction. You can talk and start again and talk. And it can catch a thing that, like I said, maybe they couldn't have caught before.
MK: Could you now see yourself going back to film?
DL: I don't know that I will, but the digital world would be very, very friendly to Ronnie Rocket.
Q8: I'm studying film at the moment and my biggest influence is you. Can you give me any advice as a struggling future film director?
DL: Stay true to your voice, stay true to the ideas, never turn down a good idea but never take a bad idea. And don't take no for an answer.
Q9: I was just wondering whether you would consider cinema as a kind of consciousness, in that it's making decisions, it's allowing us to see characters and events in certain ways?
DL: Ideas come from consciousness because ideas are things. Consciousness turns itself into things. So the whole cosmos is vibrating consciousness. There are things that cinema can do that can catch an abstraction and it can say something that can't be said any other way, or it could be said with words but it would take a poet. Cinema can do abstractions, but I don't think cinema can make you transcend. I think cinema could get you into deeper and deeper levels, theoretically I guess it could. It can say deeper and abstract things and give indications of hidden things. It's a magical medium, but this thing of consciousness... The best way to know what it is is to pretend that you didn't have it. And if you didn't have consciousness, you wouldn't exist. Or if you did exist, you wouldn't know it. It's the "I am" ness. It's the ageless thing we talk to. It's awareness and it's the thing. Some people think, "I think, therefore I am", that the brain produces consciousness. But it's the other way round; consciousness produces the brain - it produces a fish, it produces a tree, from the subtlest it just keeps coming out. It just makes things.
MK: Do you not think there are moments in cinema, especially in your cinema, in which moments of transcendence happen? Like when I watch that Laura Dern speech, something happens which is not of the moment.
DL: It could give you a blissful, beautiful feeling; whether you really get into that real transcendence, I don't know. But transcending is a natural thing. Many, many, many people have transcended, but they don't know how they did it, and they don't know how to do it again. So they say, when you're falling asleep, and going from waking to sleep, you pass through a gap, that synapse thing. People say, "Woah, I see a white light" or 'I feel bliss" - it doesn't always happen but the transcendent is behind all waking, sleeping and dreaming. It permeates creation, it's there, it's our self. And you just need to experience it to enliven it. And then it gets more and more and more.
Q10: What is it about Poland that made you decide to film Inland Empire there, and with Polish actors as well?
DL: A car arrived and five or six guys get out and come into my house. And they're from Lodz, Poland, and they say they're from the Camerimage film festival. They're the greatest bunch, these guys who run the festival, the hardest workers. They've been putting on this festival for 14 or 15 years now, on their own against all odds and it gets bigger and bigger every year. Really beautiful. They invited me over there and I asked them if I went there, because I heard there were factories, so I asked if they could get me into factories so that I could photograph, and if they could get me nude women at night to photograph.
MK: In the factories?
DL: Not in the factories. It would be very cold. And they said yes to both things. And they were as good as their word. But the city of Lodz is so beautiful to me and there's so much mood there. The architecture and the clouds and the way it all is, it's its own place. And I start falling in love. I think a place, like music or anything, it can conjure ideas. And ideas started coming out of Lodz, Poland. And one thing led to another and there it was, Hollywood feeding some of it and Lodz feeding some of it.
Q11: You were saying at the start about going deeply into the world of a film when you're filming it. But when you finish the film and you're watching it back, does it seem strange to you? Does it feel like you're a waking person looking back at a strange dream? Do you have that distance from a film?
DL: After a while. You just know a little bit too much, so it takes a while for that to go. But I can have a good experience sometimes, if I haven't seen Eraserhead for a while, to go into that world again. I got a DVD made that's so beautiful. It's clean, the sound is good even with all the compression. I was tweaking the digital projector. I feel that the DVD is better than the film prints. I just saw a film print because the Museum of Modern Art has Eraserhead and has restored it, and there are many, many, many problems with it on film, but on DVD it was just rock solid.
MK: If I can bring this to a conclusion on that note - the consistent thing through all your movies is the extraordinary soundscape, dating back to the work of Alan Splet. These sounds that we think of as Lynchian, the ambient noise. It does seem to me that sometimes you can watch a David Lynch film with your eyes closed because of what's happening on the soundtrack.
DL: Well, that's very nice but it's sound and picture moving together. And it's a magic thing. And you try to get those sounds to marry with that picture and enhance it, based on the idea. When they flow together and they marry, then you've got a chance at the thing where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And that's beautiful.
MK: I think you're an incredible advert for TM, frankly, because if it does what it does to you to everybody else, then I would advocate it immediately, because you are full of beans. Ladies and gentlemen, the fabulous David Lynch.


