May 2006

The day you’ve been waiting for: Happy Birthday Mike Leslie, Worcester’s newest visionary junk shop, opens today. I stopped by the in the morning to drop off a copy of Stale Urine’s Bachelor Party! They weren’t open yet.

(I’m hoping to see the use of the Flickr tag happybirthdaymikeleslie explode.)

Update: Stopped by again this afternoon, and they were open. Dropped off the CD. The place is magnificent. Scored some good stuff (pictured) for $7.

Golden Pizza burns: Looks like a fire hit the Golden Pizza on Chandler near Mason this morning.

Animals: Erik Marcus has a podcast about anger and activism. He thinks that because there’s so much to be angry about, unless you can deal with these negative feelings you’ll get worn down. How does Erik deal with his anger over Adam Durand getting 6 months for documenting a cruel egg farm? By doing a literary analysis of the judge’s statement. That, and thinking about Mr Rogers.

Catholicism: Apparently, to win the “Left Behind” video game, you have to convert or kill Catholics and non-Christians. The Book of Revelation, like the rest of the Bible, has lots of irony, and I wouldn’t be surprised if during the end times a bunch of uniforms and guns dropped from the sky, and Christian gangs took them and began a slaughter. I can picture one guy stopping for a moment and noticing the patches on his friend’s blood-spattered uniform: “Hey, our unit number is six-six-six . . . .”

Anyhow, before exterminating Catholics, you might want to learn the real story from “Harsh Truths About Catholicism“:

CLAIM: The inverted cross on some papal decorations shows the Catholic Church’s devotion to Satan.

This is false. The inverted cross actually shows the pope’s dedication to Danish heavy metal band Mercyful Fate.

Here are three great things in Worcester.

The first: you can buy a whole, frozen durian! In fact, you can buy it at a store about 100 yards from my house.
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Last fall I criticized the Mayor’s Social Service Task Force Report because:

First, it doesn’t have a plan for getting beyond the current hostility between social service agencies and neighborhood groups.

Second, it provides no incentive for social service agencies to follow the “best practices” it outlines for siting social service programs.

This week, the City Council voted 8-0 to endorse the report. (City Solicitor David M. Moore convinced them that endorsing the report would not violate the law, despite clear indications that this report will get the city sued at some point.)

At a Council meeting last fall, I brought my concerns to the Council. They didn’t seem to think the report was vague at all, and thought that it was practically a Roadmap to Peace between agencies and property owners’ groups.

This morning, the T&G reports on last night’s meeting between the agency SMOC and some Main South people.

Despite the presence of “five city councilors,” “the third in a series of meetings between neighbors and SMOC” was “the most acrimonious yet.”

There’s a bumper sticker that says: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”

The Worcester City Council needs to put out its own bumper sticker: “There is no way to peace.”

I was ordained to be an elder in the United Reformed Church this weekend. Our esteemed editor Mike B. wants me to write a bit about how I understand the ministry, so here is my preliminary treatise.

By clever use of transitivity, biblical prooftext, and etymological analyses, one can identify “elders” with “bishops”. But there is no mitre for us, and there is no authority in individual elders. This is because we in the Reformed tradition do not have a hierarchical view of the Church, but a conciliar view: the authority in polity and governance, if any, is in the meetings of the church (including such ones as synods and general assemblies).
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Totally topless: Buck Paxton points out that the Worcester city ordinances prohibit bar employees from displaying their aureolae (haloes) but not their areolae (nipples).

Adam Villani points out that Kern County regulates the sale of breast-shaped pillows on the highway.
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The leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, gave a speech this week pressing all the right buttons for me: “Well-being can’t be measured by money or traded in markets. It’s about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and, above all, the strength of our relationships.”

The Church of England released its Faithful Cities report this week: “For a just and equitable society, the gap between the very wealthy and the poor must be reduced.”

They should keep doing this.

After his all-black basketball team was eliminated from the playoffs, South High Coach Williams accused two referees of racial or class bias. Many denounced him as a race-baiting sore loser, but a number of coaches, teachers, players, parents, and even another referee supported his allegations and demanded a full review. Many saw this as an opportunity for Worcester to grow in racial sensitivity.

Unfortunately, the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association decided to suspend Williams for four games and require that he attend anger management classes. The Telegram & Gazette front page story on the decision noted that in 1992 the MIAA gave a milder penalty to a coach who grabbed a referee. When the coach of St. John’s grabbed a referee, spinning him around, during a game in 2004, no penalty at all was imposed.

To all those aware of racism’s deep roots in our society, Williams’s punishment represents not only a failure to consider his serious charges, but also a warning to others not to raise the issue again.

Immediately below the Williams story, the T&G featured a report that the History Channel has chosen our region to stand in for the Old South in an upcoming film. Was this a coincidence or commentary on the MIAA?

A reader letter:

Mike,

While searching Father Basil Pennington I encountered an old posting you may have made on Pie and Coffee. The posting indicated you “stopped by the monastery last week to pick up a donation of food for some shelters and soup kitchens in Worcester, and they also gave me several boxes with Fr Pennington’s clothes. It was like being handed a crate of holy relics.”

Father Pennington is meaningful in my life. He influenced me with his teaching on Centering Prayer, his writings, and a personal chance meeting in the book store while on retreat at Saint Joseph’s Abbey many years ago. Feeling like a kid approaching a great athlete I asked him to autograph his book Centering Prayer.

Your feeling of holding a crate of holy relics is very understandable.

On today’s front page of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, there’s a front-page article headlined above the fold: “Central Mass. to become Old South for TV movie.”

Above that is another article: “Boy’s basketball coach suspended: South High’s Williams alleged racist referees.” From Jackie Reis’s article:

South High Community School boys’ varsity basketball coach Patrick Williams has been suspended for two weeks or four games, the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association announced yesterday.

The penalty comes after Mr. Williams alleged that two of three referees at a Division 1 semifinals game March 5 were racist and caused his team to lose to Holy Name Central Catholic Junior/Senior High School in double overtime. Mr. Williams apologized to the MIAA five days later for “bringing racism into the conversation” and for violating MIAA rule 50.1.1, which prohibits coaches from publicly criticizing game officials.

[…]

The MIAA suspended former Burncoat High School boys’ basketball coach Jim Diamantopoulos for one year for allegedly grabbing a referee in 1992. That suspension, however, was reduced to eight days upon appeal after the MIAA sportsmanship committee determined there was “no physical assault” by Mr. Diamantopoulos, who missed just one game.

The ruling doesn’t appear on the MIAA website. No idea if Mr. Williams was additionally reprimanded for being “uppity.”

A regression analysis shows that the presence of Wal-Mart in a county increases family poverty.