June 2007

On last night’s Jeopardy!, the $1600 answer in the category “Rage Against the Machine” (all about people raging against machines, not about the band) was:

In a 1980 antiwar protest, these priest brothers, Daniel & Philip, attacked missile warheads at a G.E. plant.

Contestant Roy, a building inspector from Rancho Cucamonga, California, correctly, albeit ungrammatically, questioned, “What is Berrigan?”

The record release party for the Snow Ghost’s new album was a success. It was low-key, as you might expect from an adult party held at Pizza Hut. Attendees included a guy with a Wikipedia page, a guy without a wikipedia page, and some guys who showed up in the paper the next day. And of course the Snow Ghost himself (pictured above), the most notable of the assembled celebrities.

You can order the album at the Snow Ghost homepage.

Snow Ghost news
The new Snow Ghost CD, “Despair, Death, and Redempshire,” is out. You can listen to it at the Internet Archive, or order a $10 ppd. copy at the Snow Ghost homepage.

We’re having the record release party tonight at Pizza Hut (Bruce’s brilliant idea). The attendees will be disproportionately vegan, and one of them pointed out to me that the only vegan stuff at Pizza Hut is the crushed red pepper and pizza sauce. “They put milk in things it seems you couldn’t put milk in.”

Jacob wrote a nice description of the Snow Ghost Community Show debut party at the Catholic Worker house. “the snow ghost’s connection with them is peculiar, in that he is a self-avowed ’satanic warrior’, but i guess they can still respect each other by virtue of being on the same coin, if opposite sides.”

Worcester Wal-Mart news
The Zoning Board of Appeals was supposed to hear a petition against the Wal-Mart this week, but because of a recent change in the zoning laws, they had to turn down this particular petition. They’ll likely hear the petition after a building permit is issued, which turns it back into an issue they can rule on.

You can listen to the discussion as an mp3 or in other formats.

City Council candidate websites

Just added Joe Casello’s site to the list.

Indiana, here I come

I’m leaving Worcester in a couple days to spend the summer at the South Bend Catholic Worker, and was planning to write an article on Pie and Coffee with a bunch of suggestions on what Worcester Magazine can do to improve, because I know editor Michael Warshaw reads (but doesn’t really like) my commentary on his magazine. But last week the T&G reported that Mr. Warshaw is leaving WoMag to edit a semiweekly paper in Framingham. Good luck and godspeed. Of the three major media outlets in Worcester, WoMag was the only one that doesn’t make a regular habit of insulting its readers’ intelligence, and if I’ve written lots about the things I don’t like in it, it’s because I like it enough to want to see it be even better.

Interesting comment on th T&G article from WoMag copy editor Lester Paquin. He points out four errors in the article, none of which were in the on-line version by the time I saw it. Does the T&G make on-line corrections without noting them? So it seems.

Zhèng Xiè 鄭燮, commonly known as Zhèng Bǎnqiáo 鄭板橋, was a Chinese scholar of the Qīng Dynasty who fluorished during the reign of the Qiánlóng Emperor. His “Letter to younger brother Zhèng Mò” 寄弟墨書, which I translate below, was included in my textbook for classical Chinese when I was in high school in Taiwan(!). Rumour has it that the famous Lin Yutang had also translated the same letter into English, which I fear is still in copyright. In any case, I loosely translate/paraphrase here, with the benefit of having read some Karl Marx, John Seymour, and Derek Wall. It is an essay that affirms the primacy of primary production (agriculture) for self-sufficiency and food sovereignty, equitable land management, and indigenous eco-socialism in China.

Dear Mò,

I am very glad to read, in your letter of the 26th day of the tenth month, that our newly-bought field yielded 25 tonnes of grain in the autumn. Now we can be farmers until we leave this world.

I think that farmers, the primary producers, are first-class people between the heaven and the earth. In contrast, we scholar-bureaucrats should be the last among the four classes, ranking after farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day I got a list of City Council candidates from the election commission so I could mail them a survey, so I went ahead and put the list on the Worcester Activist wiki too. I’m pleased to report that there’s been no vandalism yet.

Many people are running for City Council this year; only a few of them have websites.

(If there’s a website I skipped, e-mail pieandcoffee@gmail.com and I’ll update this article.)
Read the rest of this entry »