text:
Tula Commissioner visited elections in Bogoroditsk
From 8 o'clock in the morning — immediately after the polling stations opened for the elections of deputies of the local
— The first thing I pay attention to is the opportunity of people with disabilities to realize their electoral rights. That's why firstly I visited the polls adapted for challenged persons' voting. I can say that both I and the voters who came by wheelchairs were satisfied with how the polls were prepared. I can say that the citizens of Bogoroditsk are showing an enviable consciousness, they are willing to go to the polls. One woman told me this: "I can't look after the city life just standing at the window. I have to take part in it." I like such approach. I also should note that the elections are going smoothly. There are observers at all the polls, they do not detect any violations, — said Galina Fomina.
Adapted from the media


text:
Father John Corapi has decided to leave the priesthood in the wake of the sex abuse allegation brought against him a few months ago. He leaves us this parting message:
This message is a mixed pickle. On the one hand, if indeed the allegations are false, Father is correct in stating that there is no way for him to prove a negative, that he did not do what is alleged.
On the other hand, if the allegations are false, he is a priest forever and able to live a quiet monastic life among the brothers in his order. He is choosing not to amid his cries of innocence. In this terrible message, Father Corapi's bitterness and bile are abundantly evident, and his black sheepdog self-identification is dark and ominous.
A true love for the people of God, for Jesus, dictates that Father Corapi get some fundamental facts straight. First, a priest and a religious are who he is. A televangelist is what he does. Because the sacrament of ordination effects a permanent ontological change in the essence of the man, Father Corapi remains a priest forever, whether he does so as a black sheepdog leading others into rebellion against the bishops, or whether he remains a secluded priest among his brothers in the SOLT, his order.
False allegation is a bitter pill to swallow and, if he is truly innocent, he should demonstrate his innocence by swallowing that pill alone.
There was much truth spoken in his video, and the bishops have lurched from one extreme to the other on the issue of child safety. However, the allegations come from a grown woman with no allegations of rape. In short, it's a mess. However, Father Corapi's bitterness and rage threaten to lead many away from the Church, and that is never good–no matter the reason.
If the newly minted black sheepdog leads so much as one soul astray, his entire twenty years of service will have amounted to a self-aggrandizing lie.
I would encourage Father to stay, pray, and listen for the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit. He isn't losing his priesthood. It isn't being taken away. Father Corapi is doing something to it that no person but Father can do.
And he needs to stop it.
UPDATE: Father Corapi's Superior Speaks Out: Shocking Details.


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If you use your pen a lot, there may come a day when it runs out of ink. That's annoying, but fixable. There's no need to discard your lovely pen, just because the ink isn't flowing! Learn how to replace the ink in a polymer clay pen, and continue to enjoy it for years to come!Read More: Replacing the Ink in a Polka Dot Cottage Pen
Tag: stick pens
TWiP: Work Life Balance
Scenes from the third week of the year.Read More: TWiP: Work Life Balance
TWiP: polymer clay by day, knitting by night
I've done a lot of making this week.Read More: TWiP: polymer clay by day, knitting by night
Handmades Shop open for business!
The Handmades Shop, which has been under construction for the last few months, is updated and open for business! Get yer fancy stick pens, yer unique crochet hooks, and more 🙂Read More: Handmades Shop open for business!
You've twisted my arm, now it's time!
I'm opening up the custom shop for one week, or until I get as many orders as I can realistically handle. Don't miss it! 🙂Read More: You've twisted my arm, now it's time!


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Astronomical Marathon Set For Hobbs State Park
The Messier Astronomical Marathon is set for Saturday and Sunday at Hobbs State Park's Conservation Area on Arkansas 12 just east of War Eagle Road in Rogers.
The Sugar Creek Astronomical Society of Bella Vista will lead the free, all-night marathon from sunset Saturday to sunrise Sunday. Classroom explanation of the Messier objects begins at 6:30 p.m., with night viewing following at 7:30 p.m.
Charles Messier, an 18th-century French astronomer, often saw objects that at first to him looked like comets, but were in fact other occupants of the sky. To keep from being confused in his quest for comets, he made a list of those unfamiliar objects that he and his contemporaries had discovered. In all, 110 objects comprise the list. Today, Messier's catalog of comet lookalikes is an excellent compilation of the brightest and best deep-space objects.
A Messier marathon is an attempt, usually organized by amateur astronomers, to find as many of the Messier objects as possible during one night.
Before the marathon begins, the evening will begin with a short program in the visitor center on the Messier objects, where they are found in the sky, and in what order the Sugar Creek group will attempt to view them.
Sky-watchers are encouraged to join the all-night marathon with their own telescopes and binoculars; opportunities will be available for the public to view the deeper space objects through the Sugar Creek Club's larger scopes.
Participants should bring a flashlight, binoculars and/or telescope, folding chair, folding chaise lounge, star chart, snacks and non-alcoholic beverages.
For information, call (479) 789-5000.