700 Arrested on Brooklyn Bridge: These arrests, of course, were dwarfed by the tens of thousands of Tea Party activists detained for civil disobedience over the past few months.
Get Ready for State Enterprise Services, Y’all: The new Megatron of State Services will include the administrative powerhouses of “General Administration, Information Services, Personnel, Printing and parts of the Office of Financial Management.”
Israel to Negotiate Directly, Without Preconditions: As per the Quartet Talks suggestion.
KISS the Bride: After a 28 year long relationship with Shannon Tweed, Gene Simmons has finally married. During the first dance, Tweed reportedly wore $2.5 million in diamonds.
Football or Something: Rumor has it there’s a game today at 1:05 p.m.. The PI has (I’m guessing) more useful pre-game commentary than I would have.
Awkwarrrd: Governor Huckabee hosted Governor Romney on his lovely Fox cable TV show, and the two grand old gentlemen were indeed jovial. Maybe this will prevent more speculation that Huckabee is reconsidering a run.
Former Parks Employee Under Scrutiny for the Most Obvious, Detectable Reasons: David Uberuaga, a former Mount Rainier parks employee, sold his home for triple the assessed value, to a company with a multimillion-dollar monopoly for business on the mountain.
Lutherans Bless Animals at Church: “‘All lizards, snakes and creeping things, praise the Lord,’ sang Burchfield as she neared the end. ‘Raccoons and squirrels, praise the Lord.'”
Seriously, just watch this song. Esperanza Spalding has performed more at Barack Obama’s White House than any other entertainer/artist/savant genius. Then watch it again and listen to the almost entirely distinct standup bass accompaniment that she’s doing at the same time.
OWS wins for the single most powerful live stream ever broadcast.
When the protestors turned to the camera and shouted their real names.
Kudos to police for handling even the most rambunctious kids with care.
Kudos to OWS for breaking through the clutter.
Interestingly the halfway on a bridge image had more power than the weeks at Wall Street.
Lutherans are an odd bunch, I kinda like them sometimes.
The Blessing of the Animals is common in many faith traditions.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-m-swee…
see also: Live Blog of #OccupyWallStreet: Day Sixteen, Aftermath of 700 Arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge
I’ve always regretted not going to see Esperanza Spalding when I had the chance. Hope she’ll come around again.
All I got out of that was hundreds of people died or starved so that Gene Simmons’ new wife could look pretty during her first dance.
@6, we may need to think about retooling that boilerplate.
http://www.realchangenews.org/index.php/…
wow, thanks for that Esperanza clip. gorgeous.
at the methodist church I attended last weekend, not only were animals blessed, but the whole congregation then went outside and blessed the new bike rack.
Heh. Yeah, the Methodists are about the closest thing to Unitarians within a 200-mile radius of where I am. Next week they’re doing a “Don’t Go To Church” thing on Sunday, instead asking the congregation to go out and actually do some good in the community–half a dozen or more possibilities including cleanups, food distribution, visits to the elderly and sick, etc. A group I belong to gave their recently retired minister our “Democratic Ideals” award.
I just don’t get it. What is “blessing” animals supposed to do? Make them go to imaginary heaven? Start speaking in tongues? Cancer free? I don’t get it. It’s straight out of the dark ages. I’m reminded of the couple in Oregon who were just found guilty of killing their child because they tried to pray away a curable illness.
Vince, I appreciate your anti-religion stance, I really do. If I could wave a magic wand [irony] and eliminate all organized religion from the face of the earth, I would, because I think it does far more harm than good. But faced with reality, I try to deal with the broad spectrum of human behavior that the impulse to faith (whatever its crazy origins) engenders.
There is a good case to be made that the roots of the modern environmental movement can be traced to St. Francis of Assisi–key elements include a sense of humility (that we are just part of a complex web of living and non-living substance), and a responsibility of stewardship (to not use up or destroy that which we do not understand and cannot replace). Other cultures also found ways to live in harmony with their surroundings, some much earlier than ours, some more completely than we.
So I’m in favor of anything that makes us pause in the dizzy, acquisitive whirl of our lives in order to consider benevolently our fellow creatures, what they bring to our lives, and what their unspoken needs might be (including more attention and patience). To, as George Booth put it, “think good thoughts about a pussy cat.” Kindness toward animals seems easier, somehow, than kindness to humans (at least among the non-psychopathic); and the wiser, more thoughtful humans seem better able to generalize and extend that kindness to their own species when given the opportunity for reflection.
http://johnesimpson.com/blog/2009/09/thi…
I love Esperanza Spalding. She and Alicia Keys need to do a collaboration jazz album
@11 In the dark ages, Christianity is good at dark ages,
it was decided that cats were witches and so they were crucified and burned alive by the tens of thousands. So many were killed that the rat population exploded. With the rats came their fleas. And with their fleas came the plague, resulting in the deaths of thousands. So much for Christian kindness to animals in history.