Pie and Coffee 
Worcester
508 is a show about Worcester. This week, Lucas Glenn, Eric L’Esperance, and Joy Murrieta talk about The Woo, and Mike and Brendan talk friendship.
Audio: Download the mp3 or see more formats.
You can watch 508 Fridays at 7pm on WCCA TV13.
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I’ve been following newspaper circulation stats for a few years now. At this point, my big takeaway is that they rejigger the circulation formula so often that any “trend” a layperson spots is as likely to be an artifact of the rejiggering as something real.
Total print and digital circulation was 79,958 Sunday and 74,563 daily. Circulation totals measure paid or verified newspapers delivered and purchased and digital subscriptions.
Sunday circulation declined by 8.8 percent and daily circulation by 9.9 percent. Nearly 60 percent of the Sunday decline and nearly half the daily decline resulted from ABC rules changes on digital access and included the T&G’s early adoption of more stringent ABC requirements before the new rules went into effect, said Tony Simollardes, T&G director of readership and circulation.
Fueled largely by increases in digital circulation and branded editions, daily circulation for the 618 newspapers reporting comparable multiday averages rose .68 percent.
T&G daily circulation stats:
There’s an interesting case to be made that focusing on raw numbers in the information economy is only one option, and perhaps not the most fun option. It’s definitely the business the T&G is in, though.
508 is a show about Worcester. This week, Brendan Melican, Tracy Novick, and David Dae An Rynick Roshi talk about Zen and school.
Audio: Download the mp3 or see more formats.
You can watch 508 Fridays at 7pm on WCCA TV13.
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508 is a show about Worcester. This week we talk a lot about the Worcester VegFest and the local competitive beer pong scene, too much about the Tea Party and the Forts kid, and just the right amount about the police chief’s Twitter account.
Audio: Download the mp3 or see more formats.
You can watch 508 Fridays at 7pm on WCCA TV13.
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Pleasant & Russell, Worcester.
508 is a show about Worcester. This week’s panel is Paula Harrison, Coqui Negron, and Doug Slinn.
Audio: Download the mp3 or see more formats.
Video: Downloads and other formats.
You can watch 508 Fridays at 7pm on WCCA TV13.
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If you were involved in Worcester’s opposition to the Iraq War, please attend this discussion of local anti-war activities 2003-2009. Portions may be videotaped. 52 Mason St, Worcester, MA. April 26, 2012, 7:30pm.
508 is a show about Worcester. This week’s panel is Brendan Melican and the man the T&G called “Worcester’s most-traveled, most-jailed, and most notorious political radical since Abbie Hoffman,” Scott Schaeffer-Duffy.
Audio: Download the mp3 or see more formats.
Video: Downloads and other formats.
You can watch 508 Fridays at 7pm on WCCA TV13.
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When President Obama proposed legislation that would require Catholic institutions to include contraception in their employee health plans, the hierarchy went ballistic. In our diocese, the bishop wrote a very forceful letter, which every pastor was required to read at Mass, urging all Catholics to contact the White House and express opposition to the proposal. Under a banner of religious liberty and freedom of conscience, Catholics raised such an outcry that the President backed down and moderated his proposal.
Pope Paul VI’s encyclical letter, Humanae Vitae, explicitly forbade artificial contraception. That ban is still part of Catholic teaching, and bishops must promote it, especially when some of what falls under the label “contraception” involves abortion, but the vigor of the hierarchy’s campaign against the Obama proposal raises serious questions of moral priorities.
The last time an episcopal letter was read in all the parishes involved the issue of gay marriage, and the time before that involved abortion. Again, the Church has clear teachings on these issues which bishops are obligated to articulate, but the degree of opposition given to them dwarfs other concerns.
A friend of mine once mused, “I think you have to pay fines for your sins to get into heaven: a half million dollars for killing, ten thousand for stealing, a hundred for lying, and a quarter for masturbation.” The hierarchy seems to be standing this paradigm on its head.
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It’s an annual tradition here at Pie & Coffee to repost this video of “The Real Saint Patrick.”
In today’s Give Us This Day essay on St. Patrick, Robert Ellsberg writes:
Patrick’s thirty years as a wandering bishop are the stuff of legend. He is justly honored as the patron of Ireland. But it is well to remember that Patrick was the victim of Irish injustice before he became the symbol of Irish pride. His spiritual conquest of Ireland followed the prior victory of love over the anger and bitterness in his own heart.
Rocco Palmo covers the feast day in the Saint Patrick’s Day Capital of the World, New York City.
This week in Worcester Magazine, Scott Schaeffer-Duffy noted it’s the 15th (I think) anniversary of the local Catholic Workers being banned from the St. Patrick’s Day parade:
As a proud Irish-American, Worcesterite, and avid runner, I am delighted to see Worcester’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade grow with the addition of the Celtic 5K Road Race. As a member of the Saints Francis & Thérèse Catholic Worker community, I still do not understand why the Parade Committee banned us from carrying an icon of the saint with his words, “Killing cannot be with Christ.” That banner was carried in two parades prior to it being banned, and the Parade Committee gave us the Spirit of Peace trophy in 1994 and Book of Kells Award in 1995. The idea that excluding Saint Patrick’s call for nonviolence makes the parade, which includes many military units, more “fun,” as the current Committee Chair suggested in WoMag, is sad, especially in the context of Ireland’s long bloody struggle and our own wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Irish winner of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, joined many others in appealing unsuccessfully to the Worcester Parade Committee to welcome our banner. It still mystifies me why they do not.
(This banner is still held at the side of the parade, and various local dignitaries still stop by for a kind word. This St. Patrick’s Day politics is weird stuff.)
Also, here’s the only known audio of Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin. He’s reading his essay “Makers of Europe,” also known as “When the Irish Were Irish.”
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