November 2009

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the four-week period of preparation for Christmas.

Advent isn’t as project-oriented as Lent, but there are many more popular rituals to mark this season. Notably, each Sunday you light candles around a wreath while praying. Today we light a purple candle, next week two, the next week we add a pink candle, then another purple, finally lighting all four plus a white candle for Christmas.

If there are children in the house, you probably have an Advent calendar with little pieces of candy attached to each day, a clever incentive for the children to remind you of the daily Advent prayer. The U.S. Bishops’ Advent website contains a simulated calendar with prayers instead of snacks.

Every year I also like caroling with friends and watching It’s a Wonderful Life with Bruce; one of my goals this Advent is to integrate them into these daily and weekly practices.

Most of all, this year I’m looking forward to sharing these traditions with a non-Catholic Christian friend who knows very little about this stuff, and hoping to gain a deeper appreciation of Advent in so sharing.

Ebenezer Scrooge was a businessman whose single employee, Bob Cratchit, a married father of four, worked for starvation wages. In the opening pages of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, we learn that Scrooge believes he is overtaxed by the government and “cannot afford to make others merry.” He doesn’t see himself as a miser, but as a victim of a bad economy. When Cratchit makes even the most modest suggestion of better working conditions (an extra lump of coal on the fire, a single day off a year), Scrooge threatens him with unemployment.

On November 6, 2009, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the unemployment rate had climbed to 10.2%, representing 16.4 million Americans, double the number of jobless when the recession began in December 2007. The government also reported that an additional 808,000 people had become “discouraged workers,” those “not looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them.” Perhaps most alarming in terms of race relations and future prospects, the unemployment rates for blacks was 15.4% and 25.7% for all teenagers.
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508 is a show about Worcester. This week, we talk with legendary Telegram & Gazette columnist Jim Dempsey and his WPI class about the state of Worcester journalism and whether bloggers can help.

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Two possible inspirations for Worcester amateurs: the NYT’s Virtual Assignment Desk, Clay Shirky’s “Let a thousand flowers bloom”

Nice profile of local Catholic Worker and awesome person Patty Angevine in the Telegram and Gazette. Among other things, she co-founded the great soup kitchen at St. John’s. (Note that it’s rarer than you might think for Catholic Workers, like Patty, to work professionally in social services.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Michael Iafrate makes the case against Thanksgiving, then admits:

. . . I am not about to be so politically smug that I would simply refuse to participate in my own family’s traditions.

Me neither. I love celebrating a fall feast with family, and I love celebrating a utopia in which natives and immigrants could co-exist. I’d embrace a chance to have a more honest celebration without giving up the joy.

Don’t forget that the day after Thanksgiving is Buy Nothing Day. I’ll be doing my bit to “keep the Christ in Christmas” by keeping myself out of the mall. For a great example of a joyous Buy Nothing Day, see Mark Dixon’s 49 Hours at Wal-Mart.

Worcester Police on Twitter

The WPD’s Twitter feed makes me wonder when we’ll see our first Worcester crime blogger. Seems like anyone could gather quite a bit of info with a computer, police scanner, and telephone.

508 is a show about Worcester. This week, Mike and Brendan discuss a skateboarding accident.

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Last night there was a forum on “Shaping a Local Green Economy” at Clark University in Worcester.

People experimenting with Worcester green initiatives, along with institutional players, spoke briefly about their work. The keynote speaker was Omar Freilla of the Bronx-based Green Worker Cooperatives.

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My video of the event was only so-so, so I’m posting the audio of the Worcester speakers here for anyone curious about the range of local green things happening.

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The Worcester speakers were:

• Joel Fontaine, Worcester’s Director of Planning and Regulatory Services. Worcester has “adopted the state’s first climate action plan.”
• Stephen O’Neil of the Worcester Regional Transit Authority. The bus system is seeking ISO 14001 certification of their Environmental Management System.
• Patricia Feraud, Toxic Soil Busters Co-op. TSB, part of the Worcester Roots Project, is a youth-led project that tests lawns for lead contamination and deals with the problem when they find it.
• Julius Jones of the Regional Environmental Council. Julius works on projects that manage community gardens and teach young people how to grow and sell food in their neighborhoods. The “overall vision is to have community gardens within walking distance of anybody that wants one.”
• Jill Dagilis of the Worcester Community Action Council. WCAC would like to “reduce and eliminate the reliance on fuel assistance” by increased weatherization.
• Clark Provost David Angel. Clark is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 20% below 1995 levels by 2010, and to be “climate-neutral by 2030.”
• Mary Knittle of Quinsigamond Community College. QCC will have a regional training center for clean energy jobs.
• Stacie Brimmage and Ashey Trull of the Worcester Energy Barnraisers. At their events, people learn weatherizing by joining dozens of others in weatherizing a local building. (I made a short video of their last event.)
• Stephen Healy of the Worcester Green Jobs Coalition.
• Sarah Assefa of the EMPOWER Energy Cooperative. EMPOWER is a business that plans to make biodiesel out of local waste vegetable oil.

508 is a show about Worcester. This week Brendan Melican and Drew Wilson talk about a bald eagle.

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Also: Buddha Hut’s vegan meatballs a top 10, Saturday is a VegWorcester buffet, Stone Soup porch burned, Rosen’s Roundtable talks taxes, and Hermis Yanis starts a podcast after his radio show is “terminated.”

God our Creator, we thank you for the elemental nitrogen, which forms the silent majority in the air we breathe. We thank you for the bacteria that fixate nitrogen from the air, activating the element for metabolism in the biosphere.

With John Seymour, companion of Saint Fritz Schumacher, we remember the nitrogen cycle: We recall how humanity has split this one wonderful system into the two problems of pollution and the need of artificial fertilization.

We grieve for the wasted material containing fixated nitrogen, polluting the rivers and seas rather than fertilizing the land. We commit to you our anxieties about the Haber–Bosch process, which fixates nitrogen to make fertilizers by burning large amounts of fossil fuels.

God the Holy Spirit, give us wisdom and courage to repair and complete the nitrogen cycle.

Now we join the Society of Ordained Scientists in this collect: Almighty God, Creator and Redeemer of all that is, source and foundation of time and space, matter and energy, life and consciousness: Grant us in this Society and all who study the mysteries of your creation, grace to be true witnesses to your glory and faithful stewards of your gifts.

We pray all this through Jesus Christ, who is Alpha and Omega – who completes the cycle and reconciles all things to himself. Amen.

This week in England, we were asked to ‘Remember, remember the Fifth of November’, and this Sunday – Remembrance Sunday – to remember the soldiers. It is well that we remember these; but I wonder whether it would have served us even better to remember that there had been three Anglo-Afghan Wars, before getting ourselves into a fourth one. The Encyclopædia Britannica has them thus: ‘The first war demonstrated the ease of overrunning Afghanistan and the difficulty of holding it. The second war proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for the British.’ So remember the poppy fields in Afghanistan, as well as those in Flanders, when you see the poppies this autumn.

508 is a show about Worcester. This week’s panel is Kevin Ksen, Brendan Melican, and Tracy Novick.

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We talk about the City Council election. We talk about the School Committee election. We talk about a new Worcester video site Mike’s playing with (and you should, too). We talk about a $10 million lawsuit against Worcester for an incident during the taping of the Fox TV show COPS in 2006.