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The show begins with an excerpt from Fr. Bernie Gilgun’s homily at the memorial mass for Tom Lewis.

Cha-Cha was part of a Real Solutions press conference this week looking to change people’s attitudes towards “sex workers” and “drug users,” among others. Real Solutions has asked the City Manager for information about the state of rooming houses and “SROs” in Worcester over the past decade.

The license commission suspended the city license for a gun range and will allow alcohol to be served at an event at Green Hill Park. City Councilor Joff Smith has suggested the city start a lottery.

“Renegade blogger” Marc Reece had a bad experience with Karon Shea Modeling and started a blog about it. Mike ties this to some of the ideas in Clay Shirky’s great new book Here Comes Everybody.

Jeff Barnard and Jordan Levy have criticized some of the recommendations the Research Bureau made about the city’s finances. Mr. Levy’s blog now has an RSS feed.

Jeff:

They recommend that the city sell, among other things, the airport. . . . the city’s been trying to sell the airport since the beginning of time . . . They’ll probably recommend in some future report that the empty mall on Front Street should be redeveloped . . . .

We experiment with reading Mr. Levy’s blog aloud.

Brendan: You, Mike Benedetti, just fixed everything that’s wrong with Jordan Levy.

Mike: As Muhammad Ali said of someone else, he’s “too old and too ugly to be the champion. Look at me! I’m pretty!”

The Telegram & Gazette spammed Mike this week. Jeff Barnard pointed out that blogging for the T&G is a rip-off. This week’s best online discussion threads include this one about school funding and this one about WRTA funding.

Fitchburg is cutting library services.

Papamoka and Wormtown Taxi posted some interesting info about groceries. Mike encourages you to hike the Massachusetts Midstate Trail and read his thru-hiker’s guide (PDF).

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Father Bernie Gilgun celebrated the mass. (Deacon Walter Doyle assisted.) Here’s Fr Bernie’s homily:

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In Psalm 137, and also in the book of Proverbs, we are told, truly told, “The memory of the just is blessed.” If you wanna be blessed, don’t forget Tom Lewis! “The memory of the just is blessed.” You wanna be blessed? Remember this just man! He carried high and proud the banner of peace and justice in this community, perhaps like no other. Like a one-man revolution.

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My bad photos.

Read comments about Tom Lewis.

Leave a comment about Tom Lewis.

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You wouldn’t know it from reading the Telegram & Gazette, but, as at other papers, their circulation is still dropping. The news could be worse. Mike notes a goofy headline. (Brendan mentions the 2-headed kitten in Milbury and a T&G column that made it to Fark.)

We have an exclusive interview with two of the kids behind the play The Dragon Sorcerer, which will be performed in Worcester May 9 and 10.

I already have my tickets

Mike summarizes this week’s InCity Times and praises Annie’s Clark Brunch.

We listen to Gary Rosen speak about the possible decriminalization of marijuana in Massachusetts.

Brendan:

Next fall marijuana will be decriminalized in the state of Massachusetts. There’s no doubt about it . . . . All the Billy Breaults in the world are not going to stand in the way of this happening. There’s just too much public support out there.

Brendan shares his thoughts on the resolution of the strip club zoning issue.

We finish the show with an excerpt from the audiobook of Cory Doctorow’s new young adult novel Little Brother. Mike is going to buy a copy for a teen he knows who likes civil liberties and dislikes The Man.

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Dorothy Day, from that issue:

It’s time there was a Catholic paper printed for the unemployed.

The fundamental aim of most radical sheets is the conversion of its readers to radicalism and atheism.

Is it not possible to be radical and not atheist?

Is it not possible to protest, to expose, to complain, to point out abuses and demand reforms without desiring the overthrow of religion?

In an attempt to popularize and make known the encyclicals of the Popes in regard to social justice and the program put forth by the Church for the “reconstruction of the social order,” this news sheet, The Catholic Worker, is started.

[…]

This first number of The Catholic Worker was planned, written and edited in the kitchen of a tenement on Fifteenth Street, on subway platforms, on the “L,” the ferry. There is no editorial office, no overhead in the way of telephone or electricity, no salaries paid.

The money for the printing of the first issue was raised by begging small contributions from friends. A colored priest in Newark sent us ten dollars and the prayers of his congregation. A colored sister in New Jersey, garbed also in holy poverty, sent us a dollar. Another kindly and generous friend sent twenty-five. The rest of it the editors squeezed out of their own earnings, and at that they were using money necessary to pay milk bills, gas bills, electric light bills.

Mel Piehl, Breaking Bread:

Fortunately for [Peter] Maurin, he finally came up with the one suggestion calculated to win a hearing from his new acquaintance: Day should start a Catholic newspaper for the unemployed.

