Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.
The last time Mike Ciul complained to me about the depressing negativity of Adbusters, we decided that there should be an equally radical, relentlessly positive activist magazine: Happiness Pony.
I’ve posted too many negative things of late. In the spirit of Happiness Pony, here is some happiness.
Continue reading “Happiness Pony”
Military recruiters get the personal info of all American public high schoolers, unless the students “opt out.”
It’s like being on the nation’s largest teen junkmail list.
Worcester Indymedia has been investigating the opt-out rates of local high schools, and trying to understand the variations from school to school.
Some of us at Pie and Coffee have joined in the effort by putting the information on the website optout.pieandcoffee.org.
If you live outside Central Massachusetts, and are interested in collecting and submitting opt-out information from your local schools, contact optout.admin@gmail.com.
This is a privacy issue. It’s about not wanting to be pestered. It’s hard to recruit kids for the military these days, and in response some military recruiters are behaving more like used-car salesmen or telemarketers than soldiers.
David Zirin has an article about the disparity between the revelry of the Super Bowl and the deplorable conditions on the street in Detroit.
He writes of
the homeless being taken to a three-day ‘Superbowl Party,’ where they’ll get the actual food and shelter they need until the big game’s over, after which they’ll be kicked back out on the streets.
From now on, all tips from readers will be treated as anonymous unless the tipster requests otherwise.
Continue reading “Items for Groundhog Day”
Each Tuesday afternoon for years there’s been a peace vigil in Lincoln Square. To pass the time, the vigilers count the number of positive and negative responses from people driving by.
Apparently the upcoming State of the Union speech had Worcesterites riled up today–check out the high ratio of positive:negative reponses (117:6). We haven’t seen anti-war sentiment like this since the height of Cindy Sheehan Fever.
I think that the vigil gets a higher ratio of positive responses than you’d get if you did a phone survey; most people shy away from confronting demonstrators if they disagree. But the trend over time is a different story. I think it reflects the changing mood of the area.
(This scatterplot is designed for the page rather than the screen–hope you don’t have to squint too much. A screen-friendly scatterplot will debut in 2006. Some weeks have no dot on the scatterplot because nobody wrote the numbers down.)
A good pie starts with a good pie crust. I once complained to my grandmother that I couldn’t make a decent pie crust. She said, “Bobby Max, that’s because you haven’t made enough pies. When you have made 100 pies, you will be able to make a great pie crust.”
Continue reading “An Introduction to Pie”
People crowd the Vietnamese Buddhist temple on Dewey Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, to celebrate the new year (Tết Nguyên Ãán).
Global Voices has a good wrapup of Chinese New Year (and Tet).
You’ll notice that the photo above is probably the least-colorful Chinese New Year picture ever taken. I didn’t think to run home and get my camera until after the dragons, fireworks, and the rest were over. Kevin Ksen took a couple good pictures inside the temple, below.
Continue reading “Happy Chinese New Year”
A few items and a lot of media analysis–or, as my grandparents’ generation called it, “bitching about the paper.”
A few items and a lot of media analysis–or, as my grandparents’ generation called it, “bitching about the paper.”
Continue reading “Items”
Central Massachusetts’s own Elmer Gantry, the suspiciously well-groomed Tom Crouse of Engaging Your World Productions, is holding an it-would-be-offensive-if-it-weren’t-so-lame event in Worcester next month called “Mr. Hetero.” You’d think conservative Catholics would be a core part of the audience–not no more. Today in his blog, he calls for the arrest of the pope, then writes:
“There is no other organization, in my opinion, this side of NAMBLA that has done more to promote and enable the rape of kids than the Roman Catholic Church.”
Pro-gay groups are encouraging local institutions to boycott prestigious Mechanics Hall, which is hosting the event. Now Crouse is working to annoy the largest religious group in the state. Who will he alienate next? Patriots fans? Candlepin bowlers?
I pray and encourage you all to pray for those trapped in the evil web of the hypocrisy and heresy that is known as the Roman Catholic Church!
Please see also “Let us now praise Mr. Hetero.”
The St. Patrick’s Four are being sentenced this week. Danny Burns was sentenced yesterday to six months in prison.
Last year a jury found them guilty of misdemeanor charges of property damage and trespassing in connection with a nonviolent 2003 demonstration against the Iraq War. They were acquitted of the much more serious charges of conspiracy to impede a federal officer.
You can expect additional commentary from Running Scared, who did a great job covering the trial.
Speaking of nonviolent protest, last week Greenpeace dumped a 20-ton dead whale in front of the Japanese embassy in Berlin.
Speaking of nothing in particular, Clark University is holding a series of events about the Wobblies. I couldn’t find a “home page” for the series.