June 2007On 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 »
Today I interviewed Worcester activist and City Council candidate Grace Ross on her experience with the “food stamp diet.” 
Many US politicians, including several members of Congress, have taken the challenge to eat on $3 a day, the average US food stamp benefit.
Open Source did a great show about the food stamp challenge.
Related at Vox Nova: The Welfare State– Right and Wrong Reasons.
An article by Dr Bob Purdie, based on a talk given at Evensong in Jesus College Chapel, Oxford, on Sunday 6th May 2007:
Fr Charles Dominic Plater SJ was a great Oxford Christian, a social visionary, an inspiring leader, a tireless organiser and a caring pastor. He is best remembered for his work of educating working people through the Catholic Social Guild (CSG) and his scheme for a Catholic Workers College (later named Plater College, it closed, sadly, in 2005). He was born in London in 1875, educated at Stoneyhurst, and was a Jesuit novice in Oxford between 1900 and 1904. He returned in 1916, as Rector of what became Campion Hall. In Oxford he developed his mission to soldiers, but refused to become a chaplain because an officer’s uniform was a barrier. He spoke out against the rivalries that had led to war. He developed retreats to give working people rest and spirituality away from work and poverty. And he collaborated with the great Anglican churchmen, Charles Gore and William Temple.
His work should be seen against the background of the challenge of the socialist movement. The radical American priest Fr T. J. Hagerty, said the effect on the church was like a colt seeing its first steam train. For Catholics, socialism was incompatible with the natural right to property, it offered entirely secular solutions and many socialists were atheists. But workers did have rights and the state had a duty to ensure that employers did not veto them. In the London Mansion House in 1919, Plater addressed a gathering of eminent people discussing industrial relations. He asked whether they really meant to bring Christianity into their endeavours, “You have to pay for it by doing a very curious thing which is rather out of the line of ordinary business – you have to pay for it by carrying a cross.”
The CSG was part of the popular educational movement of the early 20th century, with the Workers’ Educational Association, university extra-mural departments and Ruskin College, which was his model for the Catholic Workers College, He understood that all education must be pastoral but adult education must also be democratic. It requires, to use a Catholic word, “solidarity”, brimming with love for Christ which spilled out into the lives of his students. If he had been born twenty years later I can imagine him making friends with George MacLeod on Iona in the 1930s and I can hear him singing John Bell hymns in the Abbey, on retreat with his Catholic workers from Liverpool or Birmingham. I thank God for his life and I pray for the fulfilment of his vision.
a batch of haiku
catalogues our journey – here
with some photographs
Irish health warning:
perspective limits paper
(necessarily)
The Snow Ghost Community Show will start airing every weekend, starting this Friday. Fridays at 8:30PM, Saturdays at 11:30PM, Sundays at 9:30PM, and Mondays at 9:30AM, on cable channel 13 in Worcester.
We’re going to have a little party this Friday at the Catholic Worker to celebrate, since the guest is Catholic Worker Scott Schaeffer-Duffy talking about the Three Stooges.
As if that weren’t enough, you can now watch episode 100 (3) online.
A fellow Worcester blogger alerted me to this Toronto art project from earlier this year.
Mark Daye made these signs, with slogans like “Homeless Sleeping–QUIET,” for his design school thesis.
Spacing Wire has lots more pix, and The Star has an article. (I lifted this photo from The Star.)
Puts me in mind of Worcester’s ill-fated anti-panhandling campaign. The response to that mostly involved modifying existing signage, rather than creating new signs.
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