[…]

. . . the collaboration got off to a bad start. When he read the proofs of the first issue of The Catholic Worker, with its stories on strikes, race relations, labor schools, and housing, Maurin declared that “everybody’s paper is nobody’s paper” and immediately left the city. Not only did he want the paper to be called the Catholic Radical or the Catholic Agronomist rather than the proletarian-sounding Catholic Worker, but he apparently expected it to contain nothing but his own little versed “essays.”

[…]

Dorothy Day began a newspaper–the Catholic Worker–to advertise social change, but she quickly found herself at the head of a social movement–the Catholic Worker–that tried to show the way to the ideals the paper defended.

[…]

The enormous success of the Catholic Worker paved the way for the movement. Despite some initial hostility on the streets (two of the four sellers that first May Day gave up and went home), the new paper quickly caught on, gaining even the attention of those who disagreed with it.

Dwight MacDonald, “Revisiting Dorothy Day”:

Volume One, Number One of the Catholic Worker hit Union Square on May Day, 1933, with an ambiguous thud. The Marxian natives couldn’t classify this political chimera: its forequarters were anarchistic but its hinder parts were attached to the Church of Rome, whose American hierarchy then stood slightly to the right of Herbert Hoover. One editor, Dorothy Day, was known as a writer for the socialist Call and the old Masses and a friend of radicals like Hugo Gellert, Maurice Becker, and Mike Gold (to whom she was engaged for a year). But the other editor was a mystery: Fourteenth Street cafeteria savants who could distinguish at the drop of a coffee spoon between Manuilsky and Mayakovsky, Dan and Denikin, Malenkov, Martov, Miliukov, Muralov, and Muranov were stumped by Maurin (Peter). Their conclusion, reasonable enough on the premises, was that the Catholic Worker was either a Trojan horse rigged up by the Vatican to betray the oft-betrayed proletariat or, more charitably, an “adventure” by “confused idealists . . . .”

Nancy Roberts, “Dorothy Day: Editor and Advocacy Journalist”:

From 2,500 copies of its premiere issue, circulation jumped to 20,000 by November 1933, 40,000 by December 1934, and 110,000 by May 1935.

The production process for the first issue of The Catholic Worker showed no particular attitude towards technology, aside from using the cheapest means to reach the widest audience. I think blogging is very much in that Catholic Worker tradition.

The two most prolific CW blogs are the Vancouver CW’s and River Sims’s (Temenos CW, San Francisco). Here at Pie and Coffee we often write about Catholic Worker communities too, most often about Worcester, South Bend, and Orange County.

Please gather with us at midday at the Chinese Embassy, 2201 Wisconsin Ave., NW, to hold signs which say, “China’s Support for Sudan is an Olympic Mistake” and “STOP THE GENOCIDE IN DARFUR NOW.” Some of these signs have enlarged photos of victims in Darfur. We will have a limited number of t-shirts available with the same message for those who wish to join the rally and 1.3 mile march to the Sudanese Embassy at 2210 Massachusetts Ave. NW.

Please contact us now for details and for information about rides from Massachusetts (leaving at noon on May 19th), as well as about lodging in Washington, DC for the night of the 19th. With the Olympics less than 100 days away, the media and Chinese government are paying greater attention to the Darfur issue. For the sake of those Darfurians whose lives are still risk, please consider spending a half a day in the nation’s capital. RSVP ASAP!

Scott Schaeffer-Duffy
Saints Francis & Therese Catholic Worker
52 Mason Street, Worcester, MA 01610
508 753-3588
theresecw@gmail.com

Print circulation continues on its steep downward slide, the Audit Bureau of Circulations revealed this morning in releasing the latest numbers for some of the country’s largest dailies in the six-month period ending March 31, 2008. When a full analysis appears it is expected to find, according to sources, the biggest dip yet, about 3.5% daily and 4.5 for Sunday.

Worcester Telegram and Gazette daily circulation was 84,754 at this time last year. Worcester Magazine reports it’s now 81,437, a drop of about 4%.

This is not good, but it’s been worse: the past 2 reporting periods had T&G circulation dropping at 2 times faster and 5 times faster than the national average.

I get the first paragraphs of T&G articles via RSS, and I gotta say I found the first paragraph of Dianne Williamson’s Sunday column insulting enough that I didn’t bother to read the article (until this morning).

As most of you know" or maybe you dont, because youre watching American Idol rather than reading this newspaper " the news business is in trouble.

