Creative Resistance

August 6 is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. August 9 is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

One year in South Bend we held a Nagasaki commemoration and our signs were confusing to passersby. A short, clear sign might be NAGASAKI / 1945 / MOURN THE DEAD.

Here’s a leaflet with a Catholic focus you can customize.:

• .doc
• .odt
• PDF

Worcester, 2004

South Bend, 2006

If you have constructive suggestions, or this info is helpful, please post a comment.

On Saturday 7 June, I marched with many Zimbabweans in Oxford before the extraordinary provincial meeting of the Movement for Democratic Change (United Kingdom and Ireland). Please pray for the presidential run-off in Zimbabwe on Friday 27 June, and help in any way you see appropriate.

This Thursday, May 29, the City of Worcester, which has suffered under many a failed and crappy slogan, will unite without any slogans at all and drink some beers.

Worcester’s slogans include Do You Woo, The Heart of the Commonwealth, City that Reads, City on the Move, Moving in the Right Direction, Choose Worcester, Right Place/Right Time, and So Much/So Close. Discussion thread here.

Worcester has a few decent slogans mixed in there: Paris of the Eighties, Port au Prince of the Nineties, and The City that Screws Turtles all come to mind.

I say rejecting these slogans is a small price to pay for a day without the rest.

Long-time Worcester Catholic Worker Claire Schaeffer-Duffy is one of 35 people on trial in Washington, DC, Tuesday for nonviolent civil disobedience at the Supreme Court against torture and denial of habeas rights to Guantanamo detainees. I talked to her shortly before she left on the bus to DC.

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The Yerevan Office of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe reports that “Armenia’s entire stock of 872 tons of [the rocket fuel] mélange has been successfully recycled into an environmentally safe fertilizer, which was then provided to local farmers at no cost.” A modern case of swords into ploughshares. The project was part-funded by the United States of America.

At HBML.

Editor’s note: This is excerpted from Scott’s comic “Servant of God Dorothy Day” in the April/May 2008 issue of The Catholic Radical. For a copy of the whole thing, write to 52 Mason St, Worcester MA 01610.

The vast majority of those who sought help at Catholic Worker houses of hospitality were pleasant and courteous, but some, (from drink, drugs, mental illness, or plain frustration at their plight) were sometimes violent. Dorothy met those angry few with a down-to-earth love and a good sense of humor.

This weekend, 4 of us played with 2 gadgets that are intended to establish new market niches and which embrace “openness”: the XO (aka OLPC, a tiny laptop for developing-world kids) and the Chumby (a tiny wifi-enabled Linux box intended to compete with clock radios).

My blog post “The Chumby Is a Waste of Money” is coming soon, but I have to admit that watching the Worcester Commons webcam on this thing was pure fun.

Whatever the faults of OLPC’s strategy, their project already seems to have scared for-profit companies into making laptops for developing-world kids. And boy, the XO is a sweet piece of hardware: playing with it, I got the same thrill as when I first used the Wii and iPhone.

Odd UI: A big plus, in my book. What’s life without challenges?

Interesting apps: Two friends, much less geeky than I, had great fun seeing what they could get this thing to do. If there’s a fine line between confusing and intriguing, this is on the right side of that line.

Durable: I’m very hard on gadgets, so I love the solid feel of the XO. This is the only laptop I’d be comfortable using as a club or cutting board.

Cute as heck: Your iPhone will look sleek this year, old-fashioned next year. A thing of cuteness is cute forever.

We were telling one friend about the arty video game Passage (via Kottke), and Nick got it running on the XO. A cool end to a cool afternoon.

Related:
The XO in Darfur
XO vs. Macbook Air
Using the Chumby to build a robot car

Jay Smooth: Ten OTHER Things Martin Luther King Said

via Maximum Fun

Or: œcumenism in Oxford; and trees. Last Friday, journalist Eric Albert of the French newspaper La Croix interviewed several of us about œcumenism in Oxford, for a series for the centenary Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which starts this Friday. La Croix is a daily paper of Catholic foundation, with circulation about 100 000. Those interviewed include: Bede Gerrard (Orthodox; county œcumenical officer), Hugh Lee (city rector, Anglican), Stephen Platt (Russian Orthodox), Rosemary (layperson at Blackfriars, the Catholic Dominican friary), me (Église Reformée Unie), and several others. We had fun discussing. Expect to read something about this in French soon.

Tree-related news: Earlier in the month, there was some brouhaha about a tree in Bonn Square in the city centre. Now that tree is gone. ¶ Last Wednesday, my friend Oxfordshire County Councillor Deborah Glass Woodin was wrongly arrested whilst trying to ascertain the legality of some tree-felling attempts by Oxford City Council in the nearby Westgate area (but not at the same site as Bonn Square). ¶ Later in the weekend, my landlord decided to chop off the apple tree in the back-garden (more on this later, with photographs perhaps).

For this Saturday: have a happy feast-day of Saint Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, patron of vegetarians.