“[Y]oure watching ‘American Idol’ rather than reading this newspaper”? I know this is supposed to be a joke, but I wonder whether it’s also a sign of the disconnect between journalists and readers. Are people no longer subscribing because they’re watching TV, or because they’ve found more useful sources of news and advertising? What’s a better “risk factor” for someone canceling a T&G subscription in 2008, that person’s public engagement, or that person’s age?

What I would like to see the T&G do, speaking as a life-long newspaper fan: take their website seriously, so that I get value by lingering there, rather than wanting to head elsewhere after skimming the headlines.

Brendan Melican:

What may be my biggest frustration where local business is concerned, is watching good business go bad and suffer simply because the owners didnt want to learn new tricks.

Forbes:

In one sense, circulation data can understate the newspaper industry’s financial challenges. Declining circulation can affect how much a newspaper charges for print advertising, its biggest and most lucrative source of revenue.

But print advertising has been sinking faster than circulation as the slowing economy and new Internet ad platforms like Craigslist have decimated newspaper classified ads, particularly for the help wanted, real estate and automotive categories.

Also: Thoughts from Worcester’s Jeff Barnard, thoughts from Joel Achenbach.

Update: The T&G ran a wire service article on this, but didn’t list their own #s.

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I’m experimenting with new recording equipment, which did a bad job this week, but which I think will lead to good results.

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A Worcester county court officer is being investigated for leaking info to crooks; a Barre police officer who shot a dog in the leg is back to work. Worcester Peace Works has submitted an antiwar/PILOT resolution to the City Council.

We talk about how City Councilor Rick Rushton has bucked some of his political patrons by becoming an Obama delegate. Brendan explains state taxes to Mike. Brendan complains about the schools. Mike describes the Transgender Emergency Fund fundraiser. We speculate about the whole Volcanoboy/Worcesterite web forum transition, which seems to be a work in progress. (Nice to see Worcesterite is running Drupal, in my opinion the least-bad CMS out there.)

Bruce kinda promises to be at Art Attack on May 1 if any listeners want a photo with him; the event would be a nice beginning to a night on the town, which you could end with some of the Turtle Boy shows at area bars.

Of course, we also talk about guns.

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Dan McKanan interview about the Catholic Worker movement
Here’s an interview with Dan McKanan, author of Touching the World and The Catholic Worker After Dorothy, about the Catholic Worker movement. I think everything he says about the CW is dead on. I can’t find a page about this anywhere, but here’s the mp3: Link

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Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke
Interview with Christopher Lydon about his new WWII book. I love Baker, Lydon, and anything that seriously considers that war might be bad. So I’m looking forward to reading the book and hearing the interview.

Dorothy Day, the editor of the Catholic Worker, wrote an editorial called Our Stand. As in the Ethiopian war, the Spanish war, the Japanese and Chinese war, the Russian-Finnish war " so in the present war we stand unalterably opposed to the use of war as a means of saving Christianity, civilization, democracy. She urged a nonviolent opposition to injustice and servitude: She called it the Folly of the Cross.

“Where’s the Business Model for News, People?”
Jay Rosen’s latest meditation on the press. Short answer: There doesn’t seem to be one.

Meanwhile, at the Orange County Catholic Worker
OC Register:

The increase in homeless families in our local armories prompted CHAT-H public health nurse Paul Leon to create a new model program called Families and Children of Tomorrow, targeting children in what he says will be a first-of-its-kind model focusing exclusively on emergency shelter services for the homeless.

Launched yesterday to coordinate with the closure of the armories, the model program is helping five families initially and is housed in the newly remodeled Orange County Catholic Worker’s Isaiah House in Santa Ana, which re-opened yesterday.

From the hiding-your-light-under-a-bushel dept.
Why did the pope avoid addressing the Iraq War? I’ve seen essentially nothing about the fact that the pope failed to mention the war, despite many Catholics asking him to do so.

Bishop Thomas Gumbleton:

In 1991 John Paul II repeated the cry of Paul the VI in an encyclical letter, condemning the 1991 Iraq war. After that war there were over 12 years of sanctions that brought about the death of 1.5 million Iraqis, half of whom were children. This invasion has brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands more and made refugee or displaced 4 million. We’ve had thousands of U.S. soldiers killed, even more veterans commit suicide and tens of thousands of casualties. That’s why John Paul II condemned the 1991 war and pleaded that the second one not start.

Catholic Worker Frank Cordaro:

On birth control and abortion the Pope tells Catholics: you have to agree with me. But with the Vatican’s stated stance on this war — that they are against it — isn’t backed up. The Pope and the U.S. Bishops have got to let U.S. Catholics in the military, who agree with Pope John Paul II that the war in Iraq is unjust, know that the Catholic Church will support them as conscientious objectors.